Career Confessions from Gen Z: Generational Differences or Time in Life? You make the call!

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One topic that I’ve been hesitant to write about but I feel is necessary is the notion of Gen-Z as spoiled or “babied”. I think amongst the older generations, Gen-Z is often looked at as much more spoiled than the rest. Apparently, our parents do everything for us and we have it much easier off compared to the other generations.

The reality of this is that the world is a much different place than it was when Millenials or Gen-X or the Baby Boomers were young. We have so many more technological advances now that everyone is benefitting from, rather than just my generation specifically. You can’t get mad at young people for having it easier than you did just because these advances weren’t around when you were young. I get that you had to walk 14 miles to school every day, but it’s not fair to say that we’re “spoiled” because our parents drop us off on the way to work or because we can text our friends instead of paying 75 cents (or however much it was) on a pay phone to talk to them.(Editor/Dad: 25 cents Cam!)

Other than these technological advances, many people believe that Gen-Z isn’t able to do things for ourselves because people have done things for us our entire lives. While this may be true for some, the overwhelming majority are doing our laundry and helping clean the dishes. In the era of social media, this highly spoiled minority is publicized more than the others. The public has a fascination with wealth, seen in reality shows or the obsession with the Kardashian’s. Since these shows are so popular on TV, people come to believe that this is normal and align their beliefs with what they see.

Another reason for a lot of behaviors is just because we’re freaking teenagers. A large portion of Gen-Z are teenagers and all teens of every generation have had similar characteristics. You can’t blame our moodiness, dramatics, or aversion to authority on our generation, it’s our age. People like to forget their faults and think they were perfect angels when they were teens but you weren’t.

The fact of the matter is that many people are spoiled and babied. I’m not going to lie and say that I’m not spoiled. I am. My parents have provided a life for me that is beyond what I need and I’m forever grateful for that. But just since I was spoiled growing up (and still am) and my mom did a lot of things for me, doesn’t mean that I’m not capable to do good work and working hard. Just because I didn’t do my own laundry until I was 18 (I love you Mom), doesn’t mean that I can’t go kick some ass and do some great work.

What I’m trying to get across is the notion that stereotypes can be extremely harmful.

To write off an entire generation because of some incapable people is not only harmful to us but is harmful to the people that are refusing to work with some pretty smart and hardworking individuals. Try to make your judgments on a case-by-case basis. And remember we’re all just some people trying to live a fun and fulfilled life, just like y’all.

(Editor/Dad note: The opinions and statements made by this spoiled Gen Z person do not reflect the opinions of the owner of this highly engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking blog. But, I do agree with him in that ‘time in life’ issues, are always time in life issues. Gen Z will have their hickeys as a generation, but they will also have things that make them great. Just like every generation before them!) 

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.

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: CareerBuilder Partners with Google Cloud Job Discovery

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The week on The Weekly Dose I dig into CareerBuilder’s partnership with Google Cloud Job Discovery and let you know what it means to you as a Recruiting Pro and Leader!

CareerBuilder was one of the early partners with Google in a number of fronts. When Google for Jobs launched, CB was the first TA technology company to work directly with Googles team to build out their job schema and make sure that CB users who were posting jobs on CB would have those jobs show up high on GFJs search results.

CareerBuilder is pushing the relationship even farther with Google and they recently released a case study showing the advantages CB clients are receiving since CB started using Google Cloud’s Job Discovery A.I. and Machine Learning technology. Google wrote a great piece on this relationship and the advances CB users are seeing, check it out! 

What does all of this mean to us (Employers posting jobs on CB or employers thinking of using CB)? 

– Google knows what and how candidates want to search for jobs, so they built a tool to make this a better experience for candidates. CareerBuilder has also been in the game of wanting to deliver a great search experience for candidates coming to their site to look for jobs as well. When they both came together, it was pretty apparent that CB’s job seekers could benefit from Google’s Job Discovery search.

– CB started testing out Google’s Job Discovery as the backbone of their job search and some amazing things started happening:

  • 40% more views of jobs on CB’s Talent Networks
  • Candidate application quality increased by 18%
  • 41% increase on actions by candidates on their saved job search results

Why!? 

The A.I. and machine learning component of Google’s Job Discovery that is being used by CareerBuilder candidates actually improves the job search for candidates. Less false positives, the technology learns which jobs candidates are clicking on and applying for and then automatically will put more jobs that are closer to the ones you want in front of them.

What you see is less bad volume of candidates, but an increase in qualified candidates for your jobs. So, the partnership of CB and Google has reduced the amount of work it takes a recruiter on any given job by lowering the number of candidates who don’t fit your job and increasing the number that actually does.

One other driving factor around increased quality and relevance is CB’s and Google’s focus on mobile first location search. Most people want to be able to search for jobs based on commutable distance. Prior to Google’s Job Discovery search, this wasn’t as specific as most of us would want, but now people can easily search by very exact distances and times it takes to get to work.

CareerBuilder has been beaten up recently in the media with some moves they’ve made to focus themselves on the future and how things were handled, but in the end, it’s not show-friends, it’s show business, and CB is making the right business moves to ensure their clients are getting what they need.

Go read the Google Case Study, it’s a fascinating piece on why you might want to start looking at investing some of your job posting dollars away from Indeed and test out the Google Job Discovery tech that CareerBuilder is using!

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.

Working at Amazon Sucks Because They Make You Work!?!?

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So, if you didn’t see it last week, Business Insider decided to run a story about how awful it is to work at Amazon in one of their warehouses. Why is it awful to work one of those hourly paying jobs? They time your breaks, limit you screwing around talking to coworkers all day, and hold you accountable to work! The horror!!!

You didn’t take that job at Amazon to actually do work! How dare they!

From the article:

Amazon “pickers” move around the warehouse on a predetermined route to collect items for delivery, scanning each one with a handheld scanner, which times the length between scans, employees said.

They say pickers must hit a certain number of scans per hour, and if they miss their targets, a manager will show up to see what they’re doing.

Employees say that things like spending time talking to co-workers, going to get a drink, or even taking too long to find a package are billed as “time off task,” too much of which leads to penalty points for an employee. Get enough of those, and you’re fired.

That — combined with security cameras dotting Amazon’s warehouses, its airport-style security checks, and short breaks — makes employees feel like “robots,” they said. And it’s all in the service of getting those parcels out faster.

So, Amazon puts performance targets on hourly workers and has security cameras to make sure no one steals all of the stuff Amazon has in their warehouses. Yeah, that sounds awful!

Amazon also doesn’t allow hourly workers to bring their cell phones into the warehouse and they must lock them in lockers. They can access those on their 2 fifteen minute breaks, or their 30-minute lunch break. Amazon also has each employee go through a metal scanner when entering the warehouse. I think a lot of employees would love that level of security at their job!

So, I have a bit of a unique take on this because one summer when I was in college I worked as a picker for a grocery wholesaler in a warehouse environment!

One major complaint in this article is that the expectations are too high for Amazon warehouse workers. You can’t even go to the bathroom for fear of missing targets, and you get in trouble for talking to co-workers while you’re on the clock, if you miss those targets.

My first month as a Picker was awful! I never made ‘rate’ (met my targets) because I didn’t know how to do the job well. I was stressed out! By month 3 I made my targets easily, but it was about effort and knowing how to work most efficiently. The targets are based on how long would it take a normal performing employee to do certain tasks.

Let’s say a Picker gets an order and that order target is 30 minutes. The best Picker can probably do that order in 20 minutes. The extra 10 minutes they can bank towards their overall daily target. The worst worker might take 45 minutes to complete that order, so now they’re behind. So, you can see how someone who is on task and focused can actually give extra effort, make target easily and the day really isn’t so bad.

I can see how some of the things happened in the article because if the job is important to you, you’re going to do what it takes to keep that job. But, I’ll say, these are outlier behaviors and inappropriate and it sounds like Amazon terminated individuals doing this.

Amazon has made it crystal clear in everything they do when it comes to hiring. We only want to hire people who want to work hard and be successful. CRYSTAL CLEAR! Many people want to work at Amazon because they have really good pay and benefits. Unfortunately, most people can’t handle the expectations. That doesn’t make Amazon a bad place to work.

I’m not saying Amazon is the best place in the world to get a job. For some, it will be, for others it won’t be. Is Amazon a bad place to work? No. Is Amazon a hard place to work with high expectations around performance? Yes.

I think it’s a shame that Business Insider would actually write this garbage as an Amazon attack piece. They should be writing it from the take of why aren’t more employers trying to emulate what Amazon is doing!

London/UK Friends! I’m Coming to You in June!! Let’s meet up! #sosuuk

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I have something to confess, I’ve never been to Europe! Never! So, a few months ago I put that fact out into my little social world and something amazing came back to me! The Sourcing Summit UK reached out and ask me to come speak at their event in June! And, they made a little video to help promote it:

I can’t wait to come to London and speak at this event! All Americans love British accents, and I’m no different! The accent makes us believe you’re truly brilliant, even if you’re not! Such a recruiting strength! I’ve often said I could start a recruiting company in the states with just recruiters with British accents and we would own the U.S. market!

The other thing I love is building a worldwide network of recruiting and sourcing pros that love what I love!

As I’ve traveled all over the world what I’ve found is that no matter where I go when I’m with people who are passionate about our profession, that is always a good time! We get to nerd out together and learn from each other, and it brings this giant community down to size and makes it very personal!

So, let’s do this! Come see me and all the other great speakers at the Sourcing Summit UK on June 20th and 21st

Can’t wait to meet you in person!

Career Confessions from Gen Z: The Spiral of Silence is Strong With This One!

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A hot topic of discussion this week was Kayne West. It seems as if Kayne or other members of his family are always infiltrating our lives, but this news was bigger than most. Kayne sparked some controversy when he publicly announced his support for President Trump on Twitter. Many people had a hay-day, calling him out for his support, while others supported him for sharing his opinion regardless of its unpopularity.

His tweets and the following responses got me thinking about unpopular opinions. We all have them. For instance, I don’t like Mac n Cheese. You may not like Beyoncé, which is just wrong, but that’s beside the point. Everyone likes or dislikes something that is in opposition to the norm.

I want to clarify something about my definition of the word ‘unpopular’. The word is defined as “not liked or popular”. There are two sides to this definition. One side speaks to the majority opinion or whether something is liked or not liked by the majority. The ‘popular’ part is interesting because something that is popular may not be liked by the majority.

There is a common phenomenon called the “spiral of silence”, where people who hold unpopular opinions are a lot less likely to share these opinions because they fear social isolation. It makes sense; why would anyone want to share their feelings and then get hated on for them?

In a world where everyone is sharing everything at all times, it’s hard to conceal these opinions. Often when they are brought up, we find ourselves lying to others or staying quiet, but this isn’t always beneficial. While it may be okay to keep your opinions on Trump’s tax plan to yourself and save everyone from a heated argument, it may be helpful to share your feelings on a team decision even if it contradicts everyone else.

Although the concealing of unpopular opinions is done in all groups and at all ages, it is especially found amongst young people. Adolescents are inherently more insecure because duh and thus, they are much more unlikely to speak up and share their not popular feelings.

This serves as a love letter to my generation and a warning to my elders. To my fellow Gen-Zer’s, don’t be afraid to speak up and don’t be afraid to disagree with everyone else! To the millennials and Gen-Xer’s and whoever else is reading this, be on the lookout for your agreeing Gen-Z employees. Encourage them to speak their opinion in a comfortable scenario. And try to be sympathetic if you find them agreeing with the majority because we were all self-conscious young people once.

Also, I’d like to point out that I learned about the “spiral of silence” in one of my classes this semester and I’m out here applying it to real-world scenarios! (@my professors and @my parents).

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 GenZ? 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.

How Hard is it for Candidates to Find Your Jobs on your Career Site?

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The other day I got contacted by a large enterprise level TA leader. She had a major problem about to hit them. They had to hire thousands of people and she was hoping I could tell her which chatbot to use to help them.

Sweet! I love TA Tech, let’s talk about some of my favorites!

I pulled up their corporate site because I wanted to see what ATS they used and just check out the career site.

This is where I found her first problem! The first problem was I had to search to find out how to find their jobs! Like four clicks deep into the corporate website before I could even begin a job search, let alone apply.

There is only one right place for candidates to find jobs on your corporate website. It’s at the top of the page, the same exact place where you find things like: Home, Company, Products, Search, etc. If you’re making candidates scroll down to the bottom of your site, you don’t care about talent. If you’re making candidates search to find “Careers” on your site, you don’t care about talent.

You know who you are. “Well, Tim, we put “careers” under the “About” tab because we want our products front and center!” Nice! So, those candidates you desperately need now have to go on a snipe hunt to find out how to apply for your jobs!? How’s that working out for you? Or you make the scroll down fourteen feet to the bottom where you put things like “investor relations”, “contact information”, “press inquiries”, “Legal Notices”, etc.

The most innovative companies in talent acquisition have ‘finding’ their jobs down to one click. You pull up their page and it says something like “Jobs!” or “Apply Now” or “Careers” in the top right corner of the website. Sometimes there is even a button along in the corner to make it even easier for candidates to spot.

When a candidate clicks on that top of the page, right corner link they are instantly taken to a page that allows them to search. No more clicking around, no more searching for how the hell they can find which jobs you have open. It’s right there. One click.

It’s pretty common for me to visit a large brand corporate homepage and it will take me 4-7 clicks before I can actually search their jobs. If you ever want to know where TA falls in the order of importance in your organization, just count the clicks. The more you click, the less influence TA has in your organization. It’s fairly unscientific, but I find this little measure almost always works out.

So, my new TA friend was looking for a chatbot but didn’t really need a chatbot. Well, at least not yet. Foundational blocking and tackling of TA can do wonders for helping you hire. If it takes me four or five clicks to find your jobs, you’re in trouble. If you make me search around your site on how the hell I apply, I leave and go someplace else.

I know that 90% of know this,  but almost 50% of organizations can’t figure this out. Why? Because we as TA leaders aren’t going to our executive team and telling them, “Hey, idiots! We are losing 67% of our candidate traffic because some moron in marketing doesn’t like how “Jobs” looks on our corporate website in the righthand upper corner! Can we stop being stupid and do the right thing?”

I know selling our stuff is important, but if we can’t fill jobs, we won’t have stuff to sell. I know putting our employment brand out front is important, but why are we creating a search game for candidates to solve to just apply for our jobs?

Simple Tip to Share with Your Executive Team: Hiding how a candidate can apply for our jobs, doesn’t actually help us fill jobs! 

So, where do candidates find your jobs on your corporate homepage?

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @ClickBoardingHR Blow New Hires Away with Great Onboarding

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The week on The Weekly Dose I review the employee onboarding technology Click Boarding. Click Boarding is a best of breed employee onboarding solution that you can use with any ATS or HRIS system. What you’ll find is most ATSs and HRISs have something in their system that is considered ‘onboarding’, but what we know is that it’s usually a very weak version of what we actually need and want for onboarding our new employees.

Click Boarding is a technology designed for organizations that believe Candidate Experience and Employee Experience are paramount to their organizational success. You spent a ton of resources recruiting great talent to your organization, the last thing you want to happen is a poor onboarding experience to take place and that talent bails on you before they even got started!

For my money, great onboarding in the bridge from a great candidate experience to show your new employee they are about to have a great employee experience. Click Boarding is the bridge we all wish we had between those two extremely important experiences!

What I like about Click Boarding: 

– Click Boarding does everything you expect from great onboarding. As HR Pros we tend to get caught up in all of the compliance things we need to get done with new hires, and rightfully so, but true onboarding also has to be less about what we need in HR and more about creating a great experience for the new employee. This is where Click Boarding shines.

– New hires are welcomed, prior to starting, with your branded information, video welcome, access to team directory, etc. Everything they need to be ready for their first day. All of which is configurable to how you want to make it.

– TA and HR Pros, depending who covers onboarding for your organization, have easy to follow checklists to keep you on task to ensuring you easily get everything accomplished you need in onboarding, accessible via desktop and mobile.

– Click Boarding gives you a tool to personalize the onboarding experience like no other suite HRIS system currently has. From forms to pre-hire instructions, to video messages from your boss and teammates, Click Boarding allows you to make an experience to forget, to one you will remember.

I was asking the same question you are asking yourself right now. Why do we need a standalone onboarding technology, our HRIS system has onboarding? Your HRIS system has built-in new hire compliance. That is not onboarding.  This is what every single person in the world hates about HR, including those of us working in HR.

Click Boarding is easy to use, delivers a great onboarding experience for your new hires, and if that is important to you, they are a technology you should demo. I find most organizations spend a ton of time talking about making onboarding better, but spend almost zero when it comes to resources on technology to actually make onboarding better. If this is you, it’s worth an hour to see how technology can drive great onboarding.

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.

Announcing the HQ for HR Game Show – Sign Up to Play Today!

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Most of you know I founded another site called Fistful of Talent – we are getting ready to do something cool based off of the HQ series many of you play and have some fun in the process…

Fistful of Talent has teamed up with Paycor to bring you HQ for HR every Tuesday at 1 PM, starting May 1st. We’ll air five episodes with fifteen different HR leaders! Watching this could be the best 15 minutes of your day!

Here’s how it works – hit the link here or below to register for HQ for HR, and you’ll automatically receive email notifications each week about when HQ for HR is going live each Tuesday.  Click the link and join us and answer 12 HR body of knowledge questions digitally while you watch your peers answer them live on air.  You can do it from your desk or your phone, we just want you there!
After every episode, we’ll post a top 10 leaderboard at Fistful of Talent and here at the Capitalist showing who among the participants is an HR LEGEND.  We’ll use that leaderboard to invite you on the show live the following week – we’ll keep working down the list until we have 3 takers!  The top 5 cumulative scores across the 5 episodes will receive a major award to be announced during Episode 1.
PS – no Google allowed – or even Bing, people. We trust you because you look trustable, and let’s face it, most of you are in HR.
Check it as FOT’s Tim Sackett and your friend KD get down to the nitty-gritty with some of the sharpest minds in the HR/Talent industry!

Ugh! Being an Inclusive Employer is Hard!

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It seems like being an ‘inclusive’ employer would be super easy! You just accept everyone! Can’t we all just get along!?

The reality is, being an inclusive employer is hard, because being inclusive isn’t about accepting everyone. What!? Oh, great, Tim has finally lost his mind, buckle-up!

I wrote a post about Jeff Bezos’s annual letter and how he lays out a great framework for how organizations and leaders should management performance. Many people liked the post, but there was also a strong reaction from a lot of people who hate Amazon’s culture.

They hear and read media accounts of Amazon being a bad place to work. About Amazon’s hard-charging, work a ton of hours, you don’t have a great work-life balance, etc. Some people go to work for Amazon and tell themselves during the interview process that “yeah, I’ve heard the stories, but I’m different, I want this, I want to be a part of a giant brand like Amazon, I can handle it because it’s a great step in my career.”

That’s when they find out they actually lack self-insight and they should never listen to their inner-voice because it lies to them!

So, what does this have to do with ‘inclusion’?

If you truly believe in inclusion, you then believe that Amazon is a great place to work, for those who desire that type of culture. It might not be a culture you would ever choose to work. Amazon actually likes the people that self-select out! It makes their job easier because they don’t want you anyway!

If you stand up and shout Amazon is an awful employer, you don’t understand inclusion. No one forces you to got to work at Amazon, and Amazon does not hide who they are. In fact, Amazon might actually be the best company on the planet to show exactly who they are as an employer and what you’re signing up for if you decide to go to work there.

Amazon is giant and the vast majority of their employees love working for them. Those employees thrive in that environment. It’s what they were looking for. It’s how they are wired. If you put them into another what you might consider, ’employee-friendly’ environment, they would hate it and fail.

Inclusion is hard because it forces you to think in a way that theoretically every environment is potentially a good fit for the right person. We struggle because in our minds something that is opposite of what we want must be bad. Because it’s so hard for us to even consider someone else might actually love an environment we hate.

Being an ‘inclusive’ employer is about accepting all types of people (race, gender, religion, etc.), but it’s also about only accepting all of those people who actually fit the culture you have established. That’s the hard part! Amazon accepts everyone, but you better be ready to go a thousand miles an hour and never stop.

Being an inclusive employer is hard because if it’s done right, it’s not just about being an accepting employer of all, it’s about being accepting and then only picking those candidates who actually fit your culture. The outcome can be awesome. The work to get there can be overwhelming. And if done incorrectly you go from being inclusive to exclusive.

The Anatomy of the Perfect Keynote Speech

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I was recording a podcast last week with my friend and professional speaker, Jennifer McClure, last week for her new Impact Makers Podcast (check it out!). I won’t be for a while, but she has some great people she has already recorded including a brilliant session with William Tincup!

One of the secret ingredients to a well-produced podcast is that all the participants are somewhat ready for the conversation that is about to happen. So, Jen and I did some pre-gaming and post-gaming conversation that wasn’t recorded, and the topic of keynote speeches came up.

I was telling her that I had a new talk that I’m doing that is killing (speaker talk for doing well!) and I made a comment about it’s all just stories with bits of data thrown in to make the stories seem more important! (half joking) Jen commented saying, “That’s a blog post! The anatomy of a keynote!” So, here you go Jen!

Before I lay out the perfect keynote, you have to have some ingredients. Here’s the basic keynote ingredient list:

  1. A person who can speak. I would love to say an engaging person who can talk, but I’ve been to far too many conferences where this was a requirement to be a keynote!
  2. A book, working experience with a transcendent brand, or you’re famous. A book is always helpful, conference planners love to have keynotes with books. Books are like a driver’s license for a keynote speaker. But, you can also work Google or Facebook or Nike or just name a giant brand, and working for a brand like that takes the place of a book or your ability to speak.
  3. A price tag north of $20,000. You might be the most awesome speaker in the world, but if you tell them you’ll only charge $5,000, you’re out! Our conference deserves a much better keynote speaker than a $5,000 speaker, I mean we have a budget for $25K!
  4. It helps to be attractive, but the bigger the celebrity/brand the uglier you can be.
  5. Fashion that matches your speaking brand. If you’re a buttoned-up, semi-conservative speaker, you can’t get away with jeans and a hoodie on the keynote stage. If you cuss and drink a red bull and started a tech company and have a YouTube channel with 100K followers, you’ll look foolish wearing a suit and tie.

Okay, we have all the ingredients to a great keynote, what does the actual keynote look like? There are basically three types of keynotes:

Keynote #1 – I’m famous, you’re not! In America, especially, we are fascinated with ‘celebrity’. If you’re famous, you can keynote because somehow we believe you being famous gives you something important to say, even when it doesn’t.

The anatomy of Keynote #1:

– I’m famous!

– I have “being” famous stories!

– But I’m humble and I’m really just like you, but I’m famous!

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I’m famous!

Keynote #2 – I’m not famous, but I work(ed) for a famous brand/person. These keynotes can be fascinated because again we are all interested to know what the secret sauce is of other organizations, and our hope is this person will tell us.

The anatomy of Keynote #2 –

– I work for a famous brand, you don’t!

– Working for this famous brand is awesome! You should try it!

– Here’s what we do because we are a famous brand. You should try it!

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I work(ed) for a famous brand!

Keynote #3 – I’m a Professional Story Teller. A good portion of keynotes falls into this camp. Someone worked their butt off to learn how to be a professional speaker, paid their dues, probably wrote a book or two along the way, probably had a decent actual career to a point, people liked hearing them speak and they turned that into a full-time gig.

The anatomy of Keynote #3:

– Start with a story that will endear the audience to you, even if that story has nothing to do with you.

– Share some data or research, that might not even be yours, but the audience is like “Wow” that can’t be.

– Share another story (that isn’t even about you) that reinforces that data/research and ties to the concept of your new book that was written about other’s people research and stories.

– Another piece of research and data, that ties to the model you present in your book. Plus, acts as motivation for the audience to change something in their life.

– The final story, this is a big one (not yours, again), that you foreshadowed in the first story, and that will wrap up the entire keynote like a bow! This ending story is a crescendo of laughter, tears, and motivation to change your life in ways you didn’t dream of just sixty minutes before.

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I just entertained you for an hour and you have no idea why you want me to sign a book.

Okay, you guys know I love to joke and make fun of life. I get that it’s super hard and takes a ton of practice and talent to pull off a great keynote. I’ve seen keynotes that were brilliant and I know it’s a skill! I’ve also seen keynotes where the keynote speaker stole my time and the conference organizers money!

Great keynotes at any level start and end with great storytelling. The best tie those stories to an actual takeaway that will help you get better at something. That takeaway could be personal or professional, it doesn’t matter. The best keynotes also entertain you a bit. They are masters at almost instantly getting you to trust them and like them.

My least favorite keynotes are famous people. I’m not impressed by celebrity. The worst ones are the new Q&A’s with celebrities. It’s an insult to my intelligence that you’re getting paid $150K for an hour and you couldn’t even come prepared with an hour of material, instead, you just show up and we’ll ask pre-sent questions and listen to your lame answers.

My favorites are people you entertain me, teach me something, take me on a journey with them for an hour. It seems like the hour was over in twenty minutes. I want more. My all-time favorite is Malcolm Gladwell. He’s a masterful storyteller and I could sit and listen for hours.

Who is your favorite all-time keynote speaker and why? Hit me in the comments!