Category Archives: Trench HR

Learn how to give the best IT interviews on the planet!

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Tomorrow (Tuesday, April 18th at 2 pm ET) I’ll be talking IT Interviewing on a Recruiting Daily webinar sponsored by eTeki – Register Here! Most organizations suck at interviewing IT talent. I think there’s a better way!
It takes tech expertise to properly gauge tech competencies and experience and let’s face it most recruiters fall short in their capacity toTim Sackett eTeki
interview for the nuances of these specialized IT roles. You and I know this, but hiring managers struggle to understand why Talent Pros will never really be able to tell them if someone is a great coder or not!
Attend this webinar and I will show you a number of things you can start doing immediately to increase your ROI! Plus, you’ll hear from real talent leaders in the field who have already put a number of these ideas into place and hear about the success and struggles they had in launching this process.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Learn five ways successful companies are doing technical interviews differently to choose great talent.
  2. Design a technical interview process that attracts talent, and learn the things that turn off technical talent in an interview.
  3. Develop an interview strategy for technical talent that will increase your hiring manager satisfaction.

 

This webinar is designed to show any Recruiter and Recruiting leader (Corporate, Agency, RPO) a better way to interview technical talent, increase hiring manager/client satisfaction, and increase the influence and expertise your team brings to your organization.

The Secret Sauce to Landing Your Dream Job? Apply Less!

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Robert Combs over at Fast Company had a brilliant article recently, and if you’re in Recruiting or HR, it’s a must read! If you’re looking for a job, it’s also a must read!

Here was Robert’s concept. A.I. (robots) are running the world. It’s the biggest innovation to come into recruiting since Big Data (wait, didn’t we always have data…). If robots can run the apply process and find you where ever you are, Robert thought, why not use a robot to apply to jobs for him. Let the robots fight it out!

So, that’s what he did, he built a robot to go out and find jobs he would want, apply to those jobs, and then even follow up! He applied to hundreds of jobs in minutes! It got a bit out of control:

So I started slowly casting about for new challenges, initially by applying (perhaps naively) to openings at well-known tech companies like Google, Slack, Facebook, and Squarespace.

Two things quickly became clear to me:

  1. I’m up against leaders in their field, so my resume doesn’t always jump to the top of the pile.
  2. Robots read every application.

The robots are “applicant tracking systems” (ATS), commonly used tools for sorting job applications. They automatically filter out candidates based on keywords, skills, former employers, years of experience, schools attended, and the like.

As soon as I realized I was going up against robots, I decided to turn the tables–and built my own….I fired it up I accidentally applied to about 1,300 jobs in the Midwest during the time it took me to get a cup of coffee across the street. I live in New York City and had no plans to relocate, so I quickly shut it down until I could release a new version.

After several iterations and a few embarrassing hiccups, I settled on version 5.0, which applied to 538 jobs over about a three-month period.

So, what did Robert find out? Here were his biggest learnings:

1. Even your ATS robots suck at giving responses! Around 70% of his applications never got a response!

2. Only 4% of 538 jobs he applied for, got a personal email response from a recruiter.

3. Only about 6% of your hires come from people applying to your career site.

Robert found out what most of us in the business already know. Applying to jobs, doesn’t actually work. Yet, we spend so much time, energy, and resources building these great tech stacks and apply processes for just his!

So, what works?

Turns out about 85% of jobs are filled by good old fashion networking. You know someone, who knows someone, who has a friend, who’s cousin works in the department you really want to work for.

“Out-of-the-box hires rarely happen through LinkedIn (or any job board, career site) applications. They happen when someone influential meets a really interesting person and says, ‘Let’s create a position for you.’”

I disagree somewhat with the above quote. I’ve worked in large corporate TA shops, we just didn’t run around all willy-nilly creating jobs for really cool, smart people! We did many times find really great people and then stick them into a job we already had open, and usually the reason we found the person was someone who knew the job was open referred the person to us.

My advice to job seekers is always the same. Stop applying to jobs, start networking with every person you have a possible shred of connection with and let them know you’re looking for a position, what position you prefer, what position you would take, and where in the world you would work.

Every minute you spend networking is a thousand times better than every minute you spend online applying for jobs. Robert just proved this!

The Single Best Incentive You Can Offer Millennials!

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The world is millennial crazy. If you read this blog you know I think about 99% of the millennial stuff is pure B.S. (we were all young once, it’s mostly great, but sometimes sucks, buy a helmet!), but every once in a while I find something that really hits home.

Student debt is the real deal!

I’ve gotten up close in personal with this. I have two kids in college who are just starting down this debt path. I also have a brother who is a millennial who gets punched in the gut each month he has to make his mortgage-sized student loan payment! Great white collar, professional career, well paid, can’t even think about buying a house. That sucks!

Take a look at his chart:

So, if you truly want to attract great millennial talent you need to do a couple of things:

1. Offer as a sign-on to pay off their student debt.

2. Offer home buying, mortgage assistance.

Why? Turns out employees who own a home, stay around a lot longer, are more productive, and I work for a company that cares enough about me to help me with my student loans and to buy a house, I’m probably a bit more engaged as well!

Here’s the other dirty little secret we know in HR. Let’s say you have a program that pays off student loan debt for employees. With those agreements, you usually have an amount per year payoff (I.E., We pay off $30K, you give us three years of service, or pay us back the money, or something along those lines).

Very few employees leave you after they’ve been employed with an organization for three years. Three years is that tipping point where you decide you’re all in, or all out. So, your job as an HR leader is to get them past three years! Okay, every organization has their own tenure tipping point, but on average most are around three years. Go find yours!

One other item from the chart that sticks out like a sore thumb? No college degree means you’ll more than likely never own a home. That sucks! Guess what, we all have people in our organization without college degrees. These folks need our help with major financial situations, like buying a home, more than any of our employees.

We should be able to figure this out as well. What would stop an employer from offering home buying assistance, for years of service, to their employees? Nothing. But we don’t do it because we see ‘those’ employees as easily replaceable. So, why put in the extra effort?

Employees are our most valuable asset, well, unless, you know, you only make $15 per hour, then you’re just an asset, not really that valuable. Isn’t that what we’re really saying?

Long, story, short: Help your employees buy homes. You’ll never regret it.

 

The real value of A.I. is in HR, not Recruiting!

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What if you could catch and stop sexual harassment in the workplace before it got started? What about other types of violence, embezzlement, etc.? What if you could determine when disengagement was starting with an employee and address it immediately?

All those would be pretty powerful advantages to HR and leadership, don’t you think!?

Google is beginning to use A.I. and machine learning to find objectional content on the internet. Now, the main reason for this is a little less moral than it sounds. Google was losing advertisers because many ads they were paying for were showing up on content that was not something they would want to be associated with their brand.

Seems like most solutions to problems happen because of money…

Recently, in HR, we’ve seen some really high-profile cases of harassment come to light with Uber, Tesla, etc. These cases have had a major impact to both the consumer brand and especially to the employer brand of these organizations. While those of us who work in HR understand this is far too often occurrence, it seems like little gets done to stop it.

Say hello to my little friend!

Why couldn’t an artificial intelligence technology tell me when some creepy employee is sending inappropriate things to other coworkers, customers, vendors, etc.? What about when an employee uses threatening language to intimidate another employee? Wouldn’t you want to know about that? I think Mary just told Jennifer she’s ‘done’ and wants ‘out’ and she needs to get her resume together.

Would love to know that, so I can find out how to talk Mary off the ledge!

Say hello to Big Brother!

Yikes, right!? But, this is probably closer to reality than we realize and it will probably actually help our work environments a ton! Our employees communicate in a number of ways: email (primarily), messaging, voice, various tech platforms we use to do our daily work, etc. Almost all of which have unstructured data that A.I. could analyze and make predictions.

Some of those predictions could help you as an organization reduce risk. Tim seems to be coming very close to crossing a line with Mary, maybe we should give him a little reminder about our policy on harassment in the workplace. Bam! A nice, neat, little piece of content automatically hits Tim’s inbox and a message gets sent to his boss to stop by and remind Tim about what’s appropriate behavior in the workplace.

Some might help the organization retain their talent. There’s already predictive analytic solutions in play that predict employee turnover, add in machine learning, and A.I. will begin to show you employee who might turn before they’ve even thought of turning!

This might seem all futuristic, but the technology is really already here. Eventually, someone will launch a solution that does all of the stuff mentioned above, I’m quite certain someone already has this in development. It will only take one company to put it in place and the dominos will fall.

What you get paid to do at work is owned by your employer. We’ve all known this for a long time. What we never realized was that eventually, technology would actually hold us to not only the work but the behaviors as well!

Would you want to work in an environment where every move you made was measured by A.I.? I’m guessing not, but I’m also guessing it won’t be a choice!

Can I be Totally Honest?

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“Can I be completely honest with you?” is a phrase usually followed by some sh*t you don’t want to hear.  We talk about this concept a bunch in HR.  We need to tell our employees the truth about their performance.  We work to coach managers of people on how to deliver this message appropriately.  We develop complete training sessions and bring in ‘professional’ communicators to help us out on the exact phraseology we want to use.  All so we can be ‘honest’ with our employees.

Can I be completely honest with you?

No one wants you to be honest with them.

Employees want you to tell them this:

1. We like having you work here.

2. You’re doing a good job.

3.  You are better than most of the other employees we have.

4. We see great things coming from your development, and you’re on target for promotion.

5. Here is your annual increase.

Now, that might actually be ‘honest’ feedback for about 5% of your employees.  That means you will be saying a different version of honest to the other 95% that won’t like you being completely honest.

That is why talent management is really hard.  No piece of software will help you with this one fact.  Most people don’t like honest.  The cool part of this is that most managers don’t like to be honest. It’s uncomfortable. It causes conflict.  Most people aren’t comfortable telling someone else that they have some issues that need to be addressed, and most people don’t take that feedback appropriately.  You tell an employee they have ‘room for improvement’ and they instantly believe you told them they suck and they’re about to be fired.

So, as managers, we aren’t completely honest.  We tend to work around the truth.  The truth is we all have things we need to get better at, and it sucks to hear it out loud.  If someone tells you they welcome this feedback, they’re lying to you and themselves.  Those are usually the people who lose it the most when they are told the truth.  People who tell you they want honest feedback will believe you’re going to tell them ‘honestly’ they’re a rock star.  When you say something less than ‘rock star’ they implode.

So, what’s the honest solution to this?

Say nothing.  Set really good metrics. Metrics that show if a person is performing or not.  Make sure everyone understands those metrics.  Then, when the employee wants feedback, set down the metrics in front of them, and shut up.  Don’t be the first to talk.  The employee will give you some honest feedback if you wait.  Which will open the door to agree or disagree? Otherwise, you’re just working on subjective.  Subjective and honest don’t go well together.

But, you knew that. I really like having you stop by and read this.  You do a great job at your job. You’re certainly better than all those other readers who stop by and read this.  I’m sure you’re on your way up!

Body Language Matters in Recruiting Great Talent

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So, possibly the greatest basketball coach of all time is University of Connecticut’s Women’s Basketball coach, Geno Auriemma.  He currently has a 109 game winning streak in NCAA Division I basketball. Many of his current players have never lost a collegiate game!

You have no idea how unreal that streak is. It’s not like he can just recruit every top player, every year. He might get three or four of the best high school players, but other schools are also getting great talent.

Geno has something that only a tiny few great coaches have. Watch this short video to see it in action:

Couple things about this:

1. He says when he watches game film he watches what the kids on the bench are doing. If you’re at that level of detail, you’re going to be successful! I can guarantee you Nick Saban does the same thing. Tom Izzo does the same thing. Bill Belichick does the same thing.

2. If you’re interviewing for a job, the moment you pull into the parking lot, you better believe your actions are being evaluated, and almost 100% of those actions are body language!

If you hire an Eeyore, you’re going to get an Eeyore. Don’t think somehow they’ll change from the interview. If someone can’t have good body language in an interview, they’ll never have it coming to work and grinding each day.

Most of the jobs we hire for are basically skill-irrelevant. What we truly need is someone who comes to work each day with enthusiasm, is open to learning, has the ability to learn quickly, and plays well with others. I can teach you the rest. I can’t teach you to have great body language. That’s on you!

What if you could predict all of your Turnover? #UltiConnect @UltimateHCM

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Out at Ultimate Software’s Conference, this week and one of the cool features that Ultimate has within UltiPro is Retention Predictor. Ultimate has done a really good job at going out and buying some great data analytics companies and implementing that tech and talent into their organization.

So, what’s Retention Prediction? 

The concept is that if you analyze enough of your employee’s data points you’ll see trends that show if someone is highly likely to leave your organization as a voluntary term. As an organization, we really want and need to know data this to help retain our best performers.

UltiPro delivers a ‘score’ of each of your employees showing if someone is a flight risk based on their level of performance, so that you can filter, if you want, by high performers to low performers. The notion being, you definitely want to ‘save’ your high performers.

So, how do you save an employee that shows up as a High Risk? 

UltiPro will then deliver to the manager of the employee at risk specific “Leadership Actions”. These actions are recommendations of things the manager can do to help retain this employee. Currently, UltiPro has over 50 actions built into the system, and you can build in your own actions if you want for specific things you might want to do in your organization.

Does this really work? 

I spoke with multiple Ultimate Software customers who raved about how this one feature has literally changed their entire culture! One great example is Gregg Paulk, an executive at Anderson Center for Autism in New York.

Anderson had high turnover of their support staff, and also had an issue of lack of quality leadership training. Before they began using UltiPro’s Retention Predictor they had 30% turnover. In the two years since turning on the prediction feature, they’ve lowered their turnover to 15%! That’s giant! That’s real money that can now be used in other ways to better their organization and increase student care.

Anderson also saw higher engagement with their managers because they were now being able to deliver each manager specific actions to help them retain their staff, and ultimately help them become better managers of their team.

Paulk said one of the challenges in implementing anything like this is always the potential of false positives. One of your employees comes up a high flight risk, but in reality, they’re not. Yes, this can happen and will happen.

He said the key for them was to get their managers to understand how data prediction works. Yes, we’ll have a few false positives, but the majority of the data will be highly accurate and the percentage that is correct is so high, you can’t ignore what the predictions are telling your team.

What I really like about this feature is it puts HR into an immediate strategic position within the organization. It helps to make your entire team proactive and stop reacting to turnover as it happens. Your organization can finally become proactive in developing your team and leaders, which will naturally just help you drive a more dynamic culture.

What’s next? 

Ultimate Software is not just sitting on this, their data team is off the charts brilliant and they’re already working on their next generation product called “Perception” that will add in even more unstructured data into the algorithm and make these predictions more accurate, faster.

Check it out. I was super impressed by the accuaracy and real-life outcomes of this. It’s definitely a game changer for organizations.

Every Moment Matters! #UltiConnect @UltimateHCM

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So, I’m out at the Ultimate Software Conference this week and they had one of the most unique keynotes, Will Smith! Yeah, that Will Smith! Fresh Prince, I Am Legend, Hancock, Men In Black, Bad Boy himself!

At HR Conferences you don’t normally get big time Hollywood. You usually get a dude who’s really good looking, who wrote a book, telling motivational stories. The HR ladies tend to like those types. Well, they really liked Will! I really liked Will!

For starters, Will Smith is an entertainer. He immediately grabbed the audience and didn’t let go. He knows how to control and audience, tell great stories, be funny, and hit on big themes that make you think and leave you feeling motivated. That’s what a great keynote can do.

My favorite story he told was about his father dying. His father was told he had three months to live and he ended up living about six months. Will said after they got to three months every single moment felt like it really could be the last moment.

Because of this, hellos became special, goodbyes tended to linger longer, embraces were more special. It went on like that for another three months, and it made Will realize that all moments with those that you love and care about, should be moments like this because we don’t know if that will be the last moment.

On the last day of his dad’s life, Will was in LA and his dad was back in Philly. Will’s dad called him on Facetime and told him he thought this was it, that this was going to be his last day. Since he was going through this, it wasn’t a shock, but he stayed on the phone with him for a while.

Will said they went about fifteen minutes without saying anything to each other, just staring at each other, just spending this time together in the only way they could at that moment. Will’s sister was with her father in Philly and eventually broke the silence and said, “Well, dad, do you have anything you want to say to Will?”

His response was awesome and it brought down the house in classic Will Smith fashion:

My dad said, “Shit, anything I haven’t told this motherfucker isn’t going to make a difference now!”

He died that night. The crowd laughed. Will laughed. At the story, not at his dad dying!

The crowd laughed. Will laughed. At the story, not at his dad dying!

Most of us won’t be as lucky as Will to know you have that time and also in that time realize the importance of those moments. Our loved ones will die today, tomorrow, next week, and we won’t have any idea that it’s coming. We live with this reality.

We also live with a reality that we don’t have to let these moments go by. We can choose to not let moments go by and let people know how much we value them and care about them. For me, that was the real message Will was sharing.

You’ll have a bunch of moments today with people you care about. Try not to miss them!

Who Knew the World’s Best HR Technology Talks Happened in Cleveland!?

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That’s right kids! I’m coming to Believeland!

Wednesday, April 12th, from 4-6pm, I’ll be speaking at Cleveland SHRM’s – HR Technology SIG.

This will be a great night of learning and fun. It’s awesome that the HR and TA community leaders in Cleveland are putting this on, I can’t tell you how forward thinking that is for any city around the world, to the HR and TA pros and leaders in a great position to be successful! I follow my friend and HR technology guru, Steve Boese, who came out in February to speak at SIG!

The event will be held at Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, a great venue, and you will receive HRCI and SHRM credit for attending.

What’s the talk?

“See What’s Next! Be What’s Next! The Future of HR, TA, and Technology” 

Where I’ll present on where I see the future of HR and TA going over the next few years from a practical perspective of “what is the stuff you might actually do in your own shops!” I’ll also highlight a ton of tools that are new to the market and things you might want to take a look at, plus talk about some of the most innovative things happening in HR and TA, and if those are things you can do yourself!

If you attend this event, we’ve got 2 extra tickets (GREAT SEATS!) for that night to see Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers play their last regular season home game with Me! Okay, you might not want to sit next to me, I tend to yell at the referees, a lot! But, if you do, I’ll buy you drink or popcorn and we can take selfies and try to get Lebron in on it!

It’s only $25 bucks to register for Cleveland SHRM members, $40 for non-members, and Students and Transitioning folks can get in for $15! Food and open bar at the event, so come on over and I’ll buy you a drink! Thanks to the great folks at Willory for sponsoring and taking me to see Lebron! (it’ll be my first time seeing him play live, I’m kind of excited!)

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE!

Hope to see you in Cleveland! (boy, you don’t say often!)

Honestly, You’re Not Disrupting Recruiting!

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So, there’s a ton of TA Technology on the market that is claiming to ‘disrupt’ recruiting. The recruiting they are claiming to disrupt is the agency recruiting game, for their ‘ever so thankful’ corporate talent acquisition ‘partners’. I’m going to name them, new ones crop up every day it seems, but I won’t give them the extra publicity. Here’s how their sales pitch goes:

“Hey, We’re disruptive! We’ll save you 70% off your cost per hire, just use our technology! Did we mention WE’RE DISRUPTIVE! Yeah!” 

That’s honestly the sales pitch. The reality is a little less flashy and entirely different story that real corporate talent acquisition leaders aren’t buying. Why? These disruptors are building their 70% sales pitch on agency fees as your cost per hire.

It works like this:

1. You can’t fill a position.

2. Agency can for 25% of the first-year salary on a $100k job.

3. Thus, your cost of hire is $25,000.

4. We’ll do it for $7,500!

The reality is, these tech companies are frauds. The true cost of hire for a direct hire for most organizations is less than $7,500. So, no one buys your disruptive pitch of savings. What you’re truly selling is a ‘discount’, not a technology disruption, and your soft-math is all wrong. Your ‘technology’ is basically an automated version of what an agency does (but less effective), offered at a discount.

To be fair, if you have no ability to recruit internally and you use a ton of agencies and have a huge agency spend, this might help you save some money. But, it’s a band-aid for a bullet wound, not a disruptive solution.

Discounting is a crappy world to compete in because you can never get out it. Once someone gets a discount, they always want a discount or more of discount. If discounting is your business model, you need to get out of that business.  Take a look at every single retail organization that has ever gone out of business. It started with discounting.

Okay, I’ll give you that you’re disrupting bad recruiting. I’ll give you that. But, guess what, no corporate TA leader I know likes the awful Indian-Call-Center recruiting models anyway. It’s the lowest common denominator in the recruiting world. We don’t need more of that, we need less of that.

Do you really want to disrupt recruiting?

Help TA leaders truly become better in understanding the technology that will actually help them hire noticeably better talent. Don’t just take advantage of them a little less the next company. Help them build a stack and a model where they don’t have to rely on outside organizations to do the hiring for them.

There’s some really good TA Tech on the market doing this. That’s the disruptive stuff – folks like Lever, Clinch, Smashfly, HireVue, Outmatch, Role Point, Greenhouse, Textio, Jobvite, Text Recruit, etc. (plus a ton of others I reviewed on my weekly  T3 tech blog series)

These organizations aren’t trying to take advantage of your ability not to be able to hire the talent you need, they’re trying to partner with you to make you self-sufficient. That’s disruption!

So, yeah, I run an agency. A post like this probably doesn’t help my business, but I can’t stand to see these upstarts try to sell themselves as technology when they’re not. Also, I do contract work, I don’t want your direct openings! I want your contingent openings!

Happy recruiting this week!