Category Archives: Trench HR

The Number One Reason Employees Fail

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“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

It’s about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills than upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens every day in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category: the person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 44-hourtraining session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

The One Thing That Will Have The Most Positive Impact to your HR Career #TSLive17

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I just got back from attending the Halogen TalentSpace Live 2017 conference. Halogen is the industry leader in Performance Management. Great product, great tools for your hiring managers and organization. On the first day of the conference, it was announced they would be acquired by Saba.

Saba is the industry leader in Learning, so it makes a good marriage. Most large full suite HR enterprise software has both performance and learning, but it’s not even close to what these two systems have. Organizations that prioritize performance and/or learning use systems like Halogen and Saba, not large vanilla enterprise plays.

As you can imagine with any merger of this level some leadership positions are eliminated. You don’t need to CEOs! Halogen’s dynamic and beloved CEO Les Rechan is leaving the combined company immediately and said his goodbyes to the Halogen customer base. Saba’s CEO Pervez Qureshi is also a great leader and is handling the transition well and his closing address at TalentSpace Live left me feeling optimistic for the new company.

So, how does this have anything to do with making a positive impact on your leadership career? Harvard Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of men, one poor, one Harvard grads

Harvard’s Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of men, one poor, one Harvard grads for 75 years to track the physical and emotional well-being of these men. What they found over multiple generations was one thing, in particular, stood out for those men.

The study discovered that those men who had the best well-being had no real genetic similarities. Nothing to do with income or education. The geographic location made little difference. The single most compelling factor of a fulfilling life is if you have and surround yourself with good, positive relationships.

Fulfilling, healthy life = good relationships.

So, if you want to have a positive impact on your career you need to surround yourself with good positive relationships. People you care about, and people who care about you.

That’s what I saw from both Les and Pervez. To strong leaders who surrounded themselves with good relationships with people they truly care for and those people truly care for them. I’m not sure if this means the new Saba/Halogen combined company will be a smashing success, but I know the leadership understands this concept.

I was able to give Les a hug, and I told Pervez if he would have been in the same session he would have gotten one too! You see, I try and surround myself with good relationships. I want to see those in my life succeed and do well, and I always feel they want me to succeed as well.

I think most HR pros and leaders I meet sometimes struggle with this concept and keep too many bad relationships in their life. Relationships that leave them feeling unfilled and detract from them spending time on the right things for themselves and their organization.

So, today, make a deal with yourself. Tell yourself that you will eliminate one bad relationship from your life. You don’t need to do this publically. No big announcement on Facebook is needed. Just quietly walk away, disengage, and move on. It feels so uplifting, you can’t even imagine!

 

 

Stop Creating HR Metrics! You Already Have What You Need #TSLive17

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I was out at Halogen’s TalentSpace Live 2017 event this week speaking to great HR pros and leaders. Halogen is the king of performance management and they just announced their merger with the king of Learning, Saba. Together, they have a pretty great 1-2 punch for organizations to check out.

TalentSpace Live brought in Patty McCord one of the main builders of the famous Netflix Culture deck (if you haven’t read this, you need to take a few minutes and do it!):

Patty was an awesome speaker for an HR audience. Real, fresh, in your face with great energy. She’s the HR leader everyone wishes their organization had.

Patty made a statement that stuck with me:

“The metrics to running HR are already in the business, you don’t need to create new ones!” 

What she was talking about was HR shouldn’t be focused on HR metrics, HR should be focused on business metrics (Profit, Revenue, Net Income). She went on to say “Retention” isn’t a business metric. Senior leaders don’t care about retention.

They care about Profit, Revenue, Net Income, Margin, etc. As HR leaders we need to show them the impact to business metrics when we suck at HR. We need to talk about what we are doing in HR using business language, not HR language and words.

“We believe we can increase margins if we put this program in place to control the amount of money we are having to spend to replace workers when they leave us.” Not, “Our retention is worse than the industry average and we have a program to lower our turnover.”

Senior leaders hear two very different things when they hear those statements, even though they basically are pointing out the same problem and solution.

We don’t need more HR metrics. We need more HR leaders focusing on the metrics of our businesses that are already in place and show us whether we are successful or not. Patty also shared she thought every single employee should have P&L training.

If your employees know how the organization makes and loses money, there will be no question on what direction they need to take in their daily job duties to have a positive impact on that outcome. Too often we tell them what to do assuming it’s too complicated for them to understand.

If you teach your employees how you make money it’s always amazing to watch behaviors change in how they do every job in your company. I find the vast majority actually want the organization to be successful but didn’t know how to help until someone connected all those dots to their job.

I really enjoyed Patty! She spoke my language! If you get a chance check her out!

The Top 5 Predictors of Employee Turnover

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Quantum Workplace recently released a study they put together on the predictors of employee turnover. Employee turnover is becoming a huge issue as the unemployment rate falls, which is expected. As your employees have more options, they’re more likely to leave.

I’ve always been a fan of Quantum’s research but this one seemed a little light. Here are their five predictors:

  1. Lack of job satisfaction.
  2. Individual needs unmet (health, wellbeing, balance)
  3. Poor team dynamics (Basically they hate working with the people they work with, or the team hates them, either way, they’ll be leaving)
  4. Misalignment (this is a hiring fit issue – you hired the wrong person for the job. Could be culture, skill set, etc.)
  5. Unlikely to stay (when an employee indicates they want to leave, most likely they will leave. DUH! This was actually #5! How can this be a ‘real’ indicator of turnover?!)

Okay, I’ll give them the first four reasons. Of course, those are all real reasons someone will leave. Are they the top 4? Depends on your environment. Number five is just flat out silly! “Hey, when someone tells you they’re about to leave, that’s a predictor they’re going to leave your employment.”

Really!? When I tell someone I’m hungry, guess what? That’s a predictor I’m hungry! Probably could have come up with a better number five! But, check out the study, they also give some tips and insight on how control turnover.

What are the real Turnover Predictors?  Here are my Top 5:

#1 – My boss is an asshole.

#2 – I hate what I’m doing, so I’m unwilling to put up with any B.S.

#3 – I oversold myself and I will most likely fail, so I’m leaving for a new position before you fire me, so it will look like this was my position.

#4 – I’m a bit crazy (or a lot bit crazy) and my co-workers hate me, so I need to find new co-workers to creep out.

#5 – I’m telling you I’m leaving! (Ha! Just kidding!)

#5 – You’re underpaying me for what I’m doing and we both know you’re underpaying me.

Bad bosses and not paying market will kill your retention of great talent faster than anything! The crazy piece of this is I always find that organizations clearly know about both of these issues.

If you ask an organization who the worst managers are they almost always align with the highest turnover by department, location, etc. The same thing works with those being underpaid in your organization.

People will take off if the market is clearly paying more and your organization is just average. The worst part of this is most organizations will then overpay to get back average or less talent when their good talent leaves. The market always wins. Always.

 

 

 

 

I Can’t Make You Recruit!

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My mind is still racing after coming back from SHRM Talent this week! So many great conversations I had with TA leaders and pros. I actually think the level of conversation at functional specific conferences is higher because everyone is feeling the same pain!

It’s not to say a conference like SHRM National can’t be great, but you’re surrounded by HR and Talent pros with dozens of specialties and focus. At SHRM Talent you basically had the majority of the attendees focused on how do we attract and hire better talent for our organizations! That leads to great open dialogue and connection. I came back to the office super energized!

I have to share one specific conversation I had. Great, passionate TA leader approached me with a problem she was having. She was feeling a little beat up, not as successful as she wanted her function and team to be, probably didn’t have the respect and influence she deserved for the challenges they’re facing. Her question was this:

“How do I get my recruiters to recruit?” 

It was simple and honest.  The easy answer is a performance management discussion but I knew what she was really asking. It’s a dilemma most TA leaders face right now. Our organizations are pushing us for more talent, and yet I don’t really have team and technology to provide what they want!

My answer to her was also simple and honest.

“You can’t.” 

Okay, I expanded my answer because you know I love to give advice! I explained that most likely I’m guessing you have some really lovely, caring, company people working on your team that love working for you and love what they do. She said, “that’s right!” I’m  also assuming these people are administering a recruiting process, but they’re not actually recruiting. “Right again! That’s my problem!”, she said.

Here’s what I know after twenty years in talent acquisition. If someone doesn’t want to change, nothing I do will get them to change. Making someone recruit who doesn’t want to recruit, won’t work. Never has, never will. You have to want to recruit, really recruit, to recruit. No, not what you think recruiting is, what actual recruiting is!

So, I said, here’s what I would do and laid out a plan of how I would change process and activities and hold them accountable. I also said more than likely most won’t do this and they’ll quit or fight you until you fire them. If you’re lucky you might get one or two of your “Farmers” to turn into a “Hunters”. But, my experience has been most will refuse to change, while telling you they’re desire to change!

I don’t have the time or capacity to get someone to change. Either they truly care enough to change, or they don’t. There’s no middle ground because I need to change what we’re doing, and I only need people on the team that can now do the new requirements of what I’m asking.

What I find is most TA leaders die trying to change their non-recruiters into recruiters. And by die trying, I mean they eventually quit or get fired, all the while their team keeps doing what they want to do. You can change the people, or you can ‘change’ the people.

I can’t make ‘you’ recruit, but I can find people who want to recruit.

The 5 Skills I Honed From Other Jobs That Have Served Me Well in my HR Career

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Believe it or not, I didn’t go to college thinking, “Oh boy! I can’t wait to work in HR!” And there’s a pretty decent chance you didn’t either.

Eventually, if you’re like me, you got some official HR education under your belt. But a lot of the skills you use every day are skills you probably didn’t learn for the first time in an HR class. You learned them before all that—at home, or at some earlier job, right?

Here’s how it went for me:

My undergrad degree was in elementary education. Back then, my goal in life was to teach your kids how to finger paint and blow up stuff in science class. At the time it seemed like the best gig on the planet. Kids are easy to make laugh and I got my summers off. That all seemed pretty awesome. Plus, being a dude in elementary education, meant it was usually me and like 30 female teachers in the school. I wasn’t the best looking guy, so I liked those odds!

After doing a little teaching, I moved into sales and recruiting for a while. I’m a mile wide and inch deep, as they say, so I was able to carry on a conversation about just about anything. So, those two careers worked really well, because it’s pretty much just getting people to trust you and then talk them into something where they’ll never trust you again!

Then, to my good fortune, I sort of fell into HR. When I was in recruiting, one of my clients was an HR leader for General Motors. He took a liking to me and I thought he had the best job on the planet, so he encouraged me to get my master’s in HR and he would help me get a real HR gig.

When I got my first job in HR, what I found was that all of the skills I learned being a teacher, a sales pro, and a recruiter were all skills I that really helped me in HR. Here’s five in particular that have come in handy.

Being Confident: Turns out elementary age school kids can smell fear like a pack of wild dogs! When you step into a classroom and you lack confidence these little monsters will attack! So I had to learn very quickly as a teacher that even if I didn’t really need to know anything about what I was trying to teach, everything would be okay as long as I controlled the room with confidence.

Similarly, in HR, people will question you constantly, unless you can portray similar confidence in your abilities. And compared to a pack of eight-year-olds, they’re pretty tame by comparison!

A Good Attitude:  When I got into HR people kept telling me, “Hey, you’re not like every other HR person I know!” What they were saying was, you’re always positive, most HR pros come across negative. (Which I don’t think is fair.) My first job out of college was as an agency recruiter. You better have a great attitude in that job, or you’ll fail for sure!

Being Proactive: A lot of HR folks see their jobs as being firefighters. In other words, they wait for problems, and then try to solve them. When I got into HR, I decided I didn’t want to think that way. I wanted to be proactive. Nothing was ever good enough, we needed to make it better. Everything was broken because I just broke it, so we could make it better. I found as a recruiter early in my career the engineering hiring managers I worked with had thoughts like this and responded well when I came at them with ideas in the same mindset.

Being Humble: How can you be confident and humble? It’s hard, but you can do it. As a teacher, you have to do what you say, or your kids will never let you forget. Their memory is a like an elephant’s! The best sales pros are also very humble in a way you feel connected with them, that makes them relatable. The best HR pros are reliably humble. You can count on them and admire their willingness to put the organization’s needs in front of their own.

Being Persuasive: As a teacher, I had to ‘sell’ ideas to kids thousands of times per week. As a recruiter, I had to sell jobs to candidates all day, every day. And having the ability to sell ideas and projects sets great HR pros apart from average HR pros.

Why were these skills important for me to learn? They all help get the tools and technology I needed to be a great HR Pro!  These skills help make me build a story around how we are going to get better and eventually become world-class. I want those that I support and those who support me to truly believe the only choice we have to get better is to take Tim’s advice and go get that technology solution!

(P.S. If you want more ideas on how to convince your boss to give you the budget for cool new stuff, download this eBook I wrote.) —

Anyway, that’s how it went for me. How about you? What skills did you never learn in HR-school have been the most important to you? Please share in the comments below.

(Oh, and if you’d like to read more interesting posts on how to bring more of the soft skills you learned outside HR to your job, check out this awesome blog post right now:

6 Tips on Creating a More Empathetic Leave of Absence Process,  by my friend, the excellent Dawn Burke, VP of People for Daxko!

Why Hasn’t Employee Referral Automation Caught on? #SHRMTalent

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I spoke at SHRM Talent this week. One of the best corporate recruiting conferences around. Many people don’t believe me when I tell them, but the content, speakers, and audience are really engaging.

TA Tech companies and vendors haven’t caught on yet to the new SHRM Talent. Most corporate TA pros I spoke to might not have million dollar budgets to spend, but every one of them had decisions making over tens and hundreds of thousands of TA budget dollars!

It’s becoming one of the favorite conferences because the audience of corporate TA pros and leaders are very open to wanting to learn and get better. Their questions are genuine and the truly want to learn how to improve recruiting and talent attraction in their organizations.

One topic that I bring up during my sessions as the most under-utilized TA technologies on the planet is employee referral automation. Jobvite created the space, others followed, like RolePoint, Zao, Gooodjob, etc. Still, main stream corporate TA tech in mass aren’t using employee referral automation. It’s one of the great mysteries in the TA space for me!

When you ask corporate TA pros and leaders what their top source for talent is, employee referrals will always come in the top 3. When you ask what is the highest quality of hires by source, employee referrals are almost always number one! When you ask how much money have you invested in increasing employee referrals, it’s almost always $0!

So, help me out, what am I missing?!

The SHRM Talent audience told me I wasn’t missing anything, they just simply didn’t know this technology was available to them! Jobvite was in the expo hall, but mainly they were selling ATS, not employee referral automation (huge miss, but I know ATS margins are bigger than employee referral automation!). 97% of my audience weren’t using this tech, but almost all had an interest in learning more.

It’s really a zero-budget buy for most companies! If you use this type of technology you can basically get rid of your referral bonus program and your numbers will still go up on employee referrals. So, there’s the money you need to buy the tech that will put your employee referral program on steroids!

Truly, the bonuses per referral are not needed! You will have to actually begin recognizing those who do refer in your company, but almost all employees will refer people to your organization without a monetary gain! Also, increasing bonuses does little to actually increase the number of referrals you get.

So, why isn’t the vast majority using this tech?

First, they aren’t being sold this technology. Most corporate TA pros and leaders buy because of what is being sold to them, not necessarily what they need.

Second, I’m guessing the companies that sell this tech are for the most part fairly weak at marketing because it seems like a pretty easy sell to the groups I have in front of me!

Third, most corporate TA pros and leaders just have no idea this tech is even on the market for them, and if they do, they believe it’s too expensive to purchase.

They’ll spend a million dollars on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not $50,000 on technology that gives them more hires of their highest quality source?! There’s a major disconnect here on both sides of the market, which means there’s a giant opportunity for a company with a great brand with great tech that can make it simple for corporate TA leaders.

 

 

7 Ways to Increase Your Hourly Hiring!

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In 2017 there will be over a thousand webinars on how to hire more IT talent, 15,285 blog posts on how to hire more IT talent, 100s of new technologies will be released on how to hire more IT talent. You won’t see a fraction of that help when it comes to hiring Hourly Workers!

Why?

The majority of hiring done on a daily basis by most companies around the world is in hiring hourly workers, yet almost no one spends time on how to make this easier or do it better. This webinar is designed to help our brothers and sisters in the trenches who are out there every single day, doing all the dirty work in their organizations. Those recruiters and talent leaders who are responsible for hiring the masses!  

Tim Sackett loves the people! (and apparently talking about himself in the third person!) The real people, who go to work every single day and keep our organizations running like a well-oiled machine, not those pretty boys sitting behind a computer screen who have no idea what we really make and do on a daily basis!

Can you hear that music playing in the background? “America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” (Okay, I’m off my rocker, but you get it, I love this stuff!)  

What you’ll learn from FOT’s first webinar on better hourly hiring:  

–7 things you can start doing to increase and simplify hourly hiring in your organization

–3 ways top organizations are leveraging technology to do massive (over 1,000 hires per year) hourly hiring

–Pitfalls most organizations fall into when hiring hourly workers, and what you can do to make sure you don’t go down this path  

Smashfly, the world’s best recruitment marketing platform, is the sponsor for this FOT webinar.  So, you know we’ll be discussing the benefits of utilizing CRM technology in mass hiring, along with so many other tips, tricks, and techniques.

Joining me on the webinar will be my special guest, friend, and HR Influencer, Robin Schooling, VP of HR from Hollywood Casinos, who every day is in the weeds with her team in hiring the best hourly talent!

Register today! Thursday, April 27th at 2 pm ET! 

Trump Can’t Stop Immigrant Hiring!

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Before Trump was hired, err, voted in as President. I was asked to respond to this question:

What impact do you think Trump will have on immigrant hiring? 

My response was probably a bit more positive at that point, pre-Trump than it is now, but I still remain bullish on immigrant hiring. Why? Because it’s what America actually wants! I still believe that any President wants what is best for America. How they get there might be drastically different, but Trump is very similar to many Presidents we have.

Even his recent Executive Order to “Buy American, Hire American” (My grandparents who retired from GM would love this, BTW!) has little if any impact on actual H1-B hiring. H1-B hiring is broken, and random, and needs major overall, everyone can agree on that! Not hiring immigrants is just ignorant and uninformed.

Trump is easily swayed by high public opinion. He cares about what people think of him. No, really! He actually does, probably more than any other President we’ve ever had. What he doesn’t care about is crazy folks yelling on the fringes. He cares about being ‘popular’. American businesses need immigrant workers. If he gives this to them, he’ll be popular with people he views as peers in many ways.

CareerBuilder released a study today showing 33% of American companies plan on hiring immigrant workers, which is virtually unchanged from this time last year. Also, the American public doesn’t view immigrant hiring as a challenge to their livelihood. A whopping 90% feel like immigrant hiring has no impact on their career possibilities. That’s a giant number!

If you put all the psychology and data together, I think we’ll get to a place in America and the hiring of immigrants that makes more sense than what we have now. A lottery system? That’s what we pin our hopes on for American companies!? No one in business thinks this system is good. Trump is all about, well, that changes daily, but let’s say he’s a little more consistent on what American businesses want.

I can foresee, for good or bad I’m not sure, a tiered system of immigrant hiring. The Visa system really has already created this. Professional workers get preference over service level, unskilled immigrant workers. I can see this widening as this is what Trump voters are really worried about. They aren’t worried about the Software Engineer or Doctor coming into America, they’re worried about that cook at Applebee’s, the immigrant on the manufacturing line, etc.

We know the reality, most American workers don’t want those jobs anyway, but they feel that having an immigrant take those jobs is somehow holding them back. The real issue is American companies offshoring high paid manufacturing jobs, not highly skilled professionals coming into the states. Again, the CareerBuilder study backs up this assertion, “I’m not worried about an immigrant taking my job” because immigrants don’t take normal American jobs, they take the jobs on the fringes – high-end and low-end.

You need to be a part of a Professional Tribe

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One of the things I speak about when presenting to HR pros is there need to become part of the ‘Tribe’.  Meaning, if you want to have your seat at the table, you want to gain influence with your leadership team, you need to become part of that tribe.  How do you do that? Well, every tribe is different, you need to figure that out. There is no magical answer, but my guess is they have or do something in common. Find out what that is, and slowly work yourself into that tribe!

HR people struggle with this concept.

“Tim, I just want to do my job and go home!”  Okay.  Then stop bitching that you’re not getting any respect from your executives.  You’re choosing not to be part of that tribe.  Tribes take care of themselves.

You see, most HR pros place themselves on a professional island.  Just Tom Hanks in Cast Away, they’re all by themselves, plus maybe there own little ‘Wilson’ comfort toy picked up at a SHRM conference, a Monster stuffed animal, a Careerbuilder ‘recruiter’ doll, you know the ones!

I have a really, really cool tribe.  In fact, I have many tribes.  First and foremost of have my family.  My HRU tribe is next.  I probably spend more time with them, then my real family on a daily basis!  I also have a number of other personal tribes around youth sports, neighborhood, etc.

My FOT tribe is professionally very cool and satisfying. It’s a group of HR and Talent bloggers who are super smart and snarky, and they make me laugh every day.  I support this tribe and they support me.  They make my professional world better.  They help make me get excited about what I do, and how I do it.  They challenge me to be better. There are many subsets of that tribe, like the 8 Man Rotation tribe, the greater HR blogger tribe, etc.

Tribes are important.

HR and Talent Acquisition pros need to take down their locked HR office doors. Take them right off the hinges.  Get out and start getting involved with professional tribes.  Start in your own organization first.  Do you support a department or client group?  Get into that tribe, now!  Go to lunch with them. Go for drinks after work on Friday.  Bake cookies and bring them to the tribes.  All tribes like to eat and drink! Never underestimate the importance of being a part of that tribe.

I hear from HR pros who tell me all the time, “Tim, ‘they’ just won’t listen to me. How do I get them to listen?”  My first question is to ask them what relationship they have with whoever isn’t listening. That answer is usually, none, or next to none.  They aren’t part of that tribe. That’s the real problem.

I’m not saying it’s easy to break into every tribe. It might not be, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Also, you can create your own professional tribes.  There are so many people just like you that just want to be a part of a tribe.  Go find them! Start a tribe.  You’ll be better for it.

Some of my Tribe and I will be at SHRM Talent next week speaking and hanging out. If you’re going reach out to me and let’s connect! Maybe you’ll become a part of my tribe!