Telling Your Executives The Truth Isn’t Courageous

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Tim Sackett

If I have to listen to one more leadership guru tell hard working people they need to be more courageous, I’m going to walk up on stage and courageously punch that person in the face! There’s a reason you aren’t telling your executives exactly what’s going on in your business and the reason isn’t that you’re a wimp!

The reason we aren’t 100% truthful to our executives about what’s truly going on in our business is because we’ve bought in!

It’s the job of the executive to build and share a vision of the business. It’s the job of those under this executive to then go out and make sure that vision gets integrated into the business. Once you’ve drunk the Koolaid, it’s really hard to un-drink the Koolaid!

It’s not that we don’t want to tell our executives the truth, we do. We don’t because, like most executives, we can’t see the truth any longer!

I’ve worked for some really great executives who knew this about their next level leaders. They hired and promoted great people who they knew would ensure their vision was seen by all. They also knew, at that point, it was then their job to trust and verify.

The best executives I’ve worked for did not sit in an ivory tower and wait for the word to come back from their generals. They constantly spent time amongst the soldiers, those on the frontline, to ensure that the vision they wanted, was being heard at all levels.

Do you really think that most of the #2’s in organizations lack courage! They got hired and promoted, but then all at once the majority just lacked courage. That doesn’t add up to me! It’s not what I’ve seen in real life.

The reason those underneath you aren’t sharing the exact full picture of what’s going on is they have painted a different version in their mind, they’ve painted a picture of where they are trying to go. It becomes so vivid many times the present is very clear.

When I traveled to locations away from corporate in my career, I frequently got visited upon my return from my CEO. Not because I was one level below him because I was sometimes 3 or 4 levels below! He knew I was the perfect one to tell him what I was seeing and hearing because I was closer to getting my hands dirty then anyone else on the trip.

You don’t need to be more courageous to help your executives. You need to go back and dig a few more ditches!

T3 – @Ratedly

Posted on July 19, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I review the anonymous employee review monitoring mobile app Ratedly. Ratedly is the brainchild of the godfather of recruiting thought leadership, Joel Cheesman. When I entered this game eight years ago there were like four people in the world that talked about the Recruiting Industry and Joel was one of those folks, so he knows the industry very well.

Ratedly was built for HR leaders to be able to monitor employee review sites. When we hear that, most of us will only think of Glassdoor, but there are literally dozens of sites with employee reviews and new ones popping up weekly. Indeed now rivals Glassdoor with the number of reviews they have, and niche sites like InHerSight, AARP, and other local sites are collecting millions of employer reviews. Heck, it even monitors Twitter for notifications about your organization.

The problem will all of this is it becomes too time-consuming to monitor all of these sites and respond in a fashion that is representative of your employment brand. On top of being able to monitor, these sites run 24/7/365, and most of our HR and TA teams don’t! Yet, our executives want these reviews, especially the negative ones, responded to immediately!

Ratedly was built on a native mobile platform, meaning it’s built to be used on smartphones and tablets. It was done this way because of the expectation that whomever in your organization was responsible for this, more than likely, they would want 24/7 access to these reviews the moment they came in, with the ability to share with others in the organization, and be able to respond in real-time.

5 Things I like about Ratedly:

1. The UX is designed to be similar to a news feed you’ll find on many other apps, so the feel is very familiar and easy to use. Ratedly allows you to scroll through your employer reviews all in one spot, at the same time.

2. Bookmarking. On the Ratedly app you can easily bookmark reviews to go back to later and find them quickly. On each review, you will also have access to read the full review, see job title, location, star rating, etc.

3. Share feature. Ratedly easily allows you to share reviews from the app with hiring managers, executives, etc. Some organizations have the leader responsible respond, some have one department like TA respond, regardless of your process, Ratedly allows you to share with whoever you want, immediately.

4. Ratedly puts the monitoring of all of these review sites in one simple easy to use app. No longer does your employment branding team need to check into all of these sites on a daily basis. Or, like most organizations, you’re lucky to check in once or twice per month, and see some bad review that’s been sitting there for weeks!

5. It’s really inexpensive for the service that it offers! $149 per month, is peanuts for when it comes to protecting your employment brand. Most organizations have so much invested in their brand, and Ratedly becomes an inexpensive way to ensure that investment doesn’t blow up overnight!

Ratedly seems to be a technology that larger to enterprise level organizations would definitely have an interest in. If I was running employment branding for a multi-national I would definitely have it in my tool chest. The price point, though, really allows SMBs to come and play as well, especially those smaller startups who are in highly competitive environments and their brand is everything to getting talent. Well worth taking a look!

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.

The Candidate Fade Away

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Tim Sackett

There’s this thing that happens with dating nowadays, called the Fade Away. I know this because I have teenage sons. The Fade Away is when you’re dating someone and you know it’s not for you long term, but instead of just telling that person you start the Fade Away process.

You stop talking and start texting. The texting slowly becomes less frequent, spread out and shorter in length, to eventually stopping altogether. No finalization. No uncomfortable exchange of items. Just fading away into a life without that other person being in it.

You see, back in my dating days, well, we didn’t have texting. You had phone calls that you could duck for a while, but let’s face it your parents were not going to cover for you, so eventually, you had to face the other person. Those conversations were awful, I so wish I had the fade away!

Because of how we treat our personal relationships today, candidates are now using the Fade Away on companies. Recruiters talk to a candidate, they seem excited, they call you back every time you call them. They give you their cell phone number and you begin to text. All is right in the recruiting world. At some point, the candidate decides that the position, or the company, or you just isn’t right for them and they stop returning calls and texts. It’s not all at once, it just gets less, until it fades away completely. Just like we were dating.

Here are some ways to stop the Candidate Fade Away:

1. Be the understanding Girlfriend. You know the type: “No! No! Really! I get it! At any point you aren’t cool with this, I’m totally cool with this, let’s just make sure we are straight with each other and tell each other!” Then you tell her and she loses her effing mind! Okay, ladies, I know, it works both ways! As a recruiter start out the candidate relationship like this, be a pro. “Tim let me tell you how I work up front. There is going to come a time when you might feel I presenting you something that you just don’t want for some reason. I’m completely cool with that, I’m presenting you. I’m your Jerry Maguire. Let me know right away, and I’ll make sure we both look good when speaking to the company and hiring manager. But I need to know up front what’s going on.”

2. It’s about you, not me. Find out how the candidate prefers to be communicated to and have them set the terms. This usually works out well, because they become invested. You told me this is how you wanted to be communicated to, and I’m following what you wanted. Experienced recruiters usually hate this route because they’ve been trained to ‘control’ the candidate. Used in the right manner it can be very effective.

3. Call out the Fade Away! Making fun of what is going on won’t connect with everyone, but it will definitely connect with some. Many folks will get defensive if you call them out on the Fade Away, but if you have fun with it, you’ll get some to come back around and laugh it off. “Timmy! Are you trying to break up with me!? Come on, let’s talk this out, we could be so good for each other, at least talk to me before you break up with me!” You’ll get a response to this, trust me!

Recruiting Blocking and Tackling!

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week I was at CareerBuilder’s Empower Roadshow talking with a few hundred Talent Acquisition pros and leaders in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Great event, great group of pros that were super engaged.

I led a panel on tips and tricks for in-the-trenches TA pros and leaders and one of my panelist was Bryan Rice, TA leader from Stryker. The title of this post came from him, he was big on getting TA pros back to blocking and tackling!

What’s blocking and tackling in talent acquisition?

Here’s what I would call the building blocks of great recruiting (Bryan’s blocking and tackling):

1. Phone skills. Have your recruiters conquered their fear of being on the phone? When they need to reach someone is their first thought, “Oh, I should pick up the phone and just ask the person.” Versus, sending them an email.

2. Ability to sell the position they are recruiting for. Can your recruiters effectively talk to a candidate and get them excited about the position, the supervisor of the position, the direction of the company, all the opportunities you can provide them, etc.? Bryan believes today’s recruiters might struggle with this the most, over anything else, and yet, as TA leaders we do very little to ever develop this skill!

3. Building relationships with hiring managers. Do your recruiters meet face-to-face with their hiring managers when they are working a position for that manager? Not only the first time but every time! You don’t build a strong relationship and find out how to add value if you don’t put in quality time with hiring managers. Today’s recruiters are moving too fast, to understand this value, and how it ultimately saves them a ton of time and effort!

4. Building relationships with candidates, that goes beyond the initial screening interview. Can your recruiters share with the hiring manager the candidate’s ‘story’ for each candidate that is presented to the manager? My goal as a recruiter should be that a manager shouldn’t be able to ask me a question about a candidate that I can’t answer. That’s tough, but that’s my goal!

This all seems so basic, yet most recruiters are weakest in these skills.

Why?

I believe the industry struggles here because TA leaders don’t know how to train these skills, and we don’t have off-the-shelve training programs that really go deep on these skills. So, instead of training recruiters properly, we just give them more technology so they can do a bad job, faster.

The training for four things above is very much a hands-on, one-on-one training. Sitting face-to-face and going over and practicing what these conversations look and sound like, and correcting in the moment, and doing them again and again.

The phone skills are just down and dirty getting recruiters on the phone and seeing who will conquer their fear! My first three weeks as a recruiter in training was calling 100 candidates a day. I couldn’t leave until I made 100 outgoing calls, each day, for three weeks.

At the end of those three weeks, I didn’t know if I could recruit, but I knew I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone and talk to someone!

Make sure you connect with Bryan, he’s one of the TA leaders in the industry that really gets it!

The True Cost of a Bad Hire

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Tim Sackett

If there is one constant in HR and Recruiting it is the fact that no one will ever agree on how much a bad hire costs an organization! Never! It doesn’t matter how much time you put into coming up with some algorithm, how much research to back up your numbers, it’s still going to be 90% subjective/soft numbers at best.

This is the main reason executives in our organizations think the majority of HR/Talent Pros in the world don’t get business! We come to them with stuff like this:

“We need to reduce turnover because of Engineer who leaves us, costs the company $7,345,876.23!”

Then you go through a 73 slide PowerPoint deck showing how you came up with the calculations all the way down the parking meter expense during the interview, and when you’re done, no one believes you’re even close to an actual number.

The gang over at National Business Research Institute put together a pretty good infographic proving my point – take a look:

97%+ of the ‘lost’ cost is from “Training” and “Productivity Loss” and those, my friends, are considered very subjective measures in almost all organizations. What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’. And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here. Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’. And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here. Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

So, here’s a better way to figure out the cost of a bad hire:

1. Ask your head of finance or accounting what they think it costs? “Ballpark it for me?” $10K? Sounds great! We’ll use $10K.

2. Use $10K as your cost of bad hires.

Your reality, HR’s Reality, is it really doesn’t matter what the number is. Only that the powers that be in your organization all agree on the number. Stop wasting your time trying to come up with a better number, just come up with a number that those signing the check agree is probably legit.

Pokemon Go Your Employees To Better Health

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I hate posts that just comment on the hottest thing going on in the world. Here’s the thing, I’m the last guy you want to hear some commentary on Black Lives Matter! So, you get Pokemon Go commentary instead!

Okay, here’s my take on Black Lives Matter –

If you say “All Lives Matter” you’re an ignorant asshole.
Of course “all” lives matter, but “all” lives are not getting killed for basic traffic violations.
I drove my car today. I was even speeding. At no point was I concerned a cop was going to pull me over and kill me for speeding, or anything else! I’m a middle-class white dude. That, by itself, is like a get out of jail free card for life!
Black Lives Matter because right now we need Black Lives to Matter. Let’s hope at some point we can add the Black Lives to the All Lives, but right now we can’t yet.
If you say Blue Lives matter, I get it. My brother is a cop. Cops get paid for shit. Have awful training, and are asked to make split second decisions in tense moments. They put their life on the line to protect civilians every day. Mistakes in that environment will be made, often. That’s a problem. When shots are fired, I hope and pray a cop will be there to protect me. Just like many were in Dallas.

Okay, now onto Pokemon Go!

My 13 year old walked around in our neighborhood more in the past 4 days then he did in the past 4 years!
Pokemon Go is f’ing brilliant. It’s the best thing to happen to wellness since, well, anything!
You should support your unhealthy employees need to want to go and find Pokemon! It will be the most successful thing you’ll ever do in employee wellness.
Also, on a side Recruiting note, did you realize there are nerd-herds out trying to catch Pokemon! Talk about great pools of IT talent just wondering around your city! Get on this! Pokemon Go is the best thing to happen to IT recruiting since Snap Chat! (he said completely laughing to himself knowing someone will truly believe this!)

Honestly, I love Pokemon Go. I saw so many teens out in my city walking and riding bikes the past few days! Interacting together, while completely looking down at their phones.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and my parents would lock me out of the house until the street lights came on. Well, almost.

I even say white kids and black kids walking together, almost hand in hand, trying to find Pikachu! Dr. King would have had a tear in his eye, that a Japanese multi-national company developed a smartphone app that would finally bring us together under a common cause!

T3 – Whil (@WeAreWhil)

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I review the hippy-dippy app called Whil! Okay, Whil really is a mobile app that delivers mindfulness for the modern age. It’s basically a platform of mindfulness for professionals, built by professionals in the mindfulness space. Whil is specifically designed to corporate wellness, to reduce stress and related illnesses.

Let’s face it, most of us are under way too much stress. As HR pros our executives have thrown this on our backs as well, reduce the stress of all of our employees so they are better performers, more productive and, oh yeah, don’t make it cost too much! I’m very interested in mindfulness, heck, I’m interested in anything that will give me an edge, my problem has been finding the time. Whil seems like a great way to get me started and keep me going.

Do you feel me!?

Whil has a Netflix type UX that allows you to search their 1250+ sessions based on things like “what’s your issue”? Is it stress relief? Bam, here are hundreds of mindfulness exercises, yoga exercises, etc. that can help. You’re low on confidence today. Okay, here are options specifically for you.

5 Things I like about Whil:

1. They have personal dashboards for every employee so they can track their own progress, start from where they left off last, know how long they been doing something, etc. All employees are auto-enrolled by their work email, which allows HR to control access for those who are no longer an employee.

2. HR has their own dashboard which gives them great stats like who’s using Whil the most, which Whil programs are the top ones for their organization, and demographics of your employees who are utilizing the system. The crazy part about stress is we (HR) usually have no idea who is actually under stress, so Whil gives us some better insight to the overall stress health of the organization. The dashboard also allows HR to give out personal rewards to help with user adoption if you choose.

3. Whil has programs for mindfulness, yoga, emotional intelligence, compassionate leadership, etc. Many of the soft skills we need our new leaders to have as well, so it doubles as a great leadership development tool as well, or employee development for hiring managers to recommend to their own staff.

4. Wearable integration! For some organizations, this is big, as many of us have employees who have picked up on the wearable craze and this works right along side that technology as well.

5. All of the sessions are designed to be workplace friendly. 1-10 minute sessions which can be done at their workstation, or a quiet room, exercise room, out on the lawn, you name it!

Mindfulness technology might not be for every employer. The research behind the practices show great results, so it can’t be ignored by HR professionals and leaders. Whil is definitely worth a look if your organization has interest in adding this to your wellness program.

Wage Growth Means You Usually Screw Your Female Employees!

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I’ve been talking a lot lately about how women are getting paid less. Much of it is legitimate, some of it is not. Either way, it’s about to get worse!

Take a look at this chart from Business Insider, wages are growing at a fast rate:

What does this mean? You are about to start paying your employees and new hires more. This is bad news for women, since historically two things happen that screw them over in times like this:

They’re less likely to leave their current organization.
They’re less likely to negotiate higher salaries when starting a new job.

How does wage growth hurt women in these two cases?

First, if you stay at an organization, and don’t ask for more money, most organizations aren’t just going to give you money. At the same time, the organization is hiring new people, in the same positions, for more money! Now, you would hope that organizations would do the right thing, and make everyone whole, but we know this doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

Second, studies show women are less likely to negotiate for higher salaries when they are starting a new job. This becomes an issue as some organizations will pay whatever it takes in hard to find talent environments, meaning those who are tough negotiators are going to come in at higher rates. This usually means men will make more in the same or similar positions.

As wages grow fast, and talent is hard to find, many times in large organizations these inequalities will get missed. This is part of why women get paid less. Things happen fast, a hiring manager has a shot at a great male developer and they pay more than others in their group. They know it’s more, but they’re desperate. They think they’ll take care of it when things slow down, but we know, things never slow down!

HR pros need to be very careful to watch incoming salaries and salary changes during these times of high wage growth. The market compensation is changing so fast, you might have to look at this quarterly, or even monthly, depending the industry, location, or position.

You already have a problem with paying females less, don’t allow fast moving markets to make your problem worse!

#DisruptHR – Failure is the New Black

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I’ve been fairly vocal over how I feel about the concept of welcoming failure into your life. It’s kind of like welcoming heroin into your life. It feels great when you first do it, then it quickly ruins you! Failure is heroin to your mind and confidence!

You are being sold a giant line of bullshit!

You have been told that ‘you just need to fail more’! If you just fail, you’ll find success! Failure is a good thing!

It’s not!!!

You know what happens when you actually fail? It makes it easier for you to fail again. You’re actually teaching your mind and body how to fail! The way to success is not through continued failure. They way to success is by finding small ways to succeed. Giving your mind and body the pathway, the confidence it needs to succeed big.

Statistically, you are more likely to fail, the more you fail! It’s simple mathematics. Have you heard the statement, “It’s hard to beat a team three times in a row!” This is said in sports a lot after one team beats another team two games in a row. Statistically, it’s actually more likely you’ll beat a team the third time if you beat them twice already, but we so want to believe it’s not true!

Failure + Failure + Failure + Failure = crippling fear that you’ll never get it right for 99.99% of people.

Small success + Small success + Small Success = eventual big success!

It’s how we teach a child to do something new. You don’t teach a child to ride a bike by throwing them down the largest hill on the block and just let go. They’ll crash. They’ll crash again. They’ll crash again. Eventually, they’ll never get back on that bike!

We start small. You get on and I’ll hold and I won’t let go! You go a little ways. You show them that it’s fun. Eventually, you build up to being able to let go, but you make sure it’s by grass, so if they fall, hopefully, they fall into the grass.

Little successes. Lead to big successes.

That’s what my DisruptHR video is all about – check it out!

Failure Is The New Black | Tim Sackett | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

How To Build a Dream Team at Work

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Tim Sackett

If you pulled up any sports-related website or watched any sports news show on TV in the past few days you know that NBA player Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City Thunder and accepted a free agent offer to go and play for the Golden State Warriors.

It’s a big deal because Golden State was already pretty good, now, with Kevin, they look to be unstoppable! Basically, Golden State has built a team with arguably 4 of the top 20 players in the NBA on one team (Durant, Curry, Thompson, and Green). Most ‘great’ teams might have three top players, no one in history has had four when all playing at their peak!

Building a dream team seems to only happen in sports, but you hear talent acquisition leaders and executives talk about it a lot. How do we build a sales dream team, a marketing dream team, a design dream team, etc.? We all want to be a part of a dream team, or be a part of building a dream team for our organization!

So, how do you build a dream team?

1. You have to know how you want to ‘play’. You have to define what it is you want to do. An outcome. A style. “We want the best designed UX of any platform that supports patient safety in a hospital environment.” As an example.

2. You have to know who is the top talent in your industry that can accomplish the outcome you desire. This is actually the hardest part of building a dream team in a non-sports environment because we usually don’t have comparing statistics or analytics to even start to understand who the best is.

3. You have to be able to recruit those individuals to your team. This is actually easier than in professional sports. In pro sports it usually takes one or two superstars to make a decision to get together, then they help recruit the others. In the real world, it helps to have a well-known professional, but it’s not necessary if you can sell the right story, compensation, and location!

4. Just having the ‘best players’ doesn’t guarantee success, they have to buy into the goal of the entire organization. This means having leadership with a clear vision that goes beyond the outcome. Yes, we want to win a championship, but we want to win that championship together, utilizing all of our strengths. This is another really tough thing in a real-world setting because it takes great visionary leadership.

5. Having a ‘Dream Team’ is about “Team”. You’ll have great talent and that great talent needs to understand that they go nowhere without those who support them to do great work. So, your dream team members have to be servant leaders. If they have great talent and treat people like crap, they won’t end up being a great talent!

I love it when great talent makes the conscious decision to get together and try and do something great. Some people don’t. They would prefer to see one great talent try and do it on their own. I love watching highly talented people get together and see how far they can push the levels of greatness! That’s what dream teams are all about, the dream.

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team