Category Archives: Recruiting

5 Signs You Shouldn’t Make That Offer

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If I have learned anything at all in my HR/Recruiting career it’s that everyone has an opinion on what makes a good hire. If you ask 100 people to give you one thing they focus on when deciding between candidates, you’ll get 100 different answers!

I’ve got some of my own. They might be slightly different than yours, but I know mine work!  So, if you want to make some better selections, take note my young Padawans:

1. Crinkled up money. Male or female if you pull money out of your pocket or purse and it’s crinkled up, you’ll be a bad hire!  There is something fundamentally wrong with people who can’t keep their cash straight. The challenge you have is how do you get a candidate to show you this? Ask to copy their driver’s license, or something like that!

2. Males with more selfies on their Instagram, than all other photos. I don’t even have to explain this.

3. Slow walkers.  If you don’t have some pep in your step, at least for the interview, you’re going to be drag as an employee.

4. My Last Employer was so Awesome! Yeah, that’s great, we aren’t them. Let’s put a little focus back to what we got going on right here, sparky. Putting too much emphasis on a job you love during the interview is annoying. We get it. It was a good gig. You f’d it up and can’t let go. Now we’ll have to listen about it for the next nine months until we fire you.

5. Complaining or being Rude to waitstaff.  I like taking candidates to lunch or dinner, just to see how they treat other people. I want servant leaders, not assholes, working for me. The meal interview is a great selection tool to weed out bad people.

What are your signs not to make an offer?  Share in the comments!

You Don’t Have to Solve Problems in HR to be Succcessful

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I keep hearing everywhere that all organizations want from employees is people who are problem solvers! Executives when asked what they are looking for in future and current employees will wax poetically about we just need ‘good’ people (which is really slang for more people who look and act like ‘us’) who can ‘solve problems’.

Even my kids teachers and the public education system constantly talk about how we are just working to teach our kids how to solve problems.

If we just had more problem solvers in our work environments, everything else would take care of itself!

Wrong!

Our reality is everyone ‘can’ solve problems, but you don’t want their solutions. Most people have no ability to really solve problems, they usually just end up causing the problem to be bigger, or creating new problems that are worse in the long run.

In HR you don’t need to solve problems to be successful.  You do, though, have to one thing very well.  You can’t create problems!

This is tough one.

Most HR pros I know love to create problems, under the disguise of then being able to solve those made up problem. By the way, HR isn’t alone in this quest, every other function has their fake problem solvers as well.

The one I hear recently is companies that are having this candidate experience problem.  You know the drill. HR can’t find enough good talent to fill the jobs they have open (real problem), so they go to their executive team and tell them it’s because our candidate experience is awful (fake problem). The reality is HR is doing an awful job attracting talent, candidate experience isn’t the real issue, things like having recruiters pick up the phone are, but those are just details.

To be successful in HR,  you just have to not create any new problems.  You’ll have plenty of problems crop up on their own without your help! If you do nothing but come in and do the work of HR and not create new problems, you’ll be better than 90% of HR pros in the world. That’s pretty successful.

Success in HR = not creating new problems. That seems simple enough. Now getting into the top 10% means you might have to solve some of those existing problems you have, but we’ll save that for another time.

Your CEO is a Better Recruiter Than You

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Lou Adler, a great thought leader in the recruiting industry (I love to refer to him as “Uncle Lou” – endearingly), has one of the best recruiting articles of the year up on Inc. titled, “An Open Email from a CEO to All Outstanding Candidates“.   The concept of the email was getting your CEO to send out an email directly to candidates you are trying to source.

Just that idea alone is a brilliant strategy, because 99.9% of organizations will never do it!  That means, you’ll standout from the crowd. That’s good recruiting practices.

The article goes on to give you how you should actually write the email and what you should say:

1. No silly, classic job descriptions.  Instead tell them about what they’ll actually be doing.

2. Describe why the job could be a career move to the candidate.  They’ll believe this from coming from the CEO.

3. Don’t tell them to apply. That can actually be the last step. Get them interested first. Applications scream we have no idea what we are doing.

4. Provide an open invitation and a direct way to have a real conversation with someone with direct knowledge of the opening.

5. Let them know what the process would look like and next steps, if they are actually interested in moving forward.

6. Make sure the candidates have access to your hiring managers as well.  I’m assuming if your CEO is this involved, your hiring managers will be onboard as well!

Great stuff, right?!

It probably doesn’t work for high volume hiring when you have a lot of candidates. This isn’t meant for that, it’s meant for hard to find, critical to the business type positions.

I absolutely love this technique!

Here’s what I know. Most companies, and most CEOs, will never do this. Those who do, will have great success in getting candidates to respond. Put yourself into your candidates shoes. You’re sitting there some idle Friday and an email pops up from a name you don’t recognize. You open it and find out it’s coming from the CEO of a pretty good company in town. You better believe you’ll read it.

You will also ‘trust’ what is in that email, over if the exact same thing is sent by a recruiter. Why?  You believe that a CEO would never put themselves in a position to lie.  Right or wrong, you believe this. Plus, you’re flattered that a CEO sent you a personal email, not some marketing email, from their ‘real’ work email address, with their contact information in it.

None of your friends have gotten an email from a CEO telling them they are wanted! This is cool. This feels good. This feels different.

This is a winning strategy.

Thanks Uncle Lou!

The Only Candidate Available

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Almost every single week of my life for the last twenty years I’ve had to deal with an issue that just seems to never go away. I didn’t matter if I was in a HR or TA role, I was always involved with working with hiring managers who always had some sort of opening, even in bad economic times.

The scenario went something like this:

1. Hiring Manager  has an opening. I/We find this hiring manager a really good candidate. Not perfect, but probably better than many we have already hired in the same position.

2. Hiring Manager interviews candidate. Likes Candidate.

3. I go to speak with the Hiring Manager.

4. You know what happens next…

5. Hiring Manager says she really liked the candidate, but (wait for it)…She would certainly like to see other candidates to compare.

6. I put gun in my mouth and pull trigger.

This same scenario has happened weekly for twenty years across multiple companies, multiple industries and multiple states. It’s an epidemic of enormous proportion across the world.

Here’s the real problem that we face with hiring managers, and it’s completely psychological. The Hiring Manager always assumes that the ‘last’ option, or ‘only’ option is a bad option.

Pretty simple.  We all do this.  If you go to a farmers market and you go to pick out some produce, let’s say a head of lettuce, and the farmer only has one head of lettuce left on the stand. We will assume something must be wrong with that one head of lettuce!  If the farmer puts three other heads around that one, you would gladly pick up the original head, now believing you ‘picked’ the best head of lettuce.

Candidates are heads of lettuce!

When you show a hiring manager one, they assume it’s not as good as the others they are not seeing.

This is actually pretty easy to solve, but very hard to do. Never present a hiring manager with one candidate.  HR and TA are classic economist when it comes to candidate generation. We are FIFOs! Do you remember your Econ class from college? First In, First Out.  The first candidate we find, we immediately send out to the hiring manager.

This starts the problem.

The hiring managers seeing one candidate will discount this candidate as bad. If you just wait a few days, put one or two other candidates with this candidate, not the hiring manager will ‘pick’ the best.  This works pretty well, most of the time.  But, it’s hard to do because we get so excited about finding a good candidate we want to show it the hiring manager as fast as possible.

Stop that!

Be patient. Find a good ‘slate’ of candidates to present all at the same time. Reap the benefits.

The only candidate available will always be that lonely head of lettuce on the farmers stand.  Find more heads, and present them together. No one likes to pick from a pile of one!

Michigan Recruiters Conference #MiRecruits @MiRecruits

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Over a year ago Jim D’Amico and I started talking about how cool it would be to have a Recruiting only conference right here in our great state of Michigan! We had some models of how some others did it, primarily Paul DeBettignies out of Minnesota, and we decided to give it a try.  HR has thousands of conferences! National, state, local. TA has somehow become the redheaded stepchild of HR! Jim and I love redheaded stepchildren so we wanted to change this!

The first one was held on Friday March 13th in Lansing, MI, onsite at Accident Fund who was a great corporate sponsor for our first event.  We had over 100 corporate talent acquisition leaders and pros come in from all over the state. We had a great speaking group that included Paul and Jennifer McClure. It was everything we hoped for and more.

The 2nd Michigan Recruiters Conference will also be held on  Friday October 2nd onsite at Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, MI. This time we’ve added more speakers including Kris Dunn, Lori Fenstermaker, David Dart and Troy Farley.  As was the first event, the intent is to help develop and educate corporate talent acquisition pros and leaders to be great.

You can follow the action on the Twitters at #MiRecruits. Also, you can check out my Periscope throughout the day and I’ll bring some Live action to the social stream as well – which you can watch following me on Twitter @TimSackett and download the Periscope App on iTunes or Android.

If you’re just learning about this for the first time, I apologize. The reality is, the demand has been great. We sold out both shows without really even trying.  Turns out, Corporate Talent Acquisitions Pros like development, and we all don’t have very many options! We hope this is a great option, that is close to home.  Send me your contact information and I’ll make sure you get added to the contact list for the Spring 2016 conference. (timsackett@comcast.net)

So, What’s next? 

Our original idea was to try and do this event twice per year. We keep it cheap through great sponsors like Velocity Resource Group and CareerBuilder, as well as corporate sponsors (who provide us with space to hold the one day Conference/Summit) like Accident Fund and Spectrum Health.

That means the next conference will be held in the spring of 2016 and we would love to have it in the metro Detroit area – we just need to find a corporate sponsor, who has a large conference/ballroom type space that can fit a couple hundred people.  Hello, GM, Quicken Loans, Ford, Chrysler, Blue Cross/Blue Shield/ Detroit Medical Center/ Etc.!?  If you have interest in being a corporate sponsor please reach out to me directly, I would love to answer any questions you might have. I promise, we try and make it painless! Plus, it’s huge boost to your employment brand within your market!

You can check out more at www.michiganrecruits.com!

Live Streaming Today @Glassdoor’s Employer Branding Summit

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Today from 10am EST to 6:30pm EST – Glassdoor is Live Streaming their entire Employer Branding Summit from San Francisco!

Kris Dunn and I will be hosting the Live Stream with a Special Kick Off show starting at 10am EST, Halftime show at 3pm EST and special segments at breaks throughout the day!  We will be giving out special prizes to those watching the Live Stream and interacting with us throughout the day!

You can watch Live Stream for FREE by clicking on this Link.

The agenda is packed with some of the best Employment Branding minds in the business:

Glassdoor Speakers

 

 

Check it out! It’s like the next best thing besides actually being there with us, which is pretty cool. I mean you have Kris and I doing our best ESPN SportsCenter acting jobs!

 

1 Sign That Shows Google Now Controls HR

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It was just a matter of time. The company that vows to do know evil, would eventually take over the function that is the most hated in the world.  Don’t get me wrong, Google didn’t come into your organization and start giving your employees performance reviews, yet.  What Google does is much more stealth.

Remember back in April of this year (2015)? Laszlo Bock, the head of HR for Google, released his book “Work Rules!” He then went on a national book tour and was famously interviewed, everywhere, telling anyone who would listen that you don’t need a college degree to work at Google. In fact, Google has found that your college GPA and transcripts to be ‘worthless’ in terms of making a quality hire.

We all kind of chuckled.  Well, there goes Google, being Google again.

Let’s fast forward to today. Jobvite recently released their 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey.  It’s always an interesting read, with great data and metrics, but one metric stood out, to me, above all others:

“57% of Organizations now report that GPAs are unimportant.”

Do you see what just happened?

If Jobvite would have asked organizations and recruiters in January of this year, this same question, prior to Laszlo’s announcement, how do you think this number would be different?  I’m telling you the number would have been around 5% or less!

GPA are unimportant. Really?

Here’s what Google, I mean Laszlo, forgot to tell everyone about why Google can hire people who have never gone to college.  THEY HIRE FREAKING GENIUSES THAT HAVE BEEN CODING IN THEIR PARENTS BASEMENTS SINCE THEY WERE 12! These kids don’t need college. College would bore them. They know more than the professors teaching them. Google gets to hire the top 1% of people, not just college grads.

You won’t get these geniuses, who don’t need to go to college.  You get half-baked nitwits who need college, a good spanking, a few years to grow up and probably deep therapy.  You are not Google.

Yet, here we are, and you are answering Jobvite’s survey questions and acting like your Google.  Thank you Google.  Thank you for setting HR back a decade.  For not telling the full story, just swaying opinion by making bold statements.  We now get a generation of workers who think they can just jump off their Xbox and into a job paying six figures.  That’s really helpful.  You’re brilliant Laszlo.

Check out Jobvite’s 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey, it’s good stuff, even the stuff that Google brainwashed you to answer.

Watch Me LIVE Right Now! #CBEmpower15

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That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on TV LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  Today, I’ll be bringing you all the cool stuff happening at Empower 15 in Chicago!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST today and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).

My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in this morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day.

If you want to ask a question on the Live Stream – hit me on the Twitters at #CBEmpower15 or @TimSackett and I’ll try to make you famous!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

Remember! This is LIVE, who knows what might happen…

 

Not Enough Cooks In The Kitchen!

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Last weekend I spent some time with a restaurant owner friend of mine.  He runs a great place, everyone loves it, but he’s having a problem.  They are having a hard time hiring cooks.  We can commiserate on this because of my background running HR at Applebee’s, he knows I understand his pain.

In the restaurant business you don’t just shut your doors when a cook doesn’t show up to work. You put on an apron and start cooking. Customers are coming, and they don’t care that some kid would rather get high, then cook their steak.  Welcome to the show!  Oh, you thought some upstanding educated professional was back in the kitchen cooking your $50 steak!? That’s cute.

I told my friend good luck, and we went on our way.

Then I read this from the Washington Post:

The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago, where restaurateurs said they are receiving far fewer applications than in past years. “It’s gotten to the point where if good cooks come along, we’ll hire them even if we don’t have a position. Because we will have a position,” Paul Kahan, a local chef, told the Chicago Tribune last week.

It’s also an issue in New York, where skilled cooks are an increasingly rare commodity. “If I had a position open in the kitchen, I might have 12 résumés, call in three   or four to [try out] in the kitchen, and make a decision,” Alfred Portale, the chef and owner of Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill, told Fortune recently. “Now it’s the other way around; there’s one cook and 12 restaurants.”

And it extends to restaurants out West. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too.

Looks like it’s not a local hiring dilemma, but a national trend!

It’s not just cooks. All over the U.S. HR and TA pros are struggling to find people for low and semi-skilled jobs that want to work.  You know, the kind of people who will show up each day when their shift starts, for more than one day in a row! That is the new sought after skill in America! Just showing up for work.

So, why do we have a shortage of cooks?

  1. Many, many, many cook positions are filled by Mexican workers. Over the past five years the U.S. has seen a flat or negative growth of Mexican workers entering the U.S.
  2. We have entire generations that don’t cook and eat at home.  If you never learned how to make your own grilled cheese, there is a good bet you won’t apply for a cook position.
  3. The pay is lower than it probably should be (see #1 above). Restaurants have gotten away with paying low wages to cooks because many used illegal workers with shared or fake papers.  No one wants to pay $20 for a burger and fries.

Something interesting is going to happen, slowly. Prices will rise, because wages of cooks will rise to attract people to these jobs.  Menu prices will rise to meet the wage demand. Eventually that will drive prices to a point where many people will decide to cook and eat at home.  Restaurants will go out of business.

It’s the $15/hr fast food debate.  Do you want to pay $9.99 for a Happy Meal for your kid? No. Fewer happy meals sold equals fewer fast food jobs.

It’s all simple economics, not politics.  We make choices based on the perceived value we get.  If the perceived value is too low, we will make other choices.  Give it time, you’ll see.

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!