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Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @MintMesh Crowd Sourced Referrals and Recruitment CRM

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review the TA technology, MintMesh! Mint what? Sounds like a strange combination of refreshing gum and a media device I’ll get sued over! MintMesh is, in fact, a platform for crowdsourcing referrals from your trusted networks to solve your most pressing hiring needs.

With MintMesh users can actively engage with their network to provide referrals and be rewarded for those referrals through the MintMesh platform. I know you’ve seen and heard of employee referral automation, and MintMesh can easily do all of that.

BUT, Wait! There’s More! 

Truly, this isn’t an infomercial! They really have way more!

MintMesh is actually a full-blown talent acquisition CRM. MintMesh allows you to build talent networks and create talent pools (as many as you want, in whatever way you want), and from the system, you can begin to reach out and nurture those pipelines of talent.

MintMesh also gives you access to within minutes build position related “Microsites” for targeted recruiting of referrals that can be shared with your employee’s and hiring manager networks. When a candidate visits these sites they can show interest without a resume, and the built-in Artificial Intelligence will reach back out to them to finish the process.

What I like about MintMesh: 

– Referrals get their own ‘portal’ access where they can message alumni to ask questions, network with hiring managers and employees of the department they are interested in, all controlled by recruiters who decide which groups they should have access to.

– From within the platform, you can easily create a Microsite featuring a specific job, then go to your talent networks and invite the entire network to go to the microsite and apply, refer or just get more information on what you have.

– Oh, yeah, it’s also full-blown employee referral automation with a rewards system, you control. Want to reward for just referring, and not hiring? You can do that. Want to refer to both? You control it. Cash or a point-based system.

– Employees can also share feedback on a referral from within the system, that only you and the hiring manager will see.

– For referrals that don’t match a currently opening, MintMesh’s A.I. will continue to match, so when an opening is put into the system that matches the previous referral, the system will automatically reach out to them to apply.

Like I said, this is way more than employee referral automation! It’s really a full CRM that is built on an employee referral automation hiring process. Because it’s a full-fledged CRM, you can do so much with it.

So, why does MintMesh sell itself as Employee Referral Automation? Because we (talent acquisition pros and leaders) understand employee referrals and the process. Most of us still don’t really understand CRM and it’s capabilities, so MintMesh built something powerful that we could understand and use.

Who needs this? Really any organization that needs to hire consistently, and is having a hard time doing it efficiently. Well worth a demo, as the system costs $1/employee per month. 500 employee company? That’s $6,000 for full employee referral automation and CRM! You can not beat that price, and this is actually really good tech that is easy to use.

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

LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018

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Each year, over the past few years, I look forward to reviewing LinkedIn’s annual Recruiting Trends report. The 2018 version is no different! It’s sixty pages of insight and case studies and really digs into the hottest trends in recruiting we are all facing. It’s definitely something every TA pro and leader should read.

One reason I like this report is that the data comes from over 8,000 TA pros from an almost perfect cross-section of small, medium, large and enterprise-sized organizations. This is rare. Usually, these types of reports are all enterprise-focused, but LinkedIn works to get each segment to be a quarter of the respondents.

LinkedIn found four main trends across all sized organizations in Recruiting:

  1. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
  2. Interviewing
  3. Data Analytics
  4. Artificial Intelligence

At first glance, this doesn’t seem very surprising. I don’t think any of us could have thought Diversity could have gotten bigger as a trend, but when you have a current political climate in America like we have, well, diversity has never been more important. Interviewing as a trend seems strange, and it makes me think there’s probably something LI is pushing from a product standpoint. The LI data shows interviewing is a trend because of how it’s evolving in selection.

Data and A.I. are also things that also seem to be solid trends that most TA pros are in the midst of trying to figure out. A.I. is an easy one, it was huge in 2017 and it’s not going away. Data was giant in 2015-16, and every HR tech vendor became a ‘data’ company, but the fact remains most TA leaders and pros still struggle to get their arms around this and the LI data shows this as well.

I read the entire report and took away two really cool ideas:

– Diversity and Inclusion are giving way to ‘belonging’. It doesn’t matter that you hired more women or more of whatever it is you needed to look like a United Colors of Benetton ad. If those you hired don’t feel like a part of the organization, you’ll never keep them anyway. 

This level of diversity is really hard. It’s actually easy to check boxes and get to a point where you’ll look politically correct as it relates to the diversity of your employees. It’s super hard to get to a point where people feel like they truly belong. Like they’re home. The LI report gives some great case studies on how organizations are doing this.

– TA uses of data are fairly robust, and nowhere to be found where those uses concerned with Days to Fill! (see picture below)

 

#1 – Increase Retention

I’ll scream this from the mountain tops until the day I die! Employee Retention should be owned by Talent Acquisition. HR doesn’t care! If someone leaves, HR processes some paperwork. The real work of replacing that employee falls on TA. HR has no vested interested, in most organizations, to retain employees. TA always does.

The easiest hire TA will ever make is the one they don’t have to make because a good employee didn’t leave.

It’s rare that an organization would place the entire bonus goal on HR around employee retention. If they did, you would see a cultural change that is incredibly positive in terms of how HR works to keep employees. The organizations that have the foresight to do this have really strong cultures.

I love that LI was able to show TA pros and leaders from every size of organization view Retention as the top use of data. It shows that TA pros are understanding the importance of data analytics a very high level. It also shows a major trend that LI kind of skimmed over. In 2018, Retention of talent is critical for organizations. It’s not sexy to report on, but it’s a fact.

Go download the report and check it out!

 

The Most Valuable Skill Set of the Future Will be…

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Common sense.

We’ve lost most of it already.

We can no longer see both sides of a situation. There is only right and wrong, as interpreted by each individual, not actual right or wrong. That’s not reality, but that’s how we are reacting to most things that happen in our life.

The world is coming unglued because we lack common sense. We only see the extreme edges of everything. We no longer work to see both sides, or any sides other than our own, of a situation. I am right. You are wrong. Go kill yourself.

The big problem is we no this is wrong. How do we know this? We tell every person who doesn’t agree with us! The hardest thing to do in your life is being able to see the side of others. It’s super easy to only believe in the stupid stuff you already believe in.

This won’t go away because 2017 is over. What we are feeling had nothing to do with which year it is. It has everything to do with our lack of basic common sense to understand there is no right or wrong at the edges, just extremes. The answer is in the middle when you come together to find that common ground.

I not really looking to hire a certain educational skill set any longer. I’m looking to hire people that still have a shred of common sense left in them. It’s getting harder and harder to find that skill.

Is Your Organization Using HR Tech for Good or Evil?

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Right before Christmas when things were crazy and no one was paying attention, something happened in the HR Tech world that didn’t get much press. This happens at certain times. It’s why corporations, governments, etc. release bad news on Fridays at 5 pm. It gets buried during the weekend.

The thing that happened was the announcement that many companies (Amazon, Verizon, UPS, and even Facebook themselves) were using Facebook Ads to exclude older people from applying for their jobs! That’s big news, right!?

If these same companies were using the exact same technology to exclude females or African Americans, don’t you think the world would have stopped, if only for a second until Trump tweeted again!? I think it would have, but it didn’t.

From the article:

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”

Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

Verizon is among dozens of the nation’s leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found.

The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.

So, is this right? Well, Facebook seems to think so:

Facebook defended the practice. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work,” said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president.

“Age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry standard”. Really!? Well, in one way it is. But only if you’re doing it for good, not evil! If you are out trying to specifically recruit older people because you lack an older population in your workforce, then “yes” that is accepted.

If you don’t want older people, because they don’t fit your culture, then “HELL NO” it’s not an accepted standard!

The holidays came and went and all of this is forgotten because we don’t care about older workers. That’s a fact. We treat older workers like garbage in America. Once you reach 50 years old in America, you become stupid and worthless to hiring managers, even when those hiring managers are over 50!

We would have killed Facebook if they said it was an “industry standard to run ads for only white dudes”. But they are running ads for only young people and that is now an industry standard.

It’s not. It’s prejudice. It’s wrong. It is not an industry standard. Segmenting recruitment marketing is tricky. We have to be responsible enough to know when you exclude a certain group, that better not be an underrepresented group in your workforce and not the majority of your workforce (Facebook!).

So, what do you think? Industry accepted standard or bad recruitment marketing practice? Hit me in the commnets and let me know!

Unchained! Attracting Talent That Isn’t Chained to a Desktop!

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From manufacturing to construction to retail to restaurants to the service industries, most of our talent doesn’t actually sit ‘chained’ to a desk, but we’re still using recruiting practices that start with the notion we all sit at a desk waiting for a recruiter to find us!

It’s amazing that over the past couple decade most talent acquisition departments have recruited in basically in the exact same way for both office-type workers and those workers who never sit behind a desk. Which is to assume every person, regardless of where they actually work, apply and look for jobs in the same manner. They don’t!

Sign up for the Unchained! Attracting Mobile Talent Webinar with Tim Sackett and Samantha Herbein for a free discussion on how to recruit great talent out in the field, out on the plant floor, or out servicing your customers. This webinar will take place on Tuesday, December 12th at 1 pm EST! 

On this webinar you will learn:

  • The tactics top recruiting organizations use to find great talent out in the field
  • How to craft engaging text messages with introductions, call-to-actions, and signatures
  • Best practices for making introductions, asking questions, screening candidates, and scheduling interviews
  • As well as old school and new school talent attraction techniques that work, that you can start using right away!

This is a free webinar focusing on how you and your organization can begin to use innovative, modern recruiting practices to find that talent you need most!

 

Are You Struggling to be Happy at Work?

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In 1942 Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist, was taken to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents.  Three years later, when his camp was liberated, his pregnant wife and parents had already been killed by the Nazis. He survived and in 1946 went on to write the book, “Man’s Search For Meaning“.  In this great book, Frankl writes:

“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”

What Frankl knew was that you can’t make happiness out of something outside yourself.  Riding the Waverunner doesn’t make you happy. You decide to be happy while doing that activity, but you could as easily decide to be angry or sad while doing this activity (although Daniel Tosh would disagree!).  Frankl also wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I get asked frequently by HR Pros about how they can make their employees or workplace happier.  I want to tell them about Frankl’s research and what he learned in the concentration camps.  I want to tell them that you can’t make your employees happy.  They have to decide they want to be happy, first. But, I don’t, people don’t want to hear the truth.

Coming up with ‘things’ isn’t going to make your employees happy. You might provide free lunch, which some will really like, but it also might make someone struggling with their weight, very depressed.  You might give extra time off and most of your employees will love it, but those who define themselves by their work will find this a burden.

Ultimately, I think people tend to swing a certain way on the emotional scale.  Some are usually happier than others.  Some relish in being angry or depressed, it’s their comfort zone.  They don’t know how to be any other way.  Instead of working to ‘make’ people happy, spend your time selecting happy people to come work for you.

In the middle of a concentration camp, the most horrific experiences imaginable, Frankl witnessed people who made the decision to be happy. Maybe they were happy to have one more day on earth. Maybe they were happy because, like Frankl, they discovered that the Nazis could take everything from them except their mind.

Provide the best work environment that you can.  Continue to try and make it better with the resources you have.  Give meaning to the work and the things you do.  Every organization has this, no matter what you do at your company.  Don’t pursue happiness, it’s a fleeting emotion that is impossible to maintain.  Pursue being the best organization you can be.  It doesn’t mean you have to be someone you’re not.  Just be ‘you’, and find others that like ‘you.’

Care. More.

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My wife loves a super funny scene from the moving “Knocked Up”, here’s the scene:

“Care more!” My wife and I laugh at this because this one scene defines most marriages with kids!

I like “care more”. I want those I work with to care more. To care as much as I do. Care more about what we do. Care more about each other. Care more about your own development. Care more about our customers.

Care more!

Here’s the problem with ‘Care More!’ You’re assuming those around you don’t care more. Think about that for a moment. What if it was you being told to ‘care more’?

Feels like an insult, doesn’t it?

As leaders, we constantly feel like we care more about everything than all of those who work for us, but that’s just not true. It feels that way because we are surrounded by people who also care, but we are caring about different things at different times.

I’m surrounded by great people at my company, HRU Technical Resources, who are constantly caring more, but often it’s just not that we are aligned on our caring! I’m caring about something one day, and they also have things they are caring about. Some days we are all caring about the same thing, some days we are caring about different things.

When I first started as a leader in my career I would have high frustration over ‘care more’. I wanted every single person who I worked with to care as much as I did about the exact same things that I did. Let’s be honest, this is a behavior that still crops up for me from time to time!

What I’ve learned, is that almost every person that I have worked with does care more. The key is understanding what they care about, letting them know that I understand what they care about, and also have them know what I care about. I think this alignment lets all of us help each other.

Most employees working for you want to ‘care more’ about something. It’s not my job to judge what they care about, but to support them in caring more for what is important to them, not getting them to only ‘care more’ to what’s important to me.

That’s my key to great leadership and a happy marriage! Understand what others care more about. Help them care more. Don’t judge what someone else is caring more about. Let others know what you care more about so they aren’t assuming or guessing what you care more about.

The people I don’t want in my life are those who don’t want to care more about anything. I have no room for that!

Mailbag Question: Should Our Receptionist Hug Clients?

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So, yes, I’m the “World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging” so it seems appropriate that this week I would get the following question from a reader:

Dear World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging, 

My boss asked me to do something this week and before I did it I wanted to ask an expert, like yourself, and get some other opinions. The situation is our CEO has asked me to ‘tell’ our front desk receptionist that she will now be required to hug each client that comes into our office. Our CEO feels this will create a more welcoming and friendly environment for our clients. What are your thoughts on doing this?

Thinking this doesn’t right in Middle America! 

Yes, this was an actual exchange that I had this week! I made up the name, but everything else is as accurate as I can make and still protect the innocent!

So, in 2017, a CEO of an actual, successful company, wants “Mary” the Receptionist to start hugging every client that comes to the office. Wow. Right? Just, Wow!

Here’s my response:

Middle America,

First, being a hugger, I actually understand where your CEO is coming from. When I go into a business and I’m met with a friendly (natural, unforced) hug. I feel very welcome! When I’m down south, I seem to get more hugs than if I’m on either coast or in a big city. So, part of me actually understands the psychology behind this request.

That being said, I have one question for your CEO (and I encourage to ask this question): “If Mary leaves as your receptionist, and you hire “Mark” to replace her, will your CEO still want “Mark” to go and hug every client?” I’ll take make a ‘big’ assumption here and say, no, probably not!

This is a very quick and simple way to point out how harassing this action would be viewed by normal people. If you decide to go down this path of making hugging an actual work requirement, you will end up in a lawsuit at some point!

Okay, I’m a hugger, so let me tell you how you get most of what you want, without the lawsuit! Go hire a natural hugger to man your front desk and never discourage this behavior! You’ll get most of what you want, especially if your CEO and others mirror this hugging behavior to every client they meet in front of this person.

Good Luck,

Tim The World’s Foremost Expert in Workplace Hugging!

I love HR because of this very real, innocent question. You never actually know what the heck you’ll walk into each day, and there is no way of planning for the insane things that happen!

Have a great Friday HR Pros! You deserve it!

Turns Out, Employees Don’t Actually Leave Managers!

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For decades we’ve been telling leaders this one thing about employees and retention. We’ve said it so much, it’s actually become ‘common’ knowledge we take for granted. It’s this one phrase:

Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. 

Have you used this phrase? Of course, you have! Everyone in HR has used this!

New research has come out from IBM’s Smarter Workforce Institute, “Should I Stay, or Should I Go?” that has actually proven our ‘common’ knowledge is wrong:

“Managers are not the reason most people leave – 

• Contrary to many media reports, only 14 percent of people left their last job because they were unhappy with their managers.

• The biggest work-related reason (cited by 40 percent of respondents) for leaving is because employees are not happy with their jobs.

• Almost as many people (39 percent) left their last job for personal reasons such as spouse relocation, child care or health issues.

• One in five (20 percent) workers left because they were not happy with their organization.

• Eighteen percent left due to organizational changes which had caused a great deal of uncertainty.”

This isn’t some small study of a hundred employees. IBM looked at data from 22,000 employees!

So, why has this concept of employees leaving managers become so wildly accepted and popular amongst HR leaders and pros?

You won’t like this answer, but we liked using this reason for employees leaving because it meant it wasn’t our problem. I mean it was our problem to help fix, but it wasn’t our fault. It was those stupid managers!

So, we’ll coach them up. Give them soft skills training. Talk down to them like their children, and help them become ‘leaders’. IBM didn’t actually say this was the reason, this is my own reasoning. It’s just super comfortable to give this explanation to why we have high turnover.

The reality is if employees leave there are likely numerous reasons all of which are probably centered on a bad employee experience. They were unhappy because of something. It might have been because they were working for a crappy manager, but it also might be they just made a bad fit decision in the job they choose to accept, or culturally the fit wasn’t good with your organization and the employee.

One thing is certain. Employees, the majority, don’t leave managers. They leave your freaking company. That’s not our manager’s issue, it’s all of our issues. Today’s challenge? Stop using this phrase and start taking ownership of your employee turnover!

 

What if you and your competitors recruited talent together?

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Think about most U.S. cities. What do they have in common? I travel all over the U.S. and to be honest, it’s all starting to look a lot alike!

Every city has a mall or three. At these malls, you’ll find the same restaurants. Chilis, Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Bravo, steak places, some random Japanese hibachi place, etc. Usually, down from the mal, you’ll find a Home Depot. Across the street from Home Depot, you’ll find a Lowes. Down from those are the car dealerships.

Sound like your city!?

Our cities are set up like this because it works. Putting all of these competitive places close together works for the consumer. They like all the choices close together.

Talent really isn’t much different.

If I’m a nurse, I want to be close hospitals. The more hospitals the better. That way if my job at one hospital isn’t working out, I don’t have to commute all the way across town to another hospital. If I’m in IT having a bunch of tech companies in the same area is desirable for the same reason.

What we don’t find, normally, are employers working together to solve their talent issues. A cook at one restaurant might be begging for more hours, but we never think about sharing that cook with the restaurant next door. We force the talent to go figure this out on their own.

Traditionally, I think career fairs thought they were doing this. Bring all the employers to one location and then all the talent can come and pick who they want to work with. It’s a start, but this isn’t really organizations working together to bring in more and better talent.

A modern-day equivalent to the traditional career fair might be cities working to ‘attract’ talent to their cities from places like Silicone Valley. In recent years, Minneapolis has been working to position themselves as a Midwest IT hub, so local and state government dollars have been working to get workers from other cities to come to Minneapolis.

What I’m talking about is what if two companies came together to share their talent databases for the benefit of both? Could it work? What would get in the way?

I think it could work. I think the organizations involved would be some forward-thinking leadership, some tight rules of engagement, and a very new way of thinking about collaboration.

So often we make a hire of someone we know if talented, but it doesn’t work out for a number of reasons, many times those reasons are self-inflicted by the organization. What if you could ‘move’ that talent to your ‘talent partner’ organization for a fresh start, and vice versa?

I love times when talent is tight because it forces us to start thinking about different solutions and ways of doing things. We all have talent in our databases that we aren’t using and might never use, but someone else might have exactly what we need in their database.

Instead, we sit on our unused, expensive inventory of candidates and do nothing. That doesn’t seem like a smart business practice…