Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules

I’m Not in the ‘Love’ Business

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It’s almost the end of 2016 for most people. Once Christmas hits and New Years coming a week later, it seems like most of the population just coasts through the end of the year.

You know what happens at the end of each year? People begin to evaluate their life and their career. It usually goes something like this: “2016 was like totally awful. What am I doing with my life? I need to find a job that I love!” (in my head I’m totally saying this in my best 80’s valley girl voice)

I run a recruiting shop. I’m not in the ‘love’ business, I’m in the ‘win’ business.

In recruiting, someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. I mean if you’re good. If you go after noticeably better talent, that talent is actually working for someone else when you find them 99% of the time.

That means one organization is losing that noticeably better talent, and one organization is gaining noticeably better talent. Win. Lose.

Love has nothing to do with being a great recruiter. I mean it’s awesome if you’re one of the crazy ones, like me, who love this game, but it’s not necessary to be awesome. What is necessary is an emotionally unstable need to win.

Great recruiting organizations win. They win at a far higher rate than they lose. We’re not talking baseball hitting, we’re talking great free throw shooting. It must hurt when you lose. It must feel like a first kiss when you win.

Love has nothing to do with winning and losing. Some of the strongest competitors I’ve ever faced really didn’t love doing what they were kicking my butt in, but they had a great passion for winning at anything did.

Too often as recruiting leaders we feel we need to find people who love recruiting. All leaders fall into this trap, trying to get their teams to fall in love with the work they do. The belief that ‘love’ will drive great performance. Which might actually work, but getting someone to ‘love’ work, is really hard, and rare.

Getting someone who only wants to win, that’s much easier to find and feed.

I’m not in the love business. It’s messy and emotional. I’m in the win business. That’s black and white. You either won or you lost, how you react to that outcome tells me how good of a recruiter you are.

Pretty People Make the Best Employees

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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 recently 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 great job or starts a great company and makes a ton of money.
  2. Because of his success, this 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 genetically result in Pretty-Smart children.
  4. Pretty-smart children grow up with all the opportunities that come to smart beautiful more affluent families.
  5. The cycle repeats.

First, this is a historical thing so my example of using a male as our “Smart guy” and not “Smart girl” is just how this originally developed in society. I’m sure in today’s world this premise has evolved yet again adding women as breadwinners, but attractiveness probably remains. 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 hire better?  Hire more pretty people. White, black, male, female, American, Hispanic, gay, straight, it really doesn’t matter, just make sure they’re attractive!

Seems simple enough. Heck, that is even a hiring process that your hiring managers would support! The one thing I’ve never had a hiring manager tell me, male or female, is “hey, you know Tim, they’re just too pretty, they won’t work here.” Never happened. Never will.

Want to increase the talent in your organization? Just hire pretty people!

Talent Acquisition Is Dead!

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So, I wrote this little eBook called, “Talent Acquisition is Dead: Talent Attraction Takes Root“, just click through to read the entire book. It’s built on the concept that for decades, truly the entire history of hiring employees to work for companies, we’ve only ever worried about acquiring talent.

When you think about acquiring something, like assets (“Employee are our most valuable asset!”), the process you go through to acquire something is very different than the process you go through ‘attracting’ something. I believe we are entering a new era in human resources where we no longer look to acquire, we now look to attract!

The concept of acquiring talent is one-sided. I want to acquire something, I go out and acquire it. Hiring people for your organization is not a one-sided affair, but we’ve treated it like that for the history of talent acquisition. The best talent does not like to be acquired. They want to be attracted!

So, how do you attract talent?

Well, that’s what the entire eBook is about, the ideas and technology used in today’s most innovative companies to attract talent.

What we have learned over the past decade is just doing what everyone else does, does not attract great talent. If everyone has ping pong tables and beer on tap, that is no longer an attraction, and many would argue it was never an attraction, to begin with!

How do you attract someone you would eventually like to marry?  You do many things. You might change your outward appearance. That might help attract, but it might not help retain. A true attraction between two people usually happens when their visions of life are comparable. I like you, you like me, we like living on the coast and want a puppy, one child, we hate mean people, and love the environment. We should spend out lives together!

That’s tricky when it comes to hiring, but that’s exactly what talent attraction is all about. How do we share our stories and find out if we are compatible? In the eBook, I lay out five detailed ideas that will help you attract talent into your organization.

I’m thankful for Appcast in giving me the platform to write this, and the help on the editing and design side. Check out the eBook, “Talent Acquisition is Dead: Talent Attraction Takes Root” and let me know what you think!

Maybe Facebook Taking on LinkedIn is the end of Facebook!

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I’ve always been a huge proponent that Facebook could end LinkedIn at any point they decided. Facebook has more active users, more data, it’s a platform everyone is comfortable with, and companies love it as well.

So, when Facebook opened up a company’s ability to now create a job posting on your company Facebook page recently, and have candidates can apply right on that page, stuff just got real for LinkedIn!

It seems like the logical conclusion that Facebook can do what LinkedIn is doing better. But, should it be the logical conclusion?

It seems like all of these social media companies constantly stumble over themselves, primarily because they are constantly breaking new ground with each turn. You try stuff, it doesn’t work, you try more stuff, eventually, you find the secret sauce.

LinkedIn has gone through this pain, multiple times. They had one of the greatest things going ever when they were flat out a professional network and professionals flocked to LI to network, share ideas, etc. It was a modern day equivalent to the old school Rolodex. LinkedIn made professional networking popular.

Then they broke it. Let’s be fair, they broke it because eventually, we all need to get paid, LI was no different. But opening up LI to recruiting nation killed the desire for people to want to be on LinkedIn and get constantly pimped. But, at the same time they actually created a pretty cool job board 2.0, when everyone thought those were going to die.

So, now Facebook wants to come into the playground, push LinkedIn down and take their milk money.

The problem is, Facebook hasn’t really ever broken their platform before and had to recreate it into something new. The Facebook I use today is virtually the same Facebook I started using nine years ago. LinkedIn today, is not LinkedIn of five to seven years ago, it’s very different. Some people will say worse, some people will pay $26.2 billion for it!

I’m wondering if Facebook goes all full blown LinkedIn with their platform, what happens to Facebook?  Is it still a place where you’ll want to hang out four or five times a day? Do you want to share cookie recipes with your Nana and talk financial strategy with coworkers all in the same place?

It’s arrogant to think you can just come in do something better than someone who has lived the pain of creating something. LinkedIn’s history of development gives them an advantage. Can Facebook come in and do it better? Maybe, but I don’t think you’ll see it happen overnight.

I’m a huge advocate for ‘one-life’. I don’t want to live multiple lives. I don’t want to be one person on Facebook, and another person on LinkedIn, but I’m in the vast minority when it comes to that view. Most people do not want to mix their personal and professional lives. They want to be freaks in the sheets and a lady on the streets, err, LinkedIn.

Should be interesting to watch these two powerhouses fight it out. What do you think TA pros and leaders? Are you ready to do all of your recruiting on Facebook?

Vets, We Love You, but We Still Aren’t Hiring You!

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One of the most politically correct lies that employers spout off constantly is how desperate they are to hire Veterans! There’s a reason for this. In America, we love to honor our Vets! There’s nothing better than propping your brand up against that American flag with a soldier standing right next to it.

The reality is, most Vets are still struggling to find solid careers. Sure, everyone wants to offer them a $15/hr bust-your-ass-job, but Vets are looking for salaried positions with great benefits, in jobs they can work the rest of their career, that won’t destroy their body. Not many employers are offering Vets those jobs!

I’ve been writing about this problem for the past five years and I get a healthy stream of Vets who write me behind the scenes and share their stories and struggles to find solid career level positions. I just recently had an individual who came out of his service with a degree in HR, service of constant promotion, supervised upwards of one hundred soldiers at a time. In that role, he had constant performance management, training, process improvement, etc.

He was applying for an entry-level HR Generalist role. He got turned down because he didn’t have enough experience!

So, why are companies still struggling when it comes to hiring Vets into higher level roles? Here’s what they don’t tell you:

  1. Less than 1% of Americans have ever served in any branch of the military. We fear what we don’t know, and we definitely don’t hire what we don’t know! We only see pictures of Vets holding guns and in combat, but that’s a small part of their every day activities.
  2. Movies have given us a warped sense of what professionals in the military actually do. Today’s modern military is rarely portrayed as it actually is in the movies because it wouldn’t be very exciting. It’s the same reason you don’t see movies about the day to day happenings of a large company. It’s mostly boring! What most military pros do on a daily basis, away from battle zones, is mostly the same stuff you do on a daily basis. It’s HR, logistics, accounting, administration, training, development, etc.
  3. We overvalue work experience within an industry. If someone worked at your competitor for 3 months, you would value that more highly than a military professional doing the same job for 3 years. We so overvalue industry experience it’s not even funny! I’ve worked in four different industries and each time had people tell me, “Oh, Tim, this is the craziest industry you’ll ever be in”, ever time! Guess what? It wasn’t. It’s all the same! Get over yourself!

I recently hired a Vet into my own company. We mostly hire new recruiters and train them up, but it’s definitely a career job. Great recruiters can find work anywhere for the rest of their life, in every industry. It’s mostly a desk job. Recruiting companies love to hire former college athletes. What I’ve found is Vets come with the same motivations and skills, but their work ethic might be a bit stronger!

I constantly have CEOs tell me they just want people who want to work. Yet, when it gets down to their hiring managers, there’s a mental block happening. If these military folks were minority or women we would call this discrimination, but for some reason, we don’t say that with Vets. But, that’s mostly what’s happening.

We love to hide behind the fact we found someone with more ‘industry’ experience, or someone who has done the same job, etc. It’s all excuses. You don’t hire Vets because you don’t think they can handle your jobs. The fact is, they can, they just need you to give them a shot!

Do yourself a favor this Veteran’s Day. Take a chance and hire a Vet into a job you’ve never tried before. Sure, they’ll need some training, but they’ll bring the rest, and you might just find your organizations next great talent pool!

Too Many Recruiting Tools Are Killing Your Recruiting Efforts

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You’ve heard of this concept of the Inverted-U Curve, right? It’s fairly straightforward. In the beginning, you have nothing or very little. As you increase the resources you begin to become more effective. Eventually, as you add more resources you’ll actually reach maximum potential.

In the attempt to go even higher, you keep adding more resources, but you don’t see an increase in effectiveness or output, you actually see a decrease. This is the basic concept of the chart above.

This happens in recruiting too many organizations.

We start out with a bunch of recruiters and some phones. That’s not enough we need to add some other stuff, these recruiters need tools! So, we give them email and an ATS. Then comes the job boards, postings, InMails, etc. Might as well automate background checks and references. We really need to fill the pipeline, here comes sourcing tech!

Wish we had a way to get our messages out to candidates more effectively! CRM, branding technology, data analytics, SMS messaging, etc. Just keep adding more tools! That’ll a fix it!

Except it doesn’t!

What happens to your recruiting team as you add more tools?

  • The complexity of the process increases.
  • Core recruiting skills diminish, or at the very least don’t increase. (Laziness factor)
  • Increased points of failure in communication with each piece of new tech.

What we know is technology doesn’t make you better at recruiting. Technology makes you faster at recruiting, but if you suck at recruiting, technology will only make you suck faster!

Great recruiting starts with your people. Your recruiters. That’s your foundation, not your technology. Technology can help cover up some hickeys of bad recruiters temporary, but eventually, we will all see the real hickeys!

So, before you sign that next contract for some new technology, first take a look at your team. Do you have the right people on your recruiting bus? Do they have the core skills they need? How will I get them the skills they need?

The continued increase in technology will only take you so far. You can either solve this problem on the front side, or eventually, you’ll face it on the back side, but either way, it’s coming. In my experience, it’s easier to solve up front then wait for it to come up when twelve technologies deep into your TA stack!

The 7 Deadly Words You Should Never Say To a Candidate

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Communication is a tricky thing. It’s so easy to turn off another party by simply using just one wrong word, especially when you’re trying to build a relationship with a candidate you potentially want to hire.

I think there are some words and phrases that have a high probability of turning off a candidate to want to come work for your organization. I speak to students a few times a year about interviewing and I tell them something similar, which is what you say can automatically make a hiring manager not want to hire you!

Think about being an interview and the candidate starts to tell you why they’re no longer working for ACME Inc. “Oh, you know it was just a ‘misunderstanding’, I can explain…”

“Misunderstanding” is a killer word to use while interviewing! It wasn’t a misunderstanding! You got fired!

So, what are the 7 Deadly Words you should never use as a recruiters? Don’t use these:

-“Layoff” – It doesn’t matter how you use it. Even, ‘we’ve never had a layoff!’ Layoff isn’t a positive word to someone looking to come to work for you, so why would you even add it to the conversation!

-“Might” – Great candidates want black and white, not gray. “Might” is gray. Well, we might be adding that tech but I don’t know. Instead, use “I’m not sure, let me check for you, because I want to get you the truth.  Add

-“Maybe” – See above.

-“Unstable” – You know what’s unstable? Nothing good, that’s what! If something isn’t good, don’t hide behind a word that makes people guess how bad it might be, because they’ll usually assume it’s worse than it really is!

-“Legally” – “Legally” is never followed by something positive! Legally, we would love to give you a $25K sign-on bonus! It’s always followed by something that makes you uncomfortable. When trying to get someone interested in your organization and job, don’t add “Legally” to the conversation!

-“Temporarily” – This is another unsettling word for candidates. “Temporarily” we’ll have to have you work out of the Nashville office, but no worries, you’ll be Austin soon enough! Um, no.

-“Fluid” – Well, that’s a great question, right now it’s a fluid situation, we’re hoping hiring you will help clarify it! Well, isn’t that comforting… Add: “Up in the air” to this category!

We use many of these words because we don’t want to tell the candidate the truth. We think telling them exactly what’s wrong with our organization, the position, our culture, will drive them away. So, we wordsmith them to death!

The reality is most candidates will actually love the honesty and tend to believe they can be the one to come in and make it better. We all want to be the knight on the white horse. Candidates are no different. Tell them the truth and you’ll end up with better hires and higher retention!

Notes to HR Tech Vendors – #10 – Your Real Competition

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I’ve done a few presentations titled something like, “HR Tech Buyers Guide”, “How to Buy HR Tech”, etc. The presentation is designed for HR and TA practitioners to help them become better buyers of HR Tech. To understand the crap that HR and TA Tech vendors do and say to get you to buy stuff you might not need, want, or will use.

The interesting thing about these presentations is that half the audience turns out to be the actual vendors themselves wanting to hear what it is I’m telling the real HR and TA leaders! It’s smart for the vendors. It helps make the better sellers as well. Well, at least some that actually listen!

Based on these interactions I decided to build a series of what has come out of interactions to the vendors themselves, aptly named “Notes to HR Tech Vendors”. Look I don’t alway have to be creative! Enjoy!

#10 – Your Real Competition

Unless you’re buying some giant watered-down enterprise level HRIS or ATS/Talent Suite you almost never have competition!

Yes, you read that correctly. 90% of HR Tech vendors have “NO” competition! But, you believe the opposite.

Here’s the deal. HR and TA Tech buyers are fairly naive to the industry. It’s not our full-time job to track every new ATS that is being launched. We’re just trying to get people hired and stop people from quitting. Takes up about 99.9% of our job! So, when it’s time to buy new Tech we usually buy the first thing we’re sold!

The competition you face is not your real competitors. The competition you face is a “no sale”.

Almost all HR Tech buyers will buy your product, or they won’t buy anything. Primarily because they don’t even know you have competition. Well, they didn’t until you actually told them! “Hey, we’re the #1 CRM on the market, so much better than #2, #3 and #4.” What? There is more than one CRM!?

If you’re Smashfly (a CRM Tech) almost every single sale is going to be a “Yes” or a “No, we’ve decided we don’t need this right now”. It’s almost never “hey, we’ve decided to buy Clinch, or Avature, or Ascendify, or Talemetry, or Beamery, or”…you get the picture!

Almost never!

Your real competition is you. It’s your ability to sell your solution to a buyer that has some sort of pain around HR or TA. It’s shocking at how often this fails. I mean what can go wrong when you throw a 15-year-old on the phone with a twenty year HR vet on the other end, telling them how to fix her shop!?

And you think I exaggerate on the age! Almost every single HR and TA Tech sales person I speak is under the age of 30 and most have never worked a day in HR or TA. This leads to a ton of “no sales”.  If you can’t tell me how your solution is going to solve my pain, in my language, I’m probably not buying.

HR and TA Tech vendors, your competition isn’t the problem. Your technology isn’t the problem (it’s usually really awesome). Your sales strategy is killing you. The cute, little, naive babies selling your products is the problem. They don’t know me. They don’t know my pain. They don’t speak my language.

Your real competition is you.

Your Recruitment Strategy Needs Focus!

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I’ve been in Chicago a couple of times this fall. The restaurant scene in Chicago is off the charts, just like it is right now in New York, LA, etc. It’s a great time to be a person who loves food!

If you like going to new restaurants you’ll find out quickly that the restaurants of today are not like the ones we grew up with. In Michigan, and my wife still makes fun of this, any non-chain restaurant serving “American” food basically has the same menu where they serve burgers, seafood, Italian dishes, Mexican dishes, breakfast, hell they would serve Ethiopian if people would order it!

Basically, they serve a little of everything, but nothing especially noteworthy!

The new restaurant scene has changed this completely and now you’re lucky to have 8 main dishes that are served on a menu, BUT every single thing kills! The entire menu is one side of page and seems like almost no options but each dish is better than the next. Chefs of these new restaurants found out the way to make money is to focus your menu and make fabulous dishes.

You have lower food costs because of less wasted ingredients, you’re more efficient in cooking fewer items, less complaints because you know each dish is awesome and you create signature asked-for dishes. Focus = success.

When I speak with most TA Leaders they are trying to serve a menu that caters to everyone with their TA strategy.

When you ask what they are focusing on you get an answer that sounds like this, “Well, candidate experience for sure, and branding, that’s really important to us, our tech stack is a disaster we need to figure that out, big project right now with onboarding, looking at some CRM products, new career site in the works, definitely analytics is a priority and working to really get our arms around the employee experience as well.”

What!? Sound familiar?

Their “focus” is to focus on everything! It’s the I can’t see the trees through the forest mentality of focus. It’s also a huge strategic recipe for failing in talent acquisition.

What should your focus be?  Well, that depends on what’s important you to and your organization, but it surely isn’t everything. What I find is that great TA shops have one main focus and one or two minor things they’re working on.  The main focus might be analytics and to help with that they’re also implementing some new technology and building out what impact those results will have. Those results will then become the next focus, and so on.

Do a few things really, really well, then move on to develop something else that will be world-class.

 

Michigan Recruiter’s Conference 2016 Takeaways

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Last week the 3rd annual Michigan Recruiter’s Conference took place in Grand Rapids, MI onsite at our corporate host Amway World Headquarters. 150 Corporate Talent Acquisition Leaders and Pros participated and heard from an outstanding lineup of speakers including Gerry Crispin, Laurie Ruettimann, Chris Bailey, Kerri Mills and Katie Born.

I leave each time amazed at the talent we are able to bring into Michigan! Some of the brightest minds and ideas in the talent acquisition industry, but also the passion the TA pros in Michigan show in coming in and engaging with each other on a peer level.

My Takeaways from MRC 2016: 

– It takes a very confident HR and/or TA Leader to want to bring in another 150 corporate TA pros into their own shop. We’ve been extremely lucky with Accident Fund, Spectrum Health and now Katie at Amway over the past three years. I think it demonstrates how important TA is to the organizations that host and how important developing their team is to that leader.

– Gerry Crispin comes in and looks like he’s been in TA for 40 years. Wait, he has! But, for those who haven’t seen him, they believe, “oh, here comes some old dude to tell us how he recruited people back in WWII!” Gerry always blows them away!!! He is so on top of how the best, most innovative TA shops are doing it on the planet, he leaves with jaws dropped. I always chuckle at the young bucks who had no idea they are about to get completely schooled by an old dude!

– You know you have a great speaker when people can’t write down the ideas fast enough! Kerri Mills had pens burning up at MRC. I had a feeling she would kill after seeing her presentation at SourceCon and she did awesome. Side note: when you work at Indeed, people expect you to know everything about Indeed!

– People who can tell a good story, are great speakers. Laurie Ruettimann and Chris Bailey both killed with great stories! They had great content as well, but you could tell me how to make Mac and Cheese and if it’s wrapped in a great story I’ll be entertained for an hour! Also, if you have a British accent you’re automatically considered brilliant, funny and adorable by an American audience. (Note to self: work on British accent)

– In classic HROS.co fashion, Amway’s TA Leader Katie Born figuratively opened her Kimono and shared what she and her team were working on to the entire talent market in their area. The good and the bad. What’s working and what they still need to get better at? What tech we’re using and what tech we’re looking at? It was a great example of what we should all strive for as TA Leaders.  Bravo!

I had one trainwreck moment. The idea was to speed network. I hate when people go to a conference and either sit alone or sit with the only people they know, so my idea was to get them to meet 4-5 new people and make some connections. Great idea! But 150 people trying to find smaller groups of three in a room was comical and loud! In the end, people did meet new people!

Our goal for MRC 2017 is to be in the Detroit Metro Area! To bring Detroit its first ever corporate talent acquisition conference specifically for Michigan TA Pros and Leaders! Want to be a part of it?  We are currently looking for a corporate host! What does that mean? We need a big room that can hold 150 or so people, with tables and some AV equipment!

We’ll bring the food, the talent, and the TA Pros!  We just need to use your space for the day. Let me know if you’re interested (timsackett@comcast.net).