Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules

You almost never go wrong when hiring pretty people!

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What do you think of, in regards to smarts, when I say: “Sexy Blond model type”?

What about: “Strong Athletic Jock?”

What about: “Scrawny nerdy band geek?”

My guess is most people would answer: Dumb, Dumb, Smart – or something to that context.

In HR we call this profiling and make no mistake, profiling is done by almost all of our hiring managers.  The problem is everything we might have thought is probably wrong in regards to our expectations of looks and brains.  So, why are ugly people smarter?

They’re Not!

Slate published an article that contradicts all of our ugly people are more smart myths and actually shows evidence to the contrary. From the article:

Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone’s intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent?

Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests.

When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size.

That’s right HR Pros, pretty people are smarter.  I can hear hiring managers and creepy executives that only want “cute” secretaries laughing all over the world!

The premise is solid though!  If you go back in our history and culture you see how this type of things evolves:

1. Very smart guy gets a great job or starts great company and makes a ton of money

2. Because of success, “smart guy” now has many choices of very pretty females to pursue as a bride.

3. “Smart guy” and “Pretty bride” start a family which results in Pretty-Smart Children. Did you pay attention to basic genetics in biology class?

4. Pretty-Smart Children grow up with all the opportunities that come to smart beautiful families.

5. The cycle repeats.

Now, first, this is a historical thing thus my example of using a male as our “Smart guy” and not “Smart girl”. I’m sure in today’s world this premise has evolved yet again. But we are talking about how we got to this point, not where are we now.  Additionally, we are looking at how your organization can hire better.

So, how do you want to hire better employees?  That’s easy! Just hire more pretty people!

 

Building the Perfect TA Tech Stack! #HRTechConf

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Arguably the hottest tech at HR Tech will be in the Talent Acquisition space. TA Tech has blown up over the past decade with billions of dollars entering the marketplace in investment. It seems like every single day I’m getting an announcement in my email about the launch of a new TA Tech company.

All of this has caused massive confusion amongst TA leadership in trying to keep it all straight. The common questions are:

  • What does the tech even do?
  • Do I need this tech?
  • Doesn’t my ATS do this?
  • What is my competition using?
  • What should we be using to attract more talent?
  • Etc.!

It’s really just a never-ending list of questions because the TA Tech marketplace has been moving at such a fast pace and the innovation within the space is truly unparalleled in comparison to anything we’ve seen in the overall HR Tech space, ever!

Luckily, the HR Technology Conference is here to help you feel much smarter about the TA Technology space.  On Wednesday at 11am PT in the Venetian Ballroom A & B (come early they tell me this will be a standing room only session), a group of brilliant TA leaders and I, will take the stage tackling the dilemma of Building the Perfect TA Tech Stack! The experts on the panel are some of the top TA Tech brains on the planet – Jessica Lee from Marriott, Allyn Bailey from Intel, and Graham Pionkowski from Bazaarvoice (and of course me!).

The session is designed for both TA leaders and practitioners, but also all those TA Vendors trying to sell to us!

Completely vendor agnostic, which is a fancy way to say, we’ll be talking about the TA Tech we love, the TA Tech we use, the TA Tech we wish we could use, and maybe even a few TA Technologies we wish we could punch right in the face!

Our goal is to completely share our own TA Tech Stacks with the audience and have an open dialogue around what’s working and what’s not working. To help us all have a better understanding around the TA Tech that we see is foundational to our success, and what TA Tech we will need in the future to maintain our success.

It might be the most topical session of the entire show! We all need talent in a big way. Most of us will increase our chances to getting that great talent by having the perfect TA Tech Stack!

@LinkedIn Announces LinkedIn Talent Insights at #TalentConnect

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LinkedIn made a pretty major product announcement today at their annual Talent Connect conference. By the way, no one talks about this, but quietly Talent Connect has become the single largest Talent Acquisition Conference on the planet! SHRM National (HR) has 15,000+, HR Technology Conference will go 6,000+, Talent Connect I heard was around 3,000+!

That’s a ton of TA pros and leaders in one location!

This morning in Nashville, LinkedIn let everyone get a peek behind the curtain on a new product that is just being released to beta with a select group of customers, with the goal to have this available to the entire market in the first quarter of 2018.

The new product is called Talent Insights.

For years LI users have been begging for more access to data and LinkedIn has responded in a major way with their Talent Insights product. Talent Insights is basically two major reporting tools that allow those using Talent Insights to pull in data like never before.

The first report is called Talent Pool. This report is a multi-filter report with a very familiar Recruiter-like interface. This tool is used by organizations to examine the available pool of candidates based on the filters you put in. Need to hire 50 Developers in Ann Arbor? This tool gives you all the information you need to make to launch the strategy to make that happen.

Talent pool gives your team the ability to be able to prioritize their efforts and sourcing strategy by seeing out of the entire available pool of talent, based on your search criteria, which ones are already engaged with your brand on LI, then if you’re using Recruiter you can quickly see that list and decide how do you reach out from there.

Let’s say that available pool of Developers in Ann Arbor is 10,000, but 1,500 of those developers have actually connected with you, looked at your LinkedIn company page, etc. This allows you to know who already is engaging with you, but also who hasn’t.

Within Talent Pool, you can also see where there are other available talent pools via a map function which allows you to click the locations on a map to see where these other pools are, and along with tons of data on active those pools of talent are.

The second reporting tool is the “Corporate” report. This is very cool in that you can now pull information on your competition in real time. Want to see who your competitors are hiring and in what roles? Done. Want to see where your competitors are hiring their talent from? Done. Want to see who your competition is losing talent to? Done.

By the way, it’s not only competition. The Corporate report will pull this data on any company, including your own.

The Corporate reporting tool also shows trends over time. Maybe your competition hired a ton of engineers from one company over the last twelve months, but in the last two months, they’ve hired no one from some others. Again, this gives your team insight to competitive behavior and skill sets like you’ve never had before.

Not only can you see what skill sets your competition is hiring, but the Corporate report will also show you how your own team stacks up in those skill sets against your competition from a hiring standpoint.

Like I said, great first step out of the gate on giving LI users more access to the data they’ve been asking for, and it’s easy to see where this could lead to down the road with some very robust, real-time business intelligence. We’ve known forever that LinkedIn was sitting on maybe the world’s largest data set, next to Facebook. We are now seeing the power of how that data can help your organization attract and recruit talent.

#DisruptHR Detroit was a Yuuggee Success!

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Hey, gang! It’s Friday and I’m buried from a busy week. Do you feel me!?!?

We held the first DirsuptHR Detroit event this week in midtown Detroit at the Graden Theater. We sold 330 tickets for a space that held 300, we had 50 people on a waiting list. The space was awesome. The speakers were awesome. The food and drink were awesome. The crowd was awesome.

I have to give up to the DisruptHR Detroit Team – Kristen Cifolelli, Patrice Matejka, Ursulla McWhorter, Colleen Schmerheim, Bridgette Morehouse, Christie Hecht, and Christie Reeves. It takes a village and this team was awesome!

Also, I have to thank all the sponsors who made this wonderful event possible: American Society of Employers, Marsh & McClennan Agency, Ultimate Software, Grace & Porta Benefits, Cambridge Consulting Group, QuadWest Assc., Walsh College, Sift, HRU, and Qualigence. Plus, a special shoutout to SkillScout who did all of our videos for the speakers!

So, it was a great night, that was until one nice young lady decided that somehow I reminded her of Donald Trump! WTF!?!?! You can see the picture above I had on a Tiger’s cap (yes, very disruptive at an HR event!), so I’m still perplexed on how I reminded of her Trump because I was super careful not to say anything racist while on stage!

We can’t wait for the next event! More details on that coming soon. In the mean time, if you want to speak at the next DisruptHR Detroit – send me a message and I’ll make sure to invite you when we open up speaking submissions!

When Talent Gets Tight, People Break the Rules

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So, let me get this straight, high school basketball players are getting paid to go to certain schools? Yeah, I think we’ve known that for like at least twenty, plus years now!

You know the saying where there is smoke, there is fire? Well, the NCAA and big-time college athletics have been burning for decades! Now, instead of the NCAA putting your school on probation for breaking the rules, the FBI is putting your butt in prison!

My good friend, Kris Dunn, was once a college basketball player, and then an assistant coach at the NCAA Division 1 level. He has often told me that most dangerous job in America is an assistant coach in the NCAA because it’s the assistant coaches who take the fall for the head coach. The head coach knows exactly what’s going on, but has the assistants do all the dirty work!

What is happening in NCAA athletics is like a small microcosm of what is happening across all recruiting.

There are very few NCAA coaching jobs. There is a huge pool of talent for those jobs. Thus, being successful is critical in keeping your job. Being successful in athletics is one part coaching and about ten parts having great athletes! All of this is a recipe for disaster.

Each one of these kids is a potential lottery ticket for a number of people. Their parents and guardians. Their high school and club coaches. All sorts of people on the edges who could make money off of them. So, rules get bent, broken, and destroyed! To ensure the talent you need gets to your organization.

In the ‘real’ world of recruiting talent to your organization, things haven’t necessarily gotten as bad is it is with big-time college athletics. Still, we all have stories of some very unscrupulous things happening to lure talent away from one organization to another.

Let’s be clear. It takes at least two parties to tango.

The person making the ‘hiring’ decision has to be willing to do bad stuff. The person willing to ‘accept’ the offer has to be willing to do bad stuff. When you get at least two parties together willing to do bad stuff, bad stuff is going to happen. That’s how the world works. Bad people, do bad things.

It’s extremely hard to stay on the moral high ground when it seems like everyone around you is getting things you’re not.

I’ve never asked someone to break a contract to come work for me. I hope I never will. Still, there are those out there in many industries justifying why you should break a contract you signed and agreed to, to come work for their organization. As our unemployment rate gets smaller this pressure to deliver talent gets higher.

“Yeah, but Tim, employment contracts are bad, they keep people from working at better jobs.” Sorry, did I miss something? You mean someone ‘forced’ you to sign that contract that you agreed to, completely? Yeah, that didn’t happen. You’re just justifying your bad behavior.

Bad people willing to do and ask others to do bad things is a bad combination.

What if you and your competitors recruited talent together?

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Think about most U.S. cities. What do they have in common? I travel all over the U.S. and to be honest, it’s all starting to look a lot alike!

Every city has a mall or three. At these malls, you’ll find the same restaurants. Chilis, Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Bravo, steak places, some random Japanese hibachi place, etc. Usually, down from the mal, you’ll find a Home Depot. Across the street from Home Depot, you’ll find a Lowes. Down from those are the car dealerships.

Sound like your city!?

Our cities are set up like this because it works. Putting all of these competitive places close together works for the consumer. They like all the choices close together.

Talent really isn’t much different.

If I’m a nurse, I want to be close hospitals. The more hospitals the better. That way if my job at one hospital isn’t working out, I don’t have to commute all the way across town to another hospital. If I’m in IT having a bunch of tech companies in the same area is desirable for the same reason.

What we don’t find, normally, are employers working together to solve their talent issues. A cook at one restaurant might be begging for more hours, but we never think about sharing that cook with the restaurant next door. We force the talent to go figure this out on their own.

Traditionally, I think career fairs thought they were doing this. Bring all the employers to one location and then all the talent can come and pick who they want to work with. It’s a start, but this isn’t really organizations working together to bring in more and better talent.

A modern-day equivalent to the traditional career fair might be cities working to ‘attract’ talent to their cities from places like Silicone Valley. In recent years, Minneapolis has been working to position themselves as a Midwest IT hub, so local and state government dollars have been working to get workers from other cities to come to Minneapolis.

What I’m talking about is what if two companies came together to share their talent databases for the benefit of both? Could it work? What would get in the way?

I think it could work. I think the organizations involved would be some forward-thinking leadership, some tight rules of engagement, and a very new way of thinking about collaboration.

So often we make a hire of someone we know if talented, but it doesn’t work out for a number of reasons, many times those reasons are self-inflicted by the organization. What if you could ‘move’ that talent to your ‘talent partner’ organization for a fresh start, and vice versa?

I love times when talent is tight because it forces us to start thinking about different solutions and ways of doing things. We all have talent in our databases that we aren’t using and might never use, but someone else might have exactly what we need in their database.

Instead, we sit on our unused, expensive inventory of candidates and do nothing. That doesn’t seem like a smart business practice…

Do you pay your employees more for referring Diverse candidates?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.

Clearly, by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”, but for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (Workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in most circumstances, then I homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, if you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral. Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not?  I’ll tell you why, is very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this figure is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you to reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.

Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person.  When you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or a Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.

Workgroup performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.  What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity and start educating them on the performance increases we get with diversity.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

So, you take pride in your diversity hiring efforts, but you’re just unwilling to properly reward for it…

 

Everyone has their own rules. These are mine. The Sackett Rules!

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I’m heading back from South Africa today, so I’m re-posting a blog post I wrote six years ago. The day I wrote it I was at SHRM with Matt Stollak and Matt Charney, who gave me the motivation for this! It’s fun looking back on some old posts and reminding myself of some of these.

I think we all have rules, our own set of rules, but rarely do we let others know, which is why it’s so hard dealing with people. If we just knew everyone’s rules, we would probably all get along just fine!

Here are my rules:

The Sackett Rules

1. Don’t call in sick on Mondays or Fridays – no one believes you. (My staff knows this one well)

2. Everyone has a price, it’s a recruiters job to figure that out.  Never take “I’m not interested” as a reason. You just haven’t found out the price where they would be interested. (I don’t want to shovel cow manure, but if you pay me enough, well, heck, where’s the shovel?)

3. It only costs a little more to go, first class.  (My Grandpa use to say this, then my Mom, now me. It’s about doing things right.)

4. People won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel. (That’s why I bring great snacks to meetings, and try and have a funny story!)

5. Always be nice to Moms with young kids. (Their day is always much harder than mine.)

6. There’s always a reason to kick an old man down the steps, just don’t do it. (via Chris Rock – this just makes me laugh)

7. Don’t cross the streams. (from Ghostbusters: I use this one with my youngest son, it makes him laugh, and he’s never seen the original movie)

8. No touching of the hair or face. (Ron Burgundy in Anchorman: my wife will laugh at this. I don’t like people touching my almost gone hair and I had Lasik surgery years ago and don’t like anyone touching my face, and I don’t like bees!)

9. Don’t be a victim. (Yeah, you pretty much control what happens to you, I have very little patience for people who play the victim.)

10. If you are scrubbing the kitchen floor in your boxer shorts, don’t do it with the shades to the sliding glass door open, while your neighbors behind you are having your other neighbors over for drinks on the back deck. (enough said I believe)

What are your rules, that you wish everyone would know? Hit me in the comments!

It’s Better to Make a Wrong Decision Fast

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For those that don’t know I played and coached volleyball for a great deal of my life.  Being from Michigan I can tell you that is rare (being a male) and I got called “gay” more than once while fundraising to make money to pay for traveling nationally for major tournaments (I think the actual phrases were more like “don’t girls only play volleyball”, etc. Welcome to the rust belt).

Anyway, one piece of my coaching stuck with me (we used with our middle blockers) that I also have used into my adult life and I use it still today:

It’s better to make a wrong decision fast, then make the right decision to slow.

Why?  In volleyball,  when you go to block you have to make split second decisions. You have 3 options: block middle, block right side hitter, or block left side hitter.  You rely on your instincts, you rely on communication from your teammates and you survey the situation (where is the pass coming from, where is the setter, how far off the net is the setter, etc.), then you make a decision.

The problem most middle blockers have at a young age is they want to be up on every block. They want to make the right decision every time, but by doing this, they rarely make it to block any position because they are frozen with indecision.  I taught my middles to decide quickly and then do it. Do it 110%!  Go to which ever spot you decided to block and block and even if the ball went to another position!

Why?  Some positive things happen by you making the wrong decision quickly. For starters it allows your teammates to make adjustments they need to make to try and get the best possible outcome. Believe me your back row players know you made the wrong decision because they’re staring down the hitter with only one blocker! BUT, it also allows them to know how to try and defend that.

If you’re late, and you have a hole in the middle of the block and now they have to guess where to go. Fill the hole, cover the line, take the cross, etc.  It becomes a guessing game. One which you rarely win. What happens if you make the right decision to slow?  About 99% of the time, what was going to happen, already happened. You didn’t make the decision, it was made for you. I like being in control, so this isn’t an option I like.

So what? What the heck does this have anything to do with you becoming a better leader?

Fast Company has a wonderful article on this concept called: Why Keeping Your Options Open is Really, Really Bad Idea – from the article:

Why does keeping our options open make us less happy? Because once we make a final, no-turning-back decision, the psychological immune system kicks in. This is how psychologists like Gilbert refer to the mind’s uncanny ability to make us feel good about our decisions. Once we’ve committed to a course of action, we stop thinking about alternatives. Or, if we do bother to think about them, we think about how lousy they are compared to our clearly superior and awesome choice.

Most of us have had to make a choice between two colleges, or job offers, or apartments. You may have had to choose which candidate to hire for a job, or which vendor your company would engage for a project. When you were making your decision, it was probably a tough one–every option had significant pros and cons. But after you made that decision, did you ever wonder how you could have even considered the now obviously inferior alternative?…

When you keep your options open, however, you can’t stop thinking about the downside–because you’re still trying to figure out if you made the right choice. The psychological immune system doesn’t kick in, and you’re left feeling less happy about whatever choice you end up making.

This brings us to the other problem with reversible decisions–new research shows that they don’t just rob you of happiness, they also lead to poorer performance.

I tend to run into this with younger workers who want to make the right choice, fearing “death” or some other less desirable outcome if they make the wrong choice.  They tend to defer decision making to their boss or a peer instead of making it themselves, thus giving away the chance for superior performance.

When in reality, all I want is for them to make any choice, and we’ll live with the outcome.  I hire great people, so I’m sure they’ll make very wise, research driven decisions, and even then, sometimes they’ll fail.  I’m willing to live with that.  If it’s fast! Because that allows us to adjust and find a way to make it right.

Two things at play in this concept: 1. Fast action; 2. Failure is an option, that we can live with.  Give me those two things, and I’ll show you an organization that is on the move and that can block pretty well!

Is Talent Acquisition Wasting Your Hiring Manager’s Time?

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I had a conversation the other day with a corporate HR Director and we were talking recruiters, corporate recruiters.  My friend had a dilemma, a classic corporate recruiting scenario. The problem is she has recruiters who are doing a decent job, but they won’t get out from behind their desk and get out into the organization and get face-to-face feedback from the hiring managers. But, here is the real reason:  the recruiters feel like they are “wasting” the hiring manager’s time.

“So,” she asked, “How do I get them out to build these relationships?”

Great question, but she asked the wrong question (was partially my answer).  Her problem isn’t that her recruiters aren’t building the relationships face-to-face with managers. The problem is they feel they are “wasting” someone’s time.

They don’t value or understand the value they are providing to the hiring manager. If they did, it sounds like they wouldn’t have a problem with visiting with the hiring managers.  It’s a classic leadership fail, solving a symptom instead of solving the actual problem.

I don’t think that this is rare, recruiters feeling like they are wasting hiring managers time. It happens constantly at the corporate level.  Once you train your recruiters (and hiring managers) on the value the recruiters are providing, you see much less resistance of the recruiters feeling comfortable getting in front of hiring managers to get feedback on candidates, and actually making a decision.  This moves your process along much quicker.

What value do recruiters provide?  Well, that seems like a really stupid question, but there aren’t stupid questions (just stupid people who ask questions).  Here are few that will help your corporate recruiters understand their real value to hiring managers:

  • Corporate recruiters are the talent pipeline for a hiring manager. (or should be!)
  • Corporate recruiters can be the conduit for hiring managers to increase or better the talent within their department.
  • Corporate recruiters are a partner to the hiring managers in assessing talent.
  • Corporate recruiters are a strategist for the hiring managers group succession planning
  • Corporate recruiters are your hiring managers first line of performance management (setting expectations before someone even comes in the door)
  • Corporate recruiters are tacticians of organizational culture.

So, the next time you hear a recruiter tell you “I don’t want to waste their time.” Don’t go off on them and tell them to “just go out there and build the relationship”. Educate them on why they aren’t wasting their time. Then do an assessment for yourself to determine are they adding value or are they just wasting time. All recruiters are not created equal and some waste time, and it’s your job as a leader to find ones add value.

A critical component to all of this is building an expectation of your hiring managers of what they should expect from your recruiters.  They should expect value. They should expect a recruiter who is a pro, and who is going to help them maneuver the organizational landscape and politics of hiring. They should expect a recruiter is going to deliver to them better talent than they already have. They should expect a partner, someone who is looking out for the best interest of the hiring managers department.

Ultimately, what they should expect is someone who won’t waste their time!