Category Archives: Rocket Science

Recruiting Idea! This Might Actually Work!

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Why don’t potential candidates pick up your phone calls? Well, yes, no one picks up phone calls anymore, but, no, people still pick up phone calls for certain reasons. We don’t pick up phone calls when we don’t know who it is or we don’t want to talk to the person who’s calling.

Why do we pick up phone calls? 

  1. We actually like the person who is calling and we want to talk to them.
  2. We actually believe the incoming call is super important.
  3. It’s a return call we have been waiting for.

Under number 2, let’s put things like, it’s your boss calling, the kid’s school, your spouse, the police or fire department, hospital, etc. You see who it is on your cell phone screen and you instantly believe you need to pick up that call!

My family hates me! 

There’s this fun game I like to play with my family. You see, my monthly cell phone bill is equal to the GDP of a small country. So, I will, from time to time, get onto my cell phone account online and change the names of my family to something I think is funny. So, now when they call someone, instead of the receiver seeing “Tim Sackett” they might see something like “DJ TImmy T”, as an example!

Did you know you could do that!? You can, and it’s super fun! At least, it’s super fun if you have the power to be the person who can change those names to anything you desire!

My wife’s phone still says, “Kimmy” and I chuckle every time she calls me. I’m sure my son, Cameron, would love it if I changed it to “Queen”.

What does this have to do with Recruiting!? 

Oh, be patient little baby birds! I’m going to feed you!

Let’s say you’re trying to track down a potential candidate. You’ve sent the emails, the In-Mails, and even tried texting, but you are being shut out. You even *69 direct-dialed, and still, no pickup or response! The average recruiter/sourcer would have given up, but are not average! You’re slightly above average and you want to keep trying!

You see it now, right?

You go into your cell phone account and you start testing different names to see who will this potential candidate pick up for! Let’s say this person works for General Motors, here is what I might try:

  • “Ford” , “Chryseler”, “Toyota”, “Tesla”, etc.
  • “City” Police or fire – of whatever town they might live
  • “College” where they graduated
  • “Your Dream Job” they probably won’t pick up, but they’ll laugh!
  • “General Motors” who isn’t going to pick up a call coming from their own employer!

Just like Sex Panther, 60% of the time, this works every time!

Want to know why recruiting can sometimes get a bad reputation? Because I have the ability to come up with ideas like this!

If it works. It works. Don’t hate the players, friends, hate the game!

How Perfect is your Perfect Hire?

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There’s a concept known as the “Perfect Premium”. Basically, we over evaluate the value of “perfect” versus almost perfect. What do I mean?

Let me give an example that we are all familiar with, standardized college admission testing, ACT/SAT. A perfect ACT score is 36. If someone scores a 36 on the ACT, they’ll get a full ride, academic scholarship to some college.

If someone gets a 35 on their ACT test, one point lower than perfect, they might get a full-ride scholarship to a college, but that is no guarantee. We assume 35 is that much lower than a 36. Now, what about comparing an ACT score of 35 to a score of 34? Well, in that case, we assume those two scores a virtually the same! Smart, but not perfect!

We do this with employment assessments as well.

We assume the person who scores the highest on the test is the best one, and the people who scored less are really that close. Let’s say you have an assessment that scores 0 to 100. You have three candidates that score 100, 94, and 91. We will almost always assume that the 100 is by far the better hire than the 94 or 91.

If you tell your hiring manager they can’t have the 100 score because that person dropped out for some reason, they won’t really care if you choose the 94 or 91. To them, those are the same, but that 100! She was the magical unicorn!

We exaggerate the distance between the perfect and the near-perfect by an exponential amount from those who near-perfect to almost near-perfect. 

Why does this matter?

Because the reality is, those who are perfect, and those who are near-perfect, are virtually the same when it comes to potential performance. Whether you hire the perfect scoring candidate or the one who is near perfect, you are basically getting the same person, but your mind will lie to tell you and tell you that you’re not!

Your perfect hire might actually be perfect! But, your near-perfect hire might also be perfect!

Also, for those thinking, “Tim probably just got 35 on this ACT and now he’s trying to make us believe he’s as smart as the kids who got 36!” Ha! you’re wrong! I got a 32, and I’m still way smarter than those try-hards who got 36! Or am I…

Words matter! If you want more gender diversity in your applicants!

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New data study released by LinkedIn this week titled “Language Matters Gender Diversity Report” has some awesome insight to how the words we use in job descriptions and job postings have a dramatic impact to who actually applies to jobs. We’ve known some of this for a while, but the LinkedIn data is very robust and compelling at a new level.

Some highlights from the report:

– Women are 16% less likely to apply to a job after viewing it than men.

– Research shows that when words like “aggressive” are used in a job description to describe a company’s workplace, 44% of women (and 33% of men) would be discouraged from applying.

– 25% of women would be discouraged from working somewhere described as “demanding”.

– 61% of women associate the term “soft skills” as a female-gender preferred role vs. 52% for men.

– Women are 4 times more likely to want to be perceived as ‘collaborative’ in the workplace.

So, how do you put all of this into practice?

The reality is the words we choose, thinking these words are going to get us the dynamic talent we desire, might actually be hurting our ability to get the dynamic, gender-inclusive talent we desire. There are a number of technologies on the market currently that can help with the wording (Textio is probably the most known).

The data is very clear, the language you use on your job postings and job descriptions will attract or detract certain people from applying. Want to give yourself a chance to get more females to apply, use phrases like “soft skills” or “collaborative” as a desired skill set you’re looking for. Don’t use words like “aggressive” and “demanding” or you’re more likely to get fewer females to apply, and there are a whole host of these types of words.

If you can’t afford the technology that will help you catch this language, I would ask for help from females in your organization (not necessarily in HR) to give you feedback around language and suggestions for things that would get them to be more likely to apply. I find most employees welcome the chance to give TA and HR feedback about our work! 😉

What we know is cutting and pasting the same job description you’ve used since 2004 isn’t working or helping. Most job descriptions, even today, are written in a male-dominated voice that discourages females from applying. It’s very hard to read and see, but the data is screaming at us that it’s a problem that we aren’t paying attention to. We all (male, female, non-binary, etc.) all write in a male-dominated voice because that’s how we’ve been trained to write. That’s what we read. So, it’s natural for us. It’s unnatural for us to change it. Welcome to bias in hiring.

 

Announcing the HQ for HR Game Show – Sign Up to Play Today!

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Most of you know I founded another site called Fistful of Talent – we are getting ready to do something cool based off of the HQ series many of you play and have some fun in the process…

Fistful of Talent has teamed up with Paycor to bring you HQ for HR every Tuesday at 1 PM, starting May 1st. We’ll air five episodes with fifteen different HR leaders! Watching this could be the best 15 minutes of your day!

Here’s how it works – hit the link here or below to register for HQ for HR, and you’ll automatically receive email notifications each week about when HQ for HR is going live each Tuesday.  Click the link and join us and answer 12 HR body of knowledge questions digitally while you watch your peers answer them live on air.  You can do it from your desk or your phone, we just want you there!
After every episode, we’ll post a top 10 leaderboard at Fistful of Talent and here at the Capitalist showing who among the participants is an HR LEGEND.  We’ll use that leaderboard to invite you on the show live the following week – we’ll keep working down the list until we have 3 takers!  The top 5 cumulative scores across the 5 episodes will receive a major award to be announced during Episode 1.
PS – no Google allowed – or even Bing, people. We trust you because you look trustable, and let’s face it, most of you are in HR.
Check it as FOT’s Tim Sackett and your friend KD get down to the nitty-gritty with some of the sharpest minds in the HR/Talent industry!

The Anatomy of the Perfect Keynote Speech

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I was recording a podcast last week with my friend and professional speaker, Jennifer McClure, last week for her new Impact Makers Podcast (check it out!). I won’t be for a while, but she has some great people she has already recorded including a brilliant session with William Tincup!

One of the secret ingredients to a well-produced podcast is that all the participants are somewhat ready for the conversation that is about to happen. So, Jen and I did some pre-gaming and post-gaming conversation that wasn’t recorded, and the topic of keynote speeches came up.

I was telling her that I had a new talk that I’m doing that is killing (speaker talk for doing well!) and I made a comment about it’s all just stories with bits of data thrown in to make the stories seem more important! (half joking) Jen commented saying, “That’s a blog post! The anatomy of a keynote!” So, here you go Jen!

Before I lay out the perfect keynote, you have to have some ingredients. Here’s the basic keynote ingredient list:

  1. A person who can speak. I would love to say an engaging person who can talk, but I’ve been to far too many conferences where this was a requirement to be a keynote!
  2. A book, working experience with a transcendent brand, or you’re famous. A book is always helpful, conference planners love to have keynotes with books. Books are like a driver’s license for a keynote speaker. But, you can also work Google or Facebook or Nike or just name a giant brand, and working for a brand like that takes the place of a book or your ability to speak.
  3. A price tag north of $20,000. You might be the most awesome speaker in the world, but if you tell them you’ll only charge $5,000, you’re out! Our conference deserves a much better keynote speaker than a $5,000 speaker, I mean we have a budget for $25K!
  4. It helps to be attractive, but the bigger the celebrity/brand the uglier you can be.
  5. Fashion that matches your speaking brand. If you’re a buttoned-up, semi-conservative speaker, you can’t get away with jeans and a hoodie on the keynote stage. If you cuss and drink a red bull and started a tech company and have a YouTube channel with 100K followers, you’ll look foolish wearing a suit and tie.

Okay, we have all the ingredients to a great keynote, what does the actual keynote look like? There are basically three types of keynotes:

Keynote #1 – I’m famous, you’re not! In America, especially, we are fascinated with ‘celebrity’. If you’re famous, you can keynote because somehow we believe you being famous gives you something important to say, even when it doesn’t.

The anatomy of Keynote #1:

– I’m famous!

– I have “being” famous stories!

– But I’m humble and I’m really just like you, but I’m famous!

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I’m famous!

Keynote #2 – I’m not famous, but I work(ed) for a famous brand/person. These keynotes can be fascinated because again we are all interested to know what the secret sauce is of other organizations, and our hope is this person will tell us.

The anatomy of Keynote #2 –

– I work for a famous brand, you don’t!

– Working for this famous brand is awesome! You should try it!

– Here’s what we do because we are a famous brand. You should try it!

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I work(ed) for a famous brand!

Keynote #3 – I’m a Professional Story Teller. A good portion of keynotes falls into this camp. Someone worked their butt off to learn how to be a professional speaker, paid their dues, probably wrote a book or two along the way, probably had a decent actual career to a point, people liked hearing them speak and they turned that into a full-time gig.

The anatomy of Keynote #3:

– Start with a story that will endear the audience to you, even if that story has nothing to do with you.

– Share some data or research, that might not even be yours, but the audience is like “Wow” that can’t be.

– Share another story (that isn’t even about you) that reinforces that data/research and ties to the concept of your new book that was written about other’s people research and stories.

– Another piece of research and data, that ties to the model you present in your book. Plus, acts as motivation for the audience to change something in their life.

– The final story, this is a big one (not yours, again), that you foreshadowed in the first story, and that will wrap up the entire keynote like a bow! This ending story is a crescendo of laughter, tears, and motivation to change your life in ways you didn’t dream of just sixty minutes before.

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I just entertained you for an hour and you have no idea why you want me to sign a book.

Okay, you guys know I love to joke and make fun of life. I get that it’s super hard and takes a ton of practice and talent to pull off a great keynote. I’ve seen keynotes that were brilliant and I know it’s a skill! I’ve also seen keynotes where the keynote speaker stole my time and the conference organizers money!

Great keynotes at any level start and end with great storytelling. The best tie those stories to an actual takeaway that will help you get better at something. That takeaway could be personal or professional, it doesn’t matter. The best keynotes also entertain you a bit. They are masters at almost instantly getting you to trust them and like them.

My least favorite keynotes are famous people. I’m not impressed by celebrity. The worst ones are the new Q&A’s with celebrities. It’s an insult to my intelligence that you’re getting paid $150K for an hour and you couldn’t even come prepared with an hour of material, instead, you just show up and we’ll ask pre-sent questions and listen to your lame answers.

My favorites are people you entertain me, teach me something, take me on a journey with them for an hour. It seems like the hour was over in twenty minutes. I want more. My all-time favorite is Malcolm Gladwell. He’s a masterful storyteller and I could sit and listen for hours.

Who is your favorite all-time keynote speaker and why? Hit me in the comments!

How Many Beers Does it Take to Get Your Employees to Peak Performance?

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Did you see that winter Olympic athletes were using beer as a recovery drink!?

The science says that non-alcoholic beer, used as a recovery drink for sports, is better than normal sports drinks like Gatorade. From the NPR article:

Appalachian State University’s David Nieman has studied phenols’ health effects. On the whole, phenol-rich diets tend to lower inflammation and reduce the risk of sickness, he says. “[Polyphenols] have a very unique molecular structure that can actually regulate the genes that control inflammation,” in addition to general antiviral properties, says Nieman.

In 2011, Nieman and the University of Munich’s Johannes Scherr investigated the effects of beer, which contains around 50 phenols, on athletes — whose intense physical activity can compromise their immune activity. When marathon runners were instructed to drink 1.5 liters of nonalcoholic beer a day, their risk of upper respiratory infection was reduced. The activity of white blood cells, a good indicator of inflammation, was lowered 20 percent.

All over the world, we were trying to figure out why the Germans were kicking our butts in all these events and the secret was they drink a bunch of this new ‘sports’ beer!

If non-alcoholic beer helped athletes recover more quickly from grueling workouts, then it could allow them to train harder. Scherr credits the nonalcoholic beer’s salubrious effects to its high concentration of polyphenols, immune-boosting chemicals from the plants with which its brewed.

“After that, we really had the proof: It’s really healthy and not only a marketing gag,” said Holger Eichele, the chief executive of the German Brewers Association. From 2011 to 2016, German consumption of nonalcoholic beer grew 43 percent even as overall beer consumption declined, according to Euromonitor International. New brewing techniques helped to diversify and improve the flavor, and now there are more than 400 non-alcoholic beers on the market in Germany. Germans drink more nonalcoholic beer than any nation, except Iran.

So, making beer available to our employees became super popular as a ‘benefit’ to offer up over the past decade, as employers looked to attract millennials and show how ‘super cool’ they are to work for. Work hard, play hard!

What we didn’t know, was that we had it just a tiny bit wrong! We should be giving beer to our employees, but it should be non-alcoholic beer, not the normal stuff!

The one aspect of both articles I thought had particular interest to employers was the social aspect of drinking beer. All over the world, people drink beer in mostly social settings. We tend to see drinking beer as a social activity.

So, having a beer at work isn’t necessarily a bad idea, if it was non-alcoholic and it increased our employees to interact more with each other. Plus, if it actually helps your employees recover faster from those grueling all-night coding sessions, heck, we better give it a try!

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

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Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

People Who Are Always Late Are the Real Terrorists

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I have a confession to make. I’m anally retentive on time. I’m so on time, that if I’m ‘on time’ I think I’m late. For me, being on time means I’m ten minutes early to whatever it is I’m scheduled to do.

If I know I might be late, I get anxiety. My close friends, and my wife, know this about me and usually if they know I’m feeling frisky, they’ll push this button!

Look, I get it, I’m not proud of this. We all carry around our own demons…

My take on this is there could be worse things in the world I could have problems with! I could be a drug addict. I could kick puppies. I could be completely rude and annoying and show up late to stuff and put other people out and show how I don’t care about them by not respecting their time and making them believe I must be more important than them by showing up after the agreed upon time! Yeah, like those things!

So, one of these always late terrorists put together an article recently and basically said that people who are always late are “more successful and live longer, says Science”.

You can bet, I took offense to this! It goes against every fiber of my being not to be late!

So, here’s a bit from the article and the ‘science’ they claim to have to back this up:

In DeLonzor’s book ‘Never be late again’, she says: “Many late people tend to be both optimistic and unrealistic, she said, and this affects their perception of time. They really believe they can go for a run, pick up their clothes at the dry cleaners, buy groceries and drop off the kids at school in an hour…

In a study of salesmen carried out by Metropolitan Life, “consultants who scored in the top 10 percent for optimism sold 88 per cent more than those ranked in the most pessimistic 10 percent”. Their performance is better because their outlook is better…

People who are late, but genuinely don’t mean to be – the ones who want to be considerate, often live in the moment and find it hard to save for the future, says Alfie Kohn on Psychology Today. Some people “can’t summon the self-control to be on time” which would mean that person “probably has trouble getting his or her act together in other ways as well – say, around saving money or saying no to junk food.” Oops.

So, if you read the entire article the ‘science’ is basically this:

1. People who are late are optimistic.

2. Optimistic people in a sales role will sell more.

3. Selling more means you’re more successful.

4. Thus, People who are late are successful.

Apparently, people who are late also are bad at math and regression. Since you can not correlate being late to optimism to success to jump and put all those together!

Let’s face it, people who are late are awful people, and usually unsuccessful because they’re probably constantly trying to catch up from being late, and most likely fired often because they fail to keep commitments they made. Because they’re fired and constantly running behind, they’re most likely, also, stressed out more often than the fine, well-standing folks who show up on time, and that stress is a killer!

I have to assume the person who wrote the article was running late so they just made up some data and science to fit their lateness. I don’t condone it, but I understand. The habitually late need our help. It’s really more of a disease than a conscience decision. We might want to put in some legislation to give them extra protections. I want to be empathetic to their difficult plight of showing up to commitments on time! I’m not a monster.

Seriously, if you’re one of these terrorists, just know that everyone, deep down, hates you with a passion.

In Human vs. Machine – You need some Machines on your team!

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The Spring SourceCon Conference recently took place in San Diego. If you don’t know what SourceCon is, it’s basically the one place in the world sourcing pros get together to share the secret sauce!

I’ve never been invited, but I hear it’s really awesome. (The “I’ve never been invited” is somewhat of an inside joke as I know I don’t have to be invited to attend if I want to go!)

SourceCon is your NOT normal talent acquisition, recruiting type conference. You just don’t show up and go to lame sessions, then go home. They’ve added a ton of hands-on learning, so when you go home, you actually got better for coming.

One thing the SourceCon folks do is also hold an annual contest called the Grandmaster Challenge. The competition pits anyone who’s interested against each other in a sourcing challenge to see who can solve the issues the fastest and most accurate.

This year the challenge was tabbed Man vs. Machine as SourceCon decided to pit sourcing technology against real-life sourcers to see who’s better. The technology chosen to compete against the humans was Brilent. Brilent is a candidate matching tool that works with your ATS (I wrote about them in May 2016 – I really like their tech!).

The basic challenge presented was this:

  1. Download a folder of three jobs: Ground Service Agent, Systems Administrator, and Product Manager. The jobs were real but altered from when they were originally posted.
  2. Download a trove of over 5,500 resumes.
  3. Search thousands of resumes and find the people who were hired, interviewed and sourced for the roles; by an undisclosed company.
  4. Points were given when the right resumes were found and classified correctly. (i.e. This person was hired. This individual was interviewed. Et cetera.) Points were also given if contestants found the right resume but categorized it incorrectly.

Brilent uploaded the resumes and did the analysis and returned the results in 3.2 seconds! Yes, that’s seconds with an “S”! The human participants took anywhere from 4-25 hours of research to produce their results.

The machine, Brilent, ended up getting third place because the platform got some of the candidates right, but not all. Humans took first and second, for finding virtually the same list, but a little more accurate.

For my money, the machine won by a landslide!

The reality is, we’re talking about sourcing and new hires. None of us really know who is actually going to be best performers once they’re hired, so I’m not even sure just because the humans were able to find the actual hires made, that those hires will even be any good!

In 3.2 freaking seconds, the machine gave me a really solid list to work from. Or I could have waited for hours, for almost the same list. Machine – 1, Humans – 0.

I just can’t even imagine this is a conversation about who really won here. We won. We won because we can now take a tedious skill of screening and get almost the same results in a fraction of the time. This allows us to have more capacity to increase talent pools, attract higher level talent, build a stronger brand, etc.

I love having great sourcing pros on my team, but I also need to get me a couple of those machines!

The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

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Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!