Category Archives: Performance

The “New” Skilled Trades

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Google started it.  Don’t they start everything. You can thank Lazlo for all of this when he came out and said Google no longer requires a college degree to get hired into many of their technical roles. Now, we are beginning to see specialized training schools popping up to begin to ‘train’ the next gen workforce in what will be soon considered the new skilled trades of the future.  From CNBC:

Students at the New York City-based school pay $15,000 for four months of coding instruction. They leave with the ability to develop software, and according to Flatiron School, 99 percent of students get a job with an average starting salary of $70,000 a year.

Flatiron founders Adam Enbar and Avi Flombaum said they believe coding will be a form of literacy in the future.

“Just like you need to learn how to read and write, even if you’re not going to be a journalist, you need to learn how to code and wield technology if you’re going to be successful in the world,” said Enbar…

Some of Flatiron’s students share Enbar’s frustration with higher education. Jen Eisenberg was studying computer science as an undergraduate at Michigan State University, but stopped after her first semester when her father asked if she could build him a website.

“I realized I couldn’t build anything tangible … it’s more theory and algorithms,” Eisenberg said.

After completing Flatiron’s program, Eisenberg is a software engineer at Paperless Post, an online stationery shop. She helps write the instruction, or code, that makes the website function.

For years I’ve been telling high school students are getting ready to graduate that public education has given them two paths in their life:

1. College

2. Prison

That’s it!  Years ago we did away with skilled trades curriculum in public schools. The programs where kids learned how to weld, fix cars, pull wire, sweat pipe, build things, etc. Now, you go to high school to do well on a test and hopefully that test will get you into college. If it doesn’t?  Good luck, you’re basically on your own, which for most eighteen year olds usually ends up in prison.

So, I’m actually excited about these ‘new’ skilled trades!  Learning how to code, test, program, design and build web apps, etc.  Our reality is we have kids who don’t want to go to college. Traditional school environments are not their cup of tea!  They can’t wait to get out of high school, and the last thing they want is to go back to a similar setting in college.

America is in desperate need of vocational programs that start when kids are around seventeen.  Companies are begging for help in the traditional skilled trades, as well.  On both ends of technology, those who turn a wrench and those who click a mouse, need more trained individuals in the workforce, and at both of those ends, a full four year college program isn’t the answer.

Does this mean no one needs to go to college any longer? No.  We still need all kinds of college grads.  But, we can’t forget about all the others, and we have, for more than a decade.  Skilled trades, traditional and new, are the lifeblood of innovation.  You can design the greatest thing ever, but eventually, someone has to build it.  Someone has to get their hands dirty.  Someone has to put in the hours to make it a reality.

Sounds like a job for someone with a skilled trade.

The First Question HR Needs To Ask

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I love going out and speaking and meeting with HR and Talent pros across the world (I can say ‘world’ now because I’ve spoken in Canada and the Cayman Islands, which technically makes me an international speaker!).  It’s a privilege to be certain.  I also really like when I get pimped constantly for free advice. It’s part of the gig.

If you go around telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.  So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you, or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve began to change my approach, though, because I knew, like they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius, was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause, and explanation, and sometimes from this we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent pros will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you.

The Biggest Lie HR Tells Candidates

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No one ever wants to admit this but it can be really intimidating working with someone who is way smarter and more talented than you.  This is the basis for the biggest lie HR tells candidates.

You are Overqualified!

Truth be told, no one is ever ‘overqualified’ for a position.  You might have more qualifications than the organization needs for the position you are interviewing for, but that really isn’t the issue.  The issue is the person interviewing is scared that you are better than they are.

Back in the day, HR pros and hiring managers were trained to give the excuse to overqualified people that we won’t hire you because you’re overqualified and we are scared that you won’t stay in this position, and you won’t be satisfied.  Yeah, right! It’s not that we don’t want you! You won’t want us, because you’re so talented that you’ll get bored with this position and leave.

It’s such a lie, and yet, for decades we just accepted it as truth.

Being overqualified isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing! Companies should be bending over backwards to get overqualified hires.  We no longer live in a culture where people are going to stay in the job for 40 years. If you can get a good 3 to 4 years out of hire, you’re doing great.

Take the best most qualified person you can get for every position you have in your organization and let them do great things. Being worried the person will won’t be ‘engaged’ long term is silly.  That’s not for you to worry. Hire great talent and get out of their way.

The bigger reality we face in most organizations is we aren’t hiring ‘overqualified’ people because your hiring managers are intimidated to hire someone who is better, or who could become better than they are.  This is the mentality we must change in our organizations.  You can’t get better if you don’t hire better.  Hiring under the level of talent you have now is a slow slide to becoming an organization no one wants to work for.

The Number One Reason Hires Fail

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“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

Its about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over, and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert, sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills then upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens everyday in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category:  person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 4 hour training session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

The Open Office Terrorists

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So, how’s that new open office plan treating you!?

A recent study out says that it takes a normal person roughly 37 seconds to figure out working in an open office environment is going to suck! I mean, those were probably the slow people in the study, it doesn’t take a mental genius to see that going from an office where you could actually get stuff done to a bunch of people looking at each other, probably isn’t the best concept for productivity!

Okay, so that wasn’t a ‘real’ study. It was me and the voices in my head discussing the open office concept, and we all agree. Call it what you will, I’ll call it a quorum.

An actual study done GetVoip was spammed to me last week titled: The Detrimental Pitfalls of Open-Plan Offices which had the following findings:

– 95% of employees said working privately is important to them

– 89% of employees are more productive when working alone

– 63% of employees name “loud” coworkers as their #1 distraction.

“But, Tim! Open offices look so cool, and they prosper collaboration and communication and ping pong.”

Great…

But how many of you actually need more collaboration and communication?  I mean really?  Let’s be honest.

If Billy comes over to talk about The Voice one more time I’m going to gut him right here in my 8 ft by 8 ft low wall cubicle space I spend most of my time in. I’ll then use Billy’s skin to make a roof over my cubicle and finally have a little piece and quiet to actually get something done.  It’s not that I don’t like Billy. He’s was super the first three thousand times he came into talk me.  Now I want to see him die. Slowly. Painfully.

Open office space sucks because you have coworkers that are terrorists of the open office.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and they disguise themselves as actual coworkers. Here are a few examples:

1. The CrossFit Terrorist: Mandy does CrossFit. You should do CrossFit. And, apparently, the next best thing to doing CrossFit is talking about CrossFit to people who don’t give a shit about CrossFit.

2. The Vegan Terrorist: Mark is Vegan. You should be Vegan. And, apparently, the next best thing to being Vegan, is talking about begin Vegan to people who are trying to enjoy a nice fried donut and a RedBull for breakfast.

3. The Why Guy: The Why Guy can also be a Gal. They want to know why! Why are we doing this? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why is the boss nice today? Why is the sky blue? Why are you holding a knife to your wrist?

4. The Schemer: Molly is a schemer. Molly wants you to scheme with her.  Molly doesn’t like how Missy wears hair hair and wants to get her fired. Plus Missy’s teeth are too white. Molly spends 77% of her day scheming of ways to get Missy fired, and needs to tell you all about it.

You see?  Open office plans are the devil in disguise.  If you had an actual office with a door, you could shut it. Lock it. Put up a sign that says, “I hate you! Go Away!”, but that would just look silly hanging from your chair at that table in the middle of the room you share with a bunch of terrorists!

 

Top 10 Sources of Online Hires

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Silkroad recently released some results from it’s annual client survey (also released by Indeed as you can imagine from the results!), which is a rather large sample. The chart that caught my eye was this one:

Source of hire

Keep in mind these are external online sources only. These don’t include an companies own career site, employee referrals, etc. Still the information is intriguing, and almost matches my own internal numbers for my company, which means I tend to believe the data!

Indeed being number one as a source for corporate hires isn’t not surprising. If a candidate is looking for a job today, they go to Indeed to start looking.  What is surprising is the LinkedIn number!

6% of external online hires are coming from LinkedIn!

So, you need to ask yourself: How much money are you spending on LinkedIn as compared to the other sources that are getting greater results?  Indeed, CareerBuilder, other various specialized job boards, etc.

Would have ever thought that LinkedIn would have been the exact same percentage as Craigslist!?!

Obviously, the candidates you are getting on LinkedIn are different than the candidates you’re getting on Craigslist. Not many professionals are looking for jobs on Craigslist, but you will find a ton looking for lower skilled, service level jobs.

Based on the data above here’s what you need to do:

1. Are your jobs being scraped by Indeed? Have you checked?  If not, you better make this happen! (Same for SimplyHired)

2. Are you using CareerBuilder? Postings? Resume database? Might want to check into what they’ve got going on!

3. If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, are you getting a good ROI for your investment? Would you get a better ROI is that same amount of money was spent for things like sponsored jobs on Indeed, or most job posts on CareerBuilder? Maybe you need to do some testing.

4. Are you using Craigslist to help fill your lower level positions?  You know it’s free, right?

5. What the hell is Seek?  Oh, it’s a job board in Australia, you can forget about that.

6. Don’t forget about your other non-online sources: Referrals, your own career site, local state employment offices, alumni, your own internal database (this is the most under utilized source of most companies!), etc.  These probably fill more than all your online sources. How much money are you investing in them? (it’s usually a lot less than online sources and a huge miss for ROI)

There’s Collateral Damage in Leadership

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You know what none of the great leadership speakers, gurus, TEDx speakers, etc., will tell you about leadership?  Sometimes in leadership, even the best, greatest, visionaries, have to do things they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about.

We got to see this in the past weeks with Tom Brady, the Super Bowl winning quarterback from the New England Patriots, with how he responded to the Deflategate scandal.  Tom had a chance to be the leader we all believe leaders to be. Instead, he was the leader that most leaders are.

You don’t want to hear this.

Brady did what leaders do.  He protected the brand.  Whether you like it or not, New England, The NFL and Tom Brady are the brand. He protected the shield.  You really think he’s going to throw the brand on the sword for some equipment guy that no one will know in 30 seconds?

Now, don’t get me wrong. Tom Brady is a liar.  He lied about not knowing anything about those balls being deflated.  He knew exactly why and how those balls were deflated, because he gave the order!

The NFL is a $100 Billion dollar business. The New England Patriots are the NFL. Tom Brady is the NFL. Just like the rest the teams and players are.  So, the NFL, the Patriots and Brady all have a vested interested in ‘handling’ this with as little collateral damage as possible.

Throwing a couple of equipment guys under the bus, throwing the blame on them, is collateral damage to protect the brand.

You know what happens when when a giant multi-national company does something horribly wrong and there is loss of life or major damage?  They find someone to shoulder the blame that is smaller than the brand.  People lose jobs. Sometimes they even go to prison. But the company, the brand live on.

You’ll never see the multi-national CEO come out and take the blame for catastrophic events.  They’ll have empathy, they’ll have compassion, but they will not take blame. This is real leadership.

You don’t want to believe that this is leadership, but it is.

Tom Brady did for the NFL what great leaders do.  He deflected a cheating scandal that could have cost billions of dollars to the brand, and placed it on the shoulders of some guy making $40,000 a year.  People can accept that story.  Some dumb equipment manager was a super fan and just trying to help out ‘his’ guy. It wasn’t Tom. Tom is a modern day God!

Welcome to the show kids.

On the Job Extra Credit

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Remember when you were in school and you had a hard test, and it kicked your butt?  The saving grace was always when the teacher would give you extra credit to help you make up for that bad test grade!

I loved extra credit!

You know what never happened?  I never got extra credit for just showing up to class.

Why is that?

You see, you don’t get extra credit for doing what you’re supposed to do.  You need to do ‘extra’!

We are currently caught in a vicious employment performance cycle where your employees want extra credit for showing up, and guess what?  You’re giving it to them!

Your employees are showing up and doing the job that you’re paying them to do, and they want you to give them extra credit for doing what they’re supposed to do.  Weak leaders and organizations do this all the time.

Why is this?

They don’t rightly define the difference between what is expected and what you get extra credit for.  Once you define this, giving out extra credit is fun! Not entitled.

Don’t get me wrong, I desperately want to give out extra credit to employees!  I truly don’t think many actually want extra credit, but for those who do, I want to make sure they know exactly how to get it, and what’s in it for them when they decide to give that extra effort.

You know what they call this in HR business?

Performance management.

T3 – iRevu

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This week on T3 I review the the mobile micrco-feedback performance management technology, iRevu.  iRevü allows you to send micro-feedback to employees in real time, so they can view their feedback and respond in real time.  It’s a simple easy to use interface, that can interact with your system of record or performance management system to auto populate feedback directly into the system.

From your desktop or any internet connected device, you can see iRevü’s that you’ve received, requests for iRevü’s from your team and others. You can tie iRevü’s to company-wide goals and even an individual’s goals and special, short-term projects. iRevü’s and requests trigger emails to managers, and managers are periodically reminded of overdue iRevü’s. All the iRevü’s are exportable into your annual review form at any time by the person, their manager, or the HR administrator.

Adoption of current customers have been really high, with 80% using it daily to give and receive feedback.  Many of us struggle to get our hiring managers to give feedback annually, let alone daily!

5 Things I Really Like About iRevu: 

1. Mobile native. Built and designed to work like your workforce works. The technology helps create an environment where it’s easy to give and receive feedback easily and quickly.

2. Admins (HR team or other) can push out reminders to hiring managers who haven’t given feedback to certain individuals in a while. Individuals can set their own reminders to help them remember to provide ongoing feedback employees want.

3. Blackout Feature. You’re working on something on a Saturday at 9pm after four beers, and you decide it would be a great time to send feedback! Maybe not so much! iRevu has a feature that allows your organization to put a waiting period in play at certain times, so your employees aren’t getting drunk or pissed off feedback. It also protects your leaders from sending feedback they wished they hadn’t.

4. Visual timeline of feedback. Shows you and your hiring managers when feedback was given and to whom on the team. The visuals work really well with so many of our managers who are visual learners.

5. The cost!  It’s super cheap. I get asked a lot from HR pros working in small and medium shops about wanting a performance management system, but they can’t afford the big ones. You can get iRevu at a really good price, and totally re-engage performance management and feedback within your organization.

Micro-feedback was huge a few years ago, and then it went away as all the big systems kind of implemented their version of it within their large enterprise systems. This left many of the small and medium shops without anything that was easy to use for this purpose. iRevu is a great option. Also, larger companies can use it if their system doesn’t have micro-feedback tool, and they can throw the feedback directly into your system.

Check them out, the demo is quick and easy because the system is quick and easy.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Secret to Great HR

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The secret is extraordinarily simple, it’s all about a few close relationships. Depending on what type of organization you come from, it has to do with the relationship you have with those who are running operations.

First, every organization has some type of operation, meaning every organization produces something, product, service, etc. Even in church, the pastor runs operations, sharing the gospel with people, for example.

So, in your organization, to have great HR, the leadership in HR must have a great relationship with the leadership in Operations. I’m talking husband/wife great relationship, your best friend in the world type relationship, someone you could go on vacation for a week, and share a hotel room type relationship.  Not, I can ‘get along’ with them type relationships.

The blocking and tackling of HR isn’t difficult, but becomes incredibly difficult without support from your operation’s partner. People miss this and it’s very simple. Instead, in HR, we work to make new processes, new programs, better orientation, more specific recruiting plans, user-friendly HRIS, etc. Then, we get completely frustrated when we can’t get rank and file to follow some very simple steps to make it all run extremely smooth.

Why?

Because we mostly do all this HR stuff, without operations really buying into, or even wanting, our latest and greatest new thingy we just put together. Even though it’s for them, by the way!

If you have a strong relationship with Ops, they will tell you what they need, help you design it, roll it out for you, and make their own processes to ensure it’s followed. Wow! Doesn’t that sound nice? All because of a relationship.

The secret to Great HR has nothing to do with functional HR knowledge and expertise.  It has everything to do with your ability, from a position in HR, to build great two-way relationships across your organization, even with those functions you don’t like!