How Fake is Your Employment Brand?

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I think most employment brands are completely fake. The reason I feel this way is because HR and Executives approve the messaging.  We, HR and Executives, are the last people who really know what our employment brand truly is.  So, we end up with stuff like this:

Seems really cool!  Makes us feel good about ourselves and our organization.  But for the most part, it’s one big lie.

That’s marketing.  It’s not marketings job to tell you the truth.  It’s marketings job to get you to buy something.  Sometimes its just some crappy product or service. Sometimes its the church down the street with the cool young pastor and rock band.  Sometimes it’s working for your organization.

Many HR Pros and Executives get really pissed off when I say something like this.

That’s because they drink their own Kool-aid.  They truly believe the messages brought forth are the truth.  Those messages are what they hope and dream the organization to become, so they’re all bought in on making it happen.  I actually really like these people. I like people who are bought into making their organizations what their commercials are telling us they are, even when they aren’t.

Who wants to go work for an organization that puts up a commercial of some manager unable to communicate what needs to be done, and Bobby down in the accounting bitching he only got a 14 lb. turkey from the company, when last year he got a 15 lb. turkey?

No one!

But that’s truly your organization.  Organizations are like families. You have some folks in your family you don’t want the rest of the world to see, but when you take the family photo it looks like everyone is fairly normal and well adjusted.

So, how fake is your employment brand?  On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Goldman Sachs and 10 being Google, where does your organization fall?

It’s Really Hard to Judge People?

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I was out walking with my wife recently (that’s what middle-aged suburban people do, we walk, it makes us feel like we are less lazy and it gets us away from the kids so we can talk grown up) and she made this statement in a perfectly innocent way:

“It’s really hard to judge people.”

She said this to ‘me’!  I start laughing.  She realized what she said and started laughing.

It’s actually really, really easy to judge people!  I’m in HR and Recruiting, I’ve made a career out of judging people.

A candidate comes in with a tattoo on their face and immediately we think: prison, drugs, poor decision making, etc. We instantly judge.  It’s not that face-tattoo candidate can’t surprise us and be engaging and brilliant, etc. But before we even get to that point, we judge.  I know, I know, you don’t judge, it’s just me. Sorry for lumping you in with ‘me’!

What my wife was saying was correct.  It’s really hard to judge someone based on how little we actually know them.

People judge me all the time on my poor grammar skills.  I actually met a woman recently at a conference who said she knew me, use to read my stuff, but stopped because of my poor grammar in my writing.  We got to spend some time talking and she said she would begin reading again, that she had judged me too harshly and because I made errors in my writing assumed I wasn’t that intelligent.

I told her she was actually correct, I’m not intelligent, but that I have consciously not fixed my errors in writing (clearly at this point I could have hired an editor!). The errors are my face tattoo.

If you can’t see beyond my errors, we probably won’t be friends.  I’m not ‘writing errors, poor grammar guy”.  If you judge me as that, you’re missing out on some cool stuff and ideas I write about.

As a hiring manager and HR Pro, if you can’t see beyond someone’s errors, you’re woefully inept at your job.  We all have ‘opportunities’ but apparently, if you’re a candidate you don’t, you have to be perfect.  I run into hiring managers and HR Pros who will constantly tell me, “we’re selective”, “we’re picky”, etc.

No, you’re not.  What you are is unclear about what and who it is that is successful in your environment.  No one working for you now is perfect.  So, why do you look for perfection in a candidate?  Because it’s natural to judge against your internal norm.

The problem with selection isn’t that is too hard to judge, the problem is that it’s way too easy to judge.  The next time you sit down in front of a candidate try and determine what you’ve already judge them on.  It’s a fun exercise. Before they even say a word.  Have the hiring managers interviewing them send you their judgments before the interview.

We all do it.  Then, flip the script, and have your hiring managers show up for an interview ‘blind’. No resume beforehand, just them and a candidate face-to-face.  It’s fun to see how they react and what they ask them without a resume, and how they judge them after.  It’s so easy to judge, and those judgments shape our decision making, even before we know it!

 

7 Sure Ways to Fail as a HR Leader

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It’s tough being a Leader these days!  You have all these boomers retiring and taking their typewriters and knowledge with them, you have all theses X’ers who think they are now the second coming, the GenY’s and the Millennial’s who have been told they are the second coming, and now we have these Generation Zs who think they can work from where ever since they grew up with a smartphone and an iPad in their crib.

On top of all this, somehow in the last 10 years executives decided HR is no longer HR, but now we are these business partners, so on top of having to take care of all these people issues, we now have to be concerned with business issues, teach our leaders how to be leaders, continue to train our workforce to stay current, fight off talent sharks from our competition, make sure the corporate picnic still runs smoothly and oh by the way can you put a nice internal blog post together for the CEO and make it real “peopleish”.

I get it, it’s hard being a leader in HR, that’s why I’m going to help you out and give you some tips on things to stay away from:

1. Think of yourself or your company as “the” industry leader. As soon as you do, someone will knock you off.

2. Identify so strongly with the company that you no longer have a clear boundary between your personal interests and the corporation’s interests. Yes, you should be committed, but don’t be “committed” Too often leaders doing this fail to differentiate their personal agenda and the corporate agenda and start empire building.

3. Have all the answers.  This is tough because it’s common leadership training that we all know: use your people, surround yourself with people better than you, make group decisions, etc.  But until you put your butt in that seat you never realize how many things will come your way, where people want a decision and they are unwilling to make it. So they look to you for the answer. Don’t get sucked into this trap. Pushback and make them bring you solutions.

4. Hunt down and Kill those who don’t support you. Don’t think this happens?! Look at turnover numbers of departments when a new leader takes over. They are almost always higher than those of the organization as a whole.

5. Become obsessed with the company image.  Your company image is hugely important, but it is not the most important thing you have going on. Make sure your operations match the image you want to create, not the other way around.

6. Underestimate or take obstacles for granted.  As a leader you want to be confident during hard and challenging times, but don’t let yourself get fooled into believing your own confidence will get you through.  Having a clear understanding of the reality you are facing, and being able to communicate that without fear to your team, with a plan of action, is key.

7. Stubbornly rely on what you’ve always done.  “Well, when I was the leader at GE we did it this way…” Look, this isn’t the 80’s and this isn’t GE. Might it work? Sure. But be open to new ways of doing things, while being confident of what you know will work. Don’t put yourself or your organization in jeopardy, but be willing to try new things when time and circumstance allow.

Adapted from The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives in Forbes by Mike Myatt

Burning Down Your HR or TA Department

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A few years ago my parent’s house burned down.  They were away on vacation and lightning struck the roof. Before the fire department could get there and put it out, most of the house was destroyed.  60+ years of memories and possessions, gone. In hindsight, it was a bit of a blessing; their house was at the age where everything was starting to need replacing, and my father was at the age, where he wanted to retire.

Those two things don’t go well together!  Major home improvements equals major expense, and a fixed income.  So, long-story-short, mother nature, and the insurance company, gave my folks a new house for a retirement gift!  All is well that ends well, I guess.

This situation, though, led to some deep emotional conversations about what the wish they could have pulled out, if they knew this was going to happen.  As you can imagine it was all the stuff you and I would want: our photos, our mementos, some favorite things that remind us of loved ones, or things that we were proud of.

I thought about this recently when having a conversation with a friend who just started a new position as the head of a large HR shop.  His comment to me was:

“What I really need to do is burn this place down and start over!”

To which I replied, “well, isn’t there anything you would keep?”  Bam!  That is what he needed. He did need to burn it down, but there were definitely some things he needed to take out before lighting the match.

It’s a common practice that Leaders tend to do when taking on a new position. We tend to burn down our departments.  Oh, we say we won’t, as we go around throwing gasoline on everything, and we say we aren’t rebuilding as we strap our tool belt on and start hammering away, but the truth is, most leaders want to remake their new departments into what they want, not what it was.

So, I’ll ask you to take a few moments today and think about the concept of burning down your HR or TA department.  What would you pull out and save?  What would you happily allow to burn up?  What would you miss?

Every day we owe it to our organizations to get better.  You don’t have to burn down the department to get better, but you do need to get rid of those things you know you would easily allow to burn up!

You’re Running Out of Time!

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I have three sons, two of which are in college.  They can do anything right now!  If they wanted, they could fill a backpack and walk the earth. No one is going to stop them, in fact, many will congratulate them for taking this leap while they’re young.

In just a few years, people won’t say that.  They’ll tell them it’s crazy and you’re going to hurt your career, etc.

I’m in my 40’s.  I have a feeling that I’m getting to an age where I no longer can make a change in my career path.

Before you start commenting with things like, “Tim, age is a state of mind”, or “You can do anything you want”, or “Follow your passion”.  Stop it. I’m a grown ass man.  I like to think I’m an adult, although my wife and kids question that frequently. I have adult obligations: mortgage, college tuition, kids to raise, health insurance. I can’t just go off and polish rocks.

We all get to certain points in our life where you can no longer just go do ‘it’. Whatever ‘it’ is for you. I feel like I’m at a point where I can’t change careers, not because I don’t think I could, but because society doesn’t look well upon middle-aged dudes looking to change careers. Something is now wrong with me if I wanted to change careers. BTW, I don’t want to change careers, I actually think what I do is pretty cool. Or hip. Or Hella. Or whatever the kids are saying.

If I decided to go back and become a nurse, right now, at my age, with all of my responsibilities, people would say something is wrong with me. You know what? I would think there was something wrong with me.

My question is more around what is ‘that’ time when if you’re going to do it, you better do it now?

For traveling the world: I think it’s 18-22 yrs old, or after 60.

For completely changing careers: I think you have to do it around 30-35 years old. Later, and you just look like your reaching. (I think most people won’t agree with this, but it comes from my recruiting background and how hiring managers look at older candidates who have made this move)

For having kids: this one has changed a bit, but before 40 seems safe. Otherwise, you’re just tempting science to give you problems. One caveat, if you’re adopting, I’ll push out this age because those kids just need someone who will love them.

For completely your high school or college education: I’m really open on this one. I would say anytime before death! I’m a huge advocate of lifelong learning!

For having grandkids: After 45 years old for sure. If you have grandkids prior to becoming 45, you did something wrong as a parent.

For getting your nose pierced: 17-28 years old. Yeah, I’m looking at you 37-year-old mom with the kid with a mohawk not wearing his seatbelt in the back of your Ford Mustang.

So, hit me in the comments with your age ranges on when you think it’s no longer socially acceptable to change careers!

Quality of Hire is NOT a Talent Acquisition Measure of Success!

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I was looking at LinkedIn’s annual Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the way you measure your recruiting team’s performance today?“

They said:

  1. Quality of Hire metrics (hiring manager measure not a TA measure – my opinion)
  2. Time to Hire (the single worse measure of all time – my opinion)
  3. Hiring Manager Satisfaction (has no correlation to whether or not TA is actually good or not – my opinion)

I hate all of these answers!!!  In fact, these answers are so bad it makes me question the viability of the future of Talent Acquisition!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  Most of us have no freaking idea how to actually measure the quality of hire, or that what we are actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90-day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go, recruiters, you’re hiring quality!” No, they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only works if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure, to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  No? That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

The Worst Hire You’ll Ever Make!

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A crazy thing happens almost every day in professional sports, and it’s the one thing that separates great teams from the pack. Talent selection will make or break a team’s success and in professional sports, it’s about getting the right talent for the right price.

The problem with most professional sports team, regardless of the sport, is they continually try to improve their roster incrementally. “Oh, let’s pick up Pitcher A because he’s a little better than Pitcher B”.

Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

That’s the real issue!

The worst hire you can ever make is one that doesn’t solve your problem but just make it a little better. “We suck at sales, let’s hire Tim, he’s not great, but he’s better than Bob.” Wonderful, now you only slightly suck less at sales!

Never make a hire that doesn’t solve your problem completely that you are having in that specific position. Upgrading doesn’t always fix problems, and many times it actually continues your main problem longer instead of fixing it completely.

We have this belief that all we need to do is continue to get a little better each day, each week, each month until we eventually have fixed it. The problem is that this isn’t how most problems are actually solved, by getting a little bit better over time. Most problems are fixed by implementing one solution that solves the problem.

It’s basically this crappy failure paradox we continue to get sold by seemingly everyone with a platform. “Just keep failing and eventually you’ll find success!” Which is complete and utter bullshit, but we LOVE hearing this!

In hiring, you can’t keep failing and find success. You will actually find failure even faster and be out of business. In hiring, it’s critical you find success and hire the right people who will solve your problem the first time, not just make you a little better.

Another great example of this is in the NFL. It’s critical in the NFL that you have a great quarterback, but they’re extremely hard to find. So, if you don’t have an elite quarterback, most teams will continue to try and upgrade with average quarterbacks.

The better advice is work with what you have and make it the best you can until you get the opportunity to hire, or draft, that one great quarterback that can truly change your franchise. Constant change and churn, just to get a little better, is slowly killing your organization.

Make great hires. Organizational change hires. Individuals who have the ability to make things right. Too often, and we’ve all been there, we make hires that feel safe, knowing they won’t hurt us, but they probably won’t help us much either. Those are the worst hires you can make.

T3 – @W_e_d_g_e video screening

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This week on T3 I take a look at Wedge. Wedge is a video technology designed to be used by both candidates and employers. Besides having the worse twitter handle in the history of HR technology (underscores are bad for a handle, four underscores are a death sentence!), there could be some real application for both sides of the hiring equation to use this easy to use tech.

For candidates Wedge was designed to give them something they could use that was quick and easy from a video perspective to show employers who they are beyond the normal text-based resume. The system asks each candidate five random questions and gives each person one minute to respond to the question. Then the candidate gets a unique URL they can share with employers, along with their resume to get a complete package of who you are as a candidate.

Employers can use Wedge as a video-based pre-screen, picking specific questions for candidates to ask, or even designing your own unique questions. These video files can then be shared with hiring managers, or anyone else involved in the hiring process. These files can also be uploaded into your ATS as attachments.

Very soon, Wedge will be releasing a new version that allows employers the ability to do text-based searches of the transcript of these videos. As you can imagine, in video-based answers candidates could talk about experiences and skills that don’t show up in a text-based resume, but would be things your hiring managers are looking for.

Wedge is one of those TA technologies that is very narrow in what it is trying to do. It’s simple and straightforward to use. This simplicity is its real strength. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not. It does one thing. It allows you to easily get a short video of candidates answering questions you want for your hiring managers. That’s it.

It’s easy to use and inexpensive and doesn’t need anyone from IT to get involved for you to add a video component to your hiring process. You can embed the process on the front side of your application screening process, or pick and choose positions you feel it might be more critical to have a video component as part of your assessment.

There some large-sized organizations currently using Wedge, but it’s my opinion that this tech is basically designed for low volume SMB TA shops. The larger the volume, the more you really want this tech embedded into your ATS, or within a video platform that gives you a more robust dashboard.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to add video to your application process that isn’t very involved, Wedge might be right for you!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Future of Sourcing is Here!

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So, yeah, the future of Sourcing, as a function, is not Artifical Intelligence (A.I.).

I know that makes a ton of folks working in Sourcing really excited to hear! For the past year, all Sourcers have heard is that the Robots are coming to take your job. That is incorrect.

The correct version is that the robots are going to take most of your job.

Wait, what?!

Yeah, I know it sucks, but horses don’t pull carts anymore and they made out just fine.

Look, the reality of sourcing is that most sourcing technology on the market today, is better at sourcing than over 90% of actual Sourcers working in the sourcing function. No, not you SourceCon geeks! The true specialist will always have jobs.

When you take the current sourcing tech on the market, add in the A.I. component, you now have a tech landscape that can automatically take your openings, go out and find candidates on the internet, job boards, your own ATS database, etc., contact them to see if they’re interested, then deliver activated candidates to recruiters. And, the tech does this 24/7/365, without bitching about not having a LinkedIn Recruiter seat.

Yes, that is current reality.

So, what’s the Future of Sourcing?

Say, hello, to my little friend! The Telephone!

The future of sourcing is connecting with those millions of candidates, who don’t have a social footprint on the web, or at the very least don’t have enough of a social footprint to ever show up in any kind of crazy search you could dream up.

It’s Larry the Engineer, sitting at his desk in Detroit, MI. Larry works at GM, 20 years experience, hates Facebook, doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and doesn’t attend conferences or his former college events. Larry is a candidate ghost. Larry sits in a large sized office space with 35 other engineers who all do similar stuff. You know probably 25 of those engineers. You know nothing about Larry.

You only find Larry one way.

Step 1: You map out that group. You find someone on the inside that tells you about the 35 engineers. You then start piecing it together and find out you can only find 25.

Step 2: You start asking all 25 for referrals. Who do you work with? Who is great in your group? Who doesn’t anyone know about, but they should? Etc.

Step 3: You cold call Larry. You do your Sourcing magic in getting Larry really excited about going to work for Ford.

Welcome to the future of Sourcing.

The robots can’t do this. This is the real future value of sourcing.

Sounds super old-school doesn’t it!? That’s because it is. Turns out, we can find almost anyone online. The “almost” portion accounts for about 25% of the adult population. That’s about 40 Million adults in America alone that the robots won’t find, and neither will your searches. These are people you have to dig up manually, the old school way.

Okay, I’ll tell you the new old school way will be better because you can use texting and messaging and whatever else the kids are using to communicate. But, your real value as a sourcer will not be picking off people who are now online that any robot can find. Your real value will be networking your way to that talent that has no social footprint.

My mom, who started recruiting in the 1970’s would be today’s greatest sourcer! She could talk anyone into giving her anything. If you knew ten people, she could get you to make an additional one up, so she had eleven names and numbers. Your ability to get more referrals of people no one else knows about is the future of sourcing.

Everything that is old is new again.

The Definitive Recipe for Success 

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Early this week I was in the car listening to NPR on my way to a meeting. I can’t even remember which show and who was being interviewed but I remember what was said by the person being interviewed. The topic was about success.

The person being interviewed said that you reach success by having four components, which are:

– Talent

– Persistence

– Patience

– Luck

You don’t have to have all four at the same time to be successful, but you’ll probably have all four in some kind of combination if you are successful.

At first, I thought, well, yeah, duh, if you’re talented, if you’re the most talented, you’ll be successful. But that isn’t true. I can give you a hundred examples of the most talented people in any profession who are failures because they didn’t use their talents. They wasted what they had.

I love persistent people. The hustle. The grind. The never give up attitude. The scrapers in life. These are my people. I won’t take no for answer. I’ll keep doing it and doing it and doing it until I break through. So, of course, persistence is a key ingredient to success.

Patience is where I struggle. You see persistence and patience aren’t usually friends. They don’t like hanging out with each other. But, when I look at the most successful people in my life that I hang out, they all have great patience. Having patience doesn’t mean you’re willing to sit around and wait to be successful, but it’s knowing that sometimes the best path to success if putting in your time to get there. Ugh! I wish I knew this when I was 25!

Luck. Oh, boy, here we go. Successful people never want to admit luck is involved. I’m a self-made person. I did it on my own. I’m not lucky! Luck is a bad word to successful people, but it discounts the hard work, the effort and the time you put into becoming successful. But, again, each successful person I know can point to a time, or a person, or a meeting, or some chance circumstance that can only be categorized as luck. You can do every single thing right in your life, and not be successful, without that one lucky break.

I like the model.

It doesn’t let you off the hook. You still have to do it all. You can’t just say, ‘well, I didn’t get it because I wasn’t lucky enough”. That’s false, be patient. I didn’t get it because I wasn’t talented enough. No, keep at it. Luck finds those more rapidly who are talented, persistent, and patient.

I lucky enough to have a pretty good career. It only took me twenty-five years of grinding to find that luck…