The Gift of Desperation 

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Things are going pretty well. Very okay. Smooth. I’ve got no complaints. Just keeping the train on the tracks. We’re running a well-oiled machine. Things are humming along.

The sound of average is something we’ve gotten so use to hearing that we actually don’t even hear it any longer.

The calmness that surrounds average is warm and cozy, like an oversized extra-soft sweatshirt on a cool fall day.

We come in, we do our jobs, we go home.  We sleep well at night. Well, we at least sleep.

I have feeling true greatness doesn’t happen without a bit of desperation.  Your ass is on fire. You wake up in the middle of the night and you don’t know why, but you do.

Desperation is a gift to move you forward, for those who can handle it. Many can’t. Desperation will push some over the edge to give up or do stupid things. For many, it’s the push they need to finally do the thing they’ve wanted to do but were afraid to do.

Most of us will never really feel desperation. That you only have two choices, go backwards or fight like mad, claw, scrape, crawl to move forward.

Many will never see desperation as a gift, because many will not make it. It’s only those who make it past desperation that come to see it as a gift. As the push, they needed to overcome that obstacle in front of them and come out the other side stronger. For these fortunate few, desperation is a gift.

Is Your Average Cost-Per-Hire $4100? @SHRM

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SHRM Released their Human Capital Benchmark Report this past week and it’s loaded with a ton of metrics to compare your HR and TA operations against. The survey data comes from over 2,000 HR leaders and pros, and it’s pretty recent being collected earlier this year. Some interesting things I pulled from the report:

– Average cost of hire is $4100. This seemed high to me, but when you really analyze the cost of hire and add in the cost of your staff, benefits, technology, marketing, etc., it adds up quickly. Most organizations leave out the cost of staff when they figure the cost of hire and report lower costs. I like the number.

– 66% of organizations report to Not having a Succession Plan.  This number shocked me because I figured most organizations would just lie and say they have one, but we know the truth, most don’t! I tell HR Tech companies all the time, if you really want to make some money, figure out Succession, because normal HR leaders can’t.

– Only 55% of “Head’s of HR” report to the CEO or Owner. I would have thought this number would have been higher in the 85%-ish range. Looks like HR as a function still, has some proof-of-value to do when it comes to respect in reporting.

– $10,211 is the average HR-to-Expense per FTE. This is a great number to have when building budgets as a ballpark. Don’t get too crazy, though, the median is only $1,667. That means we have an industry within HR of the “Haves” and the “Have-Nots”, kind of like America!

– 61% of organizations offer Tuition Reimbursement. This just seems silly that it’s not in the 90’s. No one really uses this benefit, those that do stay for a lifetime, it’s a great selling tool because people think they’ll use it. It’s ridiculous only 61% of organizations have this, it almost costs you nothing long term.

– Average Time-to-Fill is 42 days! If you actually think this statistic is important you’re an idiot.  Taken out of context this metric is meaningless. 2000+ organizations, thousands of positions, hundreds of markets and industries. This number means nothing. Don’t pay attention to it and measure yourself against it.

– 66% of your employees participate in your 401K on average.  My goal is 100%.  It’s the one thing I know actually helps in retention, as those who participate in your retirement plan are less likely to leave your organization and have a longer tenure on average.

Click through the link above to get the report if you want all the detail, there’s a bunch more that I couldn’t fit in here and some other very interesting stuff.

One word of caution when measuring your organization and yourself against macro-data, realize you’re not ‘average’.  You are a unique and perfect butterfly. Just kidding, you’re actually less than average, statistically. Unless you’re lucky enough to work for a giant corporation with endless resources.

Great Talent Supports Great Talent

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Too often leaders put up with a great talent who’s shitty to other employees. The belief is that because the employee is so talented we should be willing to put up with how they treat others. It happens all the time in organizations! All. The. Time.

Ichiro Suzuki is a very successful Major League Baseball player for the Seattle Mariners who just hit his 3,000 hit in the major leagues, that just adds to his thousand plus hits he had in the Japanese professional baseball league. All those hits make him arguably the greatest hitter of all time at the professional level of baseball.

ESPN did an article about Ichiro recently as he was coming very close to the 3,000 hit milestone in the MLB, a very rare feat. What most people don’t know is Ichiro almost left the MLB after only one season because his teammates treated him so badly:

“Suzuki explained later that in the middle of his career with the Mariners, when the team wasn’t playing well but he was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner, his teammates called him selfish and said that he cared only about individual accolades. After Griffey, Sweeney and Ibanez arrived, he says, they stood up for him and encouraged their teammates to worry about their own play first.”

It wasn’t until Seattle brought in other MLB All-Stars that Ichiro felt welcomed. Great talent, supports great talent. Okay, everyone on an MLB roster is talented, but even within those rosters, there are levels of talent. Ichiro is a hall of fame talent. Griffey is a hall of famer.

The point to all of this is your best talent should support the other best talent of your organization.  If you have great talent that isn’t supporting each other, you need to make a move. Great talent is talented if they don’t support the other talent in the organization. That might be the single most difficult thing for leaders to understand.

Your talent is wasted if you can’t find ways to lift up the other talent around you. Seattle was able to find talent that was willing to do that and Ichiro turned his talent into one of the greatest of all time, but he was also very close to just packing it in and going home.

I wonder how much talent walks out your door based on how they are being treated by others in your organization?

I’m a Jealous Asshole.

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Don’t blow out someone else’s candle to make yours brighter. – Chelsea Handler


I had someone close to me tell me recently they were jealous of me.  It was hard for them to do, I know. It always hard to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.

I’m jealous as well. I’m jealous all the f’ing time. I hate that about myself.

I’m surrounded constantly be really, really talented people. That’s a gift and a curse. I know many of these folks on a really personal level and I know they work their ass off to get what they have, but it doesn’t stop me from being jealous of them.

Why should you care?

Jealousy kills so many talented people. Not literally killed, but emotionally and from a talent perspective.  It’s easy to say, “just focus on you! Be the best ‘you’, etc.”  It’s much harder to actually do that.

I have a couple of friends I can reach out to, tell them I’m being a jealous asshole, they’ll listen and they’ll try and help. I appreciate that. I trust them completely not to share my crazy jealous fits.  They’re so childlike, they’re embarrassing.   Everyone needs friends like these, and you need to be this friend!

It sucks being a jealous asshole. My wife says I’m never jealous, but I hide it from her. We do that kind of stuff for the people we love the most.

Don’t blow out someone else’s candle to make yours brighter, might be the best advice I’ve heard in a very long time. It won’t stop me from being jealous, but I hope it stops me from trying to bring down someone else when I’m jealous.

 

 

 

T3 – Pilot (@Pilot_Inc)

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This week on T3 I review the new startup coaching technology PILOT. PILOT is the brainchild of Ben Brooks. I’ve known Ben for years, he’s a super smart HR Pro/Leader based in New York who has an exceptional corporate HR background. From Ben’s corporate experience he realized there was a gap in the market when it came to professional, personal development for most people, and PILOT was born.

PILOT is an innovative career improvement company revolutionizing the way individuals command their careers. With leading advice and resources that were previously only available through expensive one-on-one career coaches or control-focused HR departments, PILOT combines an easy-to-use technology platform with focused, real-world advice that empowers individuals to take control of their professional success.

Basically, PILOT is a more efficient, cheaper way to have a professional business coach in your life. One that helps you drive your career forward and holds you accountable to results. For organizations, it becomes retention insurance! If your best people are being developed, they will leave, that’s been proven.

5 Things I really like about PILOT:

1. PILOT is designed like development should be designed, to ensure the person takes ownership of their development. Too often corporate development puts the ownership back on the LOD department or the hiring manager, not the individual. That is where PILOT starts.

2. PILOT’s Job Renovator measures an individual’s job satisfaction, then shows them how to become more satisfied with their job, by staying, not leaving! This is why PILOT should be considered Retention Insurance. Most business coaching type programs almost exclusively get people to find satisfaction by leaving. Ben understands this from working on the corporate side, and saw the power in getting people to stay and find a better way.

3. Each individual gets a pdf blueprint of their action plan on the steps they’ll be taking along the way of their career development.

4. PILOT is designed around your schedule. They’ve discovered about 80% of the participants will actually schedule their sessions on the weekend, for professional career development. The people who are serious about moving the needle in their career find time to make this a priority.

5. PILOT is a great combination of technology and real-life coaching with accountability, check-ins, and reassessment built into the program.

In terms of cost PILOT is a fraction of having a live business coach, plus from a corporate perspective, the system is actually working with you to re-engage your leaders and employees to find more out of current position, stay with the organization, and build their career with you. For those who have had a professional coach (like I have), so often those engagements end by you leaving the organization to meet your professional goals. PILOT is the first developmental tool I’ve seen that truly works for both the individual and the corporations best interest.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

10 Reasons HR Thinks Employees Are Crazy

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I don’t know of one HR Pro I’ve ever met who didn’t say, behind closed doors, “My employees are Crazy!” It’s like school teachers when they go into that mysterious “Teachers Lounge”, once the door is closed and they are all in there with the other teachers. Didn’t you want to know what the heck they talked about!?!?

I can tell you because before I was in HR I was a teacher.  Guess what?  Teachers talk about the exact same things that HR Pros talk about.  How crazy the kids/employees are that we have to deal with all day!  The only difference is the physical age (certainly not mental age!).

So, I wanted to come up some of the reasons we think our employees are crazy to help out those crazy employees who want to come off less crazy at their next interview.  It can happen! I don’t think employees are crazy, all the time, just at certain times. The problem is HR Pros have to deal with all the employees, so there is a good chance a crazy one is going to come across your desk at least once a day. Thus, the reason HR Pros think all of their employees are Crazy is because we deal with crazy every day!

Here’s why HR Pros think Employees are Crazy:

1. Your Boss tells us about all of your weird anxieties.

2. Your co-workers, that hate you, tell us about all of your weird anxieties.

3. We know your medical history – mental and physical – sorry, it’s part of the gig.

4.  We find out every time you cry or lose it at work – every time – also part of the gig.

5. Your crazy-ass emails find their way to our inbox – thank your “work” friends for that.

6.  We spend too much time talking about you in succession planning meetings, uncovering all that is wrong with you.

7.  You rate yourself as “Great” on your self-assessments, and we know you are barely “Average”.

8.  I know more about your divorce then your divorce attorney.

9.  Your stories about your kids haunt me at night.

10.  I know everyone you’ve slept with in the office – or tried to sleep with – or want to sleep with.

It’s a function of the job that we see and hear the worst and the best of all of our employees.  Just like the school teacher who spends more time on a daily basis with your kids than you do as a parent,  that teacher is probably going to know some things about them that you are unwilling to accept.   HR Pros know some things about our employees, many of which they aren’t willing to accept, that’s human nature.

I’m only saying this so that you understand why we think you’re crazy – you are – you just can’t accept that you are! But, here’s the dirty little HR secret, we’re crazy as well!

I Need A Nurse, Stat!

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In the United States, we are facing a major nursing crisis, unlike anything we have ever seen. If you’re in the healthcare industry, you already know this and you’re living this nightmare each day.

Your recruiters are beyond frustrated in trying to fill openings, only to have more nurses leave every day. So, what can you do?

Join Cathy Henesey, ASHHRA Board member, and Director of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning at AMITA Health and myself for a free webinar hosted by CareerBuilder that will outline 10 things you should be doing to fill your nursing openings! The webinar is August 3rd at 1pm EST. 

What can you expect to hear:

  • Old school and new school ways to recruit great talent to your hospital or health system.
  • Metrics around what recruiting pools will be most effective for you to be fishing in.
  • What best practice organizations are doing right now to retain their healthcare talent so they don’t have to fill as many openings!
  • What technology is worth the investment when it comes to purchasing recruiting tech.

Register Here! 

It will be fun, fast-paced hour packed full of great tips and ideas to help you energize your recruiting shop!

The Grass Isn’t Always Greener

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This is HR’s go-to advice for employees who put in their two-week notice, especially if that employee is heading to a competitor:

“Just remember! The grass isn’t always greener!” 

HR is mostly right. I’d say here’s the actual breakdown of ‘greenest’:

  • 50% is actually about the same shade of green. You’re moving to just move. You’ll find the job, the people, the money, everything is almost the same. The only change is the name and maybe the location by a bit.
  • 30% is going to be a nice shade of light brown, meaning the grass isn’t green at all, it’s dead! HR wants to believe this number is higher but it’s not, but it’s high enough to give some folks some pause before making such a big decision.
  • 10% is way greener! Like green M&M green. Dream job green! Everything is better and you’re so happy you made the move. You found your dream job!
  • 10% isn’t grass at all. Someone replaced the grass with some other material, like in Phoenix where grass can’t grow so they pave the front yard and paint it green, or just put in rock and cactus. This is completely something you didn’t expect. You were hoping for a better job, and you got something that isn’t better but not worse, it’s not even the job you expected, so you can’t really compare.

So, you have about a 10% chance of getting what you think you’re getting. Not good odds, but like I said, most employees way overthink their odds on this and probably believe they have a 70-90% of bettering themselves when they move. Most will just stay the same or get slightly worse.

Why do we believe moving is better?

1. You’re being sold. Sold by a recruiter and a hiring manager that you’ll be moving from a trailer park to Disney World. You really, really want to believe that’s true, so you buy!

2. You over-value that what we don’t know, over what we already have. This happens in so many areas of our life. Relationships. Jobs. Table at a restaurant.

3. You over-value what others have, over what you have. Think about this for a minute. You’re so eager to get out of this job, yet others are so eager to get this job. What does that say? You’re brilliant and everyone else is an idiot? Probably not. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

Everyone keeps telling me all these ‘new’ young workers just want to jump from job to job. They don’t have loyalty, etc. The reality is much less about their desire to move, and more about them being more naive to the realities of changing jobs.  We all loved changing jobs until it backfires and you leave something good, for something crappy.

Once that happens, you’re less likely to change jobs the rest of your career, even if you’re in a bad job! Don’t underestimate what you currently have. It’s probably way better than you’re making it out to be, and the new gig isn’t as good as it sounds. That’s not sexy, that’s just reality.

 

HR, The DNC is showing you how not to communicate!

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We love to cover our ass in HR. It’s actually in The HR Rule Book, page 1, first paragraph:

“Like our brothers and sisters in the Real Estate game, we all have really only one rule to live by. They live by, “Location, location, location”. In HR we live by, “Document, document, document”. 

Documentation is great until it’s not!

The Washington Post reported this week that:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida was forced aside by the release of thousands of embarrassing emails among party officials that appeared to show co­ordinated efforts to help Clinton at the expense of her rivals in the Democratic primaries. That contradicted claims by the party and the Clinton campaign that the process was open and fair for her leading challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Let me start by saying this isn’t a political post. This could happen to any party, in any organization, to anyone who decides to communicate exclusively via email.

What can HR learn from the DNC email mess?

We (HR) need to start asking ourselves this one simple question: If what I’m writing right now in this email, was to be made public, could it get me in trouble or would it be embarrassing to myself, my organization or my boss?

If you answer, “Yes” to any of the above questions, stop typing, click delete, stand up, walk your butt over to whoever it was you were writing that message to! Or, pick up the phone and just have the conversation!

I think at least once a day I begin writing an email, stop, and click delete. I then either stand up or pick up the phone and have a direct conversation with the person I wanted to share this information with. There’s a time to document and there’s a time to have ‘plausible deniability’!

In HR we too often get caught up in wanting to have things in writing. You have to know there’s risk associated with getting something in writing. You now are in the loop of knowing what’s going on, and if you decide not to do anything, it’s the same as knowingly allowing something to happen or continue to happen.

The DNC would have been just fine if they would have run down to Starbucks and grabbed a cup of coffee together or picked up the phone and just talked some stuff out. But, no! Instead, let’s send thousands of emails back and forth that shows how stupid we can be!

I’m not telling you to cover up stuff. I’m telling you to not have stuff you have to cover up! Some of the best leaders I’ve worked for would send me this message in reply to some crazy email I sent them, “Call me.”

That’s really smart advice!

T3 – day100 @dayonehundred

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This week on T3 I review the reference checking technology start-up day100. day100 is an automated reference checking, candidate selection technology that uses a candidate-driven process to get fast and accurate results of who the candidate truly is with virtually no effort from your talent acquisition team. The name came from your desire to be able to tell how a candidate would be on day 100 in your environment before you actually hire them.

Here’s what I know from 20 plus years of working in talent acquisition. Reference checking, as we know it, is dead, or should be dead because it’s worthless! The majority of organizations still check references by asking the candidate for references, then either calling or sending these references, who are most likely the candidate’s Mom’s best friend, their Dad’s golf buddy and their second-grade teacher, to answer questions that are all subjective.

“Is Timmy a go-getter?” “Would you hire Timmy to work for you again?” “Does Timmy have high energy?” Or other questions, all of which will come back sounding like Timmy is the second coming of Christ.  I always ask TA leaders who tell me they still check references, when was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their references? Give me one example in the past year. No one ever can! Ever!

Current reference checking is a complete waste of time and resources and shouldn’t be done if you do them like I laid out above. This is why technology, like Day100, is changing the entire game of candidate reference checking.  Automated reference checking, which is asking predictive behavioral based questions, in which the referee can’t give a positive answer over another, are the way to go. Here’s an example of what it might look like:

On a scale of the candidate prefers a “quiet, laid back atmosphere” to “loud, my hair is on fire atmosphere” which environment would this person work best in? 

Then you have four choices so the person is forced to select where they believe this person leans in the preference. This is just a simple example, day100’s algorithm is much more scientifically based than this, but you get the idea.

5 Things I like about day100: 

1. day100 helps you select the best candidate for the position by ranking them compared to what you said you’re looking for in the position and your corporate culture. You upload your job posting and candidates and day100 takes the process from there delivering you back a stacked ranked list of your candidates who would be the best fit for the position, with completed references.

2. Candidate driven process is one good way to also pre-close candidates on if they’re serious about the position and about your organization. If they don’t complete their end of the process, they don’t move on.

3. The process is designed to get references early in the process, not late, which saves time in closing when making offers. About 90% of referees have responded in 48 hours and the response rate of the references in beta is running around 75%.

4. The reference check portion for those completing takes about 10 minutes to complete on average and is a combination of multi-choice and opened ended information. The platform is very user-friendly and easy for those using to quickly click through to complete the reference.

5. day100 delivers you great visuals to be able to share and use with hiring managers to debrief on a list of candidates to make decisions on next steps.

I’m in love with automated reference checking technology. day100 goes a little bit beyond just reference checking and actually gives you some ranking recommendations as well, comparing all your candidates against each other to the actual job. Well worth a look, plus if you want to try it out they’ll give you their upgraded version free for a month to try it out.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.