T3 – @Ascendify – Intelligent People Management

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I review the end to end talent acquisition platform Ascendify. Ascedify currently is a cloud-based platform that is completely mobile and social enabled, combining all of your talent acquisition technology needs in one platform. Ascendify is also adding talent management to its platform as well and you’ll soon get performance management and employee development as well.

Ascendify can run your complete TA tech stack – ATS, CRM, recruitment marketing, onboarding, etc. If you already have an ATS you love, or you’re stuck with, Ascendify can run all the parts of your TA tech stack that are missing on your ATS, with current integrations with Taleo, Workday, Kenexa, etc.

So, what does Ascendify do? All the stuff you read about, but can’t make happen with your ATS alone! Ascendify allows you to run your own talent communities, helps you run your employment branding and recruitment marketing, engages and nurtures prospective candidates, gives you one-click apply, source tracking, multiple forms of messaging candidates, create multiple landing pages for hiring events you have, and built in employee referral, to just name some of the functionality!

What I liked about Ascendify:

– It’s built for Global enterprise talent acquisition. High security, scalable to multiple locations, divisions, different employment brands, etc.

– Easily build out talent communities based on gender, veteran status, diversity, locations, etc.

– Ascendify will help you build and re-design your career site to better use this level of technology. You’ll be driving a Ferrari, you can’t just park it out on the street!

– You can have and build separate employment brands within your organization, but still, share candidates between the brands and divisions. Super flexible and supportive of each employment brand, which letting you all work together within one system.

– Ascedify is designed so that your TA team will spend their entire day within one system to post, communicate, source, pipeline, market, etc.

– Tag candidates under ‘champion’ status giving one who interviewed a silver or bronze medal status based on finishing as a runner up in the process, knowing those who finished second and third are many times still really great candidates who barely missed out, and then we forget about them!

What I liked most about Ascendify is they know they have a big, giant sophisticated platform they are offering you. You’ll go from horse and buggy to a rocketship! That’s pretty scary, and difficult! So, they also work hand-in-hand to help you build it all out, and show you how to use it and how to kick your competition’s butt using it!

When you purchase a piece of TA technology like this, it’s a big investment in resources and time, and it’s critical you pick a vendor that isn’t just selling you the technology, but is also selling you the talent acquisition expertise to help you build out your ‘new’ TA strategy, because that is what will happen if it’s done right!

They are an enterprise level Talent Acquisition technology to be sure. If you’re a TA leader looking to modernize your processes Ascendify is definitely a technology you need to demo.

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

Turns Out, Millennials Actually Don’t Want Your Feedback!

Posted on by
1

It’s conference season and I got a chance to see the ever-popular, Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

Here was the money-shot quote Marcus dropped on the audience this time:

“Millennials don’t want feedback!”

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials and the rest of us don’t want feedback, we all just want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight into our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion too long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the sky-ish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

Posted on by
3

Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

Hyperlocal Hiring

Posted on by
3

The BLS reports that 80% of hourly workers live within 5 miles of where they work. Snagajob’s 2017 State of the Hourly Workforce survey found that 70% of our hourly workers refuse to commute more than 30 minutes to work. When you take a look at your own total workforce, my guess is you’ll find the vast majority live very close to your place of employment.

Blue collar, white collar, it doesn’t matter. People would prefer, for the most part, to live fairly close to work so they don’t waste a ton of time commuting. Commuting hours are for the most part one of the biggest drags on balance. Sure you can be productive on your commute, but it’s not really what you would prefer to be doing!

I’m wondering what it would be like if an organization started “Hyperlocal Hiring”? What if you only hired people who were willing to live within 1 mile of your place of employment? Maybe 2 or 3 miles, but not more, the idea is you could walk or bike to work in a reasonable time.

I know of some local government services that already require this in certain positions. I knew a Fire Chief who worked for a city and one requirement of the job was he had to live within the city limits. This was a rather small town, so he was within that 3-mile distance for sure!

Play along with me for a second!

We already know that the millennial and GenZ workforce like to work for companies that have community involvement. If your employees work in the communities they live in, it makes it pretty easy for organizations to truly support their local community. High engagement equals longer tenure, increased productivity, etc.

The Advantages of Hyperlocal Hiring:

– Hyper-short commutes give employees better work-life balance

– Living close to co-workers build more natural, deeper relationships (if you have a best friend at work…)

– Working and living in the same community gives you a stronger tie to both, increasing tenure.

– It would seem the living/working in close proximity would drive a stronger culture as well.

Okay, I know you’re already poking holes in this theory, but just imagine this for a few minutes on the positive side. It could be extremely cool!

I’m sure an organization with 10,000 employees couldn’t pull this off as it would be super difficult and expensive to have housing for 10,000 employees in a mile or two radius of your place of employment. SMB organizations, on the other hand, could use this as a huge advantage in hiring and attracting that younger workforce. Of course, this also works better in urban settings, but I could imagine a billionaire building their own city!

Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder, basically went up and bought much of downtown Detroit and then moved this headquarters there. 5,000+ employees, modern company, downtown Detroit! If you don’t know the area, you either live a mile or two from the headquarters, or you drive out 30 miles to the suburbs.

There’s nothing that stops you from making a proximity of where someone lives a condition of employment. As long as it’s contractually agreed to up front, you would be fine. You can’t go tell someone they’ll be fired unless they move closer to your office, but new hires coming in can have this condition.

I know most of us would say, well, you’ll limit your candidate pool, so you just can’t do this. That’s my point! I want to limit my candidate pool to others who share this vision with me. To work and build a community in a micro-community with all of us involved! Yeah, Hippies! Come join the commune, but in a very modern, free-will, capitalist sense of being!

What do you think? Would you ever want to be Hyperlocal employee?

‘Divided America’ is a myth – @Jobvite 2017 Job Seeker Nation

Posted on by
1

Jobvite does an annual study called Job Seeker Nation where they go out and survey over 2,000 Americans. The data is fascinating from an employee and candidate perspective. This year’s study found that 80% of Americans believe the country is divided, but when you dig into the detail of their responses, you find that’s not really true!

Sure, at a high level you have Dems and Repubs. Rich and Non-rich. Big city and country. Anything from far enough away can be divided into two sets. But, when you really dig into individual beliefs, you find that Americans are that different in their beliefs.

You can access the free, 35-page report from Jobvite!

Here are some of the highlights I pulled out of the data:

– Women negotiate less than Men for salary increases. We’ve known this for a while, but the data also showed that 87% of men who negotiate get a higher pay, and 80% of women who negotiate get higher pay. So, what does this tell us!? HR pros and Hiring Managers are awful negotiators! Also, it’s a candidate market! So, negotiate!

– 68% of job seekers do not believe Diversity is very important when selecting an employer. Only 36% of Women believe it’s very important, 60% of African Americans believe it’s very important. This isn’t to say that the majority don’t find diversity important, it’s saying that most candidates actually find other things more important!

– The lower you get paid, the less loyal you are to your employer. I think we all can understand the psychology behind this. If you have a great paying job, you’re probably more likely to be loyal to help keep that job. If you’re paid like crap, you probably don’t care as much about keeping that job.

– 46% of job seekers find it harder in 2017 to find a job, than in 2016. I found this unbelievable! I can walk outside of my office, right this moment, and within a quarter mile find at least ten business begging for employees. There are more jobs than job seekers, so why is it more difficult for almost 50%!?

– Get used to Hyper Job Hopping. 46% of Millennials will change jobs every 1 to 3 years. So, those hiring managers who have job hopper-itis when it comes to looking at resumes better get over it! That being said, I still don’t buy into the candidates who’s jumping a new job every year.

– Cover letters are dead. 58% of younger workers did not submit a cover letter on their most recent job application, but 26% of recruiters still view cover letters as critical to their decision to hire. That means 1 out of 4 of your recruiters have no clue at what they’re doing!

– You have a 13 times better chance of getting a job through a referral than applying on a job board. 13 times! That’s no joke. If you really want a job, find a referral, work your network, stop applying!

– 28% of younger workers analyze your company culture using Instagram. Candidates believe IG gives them better insight into your true culture over your career site.

I could go on all day with this stuff, I barely scratched the surface of what’s in this report. Go download it for yourself. We’ll basically be seeing screenshots of this study in every conference PowerPoint for the next twelve months!

Three overall key takeaways I took from the study:

  • We are more alike than different when it comes to being job seekers
  • Companies have shaped the behaviors of job seekers more than job seekers are changing company behaviors related to job seekers
  • If you hang onto your old ways of treating job seekers, you’re only hurting your own organization, not the job seeker

 

T3 – @Skillscout – Experiential Hiring through Videos

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I take a look at the employment video development company Skillscout. Skillscout is a platform for employee-generated recruitment videos. They help you develop job videos and work samples to help organizations hire candidates who are a better fit for the job and the organization.

I became aware of them when I posted the question, “Why don’t we have technology that will, easily, allow organizations to make their own employment branding videos?” I should have known, someone much smarter than me was already on top of it, and being successful at it!

Skillscout has developed a process that will allow you (yes, you, TA and HR pro) to make your own employment videos for your organization. They actually send you a video kit and step by step how-to guide. You take the kit, your iPhone and go start videoing. They show you how to upload your videos and then you sit back and wait for the final product.

They have a team of folks who take your videos and produce them into a very professional looking, branded video that you can use on your career site, with social media, etc. Here’s an example of a finished product:

Skillscout also

What I really like about Skillscout:

– They give you both options of Do It Yourself video, or they’ll also come on site and help you. Then once you become comfortable with how to do it and what to shoot, you can start doing your own shoots for all kinds of employment branded video in your organization.

– With Skillscout videos you can make video job postings for all of your jobs. This gives candidates a much better understanding of the job they are applying for and what they’ll actually be doing in the job.

– Skillscout was originally developed to be used within manufacturing to also be able to use video to screen applicants. Where the applicant watches a video within your career site then answers questions or is directed to do a certain task to demonstrate skill.

– When I first saw Skillscout I was thinking about how this could be used within a white collar environment, but Skillscout has actually used this very successfully to help companies attract more and higher quality blue collar workers.

– Cost is extremely reasonable. For a normal 90 -180 second of employment branding fully produced video you’ll pay around $20,000. Skillscout does this for a fraction of that cost. They’re pricing is transparent and listed right on their website.

I love the fact that Skillscout gives some really great direction to get you started with video, but once you get going they also will help you with more culture related videos as well. A technology and company like Skillscout truly help SMB and mid-sized talent acquisition shops to be on a level playing field with enterprise-sized organizations and budgets. If you are in the market for video, this is a must see.

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

‘Short-timer’s’ Guide to Getting Fired (Dead employee walking edition)

Posted on by
1

You know what happens when someone is on the path to being fired?  They start doing all kinds of strange things.  They’re actually fairly easy to spot, and if you follow these rules and guidelines you will be able to pick them out or know if it’s you that is about to be terminated.

In the HR game, we call these people about to be fired or leave our organization, ‘Short-timers’ (they’ve only got a short time left!).  I also like to refer to them as ‘dead employee walking’, because so many hiring managers will know for months they want to terminate an employee, but they don’t.

Instead, they begin to treat them like they’re dead.  They ignore them, stop giving them work, ‘forget’ to invite them to meetings, etc.  Almost like they’re dead.

Regardless of what you want to call them, I think we owe it to give them some rules about what to do and not to do when they hit a period of their soon-to-be-over employment.

Short-timer’s Guide to Getting Fired:

  1. Don’t start working harder. You’ve already been shot, you just don’t know it yet.  You working harder to try and save yourself just looks sad and pathetic. You had a chance to save your job, now is not the time.
  1. Don’t start talking about how you’ve been wronged. You actually might be wronged, but no one wants to hear it, and me talking to you puts me in your camp, and I don’t want to be in dead employee walking camp.
  1. Do start lining up references from those who still like you. You’re going to need references from your last employer. Do that now. It’s hard to say no to your face. It’s easy to ignore your email and phone calls after you’ve left.
  1. Do start slowly take personal effects home, little by little, so not to be noticed. This way when the big announce happens you aren’t asking people to help you carry stuff out to our car.
  1. Do start looking for a job. It’s one million times easier (that’s an exact figure from my research) to find a job when you have a job than when you don’t have a job.
  1. Don’t profess your love to a co-worker on your way out. It’s really not a great romantic time to do something like this. “Hey, Tina! I’m out of here! But I’ve always wanted to hook up, call me!” Yeah, just what Tina needs, an out of work slacker to add into her life.
  1. Do clean out your computer files and delete all search histories. You know what we do when you leave? We look at your search history on your computer and laugh. Laugh loudly and often. We don’t know exactly why you were searching for an all-black toilet seat, but it’s funny not to know!
  1. Don’t start trying to take other people down with you. Here’s the deal; you’re about to get fired. You are trying to bring others down with you won’t work because you have no credibility.  In fact, it will probably just quicken your exit.
  1. Don’t burn bridges. It’s a small world when it comes to professions and employment. That boss you tell off today might be the same executive that stops you from being hired someplace else down the road.
  1. Do burn all of your corporate logo wear. Yeah, like you’re really going to wear your old companies gear when you got fired! No, you’re not.  Burn it.  Have a party and dance around the flames.  It’s cathartic, in a way, to rid yourself of these signs and symbols of a part of your life that is now over.
  2. Take a bunch of office supplies home. You know what you need in a job search, office supplies! Plus, now that you’re on the unemployment, you don’t really have extra money to spend on office supplies, so start hoarding while you can!

People Who Are Always Late Are the Real Terrorists

Posted on by
5

I have a confession to make. I’m anally retentive on time. I’m so on time, that if I’m ‘on time’ I think I’m late. For me, being on time means I’m ten minutes early to whatever it is I’m scheduled to do.

If I know I might be late, I get anxiety. My close friends, and my wife, know this about me and usually if they know I’m feeling frisky, they’ll push this button!

Look, I get it, I’m not proud of this. We all carry around our own demons…

My take on this is there could be worse things in the world I could have problems with! I could be a drug addict. I could kick puppies. I could be completely rude and annoying and show up late to stuff and put other people out and show how I don’t care about them by not respecting their time and making them believe I must be more important than them by showing up after the agreed upon time! Yeah, like those things!

So, one of these always late terrorists put together an article recently and basically said that people who are always late are “more successful and live longer, says Science”.

You can bet, I took offense to this! It goes against every fiber of my being not to be late!

So, here’s a bit from the article and the ‘science’ they claim to have to back this up:

In DeLonzor’s book ‘Never be late again’, she says: “Many late people tend to be both optimistic and unrealistic, she said, and this affects their perception of time. They really believe they can go for a run, pick up their clothes at the dry cleaners, buy groceries and drop off the kids at school in an hour…

In a study of salesmen carried out by Metropolitan Life, “consultants who scored in the top 10 percent for optimism sold 88 per cent more than those ranked in the most pessimistic 10 percent”. Their performance is better because their outlook is better…

People who are late, but genuinely don’t mean to be – the ones who want to be considerate, often live in the moment and find it hard to save for the future, says Alfie Kohn on Psychology Today. Some people “can’t summon the self-control to be on time” which would mean that person “probably has trouble getting his or her act together in other ways as well – say, around saving money or saying no to junk food.” Oops.

So, if you read the entire article the ‘science’ is basically this:

1. People who are late are optimistic.

2. Optimistic people in a sales role will sell more.

3. Selling more means you’re more successful.

4. Thus, People who are late are successful.

Apparently, people who are late also are bad at math and regression. Since you can not correlate being late to optimism to success to jump and put all those together!

Let’s face it, people who are late are awful people, and usually unsuccessful because they’re probably constantly trying to catch up from being late, and most likely fired often because they fail to keep commitments they made. Because they’re fired and constantly running behind, they’re most likely, also, stressed out more often than the fine, well-standing folks who show up on time, and that stress is a killer!

I have to assume the person who wrote the article was running late so they just made up some data and science to fit their lateness. I don’t condone it, but I understand. The habitually late need our help. It’s really more of a disease than a conscience decision. We might want to put in some legislation to give them extra protections. I want to be empathetic to their difficult plight of showing up to commitments on time! I’m not a monster.

Seriously, if you’re one of these terrorists, just know that everyone, deep down, hates you with a passion.

5 New Rules of Work

Posted on by
6

I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles (in fact my friend Lars Schmidt is now a regular contributor to FC and his stuff is awesome!)but this one seemed like the biggest contrived piece of new-aged garbage, I just had to share!

The article has a great premise: These Are The New Rules of Work.  You know, one of those articles that will show us all how we use to do work and how we now do work. Well, maybe, but also how we hope we could do work like they talk about in magazines like Fast Company, but we really don’t because we live in the real world.

Here’s a taste:

Old Rule: You commute into an office every day.

NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Cute, but I actually work at a job where we go to the office each day, like most people in the world. So, while it would great to work in the Cayman Islands, my job is in Flint, and if I don’t come in, I don’t get paid. Which makes trips to the Cayman more difficult.

You get the idea.  It was written by a professional writer, not by someone who actually works a real job. Writing isn’t a real, normal job. When you write freelance, you can actually work from anywhere, because you basically work for yourself!

Here are the others:

Old Rule: Work is “9-to-5”

NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Well, you’re not really on call 24-7, you choose to be ‘connected’ 24-7, there’s a difference.  I do believe that ‘leaving’ your job at the office was a concept that was overblown for the most part in our parent’s generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smartphones and laptops. Let’s face it, our parents would have been just as connected given the same technology.

Old Rule: You have a full-time job with benefits.

NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

There’s no doubt there is a rise in the use of the contingent workforce, but this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily chosen by the worker.  True, thoughts have shifted that many people no longer want to work at one company for forty years, but much of that has been shaped by companies and economics. When you live through an entire decade of layoffs and downsizing, you begin to think of the work environment as more transient. The crazy part about this mindset is organizations still feel like candidates should want to stay at a company for forty years, even though they can’t, and won’t, guarantee that for you.

Old Rule: Work-life balance is about two distinct, separate spheres.

NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

This is the one rule I actually agree with.  Again, from a day when you could actually separate yourself from your work and personal life. In today’s ultra-connected world, it becomes very difficult to do this. I think most people get tired of living two separate lives, and just want to live one. This is who I am, professionally and personally, take me a whole person, or not.

Old Rule: You work for money, to support yourself and your family.

NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE “PASSIONATE” ABOUT A “MOVEMENT” OR A “CAUSE”—YOU HAVE TO “LOVE WHAT YOU DO.”

This is actually the single worst piece of advice ever given to mankind! Bar none.  If this was actually the case, how do you think anything would actually get done on this planet? How would store shelves get stocked? Gas stations get to run. Your dinner gets cooked and the dishes washed at your favorite restaurant? Do you really feel there are folks “passionate” about washing dishes for you? That they want to wash dishes for your cause of having a chicken fried steak and gravy for dinner?

Get some freaking perspective.

I think it’s great if you can work at somewhere you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you to have a great life. Have a cause that is special in your life? Perfect, go for it. You know what really helps most causes? Money! If you have a job that makes great money, just imagine how you can truly help that cause.

So, what do you think about these ‘new’ rules of work?

The Number One Reason Employees Fail

Posted on by
Reply

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

It’s about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills than upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens every day in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category: the person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 44-hourtraining session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!