How Much Did Your Dreams Cost?

It’s the holidays, do yourself a favor and go out and download or Redbox the movie “Up In the Air“.  It’s a great movie for HR pros. One of the best scenes is this one (below) between George Clooney and J.K. Simmons:

Enjoy your time off, if you have it. Either way, answer me this, how much did you get paid to give up your dreams?

I got paid $20,000.  That’s how much I get paid, salary, for my first Recruiting job right out of college.

I wanted to be a college volleyball coach.  I was good at it. I loved doing it. I found my wife because of it.

$20,000.

It seems silly, now, looking back on it.  $20,000 is nothing.  My life has worked out wonderfully, but it’s a lesson I’ll pass along to my kids. Dreams are wasted on the young.  Don’t give up your chance when you are young. All too soon, you’ll reach a stage in life where your dreams won’t seem that important any longer.

We are told that the key to a happy work life is to find a job you love, and you’ll never ‘work’ another day as long as you live. About .01% of people actually find jobs they truly love. The rest of the 99.9% work jobs that are fine, but not love. You only fall in love with a job when you follow your dreams.

It’s not 100%. Sometimes your dreams end up sucking. Don’t get down about that. Many, many people suck at their dreams. That’s life. You’re allowed to change your dreams.  Just don’t wait too long to do it!

The Best Talent Expects Tougher Interviews

I was reminded this week about the importance of tough interviews and their importance!

My friend has been interviewing at a number of good companies for high-level jobs. He’s going to be a great hire for someone, he’s a top notch talent. Great resume, experience, education and personality. He’s a five-tool player, A level talent!

He was debriefing me on some of his interviews and one thing struck me as soon as he said it. He was talking about one interview in particular and why he was interested in the company. Basically, he was interested in the company because they gave him the most challenging interview!

It was his determination that if a company was going to be that challenging in an interview, it was a place he would like to work. It was the toughest interview he has been on, and as a top talent, it seemed they were doing more to ensure they were only hiring top talent, and that made him feel like it was the right place for him!

A few things about this interview:

1. It was a long interview.

2. They didn’t force him to interview with 15 people over 8 stages.

3. They asked tough, challenging questions, they only someone who really knew their stuff, and worked at that level, would be able to answer!

The problem with saying tough interviews are better is too many HR Pros believe ‘more’ interviewing, is tough interviewing. More doesn’t equal tough, it equals more. There is a huge difference!

Tough, difficult interviews are ones where the questions asked would challenge the knowledge and skill of the person asked. Many times we end up not asking anything challenging in interviews because are spending all of our time just ‘talking’ the candidate into the job. In this instance we end up hiring the person who had the best interaction with us, maybe not the best candidate.

Top talent likes to be challenged. It’s the reason they’re top talent! If you don’t challenge them, most will not accept your offer, because they won’t view your organization as a great fit.

So, how do you challenge top talent and recruit top talent at the same time?

It’s your recruiters job to recruit and close. It’s the hiring managers job to challenge the heck out of the talent you put in front of them, then tell you which is the best. Part of the recruiters job is to ‘warn’ the candidates, that they will be challenged in this interview like none they ever have been a part of. This alone will help weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge!

Top talent wants you to want them, but they also want to know they’re going to a great organization that will challenge them and make them better!

T3 – StandOut by The Marcus Buckingham Company @StandOutTMBC

This week on T3 I review the engagement and performance management platform StandOut.  StandOut was the product created by The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), to further his work and research on helping organizations become world-class. For anyone who has read Marcus’s books or heard him speak, you can imagine this technology is very important to him.

If you’re like me, and like what Marcus has to say in regards to engagement and performance, the philosophy about why and how StandOut was created becomes an easy sell. StandOut was built around the concept of leadership and coaching, specifically around what is it that the best leaders, across industry do, and how do you get your own leaders to emulate this behavior.

The StandOut platform is a comprehensive engagement and performance management suite designed around the interaction between your team leaders and team members, not around HR.  I see more and more HR technology going down this path. If you want high user adoption, design the software for the end-user. Makes sense. With performance management, HR is not the end-user, your team leaders are the end user.

StandOut’s feedback philosophy is designed around a quick ‘pulse’ concept. The process should only take a few minutes each week to complete. It’s not task management, but more of a sharing of priorities, getting everyone on the same page quickly and going about the work at hand. Social recognition is built within the platform as well with ShoutOuts amongst the team members.

5 Things I really like about StandOut: 

1. Engagement Pulse is built around quick and easy questions that are nationally benchmarked, and also give your Team Leaders real in the moment coaching suggestions to drive great conversations with their team members, specifically around their needs.

2. Performance Pulse gives you a great view of the organizational as a whole and allows you to drill down via each team. Ultimately, organizations still need a way to compare the performance of their employees, and this does an excellent job. All the data is also weighted across the organization so it gets calibrated accordingly, so you don’t have one team always ranked higher because that team lead is an easier rater, etc.

3. ShoutOuts. Social recognition is huge, and having a system that encourages this, and tracks this is great.  This can also help those team leaders who want to do more recognition, but get caught up in the daily grind and they just forget to do it. ShoutOuts helps establish great habits by your team leads that drives positive engagement.

4. Engagement dashboard is a great tool that allows you to see who is leading your most engaged teams, but also who and how you need to help with those teams that aren’t as engaged as the rest.

5. The entire platform philosophy is built around how do we leverage our employees strengths, which you could assume being its a product of TMBC. Still, this sets it apart from many performance management platforms on the market.

StandOut is well worth taking a look at and a demo if you’re in the market for engagement and/or performance management software. It’s quite new and they have a ton more on the roadmap they are looking to add.  The team they have in place to is top notch, so I expect to see more great stuff from StandOut in the future.

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 Next Generation Just Named Itself! #NicknamingYourselfIsStupid

Have you ever had a nickname you didn’t want?  You were in the third grade and crapped your pants and some dumb kid called you ‘Stinky’ and it stuck, for life! The rest of your life you got to go around being called ‘Stinky’ and having to explain this to people.

I think most people in those situations try to create a new nickname!  “Hey, guys, just call me Dice! I was at summer camp and all the guys there called me “Dice”! We played this game with dice and I was really great at it, anyway, it stuck. So, you guys can call me Dice, I’m cool with it.” Okay, Stinky, we got you!

There’s only one rule in nicknames. That rule? You can’t make your own nickname!

To my surprise the great folks at MTV decided it would be a great idea for the kids over at GenZ, that generation under the Millennials, to just come up with their own generational nickname.  The MTV crew actually surveyed thousands of high school kids from across the country to determine what they would prefer to have their ‘generation’ called.

Say hello to The Founders!

Why the founders?  Well, apparently this next generation has attached itself the Silicon Valley culture of founding companies.  Not they have really actually done this, but it’s what they identify with, so why not act like you started this whole dot com, startup thingy.

What do we really know about these Founders? A few things for sure, that I think will help organizations understand this next generation entering the workforce:

1. They were raised during the Great Recession. Not since the Great Depression, have so many kids witnessed parents and adults close to them lose so many jobs and struggle financially. This will impact their work ethic, the importance of keeping a job, etc. Think the opposite of how Millennials view work! The Founders probably have more in common with the Greatest Generation, than the Millennials.

2. They have never not had a Smartphone. This will impact how they do their work, how they socialize and how they communicate. The Millennials had flip phones to start!

3. The media has bombarded them with unrealistic views of what work looks like.  Google is an outlier, not the norm. Yet, they tend to believe it’s the norm because the ‘Googlized’ work environment gets so much publicity. 99% of work environments do not look like Google. This will cause some ‘hey, I didn’t expect this’ moments for a ton of kids in their first jobs.

I hate naming generations. Millennials, Founders, Gen-X… They’re kids.  They won’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, and you’ll have to teach them most everything they’ll need to know about your company and your jobs, because our educational system continues give them real-world skills to compete.

Call them whatever you want.  Entry level always seems to fit best.

How President Obama Would Build a Team.

One of my favorite writers is Bill Simmons of Grantland fame.  Recently, Bill got the chance to interview President Obama for GQ Magazine. Bill is traditionally a sports writer, huge NBA fan, but also does a ton of pop culture pieces as well. So, why not the President!?

The article is great. A good read for sure. One thing I took out of it was how President Obama explains how he builds a team around him. It came when Bill asked him who he would take a call from of he was out to dinner with his wife, Michelle. A tricky situation for all husbands! My wife is the most important person in my life, BUT sometimes you have to take that call!

From the GQ article:

“Malia and Sasha. [laughs] And maybe my mother-in-law. My national security adviser, Susan Rice, and Denis McDonough, my chief of staff. Those are the only people whose call I would take during a date night with Michelle. But the entire White House is full of people who have enormous responsibilities. You can’t do this by yourself. The principle of team building in the White House is really no different than the principle of team building anywhere, on a sports team or a well-run business. Do they put team ahead of themselves? Do you make sure all the pieces fit together? Because just having the best athletes, if they’re knocking heads and nobody’s doing rebounding and everybody wants the ball, it isn’t always going to work.”

It’s the essence of leadership, right?

Surround yourself with great talent that is willing to work as a team for the greater good of the whole organization. Sounds so easy, but it’s so freaking hard to get right!

We tend to overly believe in just getting the best talent, but too often the team with the best talent fails.  Too many organizations do not put enough time into the concept of the pieces fitting together, but that is the secret sauce of great leaders.  The talent doesn’t have to be the best. Usually, the space between the best and very good is so small you wouldn’t be able to tell anyway!

The one thing you must get right is whether or not the talent you have, fits together and works together. The final step, once they all fit together and work together is getting them to works together towards that overarching organizational goal. Another tough thing to consistently make happen. Some teams love working together, but can’t complete the task of reaching the organizational goal.

President Obama gets it. It’s probably the reason he got elected for two terms. Any leadership position has very little to do with what you know, and everything to do with the team you are able to put around you. That team will define your leadership success.

How To Fall In Love With Your Job. Just. Do. This.

A psychologist, Arthur Aron, came up with a way to get to strangers to fall in love with each other.  His research is fascinatingly simple!  It basically comes down to having the two people sit down facing each other, then methodically going through and asking and answering a set of 36 increasingly more intense personal questions.  This experience gets the individuals to understand each other a highly personal level.

Here are some of the questions:

They start somewhat easy:

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

begin to increase in intensity:

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

and continue down an emotional path:

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

The science behind this study, is if you can honestly answer all 36 questions with this other person, you will probably share more with this one person, and them with you, then you have ever shared with any one person in your life!

So, how do you get someone to fall in love with their job?

Modify the technique and questions between an employee and their direct supervisor. The questions don’t have to all be asked at one time. Strategically, using these questions to drive frank discussions between employee and supervisor over time will get both to truly value and understand each other.

You can imagine how some of these questions would look:

1. Tell me about the job you loved the most and why?

2. What part of this job do you love doing? Hate doing?

3. Who has had the most influence in your life, to this point, and what do they do for you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

Here’s the deal, though. It takes two to fall in love! Your managers/leaders have to become as vulnerable as the employee. Turns out HR has very little to do with getting employees to fall in love with their job.  Having strong, understanding relationships at work, have more impact than some silly HR program. But, HR could help develop this employee/leader process!

Crazy. Real conversations with employees. Truly getting to know them. Makes a difference. This isn’t your parents leadership model!

Check out all 36 questions. They could make for some really dynamic ‘date night’ conversations!

A Farewell Tour for an HR Pro

If you didn’t see it, one of the all-time greats of the NBA, Kobe Bryant, recently announced he was going to retire. Kobe is a personal favorite of mine, because, besides Jordan, he might be the most competitive player I’ve ever seen play.  If you played against Kobe, he hated you. If you played with Kobe, he put up with you! I love me some Black Mamba!

So, Kobe is now on his city by city farewell tour.  This happens in sports all the time for the great ones.  We got to see it last year with Yankee great Derek Jeter.  It’s always the same thing. Each city/team tries to outdo each other with giving gifts and paying tribute to the all-time great player.  Everyone plays nice. Hugs (I like that part). Gifts. Don’t guard me too close so I can make a few plays for the fans to remember me by! You know the drill!

When a HR Manager decides to retire, we never get a farewell tour.  I think we should!  Here’s what an average HR Manager Farewell Tour would look like:

Week #1 – Your benefits vendor invites you out to Applebee’s for a free lunch. Go ahead get the appetizer, the sirloin, and the strawberry lemonade! Heck, throw in a brownie bite. Yeah, in might go over your $25 limit, but this is your tour, no one is going to care you took $28, not $25!

Week #2 – Your HRMS vendor wants to drop off a little something to congratulate you. Looks like a bottle of wine!  (Pro tip: I would ask if it’s alcohol on the front side, then meet them in the parking lot!)

Week #3 – Your EAP vendor dropped off bagels from Panera, with three kinds of cream cheese! Way over $25, but you’re really sharing with the group, so you can divide that out. Pretty safe! (Pro Tip: On your farewell tour, make sure to bring in a toaster into the office, if you don’t already have one – some will always drop off bagels!)

Week #4 – CareerBuilder just wants to send you a little something to say thanks! Also, who’s taking over for you?  CB swag is always great. Pick through the box for the good stuff first, then throw the rest in the break room. It will be gone in no time! (Pro tip: if you spend a bunch with your job board vendor – like $25K+ – you can turn this into a lunch!)

Week #5 – Your ATS vendor called to wish you luck. You just happen to drop the ‘hint’ you can’t wait to go to more movies! It’s a passion of yours! You love going to the theater, but it’s so darn expensive! Theater gift card will be coming soon in the mail!

Week #6 – It’s the employee cake and ice cream social event.  You have to throw this one in, even though, you’ll be the one ordering your own cake and ice cream! It’s your party, make sure you get the cake you want, and not that cheap crap you order for all the other employees who retire!

Week #7 – Save this one for last! It’s time to call on your staffing vendor! Staffing vendors are an easy steak dinner and drinks kind of night. You do this last because you don’t want to come back to the office and look anyone in the eye after this night. Staffing folks can party, and still believe that if they get you drunk you’ll tell them all your secrets. The secret is, we don’t have any!

The bigger the organization the longer you can stretch out this tour since you probably have more vendors. It’s your tour, do with it what you will. Just remember, you earned it!

 

T3 – @Clinch

This week on T3 I’m reviewing Clinch. Clinch is a recruitment marketing software that will help organizations attract, identify, and convert active and passive candidates, and oh so much more! It does a ton, so much, I will struggle to actually tell you all Clinch can really do, you’ll have to demo to see everything.

So, I’ll start off with an example we all have in TA.

Most passive candidates won’t spend time applying to your jobs. They’ll stop by the careers site, check you out, lurk on some content, watch some videos, etc. But, probably will never apply the first time they look you up.  This is a problem for all of us, because we really would love to know who these people are. Clinch solves this for you, and it’s really cool!

Clinch lets you know how candidates are engaging with you, when you don’t even know them yet. The technology tracks people who come to your site, without them knowing (by the way, most sites do this to you now, you just don’t know it).  The tech doesn’t actually know much about you at this point. When that candidate comes back, and maybe inputs their email address to get download a whitepaper, or something, now the tech puts all these dots together, and begins to share all the data back to you.

How awesome would it be to know that some engineer, who just downloaded a cool piece of your content, also was the same engineer who had already stopped by two other times and the tech shows you exactly what they looked at and for how long. Also, the tech sends your recruiter a quick message to your recruiter saying “hey! he’s on the site right now checking out a job, but isn’t applying!” So, your recruiter can send them a quick message!

That’s cool, right?!

Clinch also makes it super easy for your team to quickly set up landing pages for jobs, with unique content, etc. Basically, enhancing the ATS experience for your candidates. As well as automating candidate messaging so your candidates, or potential candidates, are getting messages to them that make sense to the context in which they are engaging with your brand, not just generic emails sent to the masses. Talk about raising your candidate experience game!

5 Things I really like about Clinch:

1. Clinch lets you show candidates something new every time they stop by to see you. Your normal careers page has a lifespan of about two years, and candidates just see the same thing over and over. Clinch makes it unique for them and every position that candidate looks at.

2. Automatic scheduling for all of your companies employment branding social feeds of when to promote certain content, jobs, etc., how often and which platform.

3. Clinch grabs candidates before they even hit the ATS, which is great because most drop off before they get too deep into your process. Gives you searchable lists of these candidates, and allows you to still engage with these potential candidates. Think about how you could easily use this in campus recruiting. Just input a student’s email address, or have them do it on tablet at your booth, and BAM, Clinch allows you to market to them and track them, especially as they begin to engage with your brand, career site, etc.

4. Clinch gives you a way to go after your competitors employees, by letting you know when an employee from a competitor is visiting your site, and will even show that competitors employee a specially designed landing page built to speak right to that individually!

5. On the Clinch roadmap is a tool that so many of us in TA will want. The ability to begin tracking the behavior of how our hiring managers engage with the candidates we sent them! You will have to check this out, it’s really cool. Dare to say, this is something every TA leader will be talking about next year!

There are a number of really great recruitment marketing tools in the space right now, and Clinch is showing it wants to be a market leader. Well worth a demo. Be prepared, it’s a lot.  I can see some TA Leaders getting overwhelmed about how they will use all of this. Clinch is designed for larger companies (mid-market to enterprise, 100-1000 hires per year) that probably have recruitment marketing as a position or function, or are seriously considering adding this function. I will say, regardless of your size, it’s very affordable for what you get.

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.

HR Pros! You Should Be Going To Court More!

There’s one thing we as HR pros are pretty consistent on. We never want to go to court! We do just about anything to mitigate risk for ourselves and our organizations.  The first step of HR Club is don’t go to court!

Now, that’s how most HR pros feel.  I don’t.  I don’t believe it’s HR’s job to mitigate risk. I believe it’s HR’s job to advise our decision makers of risk. Of course, if you are a decision maker, in HR, then it’s your job to mitigate risk over what you’re responsible for. All that being said, I’m in the minority of that opinion.

So, why do I feel this way?  It’s all numbers to me. Check this out from FloridaOvertimeLawyer.com:

-In 2014, there were 88,778 Employment Related Charges Filed in the U.S.

-In 2014, from those charges, a total of $372,100,000 dollars was awarded to the winners of those cases.

-That averages out to just: $4,191.35 per case.

Here’s the reality of employment related cases:

-Most cases are won by the employer.

-Employee and Past Employees believe their cases are worth millions.

-Most end up settling for a few thousand dollars.

First, I’m not advising you to not be safe and just go all willy-nilly and go to court!  Don’t be stupid.  Also, don’t allow yourself and your organization to be held hostage by an employee or past employee threatening a lawsuit.  Most you can settle for way less than you can ever believe!

When I first started in HR I was always shocked by how small of amount of money it would take to make ‘problems’ go away, from a legal standpoint. The numbers above say the same thing. Sure, there is always a risk of a big score.  Usually, the companies that get hit with those are truly doing something very bad.  If you’re doing good work and trying to follow the letter of the law, rarely do those cases turn into major scores for employees.

Do you want to go to court? Of course not.  You, also, don’t want to allow your organization to be bullied by an employee who is taking advantage of your fear of going to court.  Judges are really smart people. They see through most con-artists pretty quickly.  I’ve been to court on employment matters a number of times, and each time the judge was fair to my organization, and called out bullshit when they saw it.

Do good work. Do good by your employees. Don’t allow your organization to bad stuff. Trust our legal system will do what’s right.  Don’t allow yourself to be held hostage!

Open Office Spaces Now Suck…But wait for it…

This just in! Google got it wrong! It seems like we keep hearing that more and more these days. The company that seemingly invited HR and Talent Acquisition keeps getting it wrong. This time, it’s around the open office concept. To be fair to Google, they weren’t the first ones to jump on the open office bandwagon. They just became the poster child for crazy office spaces gone wild. From The Washington Post:

Despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country. Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association. Silicon Valley has been the leader in bringing down the dividers. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs and American Express are all adherents.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers. And as a businessman, Michael Bloomberg was an early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. He famously carried the model into city hall when he became mayor of New York,  making “the Bullpen” a symbol of open communication and accessibility to the city’s chief.One more reason we should be allowed to work from home!…

…But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Meanwhile, “ease of interaction” with colleagues — the problem that open offices profess to fix — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent of workers in any type of office setting. In fact, those with private offices wereleast likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue. In a previous study, researchers concluded that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.”

But wait for it…

Why is all of this Open Office hating coming out right now? Are open offices really that bad? My own opinion is that the office furniture industry is truly behind all of this anyway. Every decade or so, they need to sell new furniture and the way to do that is to tell executives that a new design will give them magical productivity gains and super happy employees! Just buy our new desk and chair!

I suspect this round of Open Office hating is coming from another corner of the universe. Can you guess?  So, closed offices don’t work. You don’t get collaboration. Open offices don’t work, because you don’t get privacy. So, what are we HR Pros to do?

Oh, I have an idea, came from the corner, of the employees who just don’t’ feel cozy enough at work!  The NEW research says that Working From Home is the real answer to all of our problems!  Yep. Open offices suck because working from home is soooo much better!

Did you see that coming?

There are seven-year-old kids in China making $100 Nikes by candle light, and amazingly their productivity goes up every day! Be careful about getting pulled down the rabbit hole of what next great office design will ‘fix’ your company.  Everyone has an agenda. Your employees who really would rather just work from home. The office supply companies who need to push product. The HR executive who needs productivity increases to show the board or at least, a reason we aren’t getting them!

What is the magical office design after work from home crashes?  I hear working from the beach in Cayman really, really increases productivity!