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Your first internship, in your career, should be in sales! No matter your major.

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So, it’s that time of year when we begin to think about our interns for the summer. I love interns because we get to show them what they’ll never do or see again in the real world when they get their first job! I’m only half-joking. Most internships I hear about today (and I hear about a lot) aren’t coming close to teaching young adults what it’s like to really work a job in your company.

Suppose I was Chief of HR for the country like I got to make all the HR decisions and make rules and stuff (wouldn’t that be a fun job!) – Chief Justice of HR! I would force every kid who ever did an internship first to do a sales internship with whichever company they decided to do an internship with. Great, you want to be in HR, or an Accountant, or an Engineer, or a Developer, etc., first, you need to go out on the road or sit on the phone with Jerry, he works in sales for our company.

Why sales?

Too often, I see entry-level grads come into organizations with this strange sense of how the world works based on what it is they do in their chosen profession. Do you want to know how to really impact your chosen profession? Go find out how the sausage is made! The ‘sausage’ in most organizations is sales.

Want to find out how to save the organization money as an Engineer or Accountant so you better understand your customer and what and how they’re buying? Want to be a great designer or developer? Sales will teach you what your priorities should be. Want to find out how to impact employee development and career growth? Go find out how hard it is to sell $1 of the product your company sells every day.

This isn’t some plan to get everyone in the world to think sales is hard and you should pity them. Sales are hard. Great sales pros also make a ton of money. No one usually feels bad for sales. This is truly about getting the new grads coming into your organization to have a better perspective on what’s really important.

If we don’t sell our stuff, you can’t ride down the slide into the lobby on your way to hot yoga.

So, no matter what you do in the organization. You should know how to sell. Well, Tim, I’m going to be a nurse. Hospitals don’t sell. We save lives. Congratulations on becoming a nurse. It’s such a great profession. You’re a moron. Every organization sells. Hospitals compete against other hospitals for high-margin healthcare business. Nonprofits compete for donations and grant dollars. Churches compete for your soul!

Every organization is selling something, and you should know what it is you’re selling and how it’s sold.

We do a disservice to new grads when we make them think that their profession is only about the skills they’re learning for some title they’ll one day have after graduation. Your profession, every profession, is about ensuring crap gets sold.

The Best Recruiting Conference/Festival on the planet is coming to the U.S.!

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I go to a lot of HR and TA conferences. All over the world. I’ve consistently said the top recruiting conference in the world is RecFest in the UK. Its outdoor summer festival meets business conference, and it’s magical! Well, I’ve got great news! RecFest US is coming to Nashville, TN, in September 2023!

Check this out:

I love RecFest, especially for a Talent Acquisition Team event. Beyond the great recruiting content and amazing speaker lineup, RecFest at its heart is a festival, so at the end of the day, you have live music, drinks, and food. Over the past three years, so many TA teams have been working overtime, so this could make a great team event to plan for.

Early Bird Tickets are on sale right now –

Click Here for RecFest US Nashville Tickets

I hope to see you there! I’m planning on attending with so many other TA Influencers, thought leaders, and friends. I already know of a large number of enterprise-level TA leaders who are also attending with their teams! I can’t wait!

Here are some highlights from RecFest UK 2022 that I attended:

Do Your Employees Have Unrealistic Pay Raise Expectations? #HRFamous

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On episode 112 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee, Madeline Laurano, and Tim Sackett come together to discuss what they’re hoping to learn in 2023, the extra burden placed on women in Executive level roles, and unrealistic hopes for pay increases. 

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:00 – JLee asks the crew what is one thing that they want to learn in 2023.  JLee has only ridden a bike a few times, and she wants to master riding a bike this year. Madeline’s goal is to get better at golfing. 

4:15 – Tim is taking his Jewish family to Israel this year. His youngest son, Cooper, is learning Hebrew at school, and Tim wants to learn some of that language. 

6:15 – JLee brings up an article from Fortune about women in C-Suite or Executive level positions and how they may have to pay a lot of money on childcare and household help. JLee asks Madeline if we are talking about this topic enough. 

8:50 – Madeline tells a story about her son, who had a female friend over. She told the kids she just needed to take some time to clean up and her son’s friend said to her, “don’t you have a cleaner?”. 

11:30 – Tim mentions how when his mom was starting her business, she hired Tim’s Grandma to come to clean the house while she worked. 

14:00 – Madeline thinks that there is more stigma around people hiring for childcare help than household help.

16:45 – Tim wonders how much of this is American culture vs. culture from all around the world. He mentions how shocked he was when he visited South Africa, and he saw how much help middle-class white families had for their everyday life. 

20:30 – Lesson of the day: parenting is not easy, and it’s nearly impossible to do it all by yourself! 

21:30 – Bloomberg reported on the unrealistic high hopes that employees have for pay hikes in the new year. JLee asks the crew if they are seeing this in the workplace. 

24:45 – Madeline notes how it still is an employee/candidate first market due to the number of jobs available. She does think that due to the layoffs happening across the workforce, the behavior of asking for raises may change. 

29:00 – JLee notes that any publicly traded company has to listen to its shareholders and what they think is best for the business. A big question for these companies is, “who are we in service to?”. 

31:30 – When can you stop saying Happy New Year? Madeline thinks she could go to 1/30, but Tim only gives it two weeks. 

ChatGPT 101 for HR and TA Pros!

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n “Making HR Tech Easy,” work tech expert Tim Sackett, SHRM-SCP, makes complex HR technology understandable for all HR professionals, because having a high competency in HR technology is critical to moving your HR career forward.

It’s been really hard not to hear about Open.AI’s ChatGPT over the past couple of months. It seems like everyone has been talking about it since its recent release in 2022. But if you’re just now encountering it, ChatGPT is a conversational SaaS artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that understands the intent of complex, specific questions and has the potential to produce human-quality responses. Yes, really human!

I say “potential” because it’s still learning. Although it’s already pretty good, and it gets better every minute as millions of people use it.

Why should you care about an AI chatbot that can answer questions like a human? Because it will most likely change work in both significant and minor ways in the near future, similar to what we saw during the first industrial revolution.

Are chatbots going to take our jobs? Well, if I’m honest, some jobs will be lost for sure, at least initially. But it will also create new jobs, many of which we don’t even know yet. Again, similar to the first industrial revolution.

Will ChatGPT Take HR Jobs?

ChatGPT can…

Click here to read the rest of this article on the SHRM website. 

Utilizing your PTO get 40 days off per year! Yes you can!

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We all know of that one co-worker that just finds a way to take advantage of every possible benefit to the fullest extent possible! These are the folks who, when on a work trip, will find a way to use every single penny of that per diem! “Hey, can I get a $3.27 gift card added to my dinner bill?”

Well, I think I found one of those folks who cracked the code on PTO! Take a look:

@johnsfinancetips Here is how you can take 40 days off with only 15 vacation days. If you had 19 vacation days, you could take up to 47 days off. Also, do you take all your vacation days every year? #pto #vacation #paidleave #work #vaca #timeoff #personalfinance ♬ original sound – John Liang

So, there’s some creative PTO math in this video for sure, but I love it. Of course, how he’s doing this by also adding in paid holidays and weekend days with his PTO, which I hate to tell a young millennial that workers have been doing this since the advent of paid time off, but he’s so excited I don’t want to burst his little bubble.

I wonder what he could do if he added in his “work from home” days! OMG! He would have like 400 days off a year!

What is your favorite PTO trick? Hit me in the comments!

Can you freelance your HR shop? #HRFamous

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On episode 111 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee, Madeline Laurano, and Tim Sackett come together to discuss 2022 and give their thoughts about this year in HR and talent. 

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:00 – Tim asks the crew what their favorite TV show, movie, or book from 2022 was. Madeline is a big Euphoria fan, JLee loved Ted Lasso, and Tim couldn’t choose one (House of Dragon, Peaky Blinders. 2022 was a great year for TV!

8:00 – The crew name some of their favorites (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is Madeline’s). Tim loves Talent by Tyler Cowen. 

10:00 – JLee tried to get Cowen to come speak at a Marriott event and she found that he isn’t too fond of HR folks. She wants to dig in with him and see his real feelings about people who work in HR. 

12:00 – It’s time for the HR and talent year in review! JLee mentions the transition from The Great Resignation into Quiet Quitting. She found that we can get worked up over things that end up not being as noteworthy in the long run. 

14:00 – Tim tried to make “The Big Regret” happened but it never took off…

16:50 – Tim thinks that the HR and talent community needs someone that we can trust for facts and information. He shouts out Roy from SHRM for his journalism work. 

19:00 – Madeline brings up how the biggest topic that isn’t being discussed in HR is the rise of freelancing within the job market. She notes that by 2030, 50% of an organization’s workforce will be freelancers. 

24:00 – Tim says that he thinks there has been a de-emphasis on DEI in 2022. Madeline thinks that within the HR technology space, DEI wasn’t the hot topic of the year. JLee notes that in 2020 there were so many topics culturally that forced the conversations around DEI to be at the forefront. 

26:00 – As we look ahead to 2023, Tim asks the team what points of emphasis he sees coming to the head. Madeline thinks the skills conversation has surprised her in its prominence. She thinks it’s the topic that everyone is obsessed with. 

28:00 – Tim asks JLee where they are at Marriott with skills. She thinks that organizations can be intimidated by the topic and that people are over contemplating where to get started. 

31:30 – JLee’s focus for 2023 is AI and how it will affect content creation.

87% of Employee are Thinking About a Promotion, and That’s a Problem for You! @iCIMS #ICIMSINSPIRE

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iCIMS 2023 Workforce Report is out, and it’s jammed full of some great data and facts. Here’s just one that caught my eye:

iCIMS 2023 Workforce Report

Now, some will read this and think, “Wow, that’s awesome!” But if you’re a leader of people, you quickly understand how problematic this is! 87% of folks want a promotion. About 10% actually get a promotion. And we wonder why over 50% of our workforce is disengaged.

You can download the full report here.

I didn’t even give you the good stuff, here is another peak:

  • 63% of job seekers say a primary factor in their job search is whether the job is remote, hybrid, or on-prem. (editors note: shouldn’t this be 100%? 😉 What this shows is how important where the work of the job is done more than ever.
  • 80% of workers do not feel secure financially or professionally. (Ouch)
  • 2 out 5 workers claim to not have a work-life balance.
  • More here.

What about all those employees who want a promotion?! What can we do?!

This is where great leaders make their money.

Being able to provide opportunity and development, mentorship, and on-demand training programs, are all a part of the plan. The biggest part of the plan truly has little to do with all of this. Your employees must feel they can trust you with their careers. That you, with them, have created a plan and will follow through with that plan to reach their goals.

Every employee can have a plan, but are you willing to be upfront enough with them about what that might look like? For some, their path might be in a year. For others, it’s much longer, and this is where it gets really difficult. Being able to provide a great opportunity takes a combination of great tools, great leadership, effort, and patience. I find that most organizations fail on at least 2 out of 4.

Great tools can be expensive, but the ROI is strong. Great leadership is expensive and hard to maintain because we also under-invest in that as well. Effort and Patience are the two that any employee can do, and the ones who have those usually succeed, but those are also very rare. This then comes down to if our leaders were born or built. We can debate that for eternity. The reality is it’s both.

I think another great question to ask this 87% of employees would be if we can keep all things the same. Same job. Same location. Same everything. Except we give you the same raise you would get if you were promoted, would you still want the promotion? I’m guessing that 87% drops to around 25%, and that’s more doable. One in four employees wanting a promotion seems like a number that makes more sense. Our problem is how we take care of our individual contributors.

Another day, another post. Right now, you have an 87% problem. Have fun!

America’s Blue Collar Starbucks are Big Gas Stations!

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I drove from Michigan to Utah and back over the past two weeks. Twenty-six hours each way. I got to stop at a lot of big gas stations. I’m not sure you can even call them gas stations anymore! You can purchase gas, but you can also purchase coffee, soda, slushies, made-to-order breakfast, lunch, and dinner, some clothing, and so much more. They have these brand new, clean bathrooms. Some have showers. They really are amazing places! I mean, these are not your Mom and Dad’s gas stations!

All of these are on the highway. So it’s mostly a collection of all those folks who travel the highways and byways of our great country. A cross of truckers, retirees, the new van people, and folks who still don’t trust airplanes. I was taking my dogs out on vacation, and one of them was too old and too big to fly. So, we had to drive.

What I noticed on my drive west was the farther you get west, the better the big giant gas stations are! I know there are a ton of Buc-ee’s fans out there, but don’t sleep on Maverik’s, Wawa’s, Sheetz, Racetrac, Casey’s, and Kum and Go. As you come east, the gas stations get worse. Speedway in Michigan and around the midwest is really good, but once you get past Ohio, the gas stations suck. Why are gas stations better south and west? It doesn’t really make sense.

Inside a Maverik gas station

I got home and, the next morning had to stop at one of these big new gas stations in my own town. That’s when it hit me. These gas stations are the high-end coffee shop of the blue-collar workforce! I do not say that disparagingly. I say that with some affirmation. I saw all these hard-working folks getting ready for their day. Big cups of coffee, energy drinks, breakfast burritos, lottery tickets, and a full tank. (By the way, don’t sleep on big gas station breakfast burritos!)

The comradery of these folks was much more lively than I’ve seen in any stuffy Starbucks!

I was driving my suburban dad Pickup Truck, wearing my Friday casuals with a trucker cap on, so I almost didn’t stand out. I had the feeling that many of these folks stopped at this same gas station every single morning they went to work. Many probably came back for lunch and maybe even stopped on the way home if they needed something.

Neighbors and work peers swapping stories from the games the night before. Giving each other grief over some mistake someone made on a job. Asking for favors and help. It was the corporate water cooler of their day. But with a much more robust and colorful network of folks.

These big giant gas stations have it figured out. They figured out all these hard-working folks need a place to congregate before their day gets started. They need a place where they can use a clean restroom. Maybe sit for a bit and make a call. Access to wifi. Grab a bite of lunch or a cold drink in the afternoon.

I’m a big fan of the blue-collar Starbucks. I like the vibe. I like the people. I like the energy.

In Low Hire Times, Great Recruiting is More Important!

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We have been on a great run! A historic run of hiring for about a decade now. That does not happen often. For the most part, over half of the current workforce has never seen a downturn in the economy that was sustained for more than a few months. It has been a heck of a good run.

Over the past decade, recruiting has seen massive evolution and growth. Our technology has improved immensely. Our skills have improved. Our branding and recruitment marketing has improved. At no other point in history has talent acquisition wielded more power than they have over the past decade.

I mean, it almost feels like recruiters have gotten respect! (almost)

Here’s the thing.

With all of this change and growth, we will still have organizational leaders when a downturn hits who believe we can cut recruiting as one of the first things. The axiom is if we aren’t hiring, we don’t need recruiters. That makes logical sense. In reality, we don’t really stop hiring. We just hire way less.

The truth is, when we hire less, each hire takes on much more significance. Our ability to hire really well when we hire fewer increases with importance. We don’t have slack in the system to make bad hires and have them be covered up by all the other hires.

If I have to hire one hundred people per month, leadership assumes some of those will be misses. If I can only hire ten per month, I can no longer have misses! False-positive hires can not happen when you only hire a few.

Why?

If times are tough and I only get to hire a few people. Multiple factors are at play. First, my hiring number is small. Second, the business needs great performers to survive and grow. Third, we truly need to know who the great performers are before we hire them. Forth, every low performer that makes it through the process exacerbates our already dire problem.

Bad Times Are Not The Time To Cut Talent Acquisition!

Bad times are the time to double down on ensuring your TA function is humming at maximum efficiency and effort. That your technology is performing exactly as it is supposed to perform. That you have very few false positives, and your Q0H (Quality of Hire) is through the roof. Also, you need to have hunters on your team, not just farmers.

Organizations will get leaner, and TA teams will get leaner. The recruiters who should keep their jobs should not be process jockeys. I can literally hire anyone with two ounces of sense to process applications. That is a pennies-on-the-dollar job. The recruiters who thrive in a down economy are assassins. Recruiters who can go out and find the best talent and talk that talent into coming onto your sinking ship.

This past decade was not a great decade to grow assassins. Why?

You would think the opposite to be true. Everyone was hiring. The competition for talent was fierce! Why didn’t we grow more assassins?

It’s a combination of technology, flow, and ease of apply. We had this strange convergence of a time when we had millions of open jobs, a time when it was never easier to find talent, and you could apply to jobs with one click. Basically, most TA shops turned into Inbound recruiting process shops. We post jobs. People apply. We process those applications. Rinse and repeat.

If there is candidate flow to your jobs, why spend the extra effort to make sure that flow is actually good? It must be good, right?! Just process more applications. We are hiring so many it doesn’t really matter, we’ll make some great hires out of that pile. Or we won’t. It doesn’t matter, we have another pile to go through.

Assassins grow when times are tough. You need to find yourself some assassins and get ready. Winter is coming.

Michigan Recruiter’s Conference – Nov. 10! Tickets OnSale Now!

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FYI – Due to limited seating capacity – this event will sell out quickly, and this will be the only event in Michigan this year. Sorry to my TA friends in West and Mid-Michigan, but we will work to have an event closer to you in 2023!

The only specifically designed Recruiter conference for corporate Talent Acquisition Pros and Leaders in Michigan! The Michigan Recruiters Conference is designed to be an annual event that will bring in the brightest recruiting minds in the country to nurture and develop corporate recruiting as a whole in Michigan. The event organizer is Tim Sackett. 

The 2022 Michigan Recruiters Conference will be held on Thursday, November 10th, in Detroit at DTE. Registration begins at 8 am, and the conference begins at 8:45 am sharp!

For the 2022 Michigan Recruiters Conference, we are bringing in some of the best talent acquisition thought leaders in the world:

  • Global TA Leader, Marriott, and Author, Kris Dunn.
  • TA Expert and Analyst, Aptitude Research, Madeline Laurano.
  • Global TA Leader, General Motors, Cyril George.
  • LinkedIn and Branding expert Brenda Mellar.
  • Branding& Conversational AI Expert, Paradox, Josh Zywien.
  • Director of Recruitment Ops, Beaumont Health, Charlotte Byndas.
  • Site HR Director General Motors, Stephanie Zywien.
  • Senior Sourcing Expert, Guild Education, Hunter Casperson.
  • Author of The Talent Fix and TA Execution expert Tim Sackett.

We also have sponsor presentations from the folks at HireEZ, Paradox, Greenhouse, and DTE! Not to sell us but to teach us! We don’t feed the vendors! 

Also, you are getting the greatest opportunity in Michigan to network with your talent acquisition peer group to connect and share! 

This is, for sure, our best lineup yet! National conferences would beg to get this group of folks in one room for one day! You don’t have to beg, we pulled every friend card we have to get them here for you! 

Register Here for Michigan Recruiter’s Conference 2022

Check it out at www.MichiganRecruits.com!