Category Archives: Trench HR

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.

Telling Your Executives The Truth Isn’t Courageous

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If I have to listen to one more leadership guru tell hard working people they need to be more courageous, I’m going to walk up on stage and courageously punch that person in the face! There’s a reason you aren’t telling your executives exactly what’s going on in your business and the reason isn’t that you’re a wimp!

The reason we aren’t 100% truthful to our executives about what’s truly going on in our business is because we’ve bought in!

It’s the job of the executive to build and share a vision of the business. It’s the job of those under this executive to then go out and make sure that vision gets integrated into the business. Once you’ve drunk the Koolaid, it’s really hard to un-drink the Koolaid!

It’s not that we don’t want to tell our executives the truth, we do. We don’t because, like most executives, we can’t see the truth any longer!

I’ve worked for some really great executives who knew this about their next level leaders. They hired and promoted great people who they knew would ensure their vision was seen by all. They also knew, at that point, it was then their job to trust and verify.

The best executives I’ve worked for did not sit in an ivory tower and wait for the word to come back from their generals.  They constantly spent time amongst the soldiers, those on the frontline, to ensure that the vision they wanted, was being heard at all levels.

Do you really think that most of the #2’s in organizations lack courage! They got hired and promoted, but then all at once the majority just lacked courage. That doesn’t add up to me! It’s not what I’ve seen in real life.

The reason those underneath you aren’t sharing the exact full picture of what’s going on is they have painted a different version in their mind, they’ve painted a picture of where they are trying to go. It becomes so vivid many times the present is very clear.

When I traveled to locations away from corporate in my career, I frequently got visited upon my return from my CEO. Not because I was one level below him because I was sometimes 3 or 4 levels below! He knew I was the perfect one to tell him what I was seeing and hearing because I was closer to getting my hands dirty then anyone else on the trip.

You don’t need to be more courageous to help your executives.  You need to go back and dig a few more ditches!

Recruiting Blocking and Tackling!

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This week I was at CareerBuilder’s Empower Roadshow talking with a few hundred Talent Acquisition pros and leaders in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Great event, great group of pros that were super engaged.

I led a panel on tips and tricks for in-the-trenches TA pros and leaders and one of my panelist was Bryan Rice, TA leader from Stryker. The title of this post came from him, he was big on getting TA pros back to blocking and tackling!

What’s blocking and tackling in talent acquisition?

Here’s what I would call the building blocks of great recruiting (Bryan’s blocking and tackling):

1. Phone skills. Have your recruiters conquered their fear of being on the phone? When they need to reach someone is their first thought, “Oh, I should pick up the phone and just ask the person.” Versus, sending them an email.

2. Ability to sell the position they are recruiting for. Can your recruiters effectively talk to a candidate and get them excited about the position, the supervisor of the position, the direction of the company, all the opportunities you can provide them, etc.? Bryan believes today’s recruiters might struggle with this the most, over anything else, and yet, as TA leaders we do very little to ever develop this skill!

3. Building relationships with hiring managers. Do your recruiters meet face-to-face with their hiring managers when they are working a position for that manager? Not only the first time but every time! You don’t build a strong relationship and find out how to add value if you don’t put in quality time with hiring managers. Today’s recruiters are moving too fast, to understand this value, and how it ultimately saves them a ton of time and effort!

4. Building relationships with candidates, that goes beyond the initial screening interview. Can your recruiters share with the hiring manager the candidate’s ‘story’ for each candidate that is presented to the manager? My goal as a recruiter should be that a manager shouldn’t be able to ask me a question about a candidate that I can’t answer. That’s tough, but that’s my goal!

This all seems so basic, yet most recruiters are weakest in these skills.

Why?

I believe the industry struggles here because TA leaders don’t know how to train these skills, and we don’t have off-the-shelve training programs that really go deep on these skills. So, instead of training recruiters properly, we just give them more technology so they can do a bad job, faster.

The training for four things above is very much a hands-on, one-on-one training. Sitting face-to-face and going over and practicing what these conversations look and sound like, and correcting in the moment, and doing them again and again.

The phone skills are just down and dirty getting recruiters on the phone and seeing who will conquer their fear! My first three weeks as a recruiter in training was calling 100 candidates a day. I couldn’t leave until I made 100 outgoing calls, each day, for three weeks.

At the end of those three weeks, I didn’t know if I could recruit, but I knew I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone and talk to someone!

Make sure you connect with Bryan, he’s one of the TA leaders in the industry that really gets it!

The True Cost of a Bad Hire

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If there is one constant in HR and Recruiting it is the fact that no one will ever agree on how much a bad hire costs an organization!  Never!  It doesn’t matter how much time you put into coming up with some algorithm, how much research to back up your numbers, it’s still going to be 90% subjective/soft numbers at best.

This is the main reason executives in our organizations think the majority of HR/Talent Pros in the world don’t get business!   We come to them with stuff like this:

“We need to reduce turnover because of Engineer who leaves us, costs the company $7,345,876.23!”

Then you go through a 73 slide PowerPoint deck showing how you came up with the calculations all the way down the parking meter expense during the interview, and when you’re done, no one believes you’re even close to an actual number.

The gang over at National Business Research Institute put together a pretty good infographic proving my point – take a look:

NBRI - The Cost of a Bad Hire Infographic

97%+ of the ‘lost’ cost is from “Training” and “Productivity Loss” and those, my friends, are considered very subjective measures in almost all organizations.  What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’.  And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here.  Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’.  And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here.  Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

So, here’s a better way to figure out the cost of a bad hire:

1. Ask your head of finance or accounting what they think it costs? “Ballpark it for me?”  $10K? Sounds great! We’ll use $10K.

2. Use $10K as your cost of bad hires.

Your reality, HR’s Reality, is it really doesn’t matter what the number is.  Only that the powers that be in your organization all agree on the number. Stop wasting your time trying to come up with a better number, just come up with a number that those signing the check agree is probably legit.

Pokemon Go Your Employees To Better Health

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I hate posts that just comment on the hottest thing going on in the world. Here’s the thing, I’m the last guy you want to hear some commentary on Black Lives Matter! So, you get Pokemon Go commentary instead!

Okay, here’s my take on Black Lives Matter –

  • If you say “All Lives Matter” you’re an ignorant asshole.
  • Of course “all” lives matter, but “all” lives are not getting killed for basic traffic violations.
  • I drove my car today. I was even speeding. At no point was I concerned a cop was going to pull me over and kill me for speeding, or anything else! I’m a middle-class white dude. That, by itself, is like a get out of jail free card for life!
  • Black Lives Matter because right now we need Black Lives to Matter. Let’s hope at some point we can add the Black Lives to the All Lives, but right now we can’t yet.
  • If you say Blue Lives matter, I get it. My brother is a cop. Cops get paid for shit. Have awful training, and are asked to make split second decisions in tense moments. They put their life on the line to protect civilians every day. Mistakes in that environment will be made, often. That’s a problem. When shots are fired, I hope and pray a cop will be there to protect me. Just like many were in Dallas.

Okay, now onto Pokemon Go!

  • My 13 year old walked around in our neighborhood more in the past 4 days then he did in the past 4 years!
  • Pokemon Go is f’ing brilliant. It’s the best thing to happen to wellness since, well, anything!
  • You should support your unhealthy employees need to want to go and find Pokemon! It will be the most successful thing you’ll ever do in employee wellness.
  • Also, on a side Recruiting note, did you realize there are nerd-herds out trying to catch Pokemon! Talk about great pools of IT talent just wondering around your city! Get on this! Pokemon Go is the best thing to happen to IT recruiting since Snap Chat! (he said completely laughing to himself knowing someone will truly believe this!)

Honestly, I love Pokemon Go. I saw so many teens out in my city walking and riding bikes the past few days!  Interacting together, while completely looking down at their phones.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and my parents would lock me out of the house until the street lights came on. Well, almost.

I even say white kids and black kids walking together, almost hand in hand, trying to find Pikachu! Dr. King would have had a tear in his eye, that a Japanese multi-national company developed a smartphone app that would finally bring us together under a common cause!

 

Wage Growth Means You Usually Screw Your Female Employees!

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I’ve been talking a lot lately about how women are getting paid less. Much of it is legitimate, some of it is not. Either way, it’s about to get worse!

Take a look at this chart from Business Insider, wages are growing at a fast rate:

Screen Shot 2016-07-08 at 2.12.49 PM

What does this mean?  You are about to start paying your employees and new hires more. This is bad news for women, since historically two things happen that screw them over in times like this:

  1. They’re less likely to leave their current organization.
  2. They’re less likely to negotiate higher salaries when starting a new job.

How does wage growth hurt women in these two cases?

First, if you stay at an organization, and don’t ask for more money, most organizations aren’t just going to give you money. At the same time, the organization is hiring new people, in the same positions, for more money! Now, you would hope that organizations would do the right thing, and make everyone whole, but we know this doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

Second, studies show women are less likely to negotiate for higher salaries when they are starting a new job. This becomes an issue as some organizations will pay whatever it takes in hard to find talent environments, meaning those who are tough negotiators are going to come in at higher rates. This usually means men will make more in the same or similar positions.

As wages grow fast, and talent is hard to find, many times in large organizations these inequalities will get missed.  This is part of why women get paid less. Things happen fast, a hiring manager has a shot at a great male developer and they pay more than others in their group. They know it’s more, but they’re desperate. They think they’ll take care of it when things slow down, but we know, things never slow down!

HR pros need to be very careful to watch incoming salaries and salary changes during these times of high wage growth. The market compensation is changing so fast, you might have to look at this quarterly, or even monthly, depending the industry, location, or position.

You already have a problem with paying females less, don’t allow fast moving markets to make your problem worse!

How To Build a Dream Team at Work

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If you pulled up any sports-related website or watched any sports news show on TV in the past few days you know that NBA player Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City Thunder and accepted a free agent offer to go and play for the Golden State Warriors.

It’s a big deal because Golden State was already pretty good, now, with Kevin, they look to be unstoppable! Basically, Golden State has built a team with arguably 4 of the top 20 players in the NBA on one team (Durant, Curry, Thompson, and Green). Most ‘great’ teams might have three top players, no one in history has had four when all playing at their peak!

Building a dream team seems to only happen in sports, but you hear talent acquisition leaders and executives talk about it a lot. How do we build a sales dream team, a marketing dream team, a design dream team, etc.? We all want to be a part of a dream team, or be a part of building a dream team for our organization!

So, how do you build a dream team?

1. You have to know how you want to ‘play’. You have to define what it is you want to do. An outcome. A style. “We want the best designed UX of any platform that supports patient safety in a hospital environment.” As an example.

2. You have to know who is the top talent in your industry that can accomplish the outcome you desire.  This is actually the hardest part of building a dream team in a non-sports environment because we usually don’t have comparing statistics or analytics to even start to understand who the best is.

3. You have to be able to recruit those individuals to your team. This is actually easier than in professional sports. In pro sports it usually takes one or two superstars to make a decision to get together, then they help recruit the others. In the real world, it helps to have a well-known professional, but it’s not necessary if you can sell the right story, compensation, and location!

4. Just having the ‘best players’ doesn’t guarantee success, they have to buy into the goal of the entire organization. This means having leadership with a clear vision that goes beyond the outcome. Yes, we want to win a championship, but we want to win that championship together, utilizing all of our strengths. This is another really tough thing in a real-world setting because it takes great visionary leadership.

5. Having a ‘Dream Team’ is about “Team”. You’ll have great talent and that great talent needs to understand that they go nowhere without those who support them to do great work. So, your dream team members have to be servant leaders. If they have great talent and treat people like crap, they won’t end up being a great talent!

I love it when great talent makes the conscious decision to get together and try and do something great. Some people don’t. They would prefer to see one great talent try and do it on their own. I love watching highly talented people get together and see how far they can push the levels of greatness! That’s what dream teams are all about, the dream.

2016’s Newest Benefit – Baby Sign-on Bonuses!

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According to this USA Today article, the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at it’s lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here are probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons one might be concerned that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. already has 3 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees today. Imagine if you now have millions of fewer workers to even choose from, and by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them as well.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment – but this will be

That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment but this will be an HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 20 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent, Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically, my advice remains the same as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself.  But as we look at countries with low birthrates the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.    We need to change our ways right now. We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest

I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the toughest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We already do it for college students! I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kid’s marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

What if it’s impossible to fix the Gender Wage Gap?

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I love the HR and Talent data analytics platform Visier and have been following them for years. Recently, Visier released a study called the Visier Insight’s Report: Gender Equity that I found fascinating!

Basically, Visier claims they discovered the main reason behind the gender pay gap and they titled it the “Manager Divide” (You can download the report here). The Manager Divide—an underrepresentation of women in manager positions—significantly contributes to the gender wage gap. To break it down simply, women begin to leave the workforce around age 26 to begin having babies. At this point, the wage gap begins and women never catch up!

Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 2.33.25 PMYou can clearly see it in this graph from the Visier report. Men and women virtually earn the same up until age 26, in fact, women earn slightly more. At age 26 there is a huge split in the graph, and women don’t even start to close that gap until close to retirement.

Visier gives a bunch of great ways for organizations to close the gap:

– Implement the “Rooney Rule”: for every manager position you have open to fill, consider “at least one woman and one underrepresented minority” in your slate of candidates.

– Implement blind screening, removing names (or other gender identifiers) from resumes when selecting candidates for interviews.

– Increase measurement and awareness of gender equity in the rollout or implementation of HR policies, including manager promotions and hires, and compensation policies.

– Support meaningful paid parental leave that is equal for both women and men.

– Ensure it is socially acceptable for both men and women to take time off to care for their children.

All good stuff, right?

Here’s my question: if this gender wage gap phenomenon happens because of a natural cause (childbirth and rearing), how does any of this change it?

It doesn’t. The majority of women are till going to leave the workforce, on average between 26 and 36, to begin raising their family. Whether these women leave for 9 months or 9 years, they’ll return to the workforce with that much less of experience.  So, they’ll always be playing catch up, for the most part, to those men who didn’t leave to have babies and raise them.

The reality is, because of women leaving to have babies and raise families, they’ll always be a pay disparity between genders. Should it be 21% on average? No. That’s why we need to focus on the real issue at hand.

In most organizations of any size, you have females making less than men who are in the same position with basically the same experience, performance, and education level. The only reason they are making less is because they’re a female. That’s the real issue.

How do you fix this?

The old fashion way. It’s a big project. You’ll have big spreadsheets and you’ll have uncomfortable conversations with managers who gave larger raises to men, for no reason other than their bias. It’s an uncomfortable project, but it’s the only way to solve the real issue. Painstakingly one position, one department, one person at a time.

You can do high-level analysis in your organization and you’ll find a gender pay gap. That’s natural, the Visier report pointed this out. It’s going to continue to happen because we live in a society and culture where women still do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to childbirth and raising the children. You have to get into the weeds to find the real issues within your organization in terms of gender pay gap, not a 20,000-foot flyover.

Every large organization I’ve ever worked in had gender pay issues within specific positions and departments. It wasn’t rampant, but it was there. A word of caution, don’t point fingers at fault. Just work to solve the problem. It happened, how do we move forward and fix it. Placing blame will cause stalls and fights, you don’t want to be a part of at an executive level. Just find ways to quietly fix the problem and make things right.

 

5 Things You Should Be Doing in June to Prepare for Your Open Enrollment in the Fall

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It’s a beautiful day here in Michigan! 75 degrees and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. In the north, we get only a limited time to enjoy summer, so when it finally arrives you better believe I’m taking full advantage! (For, me that’s tending to my flowers and doing some yard work.)

What’s my point? The last thing you probably want to be doing right now is brainstorming ways to prep for open enrollment!  But guess what—you don’t have to…Because, while I’m still here in the office, I’m going to do it for you, so you (and I) can spend a little more time enjoying this great summer weather!

Here then is my list of Important OE Stuff You Should Be Doing Right Now:

  1. Schedule employee roundtable meetings to get the feedback you need on the last benefit design. Make it fun. Provide an ice cream sundae station! It will work twofold: you’ll get the feedback you need to start your next design, and people love ice cream! You connect talking about benefits with having a positive experience. Simple psychology is the best psychology!
  2. Do a mid-year follow-up with your benefits broker.They should already be on top of this and begging you to go out to lunch, or golfing, but if they haven’t, remind them. Specifically, this is a great time to look at your brand-name drug utilization and talk about some strategies to increase generic use and reduce this cost to the organization.
  3. Executive cost foreshadowing should be happening right now.At this point in the year, your broker can have a pretty good guess at where your new premiums are going to come in at, and what this might mean to your new benefits design. Schedule a meeting with the C-Suite to give them some insight now, so they’re prepared when budgeting season comes. The best way not to ‘shock’ an executive is to get to them early in the process.
  4. Deliver your own Summer Tips and Tricks communication to your employees on proper benefit utilization!Summer seems to be the time when people find their way to the emergency room when maybe the could have gone to urgent care. These are also a great time to highlight wellness initiatives since we are all trying to get into those swimsuits before vacation! Simple reminders like these save the organization money and keep your most important messages top of mind to your employees.
  5. Schedule an OE marketing session before all the summer vacations start.As benefit pros we spend a lot of time and care figuring out what to say to our employees. What we tend to figure out too last minute is HOW we want to market these changes to our employees. Summer is a great time to not only think about the how—but to play around with some new ideas. What if you texted employees tips about OE on top of emailing them? What if you decided to send postcards to everyone’s homes? Now’s the time to figure out what you want to try—and establish a schedule for getting it done in time.

(Speaking of schedules, if you want even more ideas on what to be doing in June and July for OE, check out this excellent post—What to Do 12-16 Weeks Before OE, by the folks at Jellyvision.)

Anyway,  I really do believe you can never be too prepared for Open Enrollment. A little extra effort now will lead to a great experience for you and your team come fall—and let you have more fun this summer, knowing you’re ahead of the game.