‘Short-timer’s’ Guide to Getting Fired (Dead employee walking edition)

You know what happens when someone is on the path to being fired?  They start doing all kinds of strange things.  They’re actually fairly easy to spot, and if you follow these rules and guidelines you will be able to pick them out or know if it’s you that is about to be terminated.

In the HR game, we call these people about to be fired or leave our organization, ‘Short-timers’ (they’ve only got a short time left!).  I also like to refer to them as ‘dead employee walking’, because so many hiring managers will know for months they want to terminate an employee, but they don’t.

Instead, they begin to treat them like they’re dead.  They ignore them, stop giving them work, ‘forget’ to invite them to meetings, etc.  Almost like they’re dead.

Regardless of what you want to call them, I think we owe it to give them some rules about what to do and not to do when they hit a period of their soon-to-be-over employment.

Short-timer’s Guide to Getting Fired:

  1. Don’t start working harder. You’ve already been shot, you just don’t know it yet.  You working harder to try and save yourself just looks sad and pathetic. You had a chance to save your job, now is not the time.
  1. Don’t start talking about how you’ve been wronged. You actually might be wronged, but no one wants to hear it, and me talking to you puts me in your camp, and I don’t want to be in dead employee walking camp.
  1. Do start lining up references from those who still like you. You’re going to need references from your last employer. Do that now. It’s hard to say no to your face. It’s easy to ignore your email and phone calls after you’ve left.
  1. Do start slowly take personal effects home, little by little, so not to be noticed. This way when the big announce happens you aren’t asking people to help you carry stuff out to our car.
  1. Do start looking for a job. It’s one million times easier (that’s an exact figure from my research) to find a job when you have a job than when you don’t have a job.
  1. Don’t profess your love to a co-worker on your way out. It’s really not a great romantic time to do something like this. “Hey, Tina! I’m out of here! But I’ve always wanted to hook up, call me!” Yeah, just what Tina needs, an out of work slacker to add into her life.
  1. Do clean out your computer files and delete all search histories. You know what we do when you leave? We look at your search history on your computer and laugh. Laugh loudly and often. We don’t know exactly why you were searching for an all-black toilet seat, but it’s funny not to know!
  1. Don’t start trying to take other people down with you. Here’s the deal; you’re about to get fired. You are trying to bring others down with you won’t work because you have no credibility.  In fact, it will probably just quicken your exit.
  1. Don’t burn bridges. It’s a small world when it comes to professions and employment. That boss you tell off today might be the same executive that stops you from being hired someplace else down the road.
  1. Do burn all of your corporate logo wear. Yeah, like you’re really going to wear your old companies gear when you got fired! No, you’re not.  Burn it.  Have a party and dance around the flames.  It’s cathartic, in a way, to rid yourself of these signs and symbols of a part of your life that is now over.
  2. Take a bunch of office supplies home. You know what you need in a job search, office supplies! Plus, now that you’re on the unemployment, you don’t really have extra money to spend on office supplies, so start hoarding while you can!

5 New Rules of Work

I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles (in fact my friend Lars Schmidt is now a regular contributor to FC and his stuff is awesome!)but this one seemed like the biggest contrived piece of new-aged garbage, I just had to share!

The article has a great premise: These Are The New Rules of Work.  You know, one of those articles that will show us all how we use to do work and how we now do work. Well, maybe, but also how we hope we could do work like they talk about in magazines like Fast Company, but we really don’t because we live in the real world.

Here’s a taste:

Old Rule: You commute into an office every day.

NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Cute, but I actually work at a job where we go to the office each day, like most people in the world. So, while it would great to work in the Cayman Islands, my job is in Flint, and if I don’t come in, I don’t get paid. Which makes trips to the Cayman more difficult.

You get the idea.  It was written by a professional writer, not by someone who actually works a real job. Writing isn’t a real, normal job. When you write freelance, you can actually work from anywhere, because you basically work for yourself!

Here are the others:

Old Rule: Work is “9-to-5”

NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Well, you’re not really on call 24-7, you choose to be ‘connected’ 24-7, there’s a difference.  I do believe that ‘leaving’ your job at the office was a concept that was overblown for the most part in our parent’s generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smartphones and laptops. Let’s face it, our parents would have been just as connected given the same technology.

Old Rule: You have a full-time job with benefits.

NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

There’s no doubt there is a rise in the use of the contingent workforce, but this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily chosen by the worker.  True, thoughts have shifted that many people no longer want to work at one company for forty years, but much of that has been shaped by companies and economics. When you live through an entire decade of layoffs and downsizing, you begin to think of the work environment as more transient. The crazy part about this mindset is organizations still feel like candidates should want to stay at a company for forty years, even though they can’t, and won’t, guarantee that for you.

Old Rule: Work-life balance is about two distinct, separate spheres.

NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

This is the one rule I actually agree with.  Again, from a day when you could actually separate yourself from your work and personal life. In today’s ultra-connected world, it becomes very difficult to do this. I think most people get tired of living two separate lives, and just want to live one. This is who I am, professionally and personally, take me a whole person, or not.

Old Rule: You work for money, to support yourself and your family.

NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE “PASSIONATE” ABOUT A “MOVEMENT” OR A “CAUSE”—YOU HAVE TO “LOVE WHAT YOU DO.”

This is actually the single worst piece of advice ever given to mankind! Bar none.  If this was actually the case, how do you think anything would actually get done on this planet? How would store shelves get stocked? Gas stations get to run. Your dinner gets cooked and the dishes washed at your favorite restaurant? Do you really feel there are folks “passionate” about washing dishes for you? That they want to wash dishes for your cause of having a chicken fried steak and gravy for dinner?

Get some freaking perspective.

I think it’s great if you can work at somewhere you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you to have a great life. Have a cause that is special in your life? Perfect, go for it. You know what really helps most causes? Money! If you have a job that makes great money, just imagine how you can truly help that cause.

So, what do you think about these ‘new’ rules of work?

The Number One Reason Employees Fail

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

It’s about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills than upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens every day in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category: the person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 44-hourtraining session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

How to get your first HR job!

It’s graduation season which means I get a ton of messages from new HR grads asking for advice. I heard from someone at SHRM that there are currently 8,000 human resource’s university programs in the world currently.

Doesn’t that seem like a huge number? I’m not sure we actually need 8,000 HR post-high school programs but welcome to the business of higher education where we offer you what we can put together for the least cost that makes the most money, not what industry actually needs!

HR degrees are the new ‘education’ degree for people who hate kids, but think they’ll like adult employees who act like kids!

So, now you’ve got this bright and shiny new HR degree and you need a job. I hear Enterprise Rent A Car is hiring in their management training program! I’ve hired some great employees from Enterprise over the years. Also, every single hospital in the country needs nurses, almost every company on the planet needs technical talent. Oh, wait, yeah, HR jobs…

So, how do you get that first HR job?

Step 1: It starts the summer after your freshman year if you’re super aggressive and really want to be in HR and just didn’t fall into after your sophomore year and it seemed like the easiest way to get a degree. You need internships that allow you to do HR-type work.

Yeah, I know it’s next to impossible to get an HR internship, especially if you’re not in a top tier HR specific program. I love hiring grads from “B” schools, but “B” school and HR degree, without an internship, should be called a “B.A. in Selling Cell Phones out of a Mall Kiosk”.

Even if you’ve already graduated and struggling to get your first HR job, it’s still worth it to try and get an HR ‘internship’ at any level. What I recommend to new grads is you go do ‘volunteer’ HR work for a company or organization. Offer up yourself for 8-24 hours a week. Work a paying job nights and weekends, do whatever it takes to get “HR” on your resume.

Step 2: You’ve got to become a cray-stalker-networker. Link-In with every HR person you can find that graduated from your school. Link-In with every single HR pro in your area and ask for help getting experience and your first job. No! Actually, ask them for help! Most won’t, but some will.

Step 3: Make it super public you’re looking for your first HR Job. Tell your friends, neighbors, people at your church, your parent’s friends, the bartender when you order a drink. You need to be discovered and that only happens when you make yourself discoverable!

Step 4: Don’t worry about money in your first job. You need to get “HR” on your resume, even if it’s like going to a 5th year of college. So many HR grads I meet give up and work a job that will pay their bills. That first HR Administrator job might be a kick in the stomach to accept financially, but this is how you get to ‘the show’ and make a decent living in HR.

Step 5: Join the HR conversation online. Show up at HR meetups and local SHRM meetings. Most will let ‘students’ in for free. Use this to its fullest and then get involved and volunteer. Those people who volunteer with you will know about HR jobs before they go public and would love to plug you into it instead of posting and interviewing.

Step 6: If you can’t find any HR jobs. Apply to entry level agency recruiting jobs. Many large recruiting agencies are constantly hiring fresh meat. It’s a grind, but it’s a great resume builder, and you might fall in love with it. It’s not HR, it’s recruiting, but having this experience will get you in the door for corporate recruiting jobs and then you can eventually move into corporate HR jobs within that organization.

I love HR and Recruiting. It’s a great profession to get into, but it’s not easy to break in since the barrier to entry is fairly low. A ton of people in HR don’t have HR degrees, so most organizations don’t view your degree in HR as a necessity to work in HR.

I only offer the truth, I wish your college advisor did the same, but you can do, you can join the tribe, it might just take a little more work than you were expecting!

 

The One Thing That Will Have The Most Positive Impact to your HR Career #TSLive17

I just got back from attending the Halogen TalentSpace Live 2017 conference. Halogen is the industry leader in Performance Management. Great product, great tools for your hiring managers and organization. On the first day of the conference, it was announced they would be acquired by Saba.

Saba is the industry leader in Learning, so it makes a good marriage. Most large full suite HR enterprise software has both performance and learning, but it’s not even close to what these two systems have. Organizations that prioritize performance and/or learning use systems like Halogen and Saba, not large vanilla enterprise plays.

As you can imagine with any merger of this level some leadership positions are eliminated. You don’t need to CEOs! Halogen’s dynamic and beloved CEO Les Rechan is leaving the combined company immediately and said his goodbyes to the Halogen customer base. Saba’s CEO Pervez Qureshi is also a great leader and is handling the transition well and his closing address at TalentSpace Live left me feeling optimistic for the new company.

So, how does this have anything to do with making a positive impact on your leadership career? Harvard Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of men, one poor, one Harvard grads

Harvard’s Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of men, one poor, one Harvard grads for 75 years to track the physical and emotional well-being of these men. What they found over multiple generations was one thing, in particular, stood out for those men.

The study discovered that those men who had the best well-being had no real genetic similarities. Nothing to do with income or education. The geographic location made little difference. The single most compelling factor of a fulfilling life is if you have and surround yourself with good, positive relationships.

Fulfilling, healthy life = good relationships.

So, if you want to have a positive impact on your career you need to surround yourself with good positive relationships. People you care about, and people who care about you.

That’s what I saw from both Les and Pervez. To strong leaders who surrounded themselves with good relationships with people they truly care for and those people truly care for them. I’m not sure if this means the new Saba/Halogen combined company will be a smashing success, but I know the leadership understands this concept.

I was able to give Les a hug, and I told Pervez if he would have been in the same session he would have gotten one too! You see, I try and surround myself with good relationships. I want to see those in my life succeed and do well, and I always feel they want me to succeed as well.

I think most HR pros and leaders I meet sometimes struggle with this concept and keep too many bad relationships in their life. Relationships that leave them feeling unfilled and detract from them spending time on the right things for themselves and their organization.

So, today, make a deal with yourself. Tell yourself that you will eliminate one bad relationship from your life. You don’t need to do this publically. No big announcement on Facebook is needed. Just quietly walk away, disengage, and move on. It feels so uplifting, you can’t even imagine!

 

 

Stop Creating HR Metrics! You Already Have What You Need #TSLive17

I was out at Halogen’s TalentSpace Live 2017 event this week speaking to great HR pros and leaders. Halogen is the king of performance management and they just announced their merger with the king of Learning, Saba. Together, they have a pretty great 1-2 punch for organizations to check out.

TalentSpace Live brought in Patty McCord one of the main builders of the famous Netflix Culture deck (if you haven’t read this, you need to take a few minutes and do it!):

Patty was an awesome speaker for an HR audience. Real, fresh, in your face with great energy. She’s the HR leader everyone wishes their organization had.

Patty made a statement that stuck with me:

“The metrics to running HR are already in the business, you don’t need to create new ones!” 

What she was talking about was HR shouldn’t be focused on HR metrics, HR should be focused on business metrics (Profit, Revenue, Net Income). She went on to say “Retention” isn’t a business metric. Senior leaders don’t care about retention.

They care about Profit, Revenue, Net Income, Margin, etc. As HR leaders we need to show them the impact to business metrics when we suck at HR. We need to talk about what we are doing in HR using business language, not HR language and words.

“We believe we can increase margins if we put this program in place to control the amount of money we are having to spend to replace workers when they leave us.” Not, “Our retention is worse than the industry average and we have a program to lower our turnover.”

Senior leaders hear two very different things when they hear those statements, even though they basically are pointing out the same problem and solution.

We don’t need more HR metrics. We need more HR leaders focusing on the metrics of our businesses that are already in place and show us whether we are successful or not. Patty also shared she thought every single employee should have P&L training.

If your employees know how the organization makes and loses money, there will be no question on what direction they need to take in their daily job duties to have a positive impact on that outcome. Too often we tell them what to do assuming it’s too complicated for them to understand.

If you teach your employees how you make money it’s always amazing to watch behaviors change in how they do every job in your company. I find the vast majority actually want the organization to be successful but didn’t know how to help until someone connected all those dots to their job.

I really enjoyed Patty! She spoke my language! If you get a chance check her out!

The Top 5 Predictors of Employee Turnover

Quantum Workplace recently released a study they put together on the predictors of employee turnover. Employee turnover is becoming a huge issue as the unemployment rate falls, which is expected. As your employees have more options, they’re more likely to leave.

I’ve always been a fan of Quantum’s research but this one seemed a little light. Here are their five predictors:

  1. Lack of job satisfaction.
  2. Individual needs unmet (health, wellbeing, balance)
  3. Poor team dynamics (Basically they hate working with the people they work with, or the team hates them, either way, they’ll be leaving)
  4. Misalignment (this is a hiring fit issue – you hired the wrong person for the job. Could be culture, skill set, etc.)
  5. Unlikely to stay (when an employee indicates they want to leave, most likely they will leave. DUH! This was actually #5! How can this be a ‘real’ indicator of turnover?!)

Okay, I’ll give them the first four reasons. Of course, those are all real reasons someone will leave. Are they the top 4? Depends on your environment. Number five is just flat out silly! “Hey, when someone tells you they’re about to leave, that’s a predictor they’re going to leave your employment.”

Really!? When I tell someone I’m hungry, guess what? That’s a predictor I’m hungry! Probably could have come up with a better number five! But, check out the study, they also give some tips and insight on how control turnover.

What are the real Turnover Predictors?  Here are my Top 5:

#1 – My boss is an asshole.

#2 – I hate what I’m doing, so I’m unwilling to put up with any B.S.

#3 – I oversold myself and I will most likely fail, so I’m leaving for a new position before you fire me, so it will look like this was my position.

#4 – I’m a bit crazy (or a lot bit crazy) and my co-workers hate me, so I need to find new co-workers to creep out.

#5 – I’m telling you I’m leaving! (Ha! Just kidding!)

#5 – You’re underpaying me for what I’m doing and we both know you’re underpaying me.

Bad bosses and not paying market will kill your retention of great talent faster than anything! The crazy piece of this is I always find that organizations clearly know about both of these issues.

If you ask an organization who the worst managers are they almost always align with the highest turnover by department, location, etc. The same thing works with those being underpaid in your organization.

People will take off if the market is clearly paying more and your organization is just average. The worst part of this is most organizations will then overpay to get back average or less talent when their good talent leaves. The market always wins. Always.

 

 

 

 

I Can’t Make You Recruit!

My mind is still racing after coming back from SHRM Talent this week! So many great conversations I had with TA leaders and pros. I actually think the level of conversation at functional specific conferences is higher because everyone is feeling the same pain!

It’s not to say a conference like SHRM National can’t be great, but you’re surrounded by HR and Talent pros with dozens of specialties and focus. At SHRM Talent you basically had the majority of the attendees focused on how do we attract and hire better talent for our organizations! That leads to great open dialogue and connection. I came back to the office super energized!

I have to share one specific conversation I had. Great, passionate TA leader approached me with a problem she was having. She was feeling a little beat up, not as successful as she wanted her function and team to be, probably didn’t have the respect and influence she deserved for the challenges they’re facing. Her question was this:

“How do I get my recruiters to recruit?” 

It was simple and honest.  The easy answer is a performance management discussion but I knew what she was really asking. It’s a dilemma most TA leaders face right now. Our organizations are pushing us for more talent, and yet I don’t really have team and technology to provide what they want!

My answer to her was also simple and honest.

“You can’t.” 

Okay, I expanded my answer because you know I love to give advice! I explained that most likely I’m guessing you have some really lovely, caring, company people working on your team that love working for you and love what they do. She said, “that’s right!” I’m  also assuming these people are administering a recruiting process, but they’re not actually recruiting. “Right again! That’s my problem!”, she said.

Here’s what I know after twenty years in talent acquisition. If someone doesn’t want to change, nothing I do will get them to change. Making someone recruit who doesn’t want to recruit, won’t work. Never has, never will. You have to want to recruit, really recruit, to recruit. No, not what you think recruiting is, what actual recruiting is!

So, I said, here’s what I would do and laid out a plan of how I would change process and activities and hold them accountable. I also said more than likely most won’t do this and they’ll quit or fight you until you fire them. If you’re lucky you might get one or two of your “Farmers” to turn into a “Hunters”. But, my experience has been most will refuse to change, while telling you they’re desire to change!

I don’t have the time or capacity to get someone to change. Either they truly care enough to change, or they don’t. There’s no middle ground because I need to change what we’re doing, and I only need people on the team that can now do the new requirements of what I’m asking.

What I find is most TA leaders die trying to change their non-recruiters into recruiters. And by die trying, I mean they eventually quit or get fired, all the while their team keeps doing what they want to do. You can change the people, or you can ‘change’ the people.

I can’t make ‘you’ recruit, but I can find people who want to recruit.

7 Ways to Increase Your Hourly Hiring!

In 2017 there will be over a thousand webinars on how to hire more IT talent, 15,285 blog posts on how to hire more IT talent, 100s of new technologies will be released on how to hire more IT talent. You won’t see a fraction of that help when it comes to hiring Hourly Workers!

Why?

The majority of hiring done on a daily basis by most companies around the world is in hiring hourly workers, yet almost no one spends time on how to make this easier or do it better. This webinar is designed to help our brothers and sisters in the trenches who are out there every single day, doing all the dirty work in their organizations. Those recruiters and talent leaders who are responsible for hiring the masses!  

Tim Sackett loves the people! (and apparently talking about himself in the third person!) The real people, who go to work every single day and keep our organizations running like a well-oiled machine, not those pretty boys sitting behind a computer screen who have no idea what we really make and do on a daily basis!

Can you hear that music playing in the background? “America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” (Okay, I’m off my rocker, but you get it, I love this stuff!)  

What you’ll learn from FOT’s first webinar on better hourly hiring:  

–7 things you can start doing to increase and simplify hourly hiring in your organization

–3 ways top organizations are leveraging technology to do massive (over 1,000 hires per year) hourly hiring

–Pitfalls most organizations fall into when hiring hourly workers, and what you can do to make sure you don’t go down this path  

Smashfly, the world’s best recruitment marketing platform, is the sponsor for this FOT webinar.  So, you know we’ll be discussing the benefits of utilizing CRM technology in mass hiring, along with so many other tips, tricks, and techniques.

Joining me on the webinar will be my special guest, friend, and HR Influencer, Robin Schooling, VP of HR from Hollywood Casinos, who every day is in the weeds with her team in hiring the best hourly talent!

Register today! Thursday, April 27th at 2 pm ET! 

Trump Can’t Stop Immigrant Hiring!

Before Trump was hired, err, voted in as President. I was asked to respond to this question:

What impact do you think Trump will have on immigrant hiring? 

My response was probably a bit more positive at that point, pre-Trump than it is now, but I still remain bullish on immigrant hiring. Why? Because it’s what America actually wants! I still believe that any President wants what is best for America. How they get there might be drastically different, but Trump is very similar to many Presidents we have.

Even his recent Executive Order to “Buy American, Hire American” (My grandparents who retired from GM would love this, BTW!) has little if any impact on actual H1-B hiring. H1-B hiring is broken, and random, and needs major overall, everyone can agree on that! Not hiring immigrants is just ignorant and uninformed.

Trump is easily swayed by high public opinion. He cares about what people think of him. No, really! He actually does, probably more than any other President we’ve ever had. What he doesn’t care about is crazy folks yelling on the fringes. He cares about being ‘popular’. American businesses need immigrant workers. If he gives this to them, he’ll be popular with people he views as peers in many ways.

CareerBuilder released a study today showing 33% of American companies plan on hiring immigrant workers, which is virtually unchanged from this time last year. Also, the American public doesn’t view immigrant hiring as a challenge to their livelihood. A whopping 90% feel like immigrant hiring has no impact on their career possibilities. That’s a giant number!

If you put all the psychology and data together, I think we’ll get to a place in America and the hiring of immigrants that makes more sense than what we have now. A lottery system? That’s what we pin our hopes on for American companies!? No one in business thinks this system is good. Trump is all about, well, that changes daily, but let’s say he’s a little more consistent on what American businesses want.

I can foresee, for good or bad I’m not sure, a tiered system of immigrant hiring. The Visa system really has already created this. Professional workers get preference over service level, unskilled immigrant workers. I can see this widening as this is what Trump voters are really worried about. They aren’t worried about the Software Engineer or Doctor coming into America, they’re worried about that cook at Applebee’s, the immigrant on the manufacturing line, etc.

We know the reality, most American workers don’t want those jobs anyway, but they feel that having an immigrant take those jobs is somehow holding them back. The real issue is American companies offshoring high paid manufacturing jobs, not highly skilled professionals coming into the states. Again, the CareerBuilder study backs up this assertion, “I’m not worried about an immigrant taking my job” because immigrants don’t take normal American jobs, they take the jobs on the fringes – high-end and low-end.