HR and Recruiting are not Rocket Science!

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I hear one thing over and over from people who read my stuff or see my presentations:

“It’s not rocket science.”

It happened just last week. Some HR guy sent me a message and said, “I don’t get it?” Meaning, he didn’t get what I was trying to say like there was some deeper meaning to my straightforward point. Nope, I was just pointing out some common sense, which seems rather in short supply these days.

I take that as a compliment.  I’m not trying to ‘wow’ anyone with a couple of college credits and my top-notch brain.  I’ve never been known for being the big brain type.  I’m the common sense, straight forward type.  HR and Recruiting, to me, shouldn’t be hard and complex.  It should be simple and easy to understand.

That’s the problem.

Too many HR and Talent Pros want to make it seem like ‘our’ jobs are very complex and difficult.  This is very natural, every profession does this.  If HR is easy, you won’t be valued highly by leadership.  So, let’s make it hard.  The last thing anyone wants to do is come out and say, “Hey! A monkey can do my job, but keep paying me $80K!”   It’s very difficult culturally to come clean and say, “You know what?  This stuff isn’t hard.  It’s work.  We have a lot to do.  But, if we do what we know we have to do, we’ll solve this!”

But that’s HR and Talent Acquisition. It’s work.  Many times it’s a lot of work!  But we aren’t trying to solve the human genome!  We are trying to administer some processes, get our employees better, find ways to keep them engaged and happy and find more folks who want to become a part of what we are doing.  Not overly hard.  It’s not rocket science.

I think the complexity in HR and Recruiting comes into play with ‘us’ not being aligned with what our leadership truly wants.  Many times we flat out guess what we think they want out of HR. Sometimes we assume what they want, and try and do that. Very rarely do we actually find out exactly what they expect, and just deliver that.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, we might not agree with what our leadership wants or expects from HR.  So, we give them what we want and expect from HR.  This never works well, but is tried often!  Second, our leadership changes what they want and expect, as they see better ways to do HR and Recruiting.  Change is a bitch.  It’s more of a bitch when it’s happening to you.  Third, we might not have the experience to deliver what is wanted or needed.  So, you get what we can give you.

This seems to be why delivering great HR and Talent Acquisition becomes rocket science.  Simply, we can’t have basic communication with our leadership and some self-insight on our capabilities of what we can actually deliver.   Couple this with most people’s unwillingness to ask for help, because they fear others will look down on them for not knowing, and you’ve hit the HR rocket science grand slam!

HR isn’t hard. Recruiting isn’t hard.  Dealing with expectations, and our own insecurities, that’s hard!

The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask a Hiring Manager

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How are those hiring manager “intake” meetings going?

You know, those meetings you have with a hiring manager every single time they have an opening.  You sit down with your hiring manager, face to face, and ask them a page full of questions.  Why is this position open? What would make a candidate most successful in this role?  What color of skin would you like this candidate to have? Boobs or no boobs? Whoops! Scratch those last ones, we would never ask those…

The reality is Talent Pros really only have one question they need to ask hiring managers. That question is this:

“Do you trust that I can find the talent you need?”

Ultimately, this is all that really matters for your success.  If they trust you, they’ll give you all the information you need to be successful.  If they don’t trust you can find the talent they need, they tend to hold stuff back.

Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s real world talent acquisition stuff! Welcome to corporate America, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense!

Most hiring managers have no faith you’ll find them great talent.  They have this belief because of so many bad Talent Pros before you failed them.  So many before you didn’t really go out and find the best talent, they just delivered whatever warm body came into the ATS.

I just come out and ask the question.  The first answer you’ll get from 99% of hiring managers is a weird, “Well, sure, I do.” If you really dig into this answer, you’ll get the true answer which 90% of the time is, “Hell no! Why would I?  Your department has really never gotten this right!”

Thank you! That’s what I really needed.  I needed to get that out in the open, so now we can really build trust, and make great things happen.  They’re mostly right. Talent Acquisition fails many of our hiring managers for a number of reasons. Right now, your hiring manager doesn’t need to hear those reasons, they need to hear why this time will be different.

Then, you have to live up to ‘different’! You have to be better.  You have to get it right. Getting it right earns trust.

Once they trust you, great things will happen. Earn that trust.

Different Leaders for Different Situations – Phil Jackson Edition

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Sports/HR Blog Post Alert!

The 8 Man Rotation Crew (minus me as the annual Designated NBA Summer League Survivor) will be out in Vegas in July watching the NBA Summer League and what a summer we are having in the NBA!

If you haven’t heard, one of the great all-time NBA coaches (11 Championships) and talked about all-time great leaders, Phil Jackson was let go by the New York Knicks. Phil Jackson, 11 Championships, fired.

Okay, they said, ‘parted ways’ but we’re all smart HR and TA pros we know what that really means. The fact is Phil didn’t win or do anything in New York that even looked close to winning. Instead, he probably pushed the franchise backward about ten years by forcing every coach he hired to use an old, outdated offense (that won him 11 championships) and by and keep bad pieces that never worked together.

So, is Phil Jackson a bad NBA General Manager. The same guy who coached 11 NBA Championships and is widely considered one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time?

It probably takes a bit of breakdown to understand how Phil somehow became ‘bad’ in New York, when he was a genius in Chicago and Los Angles.

Ingredients to become a genius NBA Coach:

  1. Get lucky enough to have all-time great talents on your teams! Every heard of Michael Jordan? Scottie Pippen? Shaq? Kobe?
  2. Be awesome at managing great talent.
  3. Did I mention have great talent on your team?

Phil didn’t have great talent in New York. His most talented player was a ball hog, a me-first personality that no other great players ever wanted to go to New York and play with. Not quite the recipe to win championships!

Phil was a great coach of great talent. Many coaches could have had all that great talent and the talent would have run them over, but Phil was great at handling all those personalities and egos. What Phil wasn’t as good at was building a team from nothing, with no great players. Arguably much harder to do, and you need some luck, either way, he’s not the builder-type.

You see this happen all the time in business. A leader that is an awesome visionary front-runner, struggles the moment the company starts to struggle. Or the leader that pulls the company out of the ashes, but then doesn’t have the first clue how to take the organization to the next level.

Both leaders are good people. Phil Jackson is one of the all-time great coaches, but he stunk running the New York Knicks. Be careful hiring your next leader to make sure they have the background of where you are, not where you want to be, because many times who takes you there is different than who keeps you there.

Every First Internship Should be a Sales Internship!

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So, it’s that time of year. Bring in the interns and show them what they’ll never do or see again in the real world when they get their first job! I’m only half joking. Most internships I hear about today (and I hear about a lot – I’ve got two sons in college!) aren’t coming close to teaching young adults what it’s like to really work a job in your company.

If I was Chief of HR for the country, like I got to make all the HR decisions and make rules and stuff (wouldn’t that be a fun job!) – Chief Justice of HR! I would force every kid who ever did an internship to first do a sales internship with whichever company they decided to do an internship with. Great, you want to be in HR, or an Accountant, or an Engineer, or a Developer, etc., first, you need to go out on the road or sit on the phone with Jerry, he works in sales for our company.

Why sales?

Too often I see entry level grads come into organizations with this strange sense of how the world works based on what it is they do in their chosen profession. Do you want to know how to really impact your chosen profession? Go find out how the sausage is made! The ‘sausage’ in most organizations is sales.

Want to find out how to save the organization money as an Engineer or Accountant, you better understand your customer and what and how they’re buying? Want to be a great designer or developer? Sales will teach you what your priorities should be. Want to find out how to impact employee development and career growth? Go find out how hard it is to sell $1 of your product your company sells every day.

This isn’t some plan to get everyone in the world to think sales is hard and you should pity them. Sales is hard. Great sales pros also make a ton of money. No one usually feels bad for sales. This is truly about getting the new grads coming into your organization to have a better perspective about what’s really important.

If we don’t sell our stuff, you can’t ride the down the slide into the lobby on your way to hot yoga.

So, no matter what you do in the organization. You should know how to sell. Well, Tim, I’m going to be a nurse. Hospitals don’t sell, we save lives. Congratulations on becoming a nurse, it’s such a great profession, you’re a moron. Every organization sells. Hospitals compete against other hospitals for high-margin health care business. Nonprofits compete for donations and grant dollars. Churches compete for your souls.

Every organization is selling something, and you should know what it is you’re selling and how it’s sold.

We do a disservice to kids when we make them think that their profession is only about the skills they’re learning for some title they’ll one day have after graduation. Your profession, every profession, is about ensuring crap gets sold.

7 Things HR Pros Should Be Doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience

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Webinar Alert! Tomorrow at Noon EST – it’s me and the 7 Things every HR Pro in the World should be doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience.

Want to join me? You’ll get SHRM and HRCI credit!

Plus, you’ll get to have lunch with me. Well, only if you sit at your desk and eat lunch, and you’re in the east coast time zone, or you can have your fifth cup of coffee with me if your in the west coast time zone, or maybe you’re just central and you get up early and like to eat an early lunch. Look, I’m

Look, I’m fairly intelligent, but I’m sorry I don’t know your eating habits, so just log in and you do you, and I’ll do me, and we’ll all learn something about creating great employee experiences!

Here are the details:

“Our employees are our most important asset,” said every CEO … ever! But what if we truly treated our employees like our most important assets? Would you do things differently than you are right now?

HR expert and world-renowned HR blogger Tim Sackett and Ryan Higginson-Scott, an HR leader at Optimizely, will bring their fun and engaging style to the hottest topic on the planet — building an employee experience everyone wants to be a part of. The program will introduce you to the concept of employee experience, why it matters and, more importantly, dig into what you can do right now to begin designing and developing a world-class employee experience in your own organization. You’ll walk away from this session with at least seven great ideas that can move your employee experience from average to great.

Learning objectives:

  • Learn how best practice organizations are designing a strategy to improve the employee experience.
  • Develop a launch strategy and plan for your organization’s employee experience.
  • Understand the metrics and KPIs around world-class employee experience.

Sounds sexy, right!?

REGISTER HERE! 

T3 – @CaymanHRGuy Takes Over The Project – #SHRM17 Recap of @Beyond_Com rebranding as Nexxt

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My buddy Chris Bailey, Director of People & Organization at PwC, was at SHRM National this year, and I wasn’t. So, he sent along a post for the blog! I asked him to stop by and review Beyond that rebranded as Nexxt. Enjoy! 

Make sure you follow Chris on Twitter @CaymanHRGuy! 

Whats Nexxt? What Tics? Who’s here? So What! 

Ahh, the annual SHRM Pilgrimage, this year set to the backdrop of live Jazz, beads and the all-night antics that is Bourbon St, yes that’s right we are in New Orleans! Alas our owner of this site, Mr Tim Sackett, decided New Orleans wasn’t for him, I’m not sure why but I don’t think Tim has recovered from the last time both he and I were in the same location at the same time (You can read about that by paying $10,000 into the Chris & Tim Cayman Fund for recovering HR peeps). But he has been heard constantly humming along to the sounds of “Now That’s what I call HR” available now on Itunes…..Thus he sent me, his roving eye in the sky to report on what’s hot and what’s not at the SHRM conference.

Now as we all know Tim is a technical genius on the HR stuff…pregnant pause… So he wanted me to look at one thing in particular; a company called Beyond.com (Now known as Nexxt).

Now I was intrigued with Beyond.com as literally when they heard we were coming to review I was sent a press release by a lady called Maren Hogan of Red Branch Media. If you don’t know Maren she is one of the hardest working media pros at the event, not only was she helping Beyond launch this latest iteration of the company but she attended and supported various speakers, went to all the various networking events and even found time to have fun at the Harry Connick Jr’s concert. I say this for no other reason than if you want a lesson in how to network at a conference, build your brand, be seen and be sought out, then simply spend next year as Maren’s shadow. I guarantee you will be exhausted, amazed and light years ahead of where you are now in terms of just how much effort goes into being at the top of your game.

Back to the task at hand, Beyond had their booth draped in black with mime artists, jugglers and a jazz band right up until the countdown clock struck zero hour and then to much fireworks, t-shirt throwing and fanfare they rebranded as Nexxt.  A 20 year veteran in the space that has become more “tech-enabled” which at its core is a suite of agency tools that gives recruiters and talent acquisition professionals the ability to create customized campaigns that reach the candidate personas they design.

Does it work? 

Sure it does, but so does Indeed, and so do a few smaller players in this space. It’s a little more niche than Indeed with some pretty impressive stats. I ran a search as a job seeker for an HR Director role in the US and had over 7000 results returned (Clearly a demand for HR folk!) The same search on Indeed has just over 8500, so pretty similar job stats. If you are an employer and want to search a CV database there are Millions to choose from, on indeed it tells you they have 7.5 million CV’s in their database. So it certainly proves its veteran credentials. Nexxt is easy to use and its deep dive is also robust.

From a candidate perspective, I really don’t know why they continue to allow Google ads to show up in the job search bar as it cheapens the look of the site. I know I keep reverting back to indeed but when the employers and candidate in your space rate it as the number one recruiting tool you can’t help but compare regardless of the technical difference between the two. The creation of targeted and budget specific advert campaigns is better functionally than Indeed’s filter, so I know results will vary. At the end of the day, it comes down to feel. I like the feel of Nexxt, it feels boutique with some big data behind it. It feels a little more personal and I would certainly test it in niche areas of recruitment. It has clearly been a crowd pleaser but so was Steve Jobs launch of “Next” Computers. The fab PR needs to be backed up by great performance and Nexxt has that ability (unlike Next computers!) so watch this space as I see Nexxt growing even more of a foothold into bespoke campaigns.

So what else went on at SHRM, Dawn Burke, Jennifer McClure, Steve Brown and his new book! Jason Lauritsen, Mary Faulkner and a plethora of other inspiring HR folks who at their heart just talk sense. I heard about other great talent presenting for the first time and I look forward to watching some of the sessions on demand as the next gen is here and making waves! There was also a sighting of the lesser spotted Rueittimann but these reports have not been confirmed.

Tropical Storm Cindy led to 15,000 HR folk turning into professional grade weather forecasters but New Orleans airport was un-phased and carried on operating regardless. Top marks.

Until Next year in Chicago! SHRM17 has broken me!

 

The Grand Vision of Your Company: Ingredient #1 of your Employment Brand

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Did you see last week that Facebook changed its corporate vision? The old vision was “Making the world more open and connected”. The new vision is:

“Bring the World Closer Together”

It’s pretty good, right? Five words. That’s pretty tight! Studies have been done on thousands of company mission and vision statements and the average word count runs around 14. It’s really hard to break your mission or vision down in five words or so and have it really mean anything.

When I first got into HR developing your mission and vision statements were a big deal, then like most things we focus on too much, they became a corporate joke. Web sites cropped up where you could throw in some words about your company and these random, meaningless, vision statements would come out and actually sound like something better than you already had, but could have been used by any company on the planet!

Organizations spent millions of hours in meeting developing these statements. Billions of dollars in resources spent. These words were supposed to drive our decision making, help motivate the troops, inspire our customers, cure cancer! If we could just find the ‘right’ words for our vision we’ll change the world!

The reality is, your mission, your vision, has become nothing more than a marketing slogan.

Facebook is a social media site that most people use to share stupid cat videos and once in a while lose their minds about something political before deleting the post after they got their 72 friends in an uproar. “Bringing the world closer together?” Oh, you mean, letting skinning high school friends make fun of fat high school friends. That close? Calm down, Zuck. You stole one great idea, you didn’t cure cancer.

One exercise I’ve done with recruitment marketing and employment branding folks is to tell me your company mission or vision in seven words or less. The reality is, from a marketing perspective, this is probably the time you have as a recruiter to get this in front of a candidate, plus it fits well in a text!

Can you boil it all down in seven words?

It’s tough to do, try it with your team today. Tell me our vision in seven words or less. Share your best one below.

Mine would be – “We put asses in seats”! Five words. Beat that. “We put world-class, asses in seats!” 😉

5 Great Excuses to Miss a Coworkers Wedding!

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I had one of my Recruiters ask for some advice this week. It wasn’t work advice, it was a little more personal.  She had told a person she would attend a wedding of a family member with them but was having second thoughts. It was one of those Holy Crap moments! I don’t really like this person that much, and I don’t want to go to a family wedding with him and send the wrong message.

So, what was my advice?  It started out pretty straight. Tell them the truth!  “Look, dude, I’m just not that into you, and the last place on earth I want to be on Saturday evening is sitting at a table with your parents and Aunt Betty with them thinking “ours” is next!”

As you can imagine, that wasn’t going to do.  Not that she didn’t want to tell him the truth, but she also didn’t want to hurt him. She was looking for a softer way to cut him loose.  You know! A how-do-I-get-him-to-not-want-me-to-go excuse like he can’t stand my breathe or I have hammer toes, or something!?

Now, she was truly diving into my end of the pool!  You want a “Fake Reason” why you can’t go!  YES! I’m in HR. I’m in Recruiting. I’m the king of fake excuses of why people don’t get the job!  I’m on it!

So, here’s the first 3 I gave her:

  1. You haveVD! (Ok, I know this is strong right out of the gate – but let’s face the facts – most dudes will run from this!  Funny Fact: She is a millennial and had no idea what “VD” was! I’m old! Using WWII references like it was cool 2017 slang!)
  2. Your Dog/Cat has Cancer!(Sketchy I know, but girls and their pets…this one might work.  Funny Fact: Her dog actually did have Eye Cancer but was cured, so not technically lying…)
  3. You have to Babysit for a Co-worker!(Now this one is fraught with problems guys have gotten this one before and they might pull a. “Oh, I’ll come and help!” then you’re stuck and have to find some brat to babysit for the night. Funny Fact: She was like “Oh, hell No! I have a Real Job, why would I babysit!”)

All of this brainstorming got me thinking of how I’ve personally gotten out of going to Co-workers Weddings that I didn’t want to go to.  Here are my Top 5 Excuses to  Miss a Co-worker’s Wedding:

  1. I’ll be on Vacation! This is good because you usually find out about the wedding of a co-worker way ahead of time. All you have to do is actually plan for this and take your vacation during the weekend of the wedding. Far, far away from the actual wedding.
  2. My kid has a sports tournament out of town that weekend.  A little sketchy, but it is really hard for them to verify you really didn’t have a sports tournament, and let’s face it, I’m going to my kid’s sports game (the 127th of this year) vs. your once in a lifetime moment.
  3. I came down with the “Flu”!This one nobody believes, but it’s the go-to excuse because everyone uses it and it has been internationally certified as an acceptable lie to get out of anything. A case of diarrhea always works as well and no one digs deeper on this excuse!
  4. My Mom/Dad/Grandma/Grandpa/Great Aunt Betty/etc. fell and are at the hospital. I needed to go see them. They needed my help. It was serious.  Let’s face old people fall. In fact, it might be the only thing they have left to do. You hear about old people falling every day. Very usable excuse in a pinch because it’s somewhat believable and old people don’t remember later on when someone asks “How are you doing after your fall?”, and they’ll go “better” and then complain about their aches and pains.
  5. I’ve got another Wedding that same day! Again, believable, but what you’re really saying to the person is “I’ve ranked you lower than someone else in my life. I hope you understand, but I didn’t buy you a place setting off your registry!”

What is your top excuse for not going to a co-worker’s wedding?

The Next Great Trick in HR to Become World Class!

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Oh, Tim must be talking about the great A.I. tech that’s coming out, or the next great tech that will replace staffing agencies, or the next website that will change the entire industry forever – “Oh hey! Google Jobs.” I’m sure he’s going to be talking about using Fitbits to increase our organizational wellness! No, it’s probably how if we write one sentence of feedback a day to each employee our engagement and retention will go up 3,000%! I heard that one at SHRM this year!

 I keep searching for the next great trick that will help me to lose weight and keep it off. Why hasn’t science created a pill that allows me to eat and drink anything I want and I can stay skinning? Seriously, the person who develops this will rule the universe! 

In America, we love tricks! I think it harkens back to the Baby Boomers who got us hooked on TV Dinners and every TV infomercial products that ‘magically’ could do everything we needed without us doing anything, besides making four easy payments of $19.99.

It’s mostly all crap.

 We are hooked on tricks and over-night solutions to fix everything that is wrong with us. Personally and professionally. We live an instant gratification world. I get pissed when it takes more the thirteen seconds to get my fast food meal from the drive-thru, I mean hasn’t A.I. figured out that I’ll be stopping before I figured it out. These robots suck! 

 So, here’s the Next Greatest Trick in HR:

 Do great sh*t!

Yep, turns out the next great trick has always been the trick. Just do really awesome stuff! As I come off the conference season I look back at my notes and all the cool stories and ideas and there is one common theme. All the best stuff, the best ideas, were great from the beginning and had a team that wouldn’t allow that great stuff to die!

And by a ‘team’, it’s usually one person taking a stand, believing, caring a little too much. A try-hard. Who just wouldn’t let it go.

Rusty Rueff, says, “Make big changes, to big things”.

The trick to world class HR is do great sh*t. Then do more great sh*t. And don’t let anyone in the organization tell you to stop doing great sh*t. You need to become the Department of Great Sh*t!

That’s tricky.

The Key Trait of Every Great Employee #SHRM17

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For twenty years I’ve been hiring and firing people.  I’ve been lucky enough to have some really great performers, a bunch of good performers and also a few really crappy performers.  It seems like every time I turn, someone has an answer for me on how to hire better.  For years I have given the advice, if all else fails, hire smart people.  It’s not a bad strategy. For the most part, if you hire the smartest ones of the bunch, you’ll have more good performers, than bad performers.  I’m talking pure intelligence, not necessarily book smarts.

But, just hiring smart people still isn’t perfect.  I want to hire good, or great, people every single time.  How do you do that?  That’s the million dollar question.

To me, there is one trait we don’t focus enough on, across all industries.  Optimism.

Your ability to look at a situation and come up with positive ways to handle it.  Think about your best employees, almost always there is a level of optimism they have that your lower performers don’t.

I can’t think of one great employee I’ve ever worked with that didn’t have a level of optimism that was at least greater than the norm. They might be optimistic about their future, about the companies future, about life in general.  The key was they had optimism.

Optimistic people find ways to succeed because they truly believe they will succeed. Pessimistic people find ways to fail since they believe they are bound to fail.  This hiring thing can be really difficult.  Don’t make it more difficult by hiring people who are not optimistic about your company and the opportunity you have for them.

Ask questions in the interview that get to their core belief around optimism:

– Tell me about something in life you’re are truly optimistic about? (Pessimistic people have a hard time answering this. Optimistic people will answer quickly and with passion.)

– Tell me about a time something you were responsible for went really bad. How did you deal with it?

– The company has you working on a very important project and then decides to cancel it. How would you respond?

Surrounding yourself with optimistic people drives a better culture, better teams, it’s uplifting to your own leadership style.  I want smart people, but I truly want smart people who are optimistic about life.  Those people change the world for the better, and I think they’ll do the same for my business.