The Good Ole Inbox Zero Metric

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This holiday season, I’m stepping away from my usual writing to bring you some of the top-read posts from 2023. Enjoy!

Inbox Zero as a Measure of Performance for Talent Acquisition!

I have a new #1 question I get asked by Talent Acquisition Leaders! My old number one question was, “Which ATS should we be using?” That stood the test of time for almost a decade! But I now have a new number one.

“How should we be measuring success in Talent Acquisition?”

That question comes in a lot of versions:

  • What is the best metric in recruiting?
  • What do you use to measure the productivity of your recruiters?
  • How do you show your organization that TA is doing its job?
  • What are the metrics you use to measure TA?

I like using “Measures of Success” terminology primarily because of how I want to live my life. I never want our metrics, analytics, and data to be used as a hammer to obtain performance. I want to hire people who want to be successful in what they decide to do in life. Once they make that decision, I want to treat them like adults and help them obtain that success. I use data to help them track outcomes and measures of success to lead them on this journey.

Does that sound like a load of B.S. hustle culture or what?! LOL!

But, honestly, I genuinely believe in this philosophy, even though it’s sometimes hard to follow.

If a recruiter wants to be successful, I know there is a specific set of measures that will help them be successful if they follow the process, use the technology, and are diligent in their follow-up. They don’t have to work over 40 hours per week. They just have to work the 40 hours they work.

Every company could have a varied set of metrics that will make them successful. Most will have some similarities, but the actual numbers within the measures will be uniquely yours.

Inbox Zero is a measure a few TA Teams are using as a measure of success.

First off, I don’t necessarily believe that “Inbox Zero” has a high correlation to TA Team or Individual success, but herein lies the problem with measuring the success of TA teams today. The measures most of us use, suck! Time to fill = awful, zero correlation, you should be fired as a leader. (Editor’s note: Okay, Tim, breathe in, we know you’ll die on this hill.)

I find about 90% of TA Leaders work to build measures of success that look good without really having any real impact on actual recruiting success in their organization. That hurts, I know, but it’s true. Inbox Zero is just another sexy attempt at measuring sh*t with little accountability to success, but you can actually measure it, so it must be important. (sarcasm alert)

Just because you “can” measure it, doesn’t mean you “should” measure it.

Okay, what the hell is “Inbox Zero”?

It’s basically what it sounds like.

As a recruiting measure, some brilliant TA lead believes if every recruiter ended their day with zero emails in their inbox, they must be more successful than someone who didn’t end their day with email in their inbox.

There is some science behind inbox zero, although not a measure of recruiting success, just life success. It was developed in 2006, and here are the tenets of this email management strategy:

  • Some messages are more equal than others. On any given day, only a handful of emails are important and timely. Stop treating every email “like a Christmas present that must be savored.”
  • Your time is priceless and wildly limited. Few people have time to respond to every email they receive or even read them in detail. Accept that your workload exceeds your resources and slavishly guard your time.
  • Less can be so much more. Quit thinking that one-line email responses are rude — you’re not helping anyone by sending wordy responses. When it comes to email, economy is key, at least for most messages.
  • Lose the guilt. Out-of-control email is bad enough. Don’t make it worse by beating yourself up because of your overflowing inbox. Forget the guilt and just get busy cleaning up the mess.
  • Lying to yourself doesn’t empty an inbox. Learn to be honest and realistic about your true priorities and time expectations, while developing a “baseline gut check on what you really intend to do about any given message.”

The reality is we are addicted to data that we can measure that is clean. We love “time to fill” because we can accurately measure it. We like things like Inbox Zero because we can accurately measure it. We can show the business the black-and-white numbers we are confident in. No matter if they actually matter or not!

Inbox Zero is a time management strategy. The hope is if you can manage your inbox well, you’ll be a better recruiter. It’s a hope. That is all it is. It’s not a measure of success for talent acquisition. That being said, I need to manage my inbox better!

Posted on  by Tim Sackett

Zoo-Zapped Dreams

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Once upon a time, I had my heart set on being a teacher. All through my early twenties, that was the future I saw for myself. But then reality kicked in when I dove into teaching and realized it wasn’t the act of teaching that didn’t fit; it was the political chaos within the public education setup. One incident made it obvious.

There was this amazing exhibit at the local museum, perfectly syncing with my lesson plan by chance. I thought, “What luck! The kids would love this.” So, I proposed ditching our routine zoo visit for this exhibit.

“Can’t do that,” my principal said. “It had to be approved a year in advance, but you can do it next year.” “It won’t be here next year; it’s a traveling exhibit, only available this year,” I explained. “Sorry, won’t happen,” she replied. “What if I got parents to do this after school or on a weekend, and it wouldn’t cost anything?” I pleaded. “Nope, can’t let you do it. Don’t waste your energy on this,” she could see my rising frustration with something that made no sense. Guess where we ended up? The zoo. Same old tour, the same old caged animals, and the same lack of engagement.

Right then, it hit me hard—this system cared more about following rigid rules than genuinely educating kids. My dream of being an educator got a reality check.

But hold on, my dream didn’t vanish; it shifted. See, many think an unrealized dream equals failure. Nope. It’s about adapting when life throws a curveball.

The real grind isn’t just the pursuit; it’s in reimagining when things hit a dead-end. Time for a pivot!

We glamorize chasing a dream endlessly, but the truth is, sometimes dreams need an adjustment. And that’s okay. It’s not defeat; it’s evolution.

Let’s embrace the idea that dreams are adjustable. It’s about celebrating the courage to pivot, not just the pursuit. Chase your dreams fiercely, but know it’s equally admirable to adjust them when life asks you to. Adjustments don’t belittle dreams; they shape them, making the journey all the more vibrant.

Are Layoffs During the Holidays Wrong?

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I find it interesting that so many people are concerned when someone gets laid off in December but don’t even notice when they get laid off in March or September. “OMG! How could a company be so heartless to lay off staff right before the holidays!?”

In reality, getting laid off at any time sucks! The time of year has very little to do with timing. When you look at the average layoffs by month, over time, companies do fewer layoffs in December on average. Again, this data is particular to industry and economic timing and has very little to do with the month of the year.

The chart above shows total separations, which includes layoffs, in recent months. You can see that hiring and separations follow the economy, not the seasons. Unless, of course, your hiring is seasonal. Again, this is all baked into the overall numbers.

Should you do layoffs during the holidays?

Here’s my unpopular take. You lay off people as soon as you know you have to protect the business and as many jobs as possible to remain healthy and viable. Being good at business is about making the right business decisions. If you kill the business, you will kill every job.

Sometimes, those layoffs have to happen when it seems heartless. “What’s the difference of a few weeks!?” Maybe that difference is another dozen people getting their notice and the company being less viable. The goal should be to save as many jobs as possible.

Layoffs are a negative situation every time they happen. What you hope to do is make a negative situation the least possible negative for all involved who are trying to maintain the success of the business. To give them as many resources as possible to make it work. If that means we lay off people during the holidays, it’s going to suck, but that is the right decision.

As I said, it’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s the right one.

The tech industry is getting pounded right now for doing layoffs, and many are happening during the holidays. Many of these tech companies got caught up in a new reality around raising money when interest rates shot up. Most are finding it extremely hard to raise money to maintain their businesses and are forced to cut expenses. This is their business reality. They overhired in previous years when interest rates were near zero, and VCs were throwing money at them, and they shouldn’t have done this. They are now paying the price to try and become profitable.

This is Capitalism. For how much it can suck, I still prefer it to all the alternatives. You have amazing upside, but that means you also have down side risk when you don’t run your business to spend less money than you actually bring in. Many in the workforce in the tech sector have never experienced this, so this is extremely hard to take when it’s your first time.

Layoffs don’t happen by month or holiday. They don’t happen because some executive is trying to be cruel. Layoffs happen when business financials are failing, and something has to be done to save as many jobs as possible and cut expenses. Those times come when they come, and it has almost nothing to do with the calendar.

A Christmas Present for Your CEO

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This holiday season, you’ve got the chance to make your CEO’s Christmas wish list come true. It’s time to give them the gift of insights into what they really want from their HR and Talent Acquisition teams.

I created a short survey designed just for CEOs, all about what they wish HR and TA would do more of or start doing. It’s all about improvements, tech stuff, and making magic happen within your organization. They get to rate your HR team’s current performance, spot areas for improvement, and even prioritize the issues they care about most. Psst, CEOs, your secrets are safe with us – this survey is anonymous.

Spread the Joy

So, spread some holiday cheer and share this survey link with your CEO or hook me up with their email.

As HR pros, you have the power to make some serious magic happen. By getting your CEO involved in this survey, you’re not just boosting your own game but helping us all understand what makes CEOs tick across different industries!

I’m making this holiday season all about shaping killer HR strategies. Are you with me? Share the link with your CEO and let’s sprinkle some HR magic together!

Love vs. Victory

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With Christmas approaching and New Year’s following shortly, it often seems like everyone’s just gliding through these final days. You know what tends to happen at year-end, right? People start assessing their lives and careers. It’s the classic: “2023 was rough. What am I doing with my life? 2024 is my year! I need a job I love!”

I run a recruiting agency, but my focus isn’t on “love”; it’s on clinching victories and having success. It’s a battleground of winners and losers. Tracking down the top-notch talent usually means they’re already working elsewhere when you spot them. You’ve got to win them over.

When you snag remarkable talent, it’s a win for one organization and a loss for another. It’s a straightforward win-lose situation.

Being an outstanding recruiter is all about a drive to win. Sure, loving this game (and I’m one of those who does) is great, but it’s not the make-or-break factor for success. What matters is the hunger for victory.

The best recruitment firms are consistently on the winning side. They rack up wins at a rate that overshadows their losses, like Stephen Curry hitting threes. Losing should sting, and winning should feel like that unforgettable first kiss.

Love isn’t what decides winning or losing. Some of the toughest rivals I’ve encountered weren’t crazy about what they were doing well; they were just determined to win.

Too often as recruiting leaders we feel we need to find people who love recruiting. All leaders fall into this trap, trying to get their teams to fall in love with the work they do. The belief that ‘love’ will drive great performance. Which might work, but getting someone to ‘love’ work, is really hard, and rare.

Getting someone who only wants to win, that’s much easier to find and feed.

I’m not in the love business; it’s messy and emotional. I’m in the business of winning. It’s clear-cut – it’s either a win or a loss.

HR Meets ChatGPT

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Are you tired of the same old HR routines? HR and Talent Acquisition pros across the world are diving headfirst into the realm of ChatGPT. This AI wizard must be able to spice up their strategies, right!? Here are 5 popular prompts that HR and Talent Acquisition are throwing at ChatGPT:

  1. “ChatGPT, is this candidate a real person or a catfish?” HR isn’t meant to be Sherlock Holmes. We’re sick of desperately trying to unmask phony candidates – just tell me if they’re real or not! Expect a wild mix of advice in return, but how else will we know if this candidate is actually some weirdo scam artist living in his mom’s basement?
  2. “Craft a compelling job pitch for this job description!” When faced with the challenge of selling the unsellable—a lackluster job—we to ChatGPT for a miraculous solution. Yeah, it might be for the most boring job ever with a terrible salary, mundane tasks, and awful company culture, but make it irresistible!
  3. “Invent a mascot that represents our company culture!” Introducing “Happy Hootie”! Hootie is a wise owl wearing headphones, adorned with vibrant colors reflecting diversity and inclusivity. Their wings feature a mosaic of interconnected puzzle pieces symbolizing teamwork and collaboration. Hootie’s nest is a cozy library, showcasing our value for learning and knowledge-sharing. With a microphone in one claw and a book in the other, Hootie embodies our culture of harmony, where every voice is heard, and learning is celebrated. This mascot flaps around, spreading the message of unity, knowledge, and harmony throughout our workplace nest!
  4. “Craft a ‘thank you’ email to an applicant using only emojis!” 👋🙏📬📩🙏📝🤝🗣️🔜🌟 … oh sorry, you don’t speak emoji? Translation: Hello! Thank you for applying. We appreciate it! Let’s keep in touch! Talk to you soon. Best wishes.
  5. “ChatGPT, write a job description that makes even a pet rock excited to apply!” No really, that unsellable job description we mentioned earlier, we still need help. Please make this boring ass job description more appealing.
  6. “What do I respond to this candidate to show them that I’m interested, but not that interested, but still interested enough to show my interest?” *Inserts full email chain, with no regard to privacy and copyright laws* Response: I’m just a robot, I have no clue what you’re talking about.

The Ingredients of Success

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I still remember an NPR interview snippet that caught my attention a few years ago. The topic? Success. Initially, it seemed straightforward—talent equals success, right? Wrong. The interviewee outlined four crucial components:

  • Talent
  • Persistence
  • Patience
  • Luck

You don’t have to have all four at the same time to be successful, but you’ll probably have all four in some kind of combination if you are successful.

Personally, I admire the relentless, persistent hustlers—the ones who refuse to take no for an answer. Persistence is their superpower, a key ingredient in the recipe for success.

Patience, though, isn’t a close friend of persistence. They rarely coexist. Yet, as I think of the successful individuals in my life, they all have great patience. Having patience doesn’t mean you’re willing to sit around and wait to be successful, it’s about understanding that success often demands time—put that on a coffee mug (we’re going to have a whole collection)!

Now, luck. Successful people never want to admit luck is involved. I’m a self-made person. I did it on my own. I’m not lucky! Luck is a bad word to successful people, it discounts the hard work, the effort and the time you put into becoming successful. But, again, each successful person I know can point to a time, or a person, or a meeting, or some chance circumstance that can only be categorized as luck.

I like this model. It doesn’t let you off the hook. You still have to do it all. You can’t just say, “well, I didn’t get it because I wasn’t lucky enough”. That’s not true, be patient. “I didn’t get it because I wasn’t talented enough.” No, keep at it. Luck finds those more rapidly who are talented, persistent, and patient.

Looking back, sure my career journey has been fortunate, but it took grinding thirty years to stumble upon that stroke of luck.

What are my 2024+ predictions for Talent Acquisition?

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Predictions, opportunities, dilemmas, hopes, wishes, I’m not sure what we should call this, but I’ve got some ideas floating around about what happens next in our little recruiting world. Most predictions are worthless. I love to consider myself a futurist in our industry, but after doing this for so many years, I don’t think I’ve ever had one prediction actually come true!

So, let’s throw out some ideas for 2024:

  • Video Interviews will become a thing! Just kidding, that would have been an amazing prediction ten years ago. I do think video interviewing technology has another life as we move forward with AI advances. Imagine being able to take a long-form video screen or interview and have AI cut you a highlight real, instantly, to send to a hiring manager. Some will say that this tech can do this now, but it’s not quite right. I want a video screen solution that takes every candidate and breaks down that 10-20 minutes of video screens and gives me their best 90-second commercial on why we should move them forward. Hiring managers will only see this. No application. No resume. Just the candidate commercials.
  • AI that constantly follows up with candidates and hiring managers. When I look back at the top recruiters in my life, the one trait that stands out with all of these people is their ability to follow up better than anyone else on both sides of the recruiting equation. AI can now do this or even act as our assistant to do this activity, but it’s not yet built out to make it that useful. I need the AI to sound and act like me. To follow up in a cadence that is like a real human. To push both sides in a way that seems urgent, and human, and brings me into the loop when it senses a real human touch or voice is needed to get it to the next level.
  • We all know there are now AI application bots candidates are using that help candidates apply to hundreds of jobs at a time. Everyone in the industry sees this as bad because candidates don’t even know what they are applying to. The reality is that ATSs and matching technology will advance to understand these applications are coming from AI and recruiting will use its own AI to combat this. So, we end up with competing AIs. Sounds awful for all involved. What’s the solution? I think it will be “our” AI (recruiters) will be better in determining which AI applications might be a real fit and then do the reach out to the candidate to invite them to “really” apply in another method to check for interest and true match. I’m hopeful our AI wins!
  • “Real” human contact becomes a recruiting luxury. Most organizations will go full automation and I back that and understand that. There’s too much to gain by going full automation. However, some organizations will understand that while the crowd goes down one path, it might be best for their brand and organization to go down another. Maybe the way to separate yourself from the pack, in the future will simply be to be more human to your candidates. To give them real people to talk to. Talent acquisition has always been about trust and relationships. The future of TA is definitely more automation in the right places of your process, but it’s also about being more human in the right places within your process.
  • Remote work is not the answer for most people. Frankly, most workers won’t have the option because their work can never be remote. Also, in 2024, GenZ will overtake Boomers for the first time as a larger percentage of the workforce. We have an epidemic of loneliness in the world. Having people work by themselves most of the day does not help this. Having young people do this is disastrous to our social makeup of society. I’m not saying you don’t offer up flexibility. Young people still want that. But don’t think just because you want to be remote as a Millennial or GenX, that’s the right decision for your entire organization. Humans are social animals. We have been since the beginning of mankind. Pushing everyone to remote work isn’t evolution; it’s just bad for society. Treat them like adults, be flexible, and be robust in building culture.
  • Come see me at SHRM Talent in Las Vegas on April 14-17th. I’ll be keynoting and launching my new book, The Talent Fix, Vol. 2. We can talk shop. Be social. Discuss the future of TA. Basically, we can nerd out on all things talent!

What predictions or ideas do you have about the future of Talent for 2024 and beyond?

Are you chasing shadows?

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Ever heard of the “decline effect”? It’s this quirky psychological phenomenon where the more you try to improve something, the more it starts to decline. That’s what’s happening with Employee Engagement. You can always blame the economy or limited options for employees, but that’s not the full story. There’s a deeper reason behind the decline.

Let’s talk about the obsession with Employee Engagement in the last decade. HR departments went all-in, focusing solely on boosting engagement. We measured and implemented programs. We celebrated the uptick in scores. But then, despite our relentless efforts to push those scores higher, they started dropping again. Blaming managers, employees, or vendors didn’t solve it either.

It’s like buying a house. The first one was perfect. Then came the bigger houses with more space, more to handle, and more problems. Happiness didn’t grow with the size.

We’ve thrown everything into making employees happy—new perks, freebies, and fixes. But there’s a limit. Employees were engaged before this frenzy. Seeking more doesn’t always lead to better results; sometimes, it leads to worse outcomes.

Employee Engagement isn’t about more—it’s about balance. Don’t fall into the trap of endlessly chasing more. It’s a dead-end road that gives you less and less over time. Find a sustainable approach to engagement that doesn’t exhaust your efforts.

Spice Girls Know Best

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The Spice Girls have always had it right: “If you want my future, forget my past.”

But not HR. HR remembers everything. Once you’ve made a mistake, it’s hard to expect a clean slate in the future. Mark still holds the title of “top salesperson” despite a dry spell lasting three years. Jessica has the “drama queen” label from an incident 18 months back, even if there’s been no repeat. Once labeled, it sticks.

So, what’s the game plan?

If you screw up, if you sense that label, or if a specific issue has warranted repeated discussions, it’s time to consider a career move to a new organization. Pay attention to the number of discussions—once is a potential oversight, but twice or more likely lands you a Lifetime Label. These labels echo stick. Messed up with a subordinate? You’re forever “that” boss, unless you marry them, and even that comes with its own label. But get divorced? Back to square one.

This idea also extends to positive instances which is a good thing and a bad thing. Remember the manager who transformed a struggling business into a standout? Despite multiple failures in similar roles, their name popped up each time a struggling business nearby needed help. However, their initial success owed much to the team’s efforts. Placed in similar situations with different teams, they failed. Yet, the past clung, painting them as the ultimate “fixer.” HR just can’t forget your past!

The real issue? HR won’t acknowledge this tendency. So, if you truly want to “zig-a-zig-ha” in your career, sometimes, moving on is the only way forward.