The Ultimate Gift Guide for Boss’s Day! #MakeBossesGreatAgain

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Does anyone really celebrate National Boss’s Day?  It seems like something made up by some drunk employees one night and then the next day they realized it went too far!

What’s next National “White Man’s” Day? Oh wait, my black friends, women friends, Native American friends, Hillary, etc. say that’s every day! Or was that last week for Columbus Day? I get confused, they keep changing what we can and can’t celebrate.

I have to say I’ve been a ‘boss’ for (well, let’s face it I was born a ‘boss’!) twenty-some years and the only Boss’s Day gift I’ve ever gotten was being taken out to lunch back in the 90’s! Ever since then I was told it was a bad thing to be a boss. I needed to be a leader and leaders don’t get gifts, we give gifts!

I can’t enjoy being white. I can’t enjoy being male. I can’t enjoy being a boss. The struggle is real!

So, since I can’t enjoy Boss’s Day I decided to develop a list of gifts I would like to receive on Boss’s Day is we lived in let’s say Trump’s America! I’m sure part of his political platform is to Make Bosses Great Again!

The Ultimate Boss Gift Guide for Bosses Day:

– Free Back Massage Coupons! Can you imagine anything more magical than giving your well-respected boss a nice good old fashioned in office back rub! Yeah, I thought so!

– Liquor! Hey, this boss in-office bar doesn’t stock itself! Top shelf don’t try and drop off anything you’d find on the rail, no boss wants second tier liquor!

– A nice tie! Just kidding, you should be fired if you give your boss a tie on Boss’s Day! Unless that tie comes with an invitation to tie you up! Now we’re talking boss language!

– Signed copy of “Mean Business” by Chainsaw Al Dunlap!  You kids might have to look up the career of Chainsaw Al, it’s brilliant and inspiring for real bosses. Every boss loves a good bookshelf filled with books they haven’t read but one that scares the hell out of any employee who sees the titles!

– Your Employee of the Month parking spot! Just kidding, again! Ha! Suckers, I park in covered parking or the driver drops me off up front. Keep your Row 1 parking spot, your 2007 Honda Civic looks really nice there.

Boss’s Day! It seems like it only comes around once a year. I’m not quite sure how that happened, you would think bosses would have made it monthly!?

So, remember today isn’t about you, it’s about your Boss! Make them feel special. Treat them with respect. Kiss the ring.

It’s Super Hard to Write a Cool Job Posting!

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Almost every solid TA pro and leader I know wants to have cool, hip, on fleek, whatever new saying the kids on Snap are saying, type job postings. What most organizations end up with is still the old written job description, KSAs, boring I just feel asleep same posting as they always have had.

The main problem is you usually have some over-conservative lady in a cat sweater cardigan who a tiny ounce of power and believes you adding the word “crazy” to your job posting will get you put in prison. True Fact: I’ve been in the HR/TA game for twenty years and still to this day I have never seen anyone go to prison for getting ‘crazy’ with job postings!

I even, yes this is true, saw one company not put “EOE” on their job posting! Yep, no prison! Not even a fine! No grounding. Nothing!

Still, most of us struggle to do something about our crappy job postings and job descriptions. Well, Apple tried to do something! They got creative, kudos for that, but sometimes being creative and HR don’t mix well. Apple’s attempt was to create “Apple’s Orchard” (see what happens when HR and Creative get together! Lame city!) to attempt to recruit entry-level marketing professionals to Apple.

Because you know what’s really hard to do!? Get entry level marketing grads to want to come to work for Apple! Here’s how it sounded:

“The moment is now. Throw everything you know out the window. All in. Head first. Join the Orchard. If you’re lucky enough to make the cut, expect to surround yourself with like-minded souls who are as terrified and excited as you are. Be part of a hand-picked team with a plethora of talent. Kick ass together. Panic together. Grow together. Work alongside the brains of all the iconic work you love from Apple. Watch and learn. Trust your gut. Challenge our ways. Have an impact on everything you touch. Be prepared to stumble and fumble and embarrass yourself. It will be messy, and it won’t be pretty at times, but if you stick together as a team, you’ll build a special bond and something truly great will come out of it all. Take it from us. It’s the only way. Does this whole proposal sound crazy to you? Good. We like crazy.”

“We live crazy!” Like certifiably crazy? No, wait, I’m asking for a friend, who’s locked up..

Apple was forced to take down the land sight almost immediately after complaints started raining down on them like dollar bills at a strip club where you took the new entry level marketing recruits to show them how cool you were.

It’s kind of creepy and overzealous, right? I’ll give them credit for trying to be creative. Apple found out what most of us find out. Writing really good, creative, engaging, funny, endearing, job postings are really freaking hard! 99.9% of TA and HR pros will never be able to do this. My advice is to go out and hire real creative types to do this work, don’t kill yourself trying to do it yourself.

 

 

5 Steps to Becoming the Most Liked HR Pro Ever!

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The old adage “I’d rather be respected than liked” was made up by people who didn’t have any friends!  And it’s been perpetuated for centuries by HR Pros who didn’t think it was professional to have friends in their organizations.  “I’m not their friend, Tim, I’m in HR and there is a reason we lock the doors to our department!”

I look it this a bit differently. Make friends first.  That is all.  No, “then” or “after that”, just make friends.  Do you know why HR Pros don’t make friends with employees? Yes, you do, it’s because “We don’t want to fire our friends!” or “We need to remain impartial” or “I’m stupid” (I made that last one up, which if your stupid you probably didn’t know).

The reality is, we do things attempting to stop stuff that probably will never happen.  When is the last time you truly had to fire a friend?  “Never – because I don’t have friends that work for me!” No, really, when? Most of us would say, “Never”.

The problem with not allowing yourself to be friends with non-HR employees is that you lose a major source of influence within your organization.  Also, it sucks eating at your desk every day.  And you decrease your eventual dating pool. But, really it’s the influence!  So, here are 5 steps you can do to be more liked and make more friends at work:

1.  Stop being a know it all.  HR people act like they created Congress, everything is legal this or legal that. Stop it! Be normal. 99% of stuff HR thinks might happen, doesn’t happen. Trying to mitigate 100% of the risk in your organization makes people hate you and it doesn’t help you do your job better.

2. Make a fool out of yourself once in a while.  You’re not that important that you have to act like Mr. Manners all the time. Having employees laugh at you because you did something silly, foolish and/or crazy, will help them believe you might be normal.

3. Hang out with the smokers! Let’s face it smokers are cool and know everything that goes on in your organization – you want them as friends.  I don’t smoke because it’s gross, smells and will kill you, but I love hanging with smokers, especially if they have one of those voice boxes they talk out of!

4. Go out to Lunch with Non-HR Employees.  Preferably not with the smokers because that isn’t appetizing at all.

5. Kiss another employee on the mouth at the office Christmas party! Kidding, just making sure you were paying attention.  Don’t do this, unless you’re really drunk and want to leave a legacy. Here’s the real #5 – Spend 50% of your time away from your desk visiting employees and hiring managers, even the ones you don’t like.  This will change your professional life forever.

Being liked in HR is important it allows you to do your job in a much more efficient manner than when people don’t want you around.  It’s not about respect – you can have both – and given the choice of having respect and being hated or having respect and being liked – well, let’s just say I hang out with smokers.

The Worst Hire You Can Ever Make

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A crazy thing happens almost every day in professional sports, and it’s the one thing that separates great teams from the pack. Talent selection will make or break a team’s success and in professional sports, it’s about getting the right talent for the right price.

The problem with most professional sports team, regardless of the sport, is they continually try to improve their roster incrementally. “Oh, let’s pick up Pitcher A because he’s a little better than Pitcher B”.  Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

That’s the real issue!

The worst hire you can ever make is one that doesn’t solve your problem but just make it a little better. “We suck at sales, let’s hire Tim, he’s not great, but he’s better than Bob.” Wonderful, now you only slightly suck less at sales!

Never make a hire that doesn’t solve your problem completely that you are having in that specific position. Upgrading doesn’t always fix problems, and many times it actually continues your main problem longer instead of fixing it completely. We have this belief

We have this belief  that all we need to do is continue to get a little better each day, each week, each month, until we eventually have fixed it. The problem is that this isn’t how most problems are actually solved, by getting a little bit better over time. Most problems are fixed by implementing one solution that solves the problem.

It’s basically this crappy failure paradox we continue to get sold by seemingly everyone with a platform. “Just keep failing and eventually you’ll find success!” Which is complete and utter bullshit, but we LOVE hearing this!

In hiring, you can’t keep failing and find success. You will actually find failure even faster and be out of business. In hiring, it’s critical you find success and hire the right people who will solve your problem the first time, not just make you a little better.

Another great example of this is in the NFL. It’s critical in the NFL that you have a great quarterback, but they’re extremely hard to find. So, if you don’t have an elite quarterback, most teams will continue to try and upgrade with average quarterbacks.

The better advice is work with what you have and make it the best you can, until you get the opportunity to hire, or draft, that one great quarterback that can truly change your franchise. Constant change and churn, just to get a little better, is slowly killing your organization.

Make great hires. Organizational change hires. Individuals who have the ability to make things right. Too often, and we’ve all been there, we make hires that feel safe, knowing they won’t hurt us, but they probably won’t help us much either. Those are the worst hires you can make.

 

 

Women in HR Technology Summit #HRTechConf

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Last week I was at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago and when I arrived on Tuesday afternoon there was this buzz in the air and folks talking about this great pre-conference event called “Women in HR Technology“.

Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference, was behind the creation and had this to say prior:

“In the traditionally male-dominated technology industry, there are many successful women leaders introducing new ideas, developing transformative solutions and leading their companies to success. We are proud to hold this long overdue ‘Women in HR Technology’ event, which will not only showcase more than 15 of the most successful women changing the industry, but also provide new insights for how other women can create their own professional roadmaps.”

The agenda was loaded with the leading women from various HR technology companies from across the globe. I spoke with a couple of the speakers including, Brynne Herbert, founder, and CEO, of MOVE Guides. Brynne shared with me that women trying to start their own firms in HR Technology have some serious challenges in that only 7% of Series A funded companies in HR Tech are founded by women, and that number drops to 3% that make it to Series B funding!

Herbert shared with me the three main reasons she believes women backed companies in HR technology struggle:

  1. Females are more risk adverse and starting your company is a risky proposition.
  2. Females don’t tend to be the ones to brag themselves up and when you’re starting a company it’s an important part of making your company success.
  3. You must be able and willing to evangelize your idea against all odds. Many people will tell you that it won’t work, and you have to truly believe it will.

Hebert also mentioned that another challenge is most new HR technology companies rely on VC-backed funding and only about 8% of VC’s are run by women. Like most things in life, we tend to back that what we feel most comfortable with. That makes is super hard for women to get backed by male-run VC’s.

Many people don’t know, but I’m extremely passionate about the concept of women in leadership. I was raised by a single mother who started a technology company back some 35 years ago when no women did this, and my master’s thesis for my HR degree was a study on women and leadership.

It was a big step for the HR Technology Conference to first recognize this issue and second make actually begin to do something about it. I look forward to seeing what will come out of this and I was told by Boese and Herbert that they definitely want to continue the conversation beyond just this one summit. As soon as those next steps become solidified I’ll make sure to share how you can also become part of this conversation.

LinkedIn “Open Candidates” Is Going To Get People Fired

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By now you’ve heard the news coming out last week’s LinkedIn Talent Connect where LI announced a new feature called “Open Candidates”. Here’s how LinkedIn explains Open Candidates:

Open Candidates is a new feature that makes it easier to connect with your dream job by privately signaling to recruiters that you’re open to new job opportunities. You can specify the types of companies and roles you are most interested in and be easily found by the hundreds of thousands of recruiters who use LinkedIn to find great professional talent…

To enable the feature, simply turn sharing “On” and fill in some brief information about the types of roles you are interested in. Who among us hasn’t, at some point, tried to find work without our boss finding out? Now, you can privately indicate to recruiters on LinkedIn without worrying. We will hide the Open Candidates signal from recruiters at your company or affiliated company recruiters.

So, now if you’re a LI user you can let companies know you’re full on looking to change jobs without having to post it in your profile title and let the entire world know you’re looking.

So, is this a good thing? 

I have some feelings on this:

– First, this is brilliant from employer’s perspective! I can now call my buddy over at XYZ company, have him pull up his LI account and tell me exactly which employees of mine are looking for jobs. I can then pull up my account and tell her which of her employees are looking.

– If you want to turn on the “Open Candidates” feature in LI it would be best to assume that your organization’s recruiting/hr team will find out you’re looking like I mentioned above!

– Most organizations freak out when they find that their employees are out looking for jobs on company time. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, I’m just using LI at work because I’m ‘professionally networking’, not looking for a job!” It’s another when they know you’ve turned on the feature and are actually getting paid to look for your next job. That usually gets you fired.

Now, I’m sure LI will say, “Tim is just saying something that very few recruiters will actually do.” They might be right, but it was the actual first thing that came into my mind when heard of the new feature. How to get around it, and I was at HR Tech with other TA and HR leaders who felt the same way.

TA Leaders love this feature! For the first time, they’ll now actually get to find out for real what employees of theirs are actively looking and actually doing it on company time.

So, Open Candidates is not something you should fear as an employer. Embrace it! This might be best new feature LI has launched in years for employers to finally know which of their employees are actually on the market. It’s brilliant!

Check back next week when I start my blog series on how to have conversations with all of your employees who you find on LI actively looking to leave your organization!

2016 HR Technology Conference Themes #HRTechConf

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The 2016 HR Technology Conference is in the books!  I’ve said this a number of times, but it’s my favorite conference of the year. I love the interaction between attendees and all the great technology vendors at the conference, the energy is unlike any other conference on the planet.

Each year there are major themes that come out of HR Tech. Many we know even going in. We knew this year would be the year of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. You could not talk to a vendor that didn’t have some take on this. The problem is still what everyday HR and TA leaders believe A.I. is, is not what you’re being sold.

Here are the themes I took away from HR Tech 2016:

1. Confusion by the buyer is at an all-time high and getting worse. This is going to be a problem for vendors and most don’t get it. The main point of confusion is that so many of the technologies are now overlapping each other and claiming to do what the other does, but it’s usually to a lesser degree. The buyer is the one having to try to figure this out, and they can’t. That usually turns into a “no buy”.

2. A Talent Acquisition Tech Stack is starting to emerge and the HR Tech Stack (HRIS core providers) folks are trying to stop this from happening by offering up their own watered-down, vanilla version of what you really need.  The reality is today, HRIS providers don’t offer up the same level of TA technology that you can get from TA-specific tech vendors. What I haven’t seen yet is the TA Tech vendor community providing a model of what that TA Tech stack looks like – the first one to do that effectively will have a huge advantage in positioning.

3. Conferences, not just HR Tech, have a real problem that needs to be addressed and it doesn’t seem to me like anyone cares. Sessions are lightly attended. This has been a criticism of HR Tech in the past, but I think the HR Tech team addressed it by providing really strong content. The sessions I attended were really good, but not seen by most people. This is a problem because practitioners won’t keep coming if they think they’re going to sit in a mostly empty room. They want to feel the same energy as those folks on the expo floor, which happens when you have full session rooms.  Right now conference organizers don’t view this as a problem because vendors are falling over themselves to shell out more and more money to attend and sponsor. That bubble will eventually burst.

4. HR and TA Leaders still have this belief that you must have one system talking to each other at the enterprise level.  I heard more and more examples of this belief getting blown up and enterprise-level organizations starting to use the latest greatest HR and TA Saas-based software on the market. I don’t need by TA stack and HR stack connected for it to be great. Onboading can be my bridge point and any good BI software will pull the data I need from both.

5. If you are a CHRO of an organization that has 5000+ employees and you don’t have HR Data pros on your team, you’re losing out to your peer group and you have no idea why. Do yourself a favor and take a deep dive into this side of HR. Organizations are transforming themselves because of what their HR and TA data is telling them, and those not utilizing this information are falling behind fast.

Next year HR Tech 2017 will be back in Las Vegas for a three run.  If you haven’t ever gone to the HR Technology Conference and you’re an HR and/or TA Tech geek, it’s a must attend conference.  You can spend three straight days on the expo floor and not come close to seeing all the tech that’s available, and there are tons of great sessions as well.

HR Tech in 5 Minutes! #HRTechConf

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Gang! I’m at ‘The’ HR Technology Conference this week in Chicago. Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the conference, has added some really exciting and fun content to the program and I attended a session yesterday called “Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company”.

It’s a Shark Tank-style presentation where 8 up and coming technologies were picked from an applicant list of 150 to present to a panel of HR Tech experts and ultimately the crowd voted on who they believe is the next great HR Technology. It was fast and furious, and actually fun to watch!

The companies that got chosen were all winners (that’s what we say when we feel bad for the losers!):

  • Invesitpro – Employee relations investigation software. Not sexy, but the most practical of the bunch and something almost everyone I spoke to said, “I’d use that!”
  • Clinch – Candidate CRM, microsite builder, powerful recruitment communication tool.
  • Qwalify – Spoke about their new product called Talent Dojo – scalable two-way communication to find out if a candidate is the right fit for you, and you for them.
  • RolePoint – Employee referral automation talking about their new product for internal Talent Mobility.
  • LifeWorks – Employee engagement app and recognition.
  • Chemistry – Candidate assessment using unstructured data, so basically assessing your candidates without making them take an assessment.
  • Click Boarding – Onboarding, but very personalized.
  • HighGround – Performance management reinvented, very cool UX.

Here’s what we learned: 

1. 5 minutes is too short to try and do a demo in front of a giant crowd. It turns into people talking way too fast and flying through screens and seems confusing.

2. If you only have 5 minutes you need to get three things out: 1) Tell me what you actually do and how I will use you in my daily life. 2) Give me your twitter name so I can tweet about you at the conference during this session – you get 5 minutes of free publicity, help me out! 3) Invite me to a full demo later to see the full show. None of the 8 did this. 6 of the 8 I’m still not sure what they actually do!

3. Love this format and the audience loved the format. Most practitioners won’t come to your booth for a full demo, but they do want to know what’s out there and if they have an interest in finding out more about you. I could see this going to ten or twenty minutes and being even better!

4. If you only have 5 minutes, it’s a risk to rely on technology to tell your story! (Which is very ironic being that this is a technology conference!) But the reality is you’re relying on conference wifi, other people, a foreign environment.  The people who fared best just told a 5-minute story about what it is they solve.

5. British, Irish, Australian accents play really well with an American audience. We believe those accents are smarter, even when they’re not! So, even if you’re an American company, find a Brit to get on stage and sell your product!

Check out all of the eight vendors highlighted in the session. All the tech was awesome and did different things.

T3 – @TextRecruit

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This week on T3 I take review the talent acquisition software TextRecruit. TextRecruit is the first centralized platform designed exclusively for recruiting teams to assist in texting, engaging and measuring the effectiveness of texting candidates.

TextRecruit does what most of our ATS systems won’t, which is give you an effective and easy to use platform to reach out and engage with candidates via text. If we know anything right now it’s that candidates are getting more and more savvy to recruitment communication. Emails and phones calls, which are the two standard ways to communicate with candidates get less effective each year.

Text response to candidates continues to have a high response rate, quite simply, because most recruiters still don’t use it. Let’s face it, email has made recruiters lazy, and more and more candidates would prefer to communicate via text or some other form of short range messaging.

5 Things I really like about TextRecruit:

1. TextRecruit makes it super easy for your recruiters to mass text (create a messaging campaign), personalized text messaging to candidates and make each candidate feel like they were the only one being texted by your recruiter.

2. TextRecruit gives your entire team one platform to text from, gather responses, measure campaign effectiveness, etc. You can also embed unique URLs to drive traffic to specific landing pages, jobs, Google maps for interviews, etc.

3. Compliance with texting is still a new frontier. If your recruiters are using their own phones, or individual work phones, you have very little insight or control of what’s going on. Using a platform like TextRecruit makes all of this heartburn go away! Messages can’t be deleted from the system, so you see everything your recruiters send, candidate responses, and the entire message chain between the two.

4. TextRecruit Chrome Extension easily and instantly allows you to text candidates from LinkedIn. For those recruiters who are LI super users this is an awesome tool.

5. With traditional response rates hovering anywhere between 10-20% (on the high side with email), TextRecruit clients are currently seeing response rates, on average, of 37%. That’s giant!

I’ve been a huge fan of using text messaging in recruiting for the past few years, but it’s always been a struggle with most ATS technologies on the market. TextRecruit seems to have this figured out completely and works well in conjunction with any ATS you’re using.

TextRecruit also has some other pieces to their platform to check inclusing TextApply (self explanatory) and TextHR (an employee engagement and communication tool via text). TextRecruit is a price per recruiter model based per month.

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 HR, 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 – send me a note.

Cutting Corners Equals Better Performance

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So, there’s this famous behavioral learning study that gets performed over and over by various researchers. It’s basically the lever study in which if you learn to pull the lever something good happens. The classic is usually a monkey and the treat is a banana. Monkey learns to pull the lever and they get a treat.

The question always is, how long does it take or how many steps, can we train them in some way to do this quicker. Recently, a similar study was done with children and dogs. The researchers found they could train the children in five steps to they would get pretty good at pulling the lever and getting the treat.

The dogs, on the other hand, were another story! You see, dogs can be trained very well, but their natural instinct is not to follow rules, but to find the fastest way to gratification. The dogs mostly just went right for the box, tore off the lid, and got the snacks. Guess what? You don’t have to push down a lever if you rip off the top!

Dogs are good at cutting corners.

When I worked for Applebee’s we constantly spent time and resources training cooks how to cook new menu items. We built entire programs, did training sessions, had rewards, would go back and constantly check and test. It was critical that the Tequila Lime Chicken you ordered in Detroit was the same Tequila Lime Chicken you ordered in San Diego!

Problem was, the best cooks would always find ways to cut corners and do it as well, if not better, and faster! We would have it timed out and stepped out to the second and the data would start rolling in and show us that some kitchen in a location in Indiana is cooking it 45 seconds faster than everyone else!

It was our cooks that found if you take a skillet, turn it upside down over a piece of cooking chicken, you can cook that piece of chicken like a third faster without losing any moister or taste! At first, we pushed back in operations and sent memos out to not do this! It wasn’t “procedure”! Not soon after our test kitchen sent out specs on how to ‘dome’ chicken using an upside down skillet!

Cutting corners became the new procedure!

Organizations usually have an issue with folks who cut corners. It’s believed that cutting corners will lead to lower quality, less customer satisfaction, etc.

To me, many times, cutting corners is the first indicator that you’ve loaded in a bunch of waste into your process! Many times the people cutting corners are showing you there might be a better way of doing things, a faster way, an easier way. I’m a big believer in let’s not make this harder than we have to

Want to increase performance in your organization? Look for those cutting corners and determine are they just being lazy, or have they figured out a better way!