3 Highly Effective Habits of Annoying Candidates!

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’ve noticed a run on ‘Highly Effective’ list posts lately! It seems like everyone has the inside scoop on how to be highly effective at everything! Highly Effective Leaders. Highly Effective Managers. Highly Effective Productive People. Highly Effective Teacher. If you want a post worth clicking on, just add an odd number, the words ‘highly effective’ and a title. It goes a little something like this (hit it!):

– The 5 Highly Effective Habits of Crackheads!

– The 7 Highly Effective Traits of Lazy Employees!

– The 13 Highly Effective Ways To Hug It Out at Work!

Blog post writing 101. The highly effective way to write a blog post people will click on and spend 57 seconds reading.

I figured I might as well jump on board with some career/job seeker advice with the 3 Highly Effective Habits of Annoying Candidates!

1. They don’t pick up on normal social cues. This means you don’t know when to shut up or start talking. Most annoying candidates actually struggle with the ‘when to stop talking piece’. Yes, we want to hear about your job history. No, we don’t care about your boss Marvin who managed you at the Dairy Dip when you were 15.

2. They live in the past. Usually, annoying candidates are annoying because they were annoying employees and like to share annoying stories about how great it was in the past when they weren’t thought of as annoying. I guess you can’t blame them. If there was ever a possibility they weren’t annoying, I’d probably try and relive those moments as much as possible.

3. They lack a shred of self-insight. That’s really the core, right? If you had any self-insight, you would understand you’re just a little annoying and you would work to control that, but you don’t. “Maybe some would say spending a solid ten minutes talking about my coin collection in an interview wouldn’t be good, but I think it shows I’m passionate!” No, it doesn’t.

You can see how these highly effective habits start to build on each other. You don’t stop rambling on about something totally unrelated to the interview because you don’t notice Mary stopped taking notes ten minutes ago and started doodling on her interview notes, but you plow on because you told yourself during interview prep to make sure you got out all of your bad manager stories.

Highly effective annoying candidates are like a Tsunami of a lack of emotional intelligence. Even if I was completely unqualified for a job I think the feedback afterward from the interviewers would be: “we really liked him, too bad he doesn’t have any the skills we need.” Highly effective annoying candidates have the opposite feedback: “if this person was the last person on earth with the skills to save our company, I would rather we go out of business!”

What annoying candidate habits have you witnessed?

The First Question Every Leader Needs to Ask Themselves!

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’ve been blogging now for ten years. Writing every day for eight years. If you go around writing and telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.

So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category. These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops. How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes. Five-minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve begun to change my approach, though, because I knew as they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said. The problem with my five minutes of genius was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs. It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do or would even want to do based on their special circumstances.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!” Then, there is a pause and explanation, and sometimes from this, we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better. That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not. Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine. We’ll go on living and doing great HR work. It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent leaders will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better and move in that same direction.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we, really want to get better? I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you, and you’ll be just fine!

Career Confessions of Gen Z: Are We Too Busy For Fun?

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Tim Sackett

A few weeks back I came across a video of a guy that put a giant ball pit downtown New York City to see if people were too busy to have fun. On that same day, I had a conversation with my fiance about how I always have a million things on my mind at once. None of which are ever fun things. It’s more like a chore list that constantly runs through my mind.

To say the least, I am constantly stressed and feel like I am moving a million miles an hour without time to breathe. What stresses me out the most, is that I don’t have time for me. I don’t have time for fun. And I’m only 22! Is this how the rest of my adult life is supposed be?

My fiance asked me what things I want to do aside from completing things on my chore list. What do I want to do for me?

It made me think. There are a lot of things that I would love to do. I can’t remember the last time I did something for myself or even spent decent quality time with my family.

And why?

Because I am always to “busy”. Busy prioritizing the needs of everyone and everything except for myself. It brought me to question why we as humans get so caught up in all of these other things and forget about ourselves. Do we really not have five minutes out of our day for ourselves? Five minutes for fun?

I’m sure that I am not the first person to ever get caught up trying to keep up with the speed of life and as a result let my own enjoyment fall off the wagon.

The question is, how can we bring that enjoyment, the fun, back into our lives?

It’s really up to us to prioritize it. We are responsible for our lives and how we run them. For people like myself, we need to start saying no to things that can wait and start putting fun first. We need to say, “yes,” to that vacation we so badly need. “Yes” to drinks after work. “Yes” to catching up with friends. Work and house chores will still be there tomorrow.

I am not saying throw all of our responsibilities out the window and run wild. I just mean we need to do something for our own enjoyment every once and a while.

It’s also up to employers to encourage their employees to unplug and have a healthy life outside of work. Below 10 things that employers can do to help employees prioritize themselves without feeling major guilt.

Don’t allow employees to have their work email on their phones.
Don’t call employees or expect them to respond to emails after hours or on their days off.
Require that employees leave the office for at least half of their lunch hour.
Offer work from home days.
Offer flexible work hours.
Make the workday shorter by a half an hour.
Don’t require employees to take PTO for appointments.
Have fun at work. Throw office potlucks, cookouts, or go for a group walk.
Have team outings.
Don’t let that ping pong table in the office get dusty. Encourage employees to take at least 10 minutes out of their day to play a game and give their brain a break to recharge.

Ask yourself, are you too busy to have fun? If the answer is yes, it may be time to re-think your priorities.

Hallie Priest is a digital marketer for HRU Technical Resources, a leading engineering and IT staffing firm based in Lansing, MI, using her skills to create content to serve all involved in the job seeking/hiring process. When she is not strategizing campaigns, going over analytics, or talking about her dog you can find her at the nearest coffee shop fueling her creativity. Connect with her on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/halliepriest

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Facebook Partners with ATSs to Bring Jobs to Your Company Page!

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Tim Sackett

Today on The Weekly Dose I let you know about some changes coming to Facebook and how Facebook is partnering with ATSs to make it easier for employers to get your jobs posted on your Facebook company page.

Facebook has long been that one person we’ve always wanted to dance with us, but they seemed uninterested in having anything to do with the recruiting community. The reality is, FB has more active users than any other social network and that means the potential for us to some serious hiring on FB has always been a dream of most TA pros.

Recently Facebook announced some partnerships with ATS providers SuccessFactors/SAP, JazzHR, Talentify, and Workable. While SuccessFactors, JazzHR, and Workable are all in the ATS space, Talentify is more of a CRM-like, programmatic job posting tool. Both Workable and JazzHR are strong SMB value ATS providers, while SuccessFactors wasn’t originally designed to be an ATS, but because of the acquisition by SAP has built out that functionality, although I think most using it probably feel that recruiting still isn’t its strongest point.

I’m not sure exactly why Facebook choose this group to start, but like most things, my guess it’s probably a combination of relationships being leveraged (hello, SAP), and just scrappiness by the smaller players mentioned to find a way to get this done.

So, what’s actually being done?

“Jackie Chang, head of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said the social network will “continue to identify strategic companies” in order to help businesses hire and people find work. “We’re looking to grow these partnerships,” she said. “We know many businesses are already working with HR solutions providers to manage their hiring needs and we want to make it easier for businesses to tap into the tools they already use, and help more people find jobs.”

Also, from Chris Russell:

There are two ways that the new integrations will work – an onsite, “native apply” experience and an offsite “redirect” experience. In the native apply experience – the messenger popup will still occur.

Onsite, “native apply” experience:

- We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publish job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook.
- Job seekers can apply to those roles directly on Facebook, and the application information is sent back to the partner.
- This allows employers to reach qualified candidates while staying connected to the systems they already use.
- Employers can also create jobs in their ATS, and publish that job to Facebook.

Offsite “redirect” experience:

- We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publish job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook.
- Job seekers are redirected to the employer’s career site and can apply to the role on the employer’s career site.
- Employers can also create jobs in their Applicant Tracking System, and automatically publish that job to Facebook.

Very cool stuff, as Facebook has been one of the hardest nuts to crack when it comes to recruiting, and these integrations should make it easier for employers to start getting their jobs in front of FB users more easily. Facebook won’t be the holy grail for everyone, just as LinkedIn isn’t the holy grail for every employer either, but the potential is there for it to be a very good source for so many that don’t see the pools of talent they need on sites like LinkedIn, or other job boards.

Does your ATS have this integration, or are they working to make it happen? The only way to find out is to actually give them a call and ask that question!

Do you remember your first time!?

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I was twenty-six years old. At the time, I was living in Michigan and working in my first job right out of college. I had been doing pretty well for myself and began moving up in the company.

I had just got put into a position where I had a couple of people reporting to me, and I had to hire a new person to report to me as well. I hired this smart, young person right out of college. Their passion and energy immediately attracted to them.

Oh, wait, you think I’m talking about…

Okay, let me start again. This post isn’t about sex! This post is about my first termination!

Can you remember yours?

In my career, having to terminate individuals are some of my most memorable experiences. I think if you have half a heart, you’re probably the same. When I talk to upcoming HR graduates, I always try and forewarn them about this part of our job.

Terminating employees leads HR pros to heavy drinking or other forms of stress relief. That is a fact.

From time to time I hear HR pros talk boastful about firing someone, and it makes me sick to my stomach. While I’ve had to terminate individuals that clearly deserved it, I never took pleasure in doing it. It’s the one thing that really sucks about having a career in HR. We get to see people at their weakest moments.

Most of us pray that no one ever has to see this side of ourselves. Let alone, be in a position, where you frequently get to see this side of humanity.

When you terminate someone, there is a good chance you’re going to see this person’s biggest fears. I have enough of my own fears. I don’t need to carry around the fears of others!

My first time?

I had to fire the young kid I hired with all the passion and energy, hoping they were going to change the world, fresh out of college. This person just couldn’t come up to speed as a recruiter. It happens. I worked with this person, encouraged them, but eventually this person was ‘dead-employee’ walking.

Their body kept showing up for work, but their mind and heart had given up. No matter how hard they physically worked, it wasn’t going to happen for them. So, I pulled them into the conference room and told them it was time.

No real emotion to make this termination more memorable than any other. The person was upset, and you could see this was not something they had written on their bucket list. They stood up, walked out, and my life went on.

Nine years later, I’m working at Applebee’s in HR. I was responsible for seventy restaurants, and I happen to stroll into one of the locations and there is my first termination working behind the bar! I saw him before he saw me, but once he saw me he froze.

I went over to say ‘hi’, and catch up. It was awkward and clunky, but I’m an HR pro, I was trained to do this. After me letting him go, he bounced around for a few years, and finally decided to go back to school, and had taken the bartender job at Applebee’s to make ends meet.

I saw this person a number of times after, and on one visit, he asked to talk. He said that the day I walked into the Applebee’s, and he learned who I was, in my new position, he assumed I was going to fire him again. I said, “For what?!” He said, “I don’t know, just because.”

It hit me hard. This wasn’t about terminating a poor performer and moving on. This person carried that termination around like a backpack for nine years, and as soon as they saw me, all that fear and feelings of failure flooded back to him.

Welcome to the show kids. Sometimes working in HR sucks.

Through the Eyes of the Hiring Manager

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Tim Sackett

On Wednesday I was sitting on The Talent Fix Book Club webcast with one of my Recruiting Managers, Zach Jensen, and Zach made the comment that great recruiters do something a bit different, they look at applications and resumes through “the eyes of the hiring manager”. It’s a brilliant piece of advice, but what does it mean!?

New, or lesser experienced, recruiters look at candidates like a checklist:

Do they meet the minimum qualifications? Check.
Can they work when we need them to work? Check.
Will they fit the compensation band we have for the position? Check.
Are they interested in our company? Check.

Get enough checks and you send this candidate over to the hiring manager.

The hiring manager receives this candidate and immediately looks at this person completely different from the recruiter who was checking boxes. The hiring manager will look at the candidate and immediately think, can this person do the job I have, and do it well? Will this person fit into my team? Do I think I can manage this person? Will this person be challenged by my position, or will they be bored? Is this person better than me or someone on my team? Does this person make me/us better? Etc.

Great recruiters have enough of a relationship with their hiring managers that they are less concerned with checking boxes, and more concerned about these questions that are in the hiring manager’s head. They want to have those answers, so when the hiring manager asks, “What do you think?” What they will respond with is not checked boxes, but strategic explanations that help the hiring manager make a decision.

It’s a transition we usually see happen around year 3 with our recruiters. Checking boxes isn’t all bad, it’s how we all start. The reality is we don’t know much, so we have to go on something. Some, though, never make the transition. They just think recruiting is about checking boxes.

It’s the one reason I’m not concerned about ‘technology’ taking my job, and why the best recruiters I speak with aren’t concerned either. In fact, they welcome it. Technology will eliminate box checkers. A.I. can check boxes faster and better than you or I. A.I. can’t get into the head of a hiring manager and know what she really needs for her team. I can. Zach can.

Great recruiting happens when you build relationships with your hiring managers where they trust you know what they are really looking for. How do you get that? Mostly time and consistency. Keep showing up. Show them you have some interest in helping them improve their talent. Be persistently annoying. Rinse. Repeat.

Leadership Isn’t Raised on Promises

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’ve had a lot of conversations with c-suite leaders recently who are concerned they do not have their next generation of leaders on their team. Let’s be clear, they have people on their team, but they do not believe those people are the future or at least they don’t believe they’re anywhere near becoming the future.

The folks in position are all well-meaning enough. I mean they want to be leaders and many believe they probably are leaders. They make all the leadership promises. That’s probably the first indication they aren’t ready. This is what their c-suite is feeling and hearing.

You see, leadership isn’t raised on promises…Leadership is raised on execution and outcomes.

Give me someone who can execute and I believe I can teach them to lead. Too often I think we look for leaders in the way we look for friends. Is this a person I and others would want to hang out with? Is this a person I can trust? Is this person nice? Do I get along with this person, and do others get along with this person? Would I follow this person?

I don’t need my leaders to be my friend. I need my leaders to get sh*t done. Can you get sh*t done without pissing off every single person around you, becomes a key element, right? There’s a balance. Sometimes I think we’ve gone too far on one side of that balance, and it’s not the execution side!

So, you want to be a leader?

Great, awesome, wow! Get sh*t done! The recipe is pretty clear and most fail:

Clearly communicate what needs to get done.
Find out why that will happen or won’t happen. Fix that stuff.
Gain agreement of when and how this stuff will get done.
Help move roadblocks and excuses out of the way.
Follow up. Follow up. Follow up.
Accountability.
Stuff got done.

In my experience the best leaders never made promises, they just got stuff done. The promise leaders tended to go away at some point. Turns out most organizations don’t need promises, they need stuff to get done.

Career Confessions of Gen Z: An Interview with Johnny Campbell of Social Talent

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Tim Sackett

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with, and conduct a short interview with, the CEO and Co-Founder of SocialTalent, Johnny Campbell. SocialTalent is an online training platform where recruiters, sourcers, and recruitment marketers alike can become true business partners by way of bite-sized videos.

I’m a daily-user and huge advocate of SocialTalent, so I reached out to Johnny the second I found out that he was a featured speaker at SHRM Talent this year. I got to watch his presentation twice, and both times, I looked around the room as people scrambled to record every word and capture every slide he presented.

This was initially going to be Q&A type of interview and as time went on, I realized I just wanted to hear what he wanted to share with me, about anything. I left the conversation with both a profound sense of inspiration, along with a better understanding of my own mind.

(Answers are paraphrased but reflect exact responses. Direct quotes will be in quotations.)

1. How did SocialTalent come about?

Answer: SocialTalent was made by design but became by accident. Believe it or not, it started as a hedge. About a year in, we were doing things differently and we knew it was effective. It was just a matter of time ‘til everyone started doing it. We were amongst the first in the space and we were faced with the question, “Is this actually scalable, or do we teach people how to do it?”. SocialTalent would give in-person presentations and at a conference someone said it should be digital.

2. How do you partner with the best of the best for SocialTalent content?

Answer: I’ve always had a knack for patterns. I was figuring all of this out and felt the need to share, so I started blogging. I had eyes on my content early on, which led to meeting with guys like Dean Da Costa, Bill Boorman, and others. We have a sort of “Spotify-model”, in that we have the space for the most knowledgeable people in our space to share their ideas digitally. So there are royalties that come with that – it works great.

3. How do you decide what’s important? And how do you stay on top of producing new and relevant content?

Answer: We test EVERYTHING. We also ask our customers for suggestion on what our platform is missing. We do mapping exercises that layout everything about the recruiting process and then decide how we can make an impact in each of those steps.

4. How do you show the impact of sourcing matter to a very traditional recruiting team?

Answer: The reality is, leadership doesn’t care about the technical work you can do as a sourcer – despite how impressive it really is. It all boils down to the unexpected insights and presentation of your data. How can you present your data to make it matter to leadership, a hiring manager, recruitment marketers, etc? Don’t share the process, share the answers.

5. (BONUS) Does Bill Boorman really always wear a hat?

Answer: I have not seen Bill without a hat in 9 years – at conferences, meetings, everywhere. He has an array of them too!

Although the purpose of this interview was to learn more about the coming of SocialTalent, we were able to have a casual conversation. The highlight of the conversation you may ask? It was when Johnny, mid-sentence, said the following:

“You’ve got the best name in the world for a sourcer… like the best [expletive] name!”

It’s safe to say I’ll be keeping my eye out for the next moves from Mr. Campbell and the SocialTalent team. For those who have yet to check out SocialTalent for yourself or your teams, you oughta hop on the platform, or else you’re missing out!

Hunter Casperson — Self-proclaimed “Sourcing Nerd” — Is from Southern California, where he spent lots of time outdoors and in turn, loves nature. Hunter attended UC Berkeley where he studied Math & Psychology for three years before joining Quicken. His all-time favorite thing to do is beat-box, where he has consecutively ranked amongst the Top 10 in the United States over the past 3 years (under the name Huntybeats)!

Career Confessions from Gen Z: Welcome to the Workforce!

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Tim Sackett

Within the next month, several college students will be graduating and entering the workforce. This post is targeted towards you.

First of all, if you’re about to graduate and haven’t found a job yet, don’t freak out. It’s hard to land a full-time position before you graduate. Many businesses are looking to get employees in right away and may be turned off by the fact that you can’t start until after graduation. If you find a good company and they really want you, they will hold the job for you.

Landing your first full-time position after graduation is also difficult because you don’t have much experience yet. However, you are graduating at a great time. The economy is good, and companies are short on employees.

Secondly, working a full-time job is so much different than college. You’ve been in school for at least the last 15 years, but sitting at a desk for eight plus hours a day is very different.

While you were in school you sat in class most of the day and then came home to do homework at night. When you start out in an entry-level job, you will probably not have to bring work home every night or on the weekends. Sure, this may happen occasionally, but it won’t be as constant as homework was in school.

With this being said, you will probably have more free time in the evenings, but being at work all day is mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting so you may not be up for doing much with your additional free time.

I consider myself an extrovert, but by the end of the day I don’t want to interact with people anymore because that is what I spent the last eight hours doing. When you are at work you have to constantly be “on” because the phone will ring, or someone could walk into your office at any point and you need to be prepared.

While in school you were also always surrounded by people your age. This is not the case when you first enter the workforce. Since our generation is just entering the workforce, finding coworkers our age is few and far between.

All of my coworkers are married and have kids, but I’ve gotten used to hearing stories about their kids and enjoy it. Having friends at work is great, but it’s also important to have friends outside of work too in order to separate yourself from work sometimes.

For those of you about to graduate from college, congratulations! Welcome to the real world. It is time to start “adulting!”

Mallory Armbrustmacher graduated from Grand Valley State University in 2017 with a BA in Human Resource Management. She is an HR Generalist with the State of Michigan, Talent and Economic Development Department Human Resource Office, where she coordinates ADA Reasonable Accommodations and Ergonomic Assessments. In addition, she takes the lead on various special projects, conducts new employee orientations, processes payroll, and assists in labor relations, classifications, and selection. She is currently studying for the SHRM-CP exam, but also loves spending time with her family and friends, playing games, and cooking.

Are You A Coach in HR?

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I read an article in The New Yorker, probably the best article I’ve read in a while, on the importance of “Coaching” by Atul Gawande. Atul is a writer and a surgeon, smart and creative – I should hate him, but he’s so freaking brilliant! From the article:

The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

As an HR Pro, I’ve always believed that HR has the ability to act as “coaches” across all vestiges of our organizations. The problem we run into is this, “You can’t coach me! You don’t know the first thing about Marketing, or Operations, or Accounting.” You’re right, good thing I’m not “teaching” you that! That’s why we hired you. Having a coaching culture in your organization starts during the selection process. Are you hiring people who are open to being coached?

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team