The Only Candidate Available

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Almost every single week of my life for the last twenty years I’ve had to deal with an issue that just seems to never go away. I didn’t matter if I was in a HR or TA role, I was always involved with working with hiring managers who always had some sort of opening, even in bad economic times.

The scenario went something like this:

1. Hiring Manager  has an opening. I/We find this hiring manager a really good candidate. Not perfect, but probably better than many we have already hired in the same position.

2. Hiring Manager interviews candidate. Likes Candidate.

3. I go to speak with the Hiring Manager.

4. You know what happens next…

5. Hiring Manager says she really liked the candidate, but (wait for it)…She would certainly like to see other candidates to compare.

6. I put gun in my mouth and pull trigger.

This same scenario has happened weekly for twenty years across multiple companies, multiple industries and multiple states. It’s an epidemic of enormous proportion across the world.

Here’s the real problem that we face with hiring managers, and it’s completely psychological. The Hiring Manager always assumes that the ‘last’ option, or ‘only’ option is a bad option.

Pretty simple.  We all do this.  If you go to a farmers market and you go to pick out some produce, let’s say a head of lettuce, and the farmer only has one head of lettuce left on the stand. We will assume something must be wrong with that one head of lettuce!  If the farmer puts three other heads around that one, you would gladly pick up the original head, now believing you ‘picked’ the best head of lettuce.

Candidates are heads of lettuce!

When you show a hiring manager one, they assume it’s not as good as the others they are not seeing.

This is actually pretty easy to solve, but very hard to do. Never present a hiring manager with one candidate.  HR and TA are classic economist when it comes to candidate generation. We are FIFOs! Do you remember your Econ class from college? First In, First Out.  The first candidate we find, we immediately send out to the hiring manager.

This starts the problem.

The hiring managers seeing one candidate will discount this candidate as bad. If you just wait a few days, put one or two other candidates with this candidate, not the hiring manager will ‘pick’ the best.  This works pretty well, most of the time.  But, it’s hard to do because we get so excited about finding a good candidate we want to show it the hiring manager as fast as possible.

Stop that!

Be patient. Find a good ‘slate’ of candidates to present all at the same time. Reap the benefits.

The only candidate available will always be that lonely head of lettuce on the farmers stand.  Find more heads, and present them together. No one likes to pick from a pile of one!

5 Tips for Creating a More Human Workplace #WorkHuman

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Better Than Robots: Why Your Employees Deserve a More Human Workplace

This is a Free Webinar sponsored by Globoforce – Register Here – Wednesday, October 14th at 2 p.m. ET | 11 a.m. PT | 1 p.m. CT | 6 p.m. GMT

This is going to be fun! We won’t be coming to live from my Camry, but we will be Live! Just two HR guys sharing the tips and tricks on making your workplace and environment more human!

Admit it. Life would be a lot easier if our employees were robots. They’d be more predictable, and a heck of a lot more manageable. As we seek to gain more and more big data in HCM it seems like that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Measure and manage our cultures into a robot paradise. But that way lies danger. It is the humanity in our employees that provides the creativity, the innovation and the heart that makes our businesses really succeed.

We’re in the ‘real’ people business, and our employees need a real human workplace and culture to thrive and prosper. This webinar will give you the insight to what works and what doesn’t, and help you reimagine the concept of work-life balance.

You will learn:

  • 5 tips for creating a more human workplacGloboforce
  • A case study of how one company built a better culture
  • HR “best practices” that actually hurt workplace culture

 

What else will you get? 

Kris Dunn is coming on to talk about how he and his team are building a more human workplace at his company Kinetix.  Get some great insight and tips from Kris on how you can begin building this in your own workplace as well! The Kinetix team has one of the best cultures around, and you’ll want to hear how they’ve built from the ground up.

This isn’t your normal webinar. This is real advice, brought to you by real practitioners, letting you know what works and what doesn’t!

Register Today! 

 

T3 – Microsoft Excel

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Wait a minute, this isn’t April Fool’s Day is it?

On a daily basis I’m reminded at how much of HR and TA (Talent Acquisition – but I’m now just going with TA for the rest of time) Technology is really just Excel spreadsheets and Word docs.  That isn’t a knock on HR and TA pros. That is just a reality of resource limited universe most HR and TA shops live in every single day!

The awesome thing about HR and TA is that you really don’t need that much technology to be great.  This proven out by Men and mostly Women that run HR and TA in SMB shops everyday around the world, who use mostly email, Microsoft Office, a copy machine and a phone. I don’t have exact numbers, but if you take away a payroll system, over 50% of HR shops run on the technology listed above.

Microsoft Excel can be used to provide your organization with front-line HR and TA metrics, like turnover, sourcing information, days to fill, benefit enrollment information, employee relations log, etc. You can track time and attendance. Performance management records. Total compensation statements. Succession planning. Interview guides. And on and on.

What Microsoft did with the launch of office in 1988 is tell HR and TA that you no longer have an excuse in not providing great service to your organization, because we just gave you the backbone of every process, procedure and product you’ll ever want or need to do great work.  We look at Microsoft Excel now like we look at the internet.  We can’t imagine not having access to it to get our jobs done, and if you took it away we would lose our minds in a short period of time!

5 Things I really like about Microsoft Excel: 

1. It makes you look way smarter than you really are.

2. It makes your data look official even when it’s kind of made up to present a case to get you something you want.

3. It gives you something to blame when executives don’t buy your bullshit numbers. (Must be an Excel error, I’ll go back and check that!)

4. The learning barrier to begin using is very low, but ceiling to what you can potentially do with it is very high.

5. Almost everyone running HR or TA has access to use it, and learn how to use it for free.

In a few weeks I’ll be at the annual HR Technology Conference and I’ll be on the front-line of the best and newest HR and TA technology the world has to offer.  Every single product is designed to solve specific pain points we have in HR and TA. None of these products will have the ability to match the scope and breadth of what Excel can do, and almost all will be more expensive. I’m still super geeked to see the new stuff, and can’t wait to share what I find with you!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.

Michigan Recruiters Conference #MiRecruits @MiRecruits

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Over a year ago Jim D’Amico and I started talking about how cool it would be to have a Recruiting only conference right here in our great state of Michigan! We had some models of how some others did it, primarily Paul DeBettignies out of Minnesota, and we decided to give it a try.  HR has thousands of conferences! National, state, local. TA has somehow become the redheaded stepchild of HR! Jim and I love redheaded stepchildren so we wanted to change this!

The first one was held on Friday March 13th in Lansing, MI, onsite at Accident Fund who was a great corporate sponsor for our first event.  We had over 100 corporate talent acquisition leaders and pros come in from all over the state. We had a great speaking group that included Paul and Jennifer McClure. It was everything we hoped for and more.

The 2nd Michigan Recruiters Conference will also be held on  Friday October 2nd onsite at Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, MI. This time we’ve added more speakers including Kris Dunn, Lori Fenstermaker, David Dart and Troy Farley.  As was the first event, the intent is to help develop and educate corporate talent acquisition pros and leaders to be great.

You can follow the action on the Twitters at #MiRecruits. Also, you can check out my Periscope throughout the day and I’ll bring some Live action to the social stream as well – which you can watch following me on Twitter @TimSackett and download the Periscope App on iTunes or Android.

If you’re just learning about this for the first time, I apologize. The reality is, the demand has been great. We sold out both shows without really even trying.  Turns out, Corporate Talent Acquisitions Pros like development, and we all don’t have very many options! We hope this is a great option, that is close to home.  Send me your contact information and I’ll make sure you get added to the contact list for the Spring 2016 conference. (timsackett@comcast.net)

So, What’s next? 

Our original idea was to try and do this event twice per year. We keep it cheap through great sponsors like Velocity Resource Group and CareerBuilder, as well as corporate sponsors (who provide us with space to hold the one day Conference/Summit) like Accident Fund and Spectrum Health.

That means the next conference will be held in the spring of 2016 and we would love to have it in the metro Detroit area – we just need to find a corporate sponsor, who has a large conference/ballroom type space that can fit a couple hundred people.  Hello, GM, Quicken Loans, Ford, Chrysler, Blue Cross/Blue Shield/ Detroit Medical Center/ Etc.!?  If you have interest in being a corporate sponsor please reach out to me directly, I would love to answer any questions you might have. I promise, we try and make it painless! Plus, it’s huge boost to your employment brand within your market!

You can check out more at www.michiganrecruits.com!

The Three Loves Job Theory

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Helen Fisher, PhD. is a Biological Anthropologist and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Internet dating site Match.com.  Helen’s life work is centered around the Three Loves Theory, which helps us better understand our relationships.

The Three Loves Theory basically says not all love we feel is experienced equally.  Fisher have studied the cognitive and neurobiological processes underlying attraction and love, and they’ve begun to pinpoint different emotions that occur at different stages of romantic relationships. She believes we have three kinds of love: Lust, Passion and Commitment.

So, what does this have to do with Human Resources?  I theorize that Fisher’s Three Loves Theory can be extended to our employees.

Think about it for a second and chart your employees, who ‘love’ their job, in the following categories:

  1. Lust – It’s that new love of the job and organization. They act a little crazy about it. Can’t stop talking about it. People at this job love level will tattoo the company logo on their body!
  2. Passion – You’re working in something you really care about. You feel it’s what you were born to do, at this time. You love discussing your job with people on a deep level, wanting to learn more about it.
  3. Commitment – It’s gone beyond the job and you feel deeply connected to the organization. In fact, you would change jobs within the organization if it’s what the organization needed from you. Your job love as evolved beyond the job.

While all of these employees love their job, we tend to think of them differently.  We tend to rank this job love and judge these employees who on who ‘really’ loves their job.

We tend to value one love over another. Some organizations value that job lust, they want to hire people who are lusting over their work. Some organizations what their employees to be committed to the organization over the work. Every organizations is different, one is no better than the other.

Think about your own career path. What level of job love are you in right now?  Maybe you’re not in job love at all.

To me that is always the measure. Are you in love with your job?  People tend to think of job love, on only one level, and that level is usually Lust or Passion, rarely Commitment.  It’s also how we usually judge our employees. Those with job love Commitment, get their love discounted, because they are no longer lusting or passionate about their job.

It’s all love. We should be celebrating job love, not judging it.

What phase are you in job love?

 

3 Things You Desperately Need to Understand About Your Employment Branding

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Employment Branding is the new black.

It’s been the new black for a few seasons now, so I keep waiting to see what’s next.  Talent Acquisition technology (mostly CRM based tools) are really hot right now and will get hotter in the future, but EB is still king for the moment.

Why?  Mostly because the majority of HR and TA leaders suck at marketing, and their internal marketing folks have bigger fish to fry, like driving top-line sales, increasing traffic, gaining market share, etc.  So, HR and TA pros are left to deal with their employment brand on their own.  Which means, they’re mostly paying others to do this work for them.

Here’s what most HR and TA leaders are missing:

1. Employment Branding is not Advertising. It’s marketing. Marketing and Advertising are different. Employment branding is not about increasing the number of applicants you are getting. It’s about telling and sharing what it’s like to work at your organization.  If you do a great job, yes, you’ll see more applicants. But, I could never share my employment brand and increase my applicants through just sheer advertising muscle.

2. Your Employment Brand is most valuable when people consume it organically. No one likes to be forced fed. They love it when someone introduces them to something cool. Kind of like, “hey, I just discovered this, check it out.”

3. Your own employees’ Network Effect is the most powerful way to share your brand. Network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. Meaning your own employees are the most powerful vehicles to share your employment brand that you have. The key is finding ways where they’ll want to freely, and readily, share your brand to their network. This also speaks to the importance of Candidate Experience, since your candidates also have a strong network effect.

At the Glassdoor Employer Branding Summit last week we were asked, “where we see employment branding in five years?”  I see employment branding becoming much more integrated into the overall company branding.  Right now, some big companies are already doing this.  You see General Electric doing a strong job of finding ways to integrate their employment brand directly into their normal brand messaging.

Current GE advertising is sharing the message we are digital company who is also an industrial company, while going after Coders.  It’s a corporate brand message, that is also an employment brand message.  This is not owned or produced by GE’s HR function. This is clearly coming out of GE’s corporate marketing department, with influence from Talent Acquisition and Operations.

Employment branding is still for the most part an issue HR and TA are having to deal with. Within five years, this will be an organizational priority for not only HR, but the entire organization, and marketing will pull it over to their side of the fence, which I believe is where it belonged from the start.

T3 – @Paysavvy

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This week on T3 I take a look at the ‘modern day alternative to ADP’, Paysavvy. Paysavvy is a Canadian company that is a fully integrated payroll, HR, and time management for mid-sized companies.  I usually wouldn’t right about a payroll company on T3 but Paysavvy is a little different.

Only five years old, they really came at payroll from a different direction than those who were already entrenched in the industry. Currently, they only provide services for Canadian payrolls and since I’ve got a gigantic audience in Canada for reasons I don’t understand, I thought what the hell! They will support companies outside of Canada who have operations and a need to run payrolls in Canada.

I also love the fact they just come right out and call out  the industry giant ADP.  Who does that?! Someone who is very confident that what they are offering is good, really good.

5 Things I really like about Paysavvy: 

1. One of the few companies vetted by the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA), so you know they are reputable and can be trusted with the one thing HR departments get more bad publicity with than anything else, payroll administration.

2. Build for the SMB organization. Integrated with Quickbooks, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, etc. But, also build for modern day organizations whose employees want to do automated charitable giving (through sites like Chimp) and retirement & investing (through Wealthbar). Enterprise level functionality and tools, but not enterprise pricing.

3. Customer service support is personal and provided in ways fast moving SMB clients need. Direct access to personal support with the same person each time, dedicated customer support reps. Live chat feature for the times you don’t have time to jump on the phone. All customer support folks housed onsite at the corporate office, close to those developing and selling the product.

4. Built specifically for Canadian payrolls. Includes all Canadian holidays automated, year-end closing documents you can email directly to employees, ability to go seven years back on all payroll data within the system.

5. The system is super easy to customize and they actually have the step-by-step instructions on the dashboard you can pull up when you want to make a change, instead of having to wait for someone else to do it.  Fully integrated online or clock entry system with manager approval processes.

I know. I know. It’s a Canadian Payroll system. Yep, but it’s a pretty damn good Canadian Payroll System.

Eventually, Paysavvy is looking to quickly build out full HCM capabilities in the attempt to be a fully integrated end-to-end HR suite, all on the same platform, but still built for their core SMB audience. I’ll update you when this comes on line.  In the meantime, if you’re in need of a Canadian based payroll system, check them out!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The 1 Reason You’re Afraid To Make Recruiting Simple

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Have you ever wondered why Recruiting Departments continue to make complex processes?  In reality, all of us, wants things simple.  But, when you look at our organizations they are filled with complexity.  It seems like the more we try to make things simple, the more complex they get.  You know what?  It’s you. It’s not everyone else.  You are making things complex, and you’re doing this because it makes you feel good.

From Harvard Business Review:

“There are several deep psychological reasons why stopping activities is so hard to do in organizations. First, while people complain about being too busy, they also take a certain amount of satisfaction and pride in being needed at all hours of the day and night. In other words, being busy is a status symbol. In fact a few years ago we asked senior managers in a research organization — all of whom were complaining about being too busy — to voluntarily give up one or two of their committee assignments. Nobody took the bait because being on numerous committees was a source of prestige.

Managers also hesitate to stop things because they don’t want to admit that they are doing low-value or unnecessary work. Particularly at a time of layoffs, high unemployment, and a focus on cost reduction, managers want to believe (and convince others) that what they are doing is absolutely critical and can’t possibly be stopped. So while it’s somewhat easier to identify unnecessary activities that others are doing, it’s risky to volunteer that my own activities aren’t adding value. After all, if I stop doing them, then what would I do?”

That’s the bad news.  You have have deep psychological issues.  Your spouse already knew that about you.

The good news is, you can stop it!  How?  Reward people for eliminating worthless work.  Right now we reward people who are working 70 hours per week and always busy and we tell people “Wow! Look at Tim he’s a rock star, always here, always working!”  Then someone in your group goes, “Yeah, but Tim is an idiot, I could do his job in 20 hours per week, if…”  We don’t reward the 20 hour guy, we reward the guy working 70 hours, even if he doesn’t have to. (Editor’s note: calling yourself an idiot in a post is cathartic in a number of ways!)

Somewhere in our society the ‘working smarter’ analogy got lost or turned into ‘work smarter and longer’.  The reality is most people don’t have the ability to work smarter, so they just work longer and make everything they do look ‘Really’ important!   You just thought of someone in your organization when you read that, didn’t you!?  We all have them, you can now officially call them ‘psychos’ since they do actually have a “deep psychological” reasons for doing what they’re doing. Harvard said so!

I love simple.  I love simple HR.  I love simple Recruiting.  I hate HR and Talent Pros that make things complex, because I know they have ‘deep psychological’ issues!  Please go make things simple today!

Live Streaming Today @Glassdoor’s Employer Branding Summit

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Today from 10am EST to 6:30pm EST – Glassdoor is Live Streaming their entire Employer Branding Summit from San Francisco!

Kris Dunn and I will be hosting the Live Stream with a Special Kick Off show starting at 10am EST, Halftime show at 3pm EST and special segments at breaks throughout the day!  We will be giving out special prizes to those watching the Live Stream and interacting with us throughout the day!

You can watch Live Stream for FREE by clicking on this Link.

The agenda is packed with some of the best Employment Branding minds in the business:

Glassdoor Speakers

 

 

Check it out! It’s like the next best thing besides actually being there with us, which is pretty cool. I mean you have Kris and I doing our best ESPN SportsCenter acting jobs!