Category Archives: Trench HR

Hiring Is About To Get Really Difficult!

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One thing was abundantly clear from speakers and thought leaders at SHRM 2015, hiring is hard, and it’s about to get much harder!

That isn’t good news for any of us in HR and Talent Acquisition. There are two forces that are currently happening that are making hiring more difficult than it has been in over ten years:

  1. Solid economy and job growth.
  1. Baby Boomers leaving the workforce.

This isn’t earth shattering information, we all kind of new this was happening.  The issue is we are now all beginning to feel this in every part of the country and in almost every job category.  This means some things are going to happen, and the top HR and Talent Pros are already preparing for these:

  • Wage Growth: CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson spoke at SHRM on Tuesday and had some great data showing that organizations see wage growth of around 5% in 2015, and similar in years to come. Are you budgeting 5% increases? I’m guessing not!
  • Recruitment Process Challenges: How many steps does it take to apply for a job in your organization?  If it’s more than two, you’ve got problems!  Can someone apply for a job online with your organization without having a resume? Why not?  Matt also showed data from CareerBuilder showing 40% of HR and Talent Pros have never applied for one of their own jobs to better understand the true experience!
  • Technology Challenges: Do you have a way to reengage candidates in your system on a regular basis?  A system that allows you to let great talent know, that you already have in your system, when you have an opening that fits them? It’s called CRM, and only about 20% of companies have technology that can do this important recruitment marketing function!
  • Job Design Challenges: Too many of us are working and designing jobs like we are living in a society that was pre-internet, pre-ultra connected. We still think we need employees sitting in front of us from 8-5pm, Monday thru Friday. If they aren’t sitting in front of us, they must not be working! Indeed shared that 80% of job searches on their site include this single word: “Remote”!  Are you adjusting those jobs that can be flexible?

Those organizations that believe they can recruit and get talent like they have been doing for the last couple of decades are going to fail.  It’s really that simple.  Talent attraction will be a powerful strategic differentiator for organizations over the next decade, like almost no other time in our history.

The good news?  At no other point in our history do have access to the information on how to be successful!  Twenty years ago, doing great talent acquisition was mostly trying stuff and getting lucky.  In today’s world you can learn easily how the best organizations are attracting talent at conferences, on websites, in blogs, webinars, etc.  There are so many sources of this information, that we now have no excuse to improve what we are doing.  We just have to do it!

 

Live from #SHRM15 – It’s a Wrap! Lessons Learned.

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The largest HR conference in the world, SHRM National 2015, concluded this week on Wednesday.  As I reflect back on the conference for 2015, I wanted to share some thoughts and learnings I got from the conference.

Here are my thoughts in no particular order:

1. The Expo is still overwhelming.  700+ vendors and some of the SHRM veterans tell me it’s smaller than in year past.  Who cares! It’s still freaking huge!  The funny part is these 700+ companies are truly only a fraction of sellers who are coming after HR and Talent Pros on a daily basis.  I’ve been coming to SHRM for years, and the size of the Expo never stops fascinating me.

2. SHRM is missing an Gigantic opportunity.  15,700 SHRM members attended the annual conference.  About 235,000 did not.  SHRM should be Streaming content live to the members who can’t make it.  Not all the content, just some of the content. Give those that can’t come a taste of what they’re missing.  Of course, some of the big keynotes won’t allow this, contractually. But, almost, 100% of us speaking for free, would welcome the streaming opportunity.  If SHRM streamed content from the national conference, they could get another 50,000 members watching remotely! I can’t tell even implore to you how bad of a missed opportunity this is for SHRM.

3. We are all not Zappos and Google.  I think SHRM speakers get this more than most.  99.9% of SHRM attendees work for organizations that have daily struggles in real HR and Talent problems.  The members come to get better, not to hear how the .1% do it better.  We don’t have Zappos culture, we don’t have Google’s resources, we are Real HR people, give us real HR examples.  I think in 2015, SHRM did a good job of getting speakers that were like the rest of us, and I appreciated that.

4. I’m confused how SHRM schedules speakers and space.  I wish SHRM would tell you up front what size room you would be speaking in. Kris Dunn and I had one of the smallest venues to speak in. Probably a room of 500 and it was packed. People sitting on the floor, standing, etc. My friend Mary Faulkner, who was really good BTW, from Denver Water, had a giant room that probably sat 2,000!  It was Mary’s first time speaking at SHRM, the room was too big. Ours was too small.  SHRM had to know this.  Socially, Kris and I could have gotten 500 people to show up in the parking lot and hear us do our thing.  We’ve worked for years to build an audience.  Why doesn’t SHRM take that into context?

5. HR Vendors Have Learned the ROI on big parties just isn’t there.  Back in the day at SHRM National, you could jump from party to party, every night of the conference.  Huge parties! Free food, drink and entertainment.  This year, there was only one, and it was the SHRM party with Jennifer Hudson. Great party, but it was the ONLY one!  There were private parties, dinners, etc. But nothing for the masses.  That was a change, and I don’t see it coming back.  Vendors are getting more specific and smarter with their spend. Why spend a couple of hundred grand on everyone, when you can spend $25K on a few that you’ll know will more than likely buy?  That’s just good marketing.

6. The SHRM App continues to get better.  Early in the conference I threw SHRM VP of Conference, Lisa Block, under the bus when I tweeted out what “idiot” password protected that SHRM App, which was a first.  I quickly had to eat crow when Lisa tweeted back and said she was the idiot and the reason why was because now the App had all the content of each speaker’s presentation.   Which was totally awesome!  And, I’m the idiot! Lisa did good. Can’t wait to see what she has up her sleeve next year.

I hope to see you all at SHRM in 2016 in D.C.!

 

 

 

Live from #SHRM15 – S#*t HR Tech Salespeople Say!

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That’s right SHRMies today is the day!  2 pm West Coast time, because you know it’s the best coast, Kris Dunn, and I will be dropping knowledge at SHRM 2015. Our presentation will give you the ins and outs of selecting your next HR and/or Talent technology. We’ll also be talking HR vendor negotiating and give you keep insight to getting the best deal you can!

Check us out, if you’re here.  If you’re not, here’s a little taste of what you’ll be missing:

S#*t HR Tech Salespeople Say and How to Translate It!

“This software/tool pays for itself!”

Yeah, and so does that travel insurance you bought to protect your vacation last year!  This always goes well with another line they throw into the mix, “you’ll save so much money, you’ll be able to put money back to the bottomline of the business”.  If you believe this I’ve got some great land to sell in the Everglades!

“Buy now, before the price goes up in September!”

Every single time I hear this from an HR Tech salesperson I hang-up or end the conversation.  This is the cheesiest, of cheeseball lines that a salesperson can use when negotiating.  If you’re giving me a price in June, but I need a couple of months to get this decision through the proper channels, the price better be the same in sixty days.

“We don’t have that yet, but it’s in a future release!”

You know what else is in a future release?  Their ability to use 3D printers to make real rock star candidates!  Sure that future release might be 100 years down the road, but technically they didn’t lie to you!  If the product you’re looking at doesn’t have the functionality you need now, and it’s critical for you to have it, you need to walk away.  Too many things happen in the tech industry to plan on ‘a future release’ to make the product work for you.

Want some more?!?

We’ve got plenty, stop on down to the live show and check us out.  Kris and I are like the movie Twins, with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwartzneggar.  He’s the big one. I’m the good looking one! I think that’s how that movie went…

Anyway, it’ll be fun.  If you couldn’t make it to SHRM, hit me with an email, and I’ll make sure you get a copy of the slide deck for the presentation.

Live from #SHRM15 – Secret Sauce Recipes!

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Yeah, I know it’s Sunday and I normally don’t post on a Sunday, but I’m at the annual SHRM National Conference in Las Vegas and it starts today. The opening keynote speaker is Coach K, the Duke University head basketball coach.  I’m not a big fan.  His team beats my team way too often! So, he’ll be painful to listen to as I remember each defeat.

The SHRM expo floor also opens today with a big reception.  The SHRM expo is hard to describe.  Part flee market. Part carnival. Part car show. All HR and Talent.  Everyone who ever wants to sell stuff to HR is here.  They hand out pens, stress balls, mints, hand sanitizer, t shirts, frisbees, candy, basically, anything to get you to stop and talk to them.

My favorite free stuff that vendors give out is information!  You see, all of these vendors have clients that actually pay these vendors money to use their products and services.  These vendors know what others are doing to be successful.  If you take a few minutes they’ll gladly share the secret sauce recipes of all kinds of organizations!

We all want secret sauce recipes!

It’s probably the greatest weakness of HR and Talent Acquisition, in general, from industry to industry, is we suck at getting competitive data on what other organizations are doing in their HR and Talent shops.  We don’t network with our competition. We think if we share what we are doing, we’re somehow sharing national secrets. So, we fumble around through life, trying to figure it all out on our own.

That is why I spend most of my time at SHRM meeting with vendors.  I treat them like normal people, and they in turn give me great insight to what is working and not working in the world of HR and Talent.  I get smarter. I learn what I can take back to my own shop.  I gain some understanding of what the best organizations are doing that is successful. That’s valuable!

I don’t really care what Coach K does to cheat his way to national titles and stealing recruits.  What I care about is being on the cutting edge of what the best companies are doing to gain an advantage with their employees and getting the best talent.

Check me out on Pericope, where I’ll be live streaming during the conference!

*image credit to Gaping Void.

The #1 Way to Communicate Success of a HR Change!

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Adobe recently changed their annual performance review process of the traditional once-per-year review to a more modern design of having frequent feedback throughout the year:

So, based in part on ideas crowdsourced from employees, Morris and her team scrapped annual evaluations and replaced them with a system called Check In. At the start of each fiscal year, employees and managers set specific goals. Then, at least every eight weeks but usually much more often, people “check in” with their bosses for a real-time discussion of how things are going. At an annual “rewards check-in,” managers give out raises and bonuses according to how well each employee has met or exceeded his or her targets. “Managers are empowered to make those decisions,” says Morris. “There is no ‘matrix.’ HR isn’t involved.”

A big change for any organization, for sure, but that’s not what this post is really about.  You see, Donna Morris, Adobe’s Sr. Global VP of People and Places could have easily just said it’s been a great success and shared stories from employees and hiring managers about how much they loved it. She could have shared retention metrics and employee engagement scores to show its success, but she didn’t. What shared did was absolutely brilliant! She shared this:

Getting feedback in real time, so everyone stays on track and is pulling in the same direction, has helped make Adobe’s 13,000 employees far more productive, Morris says. Adobe’s stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In began.

Drops mic, walks off stage.

You want to really communicate the success of HR change, tie it to direct financial outcomes!  Yes, it’s a major leap to say “Check In” created $50 per share of shareholder value.  Let me say that again, MAJOR LEAP!  In fact, I don’t even think you could scientifically correlate this one HR change to the raise in shareholder value, but she did!  What she did would be similar to saying global temperatures have risen 3 degrees on average since they started making Krispy Kreme donuts, so Krispy Kreme is responsible for global warming!

You see, success of a major program has little to do with fact, and ton to do with perception.  Here is a senior HR executive who gets it.   She wants to do other cool and innovative stuff at Adobe, and now she has her big-win to go back to when someone pushes back that it won’t work, or it’s not needed.   In the minds of Adobe employees, this program has increased shareholder value, and we need to listen to her other ideas!

Take note HR Pros!  If you get this opportunity, you take it 100% of the time! Because you won’t get it often.  How do you communicate your success of a HR program?  Wait until you have favorable financial data in your organization, then connect the dots for people!

Do Demotions Work?

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Quietly, Brian Williams returned to NBC last week. Not in his usual spot of nightly news anchor, but in a demoted spot, for less pay:

The embattled former NBC Nightly News anchor has been demoted and will receive reportedly less money in his new role, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Williams is being replaced by Lester Holt, who took over for him after he was handed down an unpaid six-month suspension for making factually incorrect comments and “misremembering” details spoken about on-air.

The newspaper reported that Williams will receive “substantially” less money when he returns to the network as a breaking news and special reports anchor for MSNBC, a division of NBC. He had been making at least $10 million a year for the last five years.

It begs the question, do demotions work?

They certainly aren’t popular. Both, employers and employees, dislike demotions.  Employers feel like if they demote an employee they are just giving them notice to go find another job.  Employees feel like a failure and that the organization is probably just trying to push them out the door. In my experience demotions rarely work.

What kind of demotions work?

There are times when you promote a good worker into a new role, a promotion, and both you and the employee think it will be great, but then it ends up not being great. The employee can’t handle the new role, you did a bad job preparing them, there were other organizational issues at play, whatever the reason, it’s not working. This happens more than you realize, but we usually just end up firing the employee for performance, or they see the writing on the wall and take off before you get a chance to shoot them yourself.

I always find it ironic when I hear about this type of turnover. I’ll ask, “was this person a good, solid employee before they got promoted?”  The answer is always yes.  They wouldn’t have gotten promoted if they weren’t. So, then, why did this person have to be a turnover statistic? Why couldn’t we figure out how to get them back to a position where they were productive and successful again?

Modern organizational theory doesn’t allow for this.  We don’t believe that a person will ever want to go backwards in their career. Once they have been promoted, they will not want to go back into a position they had prior, and they definitely don’t want a pay cut!  We assume this to be true. Also, it might be true in many cases. So, we take a ‘good’ employee and terminate them or let them just go away on their own.

I think the only way you make a demotion work is if you set it up within your organizational culture that this ‘demotion’, going back into a very important role in the company, is something that happens here.  We want to challenge people, and sometimes those challenges won’t end well.  That’s okay, we still love you, and respect you, and we want to get you back on a path of success.

This conversation has to happen, not after failure, but before the person is ever promoted.  That moving along the career path here, at our organization, isn’t just up, it’s down, it’s sideways, etc.  We are going to constantly want to get you into a ‘role’ of success.  Yes, failure happens, but we will want to get you back to success as fast as possible.

The reality is, people don’t stay around if they’re failing.

Brian Williams is damaged goods, so he accepted the demotion.  He’s talented. He’ll get back on the horse, show his value, and then he’ll go someplace else.  NBC is giving him an opportunity, but this kind of demotion doesn’t usually end well, for the employer.

T3 – PeopleDoc

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing PeopleDoc.  PeopleDoc is a cloud-based HR Service Delivery and HR document management solutions.  What does that mean?

PeopleDoc has four components to what they do. First, they manage all of our employee and HR documents.  Almost like an HR system of record, but more focused on maintaining your documentation and compliance of all those docs.  Let’s say you had 5,000 employees spread over 500 locations. Maintaining your I9 compliance alone would be a nightmare. For example, PeopleDoc allows you within seconds to pull all 5,000, see which are not compliant and immediately communicate out to those individuals to correct it.

PeopleDoc also has an Employee Self-service Portal that allows your employees to get in and see all of their documentation. Make updates. See pay stubs, etc. This also acts a communication vehicle for the organization to communicate to employees anything they need, but also act as a compliance vehicle when you need to verify that each employee actually got and understood such communications.

Case management is another huge piece of the software that most companies desperately need.  This allows the organization to track every single question and problem coming into HR, and document how it was handled, auto assigns certain questions and problems to certain groups. Allows you pull metrics on almost anything related to the metadata of all these calls and emails coming in.  Need to know what location is your problem-child? Done. What about by manager or employee? Done. Show data around what your biggest issues are across the organization. This is a must have for employers working across multiple locations, where it’s hard to really understand what’s going on from location to location.

The last piece of PeopleDoc is new employee onboarding, with all electronic documents and electronic signatures.  Most companies are moving in this direction, and many ATS and Systems of Record are getting into the electronic onboarding business. PeopleDoc can easily do this for you as well, across any system you are currently working.

5 Things I like about PeopleDoc:

1. Part of their Employee Portal functionality is a blog like content developer that allows HR and Talent Acquisition to easily develop content and push it out to employees from with the system. You can even share videos. With this they also show you and your employees what the most popular content is.

2. Backend dashboard for HR to see the status of all your pending issues, who owns them, what’s been done since they’ve come in, and how long they’ve been sitting there.  With this function you can also ‘private’ message others in HR to explain what needs to be done, your opinion on the matter, etc., and it’s automatically documented as part of the record, but the employee doesn’t see it. You can also quickly message the employee on the answer to their issue, or what you are doing.

3. Acknowledgement forms that allow you to ensure CYA. It’s something we all have to do in HR. There are just certain things we need to be compliant on 100%, and it’s really hard to get there and maintain. PeopleDoc makes it so simple!

4. The data analytics you can pull are so powerful to show what HR is really working on, and where your HR capacity is going. This is particularly important for HR executives, to show the senior leaders of the organization what work is really done by HR on a day to day basis.  It might feel like all you do is put out fires all day long, but now you can actually prove that’s what you do!

5. eSignature capabilities. This sounds like a small thing, but if you don’t it, you spend so much time just tracking down signatures on documents. It’s a waste of HR and organizational resources to spend one minute on something like with today’s technology.

Check them, I did an hour demo and I ask a ton of questions, you could probably get through it faster.  Primarily, systems like this are designed for enterprise level clients, 2,000 employees and above. But, it really depends on how you are structured.  I can see this tool being invaluable to organizations that have multiple locations, even if you only have a few hundred employees.

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.

What Not To Eat: Work Edition

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We are constantly bombarded in the media about what we should be eating and what we shouldn’t be eating. Just last week the FDA came out with it’s new ban on Transfats starting in 2018.  While this is a good thing for the health of our society, it’s just one example of how we are being told what to eat and what not to eat.

While I don’t want to get into an argument here about whether or not you should be eating more protein, or fruits and vegetables, etc. I do want to give you some insight into foods you just should never eat at work.  Here’s my list:

1. Bananas.  No one wants to say it, so I will. There’s no good way to eat a banana at work and not have some fourteen year old comment come out. Male or female, eating a banana just isn’t a good look for anyone at the office.  I know, I know, you just break off small pieces and it’s fine.  It’s not. Stop it. Eat that home before coming in. (Also see: Twinkies, foot long hot dogs, those cream filled long john donuts, a full carrot)

2. Beanitos Chips.  The name pretty much tells you why.  Really, any “Beanito” product isn’t a good office product if you’re within fifty yards of a co-worker.  Yeah, they taste great, I’ll give you that!  But, an hour down the road we hate you, and that Fabreeze isn’t helping.

3. Sushi.  I love sushi.  The one problem with sushi is similar to bananas, you have to open your mouth so wide that you look gross eating it!  Sushi is a bad date food of choice as well, it’s just not a good look.  Any time you have to shove something the size of a golf ball into your mouth in one bite, you’re in trouble.

4. Raman Noodles. Again, love noodles, but I don’t want to see or hear you eating them. The slurping of noodles, while respected in Asian countries, is not respected in my office.  I don’t want to hear you eat, or slurp.

5. Anything cooked in the microwave in the break room that stinks up the entire place. Usually, this means fish. While it tastes great, fish does not smell good warmed up, and lingers.  I actually have a policy in our employee handbook at HRU that if you cook fish in the microwave you get fired.

6. Microwave Popcorn.  I actually love the smell of fresh popped popcorn! I worked in movie theaters growing up and can kill a large bucket by myself. The problem is, most people can’t quite grasp the concept of cooking popcorn in a microwave.  You have to watch it, listen for it. You have about a three second window to get it out before you have incinerated microwave popcorn. You just can’t push the “popcorn” button on the microwave and walk away, that is a recipe for disaster!

7. Any Vegan Food that looks like poop. Vegan’s know what I’m talking about. Let’s face it, most vegan food is gross and tastes like dirt, but God bless those people, they’ll probably live a lot longer than I! Like into those great 90s and 100s years! Yeah, can’t we all wait for those years…

What are the foods you don’t think people should eat at the office? Hit me in the comments!

*Shoutout to Jacks in my office for the idea for this post!

 

The “New” Skilled Trades

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Google started it.  Don’t they start everything. You can thank Lazlo for all of this when he came out and said Google no longer requires a college degree to get hired into many of their technical roles. Now, we are beginning to see specialized training schools popping up to begin to ‘train’ the next gen workforce in what will be soon considered the new skilled trades of the future.  From CNBC:

Students at the New York City-based school pay $15,000 for four months of coding instruction. They leave with the ability to develop software, and according to Flatiron School, 99 percent of students get a job with an average starting salary of $70,000 a year.

Flatiron founders Adam Enbar and Avi Flombaum said they believe coding will be a form of literacy in the future.

“Just like you need to learn how to read and write, even if you’re not going to be a journalist, you need to learn how to code and wield technology if you’re going to be successful in the world,” said Enbar…

Some of Flatiron’s students share Enbar’s frustration with higher education. Jen Eisenberg was studying computer science as an undergraduate at Michigan State University, but stopped after her first semester when her father asked if she could build him a website.

“I realized I couldn’t build anything tangible … it’s more theory and algorithms,” Eisenberg said.

After completing Flatiron’s program, Eisenberg is a software engineer at Paperless Post, an online stationery shop. She helps write the instruction, or code, that makes the website function.

For years I’ve been telling high school students are getting ready to graduate that public education has given them two paths in their life:

1. College

2. Prison

That’s it!  Years ago we did away with skilled trades curriculum in public schools. The programs where kids learned how to weld, fix cars, pull wire, sweat pipe, build things, etc. Now, you go to high school to do well on a test and hopefully that test will get you into college. If it doesn’t?  Good luck, you’re basically on your own, which for most eighteen year olds usually ends up in prison.

So, I’m actually excited about these ‘new’ skilled trades!  Learning how to code, test, program, design and build web apps, etc.  Our reality is we have kids who don’t want to go to college. Traditional school environments are not their cup of tea!  They can’t wait to get out of high school, and the last thing they want is to go back to a similar setting in college.

America is in desperate need of vocational programs that start when kids are around seventeen.  Companies are begging for help in the traditional skilled trades, as well.  On both ends of technology, those who turn a wrench and those who click a mouse, need more trained individuals in the workforce, and at both of those ends, a full four year college program isn’t the answer.

Does this mean no one needs to go to college any longer? No.  We still need all kinds of college grads.  But, we can’t forget about all the others, and we have, for more than a decade.  Skilled trades, traditional and new, are the lifeblood of innovation.  You can design the greatest thing ever, but eventually, someone has to build it.  Someone has to get their hands dirty.  Someone has to put in the hours to make it a reality.

Sounds like a job for someone with a skilled trade.

The Biggest Lie HR Tells Candidates

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No one ever wants to admit this but it can be really intimidating working with someone who is way smarter and more talented than you.  This is the basis for the biggest lie HR tells candidates.

You are Overqualified!

Truth be told, no one is ever ‘overqualified’ for a position.  You might have more qualifications than the organization needs for the position you are interviewing for, but that really isn’t the issue.  The issue is the person interviewing is scared that you are better than they are.

Back in the day, HR pros and hiring managers were trained to give the excuse to overqualified people that we won’t hire you because you’re overqualified and we are scared that you won’t stay in this position, and you won’t be satisfied.  Yeah, right! It’s not that we don’t want you! You won’t want us, because you’re so talented that you’ll get bored with this position and leave.

It’s such a lie, and yet, for decades we just accepted it as truth.

Being overqualified isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing! Companies should be bending over backwards to get overqualified hires.  We no longer live in a culture where people are going to stay in the job for 40 years. If you can get a good 3 to 4 years out of hire, you’re doing great.

Take the best most qualified person you can get for every position you have in your organization and let them do great things. Being worried the person will won’t be ‘engaged’ long term is silly.  That’s not for you to worry. Hire great talent and get out of their way.

The bigger reality we face in most organizations is we aren’t hiring ‘overqualified’ people because your hiring managers are intimidated to hire someone who is better, or who could become better than they are.  This is the mentality we must change in our organizations.  You can’t get better if you don’t hire better.  Hiring under the level of talent you have now is a slow slide to becoming an organization no one wants to work for.