Black, white, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim, Furry, Jock…
We went to the same school.
We vote for the same politicians.
We both loved Breaking Bad and our burritos with pinto beans instead of black beans.
Equals hired.
Hired doesn’t equal the most skills, it equals the most connections made with those interviewing you.
Unless you know you’re hiring people who, specifically, think different than you, inclusion is a mirage.
In athletic recruitment there are these things called ‘Prospect’ camps. Depending on who you talk to these are either just coaching staff supplemental income, or serious recruitment functions needed to get prospective student athletes on campus.
Whatever they are, they’re a little genius!
Here’s how the entire system works. Usually an assistant coach emails your kid, who has a dream to play college athletics, that they are having a prospect camp and you’re invited to attend, for $150. Two things just happened: 1. Your kid just got an email from a college coach; 2. That coach insinuated that your kid is a ‘prospect’! Either way, there’s a good chance you’ll bite and pay the $150.
A couple of things happen at these camps. Coaches actually invite players they really do have interest in, and they invite anyone else who is willing to pay $150! So, a hundred kids show up, two or three which have actual ability to play college athletics, and they go through drills and modified games. You instantly know who has ability because the coaches spend time with those kids. If your kid doesn’t have a coach talking to him or her, they don’t have ability. It’s a real quick and easy way to set your own expectations.
These camps are a necessary evil of the function of recruitment. While most parents don’t like them, they all pay the money and have their kids attend.
These prospect camps got me to thinking if we in HR could do this in our organizations. Could we charge $150 to have potential employees come in and check us out, while we check them out? We run them through some tests, show them our facilities, make them compete against others in their same job function, spend time with our employees. At the end of the day, we offer a couple of them jobs.
Could it work? Maybe not for the average organization, but what about Google or Apple or some other big organization that has thousands wanting jobs with their company? I think it could work. The one issue we face is the expectation. “Well, I paid $150 what do I get for this?!”
We would have to deliver $150 worth of ‘value’ in these Prospective Employee Camps. I think that is probably the easy part. Think interview skills, resume skills, leadership skills, some hardcore job function skills based on what they actually do. It’s part self-development, and part dating game. People pay millions of dollars per to sites to find their perfect romantic match, with most failing to do so.
Prospective Employee Camps might just be a way for your organization to set itself a part from all the noise, and get candidates to come in that truly interested in (I’m willing to pay to be here, truly) and want to be a part of your organization. I know, crazy idea, but when you see it work in one area it just begs to be tried in another!
HR 101. If there is one thing I could give a new HR Pro it would be this simple advice. No matter how prepared you think you are, you really only need to prepare yourself for one thing, being surprised.
You don’t really get judged on your daily stuff. Let’s face it, 99.9% of the time that goes off without a hitch. You get judged on how you handle surprises.
Surprises make and break great HR Pro careers.
There’s really only way to prepare for surprises. You need to expect that a surprise will always happen. That one employee you can’t lose or the entire project will blow up, be prepared to lose them. Talk about it, plan for it, and basically come to grips that it will happen. Then it will happen, and you’ll be the only one not surprised by it.
The best HR Pros I’ve worked with had this one common trait, they were unshakeable when surprised. Almost like they expected it.
I got asked to be a mentor for someone recently. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked, but I found myself wondering what ‘Tim Sackett’ as a mentor should look like. Maybe it’s where I’m at in my career, but I found myself wondering what is it that I could really give someone coming up in our industry.
I would assume anyone asking for a mentor doesn’t really want me to show them how to recruit. They’ve probably got that down pretty well, at least the basics. The advanced stuff is probably best taught by some folks much better than me (Glen Cathey, Jim Stroud, Amybeth Quinn, Paul DeBettignies, etc.).
Maybe I could offer up some help on the employment branding/marketing side on HR and Talent Acquisition. I’ve had to do that for the last 20 years, I probably know just enough to better than most, but not as good as folks like Laurie Ruettimann, William Tincup, Maren Hogan, Lance Haun and Matt Charney.
I’m just dangerous enough with HR Tech that I could probably help out in that area for sure. I’ve bought and implemented systems and tools at every stop in my career. I know the game, but I certainly don’t know it as well at Steve Boese, William Tincup (again), John Sumser, etc.
It could be my mentee could use me for just straight HR generalist knowledge base. If I know anything, I know a little about almost anything in HR from my stops in my career. While I love talent acquisition, I really consider myself more of an HR pro. Probably not as good as Kris Dunn, Dawn Burke, Robin Schooling, Jessica Miller-Merrell, etc.
Compensation and Benefits, maybe that’s should be my ticket? Um, no, probably not. I probably know the least about this area as a whole and Ann Bares is my go to person for all things compensation.
There’s got to be something I’m the best at, worthy of being a mentor. What about employee engagement? From small companies to organizations with tens of thousands I’ve had employee engagement as a major measurable, I could do some damage here. But, again, not as well as someone like Paul Hebert.
Talent acquisition as a function might be something I’m most comfortable with. In my career, I’ve been constantly pulled into TA no matter what organization I’ve been in. It’s been the one constant in my career, start in HR, and end up in Talent Acquisition. Moving an organization from old school, post and pray, to one that hunts for talent is right up my alley. I don’t really know anyone I would recommend over myself on this.
As a mentor I think the most valuable thing I can give someone is the network I’ve built over the years. It’s something I discovered a long time ago. I’m probably not going to be the best at any one thing, but I can know people who are. Having the ability to know you need to surround yourself with people who are better than you, especially in areas you’re weak, is the key to having success in any stop you have in your career.
As a mentor I’m probably going to find out what you’re bad at, then introduce you to people who are really good at those things. You don’t need to the best at everything when you surround yourself with the people who are the best at everything!
This isn’t necessarily a new concept, but it’s one that is popping up a ton lately in conversation. The basic concept is we should be our managers and supervisors to be ‘coaches’ to their employees, not managers. The view from Organizational Development and Training folks is that coaches are more of a representative of great leadership than we would normally think of when we think of managers and supervisors.
Um, what!?!
I’m not sure what people are thinking but I’ve been ‘coached’ and have been a coach most of my life. When you tell me I should ‘act’ more like a coach, and less like a manager I get very confused. Let me give you a little insight to how most coaches behave:
– We yell. Usually a lot. Yeah, you don’t see that at your 8 year old’s soccer match, but go to a high school football game, basketball game, soccer match, etc. Don’t even get me started on college!
– Our vocabulary consists of about 6 words I don’t use on this blog very often.
– Our intent is to get our players to be a more aggressive version of themselves for a short period of time to help us win a game.
– I’ll make you cry. It’s actually a goal of mine. To push you beyond your comfort zone so you’ll breakdown and comeback stronger.
– If you worked really hard and give it your all I’ll give you a hug and maybe pat you on the backside. If you fail, I’ll probably yell more.
– I’ll publicly extol the virtues of team, while behind the scenes push internal competition beyond a healthy level.
– I love it when my players want to kill each other, and having a fight at a practice isn’t really a bad thing.
This is the reality of coaching once you get beyond very young youth sports where everyone gets a participation medal. This is real life. Not every sport, not every coach. But if you took the top 100 most successful coaches in every sport, you would be shocked at their behind the scenes behaviors. You wouldn’t like most of them. You wouldn’t want them around your kid.
But, let’s go ahead and teach our managers to be coaches!
Here’s the deal. What training and OD are teaching our managers to be, are not coaches. It’s an altruistic version of what they want coaches to be. They believe coaches are there to just help you along to get better and build great teams. Which conceptually is true. How it’s done is not something your training department or OD would want to sign up for!
It’s a difficult concept. Most athletes who have really been coached at a high level get it. Coaches are super hard on you, because that’s the only way to make yourself better and win championships. They’ll push you beyond what you think you’re capable of. In the end you usually end up respecting your coach and are thankful for the pain they put you through. Mostly, it ends up good. But is that a process you really, truly want your managers and supervisors to put your employees through?
Doubtful. You want all the outcomes of a great coach, but you’re not willing to allow them to go through the process of how a great coach gets his or her team ready for battle. Give us the result without the process. It just doesn’t work that way.
Wait for it…
“That’s what she said!”
I saved you the trouble.
Being too long is a major problem in the world today. People aren’t willing to wait, primarily because they don’t have to. Baseball can’t attract a young audience because the kids don’t want to sit around for three hours, at a minimum, to find out the outcome of the game. Soccer is exploding in the U.S. because it’s 90 minutes and they don’t even stop the clock when someone is injured! No commercial breaks, except for a short halftime period.
People won’t read a 700 page book, they want 300. No one wants to watch a three hour movie, make it two. Why do we have to have an hour meeting, make it thirty minutes.
Being too long is not a weakness you want to have in todays world. Being too long is now a sign that you probably don’t really know what you’re doing. If you can’t be short and concise, you’re looked at as ‘old fashion’.
That’s what your candidates are thinking of your selection process. You try and tell yourself, and your leadership, that we ‘take our time’ because we want to ‘make the right decision’. But your competition is making those same decisions in half the time. You’re old fashion. You’re broken. You’re taking too long.
Moving fast used to be considered reckless. Older generations would tell us to ‘slow down’. Measure twice, cut once. But, what if I made a process where measuring once was all that was needed, and I could eliminate the second measure? Wouldn’t that be better?
The legacy of the recession in Talent Acquisition is this, you had less to do, so you filled that time trying to add value. There is a tipping point to adding value. You extending the length of your selection process at a point no longer adds value. You’re taking too long to make hiring decisions. I know this because I’m constantly hearing stories of candidates you want, accepting offers from other companies before you’re ready to make an offer.
You’re taking too long.
STOP! Calibrate and Listen…before you go, “Ugh! Tim’s doing another webinar!”, check this out – it’s different than other stuff we’ve done. Negotiating job board contracts, annual ATS service agreements, knowing what new technology to buy, etc. It’s all way frustrating and confusing…for me, and I’m guessing you. I want us all to get better at this stuff, and this webinar is going to put us all back in the power buyers position!
Buying HR Technology (System of Record/HRMS, Applicant Tracking Systems, Performance Management Systems, etc.) should be as easy as buying a high-priced handbag or the latest pair of Jordans! You see it. You like it. You know it’s going to fit and work for your needs. GO! Make the purchase. But it’s not that simple. Buying HR Technology is hard, confusing and frustrating. A miss can potentially stall your career and undermine your creditability.
Fistful of Talent is here to help. In classic FOT style,Steve Boese, the Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference, and I, will break down the issues surrounding buying HR Tech in our latest webinar on August 28 at 12pm ET (sponsored by BambooHR), entitled Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology.
Join us on August 28 at 12pm ET for “Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology,” and we’ll hit you with the following:
Things that are hard: Riding a bike on a freeway. Getting your kids to eat peas. Buying HR Tech. Join us on August 28 at 12pm ET for “Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology,“ and we’ll make buying HR Tech easier. You’re on your own with the other two.
REGISTER TODAY!
We think there are millions of ways to engage, or disengage, employees but there aren’t. Truly, there are only six. The six basic emotions we feel as humans, which are:
1. Anger
2. Disgust
3. Fear
4. Happiness
5. Sadness
6. Surprise.
Knowing there are only six doesn’t necessarily make it any easy for us to figure out how to raise engagement, but at least it will help you giving you a concrete starting point.
Let me help get you started. Of the six, only one really help you engage in a positive way: Happiness. The other five can all be very disengaging factors: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Surprise.
So, you want to raise engagement? Well, that seems easy, happy employees will equal engaged employees. But, you’ll have your haters which will say, “Tim! Just because I’m happy doesn’t make me ‘Engaged’!” Yes, you’re right. But, have you ever tried to engage an employee who was angry, disgusted, fearful, sad or unexpectedly surprised? It’s tough. If I need to increase engagement, I would prefer to start with happy employees. Makes my job easier.
In the short term you could ‘engage’ employees by the negative emotions as well, but that never plays out well long term. I can make employees fearful for their jobs, their livelihood and they will perform better, for a little while and seem very engaged. Until they find another job. All the negative emotions can be played out like this.
So, I’m left with Happiness. It’s not a bad emotion to be stuck with if you can only have one that helps you. I like happy people, even on Monday mornings. It’s better than assholes for sure!
We focus our engagement on so many things that have little impact to the emotion of happiness. We spend millions of dollars a year on leadership development, because better leaders raise engagement, we’re told. We spend millions of dollars on building better environments because $800 office chairs raise engagement. We spend millions of dollars on increasing wages and benefits, because more raises engagement. But none of these really raise happiness.
“But, Tim! You’ve told us before you can’t ‘make’ someone happy.”
Ah, now we’ve come to something important. If you can’t ‘make’ someone happy, how can we positively raise the engagement of our employees?!?
You can’t. It’s a dirty little secret the engagement industry doesn’t want you to know (oh boy, can’t wait for Big Papi Paul to kill me in the comments on this one!).
You can raise engagement of your organization, though. Hire happy people. Happy people aren’t just happy some of the time, they’re predisposed, for the most part, to be happy. Hiring happy people consistently over time will raise your engagement. Do you have a pre-employment assessment for happiness? Probably not. HR people hate happy people.
I thought it was time that I randomly start listing mistakes we make in HR and letting those coming into HR what not to do. So, here you go, enjoy!
10 mistakes you don’t want to make in HR:
1. Hiring someone who reschedules their drug test more than once. I’m willing to give someone one reschedule, stuff happens. After one, if you’ve got a druggie trying to find out how to keep his Mom’s pee warm long enough to make it to the testing center.
2. Creating a leadership training program when it’s really one bad leader who just needs to be canned. Everyone knows who the problem is, and now ‘HR’ is making everyone go through training one person needs. They hate us for this. Just shoot the one bad leader and move on.
3. Changing policy or making a new policy, when it’s really one idiot who is taking advantage of the current situation. See above. We do this because *93% of HR Pros and Leaders are conflict avoidant (*Sackett Stats, it’s probably higher!). Come join the 7% of us who aren’t, this side of the pool is really enjoyable!
4. Designing health benefits that are better for you, but worse for everyone else. Don’t tell me this doesn’t happen! It happens all the time. The person in charge of plan design sees something that will help them, and believes it will also help everyone else. Oh, look! We now can go see the Chiropractor for massages, but I can’t get my kid the name brand Asthma medicine he needs.
5. Talking about how much less money you make in HR, as compared to a bad performer in any other area. No one cares that you make $25K less than Mark in sales who is a buffoon. It just makes you look bad and petty.
6. Throwing a fit about hiring an executives kid, or anyone else they want you to hire. Just hire the executives kid. This is not a battle you want to fight, it’s not worth it. In the grand scheme of things this one hire doesn’t mean a thing. The kid will either be good, average or bad. Just like the rest of hires we make.
7. Designing a compensation plan which, by peer group, puts you higher than other functions. I don’t care what the ‘Mercer’ data says, you shouldn’t put out there that you should be making $15K more than the person in Finance at your same level. No one believes you, and they don’t trust you can handle this when the data doesn’t seem right. This is especially sticky for Compensation Pros, who always believe they should be paid higher within the HR function.
8. Thinking you can be ‘friends’ with people you work with, outside of work. I’m not saying it can’t happen, it might. It just becomes really bad when you have to walk into your BFF Jill’s office and ‘can’ her one day. You can have very friendly relationships at work without inviting those folks over to the office for Girls Night Out.
9. Believing it’s not your job to do something. In HR we fill the voids left by every other function. It’s our job to do everything, especially those things no one else wants to do. Never believe something is not your job! It is. Plus, that actually adds value to the organization. Be the one function that doesn’t bitch and complain when they need to do something that isn’t on their job description!
10. Telling an executive they can’t do something because ‘we’ll get sued’. Our job in HR is not to tell executives, or anyone else, they can’t do something. It’s our job to tell them how they can get it done, while making it less risky to the overall organization.
What mistakes do you see HR makes?
I’m your typical HR buyer. Each year I negotiate contracts on a number of products, from ATS, HRMS, Recruiting Tools, Selection Tools, etc. I usually demo and look at 6-10 new products each year. Okay, I’m not typical that way, I love new stuff and what it can do, so I like to check it out. Beyond that, I’m very much your typical HR buyer.
Every single time I go through a buying decision I feel like I’m buying an expensive car or a house. Hell, that’s usually the cost of the contract of whatever product I’m buying! Therein lies the problem. I hate buying cars and houses. It’s stressful and I always have this deep feeling I’m getting taken! You know the feeling. The feeling like you paid too much, and someone else buying the same exact product as you paid less!
I hate that feeling!!!
I don’t mind paying what everyone else is paying for a product. I feel like a failure, as a HR Pro, when I find out I paid more than someone else, and I check! That’s the one cool thing about writing for talent and HR blogs, I have a Big network (that’s what she said)! This allows me to connect with other HR and Talent Pros and ask them what they paid. I have a deep urge to know whether or not I got a good deal and a bad deal. And, I’ll be honest, if I got a bad deal, it really affects how I think about the company.
Because these decisions are so stressful for me, I decided to do something about it. I called the one guy that knows more about HR Technology and industry more than anyone else I know, Steve Boese! Steve is the co-chair of the annual HR Technology Conference (want $500 off? Use the code: SACKETT14 when you register), which is the 2nd largest HR conference to SHRM national, but arguably becoming the must-see HR conference of the year. HR Tech has all the players in one spot and all the HR decision makers, it’s a very cool place to see the future of HR unfold in front of you!
I asked Steve to help me put on a webinar, that would not only educate me on how I should be buying HR Tech, but also uncover all those tips and tricks to make sure I don’t ever again have that bad feeling I have when I buy! The webinar title: Buyer’s Remorse: A 1st Timers FOT Guide To Buying HR Technology and High Priced Handbags! You see, I feel buying HR Tech, should be as easy as buying a handbag without the buyer’s remorse!
This one is personal to me! I think all HR Pros can learn from all the mistakes I’ve made in buying HR technology and from Steve’s brilliance!
Come join us on August 28th at Noon EST for this FREE webinar: