Tech Companies Should Move To Detroit!

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Tim Sackett

You might have seen this chart recently over at Business Insider:

We all probably got this. It costs a TON to live in San Fransico! Way too much. You’re crazy if you want to start a tech company in San Fran. So, what do all those super smart folks do? Yeah, stay west coast and just go a bit more north to Seattle, still expensive, but seemingly cheap in comparison to San Fransico!

It’s one of the main reasons Austin, TX became a hotbed of tech startups and headquarters about a decade ago. Relatively cheap to place to live. Access to a major university (Univ. of Texas), which gives you young, talented, tech savvy folks. Nice weather.

Here’s the magical formula to picking a place to house your tech company:

Access to talent.
Place people want to live.
1. Good weather.
2. Hip vibe.
3. Affordable. (not necessarily an important factor – but increasing in importance!)

Give this magical formula, I’ll give you the number 1 destination of new tech startups!

DETROIT!!!!

Well, actually it’s Ann Arbor, which is about a 15-minute drive from Detroit’s International Airport, a Delta hub and one of the nicest airports around. Which means direct flights to almost everywhere. Home to the University of Michigan and great talent pipeline (Michigan State is also 50 minutes away). So, you have two Giant universities and roughly 80,000 students within easy driving distance. A ton of other smaller universities within a 50-mile radius as well (Eastern Michigan, Wayne State, Oakland Univ., Univ. of Toledo, etc.).

It’s super cheap to live. Ann Arbor is a great college city, with access to the bigger Metro Detroit area within a thirty-minute drive. Access to someone of the world’s largest freshwater lakes. Toronto is an easy, cheap flight, or 4-hour drive away.

Okay, you won’t get super nice weather. You’ll get four seasons, midwestern work ethic and so much more for your money you won’t understand why anyone ever went west to begin with!

Oh, I hear you. What about the talent? The Detroit Metro Area is one of the world’s largest engineering centers in the world! You know about all the auto companies, but what you don’t know is that Google has been growing an empire in Ann Arbor for years, and doing it quietly because they don’t want others hoarding in on the secret!

So, yeah, Seattle is way cheaper than San Fransico. You only have to pay 35% of pay towards rent. In Detroit, you only have to pay about 15% of your pay towards rent!

Detroit! The new San Fransico! We even have a bridge!

Recruiting is a Team Sport

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, HR Happy Hour, with Steve Boese and Trish McFarland, with their guest Daniel Chait, the CEO of Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the one the hottest ATS platforms on the market and Steve attended their user conference. (I didn’t go because I wasn’t invited, even though I sang their graces over a year ago on the world renown T3 – Greenhouse!)

Daniel made a comment on the podcast that was really good:

“Recruiting is a team sport.”

He’s absolutely right! One thing I tell Talent Acquisition leaders is that you need to establish this up front when you start a new position. During the interview, find out who “owns” recruiting in the organization you’re thinking about going to. If they say, “you!” or “recruiting does”, or anything in those terms, run!!!

Recruiting in not a function of one department. The answer I love to hear is, “the hiring managers own recruiting”. I can work with that!

Great recruiting only happens when it’s a priority by all parties involved. I tell TA pros that recruiting will happen with or without you. If an organization fired everyone in Recruiting today, they’ll still find ways to hire people tomorrow! So, find ways to add value to the talent attraction that needs to happen with each hiring manager.

Recruiting is a team sport, but you can’t have a bunch of ball hogs on the team! This isn’t hero ball! I want my organization to recruit like Golden State shares the ball! Everyone’s involved. Everyone’s excited and bought in. Everyone understands the importance of each other’s contributions.

Greenhouse built their software with this philosophy. An ATS that easily gets everyone involved in the right way. This isn’t a one department function, Recruiting is an organizational function.

Check out Daniel on the HR Happy Hour Podcast and on Twitter, he’s one of the few HR/Talent Tech CEOs that will actually engage people on Twitter. He even occasionally will tweet at me and tell me he disagrees with my posts, which I love! (which is probably why he didn’t invite me to his user conference…but, really, I’m over it…I still like their tech regardless…maybe it’s because he’s a UofM grad…)

T3 – @Joberate

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Tim Sackett

This week on T3 I take a look at a piece of technology called Joberate. Joberate’s platform tracks real-time job seeking behaviors of the global workforce by leveraging publicly available social media data. Why is that important? Well, let me tell you!

Joberate’s machine learning predictive analytics platform generates a numerical score called J-Score, which represents a person’s job seeking activity level. In addition to J-Score, the platform performs psychological profiling based on the NLP (Natural Language Processing) of CV’s and Social Data. Think of this J-score like a FICO score for HR. Instead of payment history, you get job seeking history.

Basically, Joberate lets you know which candidates you should pursue and when! This cuts your time to fill, by as much as half. The Joberate platform basically informs you of when a passive candidate begins to become active before anyone knows they’re active.

5 Things I really like about Joberate:

1. Joberate allows you to create pools of candidates to follow and attract, letting you know through alerts when they begin to become active job seekers. This allows you to pick them off before your competition.

2. The J-Index measures the Fortune 500 from an entire corporation behavior, showing you which companies have increased employee attrition, giving you insight to which companies would be easier to target for sourcing.

3. Joberate will also show you the job-seeking behavior of your internal staff. This will allow you to use this data in a number of ways including save strategies for your high potentials. Can you imagine knowing when your best employees are just beginning a new job search, and being able to address it before it goes too far?

4. The Joberate Platform gives you insight from an internal mobility aspect as well. If you know your best employees are looking to make a move, why not just move them on your own!? You don’t even need to mention you know they’ve begun a search, just move them into a new role, and beat them to the punch.

5. Benchmark your hiring managers. The Joberate platform gives you the information to know which managers, by department, have high j-score indexes amongst their team. Why do certain managers turnover more than others? Which managers are in trouble because their entire team is out looking? How can you set them up for success?

Joberate gives you great insight to your turnover risk, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The platform will actually show you a graph by individual of when their job seeking behavior spikes, and it’s scary accurate! Also, your employees have no idea you have access to this information, which allows you to manage it proactively, verse how we do it now, which is to wait for a resignation or find a resume on a job board!

On top of that, it shows you which candidates are most likely be open to making moves and easier to recruit before they’re even on the market. Very cool piece of technology. It’s built for the enterprise level organization. But, if you have thousands of employees well worth taking a look at, the ROI on just being able to manage your turnover alone would be huge!

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.

5 No-Cost Retention Fixes!

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I love SMB HR shops (SMB – small/medium sized businesses) for a number of reasons, but none more than for the simple fact, smaller sized HR shops are forced to be more creative because of

Creativity and SMB HR shops, remind me of my Grandma. Grandma grew up in the depression. People who grew up in the depression have creativity skills to burn! They had so little but found ways to fill their life with so many things. Lack of resources didn’t stop them, it unleashed their creativity! Creativity is the most underrated HR skill out there for high performing HR shops.

Having worked in big HR shops the one thing that frustrated me most was sitting around in large meetings, trying to figure out how to “fix” retention – and listening to all the ways and how much money it was going to cost. In the end, I always came back to, if we just take all this money we are going to spend on the “fix” and just go out and hand to the employees, we probably won’t have a retention problem.

Large HR shop folks don’t like to hear that! So, for you SMB HR shop folks out there, with little or no money to spend on increasing your retention, I came up with a few ideas you might want to try before you go spend all that budget money on programs with little return.

No Money Retention Fixes:

Fire the manager with the lowest retention. You have the data, you know who is turning people over. Your organization needs to send a message that managers, not HR and not the CEO, are responsible for retaining talent. This has to be the first step! Your leaders have to have a clear understanding it is their job to retain their employees, and it’s your job to hold them accountable for it.

Measure it by Department, and post it publicly for all to see. No, don’t just share it in meetings. Post it up in the lobby, down the halls, everywhere! Then just wait. It will almost change overnight. No one likes to be at the bottom of any list and have everyone know it.

Fire your worst performers – then use that money to compensate your best employees more. It’s a wash. Your worst employees aren’t helping your productivity anyway, and your best will appreciate the increase, appreciate you noticing the bad people were taking away from the team, and they’ll give you more discretionary effort. The result – same cost (actually less if you factor in benefits, taxes, etc.) more productivity, a little less headcount.

Have your senior leadership talk about retention publicly, constantly. That which gets measured will get changed, that which gets measured and has the eye of senior leadership will get changed much quicker!

Institute a “Save Strategy” for employees who want to leave. Save Strategy? If an employee puts in their notice, have them go meet with your CEO and explain to her why they are leaving. You’ll be amazed at the results and how many people will change their minds. Some people just want to know you care, and sitting down for some one-on-one with the CEO, shows that a whole bunch. Plus, it’s much cheaper than finding their replacement!

Seems like most of these retention fixes are just good old fashion performance management. Crazy how that works. Do performance management really well and people want to hang around for a while!

Sourcers Are The New Recruiters?

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Tim Sackett

Come listen to my story about a man named Tim.

Poor Recruiting Pro, barely kept his family fed.

And then one day he the internet came along,

and up on his screen came a bunch of profiles.

Candidates those are. Money, in people form.

For those of you that are under 40, you might want to go Google Beverly Hillbillies theme song…

What the hell is going on in this world?

No, really!?

I started my career out as a ‘Researcher’. Little did I know, that was really just sourcing (or at least what we call sourcing today). My job was to find candidates for jobs we had open. I find a candidate. Do a basic screen. Pass them onto a recruiter who sold them to the client/hiring manager.

I then got my own clients/hiring managers and did the full boat. Find the jobs. Find the candidates. Make the offers. Etc.

When I went to corporate Talent Acquisition almost every shop was doing it the same way. Recruiters were assigned departments, business units, hiring managers, etc. They would work with those individuals when they had openings. Post jobs. Screen incoming candidates. Attend campus job fairs. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of outbound calling – those were the rock stars. And complain how crappy their ATS was, and how awful the hiring managers were.

That was corporate Talent Acquisition, as I know it, from 7 years ago.

During this time, Sourcing became a thing. Everyone needed to now, break up “Talent Acquisition” into Sourcing and Recruiting. Sourcers found candidates. The premise being we need ‘outbound’ activity happening. Actual candidate hunting. Recruiters then did screening, setting up interviews, offers, etc.

Somewhere over the past five years. Sourcers have become what Recruiters used to be. They find candidates. They screen candidates. They set up interviews. I know some are even closing the deal with offers.

So, my question is, today, what the hell do Corporate Recruiters do in those shops that have Sourcers?

It seems like corporate recruiters are now advanced admin professionals. They really don’t have any skills to speak of. I’m honestly asking TA Leaders! If you have Sourcing doing all of the skill-based activities of recruiting, what are you paying recruiters for? It would seem like you could get some really good Admin Pros do all of the work you have Recruiters doing.

Am I off base on this?

This came up because I met with a TA Leader who was paying their corporate Recruiters $85-100K in salary. She was also paying Sourcers a bit less, $65-80K in salary. When I dug into what they were actually doing, it seemed to me the most valuable of the two was easily the Sourcing Pros! The Recruiters did almost nothing of value for what they were being paid.

The hiring managers in this environment even went to the Sourcing Pros to get information on candidates! Basically, the Recruiters set up interviews, made offers, and onboarding. To be fair, they were also in charge of ’employment branding’ for which they had an outside firm doing all of that work. Sourcing Pros had candidate experience, recruitment marketing, ATS/CRM, job postings, etc.

It seems like this is coming full circle. We split the function and now the Sourcers are just becoming what Recruiters used to be. A one-stop shop for filling positions.

What I’m quickly seeing is that the value of these two positions is quickly becoming uneven. When “Sourcing” as a concept was introduced, it was to have better efficiency in recruiting. Take a difficult function. Split into two parts, and let folks specialize. Through this specialization and synergy, you’ll get more work then everyone running their own desk. Great theoretical concept!

What I’m finding in most organizations is that the theory isn’t meeting the actual result.

Are you seeing or feeling the same thing? Hit me in the comments, I’m truly interested.

Building HR Service Delivery on a Global Scale – AMEX Edition!

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Tim Sackett

Hey, gang – I have American Express’s VP of HRIS, Adam Krahling, for a cool one-on-one SHRM exclusive where he shares how AMEX built their entire global HR Shared Service delivery model from design through production! This is a free SHRM Webcast with HRCI credits. It’s coming up next week June 8th, Wednesday, at noon EST.

Adam is an awesome speaker, and I’ll be doing my best Oprah impression to interview him and dig out all those hidden secrets!

Every major HR project has its challenges but, when you add in the global perspective, those HR projects just got exponentially more challenging! For large organizations in the banking and insurance industries, these projects also have the added complexity of major regulations and laws that change from country to country. This webinar will assist you in understanding where most organizations fail from a global perspective, how to launch and get a project like this off the ground, and how to ensure your organization is successful in the long run.

The global transformation of HR is upon us, and American Express is leading the charge. Come learn how AMEX’s HRIS team helped lead the company into this new frontier and what strategies and design it incorporated from country to country.

Adam Krahling, vice president of Global HRIS for American Express, and I will dig into the American Express case study on how the company expanded HR service delivery globally. Learn how a large organization like AMEX moved its HR operations forward on a global scale, the impact it had and the step-by-step process they used to ensure success.

You’ll be able to post your questions and thoughts on bringing your HR service delivery project into the modern era. –

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

The Right To Disconnect From Work

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Tim Sackett

Did you hear that France is trying to pass a law that would allow workers to disconnect from the office without fear of disciplinary action? Here’s some more on the proposed bill:

The “right to disconnect” legislation, which would go into effect in 2018 if passed, would require companies to encourage employees to turn off phones and other devices after they leave work…

The law reflects the sense in France that white-collar workers in the digital age are vulnerable to burnout.

Technologia, a risk analysis firm, found that 3.2 million French workers were emotionally exhausted from work and at risk of developing burnout symptoms like exhaustion and chronic stress.

“It is a real problem,” said Yves Lasfargue, a sociologist who specializes in teleworking. “Twenty years ago, before emails had been invented and we could not reach colleagues, we would have to go and knock on their doors. Traditional courtesy teaches you to abstain from disturbing people. With these new tools, this form of courtesy has totally disappeared. This is why we need to legislate.”

“Traditional courtesy”.

Two things at play here. First, there’s no doubt that our new hyper-connected world is causing people to work in ways we could never have imagined twenty years ago. Most white collar jobs currently have no ‘unplugged’ off the clock hours any longer. People are connected from the moment they wake until the moment they go to sleep, many even getting up during the night when they hear notifications coming in on their devices.

That’s a problem. That’s an organizational problem because we will see burnout at a faster rate than ever before. I am starting to hear about organizations that are shutting down email servers at 6pm and not turning them back on until 5am, trying to force their employees to shut it down and refresh, even shutting down during the weekends. It’s a drastic step, but one some organizations feel is the right one.

Secondly, is this concept of traditional courtesy. This 1950’s idea of not disturbing someone who is at home for the evening. Most everyone in the workplace has no understanding of this concept. We don’t come home at 5pm to a wife and kids sitting down for a hot meal the ‘Mrs’ cooked all afternoon. Our society has completely changed from this “Leave It To Beaver” idea of how our lives should look.

Still, I hear this courtesy issue come up many times when speaking with corporate talent acquisition pros. Well, we don’t want to make calls to people after 6pm because ‘they’ don’t like it. I still call bullshit on this! People don’t like getting calls after 9pm, otherwise, we’ve been conditioned by telemarketers to expect calls up until 9pm.

People don’t like being bothered at home with stuff that doesn’t have value to them! If you call them about a great opportunity, they would rather take that call from home, than from work. This has nothing to do with courtesy. If someone has decided to ‘unplug’ for the evening, they simply won’t pick up your call. You believing this is a courtesy issue, is an excuse not to be an effective recruiter!

So, what say you? Should there be laws on the books encouraging people to shut it down at night? I think our new world has given us more flexibility to work in our own way. I personally like that I can work when I need to. Do I need to ‘unplug’ more, especially around my family? There is no doubt. But don’t take my flexibility away from me!

Your Sunsets Are Numbered!

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I had a couple of things happen to me this past week. First, I traveled to the Cayman Islands for an HR conference and some vacation.

I’m in love with the Cayman Islands. Great people, the most beautiful water you’ll ever see and mind changing sunsets. I swam with Stingrays and Sea Turtles. I saved my wife’s life from dragged out to sea. I broke bread, several times, with friends, old and new. I was a pretty damn good trip!

I did Disrupt HR Cayman (My presentation starts at 18:18 on the video link) and talked about how Failure is the New Black, but shouldn’t be. Believing failure is okay is the worst snake oil being sold by leadership gurus today. Don’t believe the hype!

The sunset thing got me thinking. The other thing that happened is I had a friend unexpectedly pass away this past week as well.

So, I’m watching these great sunsets and thinking about my friend and understanding a little about you can’t take all of these sunsets for granted. But we do.

We take for granted that we will definitely see another sunset. So, what does this all mean?

I could tell you the same crap you hear from everyone that talks about this: make sure you tell people you love them, do what you wish now, etc., etc., etc. But I won’t, because you won’t listen. Instead, do this:

Drink expensive alcohol. You’ll drink less of it, and enjoy it more.
Wear really good shoes. They’ll feel better, look better and last longer.
Eat food that you like. I’m not a foodie. Sometimes people eat crap trying to impress others, but it quite honestly tastes awful. You’re not impressing anyone. Shake Shack tastes great. I’m that kind of foodie – burger and fries foodie.
Hang with people who want to hang with you. We spend way too much time in life hanging with assholes.
Go to the other side of the Island. There’s beauty everywhere, and yet we tend to go where we know. Some of the greatest moments in my life happen when I go to where I know nothing.

How’s that for life-changing advice that you didn’t ask for?

Now get back to work and make some money!

The Tim Sackett Commencement Speech

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Tim Sackett

It’s that time of year when universities and high schools go through graduation ceremonies and we celebrate educational achievements. It’s also that time of year when you get bombarded with every great commencement speech ever given. There is clearly a recipe for giving a great commencement speech. Here are the ingredients:

1. Make the graduates feel like they are about to accomplish something really great, and not just become part of the machine.

2. Make graduates believe like somehow they will be difference makers.

3. Make graduates think they have endless possibilities and opportunities.

4. Make graduates think the world really wants and need them and can’t wait to work with them.

5. Wear sunscreen.

I think that about sums up every great commencement speech ever given. Let’s face it, the key to any great speech is not telling people what they need to hear, but telling them what they want to hear!

I would like to give a commencement speech. I think it would be fun. I like to inspire people. Here are the main topics I would hit if I were to give a commencement speech:

1. Work sucks, but being poor sucks more. Don’t ever think work should make you happy. Find happiness in yourself, not what you do.

2. You owe a lot of people, a lot of stuff. Shut your mouth and give back to them. Stop looking for the world to keep giving you stuff.

3. No one cares about you. Well, maybe your Mom, if you had a good Mom. They care about what you can do for them. Basically, you can’t do much, you’re a new grad.

4. Don’t think you’re going to be special. 99.9% of people are just normal people, so will you. The sooner you come to grips with this, the sooner you’ll be happy.

5. Don’t listen to your bitter parents. Almost always, the person who works the hardest has better outcomes in anything in life. Once in a while, a person who doesn’t work hard, but has supremely better talent or connections than you, will kick your ass. That’s life. Buy a helmet.

6. Don’t listen to advice from famous people. Their view of the world is warped through their grandiose belief somehow they made it through hard work and effort. It’s usually just good timing.

7. Find out who you care about in life, and make them a priority. In this world, you have very few people you truly care about, and who care about you in return. Don’t fuck that up.

8. Make your mistakes when you’re young. Failure is difficult, it’s profoundly more difficult when you have a mortgage and 2 kids to take care of.

9. It’s alright that sometimes you have to kiss ass. It doesn’t make you less of a person.

10. Wear sunscreen. Cancer sucks.

So, do you feel inspired now!? Any high schools or colleges feel free to email me, I’m completely wide open on my commencement speech calendar and willing to give this speech in a moments notice!

Failure Is The New Black #DisruptHRCayman

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Tim Sackett

So, last night in the Cayman Islands DisruptHR Cayman went down! If you don’t know what DisruptHR is, you need to check it out! It’s the brainchild of my good friends Jennifer McClure and Chris Ostoich. Jen does most of the heavy lifting on this now, and it’s a global phenomenon sweeping across the HR world!

The concept was born from TEDx. You get 5 minutes to present an awesome idea, 20 powerpoint slides that automatically move every 15 seconds. Fast and furious. Alcohol is involved. Anything can happen. It’s the most fun you’ll ever see HR people have! Contact Jen and bring this concept to your conference or event – it’s a great evening event to open or close a conference, or just to have in your city to energize the HR community!

Don’t think about grabbing DisruptHR Detroit! I already have bought the franchise, so to speak! If you want in, connect with me and we can discuss a time and place!

I did my DisruptHR Cayman presentation on Failure is the new Black! Safe to say, I truly believe all of this talk about failure leading you to success is a bunch of bullshit! Failure leads you to more failure, which eventually leads you to give up, not success! But don’t worry about, I’m in the minority, you can still suck up all that failure crap from every leadership guru on the planet!

Was I successful in my 5 minutes? I don’t know, but you can check it out for yourself at DisruptHR’s website in a week or two. The brilliance of DisruptHR is that they video all the crazy ideas and put them up on the web, so you can’t hide!

Great stuff, check it out. They already have 250 videos of DisruptHR presentations for you to see!

The Tim Sackett Project

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