Category Archives: Staffing

Does Buying Sex Go Too Far In Getting The Best Talent?

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Louisville’s basketball program is under fire because of recent allegations by former recruits and players who claim that Louisville paid for strippers to entertain them on recruiting visits, that included paid sex.  From ESPN:

“Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team’s former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.

One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.

Said one of the recruits, who ultimately signed to play elsewhere: “I knew they weren’t college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club.”

Before you come down on Louisville, the reality is, this is probably happening at many institutions. Jalen Rose, former NBA player, University of Michigan Fab 5 and ESPN Commentator, also said his recruiting visits to UofM, MSU, Syracuse and UNLV were like bachelor parties and all included having sex and alcohol.

I think most of us would completely agree that taking seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys onto a college campus for this type of activity is wrong.

My question is where does recruiting cross the line when it comes to adults and working for your company?

I can’t imagine ever ‘paying for sex’ for a recruit, since it’s mostly illegal, unless you’re in certain counties in Nevada.  I also can’t imagine providing drugs to potential recruits for any company I might work for, but then you see what’s going on in Colorado and Oregon.

I think you cross the line in how you recruit when you cross the line of your moral makeup of the majority of your employees and stakeholders. Some companies are very comfortable taking recruits out to bars and getting drunk. Many companies can’t even fathom that kind of behavior!

But, doesn’t wining and dining have a place in professional recruitment?  If you could get a great software developer, one that might cost you a $25K headhunting fee, doesn’t it make sense to drop a few hundred dollars on a potential candidate?   It certainly does, if you know who your best candidates are!

That’s the problem, right?  Many of us don’t know ‘better’ talent when we see it.  So, giving out hundreds of dollars in recruiting swag doesn’t work when you give it out to everyone!  It only works when you give it to the best.  Then, it also doesn’t work every time. It’s like the famous line from Anchorman, “60% of the time, it works every time!”

Louisville didn’t get every recruit who they paid hookers to have sex with them, but they landed some of those recruits.

Buying Beats headphones with your logo and sending them to software developers won’t land everyone you send them to, but it will attract some to take that next step.  Those cost $199.  Is hiring great talent worth $199?  Oh, hell, yes it is!  But, no one is sending Beats to software developers.

I’ve always said that college athletics is always on the forefront of what true recruiting is.  Highly sought after talent. Hard to attract to your organization. They find ways to make the best candidates feel extremely special. This is way beyond candidate experience. This is closing.

Paying for sex goes beyond what I’m willing to do, to get the best talent to come and work for me.  But, I’m willing to do alot of other stuff to attract the best talent! What about you?

Sustainable Talent Acquisition

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Here’s what I know.  A sustainable talent acquisition process can’t happen if it’s human run. A manual, human run talent acquisition process eventually falls apart.

Think about your employee referral program.

It was an awesome program when you launched it last month, last year, etc.  Now it’s dead in the water. Why?  Because it’s almost impossible for you, and your team, to keep it going on your own.  Other things become a higher priority, things move fast, eventually, even the best programs get pushed to the side, or forgotten about completely.

I’m not just talking about employee referrals. Every part of your TA process is exactly the same.  Sourcing, assessments, background checks, onboarding, exit interviews, etc.

To make talent acquisition sustainable, you need to integrate technology, it can be human driven.  TA technology allows you to automatically sustain these efforts simultaneously without you actually having to do anything.  Technology can reach out and source and attract. Technology can screen and assess. Technology can drive employee referrals 24/7/365, without you ever touching it. Technology can interview.

Basically, technology allows you to sustain and ongoing recruitment effort without you ever taking your foot off the gas.  The best of us fail at this. We have the best intentions, design the best programs, then life happens and things fall through the cracks. We then come to a point, where we do it all over again.  This is where and why most talent acquisition processes and functions fail, because they are just not sustainable.

Everything is going great, then Mandy leaves for a new job, Sue goes on maternity leave, and Tim who used to be great, has now lost his mojo, and we can’t seem to do anything right. Humans screw up your process! We need them, because humans also make hires, but boy can they make it difficult sometimes!

How can you make your talent acquisition sustainable for years in your organization?  Utilize your technology to it’s fullest. Add technology to the parts that give you the biggest headaches. Then, utilize your humans to build relationships with candidates and hiring managers. Let the tech run the process, let the humans run the people.

The Uber of Recruitment #hrtechconf

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Apparently, the new marketing message for Talent Acquisition technology is to call yourself the “Uber of Recruitment”. I have had six different companies actually use this phrase to explain what their product is, and how it works.

Marketers love to play up being a ‘disruptor’, like Uber did to the taxi industry.  I love using Uber, and I think most people that use it really like it as well. So, making the jump in marketing to use that positive image and tying it back to your product makes perfect sense.

Lazy, but I get it.

Here’s the bigger story, companies are trying to cash in on the multi-billion dollar recruitment industry. Okay, it’s not a big story, it’s been happening for decades, but we are getting to a point where you can see technology making a serious play at truly changing the way companies interact with traditional recruitment agencies.

This is my game, so I’m definitely interested in checking out all these new Uber of Recruiting plays.

Here’s how most of these technologies work:

Step 1: Use our technology to connect with candidates

Step 2: We charge you about 75% less than traditional recruitment agencies

Step 3: We cut out the middle man

Step 4: You get same talent, faster, cheaper, happier.

The basic premise is Uber simple. Put the power of recruitment into the hands of the candidate.  Let them easily connect with those companies that seek their expertise.

Here’s why this is hard.  All of these Uber of Recruitment plays don’t really have an answer on how do we get people and/or companies to use their product.  The need to use Recruitment Agencies are based on a few main premises:

1. The most desirable candidates are not looking, and must be found.

2. You don’t have capacity or skill in-house to find this talent.

3. Agencies can find better talent, than other options (remember this is the premise of use!).

The Uber of Recruitment plays don’t necessarily address all of these premises. I do believe that this technology is going to have an impact to a part of recruitment industry market segment that has issue with cost.

The technology makes it easier for organizations to almost run their own type of agency in-house using this technology, and it makes it easy for candidates to connect.  But, the huge miss is that these technologies still don’t go out and sell a talented person, who is not looking for a job at your company or any company, on why they need to consider this job.

That’s called recruitment, or sales, which is recruitment. Uber of Recruitment technology doesn’t recruit, which is why these plays won’t end the industry as we know it. Uber as an example doesn’t really fit as a recruitment industry killer, but it might work in terms of disrupting and pushing bad agencies to get better.

 

5 Signs You Shouldn’t Make That Offer

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If I have learned anything at all in my HR/Recruiting career it’s that everyone has an opinion on what makes a good hire. If you ask 100 people to give you one thing they focus on when deciding between candidates, you’ll get 100 different answers!

I’ve got some of my own. They might be slightly different than yours, but I know mine work!  So, if you want to make some better selections, take note my young Padawans:

1. Crinkled up money. Male or female if you pull money out of your pocket or purse and it’s crinkled up, you’ll be a bad hire!  There is something fundamentally wrong with people who can’t keep their cash straight. The challenge you have is how do you get a candidate to show you this? Ask to copy their driver’s license, or something like that!

2. Males with more selfies on their Instagram, than all other photos. I don’t even have to explain this.

3. Slow walkers.  If you don’t have some pep in your step, at least for the interview, you’re going to be drag as an employee.

4. My Last Employer was so Awesome! Yeah, that’s great, we aren’t them. Let’s put a little focus back to what we got going on right here, sparky. Putting too much emphasis on a job you love during the interview is annoying. We get it. It was a good gig. You f’d it up and can’t let go. Now we’ll have to listen about it for the next nine months until we fire you.

5. Complaining or being Rude to waitstaff.  I like taking candidates to lunch or dinner, just to see how they treat other people. I want servant leaders, not assholes, working for me. The meal interview is a great selection tool to weed out bad people.

What are your signs not to make an offer?  Share in the comments!

Your CEO is a Better Recruiter Than You

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Lou Adler, a great thought leader in the recruiting industry (I love to refer to him as “Uncle Lou” – endearingly), has one of the best recruiting articles of the year up on Inc. titled, “An Open Email from a CEO to All Outstanding Candidates“.   The concept of the email was getting your CEO to send out an email directly to candidates you are trying to source.

Just that idea alone is a brilliant strategy, because 99.9% of organizations will never do it!  That means, you’ll standout from the crowd. That’s good recruiting practices.

The article goes on to give you how you should actually write the email and what you should say:

1. No silly, classic job descriptions.  Instead tell them about what they’ll actually be doing.

2. Describe why the job could be a career move to the candidate.  They’ll believe this from coming from the CEO.

3. Don’t tell them to apply. That can actually be the last step. Get them interested first. Applications scream we have no idea what we are doing.

4. Provide an open invitation and a direct way to have a real conversation with someone with direct knowledge of the opening.

5. Let them know what the process would look like and next steps, if they are actually interested in moving forward.

6. Make sure the candidates have access to your hiring managers as well.  I’m assuming if your CEO is this involved, your hiring managers will be onboard as well!

Great stuff, right?!

It probably doesn’t work for high volume hiring when you have a lot of candidates. This isn’t meant for that, it’s meant for hard to find, critical to the business type positions.

I absolutely love this technique!

Here’s what I know. Most companies, and most CEOs, will never do this. Those who do, will have great success in getting candidates to respond. Put yourself into your candidates shoes. You’re sitting there some idle Friday and an email pops up from a name you don’t recognize. You open it and find out it’s coming from the CEO of a pretty good company in town. You better believe you’ll read it.

You will also ‘trust’ what is in that email, over if the exact same thing is sent by a recruiter. Why?  You believe that a CEO would never put themselves in a position to lie.  Right or wrong, you believe this. Plus, you’re flattered that a CEO sent you a personal email, not some marketing email, from their ‘real’ work email address, with their contact information in it.

None of your friends have gotten an email from a CEO telling them they are wanted! This is cool. This feels good. This feels different.

This is a winning strategy.

Thanks Uncle Lou!

The Only Candidate Available

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Almost every single week of my life for the last twenty years I’ve had to deal with an issue that just seems to never go away. I didn’t matter if I was in a HR or TA role, I was always involved with working with hiring managers who always had some sort of opening, even in bad economic times.

The scenario went something like this:

1. Hiring Manager  has an opening. I/We find this hiring manager a really good candidate. Not perfect, but probably better than many we have already hired in the same position.

2. Hiring Manager interviews candidate. Likes Candidate.

3. I go to speak with the Hiring Manager.

4. You know what happens next…

5. Hiring Manager says she really liked the candidate, but (wait for it)…She would certainly like to see other candidates to compare.

6. I put gun in my mouth and pull trigger.

This same scenario has happened weekly for twenty years across multiple companies, multiple industries and multiple states. It’s an epidemic of enormous proportion across the world.

Here’s the real problem that we face with hiring managers, and it’s completely psychological. The Hiring Manager always assumes that the ‘last’ option, or ‘only’ option is a bad option.

Pretty simple.  We all do this.  If you go to a farmers market and you go to pick out some produce, let’s say a head of lettuce, and the farmer only has one head of lettuce left on the stand. We will assume something must be wrong with that one head of lettuce!  If the farmer puts three other heads around that one, you would gladly pick up the original head, now believing you ‘picked’ the best head of lettuce.

Candidates are heads of lettuce!

When you show a hiring manager one, they assume it’s not as good as the others they are not seeing.

This is actually pretty easy to solve, but very hard to do. Never present a hiring manager with one candidate.  HR and TA are classic economist when it comes to candidate generation. We are FIFOs! Do you remember your Econ class from college? First In, First Out.  The first candidate we find, we immediately send out to the hiring manager.

This starts the problem.

The hiring managers seeing one candidate will discount this candidate as bad. If you just wait a few days, put one or two other candidates with this candidate, not the hiring manager will ‘pick’ the best.  This works pretty well, most of the time.  But, it’s hard to do because we get so excited about finding a good candidate we want to show it the hiring manager as fast as possible.

Stop that!

Be patient. Find a good ‘slate’ of candidates to present all at the same time. Reap the benefits.

The only candidate available will always be that lonely head of lettuce on the farmers stand.  Find more heads, and present them together. No one likes to pick from a pile of one!

Michigan Recruiters Conference #MiRecruits @MiRecruits

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Over a year ago Jim D’Amico and I started talking about how cool it would be to have a Recruiting only conference right here in our great state of Michigan! We had some models of how some others did it, primarily Paul DeBettignies out of Minnesota, and we decided to give it a try.  HR has thousands of conferences! National, state, local. TA has somehow become the redheaded stepchild of HR! Jim and I love redheaded stepchildren so we wanted to change this!

The first one was held on Friday March 13th in Lansing, MI, onsite at Accident Fund who was a great corporate sponsor for our first event.  We had over 100 corporate talent acquisition leaders and pros come in from all over the state. We had a great speaking group that included Paul and Jennifer McClure. It was everything we hoped for and more.

The 2nd Michigan Recruiters Conference will also be held on  Friday October 2nd onsite at Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, MI. This time we’ve added more speakers including Kris Dunn, Lori Fenstermaker, David Dart and Troy Farley.  As was the first event, the intent is to help develop and educate corporate talent acquisition pros and leaders to be great.

You can follow the action on the Twitters at #MiRecruits. Also, you can check out my Periscope throughout the day and I’ll bring some Live action to the social stream as well – which you can watch following me on Twitter @TimSackett and download the Periscope App on iTunes or Android.

If you’re just learning about this for the first time, I apologize. The reality is, the demand has been great. We sold out both shows without really even trying.  Turns out, Corporate Talent Acquisitions Pros like development, and we all don’t have very many options! We hope this is a great option, that is close to home.  Send me your contact information and I’ll make sure you get added to the contact list for the Spring 2016 conference. (timsackett@comcast.net)

So, What’s next? 

Our original idea was to try and do this event twice per year. We keep it cheap through great sponsors like Velocity Resource Group and CareerBuilder, as well as corporate sponsors (who provide us with space to hold the one day Conference/Summit) like Accident Fund and Spectrum Health.

That means the next conference will be held in the spring of 2016 and we would love to have it in the metro Detroit area – we just need to find a corporate sponsor, who has a large conference/ballroom type space that can fit a couple hundred people.  Hello, GM, Quicken Loans, Ford, Chrysler, Blue Cross/Blue Shield/ Detroit Medical Center/ Etc.!?  If you have interest in being a corporate sponsor please reach out to me directly, I would love to answer any questions you might have. I promise, we try and make it painless! Plus, it’s huge boost to your employment brand within your market!

You can check out more at www.michiganrecruits.com!

The 1 Reason You’re Afraid To Make Recruiting Simple

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Have you ever wondered why Recruiting Departments continue to make complex processes?  In reality, all of us, wants things simple.  But, when you look at our organizations they are filled with complexity.  It seems like the more we try to make things simple, the more complex they get.  You know what?  It’s you. It’s not everyone else.  You are making things complex, and you’re doing this because it makes you feel good.

From Harvard Business Review:

“There are several deep psychological reasons why stopping activities is so hard to do in organizations. First, while people complain about being too busy, they also take a certain amount of satisfaction and pride in being needed at all hours of the day and night. In other words, being busy is a status symbol. In fact a few years ago we asked senior managers in a research organization — all of whom were complaining about being too busy — to voluntarily give up one or two of their committee assignments. Nobody took the bait because being on numerous committees was a source of prestige.

Managers also hesitate to stop things because they don’t want to admit that they are doing low-value or unnecessary work. Particularly at a time of layoffs, high unemployment, and a focus on cost reduction, managers want to believe (and convince others) that what they are doing is absolutely critical and can’t possibly be stopped. So while it’s somewhat easier to identify unnecessary activities that others are doing, it’s risky to volunteer that my own activities aren’t adding value. After all, if I stop doing them, then what would I do?”

That’s the bad news.  You have have deep psychological issues.  Your spouse already knew that about you.

The good news is, you can stop it!  How?  Reward people for eliminating worthless work.  Right now we reward people who are working 70 hours per week and always busy and we tell people “Wow! Look at Tim he’s a rock star, always here, always working!”  Then someone in your group goes, “Yeah, but Tim is an idiot, I could do his job in 20 hours per week, if…”  We don’t reward the 20 hour guy, we reward the guy working 70 hours, even if he doesn’t have to. (Editor’s note: calling yourself an idiot in a post is cathartic in a number of ways!)

Somewhere in our society the ‘working smarter’ analogy got lost or turned into ‘work smarter and longer’.  The reality is most people don’t have the ability to work smarter, so they just work longer and make everything they do look ‘Really’ important!   You just thought of someone in your organization when you read that, didn’t you!?  We all have them, you can now officially call them ‘psychos’ since they do actually have a “deep psychological” reasons for doing what they’re doing. Harvard said so!

I love simple.  I love simple HR.  I love simple Recruiting.  I hate HR and Talent Pros that make things complex, because I know they have ‘deep psychological’ issues!  Please go make things simple today!

1 Sign That Shows Google Now Controls HR

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It was just a matter of time. The company that vows to do know evil, would eventually take over the function that is the most hated in the world.  Don’t get me wrong, Google didn’t come into your organization and start giving your employees performance reviews, yet.  What Google does is much more stealth.

Remember back in April of this year (2015)? Laszlo Bock, the head of HR for Google, released his book “Work Rules!” He then went on a national book tour and was famously interviewed, everywhere, telling anyone who would listen that you don’t need a college degree to work at Google. In fact, Google has found that your college GPA and transcripts to be ‘worthless’ in terms of making a quality hire.

We all kind of chuckled.  Well, there goes Google, being Google again.

Let’s fast forward to today. Jobvite recently released their 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey.  It’s always an interesting read, with great data and metrics, but one metric stood out, to me, above all others:

“57% of Organizations now report that GPAs are unimportant.”

Do you see what just happened?

If Jobvite would have asked organizations and recruiters in January of this year, this same question, prior to Laszlo’s announcement, how do you think this number would be different?  I’m telling you the number would have been around 5% or less!

GPA are unimportant. Really?

Here’s what Google, I mean Laszlo, forgot to tell everyone about why Google can hire people who have never gone to college.  THEY HIRE FREAKING GENIUSES THAT HAVE BEEN CODING IN THEIR PARENTS BASEMENTS SINCE THEY WERE 12! These kids don’t need college. College would bore them. They know more than the professors teaching them. Google gets to hire the top 1% of people, not just college grads.

You won’t get these geniuses, who don’t need to go to college.  You get half-baked nitwits who need college, a good spanking, a few years to grow up and probably deep therapy.  You are not Google.

Yet, here we are, and you are answering Jobvite’s survey questions and acting like your Google.  Thank you Google.  Thank you for setting HR back a decade.  For not telling the full story, just swaying opinion by making bold statements.  We now get a generation of workers who think they can just jump off their Xbox and into a job paying six figures.  That’s really helpful.  You’re brilliant Laszlo.

Check out Jobvite’s 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey, it’s good stuff, even the stuff that Google brainwashed you to answer.

Watch Me LIVE Right Now! #CBEmpower15

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That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on TV LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  Today, I’ll be bringing you all the cool stuff happening at Empower 15 in Chicago!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST today and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).

My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in this morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day.

If you want to ask a question on the Live Stream – hit me on the Twitters at #CBEmpower15 or @TimSackett and I’ll try to make you famous!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

Remember! This is LIVE, who knows what might happen…