Welcome to Strugglesville: Population 1 (and that “1” is you!)

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Have you been struggling lately?

It seems like I go through bits of struggle here and there. The day starts off awesome, I’m getting stuff done, and then life happens and the struggle begins. Could be the boss gave some super-critical feedback on something you poured your soul into. Might be something outside of work (might? okay, probably something outside of work!). Maybe today just isn’t your day.

I know I’ve got a choice. Do I continue the struggle and take it home or pull others into my struggle, or do I pull myself out of the struggle and get back on track. I. Know. That. Is. A. Choice. And still, I struggle with that choice! Do you feel me?

The struggle is real, for all of us. Sure someone else probably has more of a struggle than you, but when you’re in full struggle mode you don’t want to hear that shit. Your struggle at that moment is for real, real!

So, how do I pull myself out of the struggle?

I’ve got a number of tactics I use to pull myself out of the struggle may be one of these will help you in your struggle:

– Find a small win! I’m not looking to save the world, I just need to get one small win under my belt! Maybe that’s not eating Taco Bell for lunch and having a salad (small win for me, yay!). Maybe it’s clearing my inbox (a little bigger win!). Maybe it’s finally having that one difficult conversation I’ve been putting off (small win with a big stress relief). It all starts with one small win, then find another, and build on those.

– Conversation with a positive ear! I’ve got some friends, peers, co-workers that I know are almost always really positive. I make that conversation happen, and the topic is not about my struggle, the topic is about something that needs to get done, or I need to make better, etc. After those conversations, I feel uplifted and energized to do something, and walk away from the struggles.

– Do something I’m good at or enjoy, that isn’t destructive. Okay, I might be a genius at ordering the perfect Taco Bell meal, but that’s not the good I’m talking about! I’m good at writing. It relaxes me. If I’m in full struggle mode, I start writing. I enjoy listening to music. It helps turn my mood around given the right playlist.

– Helping someone else. Nothing pulls me out of a struggle like being helpful to someone else. I get a positive boost. They get some help. I can return to my previously scheduled programming without the struggles!

I’ll pull myself into one of these three things mid-day if needed, because me working while struggling doesn’t help anyone, including myself.

I would love to hear how you pull yourself out of your struggle. We all visit Strugglesville, how we get home is pretty unique for each of us!

Career Confessions from GenZ! What Does GenZ Think About Your Candidate Experience?

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Career Confessions from GenZ is a weekly series authored by Cameron Sackett, a Sophomore at the Univesity of Michigan majoring in Communications and Advertising. Make sure you connect with him on LinkedIn: 

When my Dad approached me with the idea of doing this series, I was skeptical because I don’t know a lot about business! I’m only in my 2nd year of college with almost no experience in the business world. Through this process, I’m learning a lot about business (I see what you did here Dad) and I’m able to start to form some opinions about business practices.

For example, let’s talk about candidate experience. I had never really considered how vital this was until I was applying for internships. Again and again, I would find myself getting the same automated email response after I applied saying “Thank you so much for applying! We can’t wait to get to know you better”. The same age-old response, time and time again. But, after weeks and weeks of waiting, I still hear nothing. Not even a rejection!

Now, I understand some of these companies are getting thousands of applications for these internships, and it’s probably overwhelming to contact every single applicant. On the other hand, I’m taking time to apply for this job that you’re offering and you should let me know whether you want me or not! Another thing that I understand is many times, the odds that I’ll even get an interview for a job are slim to none. Although I know these things, that still doesn’t stop me from forming an opinion about your company through this application experience.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I applied for a marketing internship at the T-Mobile headquarters. I got the same automated response and after months, I’ve heard nothing. This isn’t unexpected; I knew that this internship was probably highly sought after. What T-Mobile is forgetting in this process, is that many college students, just like me, will soon be on the market for cell phone coverage. Currently, I’m under my parent’s cellular plan, but once I graduate, I will have the ability to switch networks if I choose. Even a simple and concise “thanks but no thanks” note from T-Mobile would have helped me to form more favorable views of their company, but they didn’t even do that!

Here’s what I’m saying: if companies are so concerned with “candidate experience”, they should follow through the entire process, not just the beginning of it. Many of these companies are selling products that their candidates might purchase, and if they want their candidates to have favorable views of their company, they should treat them like the potential and valued customer that they are!

And yes, I know I’m a white male college student that has never worked in the business world and doesn’t know how things really are. But, I’m not claiming to be an expert! I’m just out here, trying to gain some experience and hoping to give some insight from an up and coming generation. Really, I’m just out here hustlin’ like everyone else (Now that’s a Tim Sackett phrase if I’ve ever said one. Next time, maybe I’ll include something about rap lyrics or hugging).

Okay – this is Tim back talking – So, TA Pros, are you surprised by what Cameron says above? Hit us in the comments with what you think! 

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.

Besides being a Dad with a network, I thought the best way to get my son some ‘real-world’ experience would be to put himself out there as a writer! Let him know what you think and let us hear what you would like to learn about the next big generation entering our workforce!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CrowdedWork mine the gold in your ATS!

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This week on the Weekly Dose I review the TA technology Crowded. Crowded is a platform that fixes what’s wrong with most ATSs! What’s wrong with most ATSs? Let me explain.

A typical ATS does one thing really well. It posts jobs to your career site and collects applicants from those jobs posted. From there it basically allows you to digitally move applicants through your hiring process. That’s a normal ATS. Heck, that’s about 90% of the ATSs on the market.

What big issue then becomes what do you do with that huge database of applicants that you have? This is why Crowded was built. You spend a ton of money and resources filling your ATS with talent. If you are like most organizations in the world, that talent then sits in your ATS and dies (figuratively). Once most applicants apply for a job and enter your ATS they are never heard from again. This is a major problem!

Just because you didn’t hire this talent the first time they applied, doesn’t mean they might not be your next great hire, or a great hire a year or two down the road. Crowded is a technology that integrates with your ATS, pulls out your jobs and your applicant database and re-matches them on a constant basis. Crowded then allows you to reach out to these ‘newly’ found candidates and engage them with your current jobs.

Not only does Crowded do this matching, but Crowded also updates each candidate in your database. So, that entry-level engineer who applied two years ago, but you didn’t have anything, now becomes that Engineer with two years of experience working at your competition that is no super valuable and someone you desperately want to hire! That is why this technology is so powerful and needed by most organizations!

What I like about Crowded: 

– Can be used by both staffing, RPO, and Corporate. We all use ATSs, and we all face the same issue using ATSs.

– Bi-directional data exchange, which basically means all the cool stuff Crowded is doing, ends up back in your ATS (system of record) for compliance sake.

– Crowded allows your recruiters to communicate via email and text through their platform with each exchange being captured and uploaded back into the candidate ATS profile.

– Crowded has some built-in intelligent automation that will actually allow the system to automatically reach out to candidates that match your jobs at a certain level, so your recruiters don’t have to. Funny thing – almost no corporate TA shops use this, but staffing and RPO do! Why? You tell me! This is a brilliant use of technology and efficiency, everyone should use it.

– Data analysis from Crowded will help you make more strategic talent decisions. Crowded’s technology will show you data on what schools, companies, etc. you’re hiring from, and which ones are getting interviews, etc. This way you can be more strategic about where your team is spending its time and resources. The system will also show you apply vs. hired skills gaps.

You are sitting on a gold mine of talent in your ATS database, but you don’t ever mine it! Why? Because most ATSs suck at search, and most TA shops suck at searching our ATSs and then believing anyone in there has talent! The Crowded platform automates this process and bubbles up great talent that your team has been ignoring forever! Every single company has great hires in their ATS database waiting to be hired, but most of us never will. With Crowded, you’ll start to see these hires happen almost instantly.

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

Are You In a Rush to be Offended?

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I was on a webinar recently and the speaker kept adding “she” and “he”every time they tried to say something like, “‘he’ would have to fill out that form” and then quickly go “or ‘she’ I know we have to be correct in HR”. In my mind, I was like okay, I get it, the word we use matter.

When I write, I frequently purposely change gender to try and be more gender-inclusive in my writing, knowing I’ll always by habit write from a more male dominant voice.

If we go back to the webinar example above, I’m sure you’ve seen and heard the same, but what really stuck with me, probably because he kept doing this so often, was me waiting for a comment to come across in the question box saying something like “well, you know there are more gender identities than male and female!”

Yep. There are. But, is this really the place to point this out. Clearly, the dude speaking was having a hard with just two and making sure we knew he cared equally about ‘both’ genders.

Years ago Salon had a great article about comedians struggling with how ‘politically correct’ the audiences were becoming. Here’s a quote from Jim Norton:

“Western culture has become a “tireless brigade of social-justice warriors” and that “Being outraged and upset and feeling bullied or offended are not only things we enjoy, they’re also things we have become thoroughly addicted to. When we can’t purposefully get our feelings hurt by a comedian, we usually find another, albeit less satisfying, source of indignation… I choose to believe that we are addicted to the rush of being offended, the idea of it, rather than believing we have become a nation of emasculated children whose only defense against an abyss of emotional agony is a trigger warning.”

We live in an offensive world, especially right now.

Every day media blasts every offensive phrase uttered by politicians, professional athletes, celebrities, etc. We see our employees and leaders say and write offensive things that in another time would probably have been ignored, but now we have platforms to call out the offense.

I think we hope that in our rush to be offended we will stop the offensive behavior, or at the very least get one person to stop their offensive behavior. We hope that by doing this we’ll ‘raise’ the level of conversation around these issues.

My fear is that we aren’t raising the level of conversation, but shutting it down. In our rush to be offended, we aren’t seeking first to understand, we are first attacking and who cares about what happens after that. I think we need to be careful with our employees and our workplace cultures to correct inappropriate behavior every single time it happens and do it in a way that is lasting for the person who does the offending.

We live in a world of gray. Not black and white. While one employee might be offended, the co-worker standing right next to them might not be at all. Both are wrong, and both are right. Either one attacking the other is never a solution that is sustainable for a positive and inclusive workplace culture.

Welcome to the show kids! This is one of the most difficult issues you’ll deal with in HR. Supporting one employee who is offended, when you know the majority would not be offended. If I had the perfect answer on how to handle this I would share, but I don’t, because each and every one of these situations is unique.

Someone Is Banking on You Being Lazy!

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I work in an industry where I’ve been told for a decade technology is going to take my job. The staffing industry is a half a trillion dollar industry worldwide. The entire industry is built on us banking on the fact that someone in corporate TA is going to be lazy.

Ouch! That should sting a little!

So, I don’t really bank on you being lazy at my company. We do contract work so we are looking to fill contingent roles, not direct hire staffing, which is an industry almost completely built on lazy! For my staffing brothers and sisters out there, I hear you, I know you’re ‘just’ filling in when ‘capacity’ is an issue. (wink, head nod, wink)

There are other industries that bank you us being lazy. The entire diet industry! You’ve got overpriced awful foods, bars, shakes, workout gyms, at home gyms, etc. Because we won’t eat less and move more, because we are “lazy”, we pay a lot for that! Believe me, I pay my fair share! Just because I’m too lazy! Ugh, it’s embarrassing!

Direct hire staffing as an industry could be gone tomorrow if corporate TA just did what they were hired to do. You have an opening, you fill the opening. We aren’t trying to put a woman on the moon! This isn’t rocket science!

But, we don’t fill the opening. In fact, we do just about everything except fill the opening. We post the opening. We meet about the opening. We send whoever applies to the manager of the opening. We meet some more about candidate experience. We have another meeting about employment branding. One more meeting with the manager to see if anything has changed.

That doesn’t sound lazy, does it?

But, deflection of more difficult work is just another form of lazy.

My kid doesn’t want to go out in 90-degree heat and mow the lawn. It’s a hard, hot job. So, they come up with ‘alternative’ work that they have to do that just happens to be inside in the air conditioning.

As TA Leaders, we have to understand how are others are banking on us being lazy, and then make adjustments to stop lazy. So, how do you do that?

Well, I wrote an entire book on the subject – The Talent Fix – which is coming out in April – but until you can get it, here are some tips:

  1. Have clearly defined measurable activity goals set for each member of your TA team.
  2. Make those measures transparent so everyone can see them every day.
  3. Have performance conversations immediately when measures aren’t met.
  4. Course correct as measures need to be adjusted to meet the needs of the business.
  5. Rinse, repeat.

1 -5 above is like page 37 of the book. So, you can imagine what the rest of the 300+ pages will be like! 😉

If you follow the five steps above about half of your team will quit in 90 days. That’s a good thing, those idiots didn’t want to recruit, to begin with, they just wanted that fat corporate check and Taco Tuesdays. They were being lazy and it was costing your corporate bottom line.

The talent acquisition function is not a charity case. I think in the history of HR we’ve done some corporate charity where we let people keep collecting money even though they were costing us money. They weren’t giving back the value we needed for what we were paying. Great leaders stop this from happening.

Great leaders understand that there are people in the world that are banking on us being lazy.

Will Amazon’s New Salary Policy Actually Hurt Women?

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So, a ton of our HR peers around the country in states like California, Massachusetts, New York City, etc. are trying to figure out new laws that ban hiring managers from asking candidates about their salary history. Forever, this has been commonplace.

It might still be in your workplace, as this isn’t federal law, yet, most managers use the salary history question as a screener to understand if they can ‘afford’ a person, or if they can negotiate and get the company a better deal. There are major problems with this practice, and it’s why many states have put in place laws to remove the practice.

Amazon is one of a growing list of companies that voluntarily decided to stop asking candidates about salary history.

From Quartz:

Amazon has promised to hire at least 100,000 new employees in the US this year. And it won’t ask any of them about their prior job history.

According to a report in Buzzfeed yesterday (Jan. 17), Amazon is pledging to do voluntarily what many companies are now being forced to do by law: bar its US hiring managers from asking job candidates their prior salary.

The policy is an attempt to help correct a gender pay gap that’s perpetuated when starting salaries are based on previously low salaries. On Jan. 1, California became the largest state in the US to institute a law barring the practice, joining Massachusetts, New York City, and other states and cities with similar laws.

While these types of laws are designed to help people who have previously been hurt by these practices (females, individuals with prison records, basically anyone who took a lower than market pay wage for some reason or another), we need to understand for every action we take, Newton’s Third Law comes into play.
This law is no different and leading economists are trying to get us to understand some of these realities that will now be the norm:

But there’s reason to believe the law could backfire, and end up punishing women. That’s because taking information away from employers doesn’t make them stop caring about the information, said Jennifer Doleac, an economist at the University of Virginia.

When employers can’t ask about salary history, they’ll make assumptions based on what they think they know, Doleac said. “When we make them guess, it hurts the best applicants in the groups we’re caring about, because we have no way to distinguish them, and they get grouped together with the rest…

…If women were well paid in their previous jobs, and are offered a lower salary at their new place of work, they’ll be forced to negotiate for the wage they already had, Doleac said. For women who can’t prove they earned more, or are unwilling to haggle, they’ll get less, she said. And low-paid women will be in the same position as they were before the laws were passed.

“We know women don’t negotiate, even when it would be really easy for them to push back,” she said, referring to prior research.  “Putting that extra hoop there for them to jump through is going to hurt.”

Fix one problem, create another that might actually have a negative impact on the ones the law was created to help.

What we should be doing as HR leaders are ensuring when offers are made that they are equitable across the board in our organizations based on objective data. We own that. Managers will make dumb decisions, we know this.
This is why we have jobs in HR. It’s our job to ensure we support those managers with information to make good decisions. Then when they ignore our information to make good decisions, we smack them over the head!
I believe Amazon is doing the right thing. I think what we’ll see long term are these laws will end up benefiting more than they’ll hurt. What do you think?

Am I In Charge Yet? Career Confessions from GenZ!

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Today I’m super excited to launch a new series on my blog that brings in thoughts and opinions directly from Generation Z. How do I pull that off? I happen to have a GenZ son at the University of Michigan who is going through an internship selection and interview process and I thought we could all learn a great deal about GenZ by listening hearing from them directly! 

My son, Cameron Sackett, is an Advertising and Marketing major at U of M, looking for his first real-world experience. Here is his take on how you find that first internship: 

Every incoming college student has a plan on how their college experience is going to go. I definitely did. I’m not even halfway done with college and it has gone NOTHING like I expected, but one thing I always knew that I needed was internships.

These coveted “jobs” for college students at cool companies like Nike or Google are a main topic of conversation on any college campus. I wanted to have one of these amazing intern experiences that you hear about all the time, but I quickly learned they are impossible to get.

All of these jobs require an “in”; you need to know someone that knows someone that can get your foot in the door. Reluctantly I had to face the truth, I had no “in” except for my father. The last thing any college student wants to do is turn to their parents to ask for help for anything, let alone getting a job. I have a great relationship with my parents and I love my dad, but I wanted to do this on my own!

I want to be able to say “I got this job and I did it myself”, but I need to play the game and that’s not how the game is played anymore. Luckily, my dad was already aware of this and had posted on his LinkedIn account for internships for my older brother and I. Little did I know this post would blow up and tens of thousands of people would have viewed it! (Honestly, I’m still surprised that many people care about what my Dad has to say).

Now I’m in contact with multiple different companies who are offering me great opportunities that will really further my education in a way I can’t do in a classroom. I now can see the benefit in using my “in”, my Dad, because it’s all about networking. Everyone nowadays is always telling you to network, to make connections with everyone you meet because you never know what they might be able to provide for you. Sometimes, the connections and networking we should be doing are close to us, like our parents.

I never thought that I would want to do anything similar to my Dad’s line of work (still don’t to be honest), but when your dad is a micro-celebrity in the HR world, you should take advantage of that! My biggest takeaway from this experience is to not be ashamed of using your connections because once you get your foot in the door, that’s when you can start to make a name for yourself. I’m still hoping for that amazing internship experience, but I have accepted the reality that to get that experience, I need to use the connections I have.

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.

Besides being a Dad with a network, I thought the best way to get my son some ‘real-world’ experience would be to put himself out there as a writer! Let him know what you think and let us hear what you would like to learn about the next big generation entering our workforce!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: The Return of Disco! @trydisco

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Today, Disco launches an AI-based communication platform that enables workers to recognize fellow employees as they work by giving them kudos and micro-feedback on their tasks and efforts. Disco helps companies motivate the 68% of disengaged employees, while also rewarding those who are contributing to a positive company culture.
Designed to enable micro-feedback interactions throughout the normal course of daily business, Disco uses a combination of keywords, AI and natural language processing (NLP) to make it easy for employees to give and receive recognition.
Disco aggregates recognition data like task- and behavior-specific props, kudos, and thanks to consumable reports for company leaders. The data is then used to facilitate more meaningful and friendly communications, to drive high-visibility recognition, and to supplement performance reviews with peer-based micro-feedback. The outcome is that business leaders are better able to craft and
cultivate the company culture through a better understanding of their employees.
So, what’s is Disco really? 
– Disco is an easy-to-use, AI-based, NLP conversational UX for Slack and Microsoft Teams, with more communications platforms coming soon.
– Disco is the brand relaunch of Growbot. Basically, it’s an appreciation and engagement mechanism employees use within Slack to recognize and reward each other.
– Already over 20,000 organizations are using Disco because of its ease of use within Slack and Microsoft Teams.
– Your cultural data rolls up into a powerful dashboard and gives you actionable insights tied to sentiment, goals, and productivity.
If your organization and your employees use Slack or Microsoft Teams, Disco is definitely something you want to check to help you drive higher levels of engagement and appreciation. It super easy to begin using and fairly inexpensive, and really becomes an addictive part of how your organization communicates with each other. Go check them out.

The Weekly Dose of HR Technology – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some of the great HR and TA 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 Top 100 Fortune 500 Employment Brands Report @WilsonHCG

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RPO provider WilsonHCG released their annual Employment Brands Report for 2018. The report lists the top 100 employment brands based on an algorithm Wilson put together, and they are:

#1 – Johnson & Johnson

#2 – Intel

#3 – IBM

#4 – Lockheed Martin

#5 – Proctor & Gamble

#6 – General Motors

#7 – J.P. Morgan Chase

#8 – Dow Chemical

#9 – Cummins

#10 – ADP

So, how does that Top 10 feel at first glance?

I had some problems. The top 10 list seems a bit dated. Like it might be better titled, “Employment Brands People Over 40 Would Love to Work for!”. If someone on the street came up and said, “Tim, you can win a million dollars by telling us the 3 top Employment Brands in the U.S.” I would immediately say – Google, Apple, Facebook.

Google is on the list and in the top 20. Facebook is down at 61. Apple is NOT on the list! Also, no Nike. Very strange.

So, I looked at the criteria. How did this big RPO firm that sells to the Fortune 500 come up with this list? Here are the criteria for having a ‘top’ employment brand:

  • Career Page – Okay, that’s important to a great employment brand, solid start!
  • Job Boards – Um, what!? Your use of Job Boards has nothing to do with your Employment Brand! In fact, I would argue organizations with great employment brands don’t even have to use job boards.
  • Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement – Okay, we get it Glassdoor has data.
  • Accolades – By whom? Me? You? This is also gamed as it’s “Best Places to Work”, “Most Admired”, etc. Which are all pretty much pay to play schemes.
  • Recruitment Marketing – RM is not EB. You can be great at RM – Amazon, and still have a weaker EB.
  • Corporate Social Responsibility & Recruitment Initiatives – Recruitment Initiatives? Could one of those happen to be – “Use RPO”? Just asking for a friend.

Okay, I’ve had enough fun with Wilson and the report, there was some actual good data that came out of it as well.

The biggest one that really hits home is this: The top 100 on the list scored 805% better than the bottom 100 on the list! That’s a giant disparity and really talks to the fact that EB (or more RM in this case) still has so far to come, but many top brands are beginning to separate from the pack.

Wilson found that top scoring companies had better alignment with marketing, which completely makes sense and it should be that way. Employment branding and recruitment marketing done in a silo, is a whole lot of wasted effort and resources. Your candidates are often your consumers, and while marketing messages can be vastly different from recruiting messages, the tone and voice should be similar.

Go check out the report, you can download a copy here! Under each of the six measures, the report does a great job of giving specific things organizations can do to better themselves.

The One Big Problem with Being Pretty

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Don’t you hate pretty people? We are addicted to ‘pretty’ in America. Let’s face it, most of the world is addicted to pretty.

Pretty people get all the jobs. Pretty people get all the money. Pretty people get all the fame. Life as a pretty person is a heck a lot easier than being an ugly person! How do I know this? I’m a short, ginger with a Dad bod, I’m like the poster child for birth control!

This is why today, I’m a little excited!

Some new research shows that Ugly people actually have a leg up on pretty people when it comes to hiring! Yeah, baby! Give me a job! Here’s a bit from the American Psychological Association study:

While good-looking people are generally believed to receive more favorable treatment in the hiring process, when it comes to applying for less desirable jobs, such as those with low pay or uninteresting work, attractiveness may be a liability, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“Our research suggests that attractive people may be discriminated against in selection for relatively less desirable jobs,” said lead author Margaret Lee, a doctoral candidate at the London Business School. “This stands in contrast to a large body of research that concluded that attractiveness, by and large, helps candidates in the selection process.”

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology®.

Yeah – take that Discrimination you highly beautiful and desirable hunk of humankind!

Oh, wait, Ugly people have an advantage in getting crappy jobs…

Am I the only one crying in my office right now?

So, turns out you’re ugly. You basically have no advantages in life because the mix of your mom and dad’s genetic code produced something most people don’t find attractive. It’s like a lottery, but you lost. You lost the life lottery.

The one benefit you get is when you go to apply for a menial, low-end job, you’ll have an advantage over people who are attractive. “Sorry, Ashley, take your beautiful ass back Abercrombie, I’m running the fryer today, bitch!”

Don’t you love Life’s sense of humor?

So, the one big problem you have if your pretty is you will find it hard getting a crappy job. Yep, I don’t care that your dream is to have dirty fingernails, Stephen! Go back to that desk job making six figures and try not to get tears on your cashmere sweater.

I think what we see here has less to do with ugly and pretty, and more to do with selection profiling by hiring managers. It goes a little something like this:

  1. A pretty person applies for a low-end dirty job.
  2. The pretty person shows up for the interview.
  3. Hiring manager sees the pretty person and thinks “there is no way this beautiful person will ever stay working at this job”.
  4. Hiring manager continues to interview waiting to find an ugly enough person who the hiring manager feels lacks enough self-confidence to go look for a better job.
  5. The pretty person is denied work and is discriminated against.

We have this psychological belief as hiring managers that your looks play a role in tenure. We have a level of attractiveness internal meter we believe correlates to longevity. The better the job (and compensation) we tend to believe we can hold out for skills and attractiveness.

Go ahead and do some real-world research. Look at the most successful companies in the world and you’ll see, on average, they are more attractive across the board, then those companies that are the least successful.

It doesn’t always work out, but it mostly works out. Basically, 60% of the time, it works every time.

So, my ugly friends and peers. Go out today and walk with your held slightly higher knowing we have the advantage. Let’s just not talk to loudly about what that advantage is, okay?