Surprise! You’re an HR Manager! Now what?

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It’s graduation season and soon many new HR brothers and sisters will be entering into their first real HR gigs. Many will be titled, “HR Manager”, even without one day of experience.  That’s because in many organizations, HR Manager is the only HR position they have, and they’ll gladly take a young, fresh new HR grad.

The tendency for new managers, especially HR Managers thrust into a generalist role, is to get buried with tasks.  We all know the drill, you get started at the new company, and by day 3 you already have so many projects, improvements, process changes, etc. that need to be made you determine you probably have about 18 months worth of work.

Whether you’re a new manager, or seasoned HR Pro, we tend to forget the above concepts from time-to-time and get bogged down in the everyday details within HR Departments.  So, for the new HR Managers (and maybe some seasoned vets) I wanted to give you 3 tasks that should be accomplished everyday as a HR Manager who wants to be strategic and add value to your organization:

1. Keep Track of the Score,

2. Find Better Talent,

3. Be a Relationship Bridge.

Keeping track of the score, means you must create and track metrics, for your people practices, that have bottom-line impact to your organization. Communicate these constantly and educate your organization on how they can impact these results.

Finding better talent for your organization is really the only reason the HR Department exists.  If you did only this all day, every day, your company would be better for it.  No, having a better dress code policy isn’t going to make you world class. In the end, talent wins.

The single largest factor to inefficiency isn’t bad processes, it’s bad, or non-existent, relationships. It is your job to develop your leaders, and part of that is helping them understand the value of each part of the organization and getting them to dance with each other.  Being a bridge, and bringing leaders together, with understanding will have the greatest impact on efficiency.

Leaders understanding, and actually knowing, each others pain will solve most organizational problems. Why? Because you hire great talent, and great talent with good relationships will move mountains and get you to world class.

Never underestimate the power of relationships (good and bad).

Show me a leader who claims they can “work around” someone (meaning they don’t get along with that person), and I’ll show you a below average leader who needs to leave your organization.  New, and seasoned, HR Managers underestimate the leverage they have at helping organizational efficiency through better relationships.

Good Luck new HR Managers!

5 Ways To Make Learning Matter In Your Company

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It’s true. You know the true power of learning and development, known to the laypeople in your company by the pedestrian term “Training.”   A revamp of your approach to learning and development has been on your project list for no less than two years—but day-to-day HR and workforce management duties has kept it in the “someday” bucket.

We feel your pain. That’s why Fistful of Talent is focusing our April Webinar on L&D. Join us on Thursday, April 23rd at 2pm EDT for Bootstrap Your Training Function: 5 Ways To Make Learning Matter In Your Company (sponsored by the L&D experts at Meridian).  We’re going to give you a roadmap to build your training function from scratch, including the following goodies:

—What the modern Learning & Development function looks like across core job skill training, leadership development and more. You don’t have to focus on everything to have an effective L&D function.  We’ll walk you through how leaders in the space prioritize tough choices in this space.

—How smart HR and Talent leaders are building their approach to L&D with a mix of company provided training, outsourced training and self-paced activities tied to competencies of the most critical positions in their company.  It’s 2015.  The classroom matters, but there’s this thing called Google…

—Why you need an LMS/technology solution to bootstrap and make learning matter. There’s only one of you, right?  Then you’re going to need to use technology to make your L&D initiatives look bigger than they really are and deliver the way the end user wants—just in time, on the device your employee is using.  You don’t have to break the bank… we’ll show you what to look for.

—5 ways to effectively market your L&D/training function to look fabulous as a Talent Leader. You could build the best L&D machine in the world and there’s a good chance nobody would notice.  We’ll show you the 5 biggest lessons you can learn from marketing and how to put them into play as you build your training function.

—A roadmap for how to effectively optimize your training strategy to positively influence turnover and retention in your workforce. This just in: Some people aren’t going to leave—ever. That means you’ve got choices to make related to how you spend the limited L&D budget you have.  We’ll show you how to do that.

You know ramping up your Learning & Development function has been on your “to-do” list for too long.  Join us on Thursday, April 23rd at 2pm EDT for Bootstrap Your Training Function: 5 Ways To Make Learning Matter In Your Company, and we’ll jump start your planning process and help you get things done in 2015!

T3 – PapirFly

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This week on T3 I’m taking a look at Papirfly an employment branding software just getting started here in the United States. Papirfly is a web based technology that helps you manage and communicate your employer brand around the world, enabling non-specialists to access and edit consistent marketing and communication in-house and in local languages.

Basically, Papirfly ensures that non-marketing/branding folks don’t screw up your consistent brand message!  You know, like us Talent Acquisition and HR pros who need something real quick and aren’t patient enough to wait for something to be delivered to us from marketing. So, we cut and paste a lot!  Marketing folks just love that! HR people cutting and pasting…

Papirfly has eight internal modules, and you can start with as few as you want, but the modules consist of things like print materials, email templates, banner, print ads, presentations, etc.  These modules allow anyone, who is given access, to come in and pick what they need, make changes and the software ensures only the changes approved can be made, to ensure you don’t have rogue HR folks doing their own ‘special’ branding in the field.

5 Things I really like about Papirfly: 

1. Empowers Talent Acquisition and HR to move fast and in a way where they (and owners of the brand) know everything is approved and consistent with the message the corporation wants to share.

2. Super easy to use! If you can use word, you can use Papirfly. The system builds in what can be changed, and what can’t. It also tracks, by individual, who made what changes and what it was used for. This allows the organization to track back when a certain piece was used and who did it.

3. Completely global. You can auto change languages and images, based on your audience. Allows multinational organizations to easily share a consistent branding message, but ensure that message is appropriate for each market.

4. Allows HR and Talent Acquisition to be creative, but also ensures they color within the lines!

5. Auto set safeguards, limits and approvals so that HR doesn’t have to be the brand police, and you don’t have to wait to be number one on a priority list to get things done.

Papirfly isn’t something you’re going to use if you have a 500 employee shop. This is, obviously, something that is for enterprise level HR and Talent Acquisition shops that probably have 5,000+ employees, and are in multiple locations.

If you have ever worked for a Fortune 500 level company you know how much of pain in the butt this can be! Employment branding is exploding across the globe and this has it’s own set of challenges.   Papirfly is on the forefront of how large organizations can handle one major challenge, how do you ensure the consistency of your employment brand, and still move fast.

Check them out, definitely worth a look if you’re responsible for employment branding in your organization.  It’s so simple to use the demo literally takes like 20 minutes!

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.

Recruitment Non-Poaching Agreements and Bad HR

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Workforce had an interesting article – When the War on Talent Ends with a Peace Treaty – regarding some national non-profit teaching institutions who regularly found themselves competing against each other for teacher talent. Being “non-profit” these organizations felt that it was their “mission” to find a better way to recruit teachers. A better way, meaning more cost effective and using less organizational dollars in recruitment.

For them, non-poaching agreements were part of the answer to help save costs. Non-poaching agreement = staff retention. Less turnover = money saved.  And in the end? This would allow these organizations to spend more money on their “missions” and make the world a better place to live. Amen.

Sounds good, right?

Non-profits squeezing every penny out of every donated dollar to ultimately give “our children” the best education in the world? Let’s not kid ourselves, Teach For America (TFA), KIPP, etc. are organizations that are “non-profit” by definition, but I’m positive their Ivy League educated leadership are not living in one-room apartments, eating government cheese and taking the bus to work – as many of their constituents are. And ultimately, the individuals hurt by non-poaching agreements are those professionals looking to get a job in that chosen field (in this example they’re teachers – but all the examples play out the same way).

Let me explain. Instead of education, let’s take a look at health care. Under the premise above, it would seem safe to believe that all “non-profit” hospitals should be able to come up with similar agreements, right? I mean, we are just trying to make people better, keep them healthy, it’s our mission. We won’t take your doctors, nurses, etc., and you don’t take ours; agree? Good. Now, I can go back to coming up with some policy, like dress code, how to make our lunch menu more exciting, or some other valuable HR deliverable…

Instead I have another novel idea, how about don’t suck!

Yeah, that’s right, stop sucking as a place to work, and you won’t have to come up with agreements with your “competition” about not recruiting your people away from you. Stop sucking in not paying what the market bears for pay and benefits. Stop sucking in developing your employees and giving them a great environment to work in.  You don’t hear about Google or Zappos or Pepsi meeting with their competition about not poaching each other’s talent. Why? It’s illegal, it’s called collusion.  It’s the main reason we have Unions and Unions suck more. so stop it!

To recap: Non-poaching agreements are bad. Bad for talent, bad for business, and bad for America (but good for HR folks who don’t want to make their places of employment better). Stop Sucking as an employer. And, Unions Suck.

HR Manager Position that Pays $364,000! Want it?

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I ran into an age old issue last week, which for some reason hadn’t come up for a very long time, but there he was staring me right in the face, and I still don’t get it!  Here’s the issue, should you post the salary (or your desired salary range based on experience, yadda, yadda…) for the position you are hiring, or not?

My guess is you clicked on this post because you wanted to find out which kind of HR Manager position pays $374K! Well, none, but you clicked, I win! But, while you’re here let’s take a look at the issue at play because it’s a polarizing issue amongst HR Pros.

I say, post the salary right out in front for God and everyone to see.  It will create most interest, which gives you a larger pool of candidates, which gives you better odds at filling your position with the type of talent that fits your organization.  It allows you to eliminate many candidates who won’t accept your job, because you’re too cheap. Sure you’ll get some people who see $98K, and they are making $45K, but they want to make $98K, so they send their resume, hoping.  But we’re smarter than that, plus, maybe Mr. $45K would be a great fit for me for another position, or in 3 more years when I have the same position open.

Posting the salary on a job post creates 137% more candidate traffic, than those posts which don’t list salary, or at least it feels that way to me when I do it that way!  I’m sure my friends at CareerBuilder can probably come up with some more precise figures on this exactly, but I’ll bet my made up math isn’t too far from correct.  It’s common sense. You walk by a store and see “help wanted”, and no one goes in. You walk by the store and you see “Help Wanted $12/hr”, and they have a line out the door asking for applications.

There are only 3 reasons you wouldn’t list the target salary for the position you are hiring for:

1. You know you’re paying below market, and you don’t want to the competition to know, because they’ll cherry pick your best people

2. You can’t find the talent you want, so you’ve increased the salary target, but you aren’t going to increase the salary of the poor suckers already working for you at the lower amount.

3. You don’t know what you’re doing!

Look, I get it, I’ve been there.  You don’t want to list salary because your current employees don’t understand that while the position title is the same, you are “really” looking for someone with more experience.  Or, we just don’t have the budget to raise up everyone already working for us, but we really need some additional talent. Or, we’ve always did it this way, and we want people who are “interested in us” and not money.

Well, let me break it to you gently, you’re an idiot.  People are interested in you because the value equation of what you are offering fits into their current lifestyle!  Otherwise, you could just move forward as a volunteer organization now couldn’t you?!

Do yourself a favor and don’t make recruiting harder than it has to be.  Just tell people what you have to offer. “We’re a great place to work, we have these benefits, they’ll cost you about this much, and we are willing to pay “$X” for this position”, if this is you, we want to speak to you. If it’s not, that’s great to, but check back because we might have something for you in the future.

Also, let me know if you find an HR Manager job that pays $374K. I know the perfect candidate!

Compensation 701 – A Master’s Course

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In terms of one part of your corporate Compensation Philosophy you can be a Pay Follower, a Pay Leader or Market Rate.

You never hear Pay Leaders complain about Turnover…

You always her Pay Followers complain about how Pay Leaders can actually pay that much…

Those who Pay at the Market always talk about how money isn’t that important…

HR and Compensation Pros will always talk about how it’s not about how much someone makes, it’s about the total compensation package.  Ironically, those Best Companies To Work for tend to have the highest total compensation packages and be Pay Leaders.  It’s a vicious cycle to get the best talent.

If your a pay follower you will never have the best talent.  If you pay at market, you will never have the best talent for long.  If you’re a Pay Leader you’ll have the ability to attract the best talent and the resources to hook them, but you still have to have the culture and leadership to keep the long term.

This is everything I know about compensation after 20 years of working in HR.

What have I learned?

I always try and work for Pay Leaders, otherwise you end up chasing your tail a lot within the HR world.

Consider yourself graduated.

HR Worst Enemy

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I’ve been speaking a few local SHRM events and some corporate events and I’m always amazed to hear about all of the Enemies that HR has!  You have employees, and hiring managers, and the EEOC, and employment attorneys, and staffing firms, and insurance firms, and HR software providers – I mean, if I hadn’t been in HR, I would think that everyone is against HR!

It feels like that some days, doesn’t it?

HR’s real worst enemy, though, doesn’t get that without your organizations service or product being successful – no one is successful.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that more hurdles to jump through, means less time for operations to focus on the real business at hand.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that treating everyone the same way, doesn’t create a high performance culture.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that having employees fill out open enrollment paperwork just so you have a document to prove what they filled out, spends more resources then it saves.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that adding 5 additional steps to a process doesn’t make it simpler, it makes it more complex.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that not leaving your department to go out an build relationships in other departments isn’t a good thing.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t that eliminating all risk isn’t something that is possible – nor should it be a goal.

HR’s worst enemy…is itself.

7 Things Reviewing HR/Talent Technology has Taught Me

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I’m not going to review a specific company today because I’m on Spring Break (like the High School kids, but I can drink, legally!).  I do want to share some overall bullet points of my initial impressions of my T3 series and some of my overall opinions of HR Tech.  Also, HR/Talent Tech vendors, let’s connect, I would love to see what you’ve got cooking!

This might be a bit disjointed, but I’ve got some nuggets that I wanted to get out:

1. Every HR Technology company believes they are now a “Data Analytics” company.  They aren’t. This is marketing.  If one of them changes next year and decides to be a “Cupcake Bakery” and you love it.  All HR Technology companies will become “Cupcake Bakeries”.   This is a function of so many of the HR Technology companies are young, new startups. Marketing is usually an afterthought, and they call some Bro or Chick they knew from school.  Bad marketing just follows the crowd. It’s easy.

2. There are two types of HR Technology companies: 1. Technology companies that saw a problem with something in the HR/Talent space and designed technology to solve it. 2. HR/Talent companies that know of HR/Talent issues and either tried to buy the technology or are fumbling around on their own trying to design technology to fit their solution.  You can tell which is which, very quickly.  I’m not saying one is better than another.  I’ve seen some great Tech, from folks who have no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve also seen some great HR/Talent companies that get it 100%, but they have no idea how to make it work on the technology side.  I think there is a place in our industry for an eHarmony type broker of great tech companies and great HR/Talent companies.

3. Great HR Technology does not need to cost a lot.  Many companies are virtually giving away their solution to gain users, and build their brand.  Never in the history of HR and Talent has technology been more affordable.  If you are paying a lot for something you are not happy with, you need to change.

4. Changing HR/Talent technology is not 1990’s painful anymore.  HR and Talent Pros hate changing technology because they believe it’s a nightmare to change.  This is no longer the case for most of the HR vendors in the tech space.  Big, expensive HR technology does not want you to know this.

5. Before signing a contract to buy a HR/Talent solution, talk with those folks running the company.  What you’ll find is some of these companies are run by folks who are so passionate about what they are solving it’s almost unbelievable.  You’ll also find some folks who are trying to solve a problem, but also are try to ‘just’ sell their company. I’m a capitalist, I’m all for you selling your company and making a bucket of money.  But I like to buy technology from someone who is so passionate, they wouldn’t want to sell their business because it’s a part of them.  Either way, you’ll learn a lot by having these conversations. Both parties are super smart, usually.

6. Buying HR/Talent technology is still mostly a relationship based sale.  In the end, Mr. and Mrs. HR and Talent Acquisition need to feel like you truly care about helping them with their problems, and you get their daily struggle.  Some companies completely bomb at this.

7. Many HR/Talent technology companies bomb demos because they don’t truly understand how a ‘normal’ HR or Talent pro will use their product on a daily basis.  Thus, the demo, should demonstrate this experience.  Many times I, someone who loves HR and Talent technology, will leave a demo feeling overwhelmed by what I just saw.  If I’m feeling that way, imagine how Mike and Mary in Fargo are feeling.

The T3 series is teaching so much, I love it.  I hope you are liking it as well, and getting to know some of the great HR and Talent technology that is available to you in the marketplace. I encourage everyone to do demos.  I rarely ever feel pressured to buy anything, especially if you let them know up front you are really just looking for the future.  So many of the vendors do great demos and really teach you things during the process.  In a way, doing demos is great personal development for your career.

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.

How To Tell Someone They Suck

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Got a question recently from a newbie HR/Talent Pro about how do you tell someone they just aren’t good enough for the position you have, without hurting their feelings?  Great question, and one that we all run into frequently.  Here’s the story:

“Mr. Jones (I’ve changed the name to protect the guilty) won’t stop bugging me, he emails his resume to me ‘every’ day!”  We know Mr. Jones, because Mr. Jones use to work for us, and it didn’t turn out so well.  Mr. Jones was “laid off” back in the recession when we got rid of our dead wood. Now, Mr. Jones wants to come back for another position we have.  The problem with Mr. Jones isn’t skill related, it’s personality related, he’s annoying.  He was annoying to everyone who ever came into contact with, but his manager never coached him on this.”

So, the BIG question. How do you get Mr. Jones to stop bugging you?  This happens to every single HR/Talent pro I know eventually.

Here are the steps I use:

1. Tell Them!

That’s it, no more steps.

Here’s our problem as HR/Talent Pros, we never want to burn a bridge.  “Well, Tim, you don’t know where he might go, who might hire him, I don’t want to ruin my reputation”  Bullshit.  You’re being conflict avoidant, and if you look at your last performance review, I bet under “opportunities” is probably says something about avoiding conflict or not confronting issues head on.

I had a very good HR mentor once tell me, “it’s best to deliver them that gift, then to allow them to walk around not knowing”.  Once you start being straightforward you’ll be amazed at how many people will say, “No one has ever told me that!”  That’s the problem, no one ever tells them the truth, thus they keep doing the wrong thing, instead of trying to fix what is wrong.

How do you get an annoying candidate to stop bugging you?  You tell them exactly, very specifically, very calmly, with no ill intent, “I want to give you a gift.  You might not see it as a gift right now, but I hope in time you’ll understand it to be a very valuable gift.  I (don’t use “we” or “us” or “the company – you’re avoiding again by using those), I think you have a very bad personality flaw that comes across annoying to me, and from the feedback I have received, to those you work with.  If this does not change, you will probably struggle to find a job and keep a job.”

OUCH! That hurt right?  But, read it again, was there anything mean or untrue in the statement? If this person actually listens to the statement and acts on it, will they be better for it?  You can change the reason for whatever issue the person might have, maybe it’s hygiene, maybe it’s a crazy laugh, who knows, but the basic message stays the same.  You need to change, or I never want to speak to you again.

It’s hard for new HR/Talent pros to understand this, because 99% have been taught to be nice, thoughtful people and not to be rude.  This sounds a bit rude.  In reality, I think it’s rude to string a person along and not care enough about them to actually tell them what is wrong and to help them.  Stop telling candidates your blow off lines and start telling candidates the truth.  At the very least, you’ll have more time on your hands to talk to the candidates you really want to speak to!

2 Reason Men Get Hired More Than Women

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The New York Times had an article regarding hiring practices and succession practices at Google, and G*d knows if Google is doing it, it must be important, and we all must try and do the same thing. What I liked about this article was it didn’t necessarily look at practices and processes, it looked at data. The data found that Google, like almost every other large company, does a crappy job hiring and promoting women.

Shocking, I know, if you’re a man! We had no idea this was going on! In America of all places… Beyond the obvious, though, Google was able to dig into the data and find out the whys and make some practical changes that I think most companies can implement, and that I totally agree with.  From the article:

“Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

Google now asks interviewers to report candidates’ answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.”

Here are two selection facts that impact both men and women:

1.  We like to surround ourselves with people who we like, which usually means in most cases people who are similar to ourselves.

2. We tend not to want to brag about our accomplishments, but our society has made it more acceptable for men to brag.

This has a major impact to your selection, and most of you are doing nothing about it.  It’s very common that if you run simple demographics for your company, ANY COMPANY, you’ll see that the percentage of your female employees does not come close to the percentage of your female leadership.

Why is that?

Here are two things you can do to help make the playing field more level in your organization:

1. Have women interview women.  Sounds a bit sexist in a way, but if you want women to get hired into leadership positions you can’t have them going up against males being interviewed by males because the males will almost always feel more comfortable with another male candidate. Reality sucks, buy a helmet.

2. Ask specific questions regarding accomplishments and take detailed notes. Studies have found woman don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t “sell” or brag enough about their accomplishments giving their male counterparts a leg up, because the males making the hiring decisions now have “ammunition” to justify their decision to hire the male.

Let’s face it, Google is doing it, so now we all have to do it.  What would we do without best practices…(maybe innovate and create new better practices – but I digress…).