HR Blogging is about making HR Connections #UltiConnect

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An HR friend of mine, Cheryl Nelson, and I are out at Ultimate Connections, Ultimate Software’s annual user conference. I twisted her arm to get her on video because she just started writing her own HR blog after reading hundreds of my posts!

Cheryl’s new blog is called “Kolor Me HR” check it out. Cheryl is a real-life HR leader/Pro who is in the trenches every day. I love when practitioners take up writing because that’s when you really learn that we are all in this together!

Cheryl said she was nervous about doing this video, but said, “Amazing things happen when you say Yes!” She even wrote a post on that concept! I love it! I think you’ll agree, she was great!

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Foresight – Workforce Planning Tech

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review workforce planning technology, Foresight.Foresight is billed as the world’s first Recruitment Forecasting technology.It creates an accurate forecast of hiring need across a specified tactical time frame.

About once a year I’m completely shocked and surprised by a technology and this is the case with Foresight. I told the Foresight team, and I’ll tell you, this is the most impressive piece of HR Technology I’ve seen in a long time!

Foresight was built by some corporate talent acquisition professionals that got sick and tired of putting out fires. What we know if TA has very little control over workforce forecasting it comes from hiring managers, CFOs, CEOs, etc. So, they built a technology that kept that in mind, and got them out of fighting the recruiting fires of ‘we need to hire 100 engineers in thirty days’, ‘oh, wait, we need to layoff 300 now instead’, ‘check that, hire 1,000 total across all functions’!

What I like about Foresight:

– The platform sends out an internal email to each hiring manager from the executive explaining what needs to take place, and takes them into the systems and walks them through a very short forecasting process (15 min.) set of questions (executive can also speak to the team via video as well).

– The process takes them through the main areas of: headcount planning, known active recruiting, potential growth needs, and interns/apprenticeships. Calculates everything in a roll-up, and gives the organization a predicted recruitment path for the next twelve months.

– Hiring managers have to follow the system, they can’t skip steps or change. They can leave comments to explain, but they have to put in something.

– Executives get updates on hiring managers not completely their forecast.

– The platform works off live, real-time data, as a position gets filled, everything is updated, someone leaves, another update. Real current recruitment needs are at your fingertips, across your entire organization. Update forecasts can be sent out monthly, quarterly, up to the organization.

– After hiring manager puts in the forecast, there is an approval roll-up that takes place, so when it all comes back to TA, the department is ready to go with full approval.

Basically, anyone in the organization, from TA leader to hiring managers, to executives, can get a list of every single role being recruited for and when that role needs to be filled.

I’m in love with this from the simplicity of how it works to how if used consistently it becomes a cultural driver around your talent strategy. Everyone is onboard and in the know of what’s going on. Clearly, this is an enterprise level technology. You probably don’t need forecasting tech if you’re hiring 100 employees a year, but 500-100,000 hires, across multiple locations and countries, you need this.

Well worth a demo if you find yourself in a very typical TA role of constantly starting and stopping, and not really having a great idea around what the organization needs to hire on an ongoing basis. Bad TA happens when you can’t get out of firefighting mode. Great TA happens when you have a plan and can go make real long-term strategies to attract great talent.

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

The Email Every Employee Wishes They Sent After Leaving!

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Please raise your hand if you have ever drafted an email that you desperately wanted to fire off to your entire organization, or leadership, only to delete it, so to not ruin your career? I know most of you have because sometimes, in HR, we get to deal with those poor souls who didn’t have the willpower to push ‘Delete’ and instead pushed ‘Send’.

In the HR business, we call those employees ‘Former Employees’!  I’ve coined a name for those emails I like to call them ‘The Lotto Email’!  It’s the email you would feel comfortable sending the moment you return from picking up that overly sized Powerball check you just won.  You now have I-Don’t-Give-A-Sh*t money and you’re completely unfiltered.

I don’t hold out hope I will ever win the lottery but I imagine the email might look something like this:

Dear Fellow Employees,

I’m Rich Beeatch! (click here for context)

That being said I’d like to say a few things before not packing up any of this crap in my office and leaving forever.  To make this easier for you to cut and paste and send around later, I’ll bullet point this out into chunks – USA Today style – because I know most of you are slow and lose attention quickly:

– Mr. CEO – I know you think it’s probably adorable how you make comments about every woman in the office’s ass behind closed doors, but it’s not, it’s creepy. Just like you.

– Mr. CFO – You’re an accountant, calm the f@#K down, you’re not that important. Just tell us how much money we have and go back to being boring.

– Mrs. HR – Nobody likes you. This is just confirmation. BTW, everyone lies on your engagement surveys because all the managers use them as weapons, so it’s easier to lie and make you feel like what you do actually matters. It doesn’t.

– Mrs. COO – The CEO constantly talks about your ass. Hope that makes your meetings going forward more comfortable.

– Mary – I’ve always wanted to tell you that you are drop dead gorgeous, but your low self-esteem keeps you married to a complete asshole! I’m better than that. I won’t be that asshole. Here’s our chance, walk out of here with me Jerry Maguire style and let’s do this. Otherwise, I’m probably 5 drinks and 2 hours away from making some really bad decisions at a strip club.

– Ted – You’re a douche bag, everyone hates you.

There’s a bunch of other stuff I could to say – but really the only thing I really want to say is: I’m Rich Beeatch!

See you in the parking lot, Mary.

Former Employee

Obviously, this wouldn’t be ‘my’ letter because I’m the President of my company!  My letter would be a lot of thanking everyone for everything and I’ll see you around if you’re ever in the South of France on a large yacht. Plus a bunch of positive stuff and how valuable each and every employee was to me personally.

Follow by – “I’m Rich Beeatch!”

How Many Beers Does it Take to Get Your Employees to Peak Performance?

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Did you see that winter Olympic athletes were using beer as a recovery drink!?

The science says that non-alcoholic beer, used as a recovery drink for sports, is better than normal sports drinks like Gatorade. From the NPR article:

Appalachian State University’s David Nieman has studied phenols’ health effects. On the whole, phenol-rich diets tend to lower inflammation and reduce the risk of sickness, he says. “[Polyphenols] have a very unique molecular structure that can actually regulate the genes that control inflammation,” in addition to general antiviral properties, says Nieman.

In 2011, Nieman and the University of Munich’s Johannes Scherr investigated the effects of beer, which contains around 50 phenols, on athletes — whose intense physical activity can compromise their immune activity. When marathon runners were instructed to drink 1.5 liters of nonalcoholic beer a day, their risk of upper respiratory infection was reduced. The activity of white blood cells, a good indicator of inflammation, was lowered 20 percent.

All over the world, we were trying to figure out why the Germans were kicking our butts in all these events and the secret was they drink a bunch of this new ‘sports’ beer!

If non-alcoholic beer helped athletes recover more quickly from grueling workouts, then it could allow them to train harder. Scherr credits the nonalcoholic beer’s salubrious effects to its high concentration of polyphenols, immune-boosting chemicals from the plants with which its brewed.

“After that, we really had the proof: It’s really healthy and not only a marketing gag,” said Holger Eichele, the chief executive of the German Brewers Association. From 2011 to 2016, German consumption of nonalcoholic beer grew 43 percent even as overall beer consumption declined, according to Euromonitor International. New brewing techniques helped to diversify and improve the flavor, and now there are more than 400 non-alcoholic beers on the market in Germany. Germans drink more nonalcoholic beer than any nation, except Iran.

So, making beer available to our employees became super popular as a ‘benefit’ to offer up over the past decade, as employers looked to attract millennials and show how ‘super cool’ they are to work for. Work hard, play hard!

What we didn’t know, was that we had it just a tiny bit wrong! We should be giving beer to our employees, but it should be non-alcoholic beer, not the normal stuff!

The one aspect of both articles I thought had particular interest to employers was the social aspect of drinking beer. All over the world, people drink beer in mostly social settings. We tend to see drinking beer as a social activity.

So, having a beer at work isn’t necessarily a bad idea, if it was non-alcoholic and it increased our employees to interact more with each other. Plus, if it actually helps your employees recover faster from those grueling all-night coding sessions, heck, we better give it a try!

The Weekly Dose II: Google Hire’s New Gmail Add-on

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So, this week I’m giving you two doses of HR Tech because so much is happening in the space I just couldn’t get away with one thing this week! Google Hire, the ATS for SMBs, just released a new feature for their system that is something recruiters will really like!

If you haven’t heard of Google Hire, you really need to check it out if your a business under 1,000 employees and your business uses the G-suite. The G-suite being you do your email in Gmail and you use Google Calendar.  That’s important because the only way you can use Google Hire is if you’re a G-suite shop.

If you don’t use the G-suite, don’t waste your time, you can’t use Hire, no matter how bad you might want to give it a look.

So, what’s new with Hire? 

Hire isn’t even that old. It’s really only been on the market for about a year. So, basically it’s all new, but Google released a new Gmail add-on to Hire that is really great.

Check out the video below, but basically, the Gmail Hire add-on allows recruiters to do most of the heavy lifting in Hire, in Gmail, where most recruiters spend most of their time anyway (within their email program communicating with candidates).

The Hire add-on allows recruiters to easily see if a candidate is already in their system or will be a new candidate, makes it seamless to add a new candidate into Hire, and also lets them move candidates along the recruiting process from within Gmail, so they aren’t moving back and forth between Hire and Gmail.

Hire already logged every single candidate interaction within Gmail into Hire, but this allows recruiters to work within the G-suite in a very normal way without bouncing around between programs to interact and moves candidates through the stages of hiring.

One aspect I really liked within Hire is the ability for recruiters to reject a candidate right in Gmail, and choose if they wanted that message to go out immediately, or wait for a certain timeframe before sending. This lets recruiters immediately complete a candidate they absolutely know has no shot, and be more efficient with their time in touching candidates less.

If you’re using G-suite for email, calendar, etc., and you have less than 1,000 employees you should demo Hire, even if you’re happy with your current ATS. Why? Because it’s Google silly! Hire is inexpensive and Google will continue to innovate this product at a rapid rate.

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

Career Confessions from GenZ: Are you Pre-boarding Interns?

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College orientation was one of the most uncomfortable and awkward experiences of my life. I would say that most other current college students would attest to this. I think it’s very unreasonable to expect a group of 18-year-olds to meet for the first time and become friends in a short time span while learning everything you’re supposed to know about the school you are attending.

Thankfully I am through the college orientation process, but I have a lifetime of job orientations ahead of me. Apparently, this process in the workforce is called “onboarding” (thanks, Dad!), but to newbies like me, we invented a new term to describe this orientation called “pre-boarding”.

This new style of onboarding is a more in-depth look into general ideas about the workforce in addition to normal onboarding events. This is for people that have never worked real-life jobs before (yup, that’s me). I like this idea of pre-boarding because I am a very curious person that has a million questions and likes them all to be answered! So, here are some specific topics that I want companies to focus on while pre-boarding newbies like me:

  1. Dress Code: For someone that has always put a heavy emphasis on what I wear, this is very important to me and other young people. The words “business casual” mean absolutely nothing to me. I need concrete examples of what to wear and this means VISUALS.  I want someone to show me pictures or even show me real-life examples of what I should be wearing every day to work. Please and thank you.
  2. Logistics: I’m calling this section logistics because it encompasses a whole array of logistical things. I need to know where to park, where to sit, when I eat, where I eat, where’s the bathroom, when I’m supposed to arrive, when I’m supposed to leave, among many other things. And I would like a concrete answer to all of these. Coming from a school environment, like most newbies are, we are always told when to do things and how to do them. Therefore, it is important to realize this and adhere to how your new employees have been given information for most of their lives.
  3. Job-related content: This part of the pre-boarding process should be different for every job because it has to do with the specific duties and tasks that new employees will be performing. This can include things like meeting your fellow team members, learning how to use certain software or programs, and other instructional demonstrations as needed (you guys already know how to do this part). Will I have a laptop, desktop, no computer, no desk? Should I bring my own laptop? What about my phone, you know I’m not going anywhere without that!? 

I’m sure I’m forgetting a million other things that are important, but these are just things that I specifically worry about. For this pre-boarding process, it is extremely important to leave all questions unanswered. Gen-Z (and young people across history) DON’T ask questions, so it is important to make sure you think of everything beforehand. This process will help alleviate pressure from your new employee and will warrant an easy and successful transition into their new position.

Here’s to hoping that my future bosses will be reading this post to make it easier for me!

 

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

 

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: The Top 100 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) in 2018!

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This week on The Weekly Dose I’m taking a look at my #1 all-time favorite report that was released last week by Rob Kelly over at Ongig! The Top 100 Applicant Tracking Systems in 2018 is an annual report that Rob and the Ongig team have been putting out now for four years.

The ATS market is really hard to get data. This report measures 118 ATS platforms out of more than 1,000 on the market, but the 118 in this report make up the vast majority of the marketplace. I love this report because of how robust the data is. The report pulls ATS information from 4200+ employers, which makes it more comprehensive than anything else you’ll find.

So, what have learned about the ATS market in 2018? 

– Taleo is getting killed! In 2017 their market share was 25.51% on Ongig’s report, in 2018 their market share dropped to 19.11%. While this isn’t exact, you can bet the Oracle/Taleo people are freaking out and some folks are getting fired! My hope is this will spur the Taleo folks to finally see their solution has fallen behind the marketplace and we’ll see big innovation from them in the coming years.

– Greenhouse is moving upmarket and taking market share in a big way! Greenhouse is getting most of this market share increase from Taleo, Kenexa/Brassring, and Jobvite (who all lost market share since the 2017 report).

– Don’t look now but Google Hire just became a real threat to all SMB ATS providers! In 2017, Google Hire came in at .22% market share #44 on the list. In 2018, Google Hire is .78%, #23, but has increased their client growth by 312%! Almost triple anyone else. Don’t sleep on Hire!

– While Greenhouse is killing everyone in overall growth, iCIMS and Workday are also growing at a very high rate. Suite HCM talent solutions (like Workday Talent, Ultipro, SAP, Oracle, etc.) have some built-in advantages to growth. If you’re using their HCM, you’ll feel pressure to use the rest of the suite. But with the growth of Greenhouse, iCIMS, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc. (best of breed talent solutions) we see a clear indication that organizations that see talent as a priority are choosing the better tech over the suite solutions.

– The ATS market is growing. Ongig measured 50 different ATSs in 2014, and 119 in 2018. One major reason is you can make money selling ATS solutions primarily because most companies don’t switch ATSs often. So once you get in, you’re usually there for a while. Plus, the options at the SMB level are now very robust with Google Hire (they want us to just call it “Hire”), Workable, BreezyHR, and Newton (now integrated with Paycor).

So, how should you use this report? 

I love this report because it truly gives every talent acquisition leader a true picture of how vast the ATS market is. The ATS is foundational to your TA Tech stack and the choice you make for your ATS will dictate many decisions you make in how you recruit talent.

Do I go right to the most used? No, but I also don’t ignore the most used. There’s a reason people are using Taleo and Greenhouse. They work. There’s a reason some systems are growing and some are not. Figure out what those might be, it’s very telling!

If you’re an SMB you have a bunch of low-cost ATS technology you should be looking at. So, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using an ATS, even if you only hire one person a month. While “Homegrown” ATSs are still used widely, please don’t go develop your own ATS, it’s not worth your time or effort with so many great products already on the market.

Go check out the report – it’s one of the best reads you’ll have all year in TA Technology!

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

The One Word Recruiters Use to Describe Themselves That’s a Lie!

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Did you catch the article on LinkedIn by Lydia Abbot, The Top 10 Words Recruiters Use to Describe Themselves? If not, go check it out. Lydia is a content marketer for LinkedIn and she puts out some good stuff based on inside data LI data.

In this piece, she basically gave us the Top 10 words recruiters use to describe themselves (based on LI data):

I’ve been a recruiter for a long or worked in talent acquisition for a long time. I think I would say most of these words are pretty good. I want my recruiters to be experienced, skilled, passionate, motivated, etc.

The number 1 word is “Specialized”, it’s also the number 1 word that recruiters describe themselves, that’s almost always a lie!

“Specialized” isn’t really a word recruiters want to use to describe themselves. It’s the word that “You” want them to use to describe themselves!

Here’s what happens. You have a super important opening to fill. The leader of that group wants to ensure ‘you’ don’t screw it up. Since you don’t have anyone on your team that ‘specializes’ in the function of this position, she wants you to use an outside firm. A recruiter who ‘specializes’ in the function of this position.

The reality is, there are a few actual recruiters who “specialize” in certain functions. My friend, Stacy Zapar specializes in filling corporate Recruiter positions at The Talent Agency. That’s all she works on. I know a guy in North Carolina who specializes in filling PCB Engineering openings in the Aerospace industry. Those are the only positions he works on, period. That’s specialization.

If you fill “IT” openings or you fill “Accounting” openings. You aren’t a specialist. You don’t have specialization.

Recruiters will tell you they are specialized because that is what you want to believe, but 99% of recruiters are not specialized. They might enjoy a certain focus, like Nursing, or Engineering, or Designers, etc. But those are still very broad fields!

Corporate Hiring Managers and Corporate Talent Acquisition want to believe the recruiters they are using, or the recruiters they are hiring, are specialized, but they’re not. It’s not that they’re lying, it’s that it doesn’t really matter!

My company mostly works on recruiting positions in Engineering and IT. The reality is we train our recruiters to “Recruit”. Give them an engineering opening and they’ll kill it. Give them a Human Resources position to fill and they’ll kill it. If you can recruit, you can recruit.

Does specialization help? It can, if the recruiter is truly specialized. If you have a pipeline of very specific talent. The reality is less than 1% of recruiters will ever even come close to true specialization, yet it’s the #1 word we use to describe ourselves!

So, what do you really want out of a recruiter if we don’t need specialization? Experience for sure helps. The reality is the best recruiters take an interest in the position, the hiring manager, the department, and the company. They’re passionate about the position and can convey that to candidates. Also, they have the skill to uncover and track down talent others can’t.

In recruiting, specialization is oversold and overrated. Whereas actual sourcing and recruiting skills are underrated because we as recruiters do a terrible job of showing how a skilled recruiter is better than an unskilled recruiter!

 

The Reason You’re Being “Ghosted” After Your Interview!

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Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then I’ve heard nothing and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager and I’ve gotten no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

************************************************************

Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates and none of them are good! Here’s a short-list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because, conflict in uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate they’re trying to talk into the job, but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates are a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept, at least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re over their head in the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people, but just don’t have the time. When you’re in the firefighting mode you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do, if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a handwritten letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 140 characters send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed 2 weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (Will work on Facebook as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company who truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager treats candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?

Snoring on a Plane!

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I was flying recently and the dude right across the aisle from me started snoring. Snoring like he had a problem and there’s no way his wife still loves him kind of snoring. Snoring so loud I wanted to punch him right in the face.

I get it. Snoring is a medical condition he couldn’t help. Poor dude was tired and sitting in a hot plane and nature took over.

Snoring on a plane though speaks to me as a recruiter.

If you know you snore, you make sure you don’t snore in public. Drink 26 cups of coffee before you get on the plane, go see a doctor for some kind of surgery, take up a cocaine habit, I don’t know but do something!

It shows lack of self-insight.

The best case scenario is he wakes up, without me punching him in the face, and he looks at me and apologizes because he knows his own snoring woke him up. Or he wakes up and I tell him, dude, you’ve got a problem! Don’t ever fall in asleep on a plane!

He then looks at me, and says, I had no idea! Oh, my god, I’m so embarrassed and sorry! I will make sure to never fall asleep on a plane again without first putting on a breath-right strip!

But, he didn’t. He woke up an hour later with about 12 people hating him, and he had no idea, or he did and didn’t care. Which gets me back to recruiting.

Snoring on a plane demonstrates lack of self-insight. It might be the single most important thing you can have as a candidate. From the first moment you have contact with an employer to the last, you’re being judged.

The last thing you want to be judged on is having low self-insight. “Oh, wow, did you see Tim come in with the stain on his tie? Did he know? How doesn’t he know? Why didn’t he say something like, ‘sorry, guys, spilled coffee on my tie on the way in, and I’m totally embarrassed!’

At least we would know he wasn’t a complete moron! Instead, Tim is “snoring on a plane”.

No employer wants to hire you if you “snore on a plane”, they want to hire people who know who they are, good and bad, and can then overcome the bad and highlight the good. They want to hire candidates who have high self-insight because they know those people will take care of themselves and their performance.

We are really bad judges of self-insight for ourselves. We all think we have super high self-insight, but most of us really suck at this self-diagnosis. As someone who is close to you, but not to close, to help you out with this. Let them know you need to know the truth, the real truth.

Ask them to be real with you for a second! Hey, please, if you’re my friend, tell me, do I ‘snore on a plane’?