Should You Measure Candidate Desire by Response Time?

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I have expectations as a leader in my organizations for other employees who are in a leadership position in my company. One of those expectations is, if I call or text you on off hours, weekends, vacations, etc., for something that is urgent to the business, I expect a reply in a rather short time frame.

Some people would not like that. I don’t care. You’re a leader, the business needs you, there’s no time clock for that.

That expectation is set for someone at a leadership level in my organization. They know this expectation before taking the job. Also, I’m not an idiot about it. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in the past five years I’ve reached out to someone on weekends or vacations expecting and needing a response.

But, what if you measured candidate quality in the same manner? Seems unreasonable, doesn’t it!?

Well, check this out:

Nardini is the CEO of the sports and men’s lifestyle site Barstool Sports. In a recent New York Times interview, she detailed her process for vetting job candidates. After saying she was a “horrible interviewer” because of her impatience, she explained a unique process for gauging potential hires’ interest in the job.

“Here’s something I do,” she said. “If you’re in the process of interviewing with us, I’ll text you about something at 9 p.m. or 11 a.m. on a Sunday just to see how fast you’ll respond.”

The maximum response time she’ll allow: three hours.

So, Erika believes if a candidate doesn’t reply back to her on a Sunday at 9 pm within three hours, they are not interested in a job.

This is why recruiting is hard.

You have moron leaders who come up with stupid ideas of what they think is ‘important’ and then they make you live by these dumb rules. This rule is ridiculous. Erika’s assessment of why this works is ridiculous. But, she’ll get a pass.

Why?

She’s a she. If some dumb white dude came up with the same rule the New York Times would write an expose on how this guy is a complete tyrant and out of touch with today’s world, and how crappy this candidate experience is, and how bad leadership this is, etc. But, no one will. She’s just leaning in and doing what the guys do!

Yes, she is. She’s being an idiot.

Now, I’ll say I actually agree with her on her assessment on response time, assuming the roles she is expecting a reply from in three hours are time critical roles. She runs a media site with breaking stories. Twitter has these things up in seconds, media sites need replies to what is happening within minutes and hours. So, there could be some legitimacy to something as arbitrary as measuring candidate desire by response time.

It’s fraught with issues, to be sure, but for certain roles, it might find you some good talent. Should it be a golden rule of hiring for your organization? No, that’s just dumb.

If you really want a silver bullet I ask every candidate if they’re a dog person or cat person. Works every time!

Disrupt HR Detroit! September 27th – Tickets On Sale Now!

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DisruptHR is coming to Detroit!!!  

I’m pretty excited about it and I’m part of the great team that’s putting this event together. The date is September 27th with registration starting 5:30 pm and the event starting at 6 pm at the Garden Theater in midtown Detroit. The tickets are only $25! We should be done around 8 pm. Food and drinks. A ton of networking and laughs! REGISTER HERE! (we do anticipate this will sell out – we have limited seating)

What’s DisruptHR Detroit? 

It’s fun and fast 5-minute presentations/talks by HR and Talent pros. Powerpoint presentations of twenty slides where the slides automatically change every 15 seconds. It’s done in a TEDx-style format and the speakers are there to challenge how we think about HR and Talent, or maybe to just to poke some fun at the profession we all grind at every day.

Want to speak at DisruptHR Detroit?

Our goal is to have 12 speakers for this first event. We already have some folks who have applied and we welcome everyone who has the interest to apply to speak. It’s super simple! Follow this link and submit your idea! The DisruptHR Detroit team will pick 12 great ideas and save the others for our next Disrupt!

Why should I come to DisruptHR Detroit?

First, I’ll be there as the Emcee! I mean who doesn’t want more Sackett in their life!?!

Second, if you are passionate about our profession of HR and Talent Acquisition, this is the one place on the planet you should be to be around like mind professionals and leaders within SE Michigan!

Third, there’s a great chance you’ll take back to your organization some great ideas from the speakers and from the conversations everyone will be having about the topics!

What does a DisruptHR talk look like? 

Here’s me doing one so you can get a flavor:

Failure Is The New Black | Tim Sackett | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign Up! 

See you there! This is going to be so great! The first 200 people who sign up get a personal hug from me!!!

T3 – @Ongig Transform Your Job Descriptions

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This week on T3 I review the video job description platform Ongig. I first ran into Ongig when their co-founder and CEO, Rob Kelly, started posting some great content around the ATS market and which ATS systems were being used most. I’ve used Rob’s data at least half a dozen times for posts of my own! (Top 70 ATSs on the Market) 

So, I knew of Rob before I knew of Ongig. Because I liked the great content Rob was putting out and I wanted to know more about him and his company and what I found was really impressive! Ongig takes your boring, static job descriptions and turns them into dynamic digital job ads that match your employment brand and drive more candidates to your organization.

Ongig isn’t the only company on the market that can do this and I’ve highlighted others on T3, but the Ongig has taken a few more steps others haven’t. They’ve figured out how to integrate these within your ATS environment, not outside it, thus capturing and driving all this traffic back into your one system and process. That’s huge. It’s great to have great looking digital job descriptions, but it doesn’t do me a ton of good if they’re just sitting there outside my current process.

What I like about Ongig:

– Every ATS has the same issue, the job description pages are usually boring and plain. Ongig shows you and lets you build great job description pages for each job that are multimedia enabled with video and much more.

– The platform is easy to use and intuitive. Simply drag and drop your own pictures and media within the platform to control your own media management.

– ATS integration is paramount. It’s not enough to just have great digital job descriptions with video. You also need to be able to drive all those applicants into your current process to capture. Too many clicks and all that great looking video and branding is meaningless. Ongig is currently working with Taleo, Brassring, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc. The more open the API of the ATS the easier it is to pull off this integration.

– “App Store” type experience. Want to add a “Join our Talent Community” to your career site, JDs, etc. Ongig can support third-party talent community widgets or embed their Talent Community widget. Work Testimonials built into your JDs and career site? Sure, if that’s what you want. Glassdoor comment stream on your career site? Yep. Purpose driven mission statements on every JD? Not a problem. Pick and choose which features you want with rather ease. Chatbots, social sign-in, maps, walkscore, etc.

– Have an ATS that forces each applicant to register and you just want single-click to apply? Ongig can build that out for you as well.

Too often I run into TA executives who have their tech stack fairly determined for a number of reasons (long contract, limited budget, etc.), but they still have a need and a desire to add a bunch of stuff that candidates expect. Ongig has the ability to prop up these kinds of processes through their job description platform.

Clearly, the ability to add video to job descriptions and make them dynamic is Ongig’s bread and butter, but really Rob and the team can do so much more. If you have god awful boring job descriptions, need more functionality than you have with your career site and JDs, Ongig is worth a look.

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

I’m a Transactional Memory Leader, are you?

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There is this concept called ‘group transactional memory‘. Simply, this is your ability to allow memories you need or want to be stored within someone else. Let me give you an example. My wife is our family calendar. I unconsciously (and maybe a little consciously) don’t remember anything regarding our family calendar because I ‘rely’ on her memory to store this information.

I’m completely a Transactional Memory Leader!

I’m not the guy who knows everything in HR and Recruiting. I’m the guy who knows the people who know everything in HR and Recruiting. Why should I remember every single piece of HR technology when I have a half a dozen friends who I know will know the answer I need. Why would I remember every aspect of employment branding when I know at least five the top employment branding minds on the planet?!

I’m an inch deep and a mile wide. Some folks are a mile deep and an inch wide.

Frequently you’ll hear older people say “a piece of me died” when their long term companion dies. By the group transactional memory theory, this is actually true. If my wife would die, I would lose so much memory I can’t even tell you. She makes way better than I could ever be on my own. She’s like this awesome additional hard drive add-on that no one else has. A secret weapon!

She allows me to fill up my memory capacity with all the stupid stuff I fill my days with, and she handles all the personal daily stuff. For her, I fill my memory with stuff like directions and well, mostly directions to places (I’m also really good with movie quotes in case she needs a movie quote at any time!).

I think the best leaders are also group transactional memory leaders.

I surround myself with really talented, dynamic people who all have various specialties. I then let them do what they do best, knowing that if I need that knowledge, it’s there for me to tap into when I need it. Why would I learn every aspect of some process, when I know I have someone who is already doing that for me?

I think we used to call that delegation, but for me, transactional memory is delegation 2.0.

To me, the best thing a leader can do for their teams is to allow them to be this group transactional memory buddy. Give them your trust that when called upon to use their memory banks they’ll come through and be that personal memory bank you needed. This trust that they will perform when needed if the basis of leadership.

My wife will probably read this and think “I can’t believe he found a scientific way to be lazy!” She’s probably right! I’m really just looking for more capacity for more pop culture references and athletic statistics!

10 Ways Old White Dudes Can Stay Relevant in the Workplace

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I don’t consider myself an old white dude, but I’m sure most of the twentysomethings working for me probably think I’m the old white dude! Old white dudes are at a crossroads of the American workplace. They used to be on top. There was no better role to have in the American workplace than to be an old white dude!

But times they are a-changin (only old white dudes and hipsters will get that reference!).

In today’s workplace old white guys are as desired as foot fungus. Somewhere between WWII and last Tuesday old white dudes became irrelevant, well, I mean unless you’re a Fortune CEO or President, besides that stuff.

But, I’m here to help. I mean, eventually, I’m going to fall into the old white guy category on the diversity and inclusion surveys so I better find a way to pull us out of this funk and make us super cool again! Here what you need to be doing old white dudes:

1. Denounce all other old white dudes. That way you’re not ‘that’ old white dude, you’re the cool new old white dude who got ‘woke’ (look it up on Urban Dictionary old white dudes).

2. Stop wearing cargo shorts. Apparently, the kids decided cargo shorts are lame and only old white guys where them. Remember those shorty-shorts we wore in the 1970s and 80s? Yeah, those are super cool now. Wear shorty-shorts and show a ton of leg!

3. Hide the fact you like money, small government, and hate taxes. If you want to be cool you have to be willing to give up most of your money to a government who has continually shown to have no idea how to spend our tax dollars for people who claim they can’t find a job.

4. Buy comfortable marching shoes – but not those lame white Nikes or New Balance sneakers all the old white dudes have – go for Nike Air Max’s. Cool old white dudes march with our brothers and sisters who have been wronged. If you don’t march, or at least show up at their parties in downtown areas, you can’t join their click. Also, get ready to wear a ton of rainbow stuff. Calm down, no one looks good in rainbow, but the after parties are super fun!

5. Sell your $60, 000 pickup or sports car and buy a Prius or some kind of Subaru. Only old white dudes drive expensive pickups and sports cars. Cool old white dudes drive Prius’s and Subarus. A good second option is a bike and ride it to work.

6. Talk about Tacos like they’re your new religion. Cool folks in the workplace ‘love’ tacos. Not only are they great food but you’re also supporting a diversity group by eating them, I think. You can’t just ‘like’ tacos. You have to want to have sex with tacos. Tacos should be your primary conversation point each day until you die.

7. Get into a workout routine and then push what you do onto anyone within ten feet of you at all times. It’s cool to workout, but it’s more cool to workout and then make everyone else feel stupid who doesn’t do your workout. Old white guys golf and go boating. Stop all of that. If you want to get into the water buy a paddle board and a rack for the top of your Subaru.

8. Complain about your super long eight hour work day and how you could do all of this working at home in two hours. The goal of becoming a cool old white guy is to fit in. Sure work-life balance has never been better in the history of America, but that shouldn’t stop you from railing against the machine.

9. Be super chill about all dumb decisions people make. To be a super cool old white guy, you have to be super chill about how everyone else decides to live their life no matter how stupid it might seem. “Hey, Mikey, love the new face tattoo! I’m sure that will really help your career path! Super cool!”

10. Never say anything about diversity and inclusion. Old white dudes can’t have an opinion about diversity and inclusion because you don’t know the struggle. Even gay old white dudes should probably keep quiet. I mean Tim Cook is an old gay white dude and he runs Apple! Does he really know the struggle!?

There will come a time when old white dudes will become a minority in the world, but you pointing this out just makes you sound like a racist old white dude, so cut that stuff out. Just suck it up, buy some slim fitting jeans and throw away all y0ur Docker Khakis, no one wants your theories on changing demographics.

You might grow a crazy long beard. Many old white dudes have found that really awful long beards help them blend in a bit better. Like ‘hey, I’ve got a way too long beard, so maybe I’m not an old white dude, but a Viking!” People love Game of Thrones in the workplace, so it might help.

Hey, hit me in the comments about how ageist this is or what other great ideas you might have to keep old white dudes relevant in the workplace!

 

Email Heroes – Are you one?

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For most of their careers, my parents could never check their work email at home.  It did mean that they probably stopped working when they got home, unlike most professional employees today.  My parents also rarely made it home at 5 pm and worked in the office many Saturdays and Sundays when the work needed to get done. The world changed, we can now get work done almost anywhere.

When did we start defining work as sitting in the bathroom at home and replying to emails in five minutes as work?

Let’s face it, most people aren’t really working when they are home if they don’t normally work at home.  They like to believe that what they’re doing is real work, but if can also wait to be done the next morning when you arrive at the office, you’re not doing real work, you’re just narcissistic.  Oh, I better immediately get back to John and tell him I can definitely do that interview at 8 am, next week Friday…

We act like checking work email at home is the same as donating a kidney or something.

Studies show that 59% of males and 42% of females respond to emails when out of the office.  Those numbers actually sound low to me. The survey also shows that younger workers are more likely to think about work when going to bed and when waking. Just wait! Pretty soon thinking about work will be the same as work!

Are we losing our f’ing minds!?

Seriously! I want to know.  Having the ability to check and respond to emails outside of the office increase your work-life flexibility, but we talk about it like it’s an anchor.  That iPhone is only an anchor if you make it an anchor!  I have a son who plays baseball and I watch as many of his games as I can.  In between innings I always check my email and respond to work if necessary. I do not consider that work. I consider that watching my son play baseball!

Making the decision to take a half a day to watch my son play baseball is easy, because I know I can balance both jobs I have, running a company and being a Dad.  Does my son care that I’m checking email while he’s warming up in between innings?  No. He doesn’t even notice.  It’s not like I’m behind the backstop giving a performance review over the phone while he’s up to bat! I’m just checking and following up on some emails.

If you decide you want to stay connected to your job and organization while you are out of the office, that is a personal decision. Don’t act like you’re a hero going above and beyond by keeping up on your emails. You’re not, everyone does that.

If keeping up with your emails is the real work you’re doing, you’re highly overpaid and easily replaceable. If telling your coworkers you checked emails while out of the office on some personal time to show how dedicated and better you are than them, you need to get a life, email hero.

7 Things You Must Do if You Want to Hire the Best Team!

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Every once in a while I run into someone who “gets it”. Who understands recruiting, talent acquisition, and this whole big HR world at another level. They make it easy, or at least for them, it’s easy. It’s easy because they have a crystal clear vision of what they want and how they are going to go about getting it.

I read an article this week in some obscure publication that probably twenty people read, but the author just got it! Carmen Di Rito is co-founder and chief development officer of LifeCo UnLtd in South Africa (I’ll be speaking at HR Tech Fest in September in Johannesburg! I’m going to invite her over for sure!). Here are her guiding principles when it comes to talent:

  • Look for attitude alignment: When recruiting for a new position, look for alignment in thinking first, then competency and expertise.
  • Be fanatical: Fixate on building a cohesive, robust team that believes in and lives your values so that you have a culture you are proud of—and enjoy being a part of.
  • Be brutally honest: Share the frustrations, challenges, and demands of the job upfront, as well as the mandate of the organization. No sugar coating. Share who and what the organization is—authentically.
  • Develop a compelling, audacious vision: A strong vision will attract people who are courageous, tenacious, and hardworking.
  • Disrupt: The social sector is challenging, rewarding, but above all, disruptive. Build disruptive strategies to recruit, develop, and retain talent.
  • Experiment: Constantly improve processes and policies to unleash talent at all levels.
  • Expect excellence and reward high performance. Obsess over quality. High-performing teams and winning cultures aren’t born out of mediocrity. An organization’s leaders must be exemplars of excellence and high performance.

It’s really good, right!?

“High-performing teams and winning cultures aren’t born out of mediocrity.” This is something I would expect to hear from me, or older dudes my age, not someone who graduated college in 2010! Carmen is a pusher! Working for a non-profit!

If you can do these seven things consistently, you’ll be a great leader and you’ll run a great organization. Simple. Yet extremely hard to maintain. Why? It takes extreme perseverance and fortitude as a leader to maintain this high standard of yourself and your team.

The best organizations and leaders in the world do this. From giants to start-ups. In HR and TA we tend not to think at this level, at least average performers don’t! We tend to think about a lot of other details that might help get us to this point, but also most likely won’t.

I don’t feel like this is aspirational for Carmen. I believe this is her true north. This guides her daily decision making. She can lead a small non-profit or a major Fortune 500 company and she’ll be the same leader. That should be aspirational for all us!

T3 – @Teamableme – Recruit the Best Talent from your Employees Networks

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This week on T3 I review the employee referral technology Teamable. I’ve been a big fan of employee referral technology for a few years now, so I thought I already knew what Teamable was before I demoed. What I found was Employee Referral Automation 2.0!

Jobvite kind of created the industry of employee referral automation and leveraging your employee’s social media networks. For the money and the ROI, employee referral automation is still the most underutilized technology in talent acquisition. Almost every TA leader will tell you employee referrals are their highest quality hires and one of their top sources, but the spend almost zero dollars on technology to better these stats! It’s completely insane!

So, Teamable takes employee referral automation and says, how do we make it better? What do current users of employee referral automation like, and what do they wish they had that they don’t with this tech, and what is no one doing with this tech? This is what I think will ultimately set Teamable apart from other players in the space of employee referral automation is their innovation and ability to show organizations new ways to leverage this technology.

Teamable also found a game changer when it comes to using their technology to potentially increase your organization’s diversity hiring. That’s huge!

What I like about Teamable:

– Employees in your organization have the ability to see both the referrals they’ve made and what’s going on with them, but also those they’ve requested and where those are at as well. It’s one of the major gripes employees have after making a referral, that they don’t know what going on with it.

– Gamification is integrated very well into the dashboard showing a leaderboard of most referrals, which employees are most active, which employees have the most connected network, etc.

– The ability to segment out within your organization which employees you want to send specific job postings to. Why is that important? Diversity hires more diversity. Let’s say you had an opening for a Sales Rep. Your team was top heavy with dudes and you wanted more females. Instead of sending out this posting to all the sales reps you only sent it to your other female sales reps. What would happen? More than likely the referrals that came back with other female referrals. It’s not a guarantee, but the percentages are pretty good. BTW – works with any segment of your employees!

– ATS integrations already built for Jobvite, iCims, Lever, Greenhouse, etc. and Teamable will give you a visual cue if the person being referred is already in your current ATS, which is super helpful in letting those who referred know as soon as possible.

– Great UI/UX with their dashboard and ability to pull metrics and see the full funnel.

If you don’t have employee referral automation this is a must demo. I don’t know how to make that any clearer, this technology is a game changer for hiring more employees for less money and higher quality. I’m shocked that it’s not used by 100% of organizations who rely on and desire more referrals.

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 Story That Wins Becomes The Truth

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In HR we hear a lot of stories.

We love to tell ourselves we are hearing the truth from one side and a lie from another side, but the reality is both sides are stories with a little truth and a little lie built in. We then ‘measure’ who we feel is telling more truth than lie, and that side becomes the full truth.

Throughout history, this plays out. The winners of war decide what the truth is, not the losers. One side is good and righteous, one side is bad and evil. Before the war, both sides were just trying to make it through the day and make their society better. Truth.

We fire someone because they harassed another person. That person is a bad person. The person who got harassed is a victim and is a good person. The problem is, that’s not really reality, is it? Many times the person we fire is actually a pretty good person and the victim is a piece of garbage. But, the winner gets to decide the role they want.

We fire an employee because we are told by their manager that they are not performing well. We trust our manager. We have to it’s what our structure is built on. If we didn’t then what are we really doing? The employee claims they weren’t trained properly, they weren’t given good direction, they were put in a position to fail. You’re fired, you’re a bad employee. You lose, you don’t get to decide the truth.

It’s one major reason why I tend not to really care that a person was fired from a job. The reason probably matters. I don’t want to hire someone who embezzled from their former employer or some other major offense, but performance, let’s talk. I’m willing to talk because I know there are always two sides to the story. It just happens that this candidate lost their last story, but they might win the next.

It’s important as HR pros and leaders we understand this concept, not just for hiring, but also that we understand most times we don’t deal in complete black and white wins and losses. In HR we deal in the middle, in the gray. Once we make a determination, we are making a determination of ‘win’. We are validating one story over another. We like to tell ourselves and our leadership that this one story is the truth, but it’s really just another version of a story.

So be careful this week as you decide which stories will win and which ones will lose. Truth can be a pretty powerful thing even when it’s just a story.

HR/Corporate Communications 101 – Tesla Edition

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You might have seen this pop up on your radar this past week, but there’s a good chance you didn’t because it was put to bed as soon as it came up! Some news agencies tried to rake up a story on Tesla having a sexual harassment issue in their California plant.

Since the major issue at Uber, and big brand is now a media target for these types of stories. Not that they’re not stories, but the reality is the media consuming public love to see big name companies get killed in the media, while this kind of thing is taking place every day in lesser known companies that news agencies could care less!

So, why didn’t anyone bite on the Tesla story like Uber? Check out this response from the Tesla internal comms team:

“The topics raised in this meeting were followed up directly with those willing to discuss,” a Tesla representative told Business Insider. “We have a no-tolerance policy and have made changes to leadership, policy, and training to continue to improve our work environment.”

“The reason groups like Women in Tesla exist is precisely because we want to provide employees with an outlet to share opinions and feedback in a constructive manner. At Tesla, we regularly host events like the Town Hall, and only someone who is intentionally trying to misconstrue the facts and paint Tesla in a negative light could perceive such meetings as something negative.”

Drop mic. Walk off stage.

Clear, concise and no bullshit. We were made aware of it. We handled it. We’ll continue to handle it in a similar fashion if it comes up.

I don’t know if Tesla has a sexual harassment problem or not. What I know is they don’t have a communications department problem, those folks know what they’re doing, especially in light of recent situations at other high profile Silicon Valley companies.

A communication like this doesn’t lead one to believe there’s an ongoing problem. It’s designed to make you feel like some folks in charge know what’s going on and it was taken care of. That should be your goal in designing and developing HR communications for issues of this nature. The trick is you have to actually have taken care of it!

Do your internal and external communications sound like this? Yeah, you probably got in the ‘zero-tolerance’ language and we’ll continue to work to get better, but are you willing to call out your naysayers!? Most aren’t for the simple fact is they don’t really know for sure if there isn’t something going on, which leads me to believe Tesla has probably gone the extra mile to eliminate those responsible and make sure whatever happened won’t happen again.

Great HR communications can have a great impact on employees, shareholders, and customers. Don’t take them lightly.