Would You Hire Magic Johnson?

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(this is Magic and I at a recent MSU basketball game)

You might not have paid attention to this because you’re not a sports geek, more specifically an NBA sports geek, but the Los Angeles Lakers just hired their most famous player ever, Magic Johnson, to be their President of Basketball Operations.

If you know anything about me you’ll know this:

  1. I’m a Sparty, which means I LOVE Magic. When I was 9 years old my parents let me stay up and watch him lead MSU to the National Championship. I followed him to the pros and watched him win championships with the Lakers. I think he’s pretty neat!
  2. My dream job is to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. I make this known widely. They’ve never called.

So, you would have expected I would be super happy that the Lakers went and put Magic in charge of the whole show! But, I’m not. I believe it’s a major mistake on their part. Here’s why:

– Running an NBA team is a really difficult job, that takes specific skills you only receive by coming up through an NBA organization.

– The time commitment to running an NBA team is off the charts.

– The travel commitment to running an NBA team is unbelievable.

Magic, for all of this wonderful qualities, doesn’t seem to possess any of these skills sets needed. He’s an ultra-successful business owner and an all-time great NBA player, who is well respected. He’s also on the back side of his business career, ultra-wealthy, and more than likely unwilling to travel all over the world evaluating players in small, smoke-filled gyms across Eastern Europe.

My hope is Magic, will do magic stuff for the Lakers. He’ll surround himself with the best minds in the game. The greatest data nerds who can find hidden gems. He’ll watch the Moneyball movie and understand he can’t do this on gut instinct and his unbelievable charm. Because that won’t work. Most really great basketball players, put in this position, fail.

We do this in corporations all over the world. We hire the best ‘basketball player’ for a role that has very little to do with playing basketball, and then we are shocked when the ‘basketball player’ fails in a position of not playing basketball! We do this constantly in corporations! High performance in one position does not guarantee high performance in another non-related position.

High performance in one position does not guarantee high performance in another non-related position. I think we could all agree on this concept. Yet, we equate great performance in ‘mechanical engineering’ with the potential to be a great ‘manager’ of mechanical engineers. We somehow think those two things are similar. Mechanical engineering and Managing people. They’re in fact, very different things.

I would hire Magic Johnson for a lot of positions, but running my NBA team is very high on that list. Yes, he’s the greatest employee our organization has ever had. Yes, he knows basketball and played at an unbelievable level. No, he’s probably not the best hire to run this team. But the Magic fan in me hopes he kills it!

Dear Timmy: How can I best incentivize my corporate recruiters?

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Dear Timmy,

I have a team of corporate recruiters who we pay salary and then they also get paid a bonus amount for every individual you hire. When I read your post “The Corporate Recruitment Incentive Program” at Fistful of Talent, I was encouraged we are doing the right thing. But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How

But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How do I incentivize them during these times? My recruiters all work remotely, hire very specialized talent, and it’s fairly low volume around 15 hires per recruiter per year. The average salary is around $150K, plus bonus.

Thanks,

Corporate TA Leader who gets it

Dear Mrs. Gets it,

Will you please hire me!? No, I mean it. I will come to work for you for only the $150K and no bonus!

So, I hear you. It’s all relative to the market, location, industry, etc. I kid about wanting a job with you, but only slightly. Very few recruiters in the world make $150K working from home making 15 placements per year in a corporate environment where all of their overhead is paid and they have a great benefits package.

So, step one of finding the right incentive would first be to understand why these recruiters feel ‘underpaid’. You might be lucky and have all rock star recruiters who are the top in the field, but I doubt they are all that level. So, then I would ask myself, is this a team incentive issue, or do I have an outlier who is truly worthy.

All that being said, your problem is a real problem if part of your compensation plan for your recruiters is to be paid by hire and you have no hires to be made!

Here are some suggestions:

– If you look at your normal hiring pattern and it’s consistently at a certain level, work your bonuses into an average hire scenario. Then give your recruiters some education on how to budget! Look you first quarter might be giant, but you better know every second quarter sucks for hires, so your bonus will be low.

– Instead of compensating by hire, maybe compensate by activities that lead to hires. Thus, just because you don’t make hires, doesn’t mean the recruiters need to stop doing all those great things that fill the pipeline. The hard part about this is it will probably drag down your candidate experience as candidates won’t be too happy to be strung along and never get hired!

– Are there other valuable activities your recruiters can do in low hire situations? I love to focus on retention and the activities that increase retention. Maybe there are project related completion bonuses you can use during these times to get some things done that have been put on the back burner, but you really need to get done now that you have the capacity.

– Ask your hiring managers for suggestions. I’m always pleasantly surprised by some of the suggestions I get from hiring managers on what my team can do for them, to help them out, even if they feel it’s not recruiting related. Many of the projects they have can be done by recruiters as well, plus it gets your recruiters more integrated into the business.

Hope this helps! Please hire me.

Tim

 

Should You Be Using Facebook Job Ads?

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If you haven’t heard Facebook has been rolling out some new job posting functionality on their site for your company’s Facebook page. Audra Knight, over at Workology put together a nice little “how-to”, so go check that out if you want to give it a try!

My question isn’t how do I post a job on Facebook, but should I be posting jobs on Facebook?

Facebook designed the feature because they felt like LinkedIn, and all those organizations that only use LinkedIn, were ignoring a giant percent of the working population. Hourly workers and actively seeking employment workers. That’s not LinkedIn’s specialty. They are unapologetically, white collar and a ‘professional network’, not a job board (so they keep saying).

Facebook looked at this and thought, “Hmmm, we’ve got a couple billion people using our ‘social’ network. A majority are hourly worker types who would like to see what great jobs are open, let’s build something for companies to connect with them”. They probably didn’t really sound like that. My guess is someone at FB said, “hey, you know we can make billions of dollars charging companies to post boost jobs to our members, right?”

So, now you can post your jobs on your Facebook page in a matter of minutes. For a few extra buck Facebook will let you pick certain demographics, like location and skills, and then they’ll make sure your job posting shows up in other Facebook members timeline, even those you have no connection to!

Who will get the best results from posting their jobs on Facebook?

  • High volume, low skill jobs is an easy target and those should produce well for you.
  • But, you should be doing some testing on most of your jobs!
  • Guess what? Not only are low paid, unskilled workers on FB, so are Engineers, IT pros, Accountants, Doctors, Nurses, Truck Drivers, Cops, Teachers, Executives, okay, basically everyone is on Facebook!
  • The other thing is most people will check into Facebook daily, most check in multiple times. Most people on LinkedIn, only check in once or twice per month.

Every organization should be testing this. It’s easy. It’s fairly cheap. It actually might work you. When you test you should be doing a few things:

  1. Use multiple Ads with different titles and wording. You need to see what catches someone’s eye and what doesn’t.
  2. Use different boost amounts on the same postings to see if that makes a difference. It should.
  3. If you want white collar, professional hires, test putting in the salary level in the title, “Process Engineer – $115K”. You can do this with success with hourly positions as well, “Electrical Technician $18.50/hr”. Every time I have A/B tested this, the postings with the salary in the title produced more results. Every time.

So, should you be using Facebook Job Ads? Yes.

Does Uber’s HR Really Suck?

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Clearly by now if you’re in HR you’ve read this post by a former female engineer from Uber. It’s very detailed and sounds almost exactly like most companies in the world. No, not the part of ignoring sexual harassment, but almost every other part! Worker gets wronged. The company seems to do nothing. Worker gets more and more frustrated. The company loses patience with the worker. It always ends bad. 

The former IT Engineer at Uber, Susan Fowler, left the company and on her way out she, figuratively, burned every bridge in sight with a scathing blog post about her experience!

From her post:

When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”). 

Ouch, that’ll leave an organizational mark! Go read the post, there’s much more than this little bit.

I’m in HR so I realize a few things about this scenario:

  1. There are always, at least, two sides to every story. If what happened to Susan, actually happened as she wrote, shame on Uber. But, there are always two sides.
  2. Susan just happens to have launched a new book and is writing another. The timing on this couldn’t have been better to sell books. (that’s just the cynical HR guy in me).
  3. The former head of HR at Uber during Susan’s time there, Renee Atwood, left to go be the CHRO at Twitter after only 2 years. After seven months she then left that role at Twitter. This might speak to the lack of leadership at Uber in HR during Susan’s tenure, it might not, it’s just one piece of data. Prior to Uber and Twitter, Atwood had only held Director level roles at a giant banking company. Taking on the full show is a completely different monster, then a narrow hr director role in a giant organization.

So, the blogosphere is ripping Uber apart for being a bad organization. They might be right, maybe they’re awful. What I hear from reading Susan’s piece is a disgruntled employee that sounds like they were in a bad situation. In her post, one HR pro points out to her that the common denominator in all of this is Susan. Which she takes offense to, and if everything is as Susan says, rightly so.

I can’t get over how familiar all this sounds and feels, though. I’ve been the HR pro sitting across from a ‘Susan’. A ‘Susan’ who claims to have ‘evidence’ but really has nothing. Who claims to have witnesses, yet none come forward. Who claim some very, very bad stuff, yet, I found it not to be true, and some really solid people getting tarnished in the process.

Uber might really suck at HR and be awful people. I can’t tell that from one person’s story. I’m in HR, I need to see all the sides!

What do you think?

T3 – Fastest Growing Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on the Market

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I’m going to share some data today because it’s the single most requested question I get in my life, professionally. Here it is:

“Tim, what ATS do you use and what ATS do you recommend?”

This got me thinking that one day people will stop asking this question, but they don’t, every month, every year, for probably the past five years! I find that fascinating, the longevity and frequency of this question.

It tells me a few of things:

  1. ATS vendors have done an awful job at positioning themselves in the market (there are an estimated 1,200 ATS systems in the world!)
  2. An average ATS system could dominate the market with some exceptional marketing.
  3. TA Leaders can’t tell the difference between ATS systems.
  4. TA Leaders have no idea how many choices they actually have to choose from.

Interesting enough another talent acquisition software, an employment branding play, Ongig, actually runs a poll (The Top 70 ATSs) and publishes the results a few times per year around the ATS market. The poll has about 3,300 participants, most in the U.S., and it’s pretty straightforward – what ATS do you use?

From this poll, they can estimate market share and growth change. Here are some of the results:

Top ATS by Marketshare:

ATS 2015 Share
Taleo 36.43%
Homegrown 11.10%
Jobvite 8.58%
Kenexa – Brassring 7.56%
iCims 6.39%
ADP 4.79%
SAP-SuccessFactors 3.72%
PeopleFluent (Formerly PeopleClick) 2.52%
Silkroad 2.27%
iRecruitment/PeopleSoft 1.74%
Ultipro 1.67%
Greenhouse 1.67%
HRDepartment 1.28%
Newton Software 0.78%
Jobscore 0.50%
Lumesse 0.50%
WorkDay 0.46%
Lever 0.46%

Top ATS by % Growth:

ATS % Increase
WorkDay 570.52%
Kronos 467.36%
HRDepartment 209.47%
ApplicantPro 209.47%
ATS OnDemand 209.47%
eRecruiting 157.89%
Cornerstone OnDemand 157.89%
Lever 123.51%
PeopleAnswers 123.51%
Ultipro (UltimateHCM) 120.38%
ADP 111.00%
HireBridge 106.31%
PCRecruiter.com 106.31%
CATS ATS 106.31%
SmartSearch 106.31%
Greenhouse 102.02%

What do these two charts tell us? 

– Taleo is dominate in the market, but not growing at the rate of most others. Taleo got that growth not by being the best ATS but because Oracle bought them and then in large organizations IT forced TA to use Taleo. Welcome to corporate politics.

– Workday must be awesome because they’re growing so fast! See the first bullet! Workday is winning huge HRIS RFPs and corporate IT is twisting some arms in TA to use the Workday recruiting platform. Workday isn’t sold a separate ATS point solution, so the only way you use is it, is if you’re the core Workday HRIS product.

– Kronos – see the bullets above! They’re not an ATS, in terms of what people think of when you think of the best ATS technology.

– Homegrown systems are always big because the ATS industry does an awful job showing us why we should pay for something we can basically build on our own. Now, the best ATSs on the market are clearly light years ahead of anything you built in-house.

– In the market share list I can basically put them into three buckets: Bucket #1 – Giant Enterprise plays with average and below average ATS technology, Bucket #2 – Super cheap SMB and Mid-market plays, bought by TA leaders who don’t really know what they’re doing; Bucket #3 – True best of breed ATS technology that should be leading the market.

It’s somewhat sad that so many giant enterprise level HRIS systems are dominating the ATS market, but it speaks to how HR and Recruiting were lead ten years ago. “We need everything to talk to each other so we can get all the data!” Yeah, you can still get that with a best of breed solution and open APIs. Too many great organizations are settling for below average technology and vanilla solutions while failing in recruiting.

This data also speaks to the fact that most ATSs today are not bought, they’re sold.  TA leaders have no idea which one to select, what the differences are, and what their choices are. So, you sell them on the fact your ATS is ‘by far’ the best one and ‘unlike’ anything else on the market. The data says different. It says that basically all of these ATSs are the same, otherwise you would see a few grab most of the market.

The Dumb HR Guy Guide to Recertifying for HRCI & SHRM

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“My three years is up!”, he said as if it was a prison sentence. If you’re a regular to the professional recertification process of HRCI (SPHR, PHR, GPHR), you know this feeling well. Your HRCI certification lasts for three years and you can then retake the test or turn in continuing education credits for recertification. The first round of the new SHRM recertifications won’t take place until later this year for the SHRM CP and SCP certs.

It’s pretty simple. The first time you got your HR certification you took a test. For most of us, it sucked! It was hard, we had to study for weeks and months, and in the end when you walked out of the room you had no idea if you passed or not! It was at that point you made a pack with yourself, “I will never take that exam again!” With that statement, you signed yourself up for the three-year sentence!

Most professionals certification in other fields work in a very similar manner. In lieu of taking the certification exam over, you can do continuing education and receive credit. If you get so many credits over a certain period, you don’t have to take the test and you continue to have a valid certification. It’s a good business deal for both sides. I don’t want to take a test again, and the professional body would rather keep collecting my money.

With the breakup of HRCI and SHRM, we HR pros now have a decision to make:

  1. Maintain my HRCI certification only.
  2. Maintain my SHRM certification only.
  3. Maintain both certifications.
  4. Screw them both, this is too confusing!

I’ve maintained that having both certifications is ridiculous. You don’t need both, there isn’t enough differentiation in the eyes of employers, and there is still confusion in the market over which one you really need.

February 20th is my birthday. My SPHR certification through HRCI will expire. So, now I have a decision to make. I’ve maintained my SPHR certification since 2001. I still remember sitting in that room taking the test, finishing, and having no idea what the heck some of those answers were! I was proud when I got certified. It’s a hard certification to get and give up.

Most of you aren’t like me. In fact, I did a quick poll of some of my HR friends to find out how they recertify. It came down to three basic ways to HR pros recertify:

  1. You put in your recertification credits immediately as you earn them. This is 40% of you. These are my smart friends.
  2. You have a set schedule for inputting your earned credits (Monthly, quarterly, bi-annual,etc.) This another 40% of you. These are my slightly less smart friends.
  3. Dumb HR Guy way – you wait three years then put them all in at once. This is about 20% of us.

So, I made the decision to recertify my SPHR through HRCI. I go to and speak at a lot of conferences, I lead webinars, I get enough credits in one year for all three years, so this should be super simple!

Okay, let me stop for a second and explain, it wasn’t. But, it’s mostly my problem and my Dumb HR Guy way of doing things! Also, I think HRCI and SHRM could make this process a little easier, so I’ll give you some tips that I hope will help you not be dumb like me!

Tip #1 – Each thing you do for recertification comes with a “Program ID #”, turns out these numbers, and remembering these numbers are pretty important to the simplification of recertification! Also, both HRCI and SHRM have different numbers, which adds to the complexity of this. My suggestion to both would be to each have a simple search function on their recertification website allowing you to look up these program ID #’s so you don’t have to save all this documentation or find a way to remember them. Which leads me to Tip number two.

Tip #2 – Don’t be a Dumb HR Guy! Once you get your “Program ID #” input it into your recertification application right away. This is one million times easier! Now, SHRM also has made it super simple by providing a new mobile app so you can actually do this task in seconds while you’re at the event and you first get told the Program ID #. Super cool, super easy, go download it now if you have the SHRM CP and SCP. I’m guessing HRCI is probably not far behind in launching their own mobile app, it just makes sense for this kind of thing.

Tip #3 – Both HRCI and SHRM make it very hard for you to find Program ID #’s because they think you’ll cheat. Even though both audit and the reality is people applying for HR recertification would rarely cheat just based on their demographic and fear of being caught, let’s make it super hard for our ‘members’ to find the information you want. Even if you call them, they are not very forth giving on those IDs! Basically, we HR pros are untrustworthy to the associations we belong to. Oh, what’s the tip? It’s not one, I was just still upset over not easily being able to find the Program ID #’s of the events and webinars I attended to make it easier for me to fill out my recertification! Okay, rant over.

Tip #4 – HR blogging is pretty much worthless in the eyes of HRCI and SHRM. You get a max of like 6 credits over three years. I write every day, doing research, keeping up on the biggest HR topics on the planet, working to advance the HR profession, but somehow I don’t get credit for that. Instead, I go listen to Charlie at a local SHRM monthly luncheon talk about 401K participation for the third straight year, with the exact same presentation, and I’ll get three credits for attending those three exact presentations over three years. Doesn’t seem equitable, does it?

The moral of this story is this. SHRM and HRCI have figured out there is one really good way to recertify and if you follow their way, you’ll find this process easy and awesome. If you’re a dumb HR guy like me, you’ll find it painful.

The other moral is this, I’m recertifying for both, even those I still think it’s ridiculous. Until employers show us which certification they prefer you can’t be left not holding the one that will be most valuable to you. Unfortunately, right now, you don’t know which one that is!

 

The Single Point of Failure in Your Candidate Experience #TheCandEs

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The Talent Board (founders of the CandE Awards for the employers with the best candidate experience) recently released their 2016 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Awards Research Report. This report is well written, packed with exceptional data, and one that I look forward to reading each year.

As you think about your own candidate experience, and as I read this report, one thing screamed out from the pages:

Dispositioning Still Sucks!

From the report:

Disposition Communication Is Still a Struggle. In 2016, 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied. Plus, only 20 percent of candidates received an email from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered, and only 8 percent received a phone call from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered…

What Candidates Want After six years of candidate experience research, candidates still have one basic expectation of employers when it comes to screening: feedback and communication. Screening and dispositioning is one of the most intimidating aspects of the recruitment process as the majority of candidates do not get the job…Sixty-five percent of candidates receive no feedback after they are dispositioned and only four percent of candidates were asked for direct feedback during dispositioning

Candidate experience is a bit like going to that new restaurant in town. You’ve heard good things. You’ve seen some marketing. It looks awesome from the outside, so you decide to give it a try. Reservations were a snap and easy to do. You get sat almost immediately. Wait staff is tremendous. The menu is easy to understand and enticing. The food comes and it’s brilliant.

You almost can’t believe a place could be this good. You decide you must try the dessert. So, you order it and it comes out. The first bite is taken and it tastes like you have a mouth full of crap! It’s the worst! Oh lord, I’ll never forget that taste!

This is your dispositioning in your candidate experience. It doesn’t matter how good you do on all the steps if you don’t awful on the last step. Still, most of us still suck at dispositioning. It’s the single point of failure on almost every organization’s candidate experience.

Dispositioning sucks so bad, we call it dispositioning! Candidates don’t call it dispositioning. The real world doesn’t call it dispositioning. It’s called, “sorry, you suck, we selected someone we liked way, way better than you”.

So, what can you do about it?

First, you must understand why it is you suck at this. The majority of the people in the world hate conflict. They’ll do anything to avoid it. Telling someone they won’t get a job they applied for, that they truly believe they’re the best for, is big time conflict! HR and Talent Acquisition professionals based on their career path, are probably even at a higher percentage of being conflict avoidant.

Once you come to grips with this, you can design a dispositioning process that actually works for both sides. The other part is to understand the goal of dispositioning is to not make someone happy or satisfied because they won’t be, it’s to inform and educate. Your measures, then, around dispositioning measure those facts, not satisfaction.

I’ve never met someone who didn’t get a job they really wanted and they were ‘satisfied’ or ‘happy’. No, they were pissed and couldn’t understand why. This is why dispositioning, and the measurement of, is so difficult.

Here’s what I would do: 

  1. Set realistic goals around dispositioning. “We will let each person know if they got the job or didn’t within one week of the position being filled.”
  2. Find a process that communicates this message in the best way for the level of position and interaction with the organization. Mass apply positions with no interview, probably is best through email or SMS. High-level white collar job that went three interviews deep, yeah, that gal better receive a phone call and explanation.
  3. Pick people to communicate that have been trained on how to give dispositioning feedback to candidates.
  4. Let everyone know in your company how this looks, since most of your best hires come through referrals, most of your worst dispositions come through referrals.
  5. Spell out your dispositioning process to candidates up front.

Moneyball Rules: Offering More Experienced Workers Less Money!

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For years I’ve been trying to get people to understand this Moneyball concept as it relates to hiring, but few really listen. I know you saw the movie, Moneyball, where a major league baseball general manager finds success by signing and drafting ‘undervalued’ players. The players are undervalued for a number of reasons, it doesn’t matter, what matters he was able to get talent on at a discount rate!

Don’t you want to hire employees at a discount rate!?

Hired.com recently came out with a survey that once again demonstrates the most undervalued talent in any market are older workers, 50 years old and up. Apparently, once you become 50 years old, you start becoming worthless! Don’t kill the messenger, “you” are the ones saying this:

Basically, our average salary offer increases every single year of age. It makes sense because as you age, you gain more experience, more experience is more valuable. Or is it?

The chart, also, shows that once a worker turns 50 years old or so, employers (but not you…) start offering those workers less money, even though they have more experience!

Why!?

This has nothing to with wages! This is pure age bias shown towards younger workers. We believe, even older hiring managers, that once someone gets to a certain age, and Hired.com shows us that age to be 50 years old, older workers start losing their effectiveness even as they gain experience.

Somehow, in our minds, that 35-year-old, with three screaming kids and soccer practice four nights a week, is more effective than the 50-year-old with no kids at home, who is willing to work wherever and whenever you need them.

So, now you can play Moneyball!

You already know that most employers in the world hate old people. Thus, there are tons of gray hairs limping around out there willing to take all of your crappy low-ball offers, and they’re probably more loyal for those low wages then any younger worker you have on staff.

Yeah, for capitalism! You get great talent at low rates. Who needs H1B’s when we have old people!

“Well, Tim, it’s not about age bias! It’s about fit and culture and inclusi… I mean, we hire the best available candidate for the job!”

I’m sure you do.

Your reality is as hiring gets tighter, you can continue to overpay for younger talent with less experience, or you can pay a cheaper wage for more experience. Sooner or later, someone is going to ask the right questions. Are you going to have the right answer?

 

America First: The White Collar Workers Who Got Outsourced

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Your liberal friends want you to believe everyone who voted for Trump are racist, low paid, middle-aged white dudes from the Midwest. It’s nice and clean when you put it into that box. It fits the narrative they are selling really well.

 They don’t want you to know about the black female in California who lost her high paying salaried job to an H1B worker. Or the Asian-American male and female who lost their jobs, as well. Or the 60-year-old plus Hispanic male who lost his job. Those folks also are hoping ‘America First’ takes off.

This from the New York Times (I think this is still ‘real’ news, the NY Times?):

Audrey Hatten-Milholin, 54, was notified in July that she would be laid off from the University of California, San Francisco, at the end of February after 17 years in its technology department. Along with eight others, she filed a complaint in November with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, charging that replacing her and others with “significantly younger, male” workers “who will then perform the work overseas” was discriminatory.

“We are at a disadvantage as Americans,” Ms. Hatten-Milholin said. “They look at it like, where can we get it cheaper? And for U.C., it’s not here.”

From the same article:

In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries.

After 11 years working in the I.T. department of Northeast Utilities, a Connecticut-based company now named Eversource Energy, Craig Diangelo was among 220 employees laid off in 2014. Before leaving the company, he was told he needed to train his replacement if he wanted to receive his severance.

Mr. Diangelo, who is now 64 and was receiving $130,000 a year in salary and bonus, said he trained an employee from the Indian outsourcing firm Infosys who was an H-1B visa holder making $60,000 a year. There was also a team of workers in India making $6,000 a year that shadowed him on the computer.

There’s a reason Tech companies are screaming as loud as they can for the current administration to expand the H1B program and it’s not because they can’t find candidates for their jobs. The candidates are there, but the companies don’t want to pay the salaries of the American candidates who are available!

About half of all the H1B’s issued annually go to outsourcing firms. What are those? These are basically companies who perform modern day indentured servitude. They find a foreign worker with great skills who desperately wants to come to America, pay them a very good rate as compared to where they are coming from, but much less than a similar American worker. Since the outsourcing company holds the H1B, they basically have this person at the lower rate for six years.

The tech companies get great talent, for a much lower wage than a similar American worker. Everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone. Miss Hatten-Milholin and Mr. Diangelo from above, they’re not too happy, they are really hoping this America First thing takes off.

If you really dig into what the new administration is trying to do with the H1B program it’s not to eliminate it, it’s to bring it up to an equal footing of the American worker. If the American worker gets paid $100K to do the job, you also have to pay the H1B worker $100K for the same job. The theory being if everything is equal American companies will hire American workers. Or, in the case where a true shortage exists, then hiring H1B workers will make sense without limits.

Ah, equality, it’s what I love about America. There are at least two sides to every story, this side rarely gets shared.

HR and TA Technology You’ll Fall In Love With!

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Happy Valentine’s Day! I have a gift for you!

My friend, President of Recruiting Daily, and super brilliant HR Technologist, William Tincup puts together a quarterly list of HR and TA technology that he loves titled: 100+ HR and Recruiting Technologies Worth Watching. I get so many great ideas of companies off his list to demo, I wanted to share it with you, and if you’re smart, you’ll go follow William and get his updates to this list on a quarterly basis.

Some of these companies are well known, some I haven’t even heard about, but if William tells me to take a look, I take a look!

Here’s my recommendation. You know where your HR and TA tech stack are failing. Demo one company a month in your weak areas. These demos will show you a few things. First, you’ll see what’s possible. Second, you’ll get to see how other companies are doing the same thing, only better. Finally, you’ll probably get some ideas of how to do your stuff better, with or without the technology.

Either way, you win.

If you want to give me a gift, please send me a note once you demo’d one of these companies and let me know what you think! The sharing of information between peers is the real power.

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