3 Ways Contract Staffing Fails

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Contract technical staffing is what I do for a living – so I know exactly where it falls down.  I spend every day trying to talk people into why they should use contract staffing and why it makes sense.  In 13 years of being in this business, I’ve never had anyone ask me why it doesn’t work.  That might be kind of odd.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve talked to hundreds of corporate HR and Recruiting Pros who HATE contract staffing, but 99% don’t know why they hate it.

Most believe they hate contract staffing because it’s taking their job away.  Nothing makes me smile more than to hear a really good HR Pro say “if I hire your company ‘they’ll’ have no reason to keep me around”.  I always find this a little sad, because that’s not at all true. Contract staffing isn’t in competition with corporate staffing. Contract staffing fills temporary voids of talent and project work. Corporate staffing is looking for permanent, long term hires.

But, to be perfectly honest, there are some reasons when contract staffing fails.  If you deal with contract staffing firms, you might find that shocking to hear, because we are trained from birth not to ever say anything negative about our service.  ‘Everyone’ can use us for any recruiting need you might have!  Well, no not really.  Let me give you 3 Ways Contract Staffing Fails:

1. To Attract your competitions talent when you are equal or trailing in market compensation.  I always like to say there is no one I can’t recruit.  Given enough time and money. I could get President Obama to quit the Presidency.  But if you think a contract staffing firm is going to get your competitions best developer to leave their direct job for a contract job, for the same money or less, you’re crazy and I don’t want to work with you company.

2. When you fall in love with the talent.  Every once in a while I a client who gets upset.  They bring on a high priced contractor, that person does great work, and the client falls in love and wants to hire them.  The problem is many contractors are contractors because they like moving from project to project.  They like you, they just don’t like-like you.  Contract staffing works really well when it’s a win-win. We have a project, you nail project, and we both got what we wanted.  It fails when one party falls in love, and the other doesn’t feel the same!

3. When You Think I’m Magical. Recruiting is recruiting.  I don’t have a magical stable of candidates waiting to come to work for you. Well, I might have one or two, but not a stable. When you tell me you need something I, usually, have to go out and find the right talent, fit, etc.  Just like you would, if you were looking to hire a direct position.  I’m not magic, I’m just good at finding technical talent.  There’s a difference.

I get why some new clients get put off by contract staffing.  I call you, tell you how amazing we are and how good we are at what we do and then you expect I’m going to have 5 perfectly screened ready to work Controls Engineers in your inbox the next morning, when you’ve been searching for 6 months and don’t have one.

Expectations are a huge issue we all face in recruiting, no matter what kind of recruiting we do.  I have to manage my clients expectations, just like you have to manage your hiring managers expectations.  Contract staffing works really well when you find a client partner that makes sure your expectations and their deliverables all line up.

Want to discuss?  Contact me: sackett.tim@HRU-TECH.com, 517-908-3156 or send me a tweet @TimSackett.   I promise to under promise and over deliver.

Job Title Killers

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You know what position I would love to apply for!?  Jr. Human Resource Manager, said no one ever!

I hate spending 3 seconds on job titles, because job titles just scream, “Personnel Department”, but I have to just take a few minutes to help out some of my HR brothers and sisters.  Recently, I came across a classic job title mistake when someone had posted an opening and then broadcasted it out to the world for a, wait for it, “Jr. Industrial Engineer”.  I almost cried.

Really!  No, Really!  “Jr.”  You actually took time, typed out the actual title, and then thought to yourself, “Oh yeah! There’s an Industrial Engineer out there just waiting to become a ‘Jr. Industrial Engineer’!”  Don’t tell me you didn’t, because that’s exactly what it says.  “But Tim, you don’t understand we’ve always called our less experienced Industrial Engineers, Junior, so we can differentiate them from our ‘Industrial Engineers’ and our ‘Sr. Industrial Engineers’.  What do you want us to to do, call them: Industrial Engineer I, Industrial Engineer II and Industrial Engineer III?”

No, I don’t want you to do that either.

Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to title this position as “Lesser Paid Industrial Engineer”. You’ll get the same quality of responses!

You know how to solve this, (but why you won’t) just have one pay band for “Industrial Engineer”, from $38K to $100K.  Pay the individuals within that band appropriately for their years of experience and education.

This is why you won’t do it. Your ‘Sr.’ Compensation Manager knows you aren’t capable of handling this level of responsibility and within 24 months your entire Industrial Engineering staff would all be making $100K – Jr’s, Middles and Sr’s!

Please don’t make me explain how idiotic it looks when you list out your little number system on your post as well (Accountant I, Accountant II, etc.). Because you know there just might be an Accountant out there going, “Some day I just might be an Accountant II!”

If SHRM actually did anything, I wish they would just go around to HR Pros who do this crap and visit their work place and personally cut up their PHR or SPHR certificates in half, in front of them, like a maxed out credit card that gets flagged in the check out line.  That would be awesome!

All this does is make it look like you took a time machine in from a 1970 Personnel Department.

But, seriously, if you know of any Sr. Associate HR Manager III positions please let me know.

T3 – GR8People

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform Gr8People.  Gr8People bills themselves as an all-in-one recruiting software solution, with it’s goal to eliminate the need for ‘third party’ software solutions.  What they are trying to do is be the Oracle or SAP of recruiting software. A suite, where you don’t need to bring in any other pieces into your recruitment process.

The folks who are behind Gr8People are the same folks who developed and launched VirtualEdge back in the day. VirtualEdge was purchased by ADP, and ADP recently decided to sunset that product. When VirtualEdge was launched is the cutting edge.  Gr8People is attempting to be as cutting edge in today’s terms.

The challenge most talent acquisition shops face today with technology is they can’t get everything they need in one piece of software: CRM, Sourcing, ATS, Branding, Search, hiring manager collaboration/approval/process, recruitment marketing, referrals, etc. Most shops will have 4-8 different solutions and pieces of tech to get all this done. Gr8People is trying to give you a one-stop shop for your entire talent acquisition process.

5 things I really like about Gr8People:

1. I say this frequently, but they are led by a group of folks who have been in the recruiting business combined well over a 100 years! That makes a huge difference.  They are familiar with both the SMB market and enterprise.  They just flat out get talent acquisition from the corporate side of the fence!

2. It’s module based so you don’t have to scrap your current ATS to begin using Gr8People, but most will once they start using the pieces. You can start with Sourcing and Branding, and it will integrate with your current ATS. What you’ll find is most will try this, but eventually dump their old ATS. The entire reason is because you want a suite of products that are designed to work together for your shop.

3. Extremely configurable to how you want your process to run.  They’ll set up in a best practice model, but you can easily move things around to how your shop runs very easily.

4. One click apply from Facebook and LinkedIn! This is awesome and powerful, more companies should be doing this.  If you really want passive candidates, don’t make them go through your 23 step apply process!

5. Embedded analytics that run throughout all the modules so you get complete metrics from marketing to source to apply to interview to hire.

There’s so much more: candidate self interview scheduling, built in talent communities, internal communication tools, real recruitment marketing. Like I said, these guys get recruiting automation and technology at a different level than most companies!

I will say, it’s not completely all-in-one. You still have some integration with outside technology that they partner with, although it’s invisible to you as they build and bill the integration on their end, for posting and searching across multiple job boards/sources.  Also, they still have some pieces I would like to see added, like interview automation, selection assessments, onboarding, etc. (some of this is done with the organization’s system of record)

If you’re running a Talent Acquisition shop, you definitely need to demo Gr8People and check them out. At the very least they’ll give you some great insight to current best practices, and help you think about your own shop.  At the best, they’ll give you a great option for a pretty strong recruiting platform!

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.

8 Hacks Benefit Managers Can Do to Raise Employee Engagement

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Tomorrow (Tuesday April 21st) at 2pm I’m hosting a free SHRM webinar (Link to register below) on how you can use your normal, boring employee benefits communications to drive better employee engagement. Well, let me take that back, it won’t be your normal, boring communications, it will be newer, better employee communications!

This won’t be your normal SHRM webinar, because it’s me and the company sponsoring the webinar is called Jellyvision (and their benefit communication technology called ALEX)! This will be fun!

The days of the low-strategy, low-impact benefits communication plan are over. Today’s HR professionals can no longer approach benefits communication as a chore that must get done as quickly as possible.

Smart HR pros know that strong benefits communication strategies drive employee engagement levels through the roof. In this lively program, you’ll learn that it’s not company picnics and spiffy logo polo shirts that make people love their jobs but smart, strategic benefits communication.

What do you know? The benefits team just got elevated to strategic employee engagement driver number one!

What can you expect to hear? 

1. What and how can Leaders in your organization do to aid your benefit communications? Simple tips to get them involved without them lifting a finger!

2. Research shows that 3/4 of your employees don’t understand their benefits, BUT 3/4 also don’t want more Benefit Communications! So, what are you supposed to do!?!

3. Research also shows that the higher percentage of employees to actually understand their benefits, the higher the organizations overall employee engagement is.  I’m going to walk you through some easy to do hacks that can help you, and show you some technology that is transforming how great companies are turning employee benefit communication upside-down!

Click Here to Register! 

What is ‘Meaningful Work’, really?

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I had a couple of communications recently that lit a fire under my ass over the concept of ‘meaningful work’.  You see, there is this widely held belief by a great number of HR pros that to have true employee engagement your employees must feel like they have meaningful work.

I don’t necessarily disagree with that thought process.

The problem is, well meaning, HR pros have taken this concept and started to cram social platforms down the throats of their employees misinterpreting ‘meaningful work’ as meaning as an employer we must have support social causes so our employees see we are giving back.

The best example I can think of is everyone’s darling employer Tom’s.  With complete transparency there is probably ten pairs of Tom’s shoes in my house, none of which are mine.  Each pair of Tom’s costs around $45.  The material and labor to make a pair of Tom’s probably runs around $5. Let’s be honest, these shoes are crap. It’s a piece of canvas, rubber and some thread.

“But, Tim!, they give one of these crappy pairs of shoes to a poor kid!” Great, they just cut into their margin by $5, oh how will they survive on only a gross of $35 per pair?!

So, I’m to believe that because they give a shoe for every shoe they sell, people find this as meaningful work?

What about those companies that put big money and volunteerism towards things like Habitat for Humanity?  Great cause, right?  I worked for a company that did this. It was nice. But I grew up volunteering for Special Olympics and supporting this organization. The company I was working for wouldn’t support my cause, because they already did so much for Habitat.

What about my ‘meaningful work’?

Meaningful work isn’t about supporting causes.  Meaningful work is do your people feel that what they do on a daily basis is important to the success of your organization.  This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with supporting causes.  It definitely does for some organizations, but not most.

Employees need to know that when they show up in the morning the effort they give helps the organization reach its goals.  Not that the organization they work supports one cause or another.

The failure in believing meaningful work is tied to causes is that everyone has their own personal causes they want to support. If you believe helping the homeless is your organization’s cause, that’s wonderful! But, now you have to go out and look for talent that also believes this is their cause as well, to make work meaningful for everyone in your organization.

In HR we try and make this concept of meaningful work too difficult.  We need to help our leaders be better communicators to their staffs on how what each one does individually has impact to the greater good of our organizations.  How they, individually and collectively, make an impact to their function and to the business.

Meaningful work isn’t saving puppies. Meaningful work is using your talents to help your organization be successful.

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!