The Sackett Thanksgiving Menu

Posted on by
2

It’s Thanksgiving in America and you’re reading a blog post.  I’m assuming a few things about you at this moment:

1. You’re bored because you have family around that is driving you nuts.

2. You’re in a food coma and need the nice warm glow of a screen in your face.

3. You’re not in the U.S. and you’re working like a normal person.

Regardless, I’m thankful you stopped by. See what I did there?

Here’s the Sackett menu for today:

Lunch: McDonalds for the kids (It’s America and McD’s is open. USA, USA, USA!)

Hor’sdourves – Pre-Dinner: (cheese, crackers, chips, dips, shrimp cocktail, veggies)

Dinner:

-Turkey

-Stuffing (in a pot, it kind of grosses me out to stuff bread and spices into the bird and then scoop it out)

– Mashed potatoes (this is my wife’s job, she does the best mashed potatoes)

-Grandma Martin’s Homemade noodles with chicken (I make them myself from a family recipe)

– Texas-sized Rhodes bread rolls (they take five hours to rise, and they’re the size of a small loaf of bread, and I can eat ten of them!)

– Gravy (out of can or jar. I’ve never been good at making homemade gravy out of the turkey drippings with corn starch and such. Plus the jar/can stuff is always solid)

-Greenbean Casserole (the secret is adding soy sauce, and French style green beans because we are supporting France!)

-Grandma Sackett’s Cinnamon Cherry Jello (another family recipe, we have to make two pans of this because my oldest son eats one by himself. We do this in place of cranberry sauce)

-Key Lime Pie (my favorite)

-Chocolate Cream Pie (my wife and kid’s favorite)

-Pumpkin Pie (my oldest son’s favorite)

If you’re around, stop over. We’ll have plenty.  I only know one way of making Thanksgiving Dinner and it’s for twenty. We’ll have like eight.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

The Best Places To Work for Men!

Posted on by
3

Have you noticed that Best Places type lists are starting to go a bit far.  I get we need lists like Best Places to Work for Women, Minorities, LGBT, etc. It just seems like we’ve jumped the shark when it comes to best places to work lists.  At this point, anyone can get on one of these lists, you just need to find the right one!

I keep waiting for some company to just allow you to make up your own list. You pay, you get on the list you want for whatever marketing purposes you want. Can you imagine:

-Best Places to Work for Single Dads who have Inappropriately Younger Girlfriends

-Best Places to Work for Pug Owners

-Best Places to Work for Electric Car Owners

-Best Places to Work for Women Who Like Crossfit, but Aren’t Vegan

It’s become a bit much.

I have noticed that I haven’t ever seen a Best Places list for Dudes.  Okay, calm down. I already the hens clucking. But, for real, wouldn’t that list make sense?

The demographic of our working population in many industries now have more female than male workers, so it would make sense in these cases to highlight the best employees for the minority male worker. Right? Oh, wait, I forgot, inclusion only counts if you’re a non-white male.

Think about it. Best Places to Work for Male Nurses. Best Places to Work for Male Elementary Teachers. Best Places to Work for Male Strippers.

Here’s my list of Best Places to Work for Males:

-The NFL (okay, this one is easy, and you can also add MLB, NBA and NHL)

-Any Division I or II college athletic department (yes, Title 9 equaled the scholarships, but it’s still a male-dominated field across the board for jobs)

-Almost all manufacturing facilities (Boy those Unions sure protect workers…)

-The C-Suite of Almost all Companys

-The Executive Board of every Fortune 500 company

-Every Major Tech Firm in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Austin, Chicago, etc.

-Every Service, Retail and Restuarant Company in a Leadership position

-The Banking Industry

-The Oil and Gas Industry.

-Higher Education

Yeah, that’s a good start.  I think the guys would be happy with that list.

I’m assuming you’re all smart enough to catch the irony, but if not, hit me in the comments with how upset you are at me because you just read the title and want to beat me up.

 

 

 

What Would It Take To Get Your Employee To Leave You?

Posted on by
Reply

Anthology (formerly Poachable) came out with a fun survey recently that polled where current employees of some of the hottest tech companies would go if given the chance.  The results are interesting and really speak to organizational fit, and the appetite for risk, in the employees you hire.

On the outset, I would assume any talented person working at companies like, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Facebook or Google would be willing to accept a job at another tech firm, given the opportunity, location and pay are all that they are looking for.  Turns out that the employees at each of these organizations have a particular career taste when it comes to possible change, take a look:

Microsoft: 74% would prefer to go to another Public Company, only 32% to an early stage startup. (this limits the competition you’re up against, right?)

IBM: 72% to a Profitable Private Company, only 23% to an early stage startup.

Apple: 62% would prefer well-funded startup, or the same 62% to a public company, only 28% to early stage startup

Oracle: 69% to a public company, only 29% to early stage startup.

Amazon: 75% to public company, only 35% to early stage startup.

Google: 73% to well-funded startup, 45% to early stage startup and only 59% would want a public company.

So, what does this mean?  All those startups looking to attract folks from big tech companies might want to rethink your sourcing strategies! While some organizations like Google and Apple have employees with a higher tolerance for risk, most big tech companies are filled with non-career risk takers.

Organizational fit is so critical to making good hires, and most of us tend to overlook the risk appetite of the employees we are hiring versus the risk culture of our own organization.  This can be vetted out in an interview process, or even with an assessment, but we just forget about it most of the time.

You can usually see it on a person’s resume. Conservative company, conservative company, conservative company, oh hey, come interview over here with us at ‘our pants are on fire’, you’re going to love it! No, they won’t, but they might be attracted to the fire initially, and seem very interested.  The problem is, they’ve already shown you who they really are, you just aren’t listening!

Career ADHD: Is Employee Tenure Still Important?

Posted on by
2

I keep getting told by folks who tend to know way more than me that employees ‘today’ don’t care about staying at a company long term. “Tim you just don’t get it, the younger workforce just wants to spend one to three years at a job than leave for something new and different.” You’re right! I don’t get it.

Payscale recently released survey data showing that the average employee tenure is sitting at 3.68 years.  Which speaks to my smart friends who love to keep replacing talent. I still don’t buy this fact as meaning people don’t want long term employment with one organization.

Here’s what I know about high tenured individuals:

1. People who stay long term with a company tend to make more money over their career.

2. People who stay long term with a company tend to reach the highest level of promotion.

3. People who tend to stay long term with a company tend to have higher career satisfaction.

I don’t have a survey on this. I have twenty years of working in the trenches of HR and witnessing this firsthand. The new CEO hire from outside the company gets all the press, but it actually rarely happens. Most companies promote from within because they have trust in the performance of a long-term, dedicated employee, over an unknown from the outside. Most organizations pick the known over the unknown.

I still believe tenure matters a great deal to the leadership of most organizations.  I believe that a younger workforce still wants to find a great company where they can build a career, but we keep telling them that is realistic in today’s world.

Career ADHD is something we’ve made up to help us explain to our executives why we can no longer retain our employees.  Retention is hard work. It has real, lasting impact to the health and well-being of a company. There are real academic studies that show the organizations with the highest tenure, outperform those organizations with lower tenure.  (here, here, and here)

Employee tenure is important and it matters a great deal to the success of your organization. If you’re telling yourself and your leadership that it doesn’t, that its just ‘kids’ today, we can’t do anything about it, you’re doing your organization a disservice. You can do something about it. Employee retention, at all levels, should be the number 1, 2 and 3 top priorities of your HR shop.

Tim Sackett, Best Life Coach Ever!

Posted on by
1

I believe the concept of ‘Life Coach’ is the biggest con anyone has been able to pull off in the history of mankind.  That being said I personally know some folks who love having a life coach (#WhitePeopleProbs).  I do like the concept of ‘Business Coaches’ or ‘Leadership Coaches’, I see those things a bit differently based on what I see in organizations.  Two unique things happen in organizations that make the concept of Business Coach more viable:

1. We promote our best workers to managers.

2. Leaders are put on an island with no one to confide in.

Both ideas above are systematically flawed.  Just because you’re the ‘best’ worker doesn’t make you a good manager.  You might be, but you also might be a colossal failure.  Being in a senior leader’s role, and giving you no one to really be able to be honest, also has bad consequences.   A business coach can help both sides succeed, where normal organizational training fails.

You can give new managers all kinds of training, but there comes a time when one-on-one, let’s walk through a specific scenario you are having, just works better for learning and development of that person.   Also, a leader needs to get ideas out of their head to someone they trust will give them good and honest feedback about how freaking crazy they are!   Subordinates won’t do this, and peers might use it against them to position themselves for the next move.

I’m a big fan of Business Coaches.  I think organizations underutilize this approach because it seems expensive.  The reality is, it’s usually a billable hour or two per month, to ensure you have well functioning leadership.  That total cost might be $5000 per year.  I’m really hoping any manager or leader you have brings in exponentially much more profit than $5000 per year!

Which leads me to Tim Sackett, Life Coach.

I could be a life coach.  I have a feeling it would go a little like this:

Mark, Life Coachee: “Hey, Tim great to talk to you, just wanted to dive right into a problem I’m having, is that okay?”

Tim Sackett, Life Coach: “No, it’s not okay. That your problem Mark, you’re always thinking about you!  What about me and my freaking problems!”

Mark: “Uh, sorry. But I thought I’m paying you to help me on my stuff.”

Tim: “No, you’re paying me because I’m smart and have my shit together, and you can’t figure out how to manage your own daily simple life.”

Mark: “I don’t think this is what I expected.”

Tim: “Yes it is. That’s your problem Mark, you think too much.  You’re now paying me to do your thinking.”

Mark: “Okay, I’ll play along and see where this is going.”

Tim: “Mark here’s what ‘we’ are going to do. First, you’re getting your butt up each day and you’re going to work. Second, you’re going to stop whining about your life. Third, you’re going to go home and be an active part of your family life, and stop acting like you should be able to have a family and still act like you’re in college, you’re not.”

Mark: “But you don’t understand, I work in a stressful job!”

Tim: “Shut up, you’re an accountant. Stress is not knowing where you’re sleeping tonight because you don’t have a place to live.  You don’t have stress, you have normal.”

I have a strong feeling my ‘Life Coaching’ sessions would only go one session, and everyone would be fixed, so I’m going to have to figure out that pricing model.  If you want to set up an appointment, just hit me in the comments and we can get that set up immediately, I take PayPal!

 

When Should You Retire?

Posted on by
3

We tend to believe retirement is an age thing. Well, once you turn 65, it’s time to retire! Do you know where ’65’ actually came from? Most HR pros will probably guess it, it’s when America instituted social security insurance back in 1935.

The U.S. Government, in 1935, didn’t even use any science to determine 65 years old.  At the time, the national railroad pension retirement age was 65, and about half the state pensions were the same (the other half were 70), so 65 years old was chosen. Way less red tape back in 1935! Can you imagine the government trying to make that decision today!?

So, you turn 65 and you’re supposed to retire. In 1935, that probably was fairly accurate. The actual life expectancy in 1935 was only 61! So, we built social security knowing most people would not live to receive it. Today, life expectancy is around 79 years old!  As you can imagine, 65 years old is no longer a realistic retirement age.

I’m currently 45 years old.  It’s my belief that I have about 25 years left to work and save for my retirement. I’m assuming I’ll work until I’m at least 70.  70 years old today doesn’t seem like 70 years old when I was a kid.  My parents are now in their 70’s and they don’t seem ‘old’. I mean they’re old, but not like they can’t do anything old.  Both could still easily work and produce great work if they wanted to.

All of this should change how we look at succession planning in our organizations, but we still use 65 as the ‘expiration’ date of when someone no longer seems to have value. “Oh, you know Tim, he’s going to be 65 next year, I’m amazed he can still stay awake all day!”

65 in 2015, is not the same 65 we saw in 1935!  The health and physical wellbeing of those two people are worlds apart in difference!

Succession Planning needs to catch up with this difference.  HR needs to lead this charge.  Part of this change starts with us changing the language and numbers we use when describing retirement.  Regular retirement age needs to start at 70 years old, at a minimum and move up from there.  We need to eliminate 65 years old from everything we write and speak.  It’s just no longer valid or accurate.

Once we push this date out, we can then start to plan much more accurately to what our organizational needs will truly be.  Next, we need to have frank conversations with those who we believe are reaching an age where they want to retire and have real conversations.  HR pros have been failing at this for years!  It’s actually not against the law to ask an employee what their retirement plan is! It should be against the law that you don’t ask this question!

If an employee knows that you are working with them to reach their goals, and you let that employee know that ‘hey, we need you for another five years’, most will actually happily stay on the additional time.  My Dad worked in a professional job until he was 72, and they wanted him longer! Don’t ever underestimate the power of being wanted. As we age, that desire to be wanted just increases!

So, I’ll ask you. What age do you think someone should retire?

Where Does Retention Start?

Posted on by
4

The biggest thing in HR and TA in 2016 will be retaining your employees. Not just top talent, but that middle of the road, shows up every day, glue type talent.  Retention is a concept that most HR and TA pros haven’t had to worry about this for a long time, but it’s quickly the hottest issue facing most organizations.

My question is, where does retention start?

My friend Laurie Ruettimann and Dawn Burke talked about this on Dawn’s FOT Videocast ‘No Scrubs‘ earlier this month. Laurie’s opinion is that retention starts at the Orientation. Solid theory for sure. You want to catch them day one and start retaining them from the start.

What Laurie knows, is that most organizations don’t start retaining employees until it’s too late. You know, when you find out that the person is out interviewing with your competition! Or when you find their resume on CareerBuilder, or see that they recently updated their LI profile, or when they turn in their two weeks notice!

I tend to believe that retention, at its core, starts with selection.  Hire people who actually want to work for your company, and crazy as it sounds, they tend to stay around longer!  Most turnover happens because of poor organizational, or positional, fit. Hire people who have a strong desire to work for your company, specifically, and retention tends to take care of itself.

So, if retention starts so early, regardless if Laurie or I are correct, why do organizations still wait so long to address it?

I think organizations are still under the belief that employees leave organizations because they hate their boss.  We’ve allowed this thought to percolate for a decade and its now become fact.  This is one small aspect of turnover, but I tend to believe now that most employees expect and deal with bad bosses fairly well.

The problem with focusing retention efforts so late in the process is that it’s, well, too little, too late!

Another piece to this retention dilemma is that HR doesn’t really believe they own it, and I tend to agree with this theory. The reality is the direct supervisor should have a better handle on retention. It should be a measure that all first-line leaders are held accountable to. Therein lies the real problem. We all take some responsibility for retention, but no ownership!

It’s the classic house on fire analogy. One person sees a house on fire and they do all they can to help. Ten people see a house on fire, and they all watch, believing someone else will do something about it. Your organizational retention is a house fire. To stop it, one person, one group needs to own it, measure it, make it public, ensure everyone sees the fire burning.

I’m not sure, exactly, when retention starts, but I always know how it will end.  With you posting a job and refilling a position, you already had filled…

T3 – UltiPro – @UltimateHCM

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I take a look at one of the big boys in human capital management (HCM) software Ultimate Software. If you’re like me you probably have some confusion of what or who Ultimate Software really is. Are they Ultimate Software, UltiPro, UltimateHCM, I truly had no idea if these were all the same or different!

Ultimately (pun intended!), I found out that the main product of Ultimate Software is called UltiPro and its an enterprise level human capital management system, or in HR terms, it’s your system of record, plus some.  To give you some more perspective UltiPro runs in the same space as HR technology companies, Oracle, SAP, Workday, Ceridian and ADP.

At its core UltiPro provides you with HR, Payroll and Benefits software. All clients that use UltiPro have this core, plus they give you the ability to buy into the full enterprise for talent management, applicant tracking, compensation, time and labor, Business Intelligence/predictive analytics, payment and tax, etc.

5 things that I really liked about UltiPro:

1. Definite advantage for Canadian customers as UltiPro payroll runs both Canadian employees and U.S. employees on the same system. This is rare in the payroll world, and about 75% of Canadian companies have U.S. employees.  All of your employees in UltiPro, US and Canadian, will be housed in the same database.

2. UltiPro doesn’t seem like a cobbled together mess of technology. It was designed as one holistic system and reacts that way when you are using it. UltiPros manager and employee Self-service is one of the better ones I’ve seen in the industry.

3. The business intelligence and analytics within UltiPro is awesome. It’s built so that individuals can pull exactly what they want, in the way they want, not just pre-built reports where you get what they want you to have. I was especially impressed with their retention dashboard with retention prediction and succession management.

4. UltiPro makes HR and organizational compliance extremely easy. You can tell this was built with input from real HR pros. Need your EEOC annual report? Pull it instantly by clicking one button! UltiPro delivers over 150 different business processes, designed to be best practice right out of the box, but with your ability to change and adapt to your specific processes.

5. This might seem small but it’s a big differentiator in the HCM space, in that UltiPro does the tax side of payroll beyond most payroll systems. Each UltiPro client is indemnified, and they ensure you have the right tax forms, rates, and they’ll actually file for you as well! This is huge for SMB clients!

So, why should you use them over the other big guys in the HCM space?  Ultimate Software sells from a philosophy of ‘we’re the small, big guys’, they’re the nice guys of HCM.  If you’ve dealt with some of the big HCM players recently, you’ll understand this!

So, what size do you need to be to really be an organization that would use UltiPro? They’re primarily an enterprise level software, but do play in the SMB space more than most. So, roughly 300-1500 on the SMB side, they’re enterprise clients average around 5,000, but rise to well over 10,000.

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 Advanced Class – Recruiting Edition

Posted on by
2

As my friend Laurie Ruettimann pointed out last week, recruiting is easy and can be done by basically anyone, so just go hire some soldier to do it.   Laurie might not be that all far from the truth.  Recruiting isn’t brain surgery, it’s a process.  A process that is hated by the majority of human resource professionals around the world, which is why it is a $9 Billion dollar industry.  Not a hard skill, but many times, a really hard job to be successful at.  Old school recruiters like to believe recruiting is an Art form.  It’s not.  New school recruiters like to believe you can just source everyone you need off the internets. You can’t.

Recruiting is all about activity.  It’s a sales cycle.  The more contacts (phone calls, emails, handshakes, etc.) you make, the more candidates you will find.  The more candidates you find and get interested in your jobs.  The more jobs you will fill.  Not hard, right?  The problem is, ‘most’ recruiters look to do things that allow them not to make contacts!  They will buy every kind of technology imaginable to get people to call them.  They’ll do just about anything, besides picking up the phone and making that one call.

Want to be successful at Recruiting? Find people who are willing to make 100 calls per day and who love your company.  Go ahead, go find those people!  It might be a soldier, it might be your neighbor, it might a former crackhead, who knows!  The fact is, most people do not want to do this, even when you hire them and pay them to do just this!

So being a successful recruiter is basically easy.  You must find the sweet spot in the amount of activity you need to do each week that will get you the amount of contacts you need to get enough people for the jobs you want to fill.  Once you find that level, you need to maintain that level forever. Easy. I’m not kidding.  You don’t need fancy branding, and big ATS Systems and a bunch of processes.  You need people who will bang your internal resume database and job boards constantly, and faster than your competition.  That really isn’t that hard to do, because most shops don’t even do the basics well!

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

Do that which is written above and add just one thing.  Maintain a relationship with your companies Alumni.  There is this funny thing about human nature.  When we leave some place, we always want to know what’s going on back there!  If we move to a new city, we love updates from our old city.  When we run into past coworkers at the mall, we love updates on who is still there and who is running different departments, who got fired, who got promoted.  If we know this about human nature, why aren’t we giving it to our Alumni?

It doesn’t have to be constant but is has to be consistent.

Do a quarterly Alumni update via email to everyone who has every worked for you. Even the crappy ones who you are glad they are gone !  Give them some juicy details about promotions. Let them know some new things you’re working on.  Let them know what jobs you’re trying to fill, and how they can refer people.  Do this every quarter for 2 years.  Want to be class valedictorian?  On a monthly basis call a handful of alumni and just have a chat, build some relationships, check on where are they now.  As them if you mind if you share their story in the next Alumni News going out next quarter.  If you commit to do this for 24 months, you will start to see positions fill themselves.

This is advanced course stuff because 99% of companies aren’t doing this with their recruiting!

3 Things HR Pros Don’t Want for the Holidays!

Posted on by
1

It’s that time of year when you start receiving holiday gifts from HR Vendors.  My own company even does it.  For the most part, we send out a holiday card to the vast majority out our contacts, but those ‘paying’ clients or ‘Friends of the Company’ (former or future paying clients) we do something special.  Most companies go through the same kind of decision-making process when determining what should you do for your clients.

Some companies really get creative when determining what to send their clients. My friends Kris Dunn and Shannon Russo, who run the RPO firm Kinetix, decided a few years back to give out books to their clients and friends of the company.  Not just any books, they really dug in and got creative around a book that thought would challenge how people were thinking.  They would put together a thank you note and send out the books.  It’s different, it’s eye-catching, it’s memorable.  I’ll say, though, Kinetix is not the norm.

My friend, Eric Winegardner, at Monster.com, personally makes peanut brittle each holiday, packs it up for hundreds of clients and friends, and sends it out all over the country.  It isn’t easy. It’s very time-consuming. He could easily shop it out and buy store bought stuff.  It shows that he cares.  It shows that he is thinking about you.  Whether you like peanut brittle or not, it becomes a personal gift from him to you.

The norm is boring, safe and sometimes laughable.  Let me give you examples of the worse corporate/client holiday gifts:

1. Pinup Calendar!  Okay, I have to bust on a company that I actually like a lot, Dice.com!  But, they send out a Pinup Calendar each year, and I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a joke, or if one of their executive’s spouses runs a calendar printing company and they are forced to send these out, but it doesn’t fit their brand at all!  “Hey, we’re a tech company, take this 1970 pinup calendar and put in the wall next to your 26 inch LCD screen with your Outlook running on it.”  My grandpa had a pinup calendar in his garage he would get from the gas station!  I’m not sure who makes the Dice.com calendar decision, but I would love to hear about it!

2. Pre-printed Holiday Cards!  You know the ones that say something like “Happy Holidays from the Gang at HRU!”.  You shove it in a pre-printed envelope with a pre-printed address label of your client that your admin ran off an excel mail merge.  It says ‘Classy’!  “We care so much about you as a client that we won’t even sign our name to the card!”  Really!? I don’t care if you’re sending out 1500 cards, sign your freaking name on the cards. It might take a couple of hours and your wrist will hurt, but you’ll live.  Your clients deserve your very least!

3. Company Logo Coffee Mug!  No one really wants your crappy logo coffee mug, unless you’re going to spend some real money and get something that is really nice.  No, I take that back, we still don’t want your expensive logo crappy coffee mug!  Again, what this says to your client is: 1. You must drink coffee and 2. You must drink coffee in our crappy mug and think about us!  I don’t drink coffee. Send me Diet Mt. Dew with your logo on it and I’ll drink every last drop and sign your praises in a caffeinated baritone that would make angels blush!

So, what should you do to show your clients you really care about them and want to thank them for another year of doing business?  It doesn’t matter, big or small, but make it something personal to them, not to you.  If your first thought is: “what is something that is cheap that we can throw out logo on and send it out” — you’re doing it wrong! If your thinking what does this client (the individual I have a relationship with) really into, and what’s something I can send them to show them I was thinking of ‘them’ specifically when they open it — you’re doing it right!

BTW – for any HR Vendor reading this – I’m totally into Gin, Michigan State University and Sprinkles Cupcakes!  Have a great holiday season!