The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!

 

Exceptionalism is the New Normal

It’s the fall HR and TA Conference season. Pretty much every single week between September and December you can find multiple HR and TA conferences to attend around the world. It’s a crazy business all fueled by vendor expo dollars, pseudo-thought leadership, and a professional desire to get away from the office for a few days.

The entire conference is built on this secret. The secret that all you have to do is show attendees how bad they suck and they’ll keep returning year after year! Part of that secret, though, is not flat out telling you that you suck, because, well, that would suck! It’s showing you how great everyone else is, so you feel like you suck in comparison!

“Holy crap, Google is now building their own genetically perfect mix-raced, mix-gendered employees that never call in sick! How are we ever going to compete with that? We need to get better! We better buy some more of this crap in the expo to help us catch up with Google!” 

When all you hear about is the greatest and top innovations in an industry, you begin to believe everyone else is there except us, we need to hurry and get there as well. The reality is, we are all so far from perfect it’s actually a little bit scary.

Exceptionalism is the concept that is everyone is great. If we are all this unique and perfect snowflakes, then none of us are really unique and perfect snowflakes. Meaning, if everyone is unique and perfect than that becomes the new normal, the new average.

This is best practice in HR and TA. Google’s innovation becomes Walmart’s best practice. If we are all doing the same thing, we are all average. They don’t tell you that when you book that $500 plane ticket and pay $1995 to attend the HR Universe Conference at the Best Western Plus in Biloxi, MS!

That’s not part of a conference value proposition! Hey, pay $4000 in travel and registration to be like everyone else! Unless, you feel like you’re first less than everyone else! The reality is 99% of TA and HR shops are all about the same. Some are better at certain things than others but then suck way worse at something else.

The truth is…

– Building great HR and TA isn’t about major change, it’s about continual, disciplined improvement and always striving to get better outcomes that your business needs for better results.

– Trying to keep up with the 1% will almost always get you fired as a leader because the majority of organizational leadership just don’t value being in the 1% enough to make that commitment to get there and you trying to push them there will wear thin.

– Most of you aren’t wired or willing to do what it will take to become a truly exceptional HR or TA shop. That takes major vision and major sacrifice to reach, and most of don’t have that level of vision or are willing to have that level of sacrifice individually, let alone both.

But, that message above, doesn’t sell conference passes! Telling you that you also can be a unique and perfect snowflake sells conference passes. You just need to trash your current tech stack and build something completely new, like Google!

 

Taylor Swift doesn’t believe in a 2 week notice. Should you?

I’m a Taylor Swift fan. I love that everyone tries to bring her down and she just keeps rolling along writing breakup songs, dating again, writing more breakup songs, dating again, writing more breakup songs…you get the picture, I like breakup songs!

The one thing you don’t want to do if you’re close to Taylor Swift is wrong her in any way! If you do, know that will end badly for you and probably another hit record for her! Check out what happened when some of her dancers wanted to leave for another tour:

Apparently, three of Swift’s backup dancers had left her tour in 2013 to join pal Perry’s tour. All three had worked with Perry before they ever worked with Swift, and pretty much no one not intimately connected with either tour would’ve known the transaction had ever occurred until TMZ reported —in September 2014, a year later—that Swift was mightily ticked off by the dancers’ decision, firing them on the spot after they gave notice.

So, the dancers do what we tell them they should do, give your two-week notice. Taylor, like many employers today, accepts their resignation by kicking them out immediately!

That’s the big question today, isn’t it? As an employee, should you give the ‘standard’ two-week notice? As an employer, should you accept that two weeks or kick them curb like the unloyal swine they are!?

As with everything, it depends, right?

Here are my rules on two-week notices:

1. If the employee completely sucks and was basically dead-employee-walking, might as well thank them for nothing and have them leave immediately!

2. If your employer is evil, no need to really stay around for two weeks and be treated terribly.

The problem with both 1 and 2 is it takes a sane person to make this judgment. That’s the problem usually, bad employees and bad employers aren’t sane!  So, we probably need to add some other rules.

3. If the employee who gave two-weeks can cause harm to the organization by hanging around (recruiting other employees away, stealing trade secrets, messing up client relationships, etc.), even if they were a good employee, probably need to cut bait.

4. If you’re an average to above average employee and want to retain this relationship, you probably want to work out the two weeks.

5. Employees working out the two weeks notice know it’s tough not to look ahead. That being said, try and leave no surprises for anyone after you leave.

I still think most employers believe if you give a two-week notice, you should plan on working that out. You never know – read that again – YOU NEVER KNOW where you might end up in life and who you might run into. Skipping out on the two-week notice and be career limiting and you’ll never know how it might limit you!

On the employer side, if you decide to skip the two-week notice and kick a kid to the curb, I suggest, at a minimum, you should pay out that two weeks. I get that sometimes it just doesn’t work for you to keep someone around who has one foot out the door, but that might not be the case for everyone, so at least make them whole if you don’t want them around.

Free Agent Nation: Using Talent Assessments To Build Your Superteam

Anyone else amazed by the USA performance at the Rio Olympic Games?  Just us?

If you’re responsible for hiring and developing people, then you’d love to build a dominating team of individuals like the USA Olympic Swimming and Women’s Gymnastics teams. But how do you do it?  Executives and hiring managers tell you that the world of talent selection and team building is more art than science. Susie the manager brags about her great “gut feelings” when she hires people.

Susie’s gut feel success rate?  Um, not so good.  You’d never put Susie in charge of our Olympic talent.

You need tools to help you pick more winners. Then it would be nice to use the same tools to maximize their chances for success in that freak show you call a company, right?

That’s why we’re back with our latest version of the FOT Webinar, brought to you by our friends at OutMatch. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the following goodies:

How to research/implement assessments (and avoid getting sued) and sell the concept of leveraging external assessments to the company bigwigs. We’ll tell you how to vet assessment providers, figure out your biggest need, and partner with a firm to design an assessment process that works. Then we’ll give you the roadmap on how to get the buy-in you need to get this process started.

How to use the profiles of your existing team to understand the candidates in your recruiting funnel that have the best chance at succeeding AND raising the overall performance of your team. You need performance.  You also need someone that can blend with the team you have and make it better.  We’ll show you how to use existing team profiles to spot the right fit.

How to use your assessment platform to give your managers incredible leverage to onboard their new hires, with a focus on what makes each employee special – as well as what could hurt them in your unique culture.

A roadmap for how your managers can embed behavioral observations into their performance coaching, with an eye on emphasizing each employee’s behavioral strengths while neutralizing the weaknesses that we all have.

Whether you need help getting started with or would like to do more with talent assessments once an employee has joined your company (90%+ of the world, btw), we’ve got something for you on this webinar.

Susie the manager isn’t bad, she’s just human. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the plan to get started or do more with the assessments you already have!

Can a Better Lunch Experience Lower Employee Turnover?

You might have seen this recently, a sixteen-year-old girl from California, Natalie Hampton, developed an App called, “Sit With Us”. The App basically lets kids know who in the lunch room would be open to sitting with them. She came up with it as a way to help stop bullying:

“At my old school, I was completely ostracized by all of my classmates, and so I had to eat lunch alone every day. When you walk into the lunchroom and you see all the tables of everyone sitting there and you know that going up to them would only end in rejection, you feel extremely alone and extremely isolated, and your stomach drops. And you are searching for a place to eat, but you know that if you sit by yourself, there’ll be so much embarrassment that comes with it because people will know and they’ll see you as the girl who has nowhere to sit.”

Through circumstance, she gets to go to a new school and has a different experience. She is now accepted, she has people to eat lunch with, but she remembers how having no one made her feel, and comes up with this idea for the App.

She’s awesome. The world needs more Natalie’s!

This idea has got me thinking about how this could have an impact at our workplaces as well. We already know that having a best friend at work increases tenure and happiness at work. Having someone to go to lunch with is usually the first step in making a new friend!

The tech is simple which is why it makes so much sense. We go through so much effort and resources to get people hired. We provide great orientations and onboarding. Then we kind of leave it up to them to figure the rest out. We all probably think the same thing, “Well, we’re all adults, go make friends!” or “Their boss, and the team, will make them feel welcome.”

Then, we hear from their boss that they put in their notice and we’re shocked.

A workplace version of “Sit With Us” could really help individuals in organizations quickly feel like part of the team. Like they have a place. Like they found ‘their’ place at your organization. The best hires are the ones we never have to make.

I see tons of technology in HR and TA and I’ve even seen a few employee communication technologies that could probably be used in this capacity but weren’t designed to just do this. (If you know of one, please share it in the comments so everyone can check it out!)

 

 

 

HR Pros – Stop it! Facts Really Don’t Matter

If I know one thing in life, it’s that HR Pros LOVE facts!

We are the Queens and Kings of CYA, and nothing covers your backside better than a whole bunch of facts written down on a form, with copies of emails, and signatures on forms that said you understood what you signed!  It’s HRs little piece of Heaven.

So, you can understand why this recent study from Dartmouth has me concerned:

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.

Here’s some of what Nyhan found:

-People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.

-People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.

-People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.

-But if, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy. If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you’re more likely to say that the number of jobs increased.

Why is this research important to HR Pros?  It shows us that your facts aren’t really the most important factor in trying to influence a decision one way, or another.  As HR Pros we tend to get ready for the ‘big meeting’ by getting all of our facts in line and making graphs for the PowerPoint presentation.  When in reality, you should be working on your delivery.  You could present total B.S. but in a way that is persuasive and has a better chance of getting your way than presenting your facts in your normal way!

Let me put this another way — if your executives think your recruiting function is broken and you can’t find talent, you presenting facts that say otherwise, won’t change their mind. In fact, they actually might think you’re even worse than before! No matter how clear your facts tell a different story.  What do you need to do?  You need to do a better job marketing how your function has changed.  Make them believe you’re now different. Speak different, act different.  Even if you continue with the same processes, you need to develop an internal department marketing plan that you’re not the same department!

Our perception is our reality.

T3 – What the Hell is Artificial Intelligence in HR?

The HR Technology Conference is in Chicago this year from October 4-7 and I’ll once again be blogging live from the show. As I’m preparing and scheduling meetings with various vendors one thing have become perfectly clear, I’ll be doing a lot of talking about “Artificial Intelligence”(AI).

You know AI, right? The stuff we see in  movies in the future where computers and robots begin the think for themselves then very quickly understand that humans are inadequate so they ‘decide’ humans are no longer needed and only machines should run the world. Yeah, That AI! Sounds like the perfect HR replacement!

Okay, I’m only half joking.

So, what the hell is AI in HR, really?

The actual definition of Artificial Intelligence is simply, intelligence exhibited by machines. That’s pretty broad, but now you see why the movies have taken this to resemble human-like robots and overly aggressive computer programs with condescending attitudes. The greatest ‘real’ example of AI is IBM’s Watson (see the video below).

Artificial Intelligence in HR is designed to take and transform data into ‘humanized’ formats that we can easily digest and take action on. You will see this every day in the predictions and suggestions that your HR and TA systems make for you. A simple example would be pre-hire assessments that predict once candidate could possibly be a better hire than another candidate. This is AI for HR.

Not quite robots taking over your job, but it helps put into context the buzz word “Artificial Intelligence” is quickly becoming in HR and TA.

AI is moving into almost every kind of technology we’ll use in the next few years. There are systems on the market that can now, fairly accurately, tell you which of your employees will be next to leave your organization. Where you should be building your next call center. What groups of employees when paired together in a team will develop your next best selling product or service. That’s all really cool!

But, it’s still not robots taking over the world because they find you inadequate, yet!

So, get ready for the fall conference season knowing you’ll hear two things a lot as HR and TA vendors do their annual ‘let’s talk over your head’ by using really fancy, mostly made up, terms to make you think are tech is something you must have. “Machine Learning” and “Artificial Intelligence” (which are basically the same thing) will be shoved down your throat at an alarming rate!

While the sales pitch might be lame, you know I love the technology. Predictive technologies are the next level technology for most HR and TA shops. The challenge we all have as leaders and pros is trusting what the technology is telling us.  We still want to believe we, the humans, are smarter than the machines. Unfortunately, we are not.

The organizations who can get themselves to trust the technology the fastest and follow the recommendations, consistently, not just when it ‘feels’ right, will be out in front of everyone else. So, don’t get intimidated by AI or Machine Learning. Embrace the cheesiness of your local HR and TA vendor salesperson. Who knows, next year a robot might be selling you your software!

What Do The World’s Great Employees Have In Common?

If you haven’t seen this yet, you will! American Airlines has a new promotional campaign called “World’s Greatest Flyers” where they basically tell the world to stop bitching and act like adults while flying! Okay, to their credit, they do a much more professional job of telling flyers to stop whining and bitching while flying! Check it out:

Yeah, all you need to do is love babies and buy a $299 pair of Boese noise cancelling headphones. And, know your crappy mode is the reason this flight is two hours delayed, not because we understaffed our pilots and now we have no one at your gate to fly this smelling, outdated death trap we’re about to throw you into!

I kid! But, can you imagine if some short-sighted company tried to do this with an employment branding campaign?! Here’s what I imagine it would sound like:

The World’s Greatest Employees – 

  • Show up to work every single day, on time.
  • Always talk nicely about their coworkers, even those who don’t shower enough.
  • Never ask for a raise, because that’s rude and uncomfortable for their really smart supervisors.
  • Tell all of their friends and family that they work for the best company ever.
  • Wait to be told what to do next and never question what they’re told to do.
  • Are willing to break into the competition and steal trade secrets!

The World’s Greatest Employees work here…and never leave…never.

It’s super creepy, right!?

I’m not sure how the hell that made it through the pipeline at American Airlines. Let me get this straight, we’re a company that our only service is to fly people around the country and they have a bunch of other companies they can choose to fly and you think it’s a great idea that we tell them how to be a better customer!?

Different. I’ll give them that.

How the Largest Company in the World does Employment Branding!

Everyone loves to dump on Walmart. They’ve done enough in their past to make it easy, but I love to tell people working in HR or TA at Walmart is probably the toughest HR or TA gig on the planet! Why? Because of the challenges they face with their brand!

That’s why this recent Employment Branding video done by their CEO is freaking BRILLIANT! Check it out:

It’s clearly a take off on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series “Comedian’s In Cars Getting Coffee” (which is awesome).

I mean really! Can you imagine going to your CEO and saying, “Hey, Doug, we’ve got an idea? We’re going to have you drive around with Ted in his used Toyota Camry. We’ll video it as he asks you random questions and tries to make you act like a fool. Sound good?” How do you think your CEO would react? Would you even get into the CEO’s office to ask!?

It’s really hard for a CEO of the world’s largest company to come across like a normal person! But, Doug McMillon does it perfectly! Is it me or is McMillon, way too close to “McMillion”!?  Maybe just a coincidence…unfortunate last name for a CEO of the world’s largest company! (FYI – Doug made $19 “million” last year)

So, what did we learn about Walmart and Doug?

– Doug takes a nap on Saturday afternoon after returning from work. (Man of the people – we all want to take a nap on Saturday afternoon!)

– Great Chewbacca impression. (Willing to make fun of himself – not your normal CEO)

– Walmart overuses phrases like every other corporate, and Doug will make fun of it. (Willing to make fun of Walmart in a respectful way.)

– Walmart doesn’t need to ‘remake’ itself, it needs to remember who it is. (Founder’s culture – Sam Walton knew what the hell he was doing, let’s remember that.)

Basically, Walmart just gave you a perfect guide on how to brand yourself to your possible talent pool! If your leader can come across this way, the hope is those under him will follow the lead. It’s not easy. They have a ton of work in front of them, but this is a great first step!

Toughest job on the planet – HR and TA at Walmart. You think you’ve got problems? Try managing an organization that has 2.1 Million employees, runs on razor thin margins and has to be customer-first focused.

Kudos to Doug and the EB Team at Walmart on the video!

 

The 2016 Fall Michigan Recruiter’s Conference!

This is the third annual conference we’ve done and they just keep getting bigger and better! We’ll have 150 Corporate TA Pros and Leaders joining us this conference, all working to become the best damn TA pros we can be!

This year’s lineup includes:

Laurie Ruettimann – Mrs. Punkrock HR-Cynical Girl-Marathon Runner!

Gerry Crispin – The Godfather of Candidate Experience & Co-Founder of CareerXRoads!

Ambrosia Vertesi – Mrs. HR Open Source

Chris Bailey – Mr. TEDx Seven Mile Beach, the King of Cayman Islands HR & Anything Over Ice!

Kerri Mills – 2015 SourceCon Grandmaster Sourcing Champion, Indeed TA Pro & @TheJobGirl

Friday, October 14th onsite at the Amway World Headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan!  You can check out more details here – Michigan Recruits! 

Registration is now open! It’s $49! Why?  Because we think paying thousands of dollars to attend a great conference is out of reach for most Talent Acquisition budgets! At least it was in almost every organization I went to!  We wanted to bring great recruiting content, national level content, to our own backyard in Michigan!

REGISTER HERE! (It’s filling up quickly, we have limited space!)

We’ve designed this conference to be a corporate Talent Acquisition safe-zone! What does that mean?  Third party agency recruiters will not be invited. It’s not that we don’t like the agency folks. It’s that agency folks can’t shut themselves off when it comes to selling!  We want an environment that is about learning and development, about raising the recruiting game of all those attending.

Check it out! You won’t find a better one-day lineup anywhere in the world for $49! It’s crazy. Also, a big shout out to our two main sponsors – ViziRecruiter and CareerBuilder – without them we couldn’t keep it this cheap!