Category Archives: Trench HR

You Can’t Copy Culture

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I want our company to be just like Zappos!

No you don’t.

First, Zappos has a very strong culture, of which, most people couldn’t handle or wouldn’t like.  They hire very specific talent based on this cultural fit and desire to be in their certain culture, it’s not for everyone.  Now drink. Yep, that’s the new game sweeping the nation at HR and Recruiting conferences.  If a speaker says “Zappos” or “Google” you need to take a drink.  We might be HR nerds, but we party.

Second, you couldn’t replicate their culture even if you hired every single one of their employees and moved them into your offices.  You can’t copy culture. You can’t grow it again.  Culture is very specific to an organization, the leadership, the employee mix and time.

It’s not something you can just cut and paste into another organization. Believe me. It’s been tried about a million times and failed a million and one.

Remember when it was cool to hire folks from Disney because you wanted some of that Disney customer service culture in your organization? Yeah, how did that work out? You’re also not Disney. Or Southwest. Or some fun tech startup that plays ping pong and wears expensive hoodies.

You are you.  Stop trying to copy some other organizations culture and just do you.

Your culture is fine.  The people who are cancer to your culture are not. Get rid of them.  Communicate. Have an idea about where you’ve been and where you’re going and tell your employees.  Get them involved. Find out what tweaks their curiosity. Hire people who want to work for you.  No, not people who want a job. People who, specifically, want to work for your company.

I had a brilliant man once mentor me during a big merger between our companies.  I was young in my HR career and the company I worked for didn’t have a positive culture.  I wanted to change that. He told me that was useless.  He said we could change every single employee one by one, and would still be the same a year from now.

He said, “Culture always wins.” Good or bad, positive or negative. The culture you have will win. It will beat you.

Don’t fight the culture you have. Work with it, make it work for you.  Culture evolves, it doesn’t change quickly.  That’s your biggest problem. Too many leaders think they have the power to change culture overnight, but they don’t.

Leaders are like salt to culture. Salt exaggerates the taste of the food it is added to.  Leaders can add to the culture you have. They can make good culture even better, and they can bad culture even worse. What they can’t do is make bad culture, good.  Or, good culture, bad. An organization with a strong positive culture will beat a bad leader trying to betray it.

Don’t be discouraged.

You can keep fighting the good fight, just don’t get too down on yourself when you don’t see results right away, and don’t copy another culture!

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

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How are those hiring manager “intake” meetings going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Written Notes

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My oldest son graduated from high school this spring and we had one of those big old traditional open houses with a tent and tables and a slushy machine.  It was a nice gathering of 200+ family, friends, neighbors, teachers, coaches, people I don’t recall ever meeting, kids looking for a free desert, bums looking for a free drink, etc.

The whole idea of an open house is so your kid can get cash to start off their life in the ‘real’ world.  Invite as many people as you can. Update and clean your house for a year.  Decide on a menu that won’t break your bank account, but will impress all the other moms in attendance who are also throwing open houses.  Put up a lot of pictures and awards.

Side note: My wife won the 2015 Open House competition.  It wasn’t an unanimous vote, but she pretty much ran away with it. Also, she is a front runner for 2016 and my middle son’s graduation open house. We’re Sackett’s, we only get bigger and better!  I’m already having the back-2-back Open House Champs shirts printed up! #Confidence

We got lucky.  His real world consists of a college scholarship to play baseball.  The big expenses like tuition and books will be paid for, he has to pick up some living expenses, but his hard work paid off.  He now feels what it’s like to have more than a few hundred dollars in his bank account.  Which basically means he eats out almost every meal. He’s ghetto rich.

One really cool thing happened from having the open house.  Our son had to write thank you notes to all those who came, and all those who sent cards and cash.  He was lucky to have to write a ton of thank yous!

I voted on just getting the preprinted Thank You notes.  I bet half of the thank you notes we received of were this variety. Thanks for coming. I’m so grateful! Here’s a post card that was preprinted and my mom addressed the envelope. I probably would have went with a 10% off your next appetizer at Applebee’s or something to make it more special, but again, Sackett’s go big!

My wife is a traditionalist, he was going to be hand writing his notes.

It took some time to get them done, but to his credit, he really put in some time and thought into writing these notes.  I’ve heard from so many people congratulating me on his thank you notes!  Most commented on how much detail he added, and how he made it personal to them specifically.  That definitely makes us proud parents!

The entire experience just reminds me of how important it is to sometimes take the time to write a note out by hand.  In our world of messaging and emails, it just gets so easy to tune out so many of these communications.  Rarely, does a handwritten note get tuned out.  Remember that kids when you go looking for a job.  Your resume might get eaten up by an ATS, but most handwritten notes and cards get passed on directly to decision makers without being opened by a gatekeeper!

It’s Always Someone’s First Time

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Sometimes I forget that many other HR and Talent pros aren’t as geeky about the profession as I am.  I like to break down the profession of HR on the following scale:

1. The 1%ers.  These are the people who really get HR and Talent. They are the ones who actually decide what the future of the profession will look like, because they are smarter than all of us.  I am not one of these folks. I love to hang out with these folks, and I’m happy to call some of them friends, but I’m sure I annoy them with my questions and trivial insights.

2. The First Ten. The top ten percent of our profession.  Most of these are folks are the people you see running big HR shops, HR thought leaders, pundits in the space.  Smart folks to be sure, but also folks are involved beyond just doing the job of HR. They are the foot soldiers of the one percenters. They carry the message. I like to think I’m here most days.

3. The Masses.  These are the good men and mostly women who do the work of HR and Talent Acquisition on a daily basis. These are SHRM members, who might go to a national conference, state conference and definitely attend local meetings every once in a while. They are in the trenches every day, fighting the good fight, trying to make organizations better through great people practices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

4. The Why We Hate HR pros. These the bottom ten percent folks.  These are the HR and Talent pros that make the organization hate HR. They use their power in HR for bad, not good.  They take out their crappy, meaningless lives on unsuspecting employees.  These folks should be hung publicly. They work to bring down the entire function of HR as a whole, but think they actually do good HR work.

I try to remember this scale when I talk to HR and Talent pros around the world.  Most just want to do better, and most are seeing problems and issues for the first time.  It’s not that they “don’t get it”, they have never seen it.  It’s there first time.

Someone might be very experienced in HR and Talent, but seeing something for the first time, or have made the decision to try something they have never tried.  As a first ten it’s my role, I believe, in the industry to help those folks in any way I can to get better.  That helps the entire profession to get better.

So, what does this all mean?

I want to encourage HR and Talent pros to reach out.  If I can’t help you, I’ve got great friends who can.  The community will help you get better, if you really want to move your organization forward.  We love success stories!

At one point in time we were all first timers doing this HR and Talent thing.  We either learned through trial and error, or through someone helping us that had already experienced what we were trying to do.  The cool part about the community I hang out with, is we all remember our first time, and want to help you with yours.

T3 – @RocketLawyer

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This week on T3 I take a look at legal benefit provider Rocket Lawyer.  Rocket Lawyer allows your employees to manage, virtually, all of your legal needs online. Employees can create legal documents and legal forms instantly with safe & secure storage, e-signatures and lawyer review.

This is one of many fringe benefit options that an employer can pick up for their employees, like pet insurance, dry cleaning, free lunch, etc.  Some employees will find this service invaluable, and some will never find a use for it.  What I know is HR pros get way to many inquiries from our employees for legal advice and help!

While my employees might like a free lunch, the HR person in me really would like them to have another outlet for legal advice and services!

The one issue that I see happening constantly, and it’s only going to get worse based on demographics, is employees having to care for aging parents.  Rocket Lawyer can help your employees set up power of attorney, ask real lawyers in their state and area about their legal rights and advice in regards to dealing with their parents estates, etc.  This is one issue I just continue to hear from more and more employees on, where they need real legal advice, not my ‘legal’ HR advice!

Rocket Lawyer is not an EAP.  It’s a full blown legal technology that allows employees to take care of a ton of legal documentation on their own for no additional fees.  Handle landlord and rental contracts, Immigration and Visa issues, Pre-nuptial agreements, set up a will, etc. It’s self serve legal services, online, for a few dollars per month, per employee.

The other piece I like about Rocket Lawyer is that as an organization and HR the service is totally separate and confidential.  This takes the burden off you and your organization in dealing with your employees legal issues, but at the same time you are giving the professional support to help them take care of their business.

I was impressed. Great, easy to use interface.  Simple to set up documents online.  The service could easily save your employees thousands of dollars in basic legal fees.  Check them out, and get a demo.  Could be a great add to this years open enrollment plan!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

No One is Going to Remember How Much Money You Saved!

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When I first started my career in HR on the corporate side of the fence I was always very concerned about my budget.  I spent a long time making sure I developed a good budget and I worked even harder to stay on or under budget.  Ultimately, it was the biggest waste of time I ever spent as an HR professional.

What I learned over the years was that budgets are important, but succeeding at your functional area is more important!

No one cared if I came in 7% under budget, but I had critical positions open for way too long, and projects were behind or failed as a result. No one cared that I came in under salary budget if our turnover increased.  No one cared that didn’t use all of my HR technology budget if they continued to be frustrated with processes that caused them more work.

I didn’t learn this until I spent so much money I thought I was going to be fired, and ended up getting praised!

I was working on a project to open up 40 pharmacies in a year. That meant we had to find a lot of pharmacists.  For those in that game, you know finding 80 or so Pharmacists isn’t something you just go post on CareerBuilder.  We had to market. We had to go to a ton of schools. We had to ‘buy’ some folks. Sign on bonuses. Relocation bonuses. Tuition guarantees. Whatever it took!

I was so far over my budget I took on this thought process, “well, I might as well fill them all, I’ll be fired next year at budget time!”  So, I did. I got a sourcing company to help me. I got my team on the road. We threw parties on campuses for new pharmacy grads. We killed it!

In my year end budget meeting, the VP of Pharmacy congratulated me and my team.  We were over our budget by almost a half a million dollars. The one factor I didn’t know, which I should have, was each pharmacy that we didn’t open cost the company about three million.  My overage, wasn’t peanuts!

There are times to save money in HR.  Anything you can give back at the end of the year will always be appreciated.  I learned, though, that being over for the right reasons is looked upon almost more strategic than the times I gave money back.

I faced more questions giving money back, then spending more than I had. Executives wanted to know why I didn’t spend all the money I had in my technology budget.  Were we going to fall behind? What my plans were in the future? Etc.  Not spending my money to get better, was looked at as a sign of I didn’t know what I was doing.

I learned that no one is going to remember how much I saved if I’m not making my function better. Staying status quo isn’t a good answer.  They gave me money for a reason, and it was up to me to use that money to make us better.  Giving it back just showed them I wasn’t strategic enough to find great ways to use those resources.

Working for Free – Contingent Search Model Changing

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A funny thing happens when the economy is good. Corporate Talent Acquisition pros believe that agency contingent recruiters should work their job openings like its the most important priority the recruiter has ever had.  There are a couple reasons for this:

1. This opening is the most important priority for the Corporate TA pro, so it should be yours.

2. When the economy was bad, you treated the Corporate TA pro like they were your number one priority.

Then the economy gets good, and the agency folks have choices and now as a Corporate TA pro you find out who your real agency recruiting friends are!  Those who will actually come through for you, when you call on them and tell them you have something urgent.

My Corporate TA friends are the ones who pay me.

Don’t take that wrong.  You see this is the game we all play.  You want me to work your opening, but you ‘really’ don’t want to pay me if you don’t have to.  I get it. You get it. It’s the world of contingency recruitment.  I spend most of my time just trying to truly determine who will pay me for the work I do.  Because most of the work I do is for free.

So, now that the economy is good, way too many Corporate TA pro have unreasonable expectations of their agency counterparts. If I’m working for free, mostly, I’m going to be more picky about who I work for free for.  If you have me work five openings, and you then fill all five on your own, I’m probably not working your ‘urgent’ number six. If you have me work three, and I fill one, I’m helping you out. It’s simple economics.

Something new is being added to the game. This happens when times are good for agency recruiters.  There are two types of recruiting on the agency side:

1. Contingent – see above. Basically, I work for free until I find you someone you want to hire, then you pay me.

2. Retained – You pay me my big fee up front, and I work until I find you the person you want to hire.

Traditionally, retained is really only used for executive search, but when talent is hard to come by, you’ll also see it used in the professional ranks.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a new hybrid model of search show up, called Retained Contingent.  Retained contingent is a mix of both models. It’s still a contingent search, but you’re paying me about 10-20% of the fee up front for me to prioritize your search to the top of the workload.

Let’s say you’re searching for an Engineering Manager for $100K, and signed a 25% fee agreement. The total fee upon placement is $25K. In the Retained Contingent model you would pay me $5K to start the search up front, then $20K upon placement guarantee. If I don’t find the person, after a contracted amount of time, the $5K is for my work, no other fee is owed.

This is a win-win for both the Corporate TA pro and the agency, but only if the Corporate TA pro is sure they want to pay for the search.  If that’s the case, I want the benefit of retained focus and prioritization, without the risk of paying the full fee up front and having the firm not come through with a successful hire.

I don’t want to take you cash and then fail. You’ll make sure everyone knows I failed.  But, I also have limited resources and want to focus those resources on the best clients. We both have skin in the game.  That creates a partnership. That creates success.

Just wait. You’ll see a lot more of this over the next five to ten years.  Corporate TA pros are getting smarter, and so are the agency pros.  In the end, both sides want value for their work.

3 Ways to Turn Down a Job Offer

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The NBA free agent signings took place at midnight EST last night.  The signing period lasts 9 days, where players can negotiate, but not sign, deals until last night at midnight.  One big free agent signing this year is DeAndre Jordan, who was with the LA Clippers last season, and had a verbal, handshake, agreement to join the Dallas Mavericks.

That was until DeAndre decided to change his mind and re-sign with the Clippers, but not tell the Mavericks he was going to do this!  Basically, doing what we see in HR all the time, accepting our offer, only to see the candidate turn around and accept the counteroffer.  The problem with DeAndre was that he never let Dallas know he was going to do this, so they weren’t able to go after another player to replace him!

Not only did he not tell Dallas, he actually tweeted out a picture from his house with a chair blocking the door, to give the implication that his Clipper teammates weren’t allowing anyone to come to his house until after midnight and contract was signed!  Way to keep it classy LA…

So, how should a candidate turn down an offer when they decide to go in another direction?  Here are three ways that are all better than was DeAndre did:

1. Pick up the phone! If you are adult enough to make the decision to accept another offer, be adult enough to pick up the freaking phone and let the other party know that is what your intent is.  You get bonus adult points if you also give them a reason or two of why the other offer was better for you to accept! Do this the moment you have made the decision to accept the other position. Timing is critical for this, as the other organization might have a backup candidate and they don’t want to miss out on this person.

2. Send an email.  Less favorable, and it’s definitely conflict avoidant, but at least you did something to let the organization know.  The plus factor on the email is you have time to craft your message, as some people are not good over the phone in real-time interactions.  Again, give the organization some sort of ‘real’ reason on why their offer wasn’t as good as the offer you accepted.  This will be appreciated, as companies need to know how to get better.  NEVER – give the “it’s me, not you” as a reason. That’s lame!

3. Text message.  I put this one in for the kids. They like texting, but the reality is, this looks unprofessional, and you’ll get know adult points for doing this.  The one way I can see texting being used to turn down an offer is if it is used in conjunction with another form of communication. A quick “just wanted to let you know I will not be accepting your offer. Sorry. I’ll call soon with an explanation”, will work, but make sure you call!

I’m not sure why anyone ever feels it’s okay to accept a job offer, then just decide to not do it, but never communicate back with the organization. This happens more than you think, but I’m always surprised by this mentality of who would think this is acceptable.

In my career I’ve probably had at least a half a dozen people accept jobs, sign an offer letter, then on start day, be a no-show. I find out later they decided to accept a counteroffer, but never communicated anything back to my organization.  This is across multiple industries, multiple companies. I would love to see an industry study of why people think this is an appropriate behavior!

The morale to the story? Don’t be a DeAndre!

The Jealous Girlfriend Interview Technique!

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About a year ago Forbes had an article, Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only 3 True Job Interview Questions, that shared the “wisdom” of a handful of Executive  Recruiters on the only things that you should really have to ask a candidate.  There 3 questions where:

  1. Can you do the job?
  2. Will you love the job?
  3. Can we tolerate working with you?

Simple enough.  Straight to the point, and you can assume for the $75,000 you’re paying, this is probably the extent of their screening as well!

In my Recruiting/HR career it’s probably the single most often asked question I get:

“What are your best interview questions?”

Then, you get to hear their questions. About how Google has some really great ones. Even, how I heard once about a company that asked people if they were an animal which animal would they be? Or, if you only pick one vegetable to eat the rest of your life, would it be carrots?  It goes on, and on. Until you want to vomit!

The actual interview questions have very little impact in the success of the interview.

If you are interviewing anyone with some decent smarts, they are going to be able to ace your questions with little effort.  What is important in interviewing is what you allow the candidate to get away with.  I find that most recruiters and hiring managers to be way (I mean WAY!) to easy when it comes to questioning candidates.  See if this example sounds familiar:

Interviewer: “John, looks like you left your last next to last company in May, but didn’t start your current position until July. Can you explain that gap?”

John: “Sure, you know I was doing a great job and I didn’t see myself moving up in that company, so I wanted to go find somewhere I could move up the ladder.”

Bam! At this point, most interviewers move on to the next questions.  When clearly, John deflected, and someone needs to rip into some Gestapo interrogation tactics and find out what’s really going on.  But they don’t, it would be a conflict, he might think we are rude, and well, we’ll move on…

Follow-up questions to original answers during an interview is a skill in itself.  The only interview questions you ever need are the questions a Jealous Girlfriend asks when you come home on a Saturday morning around 3am.  Shoot, just hire Jealous Girlfriends as your interviewers! They’ll get to the bottom of a candidates background!

The hardest interview I ever had was with a woman that was eventually my boss, who was a former U.S. Army interrogator. It was exhausting! It was painful! It was Awesome! I actually lost my voice (after the 7th hour – True Story!).

She was the ultimate Jealous Girlfriend, in fact, I think she trains Jealous Girlfriends in her spare time.  There wasn’t an answer I could give her that she was satisfied with. She just kept at it, until I would slip and say something I really didn’t mean to. Once she smelled the blood, it was over.

The result? She hired the best talent (excluding me) in the entire organization by far!  Bad hired did not make it past here interviewing technique.

So, don’t worry about having the “best” interview questions. Really any will do. Just don’t accept the first answer you get!

 

T3- @Hirabl

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This week on T3 I take a look at the specialized staffing vendor software technology called Hirabl.  Hirabl is designed to help staffing companies catch revenue they missed because a client, or potential client, hired one of of the staffing vendors candidates, but never paid the fee. What!?!

Yep, it’s actually a fairly common occurrence in the staffing and talent acquisition game.  It can happen a number of ways. I don’t want my talent acquisition brother and sisters thinking I’m called them cheats.  99.9% of are completely above board, but .1% are sneaky!

Here’s how it all might go down:

An organization is contacted by a staffing company to help on an opening. A good staffing company will insist on a signed contract.  The get the signature and begin working.  The organization decides not to move forward with any of the staffing companies candidates. Both parties go on their way.  This happens a lot in the staffing world.

Fast forward six months down the road and the organization has the same opening.  They post the opening and a candidate comes into their ATS. The same candidate the staffing company presented six months prior.  By contract, that candidate is still ‘owned’ by the staffing firm. The organization hires the candidate, but never thinks about paying the staffing company. The staffing company has moved on and doesn’t even realize you hired their original candidate.  By contract the organization still owes the fee, but it’s rarely collected, because on one comes asking!

Hirabl has technology that goes out and through social profiles and your internal data, finds these circumstances.  You then get an alert, so you can go ‘remind’ the organization you presented the company to that they indeed owe you some money.  Depending on your volume, Hirabl, on average, is finding hundreds of thousands in lost fees.

You need a couple of things to make this successful: 1. Good, signed contracts; 2. Good data for them to search on. Most staffing companies, using a decent ATS, will have the data.  The contract question might be more difficult for some. In my organization we don’t do anything without signed contracts, so we would be good on that front as well.

I wanted to write about this for a couple of reasons. First, I know a lot of staffing folks who read my blog that can use this and get back some lost revenue. Second, I wanted those corporate talent acquisition folks to know that staffing vendors are getting more sophisticated, and some things that you might have gotten away with years ago, will soon be coming to an end.

Be careful signing a staffing contract. Usually, most staffing vendors are going to ‘own’ candidates they submit to you for at least twelve months.  That means if you hire one of those folks, even if that candidate came to you on their own, you contractually are liable for that fee. That’s why you should be signing a ton of contracts.  Find a few good firms. Work with them closely, and you won’t have any surprises.

You can better believe I’ll be trying Hirabl!  We do a ton of volume, and as much as I would like to think no client hired one of our folks, I know we’ll find some where it happened. Stay tuned!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.