Category Archives: Trench HR

The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask a Hiring Manager

Posted on by
1

How are those hiring manager “intake” meetings going?

You know, those meetings you have with a hiring manager every single time they have an opening.  You sit down with your hiring manager, face to face, and ask them a page full of questions.  Why is this position open? What would make a candidate most successful in this role?  What color of skin would you like this candidate to have? Boobs or no boobs? Whoops! Scratch those last ones, we would never ask those…

The reality is Talent Pros really only have one question they need to ask hiring managers. That question is this:

“Do you trust that I can find the talent you need?”

Ultimately, this is all that really matters for your success.  If they trust you, they’ll give you all the information you need to be successful.  If they don’t trust you can find the talent they need, they tend to hold stuff back.

Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s real world talent acquisition stuff! Welcome to corporate America, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense!

Most hiring managers have no faith you’ll find them great talent.  They have this belief because of so many bad Talent Pros before you failed them.  So many before you didn’t really go out and find the best talent, they just delivered whatever warm body came into the ATS.

I just come out and ask the question.  The first answer you’ll get from 99% of hiring managers is a weird, “Well, sure, I do.” If you really dig into this answer, you’ll get the true answer which 90% of the time is, “Hell no! Why would I?  Your department has really never gotten this right!”

Thank you! That’s what I really needed.  I needed to get that out in the open, so now we can really build trust, and make great things happen.  They’re mostly right. Talent Acquisition fails many of our hiring managers for a number of reasons. Right now, your hiring manager doesn’t need to hear those reasons, they need to hear why this time will be different.

Then, you have to live up to ‘different’! You have to be better.  You have to get it right. Getting it right earns trust.

Once they trust you, great things will happen. Earn that trust.

Every First Internship Should be a Sales Internship!

Posted on by
1

So, it’s that time of year. Bring in the interns and show them what they’ll never do or see again in the real world when they get their first job! I’m only half joking. Most internships I hear about today (and I hear about a lot – I’ve got two sons in college!) aren’t coming close to teaching young adults what it’s like to really work a job in your company.

If I was Chief of HR for the country, like I got to make all the HR decisions and make rules and stuff (wouldn’t that be a fun job!) – Chief Justice of HR! I would force every kid who ever did an internship to first do a sales internship with whichever company they decided to do an internship with. Great, you want to be in HR, or an Accountant, or an Engineer, or a Developer, etc., first, you need to go out on the road or sit on the phone with Jerry, he works in sales for our company.

Why sales?

Too often I see entry level grads come into organizations with this strange sense of how the world works based on what it is they do in their chosen profession. Do you want to know how to really impact your chosen profession? Go find out how the sausage is made! The ‘sausage’ in most organizations is sales.

Want to find out how to save the organization money as an Engineer or Accountant, you better understand your customer and what and how they’re buying? Want to be a great designer or developer? Sales will teach you what your priorities should be. Want to find out how to impact employee development and career growth? Go find out how hard it is to sell $1 of your product your company sells every day.

This isn’t some plan to get everyone in the world to think sales is hard and you should pity them. Sales is hard. Great sales pros also make a ton of money. No one usually feels bad for sales. This is truly about getting the new grads coming into your organization to have a better perspective about what’s really important.

If we don’t sell our stuff, you can’t ride the down the slide into the lobby on your way to hot yoga.

So, no matter what you do in the organization. You should know how to sell. Well, Tim, I’m going to be a nurse. Hospitals don’t sell, we save lives. Congratulations on becoming a nurse, it’s such a great profession, you’re a moron. Every organization sells. Hospitals compete against other hospitals for high-margin health care business. Nonprofits compete for donations and grant dollars. Churches compete for your souls.

Every organization is selling something, and you should know what it is you’re selling and how it’s sold.

We do a disservice to kids when we make them think that their profession is only about the skills they’re learning for some title they’ll one day have after graduation. Your profession, every profession, is about ensuring crap gets sold.

7 Things HR Pros Should Be Doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience

Posted on by
Reply

Webinar Alert! Tomorrow at Noon EST – it’s me and the 7 Things every HR Pro in the World should be doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience.

Want to join me? You’ll get SHRM and HRCI credit!

Plus, you’ll get to have lunch with me. Well, only if you sit at your desk and eat lunch, and you’re in the east coast time zone, or you can have your fifth cup of coffee with me if your in the west coast time zone, or maybe you’re just central and you get up early and like to eat an early lunch. Look, I’m

Look, I’m fairly intelligent, but I’m sorry I don’t know your eating habits, so just log in and you do you, and I’ll do me, and we’ll all learn something about creating great employee experiences!

Here are the details:

“Our employees are our most important asset,” said every CEO … ever! But what if we truly treated our employees like our most important assets? Would you do things differently than you are right now?

HR expert and world-renowned HR blogger Tim Sackett and Ryan Higginson-Scott, an HR leader at Optimizely, will bring their fun and engaging style to the hottest topic on the planet — building an employee experience everyone wants to be a part of. The program will introduce you to the concept of employee experience, why it matters and, more importantly, dig into what you can do right now to begin designing and developing a world-class employee experience in your own organization. You’ll walk away from this session with at least seven great ideas that can move your employee experience from average to great.

Learning objectives:

  • Learn how best practice organizations are designing a strategy to improve the employee experience.
  • Develop a launch strategy and plan for your organization’s employee experience.
  • Understand the metrics and KPIs around world-class employee experience.

Sounds sexy, right!?

REGISTER HERE! 

The Grand Vision of Your Company: Ingredient #1 of your Employment Brand

Posted on by
3

Did you see last week that Facebook changed its corporate vision? The old vision was “Making the world more open and connected”. The new vision is:

“Bring the World Closer Together”

It’s pretty good, right? Five words. That’s pretty tight! Studies have been done on thousands of company mission and vision statements and the average word count runs around 14. It’s really hard to break your mission or vision down in five words or so and have it really mean anything.

When I first got into HR developing your mission and vision statements were a big deal, then like most things we focus on too much, they became a corporate joke. Web sites cropped up where you could throw in some words about your company and these random, meaningless, vision statements would come out and actually sound like something better than you already had, but could have been used by any company on the planet!

Organizations spent millions of hours in meeting developing these statements. Billions of dollars in resources spent. These words were supposed to drive our decision making, help motivate the troops, inspire our customers, cure cancer! If we could just find the ‘right’ words for our vision we’ll change the world!

The reality is, your mission, your vision, has become nothing more than a marketing slogan.

Facebook is a social media site that most people use to share stupid cat videos and once in a while lose their minds about something political before deleting the post after they got their 72 friends in an uproar. “Bringing the world closer together?” Oh, you mean, letting skinning high school friends make fun of fat high school friends. That close? Calm down, Zuck. You stole one great idea, you didn’t cure cancer.

One exercise I’ve done with recruitment marketing and employment branding folks is to tell me your company mission or vision in seven words or less. The reality is, from a marketing perspective, this is probably the time you have as a recruiter to get this in front of a candidate, plus it fits well in a text!

Can you boil it all down in seven words?

It’s tough to do, try it with your team today. Tell me our vision in seven words or less. Share your best one below.

Mine would be – “We put asses in seats”! Five words. Beat that. “We put world-class, asses in seats!” 😉

The Next Great Trick in HR to Become World Class!

Posted on by
Reply

Oh, Tim must be talking about the great A.I. tech that’s coming out, or the next great tech that will replace staffing agencies, or the next website that will change the entire industry forever – “Oh hey! Google Jobs.” I’m sure he’s going to be talking about using Fitbits to increase our organizational wellness! No, it’s probably how if we write one sentence of feedback a day to each employee our engagement and retention will go up 3,000%! I heard that one at SHRM this year!

 I keep searching for the next great trick that will help me to lose weight and keep it off. Why hasn’t science created a pill that allows me to eat and drink anything I want and I can stay skinning? Seriously, the person who develops this will rule the universe! 

In America, we love tricks! I think it harkens back to the Baby Boomers who got us hooked on TV Dinners and every TV infomercial products that ‘magically’ could do everything we needed without us doing anything, besides making four easy payments of $19.99.

It’s mostly all crap.

 We are hooked on tricks and over-night solutions to fix everything that is wrong with us. Personally and professionally. We live an instant gratification world. I get pissed when it takes more the thirteen seconds to get my fast food meal from the drive-thru, I mean hasn’t A.I. figured out that I’ll be stopping before I figured it out. These robots suck! 

 So, here’s the Next Greatest Trick in HR:

 Do great sh*t!

Yep, turns out the next great trick has always been the trick. Just do really awesome stuff! As I come off the conference season I look back at my notes and all the cool stories and ideas and there is one common theme. All the best stuff, the best ideas, were great from the beginning and had a team that wouldn’t allow that great stuff to die!

And by a ‘team’, it’s usually one person taking a stand, believing, caring a little too much. A try-hard. Who just wouldn’t let it go.

Rusty Rueff, says, “Make big changes, to big things”.

The trick to world class HR is do great sh*t. Then do more great sh*t. And don’t let anyone in the organization tell you to stop doing great sh*t. You need to become the Department of Great Sh*t!

That’s tricky.

The Key Trait of Every Great Employee #SHRM17

Posted on by
2

For twenty years I’ve been hiring and firing people.  I’ve been lucky enough to have some really great performers, a bunch of good performers and also a few really crappy performers.  It seems like every time I turn, someone has an answer for me on how to hire better.  For years I have given the advice, if all else fails, hire smart people.  It’s not a bad strategy. For the most part, if you hire the smartest ones of the bunch, you’ll have more good performers, than bad performers.  I’m talking pure intelligence, not necessarily book smarts.

But, just hiring smart people still isn’t perfect.  I want to hire good, or great, people every single time.  How do you do that?  That’s the million dollar question.

To me, there is one trait we don’t focus enough on, across all industries.  Optimism.

Your ability to look at a situation and come up with positive ways to handle it.  Think about your best employees, almost always there is a level of optimism they have that your lower performers don’t.

I can’t think of one great employee I’ve ever worked with that didn’t have a level of optimism that was at least greater than the norm. They might be optimistic about their future, about the companies future, about life in general.  The key was they had optimism.

Optimistic people find ways to succeed because they truly believe they will succeed. Pessimistic people find ways to fail since they believe they are bound to fail.  This hiring thing can be really difficult.  Don’t make it more difficult by hiring people who are not optimistic about your company and the opportunity you have for them.

Ask questions in the interview that get to their core belief around optimism:

– Tell me about something in life you’re are truly optimistic about? (Pessimistic people have a hard time answering this. Optimistic people will answer quickly and with passion.)

– Tell me about a time something you were responsible for went really bad. How did you deal with it?

– The company has you working on a very important project and then decides to cancel it. How would you respond?

Surrounding yourself with optimistic people drives a better culture, better teams, it’s uplifting to your own leadership style.  I want smart people, but I truly want smart people who are optimistic about life.  Those people change the world for the better, and I think they’ll do the same for my business.

How Big Is Your Hotel Room? Measuring your HR Influence! #SHRM17

Posted on by
5

Just got off the spring HR conference season, although it seems like the HR/TA conference season is now never ending. It used to be the conference season for HR and TA conferences were spring and fall, with the one outlier being SHRM National at the end of June. Now, you can go to a conference in any month of the year!

As one of the many people in our industry that writes, speaks, etc. Some folks would consider me a person who has some influence in the space. I certainly don’t have the most influence, but I do okay. My wife likes to call me a ‘micro-celebrity’, meaning I have about 23-ish HR pros around the world who know who I am, and might want a hug when they see me!

When you go on the HR/TA conference circuit, as an influencer, you get humbled very quickly, as you run into conferences where your influence is minimal, and come conferences where you’re the rock star. I just came back from a conference where I was humbled, so I wanted to share how you can tell your value at a conference as an influencer!

It’s the size of the hotel room they give you!

Let me break down the ratings of Influence “5” being the highest influence, “1” being the lowest influence in the HR space:

Level 5 HR/TA Influencer:  You’re in the suite life! Gerry Crispin is a level 5 influencer! I was at a conference with him recently and his “room” was actually 4 rooms with a breakfast nook, two fireplaces, and a hot tub! That’s influence! We won’t talk about my room as compared to his! Level 5 Influencers also are picked up at the airport by someone holding a sign with their name on it. Probably have a gift basket in their room that includes something cool like a pair of Beats by Dre or Oakley sunglasses or something. Most level 5 influencers do not attend conferences for free, many of these gigs are paid gigs. (I’m not saying Gerry was paid, just that those at level 5 can get paid if they desire)

Gerry is a level 5 influencer because TA buyers listen to what he has to say. If Gerry says buy “X” software/product, people will buy. If he says “Y” software/product is crap, people won’t buy. Don’t tell me you’re a level 5 influencer without being able to move the market!

Level 5 HR/TA Influencer upgrade moment – Kyle Lagunas had a giant suite on top of the Bellagio in Vegas this year. I got invited. It was HR nerds acting like rappers, and it was awesome!

Level 4 HR/TA Influencer: You get to stay at the same hotel as a Level 5 influencer but you don’t get the same room! You probably don’t get the private ride to your hotel from the airport, but they’ll send you a note on what shuttle to take, you might even get the gift basket, but you will never get the breakfast nook! Level 4 and 5 influencers also are personally invited to these conferences, they never have to ask to attend. You’ve reached a certain level when you’re no longer begging to come to an event and work for free!

Once you reach level 4 you start getting invited to private dinners with vendors. Really nice meals at restaurants you would never go to unless someone else was paying and ordering drinks you wouldn’t if you were paying the tab.

Level 3 HR/TA Influencer: Welcome to the Hampton Inn, are you a Hilton Honors member? If so, we can get you a free bottle of water and move you to the top floor! Level 3 Influencers have made it to the land of not having to pay their own way to a conference, congratulations, that’s actually a huge step! The expectations though for this honor will be you’ll be writing, tweeting, IG’ing, Facebook live’ing, Snapping your life away for two straight days. It’s a big step to reach level 3, but that step comes with a lot of work conference organizers expect from you. At level 3 you’re probably booking your own hotel, flight and sharing an Uber to the event. But, you can turn those expenses in and get reimbursed.

Most likely at level 3 you probably had to ‘apply’ to attend the conference. Someone took a look at your name and others who applied and determined you carried enough influence to make the ‘list’. No one was contacting you asking you to come, but to be in the game, you must play the game! Level 3 influence comes with VIP access to the big HR parties, which usually means you don’t have to stand in line!

Level 2 HR/TA Influencer: You’re paying your own travel, but enough level 3-5’s didn’t want to come to our event, so we’ll give you a free pass to get in! With this free pass, we’ll make you dance like a monkey and do anything else we ask. Where a t-shirt with your logo? Sure! Many level two’s will bunk up in a two queen room. I once asked Kris Dunn if he wanted to share a room and he wouldn’t talk to me for a month! He was definitely not at level 2!

Level 1 HR/TA Influencer: At level 1 you’re paying your own way for everything. Travel, conference admission, etc. You’re probably sharing an Airbnb with other level 1’s and 2’s to help offset the cost, but you’ve got a dream, the Gerry Crispin 4-room suite dream! Plus, you can probably make at least a meal or two from snacks and candy given out at expo booths, and some giant HR vendor will have a huge party you can attend with the rest of the heard!

Some vendors completely screw themselves when they don’t understand the levels! If you’re a level 5 and a vendor treats you like a level 3, you can best believe you’ll never go back to that event! But, if you treat a level three, like a level 4 or 5, you just created an influencer friend for life! It works both ways!

The key for vendors is to try and get the most value for the level. It’s Moneyball! I want an up and coming level 3, who will probably be a 4 or 5 soon, to be at my event! I can get level 4 or 5 influence, on a level three budget. The hard part for all vendors is understanding who actually has real influence and who’s just pretending. Since I wrote the HR/TA Influence levels, I’m putting myself down as having some influence! 😉

Should Talent Acquisition Be Driving Revenue in Your Organization? #VueDD17

Posted on by
Reply

I’m on a plane flying back from HireVue’s Digital Disruption in Park City, UT this week. Really well-done user conference which is more non-user conference than user conference. Agenda loaded with great TA content, a ton of really high-level TA leaders in attendance to drive great conversation and almost no product pitch!

One of the panels they had took a strange turn down the path of whether or not, as part of a great candidate experience, TA should be making consumer offers within the apply-hire process. Basically, everyone on the panel (all retail of some sort) were really excited about their ability to drive increased revenue by sending candidates consumer offers during the hire process.

“Hey, Mary, thanks for applying for the Manager of Accounting on Wednesday, we hope to get back to you soon on the next steps! In the meantime, please feel free to use this code for 35% off regular price merchandise at the Shoe Barn!” 

My first reaction was horror!

The last thing I need my TA leaders concentrating on is driving revenue. I need talent. Figure that out and then let’s talk about you and your sales capabilities!

But the more I thought I about it, the more I think I’m on the wrong side of this!

If you’re in the business of making money to stay in business, shouldn’t every single part of your organization be focused on driving revenue? I think so. Profit or Non-profit, I want an organizational culture that is about maximizing revenue so we can better serve our mission, whatever that might be.

Can TA drive revenue through candidates? Yep. The bigger your are, the more opportunity you have. Clearly, retail, dining, etc. probably have a better chance of being more successful at this task.

Word of Caution: If you want to leverage candidates to drive revenue you better first have your candidate experienced buttoned up end to end! You can’t be awful at candidate experience and think your discount offers are going to play well when the candidate is pissed off because they never even heard if you got their application!

Bad candidate experience will more than likely lead to a bad consumer experience. So, don’t think that offering a ‘Free Appetizer” to candidates who got turned down are going to make them feel better about not getting the job!

The panel offered up a great suggestion to where these offers probably fit best – after the first interview. This goes out to those candidates who you felt were worthy of the next step, give them a little thank you and an opportunity to experience your organization on the consumer side as the process moves forward.

All of these offers can be tracked and TA can actually show how much revenue they are driving to the top line of the organization. Don’t gloat too much about your $250K in revenue you gave away at a 35% discount. That margin is low, but revenue is revenue, and besides Ops, no one else in the organization can say they added to top line sales!

I actually asked one of the HireVue product people if they would be willing to tie a data point to candidates who buy the most on one of these offers! They laughed in my face! But think about the slippery slope this creates.

I want to hire ‘fans’ of my brand. My biggest fans probably spend the most in buying stuff from my brand. So, if I can offer applicants a code to buy, why wouldn’t I want to talk to the suckers candidates who bought the most!?!

Food for thought Revenue Driving TA Leaders!

Is Love intrinsically bigger than Fear?

Posted on by
1

The most famous quote from Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” is:

“Better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

Uh, oh, Tim is quoting Machiavelli, this blog has jumped the shark!

I heard this quote recently on the HR conference circuit. HR speakers seem to come in two types:

1. Love is bigger than fear. This is popular and most fall into this camp. It’s a feel-good play. The first rule of HR speaking, it’s always better to make the audience feel good, than to give them something they actually need.

2. Machiavelli’s assessment, It’s better to be feared. Less popular take, but I do hear it in the form of stuff like, “I’m not here to be your friend, I’m here to get results!”

I also have smart friends who pull Machiavelli’s name out anytime they want me to feel like I’m on the wrong side of something, “How ‘Machiavellian’ of you, Tim!” Okay, I get it, you’re smarter than me, how ‘Machiavellian’ for you!

The normal breakdown of leadership goes like this. You would rather be a beloved leader than a feared leader. Those leaders who are loved will be more successful than those who are feared. You have to be one or the other. Or do you?

I think all leaders deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties (A Few Good Men reference!) want to be loved, or at the very least, well liked. It’s human nature. No one really wants to be hated. It’s stressful, people don’t want to be around you, it makes for uncomfortable hugs, etc.

On the love side, love can make you do some crazy things, but so can fear. I would drive all night to help my wife or kids with something if I thought they really needed me, even if they or I could probably find another alternative. I would also probably work all night if I thought I might lose my job and I need to pay my mortgage. Love and fear are powerful in getting us to act.

I think fear is bigger when it comes to crunch time scenarios. I might ‘love’ my boss a ton, but when the project is on the line and the company might lose a major project and cost us hundreds of jobs, fear is driving the truck, not love. Love won’t bring those jobs back, fear might just win those jobs back.

As leaders, this our dilemma. I want my team to love me, but I also need a touch of fear on the edge. It’s an imperfect balance.

What I know is love isn’t the only answer, no matter how many memes you make or posters you put it on. I don’t know if Love is bigger, it’s definitely more popular, for obvious reasons, but great leaders have used both. I want you to love me, I need you to fear me a bit, in the end, I’ll probably use both to get the job done.

Do you really want to get better?

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been writing about HR, Talent, and Leadership every day going on seven years. If you go around telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.  So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you, or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging and my dog for an hour.

I’ve began to change my approach, though, because I knew, like they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius, was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better? or Do you really want to change?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause, and an explanation, and sometimes from this we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better or change.

That’s powerful!

We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent pros will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you.