Category Archives: Uncategorized

10 Things That Scare Me

Posted on by
4

I listen to NPR in the mornings on my way to work. It helps me keep up on how my ultra-liberal friends are thinking, plus it’s my only access to news outside the U.S. on a regular basis. It’s important we make ourselves aware of all sides of the conversations taking place.

On a recent ride in I was introduced to an NPR produced podcast called “10 Things That Scare Me” which is a podcast about our biggest fears. The interview struck me with the idea that I’m not sure what my biggest fears are because my brain subconsciously helps me not think of them! 

I thought a good experiment would be to try and list ten things that scare me, with how I rationalize these fears. Here’s what I came up with in random order:

  1. Bees – My wife laughs at me about this. There’s an actual video of me she took of me freaking out about a bee chasing me. There’s no logical reason that I don’t like bees. Oh, wait, yeah there is, bee stings hurt!
  2. Heights – Let me preface this by saying I’ve jumped off the Stratosphere in Vegas and I’ve done many Zipline adventures. I love roller coasters. But have me climb a ladder and walk on the roof of my house and my legs are shaking like crazy! I think the difference is all about safety harnesses. I don’t mind heights if I’m safe, I mind heights when I could fall and die.
  3. Horror Movies – I don’t go to them, I don’t watch them, you can’t make me. Again, completely stupid I know, but yeah, I’m out!
  4. Something Bad Happening to my Wife, kids, or dog. I think I spend too much time thinking about this, but not half as much as my wife, but it’s still a fear. Probably will always be a fear.
  5. Not being able to pay my bills. This might seem irrational to many people. I’m a successful person. It comes from childhood and being raised by a single mom, who was trying to launch a business, and many times being at stores where they wouldn’t allow her to write a check because she had ‘bounced’ so many. And we definitely didn’t have any cash! Taking food back to the shelves of a store because you can’t afford it doesn’t leave you. That walk, with the employees staring at you feels pretty bad.
  6. Not knowing the right answer. For most of my life, in almost any situation, I’ve felt like I’ve had ‘the’ answer. School, work, life, love, okay, way less in love, but most things! So, I’m fearful of not having the right answer that will solve the problem. Turns out, some problems don’t have answers, or at least not a ‘right’ answer.
  7. Dying unexpectedly. I have this notion that I’ll die with some warning. I’m planning on it. There’s really only one time in life when you can truly tell people what you think, and I do not want to miss out on that time! We see random death every day, and it’s hard for me to understand it.
  8. Embarrassing people who are important to me. To know me is to know anything might come out of my mouth. Mostly that’s been a great trait over my life. Every once in a while, not so much. I truly care about my family and friends, and if I say or do something that embarrasses them, it truly impacts me deeply. Just not enough, apparently, to change my personality!
  9. Access to guns. Guns don’t scare me. I grew up around guns. I’ve shot guns. Hunted. Shot skeet. Etc. The access that mentally unstable people have to guns scares me because of fear #4 above. Guns are too readily available in our society and I can only pray and hope for the safety of those I care for.
  10. Failing my Mom’s company. For those who don’t know, I run the company my mother started and ran quite successfully for decades. 2nd generation family businesses have an extreme failure rate. I work and stress every day to not be a statistic. So, call me and do work with me! Help me conquer this fear!

So, what do you think? It feels pretty good to get your fears out there in the open. To look them in the eye. To introduce them to the world. They are definitely more scary when they are locked in my head!

What fears do you have that you have admitted? Hit me in the comments and let’s do this cleanse together!

The Human CRM

Posted on by
Reply

We didn’t always have sales automation and recruiting automation. There was this time when you just had to keep a ‘date book‘ or a calendar of some sort, or just simply to remember to call Mary over at Acme Inc. to see how everything was.

Old school sales was following up. Letting you know I’m still here. I still want your business. Give it to me and not someone else.

Like a CRM the goal is to eventually wear you down, and it works. It’s worked since the beginning of time.

CRMs can do it, and do it very effectively, but in some cases not as well. I can ignore the CRM. I know the CRM game, so when you see those messages they are easily ignored.

I can’t ignore the lady who has made nine calls to my voicemail. I can’t. You might be able to, but I can’t. I respect the craft too much. The effort. I know how hard it is to pick up the phone the first time, let alone 2 – 9. That doesn’t get easier, it gets harder.

You guys know I love technology. I’ve done it both ways and having the automation helps immeasurably. There’s a bit of art to the old way of following up, over and over. Some poetry to it.

You might get sick of “Steve” calling you every single month, but eventually you find yourself in a jam and “Steve” comes to mind. Steve was the one that was there when you didn’t have anything. Any “Johnny” come lately can call on you when you just landed a $50 million dollar contract, but where were they when you had nothing?

Companies fail when they take the human out of the CRM. It’s not one or the other, it’s both in combination. The plow helps the farmer do more quickly, but not without the horse.

So, the next time you see your phone ring and recognize the number, or delete that email that you know was personally sent without reading it, know a real person put in time for that recognition. The Human CRM was at work and didn’t stop!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @TheVIPCrowd

Posted on by
Reply

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at the engagement technology, VIP Crowd. VIP Crowd is a technology that organizations can use to get their employees, and their customers, to engage in a number of things.

Want to get more feedback from employees on what the like or dislike about your benefits package? Want to see what hiring manager is most admired in your organization? Want your employees to share a really important, hard to fill job with their network? VIP Crowd’s platform allows you to do this with ease.

VIP Crowd solves that aged old issue we all have in HR and TA when we can’t get our own employees and hiring managers to give us feedback or engage in our programs by making them a VIP! “Why doesn’t anyone respond to the email I send!?”

VIPs are people in your network who you’d like to keep updated and whose feedback, input and ideas can help your business. These might be co-workers, top customers, or peers. VIP Crowd is invite-only, and you decide who gets invited.

It works by you basically posting a challenge to your VIP network, and you can add ‘points’ for completely that have real money value that can be turned in for prizes, given to charity, etc. So, the gamification aspect really raises the engagement to finish these challenges.

Challenges can be something like “share this blog post”, or “give us feedback on Glassdoor”, or refer a friend, etc. The challenges are only limited to your imagination, and they don’t always have to be for points. Send a challenge out to your workgroup to see who can come up with the best place to go eat lunch!

What I like about VIP Crowd:

  • You can easily segment out departments, locations, workgroups, etc. So, you can truly personalize the challenges for more targeted groups.
  • You can post a challenge anonymously and interact with those people who respond, the entire time maintaining the anonymity of those responding!
  • The VIP platform runs the loneliest number game each week to keep your VIPs engaged, even if you don’t challenge anyone this week, for free.
  • Runs on both mobile and desktop, with about 65% of those engaging in the platform using the mobile version.

VIP Crowd is definitely worth a demo. Super simple to use and a great way to increase and measure engagement. While I see a number of uses on how HR and TA would use this, the reality is this is technology that will be used across your organization, so you might want to bring some cross-functional peers along to the demo!

The Weekly Dose – 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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

It’s 2019, Money still motivates more than anything else!

Posted on by
6

NO IT DOESN’T, TIM! YOU ARE AN IDIOT!

Well, you’re half right! I’m an idiot most of the time, but finally we are beginning to see what I’ve been saying for a decade, money is still the best motivator when it comes to getting extra effort.

For almost a decade the media and influencers perpetuated this belief that it was other things, rather than money, that motivated individuals to do more. They sited weak studies, if at all, but mostly it was antedotal evidence from people saying it wasn’t money, it was time off, it was feedback, it was…

A recent study puts this to rest, and it clearly shows that if you want ‘extra’ effort out of an employee, money is the single biggest motivating factor, overall, to get the effort your organization is looking for.

What I love about this study is they went out to over 200 experts in the field and first asked them what they thought. They were comprehensive in their analysis of the results and the most recent literature on the subject and the findings were straightforward:

We find that (i) monetary incentives work largely as expected, including a very low piece rate treatment which does not crowd out incentives; (ii) the evidence is partly consistent with standard behavioral models, including warm glow, though we do not find evidence of probability weighting; (iii) the psychological motivators are effective, but less so than incentives. 

Psychological motivators are effective, but less so than monetary incentives!

It’s not that things like working for a great leader or having time off aren’t also effective motivators to getting extra effort out of your employees. They are. But we have to stop telling ourselves that they are more important, because they aren’t!

Again, this is overall. You might have some individuals working for you that are more highly motivated by non-monetary incentives. But overall, in a large workforce, money will still get you better results.

So, why do we love saying that it’s not about the money?

If you think about how this concept became popular, it really tells the story. A decade ago we were coming out of the Great Recession. We didn’t have a ton of money to throw around, so it became popular to espouse the idea that people were really motivated by other things, rather than money.

And, it wasn’t really a lie. We are motivated by many things, money just being one.

The lie was that the other things motivated us to a higher level than money. Those don’t. I’m completely motivated by a great leader, if I’m getting paid what I think I should be. I’m super motivated by extra time off, if I think I’m getting paid what I should be. I’m not motivated by any of that, if I have a monetary issue I’m facing in my life, which most people do.

If my partner is a successful doctor and she makes way more than we need to live very well, money isn’t my primary motivation for effort, it might be a lot of other things. But, if I’m struggling to pay my mortgage, and my kid is about to go to college, I could care less that my boss is nice to me. Just pay me!

What Dog Walkers Can Teach us About Managing Up!

Posted on by
2

You might not have noticed but Americans treat their dogs and cats much better than we treat most people. I’m not sure exactly what that says about our society.

I like to believe that it’s an evolved behavior. A society that treats animals well probably on average treats all things better, but the cynical part of me says it’s more likely we treat animals well because we all craze unconditional love and aren’t finding it other areas of our live.

Either way, my Scout thinks I’m the best and is always excited to see me!

Because we love our animals so much, we spend a ton on them and want them to be taken care of well. This has created a new profession of animal caretakers, and specifically, for Dog Walkers! 

The Washington Post had a great piece on this recently and what struck me from the article was how the most successful Dog Walkers have figured out that managing up to the animal’s owners is the key to their success! 

In a nation where people lead ever more busy lives and increasingly view their dogs as family members, professional dog walking is flourishing. And along with it is what might be viewed as the unusual art of dog walker communication. Many of today’s walkers do not simply stroll — not if they want to be rehired, anyway. Over text and email, they craft fine-grained, delightful narratives tracing the journey from arrival at the residence to drop-off. They report the number of bathroom stops. They take artistic photos, and lots of them.

“For an hour-long walk, I send six or eight, depending,” said Griffin, 44, who holds a treat in her hand when shooting to ensure her charge is looking at the camera. “Then I give a full report that includes not only peeing and pooping but also kind of general well-being, and if the dog socialized with other dogs.”

Turns out that leaders want from you, exactly what we want from our Dog Walkers! More details about what’s going on when we can’t see it or hear it!

Managing up is simply the skill or task of telling someone what the heck is going on with the ‘proper’ amount of detail. “Proper” being the key the element! Too much and you’re kissing up and being annoying, too little and you’re forcing more communication to take place because you didn’t give enough detail.

The reality is, we all want to know what’s going on with enough detail that doesn’t require us to go back and ask additional questions. The perfect response to a great Managing Up message is “Thanks for this! Keep me updated.”

Where Managing Up goes wrong is when you tell yourself you’re just ‘managing up’ but when in reality you’re managing up to get feedback about yourself, your team, your project, etc. That’s not managing up, that’s you trying to train a leader to give feedback and that usually goes wrong for you!

It’s key to know the difference. Someone who is truly managing up, doesn’t want a ton of feedback or additional questions from their managing up note. A simple thanks is perfect and it’s truly all you want. It’s like when two partners share some details about their day the other should know, “Hey, that package from Amazon came with the parts we needed for the whatever…” No further comment or explanation needed, just an FYI, a common courtesy.

The Dog Walkers have this down. I’m going to give you the details, send some pics, and say great things about your animal that you love more than any other thing in your life. While you’re at work, that’s all you want to hear!

My top 5 most read posts of 2018!

Posted on by
Reply

I love lists! I love lists when I’m on them. I love lists when I make them. Lists are great!

I had an incredible year. I had the most traffic ever in my decade of blogging. I launched my book, The Talent Fix, in April and the traffic to the blog has been exceptional! I’ve got some great stuff planned for 2019, so please keep coming back and enjoying the content.

Here are my most read blog posts of 2018:

#1 – My New Favorite Interview Question!

This one post was read by over 70,000 people, and I didn’t expect it to actually do this well. Interview question posts always do well. For some reason people Google “Interview questions” a ton, both on the candidate side and the hiring manager/HR side. Want some easy clicks? Write a post on interview questions!

#2 – I’m in Indeed Jail, Help me! #FreeTimSackett

Yeah, my co-dependent relationship with Indeed got me into trouble in 2018, and it all started with this post. I wrote another post later in the year – Indeed takes away free traffic from Staffing firms! Which also got a ton of traffic, and I thought was pretty ‘fair and balanced’ from the Indeed side.

#3 – The Reason You’re Being Ghosted After an Interview

Like I said above, interview content tends to be popular! In 2018 we saw a ton of ghosting happening on both sides of the fence. Companies are ghosting candidates and candidates are ghosting companies, and apparently we have all lost our minds! I mean come on, treat others like you want to be treated!

#4 – The Top 100 Applicant Tracking Systems in 2018!

Hat tip to my buddy Rob Kelly, this was actually mostly based on his content, which I sited and love! Turns out most of us have issues with our ATS systems and we love seeing what everyone else is using, because it must be better than what we are using! BTW- we started using Loxo in 2018 and LOVE it!

#5 – Lifesaving Advice I Gave My Son When Someone Starts Shooting Up his School!

This one breaks my heart. This post was directly from my heart, shouting out to the world, as a father, for help. A lot of people agreed with it, and yet, here we are basically in the exact same place.

3 Things HR Pros Should Never Apologize For!

Posted on by
2

I think HR Pros apologize way too much, and I got the idea from the Fast Company article – “3 Things Professional Women Should Stop Apologizing For“, which are:

  1. Their Financial Expectations (I.E., pay us the same!)
  2. Their Physical Appearance (I.E., Sorry we aren’t club-ready – I was up with a sick kid all night!)
  3. Their Professional Accomplishments (I.E., Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I can’t brag about what I do great!)

It’s a great article, check it out.  This got me thinking about all things we Apologize for in HR – that we should stop apologizing for – so here’s the Top 3 Things HR Pros should stop apologizing for:

1. You Getting Fired!  Oh, boy this could be #1, #2 and #3!  I can’t tell you how many HR folks I’ve trained over the past 20 years that I’ve specifically said: “When you let this person go, Don’t apologize!”  I mean truly, what are you saying! “I’m sorry you are terrible at your job or made the decision to sexually harass your co-worker,  you’re fired!”  When you really stop and think about it, it even sounds funny.

2. You Not Getting Promoted.  This is almost the same as apologizing for getting fired.  Instead of apologizing to someone for not getting promoted, how about you give them a great development plan so they can actually get promoted!  Organizations can be big hairy breathing things, and sometimes decisions are made and you won’t know the reasons.  HR Pros shouldn’t apologize for you not getting promoted, but they should help you navigate the political and organizational landscape.

3. You not liking your Boss, your Job, your Pay.  Ugh!  We tend to apologize for all these personal ‘happy’ choices a person makes.  The last time I checked, I never forced anyone to take a job, or forced them to accept the pay I was offering them, or forced them to work in the occupation or career they chose.  These are their own personal choices, if you don’t like it, LEAVE!  Go be happy somewhere else.  I hope that you’ll be happy here, but I can’t force you to be happy. I’ll try and give you a solid leader, with good pay and challenging work, but sometimes what I see as solid, good and challenging might not meet your expectations.  That’s when you need to make a happiness decision!

So, what should you apologize for a HR Pro?  I can think of two things that I apologize for on a regular basis:

1) Things I can Control (If I control it, and I screw it up, I need to offer you an apology);

2) Surprises!  (I might not be able to control a surprise, but they suck when it comes to business and your livelihood.  I apologize for surprises because in HR it’s my job to make sure those don’t happen to you as an employee).

The Talent Fix Book Club Launching in January 2019! Monthly Development for your TA Team!

Posted on by
4

If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much. 

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions. 

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition! 

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week! 

The schedule will breakdown like so: 

  • January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019! 
  • February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019! 

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well! 

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club! 

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd! 

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership! 

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com! 

Does Technology Have an Impact to a Great Employee Experience? @PwCAdvisory

Posted on by
2

We’ve been told for at least two decades that the key to a great employee experience is what? 99% of answered probably one of two things:

1. Working for a great leader.

or

2. Having a best friend at work.

The reality is, the true key of a great employee experience is probably farther down the Maslow pyramid then we want to believe.

For sure it’s great to have a wonderful boss and great friendships at work, and those two things will give you a great employee experience, they will only give you a great experience is some others thing are first met. Things like being paid a wage that you feel is fair for the job you are doing and that is comparable with others doing the same job. Actually liking the job you are hired to do. Having the tools and technology available to you to be successful at your job.

PwC recently released their Tech at Work Report and found that while leaders believe they are attempting to deliver the right tools and technology (90% of executives believe they are paying attention to their employee’s needs when introducing new technology), only 53% of employees feel their leadership is actually delivering on this promise.

Our executives feel satisfied with their technology experience at work, while most employees are much less satisfied than their leadership team. Why? I would guess that most executives don’t live and work in the same tech environment as their teams, and while strong leaders will bring their teams in on those tech selection decisions, most do it so far into the process that employees will feel they can’t push back on decisions that have really already been made.

The PwC report also found that 73% of employees know of technology systems that could help them produce a higher quality of work. If that’s the case, that we aren’t giving our employees these tools, it will most likely lead to higher turnover. Employees will find work environments and work experiences that will assist them in being the most successful they can be, especially in today’s ultra-low unemployment environment.

Another critical factor found in the Tech at Work Report is that our employees want both digital and face-to-face interactions, but it depends on the interactions. For common HR/Work interactions (scheduling a vacation, IT help desk support, employee benefits, etc.) our employees prefer a digital experience. Whereas when we do things like training, communicating with peers, etc., we would much rather have those interactions face-to-face, and technology free.

So, how can we utilize technology to drive a great employee experience? 

First and foremost, we can decouple technology and the employee experience. These two things work together in a positive, or a negative, way when it comes to delivering a great experience. Also, the PwC report recommends:

– Don’t make technology decisions without knowing what the impact will be for the end-user. Sure you did that job, a decade ago, but have you done it recently?

– Get the right people in the decisionmaking loop who do know the current job and the impact new technology will have on the end user.

– Upskilling your workforce to new technology is not training, and we need to think about this process much differently. Employees who are upskilled are much more likely to value their experience and be retained longer.

Employee Experience is huge for 2019. With historic low unemployment and a demographic across the workforce that will keep unemployment low for the near future, it’s critical for organizations and leaders to understand how technology is driving positive employee experiences for great companies. Go check out the PwC report, it’s loaded with great information and advice!

Can we talk about the Kevin Hart Academy Award thing!?

Posted on by
Reply

If you haven’t seen or heard, comedian Kevin Hart was asked to host the Oscars. It’s a big deal for an entertainer to get that gig, 25-30 million viewers big! After it was announced, some news outlets ran some stories about some homophobic tweets that Kevin did in 2009, 2010, and 2012.

The tweets are definitely insensitive. If you had an employee sending out those tweets, you would have a problem on your hands. Kevin is a comedian, and he truly believes he was being funny. He hasn’t sent tweets like that for the last five+ years.

The Academy asked Kevin to apologize. Kevin said he already apologized for those tweets and that is old business. The Academy said apologize or step down. He stepped down. He then went on Instagram and explained himself and why he wasn’t apologizing –

“I chose to pass, I passed on the apology. The reason why I passed is that I’ve addressed this several times. This is not the first time this has come up, I’ve addressed it. I’ve spoken on it.”

Hollywood Reporter did a poll of over 2200 adults and asked what they thought and here were some of the results:

  • 42% of viewed Hart as favorable, 14% viewed the Academy as favorable. (the rest in the middle)
  • 56 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “An old social media post does not represent the person who posted it and has no influence on my opinion of someone.”
  •  44 percent agreed with the sentiment, “Social media posts are a form of expression and influence my opinion of someone regardless of how old the post is.”

GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said of Hart’s stepping down, “Hart’s apology to LGBTQ people is an important step forward, but he missed a real opportunity to use his platform and the Oscars stage to build unity and awareness.” I agree with Ellis, I would have loved to see Kevin come on and use his humor and influence to show people who he truly is and what he stands for.

This is some real life stuff.

We have employees. We have friends. We have family. We ourselves have said things and posted things for any number of reasons that we might probably don’t stand behind, but it catches up to us and now someone makes to make a big deal about it. There is a ton of learning here. I love comedy! I can put what a comedian says in the context that it’s a joke and it might be 100% the opposite of what they truly believe.

There’s a big part about Comedy is about pushing the line of what we feel is acceptable. We hear someone say something on a comedy stage that you would never hear in public and shock and awkwardness makes you laugh, not necessarily because you believe the statement, but because of how ludicrous it is.

What Kevin Hart does on Twitter is very different from what we see from other non-comedians on social media. That’s a huge difference, but Kevin doing it makes some feel they can do it. Again, it’s been a long while since he’s done this, and I think the Academy was wrong in not standing behind Kevin and saying, “Kevin has addressed these past tweets and apologized in the past, we won’t ask him to do that again, the Kevin we know and love is a man of…” That’s all that had to happen, and all of this would have gone away.

I think he and the Academy missed an opportunity to speak about this on one of the largest stages around. To bring awareness to a subject that hurts many people. 14 and 15-year-old boys still use “gay” as a negative when joking candidly with their friends because they don’t hear from people like Kevin Hart saying that it’s not a negative. Finding ways to make jokes using negative phrases and turning them into positive phrases, and yes it can be done and it can be funny.

I do not think something you posted on social media should follow you around for years if you’ve addressed and apologized for it, but it does, and it will. The cost of education at every age is super expensive. Kevin found out how expensive it can be at a very high level.

What do you think?