Category Archives: Talent Acquisition

Do you ask your interviewer about your competition?

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So, here’s the deal. Timmy gets his big break and gets the interview he’s always wanted. Goes in. Kills it. You know how Timmy does! The interviewer is doing interviewer things and drops the question, “So, Timmy, do you have any questions for me?”

Do “I” have questions for you!?! Heck, yes! I’ve been preparing for this interview for all of my life, or at least for about thirteen seconds before walking in the door! I do have some questions!

What question can an interviewee ask that will totally turn you off? 

There are probably a lot. We covered one a few weeks back in terms of asking about money, which is a big turn-off for a lot of interviewers. But one question came up and I wanted to crowdsource some results! Here’s the question:

“So, Mrs. Interviewer, can you tell me how I stack up against my competition?” (The other candidates who are also interviewing)

Hmmm….

I’ve got some feels on this:

  1. Gutsy. It could definitely blow-up on you in a hurry! Might be an immediate turn-off, and I’m not sure it would ever be a real turn-on.
  2. It does allow you to redirect the conversation back to strengths if your competition has some things they like over you. “Well, let me tell you a little more about how I also bring this to the table…”
  3. Most Hiring Managers will politely decline to talk about other people interviewing, maybe chuckle a little at the question, it’s a bit old school, so the older the people in the room, probably more likely to get a positive response.
  4. It’s aggressive, so if the role is a position where aggressiveness is a trait that is desired, it might be worth a shot.

I think there might be a better way to ask the same question, but use different wording to engage the conversation:

“What have you seen, by others interviewing, that you really liked about what they would bring to this position? Or, was there something you were hoping to hear from me, or others interviewing, that you’re not hearing?” 

This now takes it off the personal comparison of one candidate to another, and back to what the hiring manager is really looking for. Which again, allows you to redirect to your strengths, or minimize a weakness.

What say you TA and HR Pros? Hiring Managers? Does this question turn you off? If not, is there a question that would turn you off on a candidate?

Hit me in the comments!

The One Thing Most TA Leaders Miss When Creating Real Change

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Our Hiring Managers just won’t give us feedback, or give us interview times. My recruiters just won’t use our ATS or our CRM. I can’t get our executives to understand our brand isn’t what they think it is.

I had an F500 TA leader tell me last week that their biggest issue was not finding candidates, or getting qualified talent, it was simply we can not get our hiring managers to give us interview times. They desperately want and need talent, we have thousands of openings, but they won’t prioritize hiring, so we lose great candidates.

In the Talent Acquisition industry, we see a constant churn of TA leaders. Mostly they get fired because they are ineffective in creating the change they promised when they were hired. At least once per month, I’ll have some well-meaning TA leader reach out to me and ask me this question: “How do I continue to hire, using our broken processes and systems, but also build the new system and processes that I’m supposed to do?”

That’s the catch 22, right?

I wish I had some silver bullet answer for them, but I don’t. There’s no ‘one’ answer for this problem, but I think there are some core pieces to the answer that have to be met:

1 – You have to have an executive, or critical function hiring manager, who will be your champion when you break out your plan of change.

2 – An understanding by you and your team, that hiring as we know it right now, will not continue, and for a bit, we’ll probably get worse and some people might hate us, in the short run.

3 – Change only happens when you actually make change happen. (Damn, I should put that on a t-shirt!) 

The Final Step? 

You stop doing everything people are used to you and your team does. You create tension. You might just stop hiring altogether. Send a note out to your hiring managers explaining that Talent Acquisition is broken. To fix it, we have to blow it up. So, for the next 4 weeks, you are all on your own for hiring. Have fun!

Create Tension! 

The only way you’ll get lasting change is if others feel your same pain. Understand, when you stop hiring, you might just have a hiring manager who will be just fine hiring on their own! They don’t need you. If you and your team got killed in a bad ropes course team building accident tomorrow, let’s face it, the organization would still hire and move forward.

But, you’ve created tension and now you can build something new that will be “the” way you’ll be hiring moving forward. Maybe that is a rules-based approach where every single screened candidate sent to a hiring manager needs a 24-hour turnaround on feedback and also if a manager has you work on their opening they give you pre-assigned interview slots, etc.

If they don’t play along, you don’t work on their stuff.

Might you get fired? Yes. Of course. Might you get fired if you don’t change? Yes. Of course. Damn, isn’t Tension great! Also, why it’s really important to have an executive champion, who buys into your plan!

Every single TA Executive/Leader I speak with actually knows exactly how to fix their problem. Their real problem is they want to change, but they want to do it without adding Tension. That is where they fail.

Why Does Spam Recruiting Work?

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I just got done deleting the 17th phishing email from my personal email inbox today. Comcast, Amazon, Princes from far-off lands, I’ve never been more popular and, apparently, soon to be rich!

I was asking our Cyber Security company why phishing is still such a big deal. I mean don’t we all know by now that some Nigerian Prince isn’t going to give us a million dollars, or that Amazon doesn’t send us emails asking for our credit card numbers, or passwords!? There is no way someone can be this stupid, right!?

Apparently, I’m way wrong, we are all still a lot stupid! 

The reason phishing and spam are not because they are really tricking us. It’s the sure volume of messages and cadence. While we can all spot a fake fairly easily, can you always spot a fake when it’s sent a thousand times, all different times, with all different designs and strategies. Scammers will send a million to get one click. That one click will pay off.

Therein lies the strategy of why Spam Recruiting still works. It’s not about being good, or the best, it’s about being there all the time, knowing a certain percentage of the time will be the right time! Do we like it? Well, I guess that depends on who you are. If you happen to be that one person who gets the spam recruiting message at the exact time you’re desperate for a job, then yes, you will like it!

If you are the superstar performing software engineer getting twenty spam recruiting messages a day, you hate our industry!

Spam Recruiting Works Because It Works Some of the Time

I have never met one American-based TA Leader who believes that Off-Shore Recruiting firms (you know the off-shore RPO spam emails you get constantly all day long) actually are good. For the most part, they don’t recruit, they spam. Because they pay next to nothing to their workforce, they can spam a whole bunch and still make money, even if the entire process truly sucks.

They don’t have to be good. When you’re being paid like $10 a day, all you have to do is spam a couple of thousand people a week to get one placement a month and you’re making a profit for the “man”! Any company engaging in off-shore recruiting for hiring in the U.S. is basically engaging in slave labor. But, I digress. Back to crappy recruiting.

Bad recruiting is a lot like bad sex. If you really need a job, you don’t care how you get it. Which perpetuates you just continuing to be bad.

Spam recruiting works, and will always work, because the world will always have candidates who just need a job. They don’t care that you’re awful at your job. They don’t care that you are spamming them. All they care about is getting the job. Also, if you do care. If you do hate bad spammy recruiters. It turns out you also are fine with them being awful when you’re out of a job!

Spam works because we are all vulnerable at some point. It feeds on us being weak, naive, and desperate. But, at the end of the day, it works. It doesn’t work well. But it does work. And that sucks.

The Weekly Dose: @Pandologic – The Job Advertising Platform

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review the programmatic job advertising platform, Pandologic. Programmatic job advertising has been around now for a decade, but still, it hasn’t caught on as it has with our Marketing peers who have been using the technology successfully to lure customers for decades.

95% of Talent Acquisition job advertising budget is still mostly spent on traditional types of job posting products: Indeed sponsored jobs, LinkedIn job postings, ZipRecruiter, other job boards, some radio, some TV, billboards, a sexier career site no one sees, etc. 95%! 

For the most part, TA hasn’t changed how we advertise for jobs in decades. 

While there are a number of programmatic job advertising tools on the market, Pandologic has truly gone all-in on utilizing artificial intelligence to make their technology more efficient and easier to use. One of the reasons so many great TA shops haven’t yet tested using Programmatic Job Advertising is that it quite frankly seems complex. And while the science behind can be complex, Pandologic has made a simple and intuitive platform that any TA pro can easily use to get better results on their job postings.

I like to think of Pandologic as Programmatic 2.0. It’s not just about distribution (traditional programmatic – put the job everywhere at once), but the utilization of AI-driven decision-making of when and where. Precisely placing your jobs in front of the kind of job seeker you’re looking for when they’re engaged on the internet.

What do I like about Pandologic?

  • Really the only fully-automated programmatic job advertising platform. You can set it and forget it, many of the programmatic tools take some constant watching.
  • Pandologic’s AI will constantly make micro-adjustments to get the best results, including constantly testing and making small language changes to your posting to get the best results.
  • Full AI, no human in the loop. You set your campaign goals and it goes out and gets the applicants.
  • An overall reduction in job advertising spending for the same traffic you have now or increased traffic for the same spend.
  • Easily integrated with your ATS to pull in job postings.

I’m a big fan of programmatic job advertising technology. I think too many TA leaders continue to play this game trying to figure out which “site” is the best one for them, getting into long-term relationships that cost too much money and quite frankly are inefficient. At the end of the day “advertising” is about the best results for the lowest cost.

One word of caution that I constantly try and educate TA pros and leaders on. Programmatic isn’t a silver bullet for hard-to-find talent. If you need Software Engineers in a market where there are very few Software Engineers, Programmatic technology can’t magically make Software Engineers where there are no Software Engineers! But, it can help get your job advertising in front of those few, for less money.

Pandologic for the most part is an enterprise-level TA tool. More than likely they are best utilized with organizations that hire at volume, 500+ hires per year, or it also would work for organizations hiring less, if the vast majority of roles are similar in nature (I.E., we hire 200 Nurses a year, etc.) I think every enterprise and large volume TA shop should be testing Programmatic in 2021.

Build the Perfect Recruiting Stack for a Hybrid World!

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Talent acquisition has a major problem looming just over the horizon: Executives are preparing for business to accelerate in the near future and part of their plan is that talent acquisition professionals will be able to turn hiring on like a light switch. Unfortunately, the vast majority of talent acquisition departments do not have processes and technology systems in place to move this quickly.

On top of that, many of us had to reduce our recruiting budgets and teams! Now, the CEO comes down to your office and she says, “Hey! We’re getting the band back together! Get ready to hire 500 people by the end of the year!”

What are you going to do? 

Step 1: Sign up for my free webcast this week! Feb. 25th at Noon ET, 9 am on the West Coast – You get SHRM credit and a whole bunch of valuable information from yours truly!

Step 2: After the webcast – just do what I tell you! It’s super easy. Like only two steps to be super awesome at recruiting!

We will look at a bunch of strategies and technologies that organizations are using to get ready to hire in this crazy new hybrid world of work. Plus, the number one technique being used by organizations to eliminate ghosting by candidates.

Come learn how to build a light switch for your TA department and put your executive’s minds at ease for your talent attraction and hiring for 2021 and beyond.

REGISTER HERE!  (Free eBook for 5 tips for better Diversity Hiring as well!)

Thanks to Oracle Recruiting Cloud for sponsoring this SHRM Webcast!

The Single Biggest Truth in Hiring That No One Will Admit!

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I’ve had my mind changed about a lot of things over the past decade of writing. I look back at posts I wrote 5 years ago, and think, “Wow, that was a stupid way of thinking!” I’ve also consistently written about things that I can’t prove, but I know to be true with every ounce of my being.

So, every time I find data that confirms my bias, I like to share it! It makes me think I’m still correct in my viewpoints!

The more attractive you are, the more opportunity you’ll get in your job choice and career! 

Think it isn’t true? Here’s the latest study from 2021, from three PhDs in Economics from Cal and the London School of Economics,  “Do Looks Matter for an Academic Career in Economics?” Want the short answer? Yes! Of course, don’t be stupid!

“Using unique data on Ph.D. graduates from top economics departments in the United States we test whether more attractive individuals are more likely to succeed. We find robust evidence that appearance matters for job outcomes. Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher-ranked Ph.D. institutions, are more likely to find themselves in private sector jobs than in government jobs or in academia. Within academia, attractive Ph.D. graduates are more likely to be placed at higher ranking institutions. More surprisingly, appearance also predicts research productivity on the job.”

What did the study find?

  1. The more attractive you are, the better schools you’ll get into.
  2. The more attractive you are, the better jobs you’ll get.
  3. The more attractive you are, the better you’ll actually perform!

Now, come on. I get pretty people will get into better schools and get better jobs, but why in the hell do pretty people actually perform better!?! This has to be a flawed study, right!

“Pretty Privilege” is alive and well, at least in the United States, where this study took place. Maybe in other countries, like Canada, ugly people still have a chance. But, I’m doubting it. (Also, shout-out to Maria Alvarez for the “Pretty Privilege” title!)

Can people really have “Pretty Privilege”?  (FYI – the title of my upcoming autobiography is, “Of Course I Have Pretty Privilege, Just Look at Me!”)

So, I’ve laid out my theory of this before, but how soon people forget. So, here it is again:

Step 1: Pretty person gets a great job. Is Successful.

Step 2: Success and Good Lucks, get you a great choice of Mates.

Step 3: Pretty, Successful people get married and procreate.

Step 4: Pretty kids get into the best schools.

Step 5: The cycle repeats.

So, yes, of course, there is pretty privilege. So much so, we pretty people actually talk about it behind the Uggs backs! There are only two privileges stronger than Pretty, being white and being rich! If you have the trifecta-privilege, well, you’re basically unstoppable.

Now, some will want to argue. “Tim, attractiveness is in the eyes of the beholder!” This is usually said by a person who is a six, or lower, on a scale of 1 (troll) to 10 (goddess). To which I could lay out countless studies on attractiveness and call bullshit, but hey, you’re not very attractive, thus, not really my competition, so believe whatever you want, I’m 2/3 of the way to the trifecta!

So, if you have never read my stuff and this is the first time, and you’re ugly, right about now, you’re pissed! So, let me say, the paragraph before is half-joking, I’m 3 for 3, baby! 😉

What can you do if you’re not Pretty? 

First, if you’re asking yourself this question, I’m sorry, you should have more confidence, high confidence is super pretty! But, I get it. We all can’t be the belle of the ball.

If you don’t have Pretty Privilege, you need to do some other stuff extraordinary well. Be way smarter. Grind and Hustle way harder. Network way better. You must outwork the Pretty People. Invest a lot in your outward appearance. You might not be super attractive, but you can definitely be prettier than a lot of other folks! Be the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs, is all I’m saying.

Let’s break it down.

You and the people at your company responsible for hiring aren’t always hiring the best candidate. Mostly, they hire the candidate who can do the job, which also happens to be the best looking of the candidates they interviewed. All things being equal, hire pretty, is the strategy. I’m not saying it’s the best strategy, I’m just saying it’s the strategy most organizations follow, but would never admit to.

We see this in organizations all the time. You walk into an organization and you start to go, wait, I think there’s a problem, everyone here is way too good looking! Almost always, those organizations are super successful as well. Back in the day, the c-suite would call this “image”. We are upholding an “image” of the firm. What they were really saying was, you need to be prettier to hang with us!

So, keep ignoring Pretty Privilege if you want. It’s alive and well and most likely determining your next hire.

 

 

 

What Does Tim Sackett Actually Do?

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So, besides my beautiful wife asking this question, frequently, I get asked this question all the time! During the spring and fall conference season, I’m out and about all over the world speaking. At almost every stop I’ll have at least one person come up to me and ask,

“So, what do you actually do?” 

Ugh! It’s the single biggest failure of my life! How did I do so well to “brand” myself, but then have so many people not know what I actually do for my job?!

I probably should start each conversation like an AA meeting:

“Hi, my name is Tim Sackett, and I run a technical staffing company!” 

BTW, I think that’s actually Step 13 of AA! Staffing firm owners will agree with this!

That’s the real job. That’s the money maker. I run a recruiting shop! Like most of you, I have to go out and buy a recruiting tech stack that works. I need to decide if I spend money on Indeed, or LinkedIn, or ZipRecruiter. I need to hire and train recruiters. At the end of the day, I’m in the weeds finding talent.

Unlike most Staffing Firm executives, I can’t really hide. I’ve been blogging and speaking for ten years in our industry. When I meet with new clients who want to use my team, I try and tell them, “I think we’re better than most, but the one thing I can guarantee is I won’t lie to you, or take advantage of you! I’m too public! You could kill my brand overnight if I was one of those cheesy staffing guys selling you a load of bullshit!”

The name of my company is HRU Technical Resources. I own the company, now, but in reality, my Mom started the company in 1980. (Check out her profile pic from the 1st day! She looks like Farrah Fawcett!) She’s the original OG Recruiter! In her 70’s, she still could out recruit probably 99% of Recruiters in the world! Old school and proud of it! I like to tell people I was “born” into staffing, as my Mom started the company when I was a boy and I would sit on her bed as she made interview calls at night and watch TV with the sound off.

Want to work with me? I want to work with you! 

Here’s what we do:

  • Contract staffing – helping organizations for 40 years build that part of their company that they want to maintain as contingent to add flexibility to their workforce.
  • Sourcing Projects – we will your funnel with talent and let you do the recruiting
  • Project RPO – we bundle some critical hiring for you and do the entire thing end-to-end
  • Traditional Direct-hire staffing

But, wait! What else do you do? 

I also do a bunch of Talent Acquisition consulting with corporate clients as well, helping them build out their own recruiting tech stack and just flat out execute better when it comes to their own direct hiring and figuring out what’s the best way to get the most out of your recruiting team. It usually starts out like this, “Tim, can we talk? Our talent acquisition department is broken and we need some help!”

I’m also an influencer, advisor, and analyst in the HR Technology industry. I work with tech companies in a number of ways from brand awareness, to product marketing and development, sales strategy, etc. As a reader, you see this in the demos and reviews I do, over 100 per year, but behind the scenes, that’s actually working with these organizations in a number of ways.

So, yeah, I write a lot. I speak quite a bit. I do webcasts, etc. But that’s not the full-time gig. I wrote a post a few years ago titled “What would it take to get you to work 80 hours per week?” I don’t work 80 hours per week, but I probably work 60-ish. A lot of nights and weekends to make both my full-time and my side gig work.

The reality is, if I don’t work my full-time gig, my bills don’t get paid. That’s real life. So, let’s work together! I would love to get to know more of you and work with a bunch of you. Send me a note and let’s connect – sackett.tim@hrutech.com.

2021 Workforce Report by @iCIMS – 84% of HR Pros Believe Their Diversity Recruiting Sucks!

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I love workforce data and you love workforce data, so I’m super excited to share my breakdown of iCIMS’s latest report on the 2021 Workforce. Of course, we anticipate there will be a ton around remote workers and virtual hiring, and we can also anticipate the level of focus on DEI hiring and culture initiatives are only going to increase in 2021.

Let’s breakdown the iCIMS 2021 Workforce Report: 

– iCIMS hiring data seems to point to a moderate economic recovery when you look at the overall job postings, hiring activity, and employer sentiment to hire more in 2021 with 91% of employers stating they will be hiring in 2021. That’s a big number!

– Recruiting tech stacks are evolving in 2021 in a big way to accommodate the ongoing trend of being able to hire virtually. 97% of organizations stating they will invest in virtual interview technology. That’s a lot of video interviewing tech buys! And, online assessment buys! Probably some video job posting buys as well.

– Gig hiring isn’t going away anytime soon, in fact, it’s growing internally. 60% of organizations are relying on contingent labor to help meet workforce needs, which tends to go in the opposite direction of the economy. Meaning, as the economy weakens, we usually see growth in contingent as organizations get nervous about the future. In strong economies, we less growth in contingent. Also, organizations are posting more and more internal gigs for their own staff as development opportunities.

– 84% of organizations are concerned that their current strategies and tools are not reaching diverse and inclusive pools of talent. Hmmm…should be an excellent opportunity for sourcing and recruiting technology that states they can reach DEI talent, but be careful. Most of those tools, just reach back into the same pools you have already been trying to get talent. DEI recruiting starts and ends with real recruiting and outreach, professional apprentice programs, paid internships for DEI talent, employee advocacy programs, etc. There is no magic technology that will pull DEI talent out of a hat. Most fail at DEI recruiting because they keep doing the exact same thing they’ve always done, but added a picture of a person of color to the job posting.

– Probably one of the most overlooked tech items of 2020 from a recruiting standpoint. Internal collaboration tools like Teams and Slack had massive increases in usage. Recruiting teams that can figure out how to leverage these tools best, will have a distinct advantage at leveraging their employees to help them recruit better and faster. 90% of organizations started using these tools over the past year!

– Finally, 2.7 million candidates applied to jobs via Text Messaging in 2020, and that number is increasing every single month moving forward. Anytime I present and mention utilizing text messaging in recruiting it always gets more questions than anything else! Applying via text, communicating with candidates via text, is the new norm, not innovation. If you’re not doing it as a recruiter, you should be fired.

Go download the report, it’s packed with great information and data around how organizations of all sizes are moving forward with their recruiting technology and strategies.

There is no such thing as “Too Much Talent”!

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There is this common belief that one organization can have “too much” talent and having “too much” talent is most likely not going to turn out well. Okay, this is a commonly held belief amongst sports teams, specifically, basketball. (All non-sport fan HR pros check out…WAIT!)

The concept happens when you have organizations build super teams. The reason we believe it will fail is mostly ego-driven. All of these superstars won’t be able to play together because they all want to be ‘the’ star and for the team to win and play well, you must take on a role. And, that role, might not have you being the star.

The Brooklyn Nets are this year’s version in the NBA of “too much” talent, with superstar players, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and the newest addition, James Harden. All three are superstars.

Why do we feel an organization can have too much talent? 

As ‘normal’ people, we have a hard time believing that someone who is great, a superstar, would be willing to share their glory. To take a backseat or play the second chair, for the good of the ‘team’. It is our belief that most people suck, apparently. Or, truthfully, we suck, because we are just projecting our own beliefs!

I like science and some researchers wanted to take a look at this phenomenon of super teams and too much talent. What did they find?

  • Teams benefit, overall, from having more talented team members.
  • The benefit decreases over time, but…
  • More talent is never detrimental to team performance! 

While a great team might start to get less great over time, that is mostly due to a lot of non-talent factors. Could be the age of athletes, less motivated to succeed, etc. But, still, the team is more successful, with the talent, than before.

How can we use this knowledge in normal, non-sport organizations? 

First, we need to understand that all hiring managers are a bit hesitant to hire someone they feel is more talented than themselves. This is human nature, we all have this trait at some level. We want to protect the job we have, hiring someone great, no matter what we tell ourselves, we feel puts our own job at risk. This is normal, not a weakness.

The way around this is that everyone has to come together and acknowledge we all have this weakness. “Hey folks, we need to hire people better than ourselves if we want to become a super team. That said, we need to hold each other accountable to that end”

Second, we need to be able to measure “better”. What is better than you or me? How can I measure that in a candidate? That is truly an impossible task, for most professions and positions. At the very least, you must be able to look yourself in the mirror and ask the question, “Is this person better than me, or given the chance, could they become better than me and a decent time period?” “Can I help this person be better than me because they have some core skill sets I don’t have?”

Every CEO I’ve ever met wanted to hire better people for their company. Only a handful had the self-insight needed to truly hire better people. The first step to hiring better people is realizing you might not be the best! That’s hard for some executives to comprehend and admit. In fact, it’s hard for almost everyone to comprehend and admit!

You can not have too much talent on your team. You can not have too much talent on your team. You can not have too much talent on your team. You can have too many talented people who are assholes. That is something entirely different!

Hiring for a High Give-a-Damn

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Josh Zywien, the CMO of Paradox, made a great hire this past week and I sent him a note telling him so. I like to do that. He knows he made a great hire, but it’s always nice to get a note confirming your belief! If you don’t know Josh, you should give me a follow, he’s one of the good guys in our industry.

Josh responded to my note with a statement I wanted to share because it’s profound:

I like to hire people who have a ‘high give-a-damn’! 

I absolutely love that and told him I was stealing it!

What does hiring for High Give-a-Damn Mean? 

It’s one of those intangibles you know when you see it. Like porn. Hard to explain, but when I see it, I know what it is. High Give-a-Damn (HGD) individuals don’t just care about their job and their company. HGD is pervasive in all aspects of their life. You’ll see it come out in other ways away from their career as well.

The High Give-a-Damn Traits:

  • High attention to detail
  • Live an orderly life
  • Most likely, well-kept house, clean, probably makes their bed every single morning.
  • Classic fashionable dress style not to stand out, but you notice them
  • They say the right things and the right times
  • They can be counted on
  • Follow-through is impeccable
  • They give a shit about stuff that matters
  • Have a habit of taking care of their physical & mental self, more than the average person.

People with HGD don’t drive around in a messy car with a coffee stain on their shirt. They might not have a lot of money, but what they have, they take care of. They do more with less because part of HGD is not to waste resources, both professionally and personally. So, you take care of your stuff. Part of your ‘stuff’ is your personal self.

I’ve written about organizations “Hiring Pretty” in the past. About the scientific research that shows organizations that tend to hire more attractive people actually have higher results. There is a bit of this in HGD. Individuals with HGD most likely get the most out of the attractiveness they have.

It doesn’t mean the person has to be naturally ‘pretty’ but think of the time when you took that one selfie, that one time when you were feeling super cute, had that one hat on, the light was right and now it’s your favorite IG photo. Yeah, that, but now what if you did that every day? That’s HGD. “Felt cute, not ever gonna delete!”

Now, at this point, you might be saying, “Tim, all of this seems superficial. There is nothing here about skill or performance, about actually being able to do the job.” Yeah, I’m not only hiring for HGD and nothing else. This is about, what if I had three people who had similar skill level, education, experience? At that point, my tiebreaker is who has the most HGD?

Who is going to bring the most HGD to the team? Because in the end, when I’m going to war with my team, I want people who give a damn. Yeah, we might be making widgets for crackheads, but I still want people who want to make the best widgets for crackheads. People who want to make sure that crackhead has the best experience with our product and service. (Right now, Josh is like, WTF, how did I get in a Tim Sackett Blog Post with Crackheads!?)

Not enough Hiring Managers are hiring for HGD. In fact, as a society we kind of gone soft on HGD. We have this belief that you can be HGD in your personal life, but not your professional life, or vice versa. The reality is true HGD is always on or never on as a personality trait. You either give a damn about your life, or you don’t. I want to be around and work with people who are HGD.