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.

Is Smiling at a Black Person in an Interview a Racist Microagression?

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From the land of we’ve gone off the deep end of political correctness, check this out!

Do you suffer from “White Guy” smile? “When you pass a person of color on the street, do you give them the “white guy smile”? Congratulations, you’re racist! If you look at a person of color, you’re racist. If you don’t look at them, you’re racist. If you sort of look at them, then look away, you’re still racist. If you keep looking at them, well, damn you, you racist!”

So, I would love to tell you that this has never even crossed my mind, but I would be lying. Do I purposely smile at one person over another based on the color of their skin? No, that’s silly.

If I truly analyze myself I think I probably do the smile thing more for folks who I don’t think can speak English, and that’s probably even more racist! I think the smile would be more of an “I’m not sure how to start this conversation because I don’t know if you and are even going to be able to communicate” and if I smile at least you know I’m trying to have a friendly exchange.

Either way, I’m making a judgment based on how a person looks, and most likely the circumstance, this is probably going to be a problem.

All that being said, I’ve been in some way uncomfortable interviews with white hiring managers who stumbled over themselves with minority candidates and their white guy smiles! The candidates felt awkward. I felt awkward. It’s awful! They go so far overboard trying to act like they’re not racist that it’s more uncomfortable than if they were probably just racist!

How do you fix this?

Wow, that’s a loaded question! If you try to point out to the person they’re being racist, they’ll flip! If you let it go, they’ll continue to act like an idiot. Taped interview training sometimes help people see they are acting differently, just make sure you’re giving them many examples, not just one video of them interviewing a minority candidate!

I’ve seen this done with success when interviewing different genders as well. The classic example is supervisor male interviewing a female and treating them differently than when they interview another male. This training is highly effective if being used as a developmental exercise and not as a gotcha! Being taped in an interview is stressful, but it has a huge impact when you can sit and watch the differences. Not only will help catch and change biases, it also just flat out makes you a better interviewer!

The First Sign You Suck at Hiring!

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Hiring people to work for you directly is probably the single hardest thing you’ll ever have to do as a manager of people. To be fair, most people are average at hiring, some are flat out kill and probably 20% are awful at hiring.

The first sign you suck at hiring is your new hire turnover is an outlier in your organization, your market, or your industry.

So, what constitutes new hire turnover?

I find most organizations actually don’t measure their hiring managers on new hire turnover but use this to judge effectiveness on their talent acquisition team. That’s a complete joke! That is unless you’re allowing your TA team to make hiring decisions! New hire turn is a direct reflection of hiring decisions. Period.

When should you measure new hire turn?  Organizations are going to vary on this based on your normal turn cycles and level of the position. Most use 90 days as the cap for new hire turnover. That is safe for most organizations, but you might want to dig into your own numbers to find out what’s best for your own organization. I know orgs that use one year to measure new hire turn and orgs that use 30 days.

How do you help yourself if you suck at hiring?

1. Take yourself out of the process altogether.  Most hiring managers won’t do this because their pride won’t allow them. If you consistently have high new hire turn comparable to others, you might consider this, you just have bad internal filters that predispose you to select people who don’t fit your org or management style. Don’t take it personally. I suck at technical stuff. I shop that part of my job off to someone who’s better. You might be an exceptional manager of your business, but you suck at hiring. Shop that out to someone who’s better!

2. Add non-subjective components into your hiring process and follow them 100% of the time. Assessments are scientifically proven to tell you what they’re designed to tell you. If you follow what they’ll tell you, you’ll be much more likely to make consistent hires. If that assessment gives you better hires, then keep following it, or find an assessment that does give you that consistency.

3. Analyze your reasons for each misfire hire. Were there any commonalities in those? What I find is most poor hires stem from a hiring manager who gets stuck on one reason to hire, which has nothing to do with being successful in your environment. Example: “I want high energy people!” But then they work in an environment where they are stuck in a 6X8 foot cube all day. It’s like caging a wild animal! 

Numbers don’t lie. If you consistently bomb your new hire turnover metrics, it’s not the hires, it’s you! In the organizations where I’ve seen the best improvement in reducing new hire turnover, it was in organizations where new hire turnover metric results were solely the responsibility of each hiring manager, and nothing to do with talent acquisition.

It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of most new hire turn is usually coming from around 20% of your hiring managers. Fix those issues and ‘magically’ your new hire turn improves.

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.