How You Should Communicate with Your Younger Boss

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This isn’t necessarily a unique phenomenon in our society, but as the Baby Boomers continue to age and many taking on non-leader roles within our organizations, these older employees are now finding themselves reporting to bosses much younger than themselves.  Many times these younger bosses have a lot less experience doing the job, make common new leader mistakes and flat out don’t know how to communicate with subordinates that are as old as their parents and/or grandparents!

So, what can an older employee do to help out this situation?

There was a great example of this recently with the payment startup company Clinkle who was founded by 22 year old Lucas Dulpan.  Dulpan needed an experienced COO and found it in former Netflix CFO and much older, Barry McCarty.  The fact of the matter is, Barry has much more knowledge and experience running this type of company than Lucas.  So, how do you deal with is obvious situation? From Jason Del Ray at Business Insider, here’s how McCarty describes it:

Jason Del Rey: What does your role entail?

Barry McCarthy: Well, Lucas is the CEO. I work for him. I want to be unambiguously clear about that. He’ll continue to focus on product and engineering. My primary focus will be everything else.

Jason Del Rey: Do you believe Lucas can be the long-term CEO of a giant payments company?

Barry McCarthy: Absolutely. And if he’s not, then I will feel like I have not served him as well as I could have.

BAM! That my friends is called Servant Leadership.  You support the leader, in this case Lucas, by serving that person with all the positive intent and direction that you can humanly provide.  What McCarty understands, because of his vast experience, is that it’s not about him getting noticed. Those who know the industry will know that he did his job exceptionally, and that is what really matters.

What to know how to best get along with your younger boss?  Stop trying to do their job, and start helping them do their job.  Lift them up, make them the star and everyone will see what you did to make that happen.  You win. Your boss wins.  The organization wins.  Isn’t that really the goal?

Watch Me LIVE Right Now! #CBEmpower15

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That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on TV LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  Today, I’ll be bringing you all the cool stuff happening at Empower 15 in Chicago!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST today and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).

My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in this morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day.

If you want to ask a question on the Live Stream – hit me on the Twitters at #CBEmpower15 or @TimSackett and I’ll try to make you famous!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

Remember! This is LIVE, who knows what might happen…

 

Not Enough Cooks In The Kitchen!

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Last weekend I spent some time with a restaurant owner friend of mine.  He runs a great place, everyone loves it, but he’s having a problem.  They are having a hard time hiring cooks.  We can commiserate on this because of my background running HR at Applebee’s, he knows I understand his pain.

In the restaurant business you don’t just shut your doors when a cook doesn’t show up to work. You put on an apron and start cooking. Customers are coming, and they don’t care that some kid would rather get high, then cook their steak.  Welcome to the show!  Oh, you thought some upstanding educated professional was back in the kitchen cooking your $50 steak!? That’s cute.

I told my friend good luck, and we went on our way.

Then I read this from the Washington Post:

The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago, where restaurateurs said they are receiving far fewer applications than in past years. “It’s gotten to the point where if good cooks come along, we’ll hire them even if we don’t have a position. Because we will have a position,” Paul Kahan, a local chef, told the Chicago Tribune last week.

It’s also an issue in New York, where skilled cooks are an increasingly rare commodity. “If I had a position open in the kitchen, I might have 12 résumés, call in three   or four to [try out] in the kitchen, and make a decision,” Alfred Portale, the chef and owner of Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill, told Fortune recently. “Now it’s the other way around; there’s one cook and 12 restaurants.”

And it extends to restaurants out West. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too.

Looks like it’s not a local hiring dilemma, but a national trend!

It’s not just cooks. All over the U.S. HR and TA pros are struggling to find people for low and semi-skilled jobs that want to work.  You know, the kind of people who will show up each day when their shift starts, for more than one day in a row! That is the new sought after skill in America! Just showing up for work.

So, why do we have a shortage of cooks?

  1. Many, many, many cook positions are filled by Mexican workers. Over the past five years the U.S. has seen a flat or negative growth of Mexican workers entering the U.S.
  2. We have entire generations that don’t cook and eat at home.  If you never learned how to make your own grilled cheese, there is a good bet you won’t apply for a cook position.
  3. The pay is lower than it probably should be (see #1 above). Restaurants have gotten away with paying low wages to cooks because many used illegal workers with shared or fake papers.  No one wants to pay $20 for a burger and fries.

Something interesting is going to happen, slowly. Prices will rise, because wages of cooks will rise to attract people to these jobs.  Menu prices will rise to meet the wage demand. Eventually that will drive prices to a point where many people will decide to cook and eat at home.  Restaurants will go out of business.

It’s the $15/hr fast food debate.  Do you want to pay $9.99 for a Happy Meal for your kid? No. Fewer happy meals sold equals fewer fast food jobs.

It’s all simple economics, not politics.  We make choices based on the perceived value we get.  If the perceived value is too low, we will make other choices.  Give it time, you’ll see.

The 1 Miracle That Can Make Your Corporate Recruiters Better Almost Instantly

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I’ve had 3 opportunities in my career to step into traditional corporate recruiting departments and make changes that would ‘turn’ these departments around so that the organization would see them as a positive producing department, where previously that had not been viewed as this.  As you can imagine there are numerous changes that can be made to do this.  You could go out and hire more talented recruiters.  You could redesign and launch a new employment brand.  You can redesign your processes.  You can launch a new career website.  Add in recruiter specific training.  Get hiring managers and leadership involved in ‘owning’ their talent in their individual departments.  All great stuff.  All things that I eventually did – all which take considerable time and resources!

When you are stepping into a new organization and taking over, those who hired you expect instant miracles.  Why?  Because that’s what you told them you could do when you interviewed.  One problem.  You told them this without truly knowing what you were going to find when you started opening up closet doors in the department and skeletons began falling out all over the place.  You didn’t realize your staff of recruiters were really just HR admins in disguise.  That your ATS was an advance spreadsheet, and nothing more.  Your hiring managers believed the only way to get talent was to wait for you to deliver it to them on a silver platter, just so they could say “I don’t like that kind – bring me another platter!”  You didn’t know your major vendor was the CEO’s cousin who had no clue and no sense of urgency – but was entitled all the same.

Doesn’t matter now – deliver the miracle!

There is really only one thing I know that works in recruiting.  Doesn’t matter if you’re an agency or corporate.  Doesn’t matter the industry.  Doesn’t matter the recruiting experience level you have on your staff.  It’s been the one miracle that in good times and bad has always sets recruiters apart – at all levels.  Activity.  Outgoing phone calls, number of candidates interviewed, number of resumes sent to hiring managers, etc.  Higher activity level = higher recruiting department satisfaction and results, 100% of the time.  It’s a simple miracle.

So – how do you do this tomorrow?

Step 1:  Instantly track the number of ‘outgoing’ phone calls made per recruiter.  If you don’t have technology to track this – develop a simple call sheet that tracks candidate name, phone number, position called for and result.  Track calls for 2 weeks. (outgoing calls only – keep it simple, establish a habit – great recruiters call candidates)

Step 2: On week 3 – set daily outgoing call goal 25% higher than the two week daily average.  (don’t let on you will do this on week 3 or you’ll have low numbers your first two weeks)

Step 3:  Hold those recruiters accountable who aren’t reaching their call goal.

You’ll hear every single excuse in the world – you have to stay strong.  “I have too many meetings” – tell them you are giving them permission to no longer attend those meetings.  “I have to much paperwork” – stop doing paperwork – that’s for after 5pm and on weekends (recruiting isn’t a 40 hr per week job). Only concentrate on calls.  Calls. Calls. Calls.

Miracle, delivered, almost instantly.

Want to hear some more?  Call me – I’ve got more miracles. Sackett.tim@hru-tech.com; 517-908-3156 or @TimSackett  – my company delivers staffing miracles every freaking day!

CareerBuilder Empower 15 Live Stream Wednesday Sept. 10th!

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Next week Wednesday, September 10th, CareerBuilder has asked me to Host their Live Stream of Empower 15!

That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  To bring to you all the cool stuff happening at Empower!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).  My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in the morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day. Click on the link above for Wednesday’s lineup of great presenters!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

What is Empower?

DISCOVER. ELEVATE. INSPIRE.

The act of connecting employers and job seekers to make meaningful matches has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. And new economic, digital, and social trends have introduced an entirely new set of challenges. We’re giving you a front row seat to share the journey as we look back and, more importantly, ahead to the next 20. Join CareerBuilder and 1000+ other leaders for the talent acquisition event of the year where we’ll identify opportunities to continue to move the industry forward and work together to make recruitment easier and more effective.

Empower is Talent Acquisition’s version of all those cool HR conferences your HR peers get to go to, but they aren’t really designed for true Talent Acquisition leaders!

Top 10 Ways To Use Glassdoor For Good (not Evil)

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Let’s face it. HR pros have a long history of being uncomfortable with sites like Glassdoor.com. After all, the only people that use Glassdoor.com and sites like it are disgruntled ex-employees that you fired, right?

Wrong. It was wrong 5 years ago, and it’s horribly wrong today. Rather than view these types of sites as a threat, smart HR and Recruiting pros are learning how to use the reputation/rating sites to manage their employment brand, connect with candidates and make better hires.

The days of the employment brand strategy with scripted photos, smiling faces (just the right amount of diversity!) and PDFs are over.

That’s why we’re going deep on reputation sites like Glassdoor in the September version of the FOT Webinar entitled, Top 10 Ways To Use Glassdoor For Good (Not Evil). Join Kris Dunn and Tim Sackett from Fistful of Talent on 9/17 at 2pm Eastern, and we’ll hit you with the following:

– How the the yelp-ification of America—the trend towards consumer-based reviews in almost every area of our economy—is changing the way employees and candidates think about job search and employer brands. It’s second nature for your employees to rate a restaurant, a book or a movie online. That means that employees of all types (not just the ones who want to complain) are more willing than ever to participate in your brand through user review.

– We’ll cover the 5 Biggest Myths about company reputation sites like Glassdoor and tell you which ones are completely BS and which ones you actually perpetuate by not fully engaging on sites like Glassdoor. We’ll hit the usual suspects here: “The only comments are from the bad employees”  and “The salary data out there isn’t factual,” and tell you why things have changed. More importantly, we’ll cover how you actually may make the myths a reality by not fully engaging on reputation sites.  Think about that last sentence: You’ve got to be in the game to influence the game.

– Last but not least, we’ll give you a 10-step playbook on how to engage on reputation sites and become more of a Marketer as an HR/Recruiting Pro.  It’s true—you wouldn’t have read this far if you didn’t want to learn more about how to use reputation sites like Glassdoor to maximize your company and your career. We’ll help you get started.

The outside world now has a huge say in how your company/employment brand is perceived, whether you engage or not. FOT thinks you should engage.  Join us for Top 10 Ways To Use Glassdoor For Good (Not Evil) on 9/17 at 2pm Eastern and we’ll show you how.

(FOT Note: Glassdoor is sponsoring this FOT webinar. We’re happy to have them as a sponsor and, true to their commitment to transparency, they’re letting us talk about the myths and a lot of other realities HR and Recruiting pros have experienced related to Glassdoor—without restriction. That type of balance makes them a great partner.  Join us and we promise you’ll get a balanced view—no sales pitch—as well as an insider’s guide to how to use sites like Glassdoor to become a better marketer as an HR/Recruiting pro.)

Fill out the form below to register today!

The Top 20 Branded HR and Talent Pros: Meet Arie Ball from Sodexo

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Let’s face it – Fearful of the spotlight and conservative to a fault, HR pros generally aren’t the best examples to look towards when it comes to professional branding. Kris Dunn (Kinetix RPO, The HR Capitalist) and Tim Sackett (HRU Technical Resources, TimSackett.com) think that needs to change.  That’s why they created this series – The Top 20 Branded HR Pros(sponsored by the team at Glassdoor).

KD and Tim searched the globe for HR Pros who used the tools at their disposal (writing, speaking, social and more) to brand themselves in the HR space, but limited the results to actual practitioners in the areas of HR, Recruiting and Talent Management.  No consultants, no vendors. They found out well-branded HR pros who are actual practitioners are hard to find.  

Tim and KD are running the Top 20 they found here on the HR Capitalist and at TimSackett.com.  No rankings, just inclusion in the list and some notes on why.  There are at least 20 well-branded HR Pros in the world.  These are their stories. 

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I’m not really sure where Employment Branding started, who the first company was, etc. What I know is one person pushed Employment Branding over the edge and made it cool!  That person was Arie Ball, the Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Sodexo.  That is one major reason Arie was selected to the list of the Top 20 Branded HR and Talent Pros in the world!

Sodexo isn’t sexy.  There is nothing about their jobs that are sexy. But, Arie and her team found a way to make Sodexo sexy as an employment brand! She showed all these other companies how to do it, when no one knew how to do it! Arie took over TA for Sodexo eleven years ago, and started doing things no one in the industry was doing from a branding perspective.

Here is Arie Ball’s player card:

Glassdoor Top 20 - ARIE BALL

 

 

Arie is a great writer and contributes frequently to Sodexo’s career blog and has over 3500 followers on LinkedIn publishing platform.  She, also, might be the most quoted Talent Pro in the world around employment branding!

On the speaking circuit at HR and TA conferences Arie is a star. She’s done just about every one you can imagine, because everyone wanted to know the Sodexo story.

Where Arie might be tops of all the Top 20 on our list is as a Brand Ambassador.  I think more people know the Sodexo name because of Arie than any other single thing the Sodexo marketing folks could have ever done! She was the first to have all of her team add the Sodexo logo to the social profile pics. Which seems small now, but it branded each of them as Sodexo brand ambassadors. Almost everyone followed her lead across all industries!

Arie also was one of the first corporate HR/Talent Pros to show us all how to use Twitter for talent acquisition.  It’s part science, part art, mixing in great content, jobs and just enough personal to make people want to connect and interact. Over 8,000 followers and over 8,000 tweets, Arie is one of the few TA executives who is real and active on Twitter.

Arie and her team have a great LinkedIn presence. While the majority of her team’s hires will never come off of a site like LinkedIn, the company is huge and their ability to leverage the LI platform as a sourcing tool for their professional is very impressive.

I do have to say Arie has yet to personally leverage Instagram for her personal or professional branding. She has over a hundred followers, but zero posts!  Which makes you wonder, who are the hundred folks who wanted to follow her with no pics! I’m sure she’ll kill it with this platform as well, just give her a little time.

Congratulations Arie on your selection to Glassdoor’s Top 20 Branded HR and Talent Pros.  You have taught us all so much on how to brand ourselves and our organizations. The industry thanks you!

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The Top 20 Branded HR Pros is brought to you by Glassdoor, who invites you to attend the Annual Glassdoor Employer Branding Summit on September 25th, where a stellar speaker lineup of industry experts and thought leaders exploring the intersection of employer branding and talent acquisition, the candidate experience and employee engagement. 

Tickets are sold out, but wait!  You can attend the livestream online featuring studio coverage with Kris Dunn and Tim Sackett by registering here (click to register).  Fun and games are sure to be a part of that coverage.

What if a drug could save your career? Would you take it?

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It seems like daily we are bombarded by stories coming out in the media of professional athletes who are caught taking performance enhancing drugs.  They risk their entire career by taking these drugs and getting caught. This week and next NFL teams will cut down their rosters, and many players will lose the one job they’ve worked their entire life for.

I’ve often wondered if I was in that position, being a professional athlete making millions, would I take PEDs to sustain or grow my career?  I can’t initially say I wouldn’t.  I’m always thankful for not having been put in that situation. I’m extremely competitive; I’m not sure I would have the will power not to take PEDs if I thought I was failing.

Slate had a great piece a while back about a former professional football player, Nate Jackson of the Denver Broncos.  Nate was a tight end and was cut from the roster after 6 years and turned to PEDs to get back:

“I sit down in my locker for the last time. It was always a bit out of sorts, full of clothes and shoes and tape and gloves, notebooks and letters and gifts. Do I even want these cleats? These gloves? These memories? Yes. I fill up my box. Six years as a Denver Bronco. Six more than most people can say. Still feels like a failure, though. So this is how the end feels? Standing in an empty locker room with a box in my hand? Yep. Now leave.”

That’s it, right?  It’s the fear of losing all that you have.  It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, fear of losing what you have is a powerful adversary.

I’ve seen a grown man, with a wife and children, and a strong member of his church, sit in down in front of me and lie to my face, because of this fear.  You don’t have to be a professional athlete.

I completely understand this fear, and why athletes do PEDs.  So, I’ll ask you the question, if tomorrow you had a choice, lose your job or take a drug that will save your job, would you do it?

Hit me in the comments.  I have a feeling many people will say they wouldn’t.  I’ll let you know right now, based on my experiences, I’ll be skeptical.

Saying you wouldn’t tells me potentially two things about you:

  1. You don’t have fear of losing your job because you have another source income (I run into a lot of women who ‘become’ consultants and talk about how you have to ‘do what you love’, all the while having a husband who is paying the bills);
  2. You lack self-insight and/or haven’t ever experienced this fear of loss.

I guess, in a round about way, I answered my own question about what I might do facing the end.  Fear sucks – remember that HR Pros.

T3 – @Betterific

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This week on T3 I’m taking a look at the innovation management platform, Betterific!  Betterific is a crowdsourcing, communication platform that allows employees to present and share ideas, and those within the company to communicate on each others ideas.  It can also be used as an idea generation tool for those in your organization looking for new ideas and innovation to what you already do.

Let me give you an example of how this could be giant!

I worked at Applebee’s (which is true, but the rest is for example purposes!).  We had thousands of restaurants world-wide.  In a franchise environment, the more consistency and continuity you can get from location to location, the more profitable your company will be. When you go into an Applebee’s in Time Square, you expect the same great burger, hot fries and cold beer, as you would get in Albuquerque. If it’s not, it hurts the whole brand, because people don’t know what to expect.

Applebee’s isn’t selling mastery cuisine.  They’re selling great burgers, hot fries and cold beer. They’re selling safe, middle of the road, we know what to expect, it’s going to be a good meal at a decent price.  What you find when you have two thousand restaurants is that some locations find better ways of doing things that the corporate office didn’t know.  The problem is their is no good way to share these ideas and innovations in a franchise environment, or even over so many locations.

Then comes a technology like Betterific.  Betterific’s platform allows locations, employees, the corporate office, etc. to share ideas amongst each other, and it also allows a manager, a certain location, the corporate headquarters to go out in search of the best way to do current stuff, or even new ideas they’re thinking about doing.  Now, instead of leveraging some data from a handful of ‘test’ locations, you get to leverage the knowledge of your entire company!

To me, this is what Betterific is all about, Best Practice sharing at it’s finest, in real time!  When I was at Applebee’s we encouraged best practice sharing, but many times it would take months or years before we could spread this across two thousand locations. What if we could have done it in a week or hours!?

Betterific also employees some gamification aspects which rewards the users for being active in the platform, the quality of ideas, etc. Let’s encourage everyone to use it, but also let’s encourage quality usage as well.  Many times in communication platforms like this, you’ll see a few people hog the conversation. The gamification component rewards those super-users, but also encourages them to share quality information, not just everything.

There is also a follow up mechanism which shows all those using the system what is happening with the knowledge and advice being share. Is the thread closed? Is it something we are considering in the future? Is it something we are going to act on now?  This feedback loop is critical to keep your employees involved and sharing on an ongoing basis.

It’s quick and simple to get started.  You don’t have get IT involved. This is something HR can roll out and test pretty easily with your operations team, or start a leadership exchange, etc. You could even test it within your own department to see how it works. Take a look and give it a quick demo, might be something to really help you energize your employees into sharing great ideas and feedback with each other.