Category Archives: SHRM

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Trakstar_hr Employee Evaluation Software Simplified

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the employee evaluation technology Trakstar. Trakstar is a dynamic end-to-end performance management software built for SMB employers who are looking to move their paper process to the cloud and modernize their performance practices across their organization.

The biggest mistake employers make in driving great performance is setting great goals for individual employees to achieve. The core of Trakstar is built around this understanding that great goal setting leads to the potential for great employee performance.  Trakstar is built around three core products: Performance management (evaluations), 360 reviews, and goal setting.

The difficulty we all face in HR around performance management is getting our leaders to follow the process and deliver great feedback to employees that drive higher performance and higher engagement. Trakstar has built an intuitive technology that makes this process easy for our leaders and allows us to hold them accountable to the process as well.

What I like about Trakstar: 

– Super clean UI and an easy to use UX, which actually makes it intuitive for our leaders to drive better performance through the process without even thinking about it. Within a very short period of time, your leaders won’t even realize they’re actually working in a platform as this will become a business tool they rely on to manage their teams.

– Super easy to use 360 feedback tool that allows you to request feedback from anyone within the organization, so get more robust feedback across the organization and the real impact an employee is having.

– Goal setting that is bi-directional between employee and leader and tracked continuously throughout the year. As well as easy to set automated reminders, so that both sides can stay on top of these goals and not let them slip to the side.

– A succession planning tool that is built around a 9-box grid that I love! Gives your leaders an instant view of high performers and up-and-comers across the organization in an instance.

Trakstar has built a performance management tool for SMB that rivals many of the enterprise level performance management technologies. Cloud-based with an open API that allows you to integrate it into any HRIS system you might be using now. Trakstar is designed for organizations where employee performance and increased performance of the organization is a priority.

Well worth some time to look at a demo, especially if performance management is a priority within your organization. Trakstar is the best end-to-end performance management technology for SMB that I’ve seen on the market.

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

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Welcome to the Real-World Tesla Employees!

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You probably saw this last week but it came out that Tesla employees fear for their jobs more than any other technology company, of over 8000 tech workers surveyed:

A survey by workplace chat app Blind shows that out of all the major tech companies, Tesla’s employees most fear being laid off.

Blind surveyed 8,230 tech workers over a week at the beginning of this month. Overall, 35.9% of users surveyed said they were worried about layoffs at their current company, while 64.1% have job security.

Tesla had the highest percentage of fearful employees, with 77.2% saying they are concerned about job cuts. It was followed closely by eBay and Snapchat, with 71.9% and 71.3% respectively.

I’m not sure if you know this or not, but Tesla isn’t a ‘tech’ company. Tesla is a manufacturing company. They make cars and other stuff that has to be built in factories.

For the millions of other employees who work for manufacturing companies, the fear of being laid-off is super real!

Why?

  • Sometimes we design and market stuff that doesn’t sell.
  • Sometimes the Chinese steal our designs and tech and make our stuff cheaper and sell it back to us.
  • Sometimes economic conditions make it so people don’t have enough money to buy our stuff.

Layoffs happen.

The big joke here is that the company who did the survey actually thinks Tesla and Google are the same type of company. They aren’t. They are both super hot ‘brands’, but they are both not technology companies.

Sure the Tesla is loaded with technology, but so it every other vehicle on the planet right now, and it’s increasing in every model from every manufacturer.

Also, fear of layoff is real in every company, in every market, in every industry. Sure many technology companies are hot right now and need workers desperately and it looks like that will be the case for a long time, but that’s isn’t a guarantee. Blackberry was on top of the world for a hot minute, then they weren’t. (Oh, I loved my first Blackberry!)

Turns out, if you make crap no one wants to buy, or can’t afford to buy, jobs will be lost! I think people who buy Tesla’s love Teslas! I hear nothing but great things. Also, for many, a full electric car just isn’t practical, yet. And, they are super expensive. And quite frankly, Tesla isn’t very good at being a manufacturing company. Tesla is not Toyota.

After the Great Recession we have an entire Generation coming into the workforce that will place job security much higher than the generations before them. None of us wants our employees to be fearful for their jobs, when it’s not performance related. It’s an awful feeling and a culture killer.

It’s also part of business. Capitalism isn’t perfect, but I prefer it to the alternatives.

Budgeting Yourself to Below Average Recruiting

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I was with a great group of TA leaders this week at the ATAP annual board meeting. One of my colleagues made a comment during a break:

“You can’t budget yourself to great TA”

A Great TA Leader Once Said

Meaning, if you keep cutting your TA budget year after year, eventually your tech is going to be so dated, or behind the times, that you won’t be able to ever pull yourself out of the hole you budgeted yourself into. While you’ll save some money in the short term, ultimately these ‘cuts’ to the budget will cost you more overall when it comes to filling positions.

Ideally, you work for a c-suite that actually understands this and they aren’t coming to you asking for you to cut your TA budget and produce more quality hires, faster! That doesn’t really work, unless you’ve gone a run of ten straight years of padding your TA budget year after year with extra and this budget cycle is about getting back to a midpoint.

I’m not saying you need a ton of budget to have solid TA tools and processes. Too often we overspend on technology that has a lot of promise, but little actual, proven ROI. Also, we hang on to bad budget investments. Most TA leaders I speak to don’t have a real clear picture of what their best sources are and how much they are paying for each source.


When they run this analysis and really dig in, they always uncover a bucket of money that is being thrown away, but it’s a ‘legacy’ tool that at one point they relied on, but now it’s not producing like it once did, but they hope it’s going to come back, so they keep throwing money at it. It’s really scary to cut a tool that is actually producing hires, even when that tool is expensive, because we believe if we cut that over-priced tool we won’t get those hires from somewhere else.


Let me give you a Pro TA Tip! You will! Cut that $50K tool, take $25k of that money and give it to your most productive source in some way and you’ll most likely actually get more hires from that investment then you got on your weaker performing over-priced tool.

I don’t like to go backwards on my TA budget unless we know we’re going to have less hires for that budget year, or we are doing something to increase retention that will impact our capacity in a positive way. Every single time I’ve been asked to cut TA budget, but still produce, we didn’t get better, we fought like crazy to stay the same, or we got worse.

Be careful my TA friends when that budget director, CFO-type comes to you looking for cuts, but also wants you to produce the same or more. If you get trapped into this scenario make sure they give you some concessions on what they are willing to give up when it comes to your team’s services and make sure to continually remind them of your budget cut each time they complain that recruiting isn’t getting the job done!

@SHRM Making a Stand for Hiring Candidates with Criminal Record!

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When it comes to hiring bias in America we HATE hiring 3 types of candidates:

  • Old People
  • Fat People
  • People with a Criminal Record

SHRM decided to try and make an impact and help those with past criminal records get hired with their new initiative called: Getting Talent Back to Work. 

GTBW is an initiative launched by SHRM to get employers to join in and take a pledge that their organizations will work to put people with criminal records back into their hiring pools. Koch Industries, a multi-billion dollar corporations with over 120,000 employees was SHRM’s launch partner, which drew some eyre from some of the HR blogging community.

When I first heard of the program, and HR blogging blow back, the first thing came to mind was the quote:

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” by William Shakespeare from the Tempest

There are millions of American workers right now who are miserable because they have a record and we will not allow them to pay their debt to society.

This was the same language used by Torin Ellis and Julie Sowash on their entertaining podcast Crazy and The King. Where Julie was really upset by the Koch relationship because of their conservative political stance, and Torin saw it a little less so, which I thought brought great balance to this discussion. Not blind at all to what is going on, but also hopeful and realistic to how difficult this issue really is to change.

So, what do I think about all this?

Making change is messy business. Getting people with criminal records real jobs isn’t something we’ve done really well in our society. 1/3 of Americans have some sort of criminal record and we can’t just throw all of these people away. We have to start truly believing that a debt paid, is actually paid.

Johnny Taylor has a giant association to lead. Some of those SHRM members are ultra liberal. Some are ultra conservative. Some are socialist. Some are religious zealots. Some are atheist. While some HR bloggers hate him for allowing Koch Industries to be apart of this program, I find this view to be exclusive and not inclusive of all.

Odds are there are as many people who love that SHRM has Koch Industry as a partner, as there are people who hate that SHRM has Koch Industries as a partner (with 300,000+ members the stats will play out like America in general). By the way, SHRM also has over 500 other organizations that have stepped up and taken the Pledge! Which is what this is really all about!

Like the ex-criminals we are trying to help get them back to work, why is it we believe that Koch Industries can’t help in this situation? We all have things in our life, in our past, that some wouldn’t agree with, and things that people would love, no matter our political persuasion.

Our reality is almost every organization is or has probably done some crap we all can’t agree on, but they probably are smaller, or keep a lower profile, or believe in what you believe in, so we give them a pass.

I have many friends who lean very heavily liberal. Also, some ultra-conservative. Also, some socialist, and Libetarian, and who knows what else! I don’t agree with their politics and they don’t agree with my moderate politics, yet we can work together to help others and solve problems. It’s not all or nothing. That’s not how our country works. If my neighbor views the world differently than I, I don’t watch his home burn down with him in it, I run in and save him.

We are intelligent beasts that have the ability to separate one ideology from another, and while we won’t always agree it doesn’t mean we can’t find value in one another. We are HR! We own D&I. We need to stop making Inclusion, exclusive to one belief and not all beliefs.

So, kudos for SHRM in launching this initiative in getting organizations to really dig into this issue of hiring people with previous criminal records who have paid their debt to society. Kudos to each and every company that has taken the pledge to help these people who desperately need it.

I encourage you to go take a look at the site and decide if taking this pledge is right for your organization!

The Latest Global Talent Trends from @LinkedIn

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LinkedIn recently released their 2019 Global Talent Trends and it’s loaded with great data for HR and TA Pros! Take a look at the Top 4:

91% believe that “Soft Skills” is the biggest trend in the future of work! Really!? Can we discuss this?!

What do does LinkedIn mean by “Soft Skills”? Here’s how it was defined in the report –

  1. Creativity
  2. Persuasion
  3. Collaboration
  4. Adaptability
  5. Time Management

Oh! Now that makes sense because about 90% of people I know suck at least 3 out 5 of these! So, yes, we have a crisis in the global workforce when it comes to the Big 5 soft skills!

I’m not sure I’ll go all old guy on you and tell you that technology and our smartphones have ruined our ability to have soft skills, but it’s had an impact for sure. I hear from elementary school teachers who have been in the field for years talk about the trouble they have with kids who were born digital native.

(Me going all old guy) When I was a kid my Mom forced me to leave the house. Like locked the door don’t come back for HOURS. I was forced to be creative. Now, I have three sons and I wouldn’t want them out galavanting around the world, in today’s world. I love my kids, I wanted to see them return home. I’m not sure my parents really cared that much!

But there was a reason some of these skills were developed in some people and not others. I have a friend who didn’t allow his kids to watch TV for like their first six years. I thought he was a freak! Those kids are more creative and have a great ability to stay on task. Then they got computers and they’re just like every other kid!

The reality is, we (HR) are in charge of teaching adults soft skills if we want them to have soft skills, and with a number like 91% it seems like we all agree this is a big problem!

So, how do we do it?

Welcome to the new world of learning and performance management! It used to be we would work with employees to help them craft their development plans. But adults hate being told they suck at collaborating with others! It feels like you’re in kindergarten when someone tells us we can’t get along with others!

How would you feel if your boss came in today and said “Hey, Tim, yeah, um, you know, you really struggle with change, we really need you to get better at ‘Adapting’. Okay, you understand, right? So, yeah, thanks, go take a class or just fix it okay?”

Soft skill development is very personal. I think most people improve with great one-on-one coaching where the coach/mentor actually gets to see the person work and interact, so they can be confidentially called out when the bad behaviors raise their ugly head!

Great report, great data. Go download it and check it out!

New Findings from the 2018 Candidate Experience Research Report

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Over the last 8 years, the folks over at the Talent Board release an exceptional research report around Candidate Experience (CX). This isn’t a small sample report, over 130,000 candidates provided feedback! The 2018 Talent Board Candidate Experience Research Report can be downloaded by following this link.

I love this report because it’s designed to not only give you the data, but also to help every organization, of every size, increase their CX. Turns out there are certain things that companies that win the Candidate Experience awards do, like:

  • Acknowledge a candidate’s interest and provide closure. (it’s what every candidate wants – did you get my application and what happened)
  • Provide consistent communication to candidates throughout the process.
  • Ask for candidate feedback, not only at the end.
  • Hold their TA team responsible for CX measures.
  • Be perceived by candidates as having a fairer process, in terms of candidates feeling they were able to show you who and what they are.

All of that seems easy enough right? It’s not rocket science, yet so few companies actually deliver on these simple things.

The 2018 report also found a few things that I thought were pretty interesting as well.

1 – Corporate TA shops who outsourced their recruiting function to third-party, RPO, or HRO vendors, candidates actually rated those organizations better for CX! Over in-house TA shops, both centralized and decentralized. WHAT!?! There’s no way, Tim!

Way! Think about how outsourced recruiting vendors survive. They survive by delivering recruiting better and more efficiently than you can yourself, otherwise they wouldn’t exist! It’s built into their contract and SLAs.

While I found this surprising at first glance, it makes sense. It also screams to me as a TA leader that we as leaders fail in-house by not holding our teams accountable to delivering great CX. The good news – that’s actually a simple fix!

2 – Only 7% of Corporate Recruiters and Hiring Managers call candidates who are rejected after an in-person interview. But, that 7 % that do see their CX ratings jump 28% higher than those who don’t.

7% is shameful. You take a candidate all the way through your process to the final step of having that personal interview and you don’t reject with a bit of personalization. You send them a stupid email!?!

We are better than this. You, personally, reading this right now, would be pissed off if this happened to you, yet 93% of us are doing this to candidates. Good news – this is also a super simple fix! Pick up the freaking phone!

Go download the report. Use it as a tool to take your TA team through a session and analyze your current process. One of the main issues you’ll find is your process is actually decent, but the variability of how each recruiter is running that process varies widely. That’s your biggest problem!

You’re Banned From Changing My Mind…at Work!

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Did you see Facebook’s internal announcement to their employees about banning an employee’s ability to change the mind of a co-worker about Politics and Religion? I think I need to use these for my family get togethers!

An internal memo was leaked (God Bless internal memo links) from Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer on some new workplace rules that Facebook is putting into effect immediately on all communication channels, and they are:

  1. Don’t insult, bully, or antagonize others
  2. Don’t try to change someone’s politics or religion
  3. Don’t break our rules about harassing speech and expression

Sorry workplace trolls at Facebook, your Employee Experience just took a major blow! (BTW “Workplace Trolls” is a great podcast name)

As you can imagine I have a few thoughts on this!

My actual first reaction to this had nothing to do with “the rules”, but had everything to do with who was communicating this message! Why is this coming from the CTO and not the CEO or CHRO? Definitely different than most organizations.

This tells me one of two things: 1. The CTO made these up on his own; and/or 2. Facebook’s leadership team wanted to make this seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal, so let’s not have it come from the CEO or CHRO, which normally would handle formal employee communications like this.

This is a bit of an employee experience course correction that I think we’ll start seeing in many organizations over the next couple of years with a softer economy. In an ultra-low unemployment economy the inmates run the asylum.

As we back to a bit of normal unemployment environment, employers will focus less on becoming a playground you get paid to attend, and more of a ‘back to work’ mentality. You shouldn’t have time to berate Billy all day because he worships Pokemon. Get your a$$ back to work!

Over the past couple of years with #MeToo and Trump, our workplaces have become littered with landmines of employee strife. We want and value inclusion, and at the same time this increases the communication issues and the need for rules like Facebook are instituting.

So, what do you think? Does your workplace need to adopt rules like this?

The Talent Fix Book Club Starts this Week!#RecruiterDevelopment

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If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much. 

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions. 

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition! 

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week! 

The schedule will breakdown like so: 

  • January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019! 
  • February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019! 

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well! 

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club! 

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd! 

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership! 

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com! 

It’s 2019, Money still motivates more than anything else!

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NO IT DOESN’T, TIM! YOU ARE AN IDIOT!

Well, you’re half right! I’m an idiot most of the time, but finally we are beginning to see what I’ve been saying for a decade, money is still the best motivator when it comes to getting extra effort.

For almost a decade the media and influencers perpetuated this belief that it was other things, rather than money, that motivated individuals to do more. They sited weak studies, if at all, but mostly it was antedotal evidence from people saying it wasn’t money, it was time off, it was feedback, it was…

A recent study puts this to rest, and it clearly shows that if you want ‘extra’ effort out of an employee, money is the single biggest motivating factor, overall, to get the effort your organization is looking for.

What I love about this study is they went out to over 200 experts in the field and first asked them what they thought. They were comprehensive in their analysis of the results and the most recent literature on the subject and the findings were straightforward:

We find that (i) monetary incentives work largely as expected, including a very low piece rate treatment which does not crowd out incentives; (ii) the evidence is partly consistent with standard behavioral models, including warm glow, though we do not find evidence of probability weighting; (iii) the psychological motivators are effective, but less so than incentives. 

Psychological motivators are effective, but less so than monetary incentives!

It’s not that things like working for a great leader or having time off aren’t also effective motivators to getting extra effort out of your employees. They are. But we have to stop telling ourselves that they are more important, because they aren’t!

Again, this is overall. You might have some individuals working for you that are more highly motivated by non-monetary incentives. But overall, in a large workforce, money will still get you better results.

So, why do we love saying that it’s not about the money?

If you think about how this concept became popular, it really tells the story. A decade ago we were coming out of the Great Recession. We didn’t have a ton of money to throw around, so it became popular to espouse the idea that people were really motivated by other things, rather than money.

And, it wasn’t really a lie. We are motivated by many things, money just being one.

The lie was that the other things motivated us to a higher level than money. Those don’t. I’m completely motivated by a great leader, if I’m getting paid what I think I should be. I’m super motivated by extra time off, if I think I’m getting paid what I should be. I’m not motivated by any of that, if I have a monetary issue I’m facing in my life, which most people do.

If my partner is a successful doctor and she makes way more than we need to live very well, money isn’t my primary motivation for effort, it might be a lot of other things. But, if I’m struggling to pay my mortgage, and my kid is about to go to college, I could care less that my boss is nice to me. Just pay me!

When Did Causal Friday Die?

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I love the fact that at some point almost every industry decided that it was mostly stupid to wear suits and ties and dresses to work. Even more, Business Casual has mostly died out as well.

I can’t tell you how many F500 organizations I go into where the head of HR or head of Talent is wearing jeans. At my company we went casual pretty late, primarily because we are a service organization and we match that dress of our clients we go to visit.

You’ve probably seen some of these sayings going around social media:

  • There was a day when you picked up your child for the last time. You didn’t know it the time, but you’ll never pick them up again.
  • There was a day when you went outside to play with your friends. You didn’t know it at the time, but you never went out again to play.

We do a ton of stuff then one day we stop doing it and we don’t even realize it. I like to think that’s what happened to Casual Fridays.

For the longest time Casual Fridays were the thing! Some companies used them as motivation, some used them as charity vehicles to raise money for great causes, etc. Then one day, every day was casual and we no longer needed Casual Friday.

I’m not 100% sold that being casual at work all the time is the answer and there is some growing research that says the same thing. There are certain times when dressing up puts you in a better psychological state of mind!

In the study, The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing, researchers found that when a person puts on formal clothing (business formal, not wedding formal) our brain gets us to believe we are better than maybe we really are! 

When wearing formal business clothing we tend to do certain things better, like negotiating. If you were going to close a deal with a big client, it’s best you don’t show up in jeans and a hoodie, even if those you’ll be negotiating with will be. In fact, you’ll have an advantage over them if you did show up fully suited up! 

Billionaire, Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA Mavericks recently shared a post he wrote in 2007, doubling down on his belief we should never wear suits and he says he only does, to this day, for weddings and funerals. 

Mark doesn’t believe in the psychological impact of wearing a suit and tie (despite what the research says) and believes letting your employees be casual is the way to go. Since his post in 2007, I would dare to say 100% of tech companies are casual! 

I’ve worked in a business that went from a formal dress code, to a business casual dress code, to a casual dress code. I’m not sure I can tell you one made a difference over another.

I know from a client relationship standpoint when I was in formal clothing, clients felt a little uncomfortable when I was dressed up and they weren’t. But, those same clients when I was meeting them for the first time knew I looked at their business with the utmost importance. Once the relationship was established, I’m sure they felt more at ease when I showed up looking like they did.

From an employment brand standpoint I never understood the large organizations where they executives still wear suit and tie but the rank and file are casual. But I feel the same way about coaches on sidelines wearing suits, or even politicians. There is definitely a psychological power play with all of these.

So, raise one up for Casual Fridays or pour one out or whatever it is you do when something you’ve known for so long dies. Casual Fridays, you’ll be remembered well, or at least remembered as ‘why the hell did we do that?”