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?

2018 Talent Acquisition as a Career Survey! Take it now! @ATAPglobal

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I need your help!

As you may know, in 2018 I became the President-elect for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP). I’m pretty proud of that because I love our industry and spend countless hours advocating for Recruiting and TA pros worldwide.

One of the member benefits of joining ATAP is access to some great data and research. Our most recent project is our inaugural Talent Acquisition as a Career 2018 survey. This survey is meant for any and all Talent Acquisition and Recruiting professionals, including ATAP and Non-ATAP members.

So, PLEASE take a few minutes and complete the survey!

The results should provide us great insight into how TA professionals truly feel today about their roles and their opportunities to be successful in their TA career. We will be sharing the results of this survey publicly first at the Spring ERE Conference in San Diego (April 2-4, 2018), and then on the ATAP website.

Please do me this favor and take the survey. We are trying to get over 1,000 responses! Click here for the survey.

ONE MORE THING:

What the heck is ATAP?!? I get asked this question almost daily. ATAP stands for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals. Founded in 2016, ATAP’s mission is to develop a body of unified educational, ethical and measurement standards, advocate on issues that impact those in our profession, and build a global community of inspired and informed professionals. Not only am I a member, but I’m the President-elect (Hair Club for Men joke!) You should be one too – Join Here – use my code to get $5 off your first-year “ATAPDISCTS”! 

Generational Profiling – The Newest Trend in Recruiting!

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We all have heard and know what Racial Profiling is, right?

Well, we get to add something new to our toolbox in recruiting, Generational Profiling!

Targeting someone because of their race is awful and illegal. Targeting someone based on their age is no different. It’s called it Generational Profiling and we are in the middle of an epidemic.

Take a look at the average age of these super popular tech brands:

You don’t have to be a genius to understand what’s going on in hiring in these companies. Remember a couple of years ago when we all got hot and bothered because Facebook and the like weren’t hiring women? Please educate me on how this is any different.

If the world, especially our work world, is moving to more and more of a technology focus, what are organizations doing to ensure they hiring for diversity across generations? I’ll tell you! Nothing! It’s not on the radar of 99.99% of organizations. We don’t give a crap if we hire older workers or not.

But, TIM, you don’t understand, older workers don’t get tech and they don’t want to work in tech!

Really?

Here are some fairly significant tech companies, compare them to the ones above:

27 years old average age of employees to 38 years old average age employees is statistically significant in a giant way!

IBM, Oracle and HP value the diversity of generations in the workplace, and are probably more likely to not be generationally profiling when hiring.

You hear “Generational Profiling” when CEOs of Fortune companies speak at shareholder meetings. They will say things like: “We need to ‘modernize’ our workforce”. They aren’t talking about re-skilling, they’re talking about getting younger, believing that’s their real problem. These old farts can’t do what we need to be done.

So, what do you do about it?

We, talent acquisition, need to start calling this crap out! If your hiring managers weren’t hiring women or minorities because of poor ‘cultural’ fit, you would call them out.

In Generational Profiling, ‘poor cultural fit’ equals ‘overqualified’. “Yeah, I don’t want to hire Tim because he’ll be bored in this role.” Bullshit. You don’t want to hire Tim because you might be challenged by having someone on your team that knows something you don’t!

We have the data to show generational profiling. You can put a report together that shows each hiring manager by age and years of experience, then show the exact same thing for their team, then show the candidates presented in the same manner. A really interesting thing will happen! You’ll instantly see which managers are profiling hires by age!

-Tim is 27 and has 6 years of experience post-college.

-Tim’s team’s average age is 24 and has 3 years post-college.

-Tim’s interviews selected average age is “X” with “X” experience.

-Tim’s interviews declined average age is “X+” with “X+” experience.

Stuff just got real!

No one, and I mean no one, likes to be called a racist or a sexist. Our hiring managers should feel the same way if they were called and ageist, but they’re not. We need that to change.

By the way, you will see this in promotions as well…

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Will Blockchain Change Recruitment?

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So, I didn’t make millions of dollars on Bitcoin and quite frankly it pisses me off when I miss bubble like this! At this point, you’re probably tired of hearing about Bitcoin and Blockchain. I’m thankful for the bubble because it forced me to learn what the heck Blockchain is!

I think Blockchain will play a role in TA Technology in the near future. When you think of how we hire people, based on some sort of profile and/or resume, we are putting a ton of trust into something that is basically made up by an individual with little or no checking to know if it’s legit or not.

We know most people exaggerate or flat out lie on their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, etc. In a very simple sense, Blockchain is built to ensure that no information about a transaction is lost and it’s validated by everyone else in the network.

What if everyone you hired had a ‘blockchain’ resume? Where you felt 100% confident that everything on their resume or profile was 100% accurate. Sounds very interesting, right!?

I’m not sure, but I think this is where Blockchain plays a role in HR and Talent Acquisition in the future. What if we had ‘one’ unchangeable profile/resume for every single person on the planet? One common way to present all of your education and work experience that was validated. It’s a little big brother-ish to think about, but it’s not beyond reason.

I mean how long until Google forces us all down this path!? 😉

It would definitely make us feel more confident in our hiring. It would force people to rethink not giving notice, starting a job, but then they leave after a few days, all kinds of crazy things we see candidates do but it never ‘hits’ their permanent record. What if your blockchain profile would show the times you accepted an interview, then no call/no showed it!? Oh boy! I would sign up for that!

What’s the benefit to candidates? This is ‘your’ profile. This is your life. You own it. If you did great work at a job and some supervisor that hated you was trying to bad mouth you behind your back, that would no longer work. Your good work would speak for itself. Unchangeable would be the facts.

Plus, Blockchain as a resume profile would be completely transparent. This would make you ‘findable’ to every employer. If you’re a rock star, you should get paid rock star money. A blockchain profile would benefit people who are really good at what they do. It would suck for people who are bottom feeders!

I don’t know if this will happen or could happen, but it’s exciting to think about a world of resumes and profiles that were easy to navigate and completely trustworthy. I can wait for flying cars, let’s get the HR Tech industry on this situation right now!