Category Archives: SHRM

T3 – Pilot (@Pilot_Inc)

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This week on T3 I review the new startup coaching technology PILOT. PILOT is the brainchild of Ben Brooks. I’ve known Ben for years, he’s a super smart HR Pro/Leader based in New York who has an exceptional corporate HR background. From Ben’s corporate experience he realized there was a gap in the market when it came to professional, personal development for most people, and PILOT was born.

PILOT is an innovative career improvement company revolutionizing the way individuals command their careers. With leading advice and resources that were previously only available through expensive one-on-one career coaches or control-focused HR departments, PILOT combines an easy-to-use technology platform with focused, real-world advice that empowers individuals to take control of their professional success.

Basically, PILOT is a more efficient, cheaper way to have a professional business coach in your life. One that helps you drive your career forward and holds you accountable to results. For organizations, it becomes retention insurance! If your best people are being developed, they will leave, that’s been proven.

5 Things I really like about PILOT:

1. PILOT is designed like development should be designed, to ensure the person takes ownership of their development. Too often corporate development puts the ownership back on the LOD department or the hiring manager, not the individual. That is where PILOT starts.

2. PILOT’s Job Renovator measures an individual’s job satisfaction, then shows them how to become more satisfied with their job, by staying, not leaving! This is why PILOT should be considered Retention Insurance. Most business coaching type programs almost exclusively get people to find satisfaction by leaving. Ben understands this from working on the corporate side, and saw the power in getting people to stay and find a better way.

3. Each individual gets a pdf blueprint of their action plan on the steps they’ll be taking along the way of their career development.

4. PILOT is designed around your schedule. They’ve discovered about 80% of the participants will actually schedule their sessions on the weekend, for professional career development. The people who are serious about moving the needle in their career find time to make this a priority.

5. PILOT is a great combination of technology and real-life coaching with accountability, check-ins, and reassessment built into the program.

In terms of cost PILOT is a fraction of having a live business coach, plus from a corporate perspective, the system is actually working with you to re-engage your leaders and employees to find more out of current position, stay with the organization, and build their career with you. For those who have had a professional coach (like I have), so often those engagements end by you leaving the organization to meet your professional goals. PILOT is the first developmental tool I’ve seen that truly works for both the individual and the corporations best interest.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 T3 – send me a note.

10 Reasons HR Thinks Employees Are Crazy

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I don’t know of one HR Pro I’ve ever met who didn’t say, behind closed doors, “My employees are Crazy!” It’s like school teachers when they go into that mysterious “Teachers Lounge”, once the door is closed and they are all in there with the other teachers. Didn’t you want to know what the heck they talked about!?!?

I can tell you because before I was in HR I was a teacher.  Guess what?  Teachers talk about the exact same things that HR Pros talk about.  How crazy the kids/employees are that we have to deal with all day!  The only difference is the physical age (certainly not mental age!).

So, I wanted to come up some of the reasons we think our employees are crazy to help out those crazy employees who want to come off less crazy at their next interview.  It can happen! I don’t think employees are crazy, all the time, just at certain times. The problem is HR Pros have to deal with all the employees, so there is a good chance a crazy one is going to come across your desk at least once a day. Thus, the reason HR Pros think all of their employees are Crazy is because we deal with crazy every day!

Here’s why HR Pros think Employees are Crazy:

1. Your Boss tells us about all of your weird anxieties.

2. Your co-workers, that hate you, tell us about all of your weird anxieties.

3. We know your medical history – mental and physical – sorry, it’s part of the gig.

4.  We find out every time you cry or lose it at work – every time – also part of the gig.

5. Your crazy-ass emails find their way to our inbox – thank your “work” friends for that.

6.  We spend too much time talking about you in succession planning meetings, uncovering all that is wrong with you.

7.  You rate yourself as “Great” on your self-assessments, and we know you are barely “Average”.

8.  I know more about your divorce then your divorce attorney.

9.  Your stories about your kids haunt me at night.

10.  I know everyone you’ve slept with in the office – or tried to sleep with – or want to sleep with.

It’s a function of the job that we see and hear the worst and the best of all of our employees.  Just like the school teacher who spends more time on a daily basis with your kids than you do as a parent,  that teacher is probably going to know some things about them that you are unwilling to accept.   HR Pros know some things about our employees, many of which they aren’t willing to accept, that’s human nature.

I’m only saying this so that you understand why we think you’re crazy – you are – you just can’t accept that you are! But, here’s the dirty little HR secret, we’re crazy as well!

I Need A Nurse, Stat!

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In the United States, we are facing a major nursing crisis, unlike anything we have ever seen. If you’re in the healthcare industry, you already know this and you’re living this nightmare each day.

Your recruiters are beyond frustrated in trying to fill openings, only to have more nurses leave every day. So, what can you do?

Join Cathy Henesey, ASHHRA Board member, and Director of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning at AMITA Health and myself for a free webinar hosted by CareerBuilder that will outline 10 things you should be doing to fill your nursing openings! The webinar is August 3rd at 1pm EST. 

What can you expect to hear:

  • Old school and new school ways to recruit great talent to your hospital or health system.
  • Metrics around what recruiting pools will be most effective for you to be fishing in.
  • What best practice organizations are doing right now to retain their healthcare talent so they don’t have to fill as many openings!
  • What technology is worth the investment when it comes to purchasing recruiting tech.

Register Here! 

It will be fun, fast-paced hour packed full of great tips and ideas to help you energize your recruiting shop!

HR, The DNC is showing you how not to communicate!

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We love to cover our ass in HR. It’s actually in The HR Rule Book, page 1, first paragraph:

“Like our brothers and sisters in the Real Estate game, we all have really only one rule to live by. They live by, “Location, location, location”. In HR we live by, “Document, document, document”. 

Documentation is great until it’s not!

The Washington Post reported this week that:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida was forced aside by the release of thousands of embarrassing emails among party officials that appeared to show co­ordinated efforts to help Clinton at the expense of her rivals in the Democratic primaries. That contradicted claims by the party and the Clinton campaign that the process was open and fair for her leading challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Let me start by saying this isn’t a political post. This could happen to any party, in any organization, to anyone who decides to communicate exclusively via email.

What can HR learn from the DNC email mess?

We (HR) need to start asking ourselves this one simple question: If what I’m writing right now in this email, was to be made public, could it get me in trouble or would it be embarrassing to myself, my organization or my boss?

If you answer, “Yes” to any of the above questions, stop typing, click delete, stand up, walk your butt over to whoever it was you were writing that message to! Or, pick up the phone and just have the conversation!

I think at least once a day I begin writing an email, stop, and click delete. I then either stand up or pick up the phone and have a direct conversation with the person I wanted to share this information with. There’s a time to document and there’s a time to have ‘plausible deniability’!

In HR we too often get caught up in wanting to have things in writing. You have to know there’s risk associated with getting something in writing. You now are in the loop of knowing what’s going on, and if you decide not to do anything, it’s the same as knowingly allowing something to happen or continue to happen.

The DNC would have been just fine if they would have run down to Starbucks and grabbed a cup of coffee together or picked up the phone and just talked some stuff out. But, no! Instead, let’s send thousands of emails back and forth that shows how stupid we can be!

I’m not telling you to cover up stuff. I’m telling you to not have stuff you have to cover up! Some of the best leaders I’ve worked for would send me this message in reply to some crazy email I sent them, “Call me.”

That’s really smart advice!

Is Smiling at a Black Person in an Interview a Racist Microagression?

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From the land of we’ve gone off the deep end of political correctness, check this out!

Do you suffer from “White Guy” smile? “When you pass a person of color on the street, do you give them the “white guy smile”? Congratulations, you’re racist! If you look at a person of color, you’re racist. If you don’t look at them, you’re racist. If you sort of look at them, then look away, you’re still racist. If you keep looking at them, well, damn you, you racist!”

So, I would love to tell you that this has never even crossed my mind, but I would be lying. Do I purposely smile at one person over another based on the color of their skin? No, that’s silly.

If I truly analyze myself I think I probably do the smile thing more for folks who I don’t think can speak English, and that’s probably even more racist! I think the smile would be more of an “I’m not sure how to start this conversation because I don’t know if you and are even going to be able to communicate” and if I smile at least you know I’m trying to have a friendly exchange.

Either way, I’m making a judgment based on how a person looks, and most likely the circumstance, this is probably going to be a problem.

All that being said, I’ve been in some way uncomfortable interviews with white hiring managers who stumbled over themselves with minority candidates and their white guy smiles! The candidates felt awkward. I felt awkward. It’s awful! They go so far overboard trying to act like they’re not racist that it’s more uncomfortable than if they were probably just racist!

How do you fix this?

Wow, that’s a loaded question! If you try to point out to the person they’re being racist, they’ll flip! If you let it go, they’ll continue to act like an idiot. Taped interview training sometimes help people see they are acting differently, just make sure you’re giving them many examples, not just one video of them interviewing a minority candidate!

I’ve seen this done with success when interviewing different genders as well. The classic example is supervisor male interviewing a female and treating them differently than when they interview another male. This training is highly effective if being used as a developmental exercise and not as a gotcha! Being taped in an interview is stressful, but it has a huge impact when you can sit and watch the differences. Not only will help catch and change biases, it also just flat out makes you a better interviewer!

The First Sign You Suck at Hiring!

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Hiring people to work for you directly is probably the single hardest thing you’ll ever have to do as a manager of people. To be fair, most people are average at hiring, some are flat out kill and probably 20% are awful at hiring.

The first sign you suck at hiring is your new hire turnover is an outlier in your organization, your market, or your industry.

So, what constitutes new hire turnover?

I find most organizations actually don’t measure their hiring managers on new hire turnover but use this to judge effectiveness on their talent acquisition team. That’s a complete joke! That is unless you’re allowing your TA team to make hiring decisions! New hire turn is a direct reflection of hiring decisions. Period.

When should you measure new hire turn?  Organizations are going to vary on this based on your normal turn cycles and level of the position. Most use 90 days as the cap for new hire turnover. That is safe for most organizations, but you might want to dig into your own numbers to find out what’s best for your own organization. I know orgs that use one year to measure new hire turn and orgs that use 30 days.

How do you help yourself if you suck at hiring?

1. Take yourself out of the process altogether.  Most hiring managers won’t do this because their pride won’t allow them. If you consistently have high new hire turn comparable to others, you might consider this, you just have bad internal filters that predispose you to select people who don’t fit your org or management style. Don’t take it personally. I suck at technical stuff. I shop that part of my job off to someone who’s better. You might be an exceptional manager of your business, but you suck at hiring. Shop that out to someone who’s better!

2. Add non-subjective components into your hiring process and follow them 100% of the time. Assessments are scientifically proven to tell you what they’re designed to tell you. If you follow what they’ll tell you, you’ll be much more likely to make consistent hires. If that assessment gives you better hires, then keep following it, or find an assessment that does give you that consistency.

3. Analyze your reasons for each misfire hire. Were there any commonalities in those? What I find is most poor hires stem from a hiring manager who gets stuck on one reason to hire, which has nothing to do with being successful in your environment. Example: “I want high energy people!” But then they work in an environment where they are stuck in a 6X8 foot cube all day. It’s like caging a wild animal! 

Numbers don’t lie. If you consistently bomb your new hire turnover metrics, it’s not the hires, it’s you! In the organizations where I’ve seen the best improvement in reducing new hire turnover, it was in organizations where new hire turnover metric results were solely the responsibility of each hiring manager, and nothing to do with talent acquisition.

It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of most new hire turn is usually coming from around 20% of your hiring managers. Fix those issues and ‘magically’ your new hire turn improves.

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.

Telling Your Executives The Truth Isn’t Courageous

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If I have to listen to one more leadership guru tell hard working people they need to be more courageous, I’m going to walk up on stage and courageously punch that person in the face! There’s a reason you aren’t telling your executives exactly what’s going on in your business and the reason isn’t that you’re a wimp!

The reason we aren’t 100% truthful to our executives about what’s truly going on in our business is because we’ve bought in!

It’s the job of the executive to build and share a vision of the business. It’s the job of those under this executive to then go out and make sure that vision gets integrated into the business. Once you’ve drunk the Koolaid, it’s really hard to un-drink the Koolaid!

It’s not that we don’t want to tell our executives the truth, we do. We don’t because, like most executives, we can’t see the truth any longer!

I’ve worked for some really great executives who knew this about their next level leaders. They hired and promoted great people who they knew would ensure their vision was seen by all. They also knew, at that point, it was then their job to trust and verify.

The best executives I’ve worked for did not sit in an ivory tower and wait for the word to come back from their generals.  They constantly spent time amongst the soldiers, those on the frontline, to ensure that the vision they wanted, was being heard at all levels.

Do you really think that most of the #2’s in organizations lack courage! They got hired and promoted, but then all at once the majority just lacked courage. That doesn’t add up to me! It’s not what I’ve seen in real life.

The reason those underneath you aren’t sharing the exact full picture of what’s going on is they have painted a different version in their mind, they’ve painted a picture of where they are trying to go. It becomes so vivid many times the present is very clear.

When I traveled to locations away from corporate in my career, I frequently got visited upon my return from my CEO. Not because I was one level below him because I was sometimes 3 or 4 levels below! He knew I was the perfect one to tell him what I was seeing and hearing because I was closer to getting my hands dirty then anyone else on the trip.

You don’t need to be more courageous to help your executives.  You need to go back and dig a few more ditches!

T3 – @Ratedly

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This week on T3 I review the anonymous employee review monitoring mobile app Ratedly. Ratedly is the brainchild of the godfather of recruiting thought leadership, Joel Cheesman.  When I entered this game eight years ago there were like four people in the world that talked about the Recruiting Industry and Joel was one of those folks, so he knows the industry very well.

Ratedly was built for HR leaders to be able to monitor employee review sites. When we hear that, most of us will only think of Glassdoor, but there are literally dozens of sites with employee reviews and new ones popping up weekly. Indeed now rivals Glassdoor with the number of reviews they have, and niche sites like InHerSight, AARP, and other local sites are collecting millions of employer reviews. Heck, it even monitors Twitter for notifications about your organization.

The problem will all of this is it becomes too time-consuming to monitor all of these sites and respond in a fashion that is representative of your employment brand. On top of being able to monitor, these sites run 24/7/365, and most of our HR and TA teams don’t! Yet, our executives want these reviews, especially the negative ones, responded to immediately!

Ratedly was built on a native mobile platform, meaning it’s built to be used on smartphones and tablets. It was done this way because of the expectation that whomever in your organization was responsible for this, more than likely, they would want 24/7 access to these reviews the moment they came in, with the ability to share with others in the organization, and be able to respond in real-time.

5 Things I like about Ratedly:

1. The UX is designed to be similar to a news feed you’ll find on many other apps, so the feel is very familiar and easy to use. Ratedly allows you to scroll through your employer reviews all in one spot, at the same time.

2. Bookmarking. On the Ratedly app you can easily bookmark reviews to go back to later and find them quickly. On each review, you will also have access to read the full review, see job title, location, star rating, etc.

3. Share feature. Ratedly easily allows you to share reviews from the app with hiring managers, executives, etc. Some organizations have the leader responsible respond, some have one department like TA respond, regardless of your process, Ratedly allows you to share with whoever you want, immediately.

4. Ratedly puts the monitoring of all of these review sites in one simple easy to use app. No longer does your employment branding team need to check into all of these sites on a daily basis. Or, like most organizations, you’re lucky to check in once or twice per month, and see some bad review that’s been sitting there for weeks!

5. It’s really inexpensive for the service that it offers! $149 per month, is peanuts for when it comes to protecting your employment brand. Most organizations have so much invested in their brand, and Ratedly becomes an inexpensive way to ensure that investment doesn’t blow up overnight!

Ratedly seems to be a technology that larger to enterprise level organizations would definitely have an interest in. If I was running employment branding for a multi-national I would definitely have it in my tool chest. The price point, though, really allows SMBs to come and play as well, especially those smaller startups who are in highly competitive environments and their brand is everything to getting talent. Well worth taking a look!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 T3 – send me a note.

The Candidate Fade Away

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There’s this thing that happens with dating nowadays, called the Fade Away.  I know this because I have teenage sons.  The Fade Away is when you’re dating someone and you know it’s not for you long term, but instead of just telling that person you start the Fade Away process.

You stop talking and start texting.  The texting slowly becomes less frequent, spread out and shorter in length, to eventually stopping altogether.  No finalization.  No uncomfortable exchange of items. Just fading away into a life without that other person being in it.

You see, back in my dating days, well, we didn’t have texting.  You had phone calls that you could duck for a while, but let’s face it your parents were not going to cover for you, so eventually, you had to face the other person.  Those conversations were awful, I so wish I had the fade away!

Because of how we treat our personal relationships today, candidates are now using the Fade Away on companies.   Recruiters talk to a candidate, they seem excited, they call you back every time you call them.  They give you their cell phone number and you begin to text. All is right in the recruiting world.  At some point, the candidate decides that the position, or the company, or you just isn’t right for them and they stop returning calls and texts.  It’s not all at once, it just gets less, until it fades away completely.  Just like we were dating.

Here are some ways to stop the Candidate Fade Away:

1. Be the understanding Girlfriend.  You know the type: “No! No! Really!  I get it! At any point you aren’t cool with this, I’m totally cool with this, let’s just make sure we are straight with each other and tell each other!”  Then you tell her and she loses her effing mind! Okay, ladies, I know, it works both ways!  As a recruiter start out the candidate relationship like this, be a pro. “Tim let me tell you how I work up front.  There is going to come a time when you might feel I presenting you something that you just don’t want for some reason. I’m completely cool with that, I’m presenting you.  I’m your Jerry Maguire. Let me know right away, and I’ll make sure we both look good when speaking to the company and hiring manager.  But I need to know up front what’s going on.”

2. It’s about you, not me.  Find out how the candidate prefers to be communicated to and have them set the terms.  This usually works out well, because they become invested.  You told me this is how you wanted to be communicated to, and I’m following what you wanted.  Experienced recruiters usually hate this route because they’ve been trained to ‘control’ the candidate.  Used in the right manner it can be very effective.

3. Call out the Fade Away!  Making fun of what is going on won’t connect with everyone, but it will definitely connect with some.  Many folks will get defensive if you call them out on the Fade Away, but if you have fun with it, you’ll get some to come back around and laugh it off. “Timmy! Are you trying to break up with me!?  Come on, let’s talk this out, we could be so good for each other, at least talk to me before you break up with me!”  You’ll get a response to this, trust me!