How Can You Become a Great HR/Talent Professional?

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I met an aspiring HR college student recently. The question was asked, “Tim, how can I be great at HR?” I told them to buy my book and read my blog and that’s really all there is to it! Just kidding, I said something after that as well! 😉

It’s a great question that ultimately has very little to do with HR or Talent Acquisition. To be great at HR, or anything, rarely do you have to be great at that certain skill set. For some things, it’s important: doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. But most professions you can learn the skills, so it’s about these other things that I told this young Padawan:

– Go deep on a few things. The world needs experts, not a generalist. Don’t kid yourself to think being a generalist is really what your organization wants. People say this when they are an expert in nothing. Be an expert in something and a generalist in a bunch of stuff.

– Don’t be super concerned with what you’re going deep on, just make sure it interests you. While it might not seem valuable now, at some point it probably will be. I’m not in love with employee benefits, but someone is and when I need help with that I’m searching for that person.

– Consume content inside and outside of your industry. Those with a never-ending appetite to learn are always more successful.

– Connect with people in your field outside of your company. We are in a time in the world where your network can be Pitbull Worldwide! Use that to your advantage. There is someone smarter than you a thousand miles away just waiting to help you.

– Just because someone older and more experienced than you might think something is unimportant, don’t give up on it. We all get used to what we are used to. Older people think Snapchat is stupid and it might be, but it also might unlock something awesome in our employment brand. Experience and age are super valuable until they aren’t.

– Constantly make stuff and test it. Some it will fail, most of it will be average, some of it will be awesome. Give yourself more chances for awesome! Don’t let someone tell you, “we tried that three years ago and it didn’t work”. Cool, let’s do it again, but this time change the name!

– Take a big chance early in your career. Find a company that you absolutely love and just find a way to work there in any position, then be awesome for a couple of years and see what happens. Working for a brand you love is beyond the best career feeling you’ll have.

– Don’t expect to be “HR famous” overnight, but the work you do right now will make you HR famous ten years from now. Do the work, fall in love with it, the fame will come down the road. “I want to blog and speak just like you, Tim!” Awesome, I started doing this a decade ago. Let’s get started right now!

– Don’t discount social skills in the real world. You can be the smartest most skilled person in the room, but the one with a personality is the one people will pay attention to. This is a skill that can be learned and constantly improved upon if you work at it.

– Spend time with Great HR and Talen pros. No one is really hiding their secret sauce, you just aren’t asking them questions. The key in spending time with others is not asking them to invest more in helping you than you’re willing to invest in making it happen. I get asked weekly for time from people who rarely are willing to help me in return.

Okay, as internships are concluding for the summer let’s help these aspiring professionals out! Give me your best advice in the comments!

A Tribute to Elle Taylor Seiden #ATributeToElle

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today I get the privilege of introducing you to a brilliant young lady who unfortunately left this world too soon. I was introduced to Elle by her father and my friend Jason Seiden. Today, our community is celebrating Elle by doing a day of giving to her favorite charities.

Here’s how I remember Elle back then in 2010, Elle was around 7 or 8 years old:

One thing you have to know about Elle, she is beyond her years when it comes to most things in life and her writing was off the charts. Jason would share things with me and it was impossible for me to believe a child could write with such deep passion and meaning. I would joke that I felt inferior as a parent as my boys could barely speak let alone write so beautifully.

Here is one of her poems – remember – this is from an 8-year-old!

Nipula

By Elle Seiden

It cannot be life

Of the vibrations, they come

Over a force, they leap and twirl

Many rise, many pray

No, no God, we’re okay.

Leave the creatures of Earth at their own level

They will rise to only the vibrations of love

When time ends.

Jason would do videos on his blog with Elle on his lap, asking her normal life questions to get a ‘normal’ child response to life. Elle never gave a normal ‘child’ response. She shared a wisdom that would sometimes take your breath away. I loved those videos. Every time I would see Jason I would ask about Elle because she was so remarkable and I was just fascinated.

I think G*d knew Elle needed Jason on her journey. Jason is an amazing person himself. Like his daughter, he always sees the world a bit differently than the rest of us. I try to steal time from him because I’m always smarter when I leave him. It’s not often when you have a child that is smarter than you from almost birth. I know all kids think they’re smarter than their parents, but almost none really are. Most parents couldn’t handle that situation. Jason loved it.

I’m going to miss Elle, she was an awesome person. The world was better with her in it.

I hurt for Jason as a friend and a father and can’t imagine this kind of loss. What I know, though, is Jason will live on and thrive because that’s how Elle will live on and thrive. He was the exact Dad that Elle deserved and needed. He was supportive and loving and helped her reach out to the world in every way she chose.

Today I celebrate Elle Taylor Seiden. Please join me in supporting her favorite charities. It’s really a great way to celebrate who she is!

The “Real” Man Talent Crisis in America!

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I have to admit, I’m not much of a “real man”. I don’t know many ‘man’ things. I don’t fix cars. I’m horrible fixing almost anything. I have a lot of tools, but the reality is I usually cost myself more money by trying to fix something myself than just paying to have a ‘real’ man fix it.

That’s hard to admit. I want to be a real man. I want to have something go wrong in my house and instantly know what to do and how to correct it. I usually just go to YouTube and watch a real man show me how to fix it, then I call a real man to come over and fix it.

It seems like there is a huge need for real men right now in the world. It’s a shrinking talent pool for sure!

My mother is at a point in life where she finds herself without a man, real or fake, but she needs the skills of a real man to help her keep up her house. We found her someone and all I can think is I really need this guy for myself, not her! I need her real man for me!

I have three sons and none of them are real men, and unfortunately, I don’t see them becoming real men. I’m teaching them to pay for a real man. It’s cheaper and less frustrating in the long run. I don’t really have a desire to learn to plumb, do electrical work, appliance repair, engine repair, carpentry, etc. I mean I wish I had those skills, but that’s a lot of life experience and it’s almost too late for me to pick those up and be any good at them.

I have some great qualities that most ‘real’ men probably don’t. I’m awesome at gardening. I love to shop. Go to the movies. I love to go to the theater. I can cook up a storm. I do some basic sewing. I’m awesome with children. Just don’t ask me to ‘fix’ the front door when it won’t close properly.

While you might think this is a ‘me’ problem, it’s not. This is an “us” problem. I can foresee a time when ‘real’ men are so scarce we won’t be able to find anyone to fix our stuff! We have a real man talent crisis on our hands and I don’t think people really understand how bad it is, and how bad it’s going to get.

I don’t need someone to show me how to play Fortnite! That is a skill I can live without. But I can’t have the deck falling off my house and just let it dangerously hang there! I don’t need someone to show me how to watch the entire series of The Office on Netflix, but I do need someone to help me fix my garage door when it won’t go up or down!

I’m sure there is a correlation between skilled trades leaving public education and downfall of “real” man skills in the U.S. I’m also sure that there is a correlation between white collar jobs and blue collar jobs and real man skill level. You could probably add in a number of other factors around higher education, income level, etc. But, it’s all really meaningless, I still need have a need for real man skills no matter the reason I lack them!

So, I’m wondering. Is this just me or are others feeling the real man skill pinch as well? Hit me in the comments with how you lack real man skills, or how you got your real man skills, even if you’re a lady with ‘real man’ skills!

Career Confessions from Gen Z: Celebrate Success, But Don’t Stop Moving Forward!

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Tim Sackett

At a pretty young age, I discovered I wasn’t very good at most sports. I tried the normal ones: baseball, soccer, basketball, but I didn’t really seem to find any hand-eye coordination, running ability, or a general sense of how to be good at sports. In third grade, I asked my Mom to try out for the local swim team because some of my friends were on it and she was reluctant to say yes. I hadn’t necessarily excelled at swim lessons growing up and she thought that I would be bored just doing laps over and over.

Through her reluctance, she let me try out, but I didn’t make it because my backstroke wasn’t up to par. They recommended that I take a few private lessons and then I could try out again and start on the team. My parents got me a few private lessons, and about a month later, I tried out and made the swim team.

Fast forward, 10 years later and I am finishing my swim career on an NCAA Division 1 varsity swim team, scoring for my team in guess what stroke, backstroke. Never could anyone have predicted that I would go on to improve and have the success in the sport that I did. Now, I wasn’t some swimming prodigy, and it took a lot of hard work to get to where I was, but not everyone goes on to be a collegiate athlete!

Almost every day (especially on Facebook), we see these stories of extraordinary people excelling under incredible circumstances. We hear and see stories like of Michael Oher (watch The Blind Side if you somehow avoided Sandra Bullock’s amazingness), where people go from nothing to the best in their field. While we all love a great underdog story, it’s hard to relate to these improbable situations. There’s a pretty big chance that not many of the people reading this blog post are undiscovered football stars or musical geniuses, and although we may love watching these stories, it’s a struggle to relate.

That’s why we need to find these success stories in our own lives. I didn’t go on to play in the NFL or win an Olympic medal, but I went from not making the swim team at 8 years old, to competing in the NCAA. If I had just given up and tried a new sport, the course of my life would have been completely altered.

With the prevalence of the media, we see these extraordinary stories all the time. The media loves to sell these almost impossible moments to us because we can’t look away! This isn’t going to change. The news isn’t all of a sudden going to start talking about my slightly above average swimming career just so we can celebrate something more normal!

My advice for my fellow Gen-Zer’s is to look for these moments of success in your life. Celebrate them. And then keep moving forward for another moment of success. The reason I had a slightly above average swimming career was that I always wanted more, but I never let myself get burnt out. I would go get pizza to celebrate after a good meet, but I’d be right back in the pool working hard on Monday.

Next time you do something pretty freaking cool, pat yourself on the back, get a treat, and then get your butt working again the next day.

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are Pretty Awesome!

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on The Weekly Dose I review two of Microsoft’s newest entries into the HR tech space Workplace Analytics (WPA) and MyAnalytics. Both MS Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are products that can be purchased to use with Microsoft 365.

From a high level what Microsoft does is pull in your data from all the other Microsoft 365 products you use like email, your calendar, activities you do on various other products like Skype, etc. This data is then used to unlock a bunch of stuff around cultural change and transformation.

You can imagine mining this data from your entire employee population would give you insights around how to create more capacity in new ways to work, understand what your best performers are doing to be the best, how certain teams, locations, etc. are collaborating, or not collaborating, etc.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can then help your organization show where time is being wasted, communication breakdowns, how to increase worker focus time, reduce your amount of meetings, reduce the amount of after-hours work being done, etc.

MyAnalytics can be bought by itself as a stand-alone product for 365 users, but it works great in conjunction with Workplace! It’s the natural offshoot technology for once you have your insights from Workplace you can then help individuals with how can they better manage themselves and their calendars to be more effective and efficient in their work.

What I like about Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics:

– It’s 100% adoption! Your employees don’t have to do anything to gain the value of using Workplace, they just keep doing what they’re doing and the data insights automatically start coming in. Then it’s ‘just’ simple behavior changes!

– Leaders can easily see ways to increase productivity almost instantly after turning it on. Workplace gives you a dashboard that can be drilled down to the team level to show you where your team’s time is being fragmented and help get them more focus time to work better.

– It’s a dynamic tool that is fairly flexible as a BI tool allowing you to bring in other outside data like Sales metrics or employee engagement data, and give you insights on how to best work on increasing the measures that move your business.

– Workplace shows you organizational and team trends around meetings, emails, internal vs. external hours worked, meeting overviews and effectiveness, coaching opportunities, etc. It’s really unbelievable on how one tool touches every person equally in our organization and can have a real impact on moving the culture of an organization on how the leadership wants to define it.

– MyAnalytics is literally like a Fitbit tracker for your workplace. Complete privacy of the individual data. Organizations have zero access to the individual data. “Nudges” the employee to more efficient/effective behaviors based on data. Constantly gives ideas and tips to help them. Shows awesome things like what percentage of your emails were actually opened, reminds them to block time when their calendar begins to get to full with meetings in the future, etc.

When I first started to see this my first thought was “Oh no! Big brother!” but Microsoft has taken real care to ensure this is a product for a positive cultural change, not a hammer for performance management. It’s a technology to aid organizations at a high level, but also give individuals the empowerment to help control their own work lives as well.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can work with organizations as small as a couple of hundred and still deliver great returns. MyAnalytics can work in teams as small as 3 or 4 and deliver results. It’s easy to see how you would get giant ROI at the enterprise level, but I love that this can be used for organizations of all sizes.

I’m a big advocate that HR should own culture and be the organizational performance driver at a high level. Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics give those leaders in organizations a tool that delivers real insights into how we can begin changing work for the better! Less wasted time in meetings. Less redundant email. Less of all of those things that keep us from being successful. If you’re a Microsoft 365 shop, this is a demo you need your entire leadership team to take a look at!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market. None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion. There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find. If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

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

SHRM CEO says All Employers Should “Require” HR Certification!

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Did you see this last week by new SHRM CEO Johnny Taylor?

“Require certification,” Taylor said. “SHRM certification is a validation that the professional doing the job has the competency to do it. Treat HR like a profession. Don’t just prefer—require!”

So, there will be a reaction from the HR community on this for sure! My guess is it will be mostly negative by those who aren’t certified, and mostly positive by the small percentage, overall, of HR professionals who do have a certification.

Here’s my take – I 100% agree with Johnny!

In fact, I love Johnny even more as the selection of SHRM CEO!

We (HR) want to be put on the same level as our peers in accounting, legal, etc. They are required to complete an examination to reach their CPA or pass the bar exam. Why should HR be any different?

I think it would be awesome to begin seeing HR positions at all levels have “HR Certification Required to Apply to this Position!” on job descriptions and job postings. I think it’s a sign that organizations are saying we want to ensure that our HR professionals meet some basic understanding and competency of the profession, at a minimum.

I think the one pushback would be there is a cost of obtaining the certification. That’s a real barrier and being a professional that embraces and espouses to inclusion, we want to eliminate barriers. Thankfully, SHRM also was prepared for this and announced last week:

“We’ve adapted our recertification process to provide additional flexibility to match your learning needs.

Going forward, SHRM will no longer have a maximum limit on self-paced activities, in the ‘Advance Your Education’ category.”

What this means is an HR professional can go out and take all 60 recertification credits for free through various webcasts or other self-paced free HR learning opportunities.

There still the cost to recertifying ($100 for members, $150 for non-members) and a cost to take the initial exam ($300 or $400, respectively). The reality is we all have investments we need to make to maintain and grow ourselves in our profession. This is a rather small amount for such a great profession.

I’ve been a long time vocal critic of SHRM in many ways but I love this push from Johnny to the profession. Sure it’s a bit self-serving since SHRM is the one selling the SHRM-CP and SCP certification (along with HRCI who sells the PHR, SPHR, and GPHR separately), but I don’t care. It’s the right thing to do.

I’ve been an HR professional who has held a certification since 2001. Gaining that certification took work, study, and practice. It wasn’t easy. After completing the examination and passing it was a big deal. 17 years of pursuing continuing education puts me in a really great position as a professional that I know a great deal about HR in a number of facets.

Does this make me a ‘better’ HR professional than someone who does not have a certification? That’s the big question, right? I believe it does, on average. Sure someone can know more than me, who does not have an HR certification, but normally, I would say that is not the case.

So, kudos, to Johnny, who got beat up recently in social media for shaking President Trump’s hand and taking a pic at an event. I believe requiring HR certifications for HR positions is the right stance to take for SHRM and for the profession.

What’s the Best Day of the Week to Take Off?

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Right now you’re probably in the middle of your ‘summer’ work schedule. You know where the office gets out early on Friday or doesn’t even come in on Friday so everyone can have the long weekend and enjoy the great summer weather. In the North and Midwest, where we have short summers, this is fairly common.

I have a confession to make. I’m an awful judge on what I really want for myself.

When I was in college I scheduled myself from 8 am to noon, Monday through Thursday believing how great it would be to get school done early and have the entire rest of the day off to do whatever it is I wanted, and have a long weekend. It was a disaster! Not only did I have my afternoons and long weekend, I also had most mornings off, because I didn’t drag my butt out of bed to go!

I have this same ‘traditional’ mindset when it comes to flexibility scheduling at work. In my mind, I believe I would want to either take off Friday (ideally, choice #1) or Monday so that I could always have a long weekend. Without really putting thought into it, I think most people would say the same thing.

As with everything nowadays, some research is helping to shape my mind differently:

The key is giving yourself a beat, a day to make your own pace, and to break the tyranny of the over-scheduled work week. Our human experience of time is ordered by “pacers,” both internal (like being a “morning person” or a “night owl”) and external, like the work week or a deadline, says Dawna Ballard, a communications professor at University of Texas at Austin and a scholar of chronemics, the study of time and communication. “Everyone has a different chronotype. Some people are slower moving, some people are faster moving,” she told me over the phone. “Our work, though, just goes and throws that out the window and says actually, this is how fast you have to work, this is when you have to work…

…One of the hallmarks of modern life is that our internal and external pacers are often at odds with one another—one reason Monday mornings are difficult. “You’re coming off from a weekend, where you do have your own pace,” Ballard says, explaining the Monday blues from a social science perspective. “It’s having to go from your pacer, back to this other pacer, there’s that friction.”

So, what’s the best day to take off in your week?

Wednesday!

Having that break in the middle of your week does a couple of really positive, psychological things. One, you go into your week knowing you only have two days of work, until your next break to do ‘you’ stuff. Then, another couple of days before a two-day break. The second thing is having that mid-week break allows us to do life stuff when it’s less busy with everyone else doing ‘life’ stuff.

You can go work out at the gym and it’s not busy. You can go to a doctor’s appoint or get your hair done in the middle of the day, that’s not a Saturday. You can go to the DMV when it’s quieter than normal. You can take a breath at home, while it’s quiet and recharge your batteries.

When you look at adding a little bit of flexibility to your organizations, it doesn’t always have to be some sort of “we’re letting everyone out early on Friday”. Maybe some of the best ‘flexibility’ would be having a half-day on a Wednesday! Can you imagine instead of a half day on Friday, you got a half day on Wednesday each week? How would your life change?

The next time you use a PTO day to extend a weekend, rethink what you’re doing and try taking a PTO day on a Wednesday. It just might be the break you need to keep you fresh all week!

Career Confessions from Gen Z – I’m Probably Going to do Stuff Differently, but That’s Okay…

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Ever since I was 8, I have been on a swim team. I quickly learned that swimming was the only sport I really excelled at and I ran with it all the way until I was 18. Luckily, I was blessed to be coached by some really great people that helped me swim faster while also teaching me about hard work and perseverance.

One common theme amongst my coaches was that they were all young. This tended to be coupled with a newer style of training that was more tailored to shorter intervals. Many of my swim friends had different coaches that coached in a more traditional way that involved a lot of non-stop distance swimming. While they are two completely different styles of training, we often got similar accomplishments.

Something that I’ve been exposed to during my time working, is different ways to get the same thing done. Every person is super different, and that means that we probably process information in different ways and complete tasks differently. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. No two humans’ brains are hard-wired the same way and so, no two humans are going to think exactly the same!

This especially goes for people of different generations. Again, there’s nothing with this! Generations grow up differently, with different technologies, ideas, and practices.

One of the things that I bicker most about with my parents are these differences in getting things done. My parents LOVE to tell me “just call them!” whenever I have to solve a problem that will require assistance from someone else. Personally, I really dislike calling people and I know for a fact that the majority of Gen-Zer’s would say the exact same. I don’t see calling going away anytime soon, but there is a very apparent rise in mediums that are replacing calling, that you can use to solve the same problems!

I would much rather prefer ordering my pizza online, but my Mom might prefer to order pizza over the phone. That’s okay! We are getting the same thing done, just in a different way.

In my experience, I tend to find that leaders in business may preach that they are open to new ideas, but they still think their way is the best way. That’s normal! Everyone always thinks that their way is going to be the best way because it makes sense to YOU. It’s important to realize that the way that makes sense for you to complete a project may make perfect sense for your 48-year-old brain (Gen-X, I’m looking at you), but that might not make sense to my 19-year-old brain.

The majority of the time, the leader’s way probably is the best. They definitely have more experience and they know what is the most efficient way to get things done. A lot of people are good at taking criticism or recommendations from people that are at the same level as them, but they aren’t so good at taking it from say, an intern like me.

We were all young once and we get that youngins’ are impulsive and stupid. But amongst all that mess, there can sometimes be a little nugget of genius and you find that nugget, let that nugget grow, and then let that nugget shine!

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

Taking a Vacation from My Vacation!

Posted on August 1, 2018 by Tim Sackett

I’ve got three sons, for years we would plan and save to take a big annual vacation with our kids. Places like Disney, and national monuments, and beaches. All the work to get ready for it, all the excitement, all the letdown! I should have saved all of that money for when they were older and then just left them at home to fend for themselves while my wife and I spend three weeks in Hawaii!

Let’s face it, taking a vacation with three kids is not a vacation. There should be a different name for taking a vacation with three kids. It doesn’t matter where you go with three kids, it’s not relaxing, in fact, it is the opposite of relaxing. If you go on vacation with kids coming back to work is the real vacation. We all know it, but no one wants to admit it because you just burned valuable days off and a giant pile of cash.

This concept of vacation is very personal to your employees. It has a huge impact to help your employees keep a good balance in their lives. That’s why I was excited to read about some research being done to determine the what is the perfect amount of time on a vacation to get to an ideal state of relaxation. From the WSJ:

“In a study of 54 people vacationing for an average of 23 days, Dr. de Bloom and co-researchers found that measures of health and wellness improved during vacation compared with baseline, peaking at the eighth day before gradually declining.

“It could be that eight days is the ideal to fully gain the benefits of a holiday,” said Dr. de Bloom. The study was published in 2013 in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

Laura Beatrix Newmark, of New York, has tried getaways of different durations. Her ideal vacation: nine days. “You really feel like you can get into a different zone and then when you come back you feel like you’re in a different mindset,” said the 38-year-old entrepreneur and mother of two young children.”

Eight days. Seems about right. You take off on a Friday after work, maybe sneak out a little early. You then have Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Eight days. The problem is that first day never seems like a vacation as you get settled in and try to unwind and that last Saturday you need to start packing and getting stuff together because you leave on Sunday. That final Sunday might as well be a work day because you definitely aren’t on vacation any longer!

One other thing the study found that could really help your employees if getting people to think and visualize their vacation in the days leading up to their time off. We’ve all heard that: “Oh, Tim, he’s already on vacation!” But, I’m sure it helps people start to unplug from the job and get ready for the full-time role of just enjoying some downtime.

Those who are working like mad right up until the time they leave, have a really hard time shutting it off! A great engagement idea would be getting employees little care packages of things that will help them on their vacation: some extra sunscreen, bug repellent, a Starbucks card, etc. Help them start to get their mind on having a relaxing time.

If they’re parents, select a safe word they can text you to call them and tell them they are urgently needed back at work!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Kununu_Us – Workplace Insights That Matter!

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Tim Sackett

Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the employer review technology Kununu. Kununu is a technology that allows employees of a company to share their insights with potential applicants of what it’s like to work at that company. It also allows the company to mine that information to have a better understanding of how they can impact this experience in a more meaningful way.

So, they’re Glassdoor?

No, not exactly, Kununu goes much deeper in gathering those insights than a simple verbatim review from a past employee who hates your company!

Each person who gives a review of an employer on Kununu is asked a series of 18 different insights in which they rank the employer. This level of insight allows both applicants and employers to really dig into what the real issues are when it comes to both the candidate experience and the employee experience.

To leave a review of an employer, the person must also have an actual company email address, so you aren’t getting jaded ex-employees, but actual employees who are living in that work world right now. In this type of framework, you’re probably going to get a better balance from both sides.

What I like about Kununu:

– To consume their content you don’t need to log in and create a profile. Just go on there and start reading reviews of potential employers.

– Q&A Tab which allows users to ask a question and those employers who have claimed their Kununu profile will get an alert to go out and answer the question. This is public for all to see. If it’s inappropriate it’s immediately flagged and taken down.

– Kununu doesn’t make most of their revenue as a job board, all job ads are free to employers, which gives them a higher level of transparency when it comes to who their ultimate customer really is. Candidates coming to your profile won’t see your competition’s job ads like you see on that other review site!

– The review profiles created by Kununu reviewers are very robust and have a ton of detail. So, as a potential applicant, I get a much truer sense of what it’s actually like to work at each location.

– Offer both employee reviews and applicant reviews so you get to see what’s it’s like to work at an employer, but also what’s it’s like to go through the applicant experience. This also gives you competitive benchmarks so you can see how your experience is compared to others in your market.

The entire world of employer reviews become much more important with Google for Jobs using this type of data within their algorithm to determine how high your job postings should show up in Google’s search results. Organizations are now tasked with ensuring they pay attention to their online reputation as an employer.

Kununu is definitely a more robust alternative to the one main employer reputation site that most will believe they have. It’s also a great technology to give you real insights to not only your employee experience but also to your candidate experience. Kununu is definitely something employers should be checking out!