How an HR Leader Would Help Trump Get Better

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By now, if you didn’t see the debates live, you’ve heard that Trump, for the most part, was unprepared and got beat pretty good by Hillary. (BTW – the media, and Clinton’s marketing machine have conditioned me to do this – I call Donald Trump – “Trump” and I call Hillary Clinton – “Hillary” – why is that? Because we have a negative reaction to “Clinton” based on Bill!).

All the time I’m watching this butt whipping I thinking to myself if I had an employee who just performed that badly how would I coach them, pick them up from an HR perspective. Here’s what I think most HR leaders would do with Trump:

1. Pull them into a closed door meeting and say something like, “So, tell me, how did ‘you’ feel like it went last night?” Inevitably, Trump, being Trump, would say something stupid like “I was Yuuuge!” or some sexist remark, which would help the HR Leader frame the rest of how this discussion would go.

2. The next statement from HR would most likely be, “Well, the feedback I’m getting is that it didn’t go so well”. It’s a safe statement, non-confrontational, allows us to keep the energy and passion down so the ’employee’ doesn’t get worked up and this gets out of control.

3. “Let’s talk about your preparation. What did you do to prepare for this event?” Now we are getting into helping the employee understand where their performance started going south. You didn’t prepare, it showed up on game day, we need to correct this. Unfortunately, you’re dealing with a high performer, or at least that’s what Trump would consider himself, so ‘preparation’ isn’t something he needs, he’s a natural, he’s always on, he’s a closer.

4. Ugh, so you’re dealing with unreasonable expectations of their own performance (sound familiar!?). At this point who have two choices, either you’re willing to except this performance again, or you need it to change. Let’s assume you want it to change.  You have to define to Trump what would success look like, but first draw a line in the sand that what the past performance was, was not success. “Look, you got your butt handed to you by a ‘girl’ (I like to twist the knife a little, what can I say!) we can’t have this happen again and it’s going to start with preparation!”

5. Now, HR being HR, they will want to give you some tool. Maybe online time management training, a life coach, or something else that will have little impact in actual performance, but make them feel like they really are moving the needle on performance.  Trump being Trump will take the easiest way out, I would guess life coach, as long as she is young, skinny and pretty.

6. Debate #2 happens and Trump does the exact same thing!!! No preparation and once again gets beat up by a girl and once again believes he did great!

7. Go to Step #1

Some will find this funny, some will find this as a painful reminder of their own performance management within their own organizations. Way too many organizations continue to just do the same thing over and over, expecting it to magically change, but it doesn’t.  Accountability happens when step #6 happens and instead of going back to step #1 to jump to step #8 and go back to the definition of success, what was missed and now what is the accountability factor that was agreed to.

Great performance management is comfortable until it has to be uncomfortable.

The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

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Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!

 

T3- Jobvite’s Annual Recruiter Nation Report

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Talent Acquisition software provider Jobvite released their annual Recruiter Nation 2016 report today. This report always has some gems I love to share and usually use in presentations throughout the year. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s report:

– 51% say that employment branding is their #1 investment that they will make in the next 12 months! In case you’re bad at math, that is over half! This doesn’t really speak to a “real” need for EB, it speaks to a lack of understanding of what their organization truly needs from TA. For most companies, this will be a waste of resources. An organization can be great at attracting talent with a brand no one knows. The fact that half of all organizations will have this as their #1 investment is a painful reality of a lack of great TA leadership in the industry.

– Internal hires (38%) are ranked highest quality by recruiters — followed closely by employee referrals (34%). I actually laughed out loud when I first read this! Really? I mean REALLY!? Internal hires rank as your highest quality? Well, isn’t that surprising…They better be your highest quality!!! They already work for you, Moron! Sometimes I just don’t get why we ask stupid questions. Another stat you might find surprising, water is wet! Also, stop giving internal recruiters credit for internal hires. They didn’t do anything to fill that job.

– According to recruiters, 43% of them rated diversity as somewhat or very important when making a hiring decision. But 40% of them were neutral about diversity and its influence. Want to know why your organization isn’t moving the needle on diversity recruitment? It’s this stat! Your recruiters hear that it’s important, but they don’t believe it’s important. Why? Because you don’t show them any internal statistics that more diverse work groups, in your own environment, perform better than those lacking diversity. Show them, or shut up.

– 60% of recruiters rate culture fit of highest importance when making a hiring decision — topped only by (you guessed it) previous job experience (67%)! What didn’t matter? Cover letters (26%), prestige of college (21%), and GPA (19%). Yep, all you haters that still think cover letters are a thing! They aren’t, go back to 1997.

– This year, recruiters are most focused on growing talent pipelines (57%) and the quality of their hires (56%). 

Can we be real for a second? I mean really, really!? You’all are pissing me off!

56% of Recruiters are concerned with Quality of Hire. That’s nice. Tell me how you measure that? Oh, it’s when a new hire stays 90 days in the job. That means quality? How does that align with the industry? Oh, you don’t know, because everyone measures QofH completely differently and it’s a freaking meaningless metric! I WANT TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD!

Quality of Hire is not a Recruiting metric. Quality of Hire is a hiring manager metric! It’s something that starts with TA, flows through HR, ends up in Performance Management and ultimately is tied to Hiring Manager decisions and their ability to develop and onboard new hires. TA has very little to do with quality of hire. TA is responsible for Quality of Source, that is a different thing.

So, just stop it. Stop doing this. You’re giving me an aneurysm!

And now back to the survey…

– 87% of Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, the largest of all networks. 67% of Candidates use Facebook to search for a job, the largest of all networks. Do you see a problem here?

Definitely, go download the report! It’s loaded with a ton of data that can help shape some of your TA decisions in the near future, or just get you to do more of what everyone else is doing because you were told by idiots like me it’s the new hottest thing on the market to do, and fun wasting most of your budget developing your brand no one will ever know about.

Exceptionalism is the New Normal

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It’s the fall HR and TA Conference season. Pretty much every single week between September and December you can find multiple HR and TA conferences to attend around the world. It’s a crazy business all fueled by vendor expo dollars, pseudo-thought leadership, and a professional desire to get away from the office for a few days.

The entire conference is built on this secret. The secret that all you have to do is show attendees how bad they suck and they’ll keep returning year after year! Part of that secret, though, is not flat out telling you that you suck, because, well, that would suck! It’s showing you how great everyone else is, so you feel like you suck in comparison!

“Holy crap, Google is now building their own genetically perfect mix-raced, mix-gendered employees that never call in sick! How are we ever going to compete with that? We need to get better! We better buy some more of this crap in the expo to help us catch up with Google!” 

When all you hear about is the greatest and top innovations in an industry, you begin to believe everyone else is there except us, we need to hurry and get there as well. The reality is, we are all so far from perfect it’s actually a little bit scary.

Exceptionalism is the concept that is everyone is great. If we are all this unique and perfect snowflakes, then none of us are really unique and perfect snowflakes. Meaning, if everyone is unique and perfect than that becomes the new normal, the new average.

This is best practice in HR and TA. Google’s innovation becomes Walmart’s best practice. If we are all doing the same thing, we are all average. They don’t tell you that when you book that $500 plane ticket and pay $1995 to attend the HR Universe Conference at the Best Western Plus in Biloxi, MS!

That’s not part of a conference value proposition! Hey, pay $4000 in travel and registration to be like everyone else! Unless, you feel like you’re first less than everyone else! The reality is 99% of TA and HR shops are all about the same. Some are better at certain things than others but then suck way worse at something else.

The truth is…

– Building great HR and TA isn’t about major change, it’s about continual, disciplined improvement and always striving to get better outcomes that your business needs for better results.

– Trying to keep up with the 1% will almost always get you fired as a leader because the majority of organizational leadership just don’t value being in the 1% enough to make that commitment to get there and you trying to push them there will wear thin.

– Most of you aren’t wired or willing to do what it will take to become a truly exceptional HR or TA shop. That takes major vision and major sacrifice to reach, and most of don’t have that level of vision or are willing to have that level of sacrifice individually, let alone both.

But, that message above, doesn’t sell conference passes! Telling you that you also can be a unique and perfect snowflake sells conference passes. You just need to trash your current tech stack and build something completely new, like Google!

 

Taylor Swift doesn’t believe in a 2 week notice. Should you?

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I’m a Taylor Swift fan. I love that everyone tries to bring her down and she just keeps rolling along writing breakup songs, dating again, writing more breakup songs, dating again, writing more breakup songs…you get the picture, I like breakup songs!

The one thing you don’t want to do if you’re close to Taylor Swift is wrong her in any way! If you do, know that will end badly for you and probably another hit record for her! Check out what happened when some of her dancers wanted to leave for another tour:

Apparently, three of Swift’s backup dancers had left her tour in 2013 to join pal Perry’s tour. All three had worked with Perry before they ever worked with Swift, and pretty much no one not intimately connected with either tour would’ve known the transaction had ever occurred until TMZ reported —in September 2014, a year later—that Swift was mightily ticked off by the dancers’ decision, firing them on the spot after they gave notice.

So, the dancers do what we tell them they should do, give your two-week notice. Taylor, like many employers today, accepts their resignation by kicking them out immediately!

That’s the big question today, isn’t it? As an employee, should you give the ‘standard’ two-week notice? As an employer, should you accept that two weeks or kick them curb like the unloyal swine they are!?

As with everything, it depends, right?

Here are my rules on two-week notices:

1. If the employee completely sucks and was basically dead-employee-walking, might as well thank them for nothing and have them leave immediately!

2. If your employer is evil, no need to really stay around for two weeks and be treated terribly.

The problem with both 1 and 2 is it takes a sane person to make this judgment. That’s the problem usually, bad employees and bad employers aren’t sane!  So, we probably need to add some other rules.

3. If the employee who gave two-weeks can cause harm to the organization by hanging around (recruiting other employees away, stealing trade secrets, messing up client relationships, etc.), even if they were a good employee, probably need to cut bait.

4. If you’re an average to above average employee and want to retain this relationship, you probably want to work out the two weeks.

5. Employees working out the two weeks notice know it’s tough not to look ahead. That being said, try and leave no surprises for anyone after you leave.

I still think most employers believe if you give a two-week notice, you should plan on working that out. You never know – read that again – YOU NEVER KNOW where you might end up in life and who you might run into. Skipping out on the two-week notice and be career limiting and you’ll never know how it might limit you!

On the employer side, if you decide to skip the two-week notice and kick a kid to the curb, I suggest, at a minimum, you should pay out that two weeks. I get that sometimes it just doesn’t work for you to keep someone around who has one foot out the door, but that might not be the case for everyone, so at least make them whole if you don’t want them around.

Free Agent Nation: Using Talent Assessments To Build Your Superteam

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Anyone else amazed by the USA performance at the Rio Olympic Games?  Just us?

If you’re responsible for hiring and developing people, then you’d love to build a dominating team of individuals like the USA Olympic Swimming and Women’s Gymnastics teams. But how do you do it?  Executives and hiring managers tell you that the world of talent selection and team building is more art than science. Susie the manager brags about her great “gut feelings” when she hires people.

Susie’s gut feel success rate?  Um, not so good.  You’d never put Susie in charge of our Olympic talent.

You need tools to help you pick more winners. Then it would be nice to use the same tools to maximize their chances for success in that freak show you call a company, right?

That’s why we’re back with our latest version of the FOT Webinar, brought to you by our friends at OutMatch. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the following goodies:

—How to research/implement assessments (and avoid getting sued) and sell the concept of leveraging external assessments to the company bigwigs. We’ll tell you how to vet assessment providers, figure out your biggest need, and partner with a firm to design an assessment process that works. Then we’ll give you the roadmap on how to get the buy-in you need to get this process started.

—How to use the profiles of your existing team to understand the candidates in your recruiting funnel that have the best chance at succeeding AND raising the overall performance of your team. You need performance.  You also need someone that can blend with the team you have and make it better.  We’ll show you how to use existing team profiles to spot the right fit.

—How to use your assessment platform to give your managers incredible leverage to onboard their new hires, with a focus on what makes each employee special – as well as what could hurt them in your unique culture.

—A roadmap for how your managers can embed behavioral observations into their performance coaching, with an eye on emphasizing each employee’s behavioral strengths while neutralizing the weaknesses that we all have.

Whether you need help getting started with or would like to do more with talent assessments once an employee has joined your company (90%+ of the world, btw), we’ve got something for you on this webinar.

Susie the manager isn’t bad, she’s just human. Join us on September 29th at 2pm ET (1pm Central, 11am Pacific) for Free Agent Nation – Using Talent Assessments to Build Your Superteam (Click to Register) and we’ll give you the plan to get started or do more with the assessments you already have!

Recruiting Secret #4

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #4

Hiring managers are more likely to hire someone who looks like them because there is a much less chance that the person they are hiring will ever accuse them of bias behavior.

Hiring managers in today’s employers are running scared! If I’m a male and I hire another male, I know that hire will never say I’m “Sexist”. If I’m a white dude and I hire another white dude, that hire won’t say I’m “racist”. Even though that behavior is probably indicative.

Hiring managers (male and female) are more likely to hire someone who looks most like them because they believe it’s a ‘safe’ hire. Safe they won’t get themselves in some kind of trouble.

 

T3 – The Next Great HR Technology Company

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The HR Technology Conference is coming in a few weeks and they just announced the list for a competition they are having this year called “The Next Great HR Technology Company”. Here’s what is, from HR Technology Chair, Steve Boese:

“Each year, the HR Tech Conference puts the spotlight on the latest innovations to emerge in the HR technology marketplace. As the industry as a whole continues to evolve and new challenges arise, there are many startups introducing game-changing solutions to help HR address the growing complexity. The ‘Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company’ session will examine the offerings from some of the industry’s most promising startups, and allow attendees themselves to vote for companies they think introduce the most cutting-edge solutions to enhance how they do their jobs as HR professionals.”

So, who are these ‘startups’?

Clickboarding: is a comprehensive employee onboarding software focused on the new hire experience by not only leveraging cutting-edge cloud technology but also embracing regulatory compliance and providing a Candidate Care services team as an extension of the company.

Clinch is a Recruitment Marketing and CRM platform designed to centralize a company’s career pages, recruitment marketing, and talent network initiatives, enabling employers to source, identify, understand, engage and convert the best candidates – including the 90 percent of those who demonstrate an interest in their company but don’t apply.

Highground enables organizations to modernize performance development and engagement for a more productive, motivated workforce.

InvestiPro is a fully-automated workplace investigation solution designed to simplify the way employers conduct investigations.

LifeWorks will present its industry-first wellness and engagement platform that makes employees Feel Loved in any organization.

Qwalify will present its solution, Talent Dojo: a professional digital networking platform that is the evolution of talent engagement for recruitment.

RolePoint will present its leading internal talent mobility tool to deliver a streamlined career progression experience for employees and enable talent development teams to improve retention across their entire organization.

The Chemistry Group will present a combination of its technology and award-winning intellectual property allows its global clients to predict the future performance of potential and existing employees to an unparalleled level of accuracy.

I’ve known some of these technologies for a few years, others I’ve never heard of, so I’m really interested to see all of them, and then see what the HR Tech audience believes is the best Next Great HR Technology! Especially since all of these techs really don’t compete against each other.

For other HR Tech geeks like me, these types of competitions are awesome! You get to see a bunch of great tech in a small amount of time and you don’t feel like you’re being sold something!

Can a Better Lunch Experience Lower Employee Turnover?

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You might have seen this recently, a sixteen-year-old girl from California, Natalie Hampton, developed an App called, “Sit With Us”. The App basically lets kids know who in the lunch room would be open to sitting with them. She came up with it as a way to help stop bullying:

“At my old school, I was completely ostracized by all of my classmates, and so I had to eat lunch alone every day. When you walk into the lunchroom and you see all the tables of everyone sitting there and you know that going up to them would only end in rejection, you feel extremely alone and extremely isolated, and your stomach drops. And you are searching for a place to eat, but you know that if you sit by yourself, there’ll be so much embarrassment that comes with it because people will know and they’ll see you as the girl who has nowhere to sit.”

Through circumstance, she gets to go to a new school and has a different experience. She is now accepted, she has people to eat lunch with, but she remembers how having no one made her feel, and comes up with this idea for the App.

She’s awesome. The world needs more Natalie’s!

This idea has got me thinking about how this could have an impact at our workplaces as well. We already know that having a best friend at work increases tenure and happiness at work. Having someone to go to lunch with is usually the first step in making a new friend!

The tech is simple which is why it makes so much sense. We go through so much effort and resources to get people hired. We provide great orientations and onboarding. Then we kind of leave it up to them to figure the rest out. We all probably think the same thing, “Well, we’re all adults, go make friends!” or “Their boss, and the team, will make them feel welcome.”

Then, we hear from their boss that they put in their notice and we’re shocked.

A workplace version of “Sit With Us” could really help individuals in organizations quickly feel like part of the team. Like they have a place. Like they found ‘their’ place at your organization. The best hires are the ones we never have to make.

I see tons of technology in HR and TA and I’ve even seen a few employee communication technologies that could probably be used in this capacity but weren’t designed to just do this. (If you know of one, please share it in the comments so everyone can check it out!)

 

 

 

Recruiting Secret #5

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #5

I haven’t read a cover letter to a resume since 1999.

If you are sending a cover letter with your resume, the recruiter that is receiving that letter thinks you’re a moron. If you’re being told to develop and send a cover letter, the person telling you to do that is a moron.

Cover letters died when ATSs began accepting applications and resumes. At this point, even if you are able to upload a cover letter, no hiring managers are ever going to see that, and most recruiters will never read a sentence of it either!