It’s Tim Sackett Day – Celebrating Kelly Dingee!

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Tim Sackett

January 23, 2012 my friends made that day forever be known as Tim Sackett Day! By January 23, 2013 those same friends thought I couldn’t take another day of celebration and honor, and decided to honor another individual but still call it Tim Sackett Day! So, last year we honored the great Paul Hebert!

Tim Sackett Day is about honoring and giving respect to fellow HR and Talent Pros that we don’t think get enough respect. They are wicked smart. Great at their profession. Helpful towards others. Really, just good all around people, we think you should know more about. Yes, everything I’m not! Laurie’s original goal was to introduce our little HR and Talent social world to people they might not know, but really should.

That’s why I’m excited on this day, January 23, 2014 for Tim Sackett Day, we are honoring Kelly Dingee! (Pronounced Din Gee like a dirty window, not Dinghy like a small boat or silly person) You might know her as @SourcerKelly on the Twitters, or that super cool chick out of Washington D.C. who is the Recruiting Manager at Staffing Advisors. I know her as a peer and colleague from Fistful of Talent.

If I grow up to be a lady, I would want to be Kelly! Great Talent Pro. Helpful as can be. Funny. Great Mom.

Behind the scenes I tell Kelly this probably 3-4 times per year – ‘I Love Your Writing’. Kelly teaches me more in a year than anyone else in the industry. I don’t think I can ever thank her enough for that. We both are in the staffing game so she speaks my language, and she knows my problems, and she usually has really good ways to solve all of my roadblocks.

If anyone should have their own day, it’s Kelly! She would never ask for it, or feel she deserves it, but she does.

Please send Kelly a note on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn – where ever you like to hang and congratulate her on being named the 2014 Tim Sackett Day honoree!

Job Seekers Still Mostly Offline!

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Tim Sackett

I was sent some research recently from Whale Path, a business research company, that was looking at how employers really find their employees. What they found might surprise many within the Talent Acquisition space. Their research found that a majority of employees under the medium U.S. wage scale (around $50k per year) actually found their jobs offline!

Does this jive with your hiring?

Here are some of the actual stats from their research:

– Only 7% of jobs paying $25 per hour or less are filled through online sources

– Personal referrals account for 46% of hires for positions paying less than U.S. median income, up from 41% in 2008

– Craigslist was cited by more than half of businesses as a low-cost resource for finding employees.

We tend to believe everyone is online. We then believe since they are online, they must be looking for jobs online. Do you know why you believe this?You’ve been told to believe this, over, and over, and over, through great marketing by companies who are selling online hiring solutions. We see Monster.com and CareerBuilder ads on the Superbowl. We are bombarded with emails daily about easy, fast ,cheap hiring solutions. We see constant media reports about the growth of LinkedIn. We are told everyone will be searching for a job on their phone, you MUST have a mobile solution. Yet, we don’t actually know anyone personally who applied and got a job on their phone. We are conditioned to believe everyone must be searching for a job online. Marketing is so strong, you don’t even know it’s happening to you.

But they aren’t. At least millions and millions and millions of our potential employees aren’t searching for job online.

They’re finding jobs like your grandparents found jobs. They are networking, they’re letting their friends and family know they’re looking, they’re letting the members of their church and synagogue know they’re looking, they’re letting their bowling buddies know they’re looking. Eventually, someone refers them to a job, and they get hired. We tend to thing we’re all just trying to hire professionals for $100K jobs, but we aren’t. Most of the hiring done in the U.S. is for positions under $50K, and most of your budget is being spent on tools that don’t attract these individuals. Individuals that don’t need a resume, they just need to fill out an application, because they have people who will vouch for their skills.

Interesting research, much of it we don’t normally focus on. What are you spending your hiring budget on today?

The Bigger You Are, The Smaller You Need To Act

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Do you know why most restaurants fail? They don’t do anything really, really well. There are a number of new burger chains popping up all over the country who are doing great. These chains have decided to have only a few menu items, but do each of those items better than anywhere else. You can get a burger, fries, shake and a soda. That’s it. Small, focused, the best you’ll ever taste – each item.

I work with a lot of big companies, and the hiring managers love me! You know why?

I’m small (okay, I walked into that one!). My company is small. When you’re small you do a number of things that most big companies don’t do. Here’s a short list:

You take full responsibility (no one else around to blame)
You’re responsive to everything (or you go out of business)
You’re in the know of what needs to be done
You say ‘Yes’ to almost everything
You treat the business like it’s your own

I meet with a lot of HR executives who work for big companies and almost 100% have the same issue. They feel like their department doesn’t have the credibility and influence it should. They are concerned that their department’s reputation is that of a roadblock and not of a valued partner. They don’t know how to get the organization to view them differently.

It’s really easy.

Big HR departments have to act like they are small HR departments. While their is a business necessity to have specialist in large HR shops, everyone must act like they are generalist. Leaders have to make sure that it’s known that lack of response, lack of solutions, lack taking full responsibility to ensure someone gets the answer they need will not be tolerated, at any level, within their HR shop.

Hiring managers, executives, individual contributors, etc. only want to hear one thing when they call HR – “Yes, we’ll take care of it, right now”. Not an endless loop of we can’t do it, I’m not the person, I’ll try and find out, I don’t know, call such and such, etc. Small shops don’t have this luxury. If they would say these things, they’d be out of job, because they wouldn’t be needed.

The key to great HR in a big HR shop is to act small. Yet most big HR shops work really, really hard on trying to be big. When you act small you get very good at pinpointing what is really important and getting that accomplished. You do this because you just can’t do everything, you don’t have the resources. By doing a few things really, really well, your organization knows what they can’t count on you to deliver. Large HR shops try to do everything, and usually do it all really average, or below average. They are trying to do too much. Don’t get bigger, get smaller – smaller on your focus, smaller on your deliverables, smaller on your accomplishments, but make those things world class.

How To Pay A Headhunting Fee in 15 Easy Steps

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Tim Sackett

I hear statements like this all the time: ‘Ugh, I don’t want to pay a headhunting fee!’ I know this is because corporate HR folks think that it’s really hard to do, but I’m hear to show you that it isn’t hard! In fact, in 15 easy steps, I’ll show you how you can do this all the time!

Here are the 15 Easy Steps in Paying a Headhunting Fee:

1. Post all of your jobs and wait for applications/resumes to come into your email and/or ATS.

2. Weed out as many candidates as possible for stuff that doesn’t really matter, like: too many jobs, not enough time at a job, going to the ‘wrong’ school or not high enough GPA, working for a company that was too big or too small, making a grammatical error on the resume, not living in the ‘right’ area, etc.

3. Email the few candidates you have left with a message about their interest level and make them fill out stuff like applications and questionnaires to be considered for the next step.

4. Wait for email replies.

5. Send the 2 that reply as your ‘best candidates’ onto the hiring manager. 7 others reply after, ignore these, they weren’t quick enough to be the ‘best’ candidates.

6. Don’t follow up with the hiring manager on the two candidates you sent. If she is interested, she’ll get back to you.

7. Don’t respond to candidates following up looking for feedback on next steps, you want to keep the power position in this arrangement.

8. Send another email to hiring manager after two weeks looking for feedback on original candidates you sent. Hiring manager won’t like the two, wants more candidates. You go out and see who else has posted for the position in the past week (forget about those other 7 who first applied, they are old by now). Send 5 additional emails to the new candidates. 1 replies. Send to hiring manager.

9. Let Hiring Managers return calls go to voice mail, you know they just want to complain about the quality and lack of candidates. Call her back end of business tomorrow. She’s already gone for the day.

10. Hiring manager comes to your office. Crap. They caught you. You tell the manager you’ve been working non-stop on their opening, the three candidates are the best you can come up with.

11. Hiring manager goes back to their office. I call your hiring manager. She tells me she can’t get any good candidates.

12. Hiring Manager sets up their own interviews. Three days later, if not sooner, I send your hiring manager 5 candidates all capable of doing the job. I call your hiring manager to highlight two of the candidates who I feel would be the best fit for your organization.

13. Hiring manager picks a favorite from the great interviews they just had. I’ve pre-closed both on an offer, so I’m what they call in the business, a ‘sure-thing’.

14. Hiring manager calls you and tells you they found a candidate through an outside source.

15. You process my invoice.

See, it’s really not that hard to pay a headhunting fee, in fact, you practically don’t have to do much of anything! Just keep doing what you’re doing.

Your Open Office is Killing Your Productivity

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Tim Sackett

You know what’s funny – everyone, who is anyone, wants to work in a new, cool, ultra modern open office concept! Organizations are spending billions creating these environments, and now studies are coming out and showing that productivity suffers in open concepts, especially with younger workers and those that love to multitask. From the New Yorker:

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve…In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

So, why do we continue to design our workplaces around this open office concept? Here’s what I think:

1. Recruiting. Young talent likes to walk into the ‘cool’ office. Executives feel that this is a recruiting advantage and a marketing advantage when customers see a new, ultra-modern office environment.

2. We think we want our office, like we want our homes. Over the past 2 decades home builders have been ask to build open home plan designs. We then go to our office which is all cut up into small rooms and think ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be ‘nicer’ if this was all opened up?’

3. Collaboration. Open office design was billed as the next best thing for creativity and collaboration. It was a theory. It was never really tested out. Someone had an idea, ‘you know what, if we break down these walls and have everyone in one big room, we’ll be more collaborative, we’ll be more creative”. Sounds good. Research is showing us that theory was just that, a theory.

I think for certain aspects the open concept still has merit. Sales offices for years have been using the open concept with success, in a bullpen environment. Hear your peers next to you on the phone, and your competitive nature takes over, you get on the phone. You can feel and hear a buzz in the air in a well run sales bullpen. I tend to think I’m creative, but having others around me, talking, doesn’t help my creative process. I hear this from IT and Design professionals as well. Have you been in a big IT shop or Design house? Most of the pros where headphones, dim the lights, try and create an environment that the open concept isn’t giving them.

Be careful my friends. I love the look of many of the new offices, but if it’s hurting productivity and making my workers worse – I’ll gladly give them back their offices!

Hiring Back An Employee Who Left You

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Did you see what happened last week on the college football carousel? The University of Louisville hired their ex-coach, and current Western Kentucky Coach, Bobby Petrino. For those who don’t know the Bobby Petrino story check out his detailed coaching timeline on SB Nation (it’s awesome!) – I’ll give you a five second tour:

I. Hired Head Football Coach at University of Louisville – doing great (2004)

II. Hired Head Coach NFL Atlanta Falcons (Jan. 2007) – didn’t do great

III. Leaves mid-season and takes University of Arkansas Head Coach job – did good (December 2007)

IV. Head Coach Arkansas, has a motorcycle crash with a 25 year old female assistant on the back that wasn’t his wife and that he was having an affair with, and that he hired – Power drunk. (April 2012)

V. Fired as Head Coach at Arkansas – not good (April 2012)

VI. Hired Head Football Coach Western Kentucky University- did good (December 2012)

VII. Hired Head Football Coach University of Louisville. (January 2013)

There’s a bunch of other luggage along the way that SB Nation points out which leads me to only one question – Was it a good hire by Louisville to take Bobby Petrino back?

I asked a couple of my friends and fellow #8ManRotation authors this same question – here are their responses:

Matt (akaBruno) Stollak:

How much time off does a mercurial talent deserve before being brought back? Is Jim Tressel looking at the Petrino hiring and thinking he is up next?

Similarly, how does Louisville Football Core Values (http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/06/louisville-footballs-core-team-values-include-no-guns-no-drugs/) continue to exist when Petrino has blatantly violated #1 and #2. Is it all about winning? What message does it send to staff and players?

Steve (Mr. HR Tech) Boese:

Even a cynic like me is surprised by this move. I guess the argument was he hit rock bottom and now has done the football equivalent of finding Jesus or something, But it is also about positioning, Louisville does not want to be a stepping stone job between the MAC and the Big 10 or SEC, (they are delusional about this, but I think it is true). So at some level they see this hire as a the best they could do with that in mind. No successful power conference coach would leave for Louisville so with Petrino they find the closest they could to that ideal.

Petrino going to Western Kentucky after his biggest screw up at Arkansas and before coming back to Louisville also serves to give Louisville some cover on this. It is kind of like Western Kentucky took at least some of the flak for letting the guy back in to the world of coaching and at least in theory that will diminish the heat that Louisville is going to take. Kind of like Petrino went to jail (getting canned at Arkansas), then got released to probation, (Western Kentucky), and now the ankle bracelet has been finally cut off (back to Louisville).

Here’s my take:

The best hires that most companies will never make are the ones like this. He was great for us. Went someplace else and had a meltdown. Now we won’t hire him back either. For some reason, he was great with you. Don’t discount what certain environments, certain cultures, etc. will do for someone’s performance. Bobby Petrino is a broken man, coming home to where he had his most success. This might turn out to a great hire for Louisville.

What do you think?

5 Top Regrets of People Leaving a Job

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Being in my line of work, I get to hear from a ton of people who have left jobs. One of the questions I like to ask people is to give me one thing they regret about leaving a certain position or company. You might think that most people would find this hard to answer, but I’m always surprised at how quickly people can answer this question, and the fact that no one ever answers it with “I have no regrets.” I use this question to help me understand a candidates level of self-insight. If a person can look back on a job, and say you know what, the company might have sucked, but I could have done ‘this’ better, that’s someone who gets it.

Here are the Top 5 Regrets people have when leaving a job:

1. “I could have done better.” I like people who can come out and say, I just didn’t do enough. It’s usually followed with reasons why, lack or resources or tools, etc. But it shows me they have a desire to be successful at anything they do.

2. “I should have made more work friends.” I talk to a lot of people who have been at a company for years, and after they leave they realize they weren’t really close to anyone. They realize they miss some of the people, but never really put in the time to establish enough of a relationship to carry it beyond just a working relationship.

3. “I didn’t let the executives know what I was really thinking.” This happens to so many people. Even when leaving they somehow justify to themselves that it won’t matter, so they never share what they really thought of so many things. While some of it might not matter, there might have been a great idea or change in there that could have a positive impact to the organization. Yet, they walk away with it unsaid.

4. “I wish I would have celebrated my accomplishments more.” You know what happens when you celebrate your accomplishments? People begin to notice them as accomplishments. Those things turn into positives for the organizations. People are drawn to you and want to be a part of what you’re doing. Celebrations, real celebrations, make a closer bond between you and your coworkers.

5. “I wish I never would have left.” (or “I left for the wrong reasons.”)I hear so many people say these words – “I loved that job!” My next question is – “Why did you leave?” It’s always followed by a reason, promotion, more money, different location, etc. After they left, they found out how much the job they had, was a really, really good job that they loved. I always caution people from leaving a job, especially when they tell me they love the job. Don’t discount loving your job. It’s hard, really hard, to find jobs you love.

The beginning of the year is always a good time to reflect on your regrets from the prior year. I know many people who took on new positions in the past year. I always love to find out how the new gig is going, but I also love to ask about what they regret about leaving, and I’ve never disappointed by the response!

Hire More Pretty People

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Tim Sackett

This post originally ran in January of 2012, and in one of the most read posts I’ve done. It as so popular, Kris Dunn, stole the idea, tweaked it, and made it his most downloaded whitepaper in Kinetix history! You’re Welcome, KD. After 2 years, I still find this concept has merit! It’s also very close to how Hitler’s Germany started! Enjoy.

What do you think of, in regards to smarts, when I say: “Sexy Blond model type”?

What about: “Strong Athletic Jock?”

What about: “Scrawny nerdy band geek?”

My guess is most people would answer: Dumb, Dumb, Smart – or something to that context.

In HR we call this profiling – and make no mistake – profiling – is done by almost all of our hiring managers. The problem is everything we might have thought is probably wrong in regards to our expectations of looks and brains. So, why are ugly people more smart?

They’re Not!

Slate recently published an article that contradicts all of our ugly people are more smart myths and actually shows evidence to the contrary. From the article:

Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone’s intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent?

Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests.

When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size.

That’s right HR Pros – Pretty people are smarter. I can hear hiring managers and creepy executives that only want “cute” secretaries laughing all over the world!

The premise is solid though! If you go back in our history and culture you see how this type of things evolves:

1. Very smart guy – gets great job or starts great company – makes a ton of money

2. Because of success, Smart guy now has many choices of very pretty females to pursue as a bride.

3. Smart guy and Pretty bride start a family – which results in “Pretty” Smart Children

4. Pretty Smart Children grow up with all the opportunities that come to smart beautiful families.

5. The cycle repeats.

Now – first – this is a historical thing – thus my example of using a male as our “Smart guy” and not “Smart girl” – I’m sure in today’s world this premise has evolved yet again. But we are talking about how we got to this point, not where are we now. Additionally, we are looking at how your organization can hire better. So, how do you hire better? Hire more pretty people.

Seems simple enough. Heck, that is even a hiring process that your hiring managers would support!

Recruiting without actually doing it

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Most recruiters believe they are actually recruiting.

They ensure they have well written job descriptions.

They have a great process set up to screen applicants.

They’ve gone out and chosen the best pre-employment assessments for their organizations.

They implemented an awesome new applicant tracking system.

They’ve posted their opening on their careers page of their organizations website.

They’ve contracted out with the best background screening company.

They’ve done everything but pick up a phone and talk to someone…

You see recruiting is a lot like painting a picture. Of course you have to have canvas, and paints, and brushes, but mainly you need to start painting. In recruiting all you really need to have is one contact to contact. That’s how it starts. You turn one contact into another, repeat. All the other stuff is great, but it’s not recruiting. Although, it’s what most recruiters will tell you recruiting is.

The hard part of recruiting, is actually recruiting.

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

Category Archives: Recruiting

The Bigger You Are, The Smaller You Need To Act

Your Open Office is Killing Your Productivity

Hiring Back An Employee Who Left You

5 Top Regrets of People Leaving a Job