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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!

Does working for a bad boss help your career more than a good boss?

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If you’re like most people, you’ve probably worked for some good bosses and some bad bosses. The best bosses I worked for were supportive and empathetic. They cared about me as a person and supported me as a professional. The bad bosses usually just focused on themselves and what I could do for them.

I know many people who will talk about working for a terrible boss and actually show signs of professional PTSD! We joke, but sometimes the experience can be that awful. There was a recent study done with refugees who are survivors of torture. I’m not saying working for a bad boss is “torture,” but I know I can find some people who would argue it is!

Here goes, Tim! Good bosses, bad bosses, and torture survival!

The study mentioned above found that refugees who were tortured, compared to those who didn’t get tortured, became more resilient. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, comes to mind.

I think the same can be said about working for a bad boss compared to a good boss.

Employers are constantly looking for resilient employees. We try to measure resiliency in pre-employment assessments. During the past few years, resilience as a hiring competency has been very hot.

I have this theory that working for a bad boss or a bad company that treats you poorly, in many ways, makes you a better employee than you working for a great boss and a great company. And it all has to do with raising your level of resilience! You see, when times are good, and things are relatively easy, you are exercising that resiliency muscle.

I’m not saying you get soft working for great leaders and great companies, but you might get a little soft!

We see this constantly in the world as we go through great economic times. Everyone gets a little softer. Hard economic times force us to work that resiliency muscle. To harden up a bit, to grow a thicker skin, put up with some stuff that we wouldn’t normally, to survive.

Bad Bosses and Bad Companies Make More Resilient Workers!

There’s a fine line between becoming resilient and getting broken. That’s the hard part. Like the study found, in some cases, a person just gives up and accepts their fate. They begin to believe this was somehow deserved. The key is to find the “survivors,” those who wouldn’t give in or give up. Those who actually become more resilient from their experiences. Those are your diamonds in the rough from an employee perspective.

Too often, we only want to hire from winners. “Well, they worked for Google. They must be awesome!” And they might be. But I want “awesome” and “resilient” when I know we’ll face tough times. When we have to dig ourselves out of a hole, from a business perspective, I want to have some people who have been in a hole before and found their way out!

Another option is looking for strong workers who work for a bad boss at a good employer. We all know the world, at every company, is littered with some bad bosses, no matter the brand. I have a feeling the same resilience is built up over time. Having to “deal” with a bad boss for a while, and figuring out how to be still productive and get things done is an amazing skill to have acquired in your career. Even though it won’t feel that way at the time!

Yep, today Tim wrote about how refugee torture victims and working for bad bosses is similar to how we build resilience. Now to work on a case study with my own team…

Stay hard.

The BIG HR Tech Conference What I Learned Post! #hrtechconf

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The largest HR Technology Conference in the world took place a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, and I attended it for my 10th year in a row! At this conference, I did 26 briefings with various HR Technology companies and judged two rounds of the Pitchfest HR Tech Startup competition! I also hit 13 cocktail parties and had my shared BFF cocktail party with Madeline Laurano and Kyle Lagunas get shutdown do to overcrowding! Welcome back to Vegas, HR Tech!!!

The big question is always: What did I learn and see?

– First, it was giant! Over 600+ vendors at the expo make it the largest ever, and I can’t even describe how incredible it is!

– The vibe? High energy! Folks were excited to be back in person, and it seemed like everyone was happy with the show and the content. Josh Bersin, once again, killed his keynote to a packed audience. I’m not sure who can fill his shoes in our space! There is really no one who pulls such a crowd like Josh. I’m positioning myself as his opening act at HR Tech Fest Asia next spring! He’s that HR Famous that he needs an opening act!

– The Pitchfest winner this year was Spotlyfe, an employee engagement platform that makes sense coming out of the pandemic, with so many more employees working remotely and hybrid and more awareness around our employee’s mental health!

– Other Pitchfest startups that I really liked also: Dalia (recruiting automation), JobSync (recruiting orchestration), and SmartRank (candidate screening). That’s the hard part of Pitchfest. 33 startups, and think about ten could have won!

– The rise of Talent Orchestration! HiredScore is the originator of this new marketing speak, to give credit where credit is due, and an amazing technology to check out! What is “talent orchestration”? Basically, it’s an invisible AI-driven technology that connects all of your recruiting technology and makes it work as it should! I spoke to some enterprise-level TA leaders who had great things to say about their experience using HiredScore.

– I was a bit surprised that I didn’t really see anyone who has figured out how to leverage technology to figure out the cultural dilemma we currently have with remote, hybrid, and on-premise workers. How do you bring all three of these segments together, effectively and efficiently, under one culture? It just shows how complex of an issue this is for HR!

– The Future of HR Technology is technology you don’t see. That is amazing and what is needed, but also a problem for marketers! “Invisible Tech” is the technology you don’t see, but it does exactly what you want it to do. Most tech is sold through a demo, and you see what you’re buying. The future tech you won’t see, but it will actually work! Hard to sell six and seven-figure deals of something you don’t see! But this is exactly how our tech should work. I want to fill job “X” and all of a sudden, candidates who are interested and match the job show up in my email or on my calendar to interview for job”X.” I don’t need to see any of that. I just need it to work!

– Apparently, vendors think the future of HR Technology is “Skills”! I’m not 100% sold we are in a skills economy. We are in a definite lack of skills economy, which puts us in need to build and develop skills. The problem is, it’s really hard to do! We have historically been really bad at building talent for our organizations. Just because you can now measure and deliver skills doesn’t necessarily make us better at building talent. But, it won’t be for lack of trying from the vendor community around HR Technology!

– My friend and HR Famous fellow podcaster, Madeline Laurano, did a session on the future of talent acquisition technology and the current landscape. She did an absolute mic drop when it came to DEI recruiting technology when she put up the slide of the vendors you should look at, and it was EMPTY! Her point is most of the DEI tech on the market is vapor. You either have great recruiting technology, or you don’t. Calling yourself DEI recruiting tech, but no one uses it for recruiting tech, is very telling! By the way, she’s right. You can either help a company recruit better, or you can’t. There’s nothing special about DEI recruiting tech that shouldn’t be built into your core recruiting technology.

– The overlap of technologies is becoming a problem. Basically, we have techs building out more and more and encroaching on each other’s turf. Great, but it’s confusing the buyer in a major way. Normally, when a technology space gets like this, you would see massive consolidation. The problem is the values of tech in our space over the past few years are extremely overvalued, so we aren’t seeing this consolidation happen yet. If a recession does impact HR tech values, it’s going to get crazy with folks buying each other!

Recruiting is going to continue to be very difficult over the next few years, even with a business slowdown. There just aren’t enough humans for the jobs we have open. Automation and robotics will catch up and help, but we still have some major demographic issues we will face. This means the technology and investment will continue as well. We are being forced into a path of choosing your pain – steal talent from others, build your own talent, do a combination, or die waiting for applicants to apply to your jobs.

The ones with the best technology stacks, best measures, and best insights into their data will win. Today is not the time to sit by and watch the world pass you in HR. The technology that runs our people business is changing fast, and the top leaders in HR stay on top of this curve.

Shoutout to the LRP Team and Devon Team for all the work that goes into pulling off this event. I’m just not quite sure how they do it!

Set your calendar for 2023 – The HR Technology Conference will be back at the Mandalay Bay on October 10-13th, and god willing, I’ll be back for my 11th time!

The Recruiter Texting Rules!

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Here we go! Your boy is back with some more rules! You know I love me some rules! I’m high rules, and low details, which drives most people crazy!

I was having a conversation recently with some recruiters about texting candidates. For the most part, in recruiting, we’ve gotten to this point where we believe every candidate prefers texting over every other kind of communication. And, if they don’t want a text message, then they want email.

This isn’t exactly true! I did some research and surveyed over 1600 candidates we screened to find out the facts and published it – 6 Things Candidates Want You to Know – you can download it here for free. But I’m not here trying to sell you a free whitepaper!

The entire reason we believe candidates prefer text over any other form of communication is some creative marketing around text vs. email response rates in overall text vs. email communications. Now, this is where all of this falls apart. I get over 500 emails per day. I get maybe 25-50 messages. Of course, I’m going to respond more to text messages vs. email. But that doesn’t mean, as a candidate, I want text vs. email, necessarily!

This all lead me down a path where I believe we need some rules around texting as recruiters!

The Recruiter Texting Rules:

Rule No. 1 – As the first outreach to a candidate you don’t know, texting is not preferred by candidates. They don’t know you, and they certainly don’t want you jumping into their private text messages with a spammy job offer!

Rule No. 2 – No one of quality ever accepted an interview and job offer through text message without first speaking to a real human. Pick up the god damn phone. Once a candidate is all in with you, then yes, they will most likely only want texts from you.

Rule No. 3 – Give me a way to opt-out of your bad text recruiting automation hell! For one, it’s the law. But, most still make it way too difficult to stop the automated texts.

Rule No. 4 – Just because you have my number as a candidate does not give you permission to stalk me for a date. It’s super creepy!

Rule No. 5 – If we aren’t friends, don’t text me like we are friends. Avoid sarcasm. Keep it professional and short.

Rule No. 6 – If it feels like you’re sending candidates too many text messages. You are sending candidates too many text messages! Also, don’t text me a novel! Send long stuff in an email.

Rule No. 7 – If I ask you a question, answer the damn question! We are adults. You can tell me the truth I don’t need some run-around answer that doesn’t really answer my question.

Rule No. 8 – If you expect me to respond within minutes. I expect you’ll respond within minutes. Set the ground rules around expectations early.

Rule No. 9 – Never! And I mean, NEVER! Text with a green bubble! Just Kidding! 😉

Okay, peeps, what did I forget? Give me your favorite rule for texting candidates in the comments below.