Category Archives: Recruiting

3 Myths of the ‘Cool’ Office

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I think the one thing that ‘normal’ HR Pros are sick of hearing about it the crap in HR that gets the most headlines in the media – The Cool Office Perks! Let’s face it the majority of HR Pros don’t have the budget to do anything close to what you hear about in magazines articles about the cool new start-ups or big IT firms like Google and Yahoo.  We can’t give our employees free lunches, and brand new open environment office spaces that look like a cross between a MTV Real World house and a abandoned slaughter house and unlimited time off!

The Atlantic had a great article on this recently that will for sure put ‘normal’ HR pros at ease on these escalation of perks:

“Don’t be fooled by the perks at all those Silicon Valley (and Alley) offices — it’s all just part of a subtle plot to control employee behavior. The founders of Fab.com, which just got itself a $1 billion valuation, admitted as much to Bloomberg’s Sarah Freier. The shopping site wields its beer on tap, free lunch, and ice-cream machine as a means to force Fab employees to send emails in a “certain font,” use high-quality paper, and always “be Fab” — whatever terrible thing that means. Those types of office perks abound at startups, of course, not only as a way to attract the best talent, but also to get that “talent” working on message, official office font included. Each and every kegerator serves as a reminder of what you owe the company…

It sounds like the best perk ever: You could, officially, and under official policy, get paid for a three-month summer vacation. But of course the increasingly popular you-work-so-hard-that-we-won’t-count strategy doesn’t work that way. First, most companies wouldn’t allow it. The marketing company Xiik, for example, boasts the limitless vacation offer, but in its fine print discourages long hiatuses. “There are no hidden agendas; xiik employees can take as much paid time off as needed,” claims a Xiik project manager on the company website, before clarifying what that really means: “As nice as it would be to regularly leave for months at a time, common sense prevails: In most cases, it simply doesn’t make sense to be away from work for extended periods.”

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with HR Pros across so many industries that involve this idea of how do you compete against all these perks?!  I’ve always come back to  – you don’t!  The perks are just perks  – they might help you hold onto some folks a bit longer – but they don’t make your employees better and they don’t raise the performance of your company.  In HR we need to figure out those things, first.   Here are the 3 Myths (Thank you Sally!) of the ‘Cool’ Office concept:

1. Offering Free food and drinks will keep our employees working longer and more productive. Workers apparently “waste” 2 billion minutes a day of “productivity” getting snacks, lunch, and coffee, according to Staples.

2. Having an ‘open’ office environment foster collaboration and productivity. A recent Quartz article outlines all the terrible things that come out of the open quarters, such as decreased productivity and more airborne illnesses.

3. Unlimited time off allows your employees the ultimate work-life balance – which will increase productivity and retention.  The reality is your work culture makes people feel bad about taking time off and discourages people from utilizing ‘unlimited’ time off policies.  The reason companies can offer ‘unlimited’ time off policies is because studies continue to show those organizations with these policies actually use less time off than those with set limit policies.  It’s a benefit to organizations to use this – not employees!

HR Announces – ‘We’re Out of Ideas’

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Recently the crew at FOT has been having some conversations about what’s new in HR.  It use to be all you had to do was show up at a HR conference and listen to someone from Zappos, Google, Sodexo, etc. to find out what were the latest and greatest happenings going on in HR!  But no more – it seems like HR is in a dead period of new ideas!  I blame the recession – why wouldn’t I – the ‘Great Recession’ gets blamed for everything – might as well take some HR heat!   Nobody at FOT could really come up with any ideas that were new.  But thankfully the good HR folks at Google came through one more idea, but I don’t how new it is…

From Quartz – Google admits those infamous brainteasers were completely useless for hiring:

“Google has admitted that the headscratching questions it once used to quiz job applicants (How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Why are manhole covers round?) were utterly useless as a predictor of who will be a good employee.

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart…

Bock says Google now relies on more quotidian means of interviewing prospective employees, such as standardizing interviews so that candidates can be assessed consistently, and “behavioral interviewing,” such as asking people to describe a time they solved a difficult problem. It’s also giving much less weight to college grade point averages and SAT scores.”

Yes, you are reading that correctly – Google’s ‘new’ HR idea is to go retro!  Back to behavioral interviewing and standardized interview decks – hello 90’s!  Isn’t that wonderful – I can’t believe Google didn’t have someone at SHRM 13 leading a session like “Google’s Strategic HR Innovations – Just Interview Them Stupid!”  HR ladies would have packed the house to find out how they to could jump into the 90’s.  Also, let’s just come right out corporately and validate to all those kids in college – you’re just wasting your time and spending your parents retirement.  I’ve really never been so excited for our industry!

So, I would like to take it upon myself and the entire HR community to let the world know – HR is out of ideas!

Here’s were we/HR stand:

– Still need to hire people

– Still need to train our employees

– Still need to provide benefits and pay administration

– Still planning the company picnic, and/or ‘holiday party

Long live HR.

Coming out of the Unemployment Closet

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I have an acquaintance who was out of work for an entire year.  Not surprising with all the stories we’ve heard throughout the recession.  The surprising thing was that over that entire year, and him knowing exactly what I did, he never once reached out for help.  In fact, I didn’t even know he was out of work and looking for a job.  Not only did I not know, but our friend group did not know as well.  He hid it from us.  He hid the fact he had lost his job for an entire year!  I found out when he got his new position and finally came clean what he had been going through for an entire year!

It hit me that he is not alone.  What he did and felt is very common.  He was embarrassed about losing his job, and not having a job, so he kept it a secret.  Got up everyday like he was going to work and went somewhere to do his job search.  It pains me to know so many people in our culture are embarrassed about not having a job.   That so many of us judge people based on whether they have a job or can get a job.  This concept of ‘being embarrassed for not having a job’ actually hurts the job seeker tremendously!

When a job seeker is hiding the fact they are out of work to friends, peers, acquaintances, etc.  They are limiting themselves to all kinds of opportunities that might be out there for their network to recommend them for.  I think back on the past year and think to myself  – how many positions did I hear about over the past 12 months that this person would have been perfect for!  I cringe at how many.  At the stress he put himself and his family through because he was too embarrassed to say “Tim, I lost my job, just wanted to let you know in case you hear of anything.”  It seems so simple – yet so many people don’t have the courage to even say it because of how culturally we treat the unemployed!

I don’t know if this will help – but I want every job seeker to know – I’ve got your back.  You can tell me.  Don’t be embarrassed.  There is a better way to handle this.

What is that way?

Tell everyone!  Put a freaking sign in your front yard! On your car!  When you go jogging in the morning put it on your t-shirt! We’re going to own this! We’re going to make you come out of the Unemployment closet! We need to let everyone know you’re on the market, you’re ready to work and you’ve got passion to do great things for organizations.  You don’t have time to be embarrassed. To care about what others might think of you because you lost your job.  Your career is waiting!  We need to show the world you are not someone who is going to back down! I don’t want one more person that I know to go through this, ever.

Please come out of the closet for me.  It’s alright – I’ll support you!

 

 

#1 Thing Job Seekers Do Wrong

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I was asked recently by a job seeker: “How do I zero in positions that I’m qualified for and, those that I will be challenged by?” (shout out to Michael Kubica, MBA for the question)  After going back and forth with Mike I think the question is really: “How do I get a job that will use my skills and that I will actually find interesting?”   Most people don’t really want to be ‘challenged’ – they use the word ‘challenged’ or ‘challenging’, but when push comes to shove what most people want is a job where they feel like their contributions are valuable to the organization and their using the skills they are best at.  People want to feel successful – not challenged.  Many times when you’re challenged, you fail – most people don’t like to fail – and will quit.  But job seekers know that hiring managers and HR folks to hear the “challenge” word!

It boils down to what are failed job seekers doing wrong?

The #1 thing that job seekers are doing wrong is only looking for jobs, of jobs that are posted!

I hear it constantly. “I’ve been applying to jobs constantly”, “I’m on the job boards, Indeed, directly to company pages, etc. There isn’t a job posted that I haven’t applied to – there’s nothing left I can do…”  The reality is, HR and Talent Pros know this, most jobs that you want never really get posted.  Here’s how a vast majority of jobs get filled today:

Step 1: Need for a position is Identified in an organization. This might be for a new position being created, a person who resigned, termination, etc. – but now we know we need a body.

Step 2:  The hiring manager, or person who knows of the need first, has one thought – “who do I know, right now, that would fit this position?”

Step 3: If there is an answer to the question in Step 2 – that person is contacted.

(Realize – never in the first 3 steps was there any mention of “Oh, we better post that position quickly!” This all happens before any of that talk)

Step 4:  If there is a viable candidate to fill the need of the organization – that position is filled with that need – the position is never posted.

I say ‘it’s never posted’, but we all know that’s not true – it gets ‘posted’ but it really doesn’t get posted.  It only gets posted to close the loop on the recruiting process – but the resource to fill the need has already been identified – so you applying to that posting is an exercise futility. So many of the positions that get filled in our organizations, are filled like this. Who do you know?  I know someone. Bam! Filled. Job seeker – you’ve got know shot at these ‘prime’ positions.  That’s something behind the curtain that HR/Talent Pros don’t want you to know.

So, what can Job Seekers do to combat this?

Simple.  Network.  Connect with people in your expertise in the companies you want to work. With the people at companies in the area you want to work.  As a job seeker you want to put yourself into the minds of those individuals who when they find out they’re going to have a need – your name comes up in that conversation.  Keep posting – but spend at least double the time you do posting – networking and meeting those who will be in those conversations.  You’ll open yourself up to an entire other bucket of potential openings!

 

The Myth of Being a Highly Selective Employer

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We all think it, don’t we?  We all want to believe in this notion that we only hire the best and brightest – we only hire quality.  We are ‘highly’ selective.

We’ll show our executives really cool data that shows how ‘highly’ selective we are.  Number of applicants per hire – 25,000 people applied for this position and we only took the best 1!

I read something interesting recently from Time magazine and college admissions at highly selective colleges – think Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc.  Schools that are super hard to get into because of how selective they are – much like your hiring process of your organization. From the Time’s article:

“What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions. In fact, it has arguably become easier to get into a selective school, though it may be harder to get into a particular selective school…

The most recent study available from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that between 2010 and 2011 (the most recent years available), the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77% to 79% and the percentage of students applying to at least seven colleges rose from 25% to 29%. In 2000, only 67% of students applied to three or more colleges, while 12% applied to seven or more.

The net effect of this behavior is to create an illusion of increased selectivity. Especially at the most selective schools, an increase in applications generally leads to the acceptance of a smaller percentage of the students who apply. However, students who meet the academic and extracurricular thresholds to qualify for competitive schools will still get into a selective college; it’s just less likely that they’ll get into a specific competitive college. These schools work hard to not admit students who won’t attend;  the acceptance rate and the matriculation rate (the percentage of accepted students who attend) are key measures in many college ranking methodologies, so both admitting too many students and admitting students who don’t attend can hurt a college’s ranking.”

An illusion of increased selectivity…You see, just because you turn down a high number of candidates doesn’t make you more selective – it makes you popular.  Too many organizations, and HR departments, are marketing that they are highly selective based on some simple numbers that give an illusion of being highly selective, when in reality, they’re just good at processing a high number of applicants – but not really being ‘more’ selective.  Just because you turn down 24,999 candidates doesn’t make you selective – it just means you have a high number of applicants.

So what does make you selective?  Quality of hire – which I can argue is another very subjective metric in most organizations – but at least it’s a start.  Can you demonstrate with real measurable items that the applicants you’re hiring are better or getting better than those previously?  This creates a real evidence that you’re becoming ‘more’ selective and on your way to becoming ‘highly’ selective.

93% Employment!

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I don’t know about you, but I think having a 93% employment rate is pretty damn good!

Take this little test:

1. Pick any profession or trade – even unskilled positions.

2. Bring in 100 currently employed people within your specific position you chose.

3. Interview all 100.

4. Now – tell me out of the 100 you interviewed – would you offer a position to 93 of them!?

No way, ever, in any position!

Let’s break down the 100 interviews:

– 3 – you’ll have 3 candidates that won’t even show up – car trouble, emergency, alarm clock didn’t go off, etc. (these are automatic ‘No’s’)

– 4 – you’ll have 4 candidates that will show and you will wish they hadn’t for a number of reason – most dealing with hygiene and/or obnoxious laughing or talking.

– 2 – you’ll have 2 candidates that will be completely arrogant and won’t fit your culture – no offer.

– 5 – you’ll have 5 candidates that you’ll like, but they won’t like you.

The reality is your pool is about 85 of 100 on your very best, most lucky day.  You’re not really selecting from 100 ever.  So now you have 85 candidates of which you’ll find some too light or too heavy on experience,  you’ll hate the school they graduated from, you’ll get bad references on a half dozen, etc.

93%!

I’m telling you right now – at 93%, America is fully employed!  I’m always amazed to hear people in business talk about high unemployment.  I don’t think they really understand what that number represents.  When you talk to HR people, 100%, they’ll be able to give you a list of people who are working for them, that they wish weren’t working for them, but they can’t find anyone better!

93%!

 

 

Brains Before Bros

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True or False: My existing talent pool is always my first line of defense in filling key roles that become available in my organization.

If the first statement is true, shouldn’t the second one be too? In a perfect world, yes. But we know that isn’t always the case, and unfortunately employee development is often overlooked when organizations are forming their talent strategies.

Join hiring smart (people) experts Kris Dunn and Kelly Dingee for Brains Before Bros: Why Hiring Smart People over Experienced People is a Winning Talent Strategy, sponsored by our friends at SumTotal, on Tuesday June 12 at 1pm EST and they’ll hit you with the following:

1.    A rundown of the factors driving talent scarcity in today’s workforce and why it’s better to hire smart people and train for success.

2.    FOT’s definition of “smart” and common false positives you need to consider when defining what smart looks like for your organization.

3.    Three signs that your top talent may be looking to jump ship and how to reel them back in by providing the incentives they really want. (Hint: It’s not always monetary).

4.    Five ways to keep training and development programs aligned with evolving expectations from top applicants and your existing talent – without breaking your budget.

5.    We’ll close this webinar by bringing in Steve Parker from SumTotal to help you ensure your leadership team is creating the right environment to get the most out of your existing talent.

 Your traditional approach to talent isn’t working—start putting brains before bros and maximize your talent strategy today.

REGISTER HERE

1 Reason Interns Suck

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I get pimped constantly to write about companies and their products and I rarely do.  It’s not that I don’t like the companies, products or people – but it’s boring!  Recently, Katie Farrell, was pimping me to write about her client InternMatch and more specifically a report they did called “State of the Internship 2013” where they actually had some fun data to report and one interesting piece I couldn’t turn up!  In full disclosure – Katie and InternMatch paid me absolutely nothing to do this – which is probably why I don’t pimp more stuff for Katie (come on Katie! Some cookies, a diet Dew, anything – really!).

Here’s the 1 Reason Why Interns Suck:

“If a company has pets in the office, it would dramatically increase an intern candidate’s likelihood of applying (24.3%)”

 

I don’t care what you say – that is fascinating data!  Not only does that one data point tell you how worthless it is to hire interns – it gives you actual first hand data about what is really going on in the mind of a college freshman and sophomore that you’re paying bottom-line dollars to!   1/4 of potential interns are swayed in their internship decision by the simple fact if they can bring Ms. Cookie Kitty with them to their big-girl summer job.  Fascinating – with a capital F!

I always viewed internships as a public service for employers.  It’s very similar to buying lemonade from the 8 year old kid running a lemonade stand on a cardboard box on the street corner. You don’t really need a lemonade – but it’s cute and makes them feel like their a real person.  The reality is, the 8 year old, like the college intern doesn’t really want to work for your lame department and learn real skills – they want ice cream truck money – scratch that – they want beer money!

If I was running a Fortune 500 HR shop here is what my internship program would look like:

1. Hire Interns

2. Make them do the worst jobs in our company – no matter what their degree program.

3. Try and get them to quit the internship program.

4. Make it the absolute worst summer of their life.  Boot camp for Frat Boys and Girls.

5. Those few that make it – get automatic offers to come to work real jobs the next year.

Oh, I hear you saying “Tim you have no idea, we need our interns to love our company so we have recruits when they graduate!”  No you don’t.  You need to find people who will work.  I mean really work.  Hire those people.  Don’t hire someone who determines their work future by whether they can bring their cat or dog with them to their summer job!  Oh yeah, they had some other real statistics as well – but that was the only interesting one.

 

3 Reasons You’ll Never Be Fully Staffed

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For any HR/Talent Pro who lives with the concept of staffing levels – becoming ‘fully staffed’ is the nebulous goal that always seems to be just out of arms reach.  I’ve lived staffing levels in retail, restaurants, hospitals, etc.  I know your pain – to be chasing that magic number of ’37 Nurses’ and almost always seeming like you’re at 35 or 36, the day that #37 starts, one more drops off…

There are 3 main reasons you can’t get fully staffed:

1. Your numbers are built on a perfect world, which you don’t live in.

2. Your hiring managers refuse to over-hire.

3. Your organization actually likes to be under staffed.

Ok, let me explain.

The concept of being fully staffed is this perfect-case scenario – a theory really – in business that there is a ‘perfect’ amount of manpower you should have for the perfect amount of business that you have at any given moment.  That’s a lot of perfects to happen all at once!  Usually your finance team comes up with the numbers based on budgeting metrics.  These numbers are drawn down to monthly, weekly, daily and hourly measures to try and give you precise number of ‘bodies’ needed at any given time.  You already know all of this.  What you don’t know is why this type of forecasting is so broken when it comes to staffing.

These models are predictive of having a fully functioning staff to meet the perfect number needed.  Fully trained, fully productive, etc.  If the model says you need 25 Nurses to run a floor, in reality you probably need many more than that.  Finance doesn’t like to hear this because they don’t want to pay 28 Nurses when the budget is for 25 Nurses.  You’re in HR, you know the reality – staffing 25 Nursing openings (or servers, or assembly workers, or software developers, etc.) takes more than 25 Nurses.  You have Nurses who are great and experienced and you have ones who are as green as grass -you have ones retiring in a few months, some taking leave, some leaving for other jobs, etc.  Because of this you have a budget for overtime – why? – because you need coverage.  This why you need more than 25.  And the staffing levels argument goes around in circles with finance.

I’ve worked with some great finance partners that get the entire scenario above – and would let me hire as many people as I felt I needed – and it still didn’t work!?  Hiring managers struggle with one very real issue – what if.  What if, Tim, we do get all 28 hired and now I only have needs for 25?  What will we do?!  Even when you explain the reality, they will subconsciously drag their feet not to hire just in case this might actually come true.  I’ve met with HR/Talent Pros from every industry and all of them share very similar stories.  They can’t get fully staffed because of what little stupid ‘perfect’ concept – “what if we actually get staffed!”  That’s it.

You can’t get staffed because you actually might get staffed!  If you’re fully staffed hiring managers are now held accountable to being leaders.  If you’re fully staffed, plus some extra, hiring managers have to manage performance and let weak performers go.  If you’re fully staffed – being a hiring manager actually becomes harder.  When you’re under staffed everyone realizes why you keep a low performer, why you allow your people to work overtime they now count on as part of their compensation and can’t live without.  When you’re under staffed everyone has an excuse.

You’ll never become fully staffed because deep down in places you don’t talk about at staffing meetings you like to be under staffed, you need to be under staffed.

 

 

The Reality About Salary Expectations

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I think we all know that one person in our life that thinks they get the best deal on everything!  They consider themselves the ultra-negotiator, the person sales people hate to see coming! You know the person -they go and buy a $40,000 car and call and tell you how they got it for $27,000 and the car dealership actually lost money on them.  These are the same people that believe they can also ‘negotiate’ their salary.  There are some realities we face as HR Pros that most employees don’t get.  While we have rules and processes and salary bands – quite honestly, very little negotiation goes into any salary offer.  Younger people are always told, usually by their Dad or some cheesy uncle, to “Negotiate” their salary – “Never take the first offer!”

To me there are 7 main realities about negotiating salaries, and here they are:

1. A good HR/Talent Pro will pre-close you one what you are expecting. This is truly the point where you should be negotiating – the first call. 99% of candidates miss this opportunity.  This is also where you can truly find out what the position pays by playing ‘the game’ – Go in super high and work backwards – you’ll eventually get to the ceiling.

2. Health Benefits, 401K match, holidays – are all non-negotiable, unless you’re negotiating a C-suite offer.

3. Vacation days are usually negotiable – but only if you’re coming in with experience – most entry levels have no room to negotiate this – and if you did negotiate, as an entry level, and get more vacation than they originally offered, calm down, they were willing to give this already – it was a test.

4.  In most positions you have a 10% range within a position to negotiate salary for an experienced professional – they offer $60K – you can probably get $65K without much hassle.

4a. There are 2 schools of thought on this:

A. The fewer the people in a position the easier it is to negotiate salary – the theory being we can hire Tim at $65K, we have  Jill is already hired and working at $60K – but it will only cost us $5K to move her up to that same level – everyone’s happy.

B. The more people in a certain position the harder it becomes to negotiate because the example above, pay inequity now becomes very expensive, and ‘pay creep’ is more of a concern when you have 200 people in a position vs. 2.

5. You can raise your salary up quickly by moving around early in your career and jumping from company to company – but it won’t help you move ‘up’ in your career.  Congratulations you’re making $95K as an Engineer – but you won’t be the first choice to a manager or director position – that will go to the person who has been there for 8 years while you were working for 4 different companies.

6.  HR/Talent Pros (the good ones) expect you will negotiate something – they usually are holding something back to help seal the deal.  If you don’t negotiate, you missed out an opportunity to get something – and that will follow you as long as you are with that company.  The $5K you left on the table initially, compounds each year like bank interest – if you’re with the company 20 years – that one little $5K negotiation will cost you $100K+.

7. The best HR/Talent Pros will tell you up front if they have don’t have room to negotiate – very rarely are they lying.

Share some of your salary negotiation stories in the comments below.