Category Archives: Performance

The 1 Reason You’re Afraid To Make Recruiting Simple

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Have you ever wondered why Recruiting Departments continue to make complex processes?  In reality, all of us, wants things simple.  But, when you look at our organizations they are filled with complexity.  It seems like the more we try to make things simple, the more complex they get.  You know what?  It’s you. It’s not everyone else.  You are making things complex, and you’re doing this because it makes you feel good.

From Harvard Business Review:

“There are several deep psychological reasons why stopping activities is so hard to do in organizations. First, while people complain about being too busy, they also take a certain amount of satisfaction and pride in being needed at all hours of the day and night. In other words, being busy is a status symbol. In fact a few years ago we asked senior managers in a research organization — all of whom were complaining about being too busy — to voluntarily give up one or two of their committee assignments. Nobody took the bait because being on numerous committees was a source of prestige.

Managers also hesitate to stop things because they don’t want to admit that they are doing low-value or unnecessary work. Particularly at a time of layoffs, high unemployment, and a focus on cost reduction, managers want to believe (and convince others) that what they are doing is absolutely critical and can’t possibly be stopped. So while it’s somewhat easier to identify unnecessary activities that others are doing, it’s risky to volunteer that my own activities aren’t adding value. After all, if I stop doing them, then what would I do?”

That’s the bad news.  You have have deep psychological issues.  Your spouse already knew that about you.

The good news is, you can stop it!  How?  Reward people for eliminating worthless work.  Right now we reward people who are working 70 hours per week and always busy and we tell people “Wow! Look at Tim he’s a rock star, always here, always working!”  Then someone in your group goes, “Yeah, but Tim is an idiot, I could do his job in 20 hours per week, if…”  We don’t reward the 20 hour guy, we reward the guy working 70 hours, even if he doesn’t have to. (Editor’s note: calling yourself an idiot in a post is cathartic in a number of ways!)

Somewhere in our society the ‘working smarter’ analogy got lost or turned into ‘work smarter and longer’.  The reality is most people don’t have the ability to work smarter, so they just work longer and make everything they do look ‘Really’ important!   You just thought of someone in your organization when you read that, didn’t you!?  We all have them, you can now officially call them ‘psychos’ since they do actually have a “deep psychological” reasons for doing what they’re doing. Harvard said so!

I love simple.  I love simple HR.  I love simple Recruiting.  I hate HR and Talent Pros that make things complex, because I know they have ‘deep psychological’ issues!  Please go make things simple today!

Can HR out Crazy a Crazy Employee?

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In HR we run into employees all the time that do “Crazy” pretty dang good!  I’m always interested in how we work around crazy.  Almost never do we just fire crazy and get rid of it, we tend to keep it around. In fact, we tend to try and fix crazy.

I’m not talking about legitimate mental illness. I’m talking about employees who are perfectly “fine” but act crazy for a number of reasons: attention, they love drama, they love pushing buttons, they love being in the middle of shit, you know, work crazy.   We see it every day in our organizations.

I’ve found something that works really well for me in dealing with crazy.  Do crazy, better than the employee does crazy. Sounds crazy right?!  Here’s how it works.

Crazy employees have power because they act crazy, and no one wants to jump into their crazy storm.  So, people just stay silent, try to stay away, change subjects, ignore, etc.  These are all great mechanisms to stay out of the crazy storm.  Unfortunately, this just feeds the crazy storm and helps turn it into a crazy hurricane!  You see, crazy employees hear silence  and silence to them is agreement. Now, they’ve got justification for their crazy storm because in their mind no one told them they disagree, so that must mean they agree!

You can’t reason with crazy.

So, how do you stop crazy?  You do crazy better than they do crazy.  But you do crazy under control. You fight a crazy storm with a crazy calm.  But, let’s be clear, you still need to go crazy.  Let me give you an example:

Crazy Employee:  “My boss is out to get me!  Yesterday he told Jill “great job” and he didn’t tell me great job.  I think he’s sleeping with Jill – you need to investigate.  Also, Jill might be stealing – you didn’t hear that from me, but she just bought a new car and we make the same amount, I think – what does she make? – anyway I can’t afford a new car!” 

Me: “You know what?  I want to thank you for giving me this information – I’m pulling in your boss right now and we are going to have this out!  Just sit here while I call him in – we are going to blast him!”

Crazy Employee: “Hey! Wait! Don’t call him in while I’m here – he’ll know it’s me that told you.”

Me: “Yeah – but to fire him I’m going to need you to testify at the trial. Once I fire him for sleeping with Jill, he’ll want to fight it – happens all the time – no big deal – we got him!  You’ll do fine on the witness stand.”

Crazy Employee: “Um, I don’t want to do that – just forget it”

Crazy doesn’t like to go public in front of others. Crazy works best one-on-one behind closed doors where there aren’t witnesses.  You can stop crazy very quickly by going public and asking them to be crazy in front of others.  I’ve found that if I can do crazy behind closed doors better than crazy can do crazy, it tends to snap crazy back into semi-reality.  Plus, it’s fun to act crazy sometimes, as long as it’s behind closed doors!

What is your Organizational Expiration Date?

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We got home from vacation recently and like most families we were foraging through the cupboards and refrigerator to make dinner our first night back home.  I poured some milk for my son, and he asked me “is that milk alright?” Like somehow I hadn’t considered its feelings, but he mostly meant was it still good.

Sure the expiration date had passed a day, or so, prior, but I did the Dad smell test, and that milk was more than alright!  He wasn’t in agreement, so our “alright” milk took a trip to never-gonna-get-drank-land down the sink.  Expiration dates on food are great. They help us understand when something goes bad, protects us from ourselves and what we think is good and bad, which can be subjective.

All this makes me think that we should have expiration dates on our employees!

It was recently rumored that Detroit Tigers Manager, Brad Ausmus, is probably going to get fired after this season.  He was a popular hire two years ago and led the Tigers to the playoff.  This year, though, the Tigers have not met expectations, with a team filled with high price talent.

So, why has his expiration date come up?  It’s all about expectations.  Once you gain success, it’s not good enough to maintain that success or, G*d forbid go backwards, you have to keep getting more successful.  The only way Ausmus get’s more successful is to win the World Series, which is tough to do.

There are a number of other reasons people should have expiration dates with organizations; these include:

  • Chronic Average:   This is for the people who just never really do anything- they just exist in your organization.  After a while, they need to just go exist at another organization.
  • Convicted Idiot: This is the person who makes certain bad decision, so bad, that their expiration with your organization must come up. Think, hitting on the bosses wife at the holiday party, or worse!  Probably can’t legally terminate them, but they need to go someplace else.
  • 1997 Top Salesman/woman:   This happens way to much – yeah, you were top sales person a decade ago, either get the trophy back or give another organization your attitude!  We tend to keep them around because we are hoping they’ll regain their top form – but they don’t – let them expire.
  • My Boss Is Dummer than Me: An organization can take only so many of these, for only so long – Ok, you win, go be smarter than us someplace else.
  • No Admins Left To Sleep With: I’m hoping the title of this one explains it as well – otherwise you might have reached your HR expiration date at your organization!

How to Gently Crush Your Employee’s Dreams!

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I get the feeling that many of your employees feel that HR Pros are Dream Crushers!  It’s the main reason almost everyone hates HR, right?

I don’t actually buy into this theory, but there are some valid things we do in HR that don’t help our reputation.  Here’s how we crush dreams on a daily basis:

  1. We don’t allow our employees to develop.  Let’s first start with the concept of development vs. training.  You giving job training is not development. While it might help the employee get better at the job they have, it’s not exactly personal or professional development. Development is very individualized.
  2. We don’t listen or act on your employees ideas.  I get to go in and work with companies a lot and almost always the employees already know what needs to be done, but leadership isn’t listening to them.  So, I’m not really brought in to tell them something they don’t know, I’m brought in to them their employees are smart and you should start listening to them!
  3. We don’t allow our employees to dream about the future. This is really difficult for most organizations.  We won’t promise an employee where they’ll be in 1 or 2 or 3 years, because we believe if we can’t deliver it, it worse than not giving them anything to begin with.  Actually, that’s a false premise.  Allowing your employees to dream about the future and giving them something to shoot for, will give them hope. Hopeful employees stay around and work hard.
  4. We micromanage the work, not the result.  I don’t care how you get there, just get me there.  We have been taught for way too long to ‘manage’ people. This means we tell them how to do the job exactly, instead of letting do the job in a way that works best for them, and holding them accountable to the result, not the path. This not only crushes your employees dreams, it crushes their soul.

I think it would be funny to see someone has that as a title in HR: Dream Crusher, VP of Crushing Dreams, Chief Dream Crusher!  Sad, but funny.

What are you doing with your employees today?

The 1 Miracle That Can Make Your Corporate Recruiters Better Almost Instantly

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I’ve had 3 opportunities in my career to step into traditional corporate recruiting departments and make changes that would ‘turn’ these departments around so that the organization would see them as a positive producing department, where previously that had not been viewed as this.  As you can imagine there are numerous changes that can be made to do this.  You could go out and hire more talented recruiters.  You could redesign and launch a new employment brand.  You can redesign your processes.  You can launch a new career website.  Add in recruiter specific training.  Get hiring managers and leadership involved in ‘owning’ their talent in their individual departments.  All great stuff.  All things that I eventually did – all which take considerable time and resources!

When you are stepping into a new organization and taking over, those who hired you expect instant miracles.  Why?  Because that’s what you told them you could do when you interviewed.  One problem.  You told them this without truly knowing what you were going to find when you started opening up closet doors in the department and skeletons began falling out all over the place.  You didn’t realize your staff of recruiters were really just HR admins in disguise.  That your ATS was an advance spreadsheet, and nothing more.  Your hiring managers believed the only way to get talent was to wait for you to deliver it to them on a silver platter, just so they could say “I don’t like that kind – bring me another platter!”  You didn’t know your major vendor was the CEO’s cousin who had no clue and no sense of urgency – but was entitled all the same.

Doesn’t matter now – deliver the miracle!

There is really only one thing I know that works in recruiting.  Doesn’t matter if you’re an agency or corporate.  Doesn’t matter the industry.  Doesn’t matter the recruiting experience level you have on your staff.  It’s been the one miracle that in good times and bad has always sets recruiters apart – at all levels.  Activity.  Outgoing phone calls, number of candidates interviewed, number of resumes sent to hiring managers, etc.  Higher activity level = higher recruiting department satisfaction and results, 100% of the time.  It’s a simple miracle.

So – how do you do this tomorrow?

Step 1:  Instantly track the number of ‘outgoing’ phone calls made per recruiter.  If you don’t have technology to track this – develop a simple call sheet that tracks candidate name, phone number, position called for and result.  Track calls for 2 weeks. (outgoing calls only – keep it simple, establish a habit – great recruiters call candidates)

Step 2: On week 3 – set daily outgoing call goal 25% higher than the two week daily average.  (don’t let on you will do this on week 3 or you’ll have low numbers your first two weeks)

Step 3:  Hold those recruiters accountable who aren’t reaching their call goal.

You’ll hear every single excuse in the world – you have to stay strong.  “I have too many meetings” – tell them you are giving them permission to no longer attend those meetings.  “I have to much paperwork” – stop doing paperwork – that’s for after 5pm and on weekends (recruiting isn’t a 40 hr per week job). Only concentrate on calls.  Calls. Calls. Calls.

Miracle, delivered, almost instantly.

Want to hear some more?  Call me – I’ve got more miracles. Sackett.tim@hru-tech.com; 517-908-3156 or @TimSackett  – my company delivers staffing miracles every freaking day!

What if a drug could save your career? Would you take it?

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It seems like daily we are bombarded by stories coming out in the media of professional athletes who are caught taking performance enhancing drugs.  They risk their entire career by taking these drugs and getting caught. This week and next NFL teams will cut down their rosters, and many players will lose the one job they’ve worked their entire life for.

I’ve often wondered if I was in that position, being a professional athlete making millions, would I take PEDs to sustain or grow my career?  I can’t initially say I wouldn’t.  I’m always thankful for not having been put in that situation. I’m extremely competitive; I’m not sure I would have the will power not to take PEDs if I thought I was failing.

Slate had a great piece a while back about a former professional football player, Nate Jackson of the Denver Broncos.  Nate was a tight end and was cut from the roster after 6 years and turned to PEDs to get back:

“I sit down in my locker for the last time. It was always a bit out of sorts, full of clothes and shoes and tape and gloves, notebooks and letters and gifts. Do I even want these cleats? These gloves? These memories? Yes. I fill up my box. Six years as a Denver Bronco. Six more than most people can say. Still feels like a failure, though. So this is how the end feels? Standing in an empty locker room with a box in my hand? Yep. Now leave.”

That’s it, right?  It’s the fear of losing all that you have.  It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, fear of losing what you have is a powerful adversary.

I’ve seen a grown man, with a wife and children, and a strong member of his church, sit in down in front of me and lie to my face, because of this fear.  You don’t have to be a professional athlete.

I completely understand this fear, and why athletes do PEDs.  So, I’ll ask you the question, if tomorrow you had a choice, lose your job or take a drug that will save your job, would you do it?

Hit me in the comments.  I have a feeling many people will say they wouldn’t.  I’ll let you know right now, based on my experiences, I’ll be skeptical.

Saying you wouldn’t tells me potentially two things about you:

  1. You don’t have fear of losing your job because you have another source income (I run into a lot of women who ‘become’ consultants and talk about how you have to ‘do what you love’, all the while having a husband who is paying the bills);
  2. You lack self-insight and/or haven’t ever experienced this fear of loss.

I guess, in a round about way, I answered my own question about what I might do facing the end.  Fear sucks – remember that HR Pros.

Positivity: The New Red Flag in Hiring

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I’m trained as an HR pro to pick up on ‘red flags’ in interviewing, in employee behavior, potential turnover risks, etc. Sometimes those red flags are really obvious.  I tease my staff all the time, but missing time on Mondays and Fridays, unexcused time, is a red flag.  It says something about how you feel about work, that you want to extend your weekend. It’s subtle, but in my experience it doesn’t play out well.

My new red flag is Positivity.

First, I’ll admit to you that I’m a mostly positive person.  My normal gauge is set to “things will probably work out in the end”.  I try to be realistic, without thinking the sky is going to fall when something doesn’t go my way.  Life has been pretty good to me. My glass is over half full, and when it’s not, I believe I can find a way to fill it up.

What I don’t buy is the people who are so positive they seem to be telling themselves they’re positive.  I tend to believe if you’re positive, you don’t need to say you outlook is positive, people will hear it and see it in your daily interactions.  Those are the people you get drawn to. They are truly positive people who enjoy the life they’ve created for themselves.

There is another kind of positive person.  This is the person who needs to keep reminding themselves and anyone around them they’re positive. This positive scares me. This positive is a red flag for me.  This type of positive makes me believe you are actually fairly negative, but trying to turn yourself into positive.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that’s bad, someone wanting to change from negative to positive.  I applaud the effort. I also know that most people are hardwired to lean one way.  It’s your personality, and that’s really hard to change long term.

My friend, Kris Dunn, loves to ask applicants about what work experience in their life they enjoyed the most, and which one did they dislike the most. Each tell you something about the person.  A truly positive person will have a hard time finding a place they truly disliked, but they’ll speak a ton about what they really liked. A truly negative person will do the opposite. They’ll go on and on about what they dislike, but move on quickly with their answer about what they like.

Basically, you can fake positivity, and it’s common amongst candidates.  The problem is, you can’t fake it for long, and even if they can fake it, fake positivity can get down right annoying!

I think it’s important to remember that opposite of Positive Thinking isn’t Negative Thinking. It’s Possible Thinking. I want to hire people who are realistic about what is possible. Blind positivity doesn’t last and usually leads to a big fall.  I don’t need the drama in my work environment. Who would have ever thought that positivity would be a hiring red flag!

It’s Okay to Just do HR

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If you’re highly active in HR and Talent Acquisition in the social space (read: blogs, sites, pod/video casts, webinars, conferences, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you might be caught up in this mindset that what you’re doing is not what you should be doing.

You’re being told what you should be focusing on by idiots like me, and thousands of others, most of whom don’t even work in HR or Talent Acquisition at this moment.  That’s not a bad thing, some are brilliant and took their brilliance to the consulting/analyst/vendor side of the fence because the money was better, or the balance was better, or both.  This isn’t a consultant vs. practitioner post.

This is a post to remind you that it’s alright if you just put your head down and do actual HR and Recruiting work for a while.

That it’s okay not to be instituting the next best practice or innovation.

That it’s okay not to be focusing on recreating HR and Talent Acquisition in your organization.

Sometimes we just need to keep the train running down the tracks.  Allow ourselves to catch out breath. Get and build a strong team around us, and get ready for big things in the future.  In the mean time, we just do what we do.

We make sure our employees are doing alright.  Is there anything we can do to help them be better?

We make sure our employees get paid correctly and benefit card works when they show up at the doctor.

We make sure to kick managers in the shin, under the table, when they’re being idiots to their teams.

We make sure new employees have the tools they need when the show up on their first day, and they feel welcomed.

We give bad employees the gift of finding a job they will truly love, by letting them find that job on their own time.

Sometimes when I’m writing I forget what it’s like to have a million priorities in your day, and knowing you won’t get to half of them.  That’s the daily grind in HR and Talent Acquisition.  So, I write about how you should do this or do that, how you should be all innovative and shit, but I get that many days (sometimes weeks and months!) you just need to do the basics.

I’ve been there.  I struggled to just do the basics many days.  When thinking of being the best and innovating seemed so far away from reality that you felt like giving up.

That’s when I would tell myself, “Today, I’m just going to do HR”.  Focus on what I’m good at. Focus on what I can control.  Make it to the next day, where just maybe, that day would allow me to get better.

It’s okay for you to just do HR today!

 

What Happen When Everyone Thinks They’re An Outlier?

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My friend, Laurie Ruettimann, made a comment to me the other day, in regards to HR and Talent Blogging to the affect of, “everyone thinks they’re an outlier, Tim.”

She’s right.

It’s partly that people who blog, like me, are fairly high the narcissism scale.  We tend to believe that what we say and how we say are different than what others say and how they would say it.  It’s not, but that’s how we think.  Hold up.  Let me stop using “we”, because I’m quite certain this nice little HR and Talent blogging community hasn’t chosen me to speak!

I tend to believe anyone could say what I say if they decided they wanted to.  They just decide they would rather read my opinion, than go out, half-crazed and share their opinion on everything in the industry.

She is also very wrong.

There are very few Outliers in the HR and Talent blogging community. So, this point is mostly irrelevant. Just because someone thinks they’re the Pope doesn’t make them the Pope. It makes them crazy.

Outliers in blogging aren’t just people saying things first, or differently.  They are people who are saying things of interest.  They are helping to change the way the profession works.

I take a look at the work of Glen Cathey does and say, holy shit, I need to get better! He’s an Outlier.  I take a look at how Kris Dunn explains performance management in a real context to real HR pros, that I can grasp, that I can take back to my hiring managers and make real change without having a PhD. He’s an Outlier. I take a look at how Laurie challenges how I deeply think about a subject, and sways my opinion to be more open about how others think. She’s an Outlier.

The concept is when everyone believes they’re an outlier, no one is an outlier.  I don’t buy that, because I know the truth above. There are true Outliers.  There are a few brilliant people who shape opinion and slowing get an industry to move in other directions.

So, guess what?  You’re not an Outlier.  You think you are, but you’re not.  Sorry. Buy a helmet, life sucks sometimes.

 

SHRM National Speaker Feedback!

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Got my/our SHRM National Speaker Evaluation back last week.  It’s always fun to get and look at the comments and how you rated as compared the average.  Kris Dunn and I co-presented at SHRM this year. The session was titled: We’re Bringing Techy Back, and it focused on how to buy HR technology.

Here were are ratings, based on 152 responses:

Item Rated Our Average Rating  All Session Average Ratings
Quality of Information 4.41 4.27
Presenters 4.58 4.32
Too Basic 16 14
About Right 78 82
Too Advanced 1 1
Didn’t notice 4 4
Did They Sell – Yes 2 5
No 98 95

All that is cool.  Pretty good ratings. KD and I were happy with the presentation. Great turnout and high participation.

The great part of the SHRM Presentation evaluation are the Real comments that people leave you.

We got a lot like this (95%): 

– “Love these guys! Fresh, from the heart, solid content. Fun.” 

– “HR Pros need to have this presentation.” 

– “Most informative session I’ve attended. Best presentation so far!” 

– “Best session I’ve been to in years! Tons of practical advice. Very engaging!” 

We got a few like this (1%): 

– “Offensive towards vendors and sales people.”

– “The corny jokes at the beginning could be done without. Humility is a good thing.”

– “Very disappointed – a topic of great interest and the deliver ruined the presentation.”

We got some that made us laugh! 

– “Kris interrupts Tim a lot.” (thanks, to my one fan!)

– “Found that the tech session has paper evaluation forms!” (well…)

– “The guys attempt at being funny affected credibility.” (You’re telling us!)

One of the biggest takeaways was a lot of comments about what people were hoping we would have done more of, namely, tell them exactly what vendor to use, for certain situations. It’s the “what ATS should I buy?” dilemma. Kris and I addressed this because we knew this would be stuff people would want.  The problem is, a great technology for one organization, might be the exact wrong technology for another organization.

With such a diverse crowd at SHRM, it is almost impossible to recommend one HR and Talent vendor over another, if we are being honest about what is the best choice for your organization specifically.

This does bring up a great issue, though, across all the SHRM attendees.

People commented on this because they truly want an unbiased and trustworthy opinion on who they should be looking at, and what they should be buying.  They don’t trust vendors, for the obvious reason the vendor is trying to sell you.  They don’t trust industry analysts because they are all in bed with someone.  They don’t want to pay for consultants.

The HR and Talent industry doesn’t have a Consumer’s Report or Trip Advisor to give HR Pros unbiased advice.  So, they look at people, like Kris and I, as someone who will tell them the truth.  Which we would, and did, for many who stayed after and we had one on one conversations with about their specific issue.

I think SHRM could fill this void with some kind of behind the member wall “Trip Advisor” like site that allows all of us to give our own feedback on all HR and Talent technology.  This community share would be invaluable for all of us trying to make that next buying decision.