T3 – Recruiter Sidekick

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Today on T3 I take a look at the talent acquisition tool Recruiter Sidekick. Recruiter Sidekick helps take care of one of the biggest issue we all face in Talent Acquisition, regardless whether or not you are agency or corporate.  We do a terrible job a mining our own internal databases!

Your internal database in the most underutilized resource that you have.  I could go into most corporate talent acquisition shops and fill 35-40% of their jobs from their own database, without ever having to use another tool to find and source candidates!  How do I know this?  I’ve done it.

This is the primary idea behind how Recruiter Sidekick was developed.  It runs like an extension to your ATS and acts like a referral engine from your own resume database.  It basically looks at every new requisition being put into your ATS and instantly begins searching, based on their own proprietary algorithm, and sends your recruiters a “top 10” list of candidates that most closely match your requisition, that are already in your database.

Think about this concept for a minute.  Two years ago you were hiring for a specialized position in your company.  You presented a number of candidates to your hiring manager.  She interviewed three, and eventually chose the one.  Two more years pass, and you’re growing, or you had someone on your team retire, and now you need to go hire another person in the same role.

Most organizations – like 99% – just do the same thing they’ve always done. They’ll take the new position, input it into their ATS, it will get posted to your career site, maybe a few others, and you’ll begin the process of looking at those candidates who are ‘now’ available.  But, what about those other two candidates two years ago who wanted to come work for you, but someone just beat them out.  Now they have two more years of experience. Maybe one of them is the ‘one’!

In a nutshell, this is what Recruiter Sidekick helps you with.  Recruiter Sidekick doesn’t let you forget you have unmined gold in your own database.  All of this for $10 per month, per recruiter.  It’s a niche piece of software to be sure, but one that almost all of us can use.  Heck! I’m paying an intern right now to just do this, mine our own internal database for talent!

Check them out. For the price you really can’t go wrong!

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.

Delivering Bad Benefits News with @JellyVisionALEX

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It’s getting close to being that time of year when you start to deliver messages out to your employees about upcoming benefits open enrollments.  True HR and Benefit Pros know that the heavy lifting of open enrollment is done in the summer and fall.  Getting communications ready, making tough decisions on what to offer, and not to offer, all start to take shape in the ‘HR offseason’.

That’s why I’m hosting a webcast tomorrow (Tuesday June 16th at Noon ET) in conjunction with ALEX and SHRM, to help HR and Benefit pros prepare and give them some tips and tricks of delivering tough news.  Unpopular messages are always tough, and great HR pros deliver them in a way that is straightforward, empathetic and helpful.

Also, I’m bringing in a special guest, Dawn Burke, the tremendous and brilliant VP of People at Daxko who is in the trenches and has to deal with this kind of stuff every day.  We’ll be playing a game I made up called Real Life HR, with a Real Life HR Lady! Where I, and you, get to see if we can stump the HR pro with real life benefit communication issues!

It’s going to be fun! It’s going to insightful! It’s going to kick of this years communications better than ever before.

Sign up for free! Tuesday June 16th at Noon EST.

Click to REGISTER

The First Question HR Needs To Ask

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I love going out and speaking and meeting with HR and Talent pros across the world (I can say ‘world’ now because I’ve spoken in Canada and the Cayman Islands, which technically makes me an international speaker!).  It’s a privilege to be certain.  I also really like when I get pimped constantly for free advice. It’s part of the gig.

If you go around telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.  So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you, or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve began to change my approach, though, because I knew, like they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius, was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause, and explanation, and sometimes from this we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent pros will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you.

The Biggest Lie HR Tells Candidates

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No one ever wants to admit this but it can be really intimidating working with someone who is way smarter and more talented than you.  This is the basis for the biggest lie HR tells candidates.

You are Overqualified!

Truth be told, no one is ever ‘overqualified’ for a position.  You might have more qualifications than the organization needs for the position you are interviewing for, but that really isn’t the issue.  The issue is the person interviewing is scared that you are better than they are.

Back in the day, HR pros and hiring managers were trained to give the excuse to overqualified people that we won’t hire you because you’re overqualified and we are scared that you won’t stay in this position, and you won’t be satisfied.  Yeah, right! It’s not that we don’t want you! You won’t want us, because you’re so talented that you’ll get bored with this position and leave.

It’s such a lie, and yet, for decades we just accepted it as truth.

Being overqualified isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing! Companies should be bending over backwards to get overqualified hires.  We no longer live in a culture where people are going to stay in the job for 40 years. If you can get a good 3 to 4 years out of hire, you’re doing great.

Take the best most qualified person you can get for every position you have in your organization and let them do great things. Being worried the person will won’t be ‘engaged’ long term is silly.  That’s not for you to worry. Hire great talent and get out of their way.

The bigger reality we face in most organizations is we aren’t hiring ‘overqualified’ people because your hiring managers are intimidated to hire someone who is better, or who could become better than they are.  This is the mentality we must change in our organizations.  You can’t get better if you don’t hire better.  Hiring under the level of talent you have now is a slow slide to becoming an organization no one wants to work for.

Overly Loving Father, Rob Lowe #WorkHuman

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By now you’ve seen all the DirectTV ads featuring the funny characters of Rob Lowe. My favorite is super creepy Rob Lowe! I’m at Globoforce’s WorkHuman event this week and got to see Rob Lowe keynote this event.

When my friend, Laurie Ruettimann, told me Rob was keynoting she was really excited, and I was like, okay.  I’m a dude, I don’t really get the fascination. I mean I’ve liked some of his movies and TV shows, but not overly so (one of my favs is Youngblood, because as a teen I was in love with Cynthia Gibb – don’t judge me it was the 80’s!).  So, I was interested in seeing Rob speak, but it wasn’t one of bucket-list must sees!

Before I got to WorkHuman, though, I purchased Rob’s latest book. It was an impulse buy. I was going on vacation, needed something to read on the beach and just had heard he was going to be speaking at this event.  Rob also had a great story to share about his oldest son going off to college, just as my oldest son is graduating and going off to college.  Slate did a great piece on it, you can read here.

It felt like his story was my story. The great thing about Rob is he’s a great storyteller and I like storytellers!

To me Rob Lowe gets the concept of work-life balance better than most.  Here’s a guy who because of a famous celebrity career couldn’t have normal work-life balance like we think of it for most of us.  But that’s what I really like, there isn’t any normal work-life balance. Working 9-5, Monday through Friday is a myth.  It’s not the way the majority of the world works anymore.

It’s a concept from the 1950s and 40s that just is no longer relevant.

Rob taught us, through his own experience, that you can find balance, but it has to be a balance that you define.  Rightly so, it’s all that really matters, but we struggle with this as leaders and HR pros. We want to define work-life balance in one context, and make all of our employees fit into this little paragraph. It’s just not reality.

You work the way you need to work to live the lifestyle you decide to you want to live, then you live your life around that the best you can.  It’s not always going to be perfect. Again, that’s life. I would rather show my sons that life isn’t perfect, that sometimes work is great, sometimes work sucks, but so is your personal life!  The balance comes from knowing when it’s time to work and when it’s time to focus on other parts of your life. Do too much of either, and you’re out of balance.

I know a bunch of people who don’t get this from the personal aspect.  They want their balance to be all about their personal life, and not about work. Which is fine, but you then have to understand you then need to lead the personal life that not focusing on work affords you.

I’m glad I got to see Rob speak at WorkHuman. I’m now more of a fan, because despite his celebrity he seems like a guy who gets it.

 

T3 – @ZipRecruiter

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This week on T3 I take a look at the Talent Acquisition technology ZipRecruiter.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past year, you couldn’t have missed the media and marketing blitz ZipRecruiter has been putting on.  You can’t turn on the radio without hearing one of their ads, so I was intrigued to find out who and what they actually were!

ZipRecruiter is an online job distribution and job board service. The web-based platform aggregates applications from job boards and provides tools for applicant tracking and screening. It is a subscription-based SaaS for employers, recruiting firms, and staffing agencies. They have about 5.2 million resumes in their database. They also have a new product called ZipHire which helps you onboard candidates.  When you post your jobs they go out to over hundred free sites, and you have options to buying up for pay sites like Monster and Careerbuilder at a reduced rate.

For all intensive purposes ZipRecruiter/Hire can act as your ATS and System of Record.  It’s not as functional as those designed to be that, but their goal isn’t to be an enterprise level system. Their goal is to give SMB clients similar technology that the Fortune 500s are getting to play with at a greatly reduced cost, and they seem to be doing it! This is a technology designed to be used by smaller and medium sized shops for folks who might not be as technology savvy as large HR shops. Easy to use. Easy to get started.

5 Things I really like about ZipRecruiter: 

1. Zip is not shy about saying this is who we are, and this is who we aren’t. They do really well with high volume hiring jobs – service level, call centers, skilled trades, etc. They’re inexpensive to use and get your jobs out on the web to hundreds of locations and drive traffic to your postings.

2.  InstaMatch technology which automatically shows the user which candidates within their database is the closest match to their opening. For big shops this is a no brainer, for small shops this is a pretty cool function.

3. Interview type pre-screen filter questions.  For those who don’t have an ATS or don’t have this functionality within their ATS this is another great feature most SMB HR shops don’t have.

4. You can have multiple companies, divisions, locations, etc. all under one account.  Your corporate office can set the account up, then you can allow all of your locations to run their own postings, but it all roles up to the corporate account giving you visibility of who is using it and how it’s going.

5. Zip has a Job Widget you can put right onto your careers page, so people can applying directly to your jobs on Zip from your career site. Again, many SMB companies don’t even have technology to post jobs on their career site/page and this makes it super easy for them to do so.

ZipRecruiter is growing extremely fast and has hundreds of thousands of companies using them, so they are proven to work. The feedback I’m hearing in the industry is that for the price their users are extremely happy with what they are getting, especially on the non-technical/professional level job postings.

Check them out, they are pretty inexpensive and set up under a Saas pricing model where you pay monthly based on how many job you want to post on Zip.  This can also be changed month to month. One month you need to post ten jobs, but the next six months you only need a couple, Zip allows you to flex your plans to meet your needs. Their prices are public, free trial to start, but for posting 1-3 jobs you’ll pay $99 per month.  If you have high volume lower end jobs you almost have to try it for that price!

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.

Sackett’s Guide to SHRM 2015 #shrm15

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It’s that time of year when HR freaks from all over the world begin planning out their annual pilgrimage to the SHRM National Conference. The 2015 SHRM conference is being held in Las Vegas, which always makes it a popular destination to attend. SHRM is expecting over 15,000 HR and Talent Pros to be in attendance, and I will be one of them!

I’ve had the pleasure of attending the last seven SHRM National Conferences and have been lucky enough to speak at the last three and this year will make it four in a row, as my good friend, and FOT founder, Kris Dunn and I will be taking the stage on Monday June 29th at 2pm to talk HR technology in our presentation titled “We’re Bringing Techy Back!” (now try and get the song out of your head!).  Kris and I will be sharing what HR and Talent tech we use and what we would use given different size organizations and budgets. Come check it out! KD and I always have fun when speaking together and we’ll be in rare form for SHRM National!

Please connect with me if you’re going to SHRM National, I love meeting new and old friends at SHRM. I spend most of my time doing this. A thirty minute conversation with a great HR pro and a Diet Mt. Dew is usually better than any session I could attend!  Being able to build a great HR network of brilliant people is the real value of attending a SHRM conference.

I do SHRM a little different than most.  I search out great speakers, not topics.  I’ve gone to too many sessions where I wanted to kill myself from boredom.  So, I’ve learned to find great speakers because they’ll always teach me something new and keep me entertained!  Here are some other sessions I recommend and will be checking out myself (in order of presentation time):

#1 – Sackett & Dunn – We’re Bringing Techy Back! Monday June 29th at 2pm

#2 – Mary Faulkner – The Leader’s Legacy: Managing Your Impact on Your Company’s Culture.  Monday June 29th at 4pm. Mary is a true HR practitioner and Head of Talent at Denver Water. She’s an HR pro who truly gets it!

#3 – Steve Browne – Culture that Rocks! Tuesday June 30th at 7am.  If there is a reason to get up at 7am in Vegas, it’s to see Steve. Great HR pro and Head of HR for LaRosa’s Pizza. His energy is off the charts and I guarantee he’ll get you going for the day!

#4 – Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane – After the Contracts are Signed: Keys to Successful HR Technology Implementation.  Tuesday June 30th at 7 am. Friends of FOT and two great speakers, Steve and Trish deliver every time.

#5 – Joe Gerstandt – The Future of Diversity and Inclusion. Tuesday June 30th at 10:45am.  Flat out Joe is one of the best speakers at SHRM year in and year out. Polished, insightful and funny. He gets modern day Diversity and Inclusion better than anyone.

#6 – Matt Ferguson – What CEOs Think About 2015’s Top Workforce Issues. Tuesday June 30th at 2:15pm. Matt is the CEO for CareerBuilder and they have some great data, plus I like hearing what CEOs think from a CEO!

#7 – Jennifer McClure – 7 Strategies to Transform from HR Leader to Business Leader. Tuesday June 30th at 4pm. Jennifer is the HR lady whisperer! Extremely popular SHRM speaker, she fills the room, so get there early! Also, Jen is a FOT alumnus.

#8 – Inga Masjule – How to Build World Class HR Around the World. Wednesday July 1st at 11:30am. I met Inga while speaking in the Cayman Islands, she is an HR pro there, currently, but has run HR teams all over the world. Smart lady, who can really give you a flavor of what it’s like to work in HR all over the world.

I’m sure there are other wonderful speakers as well. These are just ones I know will be awesome!  I’ll spend a bunch of time on the Expo floor as well. It’s a great place to demo a ton of different technologies that are being offered in HR and Talent Acquisition, in a low sales environment. Take advantage and see what’s out there.  You’ll be amazed at how inexpensive some of the technology is becoming!

Hit me in the comments if there is a session you feel is a can’t miss!  Also, if you want to meet in person send me a message and I’ll do everything I can to make that happen!  See you in Vegas!

The Secret to Employee Retention

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What is the one thing that employees hate more than anything else?

Change.

Bar none, ‘change’ would rank as the most disliked thing that a company can do to employees.  I know, I know, all of you reading this are progressive and you ‘love’ change, you embrace ‘change’, you’re ‘change’ advocates.  Yeah, right.

The people who say they ’embrace’ change are the same folks who go into a deep depression when their favorite TV show is cancelled.  Change for most people sucks.  People like what they know.

They like knowing that they’ll stop at the same place each morning to pick up their morning coffee and Joe behind the counter will know they like it with low fat milk and one sugar.  They like knowing that the doctor they’ve gone to since they started with you right out of college is in your insurance plan, and they can keep going to that doctor.  They like knowing that their check will always be deposited into their bank account on the first and third Friday of each month. No. Matter. What.

That is the secret of Employee Retention.

People, your employees, don’t actually want to leave your employment.  Starting a new job, in a new location, working a new boss, etc., Sucks!  It’s major change!  Your employees want to stay with you, they just don’t want their job and the company to suck.  So, you Change!  And change causes them to what?  Ugh…this is hard.

So, how do you keep your employees, without changing?

Most change fails because of the communication.  This is especially true in so many HR shops, where we tend to overcommunicate and over complicate minor changes, with major communications!

We are implementing a new payroll system that will save us time and money, but in doing so checks will now be deposited on the second and fourth Friday of each month.  OMG!  Our employees are going to freak out, they are used to the first and third Friday!  This. Is. A. Major. Change.  We need a committee.  We need posters and wallet cards.  We need changes to our policies.  We need to have a six month transition period where we will communicate this over and over.  We need…Stop.

What you need is a simple message out to the troops.  Hey all, payroll is getting a great new system.  We’ll have less errors, save the company a bunch of money.  We’re happy we could get them some really good technology for their function.  Checks will now come out on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Plan accordingly.  Let your supervisor know if you need some help in this transition. This will go live next pay period.  Bam!

People don’t like change.  So, don’t maximize change that doesn’t need to be maximized!   If you only communicated truly “Big” change and “Big” change happens rarely, it doesn’t seem like change is happening all the time.  Your employees WANT to stay with you.  They HATE change.  Stop making them feel like change is happening all the time, just so you feel like you have some IMPORTANT to do.

Employee Retention is Easy, simply because deep down, your employees really don’t want to leave.

 

My Big Fat Recruiting Dilemma!

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Have you had an employee who had to stop working because they became too fat? Just wait, you will, it’s just a matter of time.

I remember when my biggest nightmare as an HR pro was going to tell an employee they need to bath and wear deordorant. I can’t even imagine having to go tell an employee, “Hey Bro, you have to go home, you’re too fat.”

The U.S. Army recently came out and shared some statistics about how the U.S. obesity epidemic is hurting their recruitment efforts:

“Just under three in 10 young people [ages] 17 to 24 can join the Army today – and the other armed services for that matter – and the single biggest disqualifier is obesity,” Major General Allen Batschelet of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command told CNN. “Ten percent of them are obese and unfit to the point that they can’t join the service. It’s really very worrisome.”

“The obesity issue is one of the most troubling because the trend is going in the wrong direction,” says Batschelet. “Ten percent are disqualified today, and we think by 2020, it could be as high as 50 percent, which would mean only two in ten would qualify to join the Army.”

Our national security is at risk because our citizens can’t put down a Big Mac. Our enemies don’t need to attack us with bombs and troops; they just need to keep sending us cheap junk food to consume!  Then one day they just come ashore and roll us over to the POW camps.  I sure hope they serve good food at the camps…

Big fat Americans just aren’t a national security issue; this is a major issue facing all employers.  The reality is, no one wants to hire unhealthy people. If given a choice between people with similar skills and abilities, one in shape and one obese, employers will always hire the person who is in shape.

You want to see hiring discrimination at its finest?  Put a minority in good shape, a woman in good shape and an obese candidate, all with similar skills, in front of a hiring manager and have them rank them on most likely to hire.

The obese person will always rank last. Why?  Your hiring managers fear hiring someone who might die on their watch, more than hiring a minority or woman.  Was that too real for you? Check your analytics, you know where your problems are.

How do we fix this?

Companies have failed at wellness across the board.  I think it’s just a matter of time until you begin seeing organizations tie performance and compensation into their wellness plans.  It seems extreme, but so is this problem.  When a company reaches the point where they’ll tie your job performance to your health ‘performance’, that’s when you have an organization that truly cares about you.

7 Realities for Negotiating Salaries

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I think we all know that one person in our life that thinks they get the best deal on everything!  They consider themselves the ultra-negotiator, the person sales people hate to see coming! You know the person -they go and buy a $40,000 car and call and tell you how they got it for $27,000, and the car dealership actually lost money on them.

These are the same people that believe they can also ‘negotiate’ their salary.  There are some realities we face as HR Pros that most candidates don’t get.  While we have rules and processes and salary bands, quite honestly, very little negotiation goes into any salary offer.  Younger people are always told, usually by their Dad or some cheesy uncle, to “Negotiate” their salary, “Never take the first offer!”

To me, there are 7 main realities about negotiating salaries, and here they are:

1. A good HR/Talent Pro will pre-close you one what you are expecting. This is truly the point where you should be negotiating. The first call and 99% of candidates miss this opportunity.  This is also where you can truly find out what the position pays by playing ‘the game’. Go in super high and work backwards, you’ll eventually get to the ceiling.

Example of what this looks like:

HR/Talent Pro: This position is ‘wide’ open for the right person and skills, we just wan to judge your interest.

Candidate: I’m interested. I’ll need $350K!

HR/Talent Pro: Oh! My! That is above our range!

Candidate: Okay, give me  ballpark.

2. Health Benefits, 401K match, holidays – are all non-negotiable, unless you’re negotiating a C-suite offer.

3. Vacation days are usually negotiable, but only if you’re coming in with experience. Most entry levels have no room to negotiate this, and if you did negotiate, as an entry level, and get more vacation than they originally offered, calm down, they were willing to give this already. It was a test.

4.  In most positions you have a 10% range within a position to negotiate salary for an experienced professional. This means if they offer $60K, you can probably get $65K without much hassle.

4a. There are 2 schools of thought on this:

-The fewer the people in a position, the easier it is to negotiate salary. The theory being we can hire Tim at $65K, we have  Jill is already hired and working at $60K. but it will only cost us $5K to move her up to that same level. Everyone’s happy.

– The more people in a certain position, the harder it becomes to negotiate because the example above, pay inequity now becomes very expensive, and ‘pay creep’ is more of a concern when you have 200 people in a position vs. 2.

5. You can raise your salary up quickly by moving around early in your career and jumping from company to company, but it won’t help you move ‘up’ in your career.  Congratulations you’re making $95K as an Engineer, but you won’t be the first choice to a manager or director position. That will go to the person who has been there for 8 years while you were working for 4 different companies.

6. HR/Talent Pros (the good ones) expect you will negotiate something. They usually are holding something back to help seal the deal.  If you don’t negotiate, you missed out an opportunity to get something and that will follow you as long as you are with that company.  The $5K you left on the table initially, compounds each year like bank interest. If you’re with the company 20 years, that one little $5K negotiation will cost you $100K+.

7. The best HR/Talent Pros will tell you up front if they have don’t have room to negotiate. Very rarely are they lying.

Share some of your salary negotiation stories in the comments below.