Turns Out, Employees Don’t Actually Leave Managers!

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For decades we’ve been telling leaders this one thing about employees and retention. We’ve said it so much, it’s actually become ‘common’ knowledge we take for granted. It’s this one phrase:

Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. 

Have you used this phrase? Of course, you have! Everyone in HR has used this!

New research has come out from IBM’s Smarter Workforce Institute, “Should I Stay, or Should I Go?” that has actually proven our ‘common’ knowledge is wrong:

“Managers are not the reason most people leave – 

• Contrary to many media reports, only 14 percent of people left their last job because they were unhappy with their managers.

• The biggest work-related reason (cited by 40 percent of respondents) for leaving is because employees are not happy with their jobs.

• Almost as many people (39 percent) left their last job for personal reasons such as spouse relocation, child care or health issues.

• One in five (20 percent) workers left because they were not happy with their organization.

• Eighteen percent left due to organizational changes which had caused a great deal of uncertainty.”

This isn’t some small study of a hundred employees. IBM looked at data from 22,000 employees!

So, why has this concept of employees leaving managers become so wildly accepted and popular amongst HR leaders and pros?

You won’t like this answer, but we liked using this reason for employees leaving because it meant it wasn’t our problem. I mean it was our problem to help fix, but it wasn’t our fault. It was those stupid managers!

So, we’ll coach them up. Give them soft skills training. Talk down to them like their children, and help them become ‘leaders’. IBM didn’t actually say this was the reason, this is my own reasoning. It’s just super comfortable to give this explanation to why we have high turnover.

The reality is if employees leave there are likely numerous reasons all of which are probably centered on a bad employee experience. They were unhappy because of something. It might have been because they were working for a crappy manager, but it also might be they just made a bad fit decision in the job they choose to accept, or culturally the fit wasn’t good with your organization and the employee.

One thing is certain. Employees, the majority, don’t leave managers. They leave your freaking company. That’s not our manager’s issue, it’s all of our issues. Today’s challenge? Stop using this phrase and start taking ownership of your employee turnover!

 

The Core of Employment Branding & Recruitment Marketing

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I’m writing a book on Talent Acquisition. You can buy it in April of 2018. It’s due to the publisher on October 31. I’m almost done and finishing up the chapter on Employment Branding and Recruitment Marketing. It’s a hot topic right now in the TA space.

Like most stuff I write, I try to break down things in HR and TA that we make way more complicated than it really is. We’re just hiring people, and trying to get the most out of our employees that we can. We aren’t launching the space shuttle or performing brain surgery. This stuff really isn’t that complicated.

I asked some of the most brilliant minds in the space and they gave some great advice, tips, and tricks. Some started to get deep into the weeds, but most gave ideas that were simple in nature to execute. There was basically one theme for each function, employment branding, and recruitment marketing:

Employment Branding at its core is your organization just telling your stories to candidates. 

Not made up stories of what you want people to think about you, but your real employee stories. Simple, straightforward, this is who we are and why we love who we are. Some will love you, some will not. The best EB does just that, allows people to choose, so they don’t make a bad cultural fit choice.

Recruitment Marketing at its core is ensuring your stories get in front of candidates in a way and time they would like to consume those stories. 

So, it’s less “We’re a great company to work for!”, because everyone says they’re a great company to work. No one says, “Hey, we’re a better than average company to work for!” Even though, that’s probably the real truth.

There is a piece of this, though, that I think the true employment branding experts are missing.

As consumers, we are all mostly dumb. A company tells us they have the best most reliable cars and then they tell us this over and over a million times, and we believe that those cars are the best and most reliable. We actually don’t do any research to find out if these cars are actually the best and most reliable. We got ‘marketed’ to.

Recruitment marketing can work the exact same way. Put enough content out saying you’re the employer of choice, and people will recognize you as an employer of choice. The reality is the difference between a ‘true’ employer of choice, and an organization that is not an employer of choice is pretty small. Small, like, most people wouldn’t see any differences.

Most employers are stuck in the middle of delivering a fairly stripped down basic employee experience. We all offer basically the same thing for all candidates. Thus, there’s a great opportunity for marketing to tell people we ‘actually’ offer a ‘better’ experience. Say it enough times and people will believe it.

I know my EB expert friends will say this isn’t being transparent and once the candidates get hired they’ll realize it’s not an exceptional experience. But, this is also mostly bullshit. Most people don’t realize it. They’ll get hired. They’ll go to work. They’ll be super excited for the new job. They’ll post a pic on IG. Life continues. One day, three years from now, they’ll wake up and think, nothing. They won’t think either way about your company from the last company.

There are like 3 actual companies that offer up this ‘unicorn’ level employee experience that can actually match your brand. The reality of employment branding is far less sexy and fun than we make it out to be. Our stories are uniquely our own, and yet, very similar to those stories of every other employer.

I love your stories, but don’t discount the power of marketing will have on candidate behavior.

GenX Rant: You’re not lonely, you’re just an idiot…

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So, the Washington Post ran an article this week where the former Surgeon General states that the U.S. has a “loneliness epidemic” it’s currently facing. A what?!

From the article:

“Vivek H. Murthy, who became the U.S. surgeon general in late 2014 after a lengthy confirmation battle over his remarks about guns being a health-care issue, added emotional well-being and loneliness to his list of big public health worries.

Now he’s writing about the impact the workplace has on those issues, taking his concerns to employers and speaking out about how the “loneliness epidemic” plays out on the job. In a new cover story in the Harvard Business Review, Murthy treats loneliness like a public health crisis, and the workplace as one of the primary places where it can get better — or worse. “Our social connections are in fact largely influenced by the institutions and settings where we spend the majority of our time,” Murthy said in an interview with The Washington Post. “That includes the workplace.”

Have we lost our f#*king minds!?

So, Timmy doesn’t make friends at work, goes home and spends eight straight hours on social media, or binge watches 8 episodes of Breaking Bad and feels like no one is his friend. That not an epidemic. Tim is an idiot!

I wasn’t a lonely kid, and I didn’t grow up being a lonely adult. Why? My parents would physically lock me out of the house from like after school to whenever the street lights came on. I was no ‘allowed’ in the house. They forced me to got out and make friends. It’s a learned skill, making friends. They said only one thing, “Go make friends.”

No instructions. No scheduled playgroups. Get your lazy ass outside and make friends. It’s not hard, just don’t be an idiot to the other kids who are were also forced outside. A ‘friend’ is not a social connection. It’s someone you physically talk to, touch, you know what each other’s likes and hates. You know their dreams and fears.

So, here we are in 2017, we can’t find enough talent, we’re struggling to help our leaders manage the performance of our workforce, and now we have to teach adults how to make friends? You have to be freaking kidding me!

A decade ago Gallup found out the ‘trick’ too happy employees is they have a ‘best friend’ at work. Little did we know, then, but apparently we do today, HR would become best friend matchmaker for friendship illiterate millennials who couldn’t look up from their phones for fifteen seconds to say an actual “hello” to Timmy as he walked by.

I give up. We’re all morons. Society is lost. China, please come takeover already…

@LinkedIn Announces LinkedIn Talent Insights at #TalentConnect

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LinkedIn made a pretty major product announcement today at their annual Talent Connect conference. By the way, no one talks about this, but quietly Talent Connect has become the single largest Talent Acquisition Conference on the planet! SHRM National (HR) has 15,000+, HR Technology Conference will go 6,000+, Talent Connect I heard was around 3,000+!

That’s a ton of TA pros and leaders in one location!

This morning in Nashville, LinkedIn let everyone get a peek behind the curtain on a new product that is just being released to beta with a select group of customers, with the goal to have this available to the entire market in the first quarter of 2018.

The new product is called Talent Insights.

For years LI users have been begging for more access to data and LinkedIn has responded in a major way with their Talent Insights product. Talent Insights is basically two major reporting tools that allow those using Talent Insights to pull in data like never before.

The first report is called Talent Pool. This report is a multi-filter report with a very familiar Recruiter-like interface. This tool is used by organizations to examine the available pool of candidates based on the filters you put in. Need to hire 50 Developers in Ann Arbor? This tool gives you all the information you need to make to launch the strategy to make that happen.

Talent pool gives your team the ability to be able to prioritize their efforts and sourcing strategy by seeing out of the entire available pool of talent, based on your search criteria, which ones are already engaged with your brand on LI, then if you’re using Recruiter you can quickly see that list and decide how do you reach out from there.

Let’s say that available pool of Developers in Ann Arbor is 10,000, but 1,500 of those developers have actually connected with you, looked at your LinkedIn company page, etc. This allows you to know who already is engaging with you, but also who hasn’t.

Within Talent Pool, you can also see where there are other available talent pools via a map function which allows you to click the locations on a map to see where these other pools are, and along with tons of data on active those pools of talent are.

The second reporting tool is the “Corporate” report. This is very cool in that you can now pull information on your competition in real time. Want to see who your competitors are hiring and in what roles? Done. Want to see where your competitors are hiring their talent from? Done. Want to see who your competition is losing talent to? Done.

By the way, it’s not only competition. The Corporate report will pull this data on any company, including your own.

The Corporate reporting tool also shows trends over time. Maybe your competition hired a ton of engineers from one company over the last twelve months, but in the last two months, they’ve hired no one from some others. Again, this gives your team insight to competitive behavior and skill sets like you’ve never had before.

Not only can you see what skill sets your competition is hiring, but the Corporate report will also show you how your own team stacks up in those skill sets against your competition from a hiring standpoint.

Like I said, great first step out of the gate on giving LI users more access to the data they’ve been asking for, and it’s easy to see where this could lead to down the road with some very robust, real-time business intelligence. We’ve known forever that LinkedIn was sitting on maybe the world’s largest data set, next to Facebook. We are now seeing the power of how that data can help your organization attract and recruit talent.

T3 – @Entelo Launches Envoy prior to #HRTechConf

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This week on T3 I review the newest addition to Entelo, Envoy. First, who is Entelo? Entelo’s recruiting platform enables top talent professionals to find, qualify, and engage with in-demand talent. So, basically, Entelo was one of the first passive candidate aggregators that allows you to search for passive candidates.

Since they launched six years ago they’ve continued to add in functionality and features, including products to assist your organization in diversity recruiting, help you search your own ATS database better, and engage in outbound recruiting campaigns.

Yesterday, they’ve announced their most advanced product to date, Envoy. EnteloEnvoy uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to automatically find, nurture and deliver interested job candidates directly to the email inboxes of recruiters. This algorithmic approach to sourcing is the latest data-driven innovation from Entelo, the leader in helping talent acquisition teams hire better-qualified candidates, faster.

So, what does all this really mean?

With Envoy, recruiters simply set candidate criteria and the technology works in the background to sort and rank millions of potential candidates using machine learning algorithms that analyze fit across a number of different dimensions. Once top talent is identified, Entelo Envoy will personalize messages and send emails to candidates at optimal times and deliver replies from interested candidates directly to a recruiter’s inbox. Because the discovery, qualification and outreach portions happen instantly and automatically, companies hire faster and significantly reduce cost-per-hire and time-to-hire.

EnteloEnvoy will take the heavy lifting of sourcing and recruiting, and automate most of the steps. Your recruiters put in the job requirements and Envoy will go out and source over 300 million potential passive candidates, rank those candidates by who is the closest match, reach out to those candidates via email communication, and at the end of the process your recruiters will have a list of interested candidates who match the specifications you’re looking for.

It’s sourcing and recruiting for dummies! Envoy has basically idiot-proofed the process, and put your recruiters in a position to close! No longer will they spend most of their day on LinkedIn searching for candidates. Now they’ll spend most of their day speaking to interested candidates who closely match what you’re looking for.

Entelo has had Envoy in beta for a while working live with 50 of their current clients, and those clients are raving about the results. What TA leaders are seeing is Envoy is making their recruiting teams much more productive as they are now focusing their efforts on talking to candidates about their organization versus spending most of their time looking for candidates.

I love how TA tech is beginning to really increase the productivity of our recruiting teams and EnteloEnvoy looks to be leading the charge into this arena. Entelo Envoy will be demonstrated in Booth No. 2928 at the 20th Annual HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas from October 10-13, 2017.

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

Are You Hiring Raw Talent?

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Last week I got invited down to Rock Ventures (Dan Gilbert – the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Quicken Loans – yeah that Rock Ventures) to do the closing keynote for their HR and Talent Summit across the family of companies in Downtown Detroit! Fun, fast-moving culture. Seemingly every CEO of the 130 Rock Venture companies looked to be 30-ish!

As you can imagine, fast-growing organization, that can grow or hire enough talent fast enough to keep up.

One of the sessions was led by Victor You, CEO of Rock Connections, which is a call center that was built for Quicken Loans, but they found out other companies needed a high-quality call center, so they started selling their services. Most of the Rock Venture companies have a similar story. Idea by an employee, run with it, if you can make it happen, you become the CEO!

Rock Ventures is a Detroit company. When I say “Detroit” I mean “Detroit”. The entire campus is downtown Detroit. They hire Detroit city citizens. They are almost singlehandedly turning Detroit into one of the hottest growing cities in the U.S. Therein lies Victor’s problem as a CEO of a fast-growing startup.

Rock doesn’t want to have to relocate everyone they hire to Detroit. They want to hire those people already in Detroit. As you can imagine there’s a skills gap. The normal Detroit citizen is like most urban center citizens. Lower educated, lower income, less likely to have a college education.

Victor graduated from the University of Michigan. Engineering grad who didn’t like engineering. So, he went and sold mortgages. Did pretty well. Good enough that Dan Gilbert made him CEO of a company! What I love about Victor is he gets talent. He gets talent at a very different level than 99% of CEOs on the planet.

Victor explained it the group as “Raw” talent versus experiential talent. Almost all of us hire experiential talent. We have a job opening. That job needs a certain level of experience. So, that’s what we recruit and hire.

Victor doesn’t look for experience. Victor looks for raw talent attributes. What are those?

  • Hard working
  • Pride in the work they do
  • Wants to be apart of something bigger than them
  • Never satisfied

He saw that many Detroiters had these attributes, but no one was willing to give them a shot because they didn’t have the ‘experience’. He was like, “we can teach them the job”, it’s harder to teach them the raw talent attributes. In fact, you can’t teach those raw talent attributes.

The results have been off the charts! Great retention. High performance. High diversity. High concentration of Detroiters.

In a tight talent economy, you need to start changing the way you do things. We need to open up these modern day ‘apprenticeships’. We need more CEO leadership like Victor You.

#DisruptHR Detroit was a Yuuggee Success!

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Hey, gang! It’s Friday and I’m buried from a busy week. Do you feel me!?!?

We held the first DirsuptHR Detroit event this week in midtown Detroit at the Graden Theater. We sold 330 tickets for a space that held 300, we had 50 people on a waiting list. The space was awesome. The speakers were awesome. The food and drink were awesome. The crowd was awesome.

I have to give up to the DisruptHR Detroit Team – Kristen Cifolelli, Patrice Matejka, Ursulla McWhorter, Colleen Schmerheim, Bridgette Morehouse, Christie Hecht, and Christie Reeves. It takes a village and this team was awesome!

Also, I have to thank all the sponsors who made this wonderful event possible: American Society of Employers, Marsh & McClennan Agency, Ultimate Software, Grace & Porta Benefits, Cambridge Consulting Group, QuadWest Assc., Walsh College, Sift, HRU, and Qualigence. Plus, a special shoutout to SkillScout who did all of our videos for the speakers!

So, it was a great night, that was until one nice young lady decided that somehow I reminded her of Donald Trump! WTF!?!?! You can see the picture above I had on a Tiger’s cap (yes, very disruptive at an HR event!), so I’m still perplexed on how I reminded of her Trump because I was super careful not to say anything racist while on stage!

We can’t wait for the next event! More details on that coming soon. In the mean time, if you want to speak at the next DisruptHR Detroit – send me a message and I’ll make sure to invite you when we open up speaking submissions!

When Talent Gets Tight, People Break the Rules

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So, let me get this straight, high school basketball players are getting paid to go to certain schools? Yeah, I think we’ve known that for like at least twenty, plus years now!

You know the saying where there is smoke, there is fire? Well, the NCAA and big-time college athletics have been burning for decades! Now, instead of the NCAA putting your school on probation for breaking the rules, the FBI is putting your butt in prison!

My good friend, Kris Dunn, was once a college basketball player, and then an assistant coach at the NCAA Division 1 level. He has often told me that most dangerous job in America is an assistant coach in the NCAA because it’s the assistant coaches who take the fall for the head coach. The head coach knows exactly what’s going on, but has the assistants do all the dirty work!

What is happening in NCAA athletics is like a small microcosm of what is happening across all recruiting.

There are very few NCAA coaching jobs. There is a huge pool of talent for those jobs. Thus, being successful is critical in keeping your job. Being successful in athletics is one part coaching and about ten parts having great athletes! All of this is a recipe for disaster.

Each one of these kids is a potential lottery ticket for a number of people. Their parents and guardians. Their high school and club coaches. All sorts of people on the edges who could make money off of them. So, rules get bent, broken, and destroyed! To ensure the talent you need gets to your organization.

In the ‘real’ world of recruiting talent to your organization, things haven’t necessarily gotten as bad is it is with big-time college athletics. Still, we all have stories of some very unscrupulous things happening to lure talent away from one organization to another.

Let’s be clear. It takes at least two parties to tango.

The person making the ‘hiring’ decision has to be willing to do bad stuff. The person willing to ‘accept’ the offer has to be willing to do bad stuff. When you get at least two parties together willing to do bad stuff, bad stuff is going to happen. That’s how the world works. Bad people, do bad things.

It’s extremely hard to stay on the moral high ground when it seems like everyone around you is getting things you’re not.

I’ve never asked someone to break a contract to come work for me. I hope I never will. Still, there are those out there in many industries justifying why you should break a contract you signed and agreed to, to come work for their organization. As our unemployment rate gets smaller this pressure to deliver talent gets higher.

“Yeah, but Tim, employment contracts are bad, they keep people from working at better jobs.” Sorry, did I miss something? You mean someone ‘forced’ you to sign that contract that you agreed to, completely? Yeah, that didn’t happen. You’re just justifying your bad behavior.

Bad people willing to do and ask others to do bad things is a bad combination.

What if you and your competitors recruited talent together?

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Think about most U.S. cities. What do they have in common? I travel all over the U.S. and to be honest, it’s all starting to look a lot alike!

Every city has a mall or three. At these malls, you’ll find the same restaurants. Chilis, Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Bravo, steak places, some random Japanese hibachi place, etc. Usually, down from the mal, you’ll find a Home Depot. Across the street from Home Depot, you’ll find a Lowes. Down from those are the car dealerships.

Sound like your city!?

Our cities are set up like this because it works. Putting all of these competitive places close together works for the consumer. They like all the choices close together.

Talent really isn’t much different.

If I’m a nurse, I want to be close hospitals. The more hospitals the better. That way if my job at one hospital isn’t working out, I don’t have to commute all the way across town to another hospital. If I’m in IT having a bunch of tech companies in the same area is desirable for the same reason.

What we don’t find, normally, are employers working together to solve their talent issues. A cook at one restaurant might be begging for more hours, but we never think about sharing that cook with the restaurant next door. We force the talent to go figure this out on their own.

Traditionally, I think career fairs thought they were doing this. Bring all the employers to one location and then all the talent can come and pick who they want to work with. It’s a start, but this isn’t really organizations working together to bring in more and better talent.

A modern-day equivalent to the traditional career fair might be cities working to ‘attract’ talent to their cities from places like Silicone Valley. In recent years, Minneapolis has been working to position themselves as a Midwest IT hub, so local and state government dollars have been working to get workers from other cities to come to Minneapolis.

What I’m talking about is what if two companies came together to share their talent databases for the benefit of both? Could it work? What would get in the way?

I think it could work. I think the organizations involved would be some forward-thinking leadership, some tight rules of engagement, and a very new way of thinking about collaboration.

So often we make a hire of someone we know if talented, but it doesn’t work out for a number of reasons, many times those reasons are self-inflicted by the organization. What if you could ‘move’ that talent to your ‘talent partner’ organization for a fresh start, and vice versa?

I love times when talent is tight because it forces us to start thinking about different solutions and ways of doing things. We all have talent in our databases that we aren’t using and might never use, but someone else might have exactly what we need in their database.

Instead, we sit on our unused, expensive inventory of candidates and do nothing. That doesn’t seem like a smart business practice…

7 Secrets Only HR Pros Know!

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I was reading an article the other evening over at Huffington Post, Welcome to the Club: What only Moms know (Why was I reading this I hear some of my dude HR guy pros asking themselves? Let’s face it I’m 40ish and woman are still mostly a mystery to me, so I try and find out their secrets! Plus I hate being left in the dark on this parenting thing, so “I need the info” as Dr. Evil would say.)  I don’t want to spoil the article, but suffice to say, either I’m very in touch with the feminine side of parenting, or what they were sharing really wasn’t the “real” secrets Moms know!

The article did get me to thinking about secrets and how in HR we seem to always have a few that we are either ask to keep by others or just the ones we share in this great fraternity of HR.  Here are some of the HR secrets that I thought of:

1. Who in the organization is on the way out.  (Sometimes many people know of individuals who are on the way out, but usually, HR has a good pulse on everyone)

2. Who in the organization is probably on the way up, and not because they deserve it. (Every leader has an attraction to an employee or two, for a number of reasons, and those folks usually find their way into roles that they don’t deserve.)

3. How much money you’ll get on your next raise.  (Oh, yes we do. But keep working hard anyway, we don’t want it to seem like it’s predetermined)

4. The information of why certain departments tend to get more (resources, staff, etc.) than others – but we can’t you – it would cause organizational chaos!  (I hate to tell you this, but it usually has nothing to do with department performance and everything to do with your department leader – or should I say lack thereof)

5. What you’re going to get for your annual bonus – usually 6-12 months before you get it. (hey, this stuff has to be budgeted)

6. What changes will happen to your benefits – again – usually 4-8 months before it hits you.

7. Who in your company is most likely to go postal on you.  (But we can’t tell you for HIPAA reasons – sorry – but if you sit next to Ted you might want to invest in a bulletproof vest)

I’m sure there are a number of others, but many aren’t unique to just HR.  I was thinking of putting down: We cook the books on our metrics, but guess what? So does every other department!  Let’s face it, in a political corporate structure that relies on metrics to obtain budgeted resources, the numbers aren’t always going to be clean!

I like HR because we tend to have “big” secrets and are called upon to keep those secrets.  It’s probably the biggest failure I see with new HR pros – they tend to try and create organizational friendships by sharing “the secrets” -and it always ends up blowing up on them.

HR has secrets, you knew it and just I confirmed it for you.  Now let’s move on because I not telling you any of the specifics! (besides the Ted thing)