The True Value of Working for a Crappy Company

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As some of you may have realized from recent posts (Wanted: People Who Aren’t Stupid), I’ve been interviewing candidates recently for the position of Technical Recruiter working for my company HRU. I love interviewing because each time I interview I think I’ve discovered a better way to do it, or something new I should be looking for, and this most recent round of interviews is no different.

Like most HR/Talent Pros I’m always interested in quality work/co-op/internship experience. Let’s face it, it’s been drilled into us, past performance/actions will predict future performance/actions.  So, we tend to get excited over seeing a candidate that has experience from a great company or competitor and we’re intrigued to know how the other side lives and our inquisitive nature begs us to dig in.

What I’ve found over the past 20 years of interviewing is that while I love talking to people that worked at really great companies, I hire more people that have worked at really bad companies.  You see, while you learn some really good stuff working for great companies, I think people actually learn more working for really crappy companies!

Working at a really great companies gives you an opportunity to work in “Utopia”. You get to see how things are suppose to work, how people are suppose to work together, how it a perfect world it all fits together.  The reality is, we don’t work Utopia (at least the majority of us) we work in organizations that are less than perfect, and some of us actually work in down right horrible companies. Those who work in horrible companies and survive, tend to better hires. They come with battle scars and street smarts.

So, why everyone wants to get out of really bad companies (and I don’t blame them) there is actually a few things you learn from those experiences:

1. Leadership isn’t a necessity to run a profitable company. I’ve seen some very profitable companies that had really bad leadership.   Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed to make money. Leadership doesn’t equal profits.

2. Great people sometimes work a really crappy companies.  Don’t equate crappy company with crappy talent.  Sometimes you can find some real gems in the dump. I talk with idiots, every day, that work for really great brands. Blind squirrels…

3. Hard work is relative.  I find people who work at really bad companies, tend to appreciate hard work better than those who work a really great companies with great balance.  If all you’ve ever known is long hours and management that doesn’t care you have a family, seeing the other side gives you an appreciation that is immeasurable.

4. Not having the resources to do the job, doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Working for a crappy company in a crappy job tends to make you more creative, because you probably won’t have what you need to do the job properly, so you find ways.

5. Long lasting peer relationships come through adversity.  You can make life-long work friends at a crappy job who you’ll keep in contact and be able to leverage as you move on in your careers.  And, here’s what each of you will think about the other: “That person can work in the shit!”; “That person is tough and get’s things done”; “That person is someone I want on my team, when I get to build a team”.

We all know the bad companies in our industries and markets.  Don’t discount candidates who have spent time with those companies. We were all at some point needing a job, a first experience, a shot at a promotion or more money, etc., and took a shot at a company we thought we could change or make a difference.  I love people who worked for bad companies, in bad jobs with bad management, because they wear it like a badge of honor!

Do You Pay Your Employees More for Referring Black People?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.  Clearly by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”. But, for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in many complex circumstances, then a homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, is you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, MLK Celebrations, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral.  Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not!?  I’ll tell you why, it’s very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this ratio is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you get reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.  Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person, when you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or an Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male, to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.   Work group performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.

What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity, and start educating them on the performance increases we get with a diversified workforce.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

 

T3 – GlideHR

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This week on T3 I take a look at a niche piece of HR and Talent Acquisition software from GlideHR.  GlideHR helps you do the one thing that 99% of us suck at really bad, make better Job Descriptions!  You and I both know this is such a huge weakness in our HR and TA shops.  Glide’s program makes this process really easy, and really fast.

What usually happens is a hiring manager comes to you and says they need to add someone to their team, or they are losing someone.  If you haven’t hired for that position in a while, let’s say even a year, you pull out the last job description.  Chances are ‘that’ job description you pull out was probably written ten years prior or just stolen from some other company that had a similar posting. Welcome to real HR kids.

You want your hiring manager to ‘revamp’ the JD.  They start to work on it, don’t have the time or the patience, and tell you, “what you send me is great”.  A week or so later you start filling their inbox with candidates and they say, “these all suck, none of them fit the job I have”, to which you say, “they all fit the JD!”

Sound familiar?  Don’t get depressed, almost everyone does it the same way, or they use some dated program that spits out the most boring, worthless JD known to mankind. Take your pick.

GlideHR is an online system that let’s your hiring managers give the information that is needed in about 20 minutes of answering a series of questions, which is then sent to the Glide team who puts together awesome JDs based on your brand, the department, etc. All in about 48 hours. I can’t tell you how many weeks I’ve waited, sometimes, to get a JD back from a manager so we could start sourcing!

5 Things I really like about GlideHR

1. They solve a real problem that the majority of working HR and TA pros actually have. Bad Job Descriptions and almost no creative ability to make the sound like jobs people would actually want.

2. A mechanism and process that helps hiring managers provide the information that is needed, quickly, and doesn’t force them to write the entire thing.

3. Cultural focused job descriptions. You generic JDs aren’t getting anyone to apply. Also, your generic employment brand is getting anyone excited, either. But, what about the culture for that department?  That leader? Glide helps align the JD to that level of your culture specifically.

4. Glide virtually eliminates your need for ‘launch meetings’ with hiring managers every time they have an opening. So, your efficiency as a department increases and you move faster.

5. In the grand scheme of things, it’s really inexpensive!  Also, this is a tool that can be used by any sized shop. Small, Medium and Enterprise all get the same value. That’s rare in a technology.

GlideHR won’t change your HR or TA life, but it will definitely make it easier. Also, the perception from the organization and hiring managers will be that HR is finally doing something, because this is something everyone sees and reads.  Don’t underestimate this.  Small changes can make a huge difference in how the organization views your function and better, faster, more creative JDs can do this.

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.

Talent Acquisition’s 2032 Nightmare

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According to a recent USA Today article the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at its lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here’s probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons and one might be that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. has 5 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees, today. Imagine if you now have millions of less workers to even choose from, and, by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  This will be a HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 10 to 15 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent. Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically my advice remains the same, as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now, for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself, but as we look at countries with low birthrates, the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.   We need to change our ways right now.  We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-fallingish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We do it for college students. I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kids marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple! I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet…

You Wouldn’t Even Hire Your Own Mom

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I had a conversation recently with a friend about how hard it is to work and be a Mom.  Just to be a clear, I’m not a Mom.  I hire Moms. In fact I love hiring Moms, they work their asses off.

I know this because I was raised by a single mother.

I remember my Mom having to pick where we would go buy our groceries based on how long it had been since she bounced a check at that store. I remember her handing me items off the belt to return because they wouldn’t take her check and we only had enough cash for a few items. I remember pouring water into my bowl of generic Fruit Loops because we didn’t have enough money to buy milk that week.

My Mom started her own business, paid her own mortgage and raised two kids. It wasn’t perfect, but we made it. Those experiences shape a kid for life. It makes you appreciate what you have, when you know you can live with much less.  My Mom got hugely successful after I got out of college and my kids only know her as the grandma that has so much.  I can’t even describe to them the struggle, they have no concept.

I have zero tolerance for hiring managers who don’t want to hire moms because they might have to stay home with a sick kid, or they might want to take an early lunch to catch fifteen minutes of fourth grade play at school during the day.  Both men and women, hiring managers, have told me they don’t like to hire moms.  This doesn’t sit well with me.

The Moms I hire are some of the strongest employees I have.  They come to work, which for many is a refuge of quiet and clean, and do work that is usually less hard than the other jobs they still have to perform that day and night.  They rarely complain, and usually are much better to put issues into perspective and not freak out.

When I look at my own ‘tough’ days I try and remember that most of my day is done, while theres won’t be until their head hits the pillow. Old people and Moms are the most disrespected of the working class.  They are the most underutilized workers of our generation.  A woman takes a few years off to raise a kid and somehow she’s now worthless and has no skills.

I don’t even want to write this post because I feel like I’m giving away a recipe to a secret sauce.  All these national recruiting companies are hiring the youngest, prettiest college grads they can find to work for them, and they mostly fail in the recruiting industry. Moms find this industry rather easy as comparable to what they are use to doing.

The recruiting secret sauce, main ingredient = moms.

Watered Downed Feedback is Killing America

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I said this before, but you don’t want to hear it.  No one cares about what you have to say, unless it’s telling them how good they are.

People can’t handle critical feedback, unless it’s set up in a mechanism where they expect it and desire it.  That’s the crux, hardly anyone has that mechanism and while most people tell you they want critical feedback they don’t have the makeup to handle it.

Here are the types of “critical” feedback people can handle:

“You’re doing a good job, would love it if you could get that big project off the ground. That would really help us out!”

Here’s what you really want to say, critically, but can’t:

“You do good at things I tell you to do, and all basic day to day duties of the job. I need more from this position and from you, and I’m willing to help get you there. I need someone who can take a project from scratch and kill it, without me having to babysit the entire thing. You’re not doing that, and that’s what I really need you to do. Are you willing do that?” 

Same message, right?  You do some stuff good, but one critical aspect of the job is not getting done. The problem is, the first level feedback is given 99.9% of the time, because managers and leaders know if you deliver the second level, that person will be destroyed!

They’ll think you think they suck, and they’ll start looking for a job.  When in reality, you were just trying to give them legitimate feedback. Real feedback. Something that would actually help them reach expectations.

So, how do you get to a point to be able to deliver ‘real’ feedback?

It’s starts with your hiring process. In the interview process you need to set people up to understand that your organization delivers real feedback, and they must be able to accept critical feedback and not crumble.  This is a team, it’s about getting better, not hurt egos.  Half will crumble in the interview, which is a good thing, you don’t want them anyway.

For those that you think have the self-insight enough to handle it, you need to do it before hire. Give them the real feedback from their interview, and see how they reply, how they interact.  This will show you what you can expect from them when they get this level of feedback as an employee.

For the employees already working, you need to start by showing them and giving them examples of what true feedback looks like. You need to coach and train your leaders on how to deliver this, on an ongoing basis.  You then need to have coaches and mentors sit in with all leaders when they begin to deliver this feedback.

Part of your leader training is to show them how to accept feedback from their teams as well. If you want to dish it out, you have to accept it as well. Training and coaching employees on how to ‘manage up’ is key to making this successful. This isn’t about blowing people up. It’s about delivering true feedback to help them get better, and person accepting and receiving this information under that assumption. We want you to be the best you, you can be.

All this takes work and time. The organizations that can do this win the culture war, because all the people working for you will know they won’t get this anywhere else!

Discount Employee

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No, I didn’t make another mistake and mean to title this “Employee Discount”, but you were totally in your right to think I would make a mistake!

We discount our employees.  We do this in a number of ways:

1. Experience.  The ten year employee is always looked at less than a new employee coming in with ten years of experience.

2. Opinions. The long term employee’s opinion gets lost to the new voice, because we’ve heard the old employees opinion before. It doesn’t, necessarily, become less valid, but we treat it as such.

3.  Value.  We tend to pay same level experience internal employees less than we pay someone coming from the outside with the same experience, education, etc. This ‘discount’ is well known in the industry.  Hometown discount. They’ve been here forever. They aren’t going anywhere. Why pay them more competitively?

 There is one more way you are currently discounting your employees, Candidate Experience.

Candidate experience is really sexy right now in HR and Talent Acquisition.  It’s all the buzz! Everyone is concentrating on making their candidate experience better.

You know why?  It’s fuzzy metrics.  While you can get ‘real’ measures and metrics from your Candidate Experience, it’s not really, real.  Candidates want a job from you.  When you ask them about their experience they inflate what they really think because they want a job from you.  When you ask them after the entire experience is over, two things happen, first, they either got the job (in which you’ll get good measures) or second, they didn’t get the job and still want one (in which you’ll get good measures).

We love good measures in HR and Talent Acquisition.

We hate measures that make us work, like employee engagement.  It’s easier and more rewarding to spend money and energy and Candidate Experience, than Employee Engagement. Employee engagement is hard. As soon as we fix the stuff from the last survey, the employee expect more! You know who doesn’t expect more? Candidates.

The ironic part of all of this is the easiest and best way to have great candidate experience is to not have to hire.Spend more resources on Employee Engagement, and you won’t have to spend more resources on Candidate Experience.

Chicken or the egg. Discounted Employees. You are discounting your employees in favor of candidates, and you don’t even realize it.

T3 – Honeit

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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.

This week on T3 I’m taking a look at the digital interview platform Honeit (pronounced “Hone It”, as in hone your skills).  Honeit comes at the interview process from a bit of a different angle.  There is a segment of HR Technology that is originally started not to help companies, but for helping job seekers.  If you think about where we’ve been the last ten years, job seekers needed help and a bunch of well intentioned people had great technology ideas to help those folks.

Honeit comes at the interview a bit from that angle.  How can we help job seekers share their skills with employers, but what does “top talent” want and expect from top companies.  Many of assume that top talent wants to interview digitally on their own time, when it is convenient for them. 90% of the digital interview space is designed around this concept. Post a job with a digital interview/screen link, and people will click through and ‘tape’ their responses to your screening questions.  Honeit feels, and I tend to agree, top talent wants live interaction with a real person from your company.

The Honeit interview platform is designed whereas the candidate and the organization have access to their taped, live interview and can have outside professionals give them feedback on how they feel the candidate can interview better, differently, etc. The company can send the interview on to hiring managers, other recruiters, save it for later, etc.  The candidate can use ‘their’ interview to get better at interviewing, and get real feedback from real talent acquisition pros.  Plus, job seekers get an unique URL to use to help share and promote themselves based on their results.

5 Things I Really Like About Honeit: 

1. Easy to use dashboard and a clean UI gets you up and running in minutes.  There isn’t some big implementation to get this off the ground and running.

2. Build interview scripts and questions for hiring managers to use, and the system basically shows you if they’re using it or not because it’s tied to the taped answers of the live interview.  The system time stamps each question and answer during the interview so you can automatically jump to specific Q and A’s, and also share specific Q and A’s without having to share the entire interview.

3. Some HR and TA pros will hate this, but I love that a job seeker can decide to buy up services in Honeit to get themselves better at interviewing, and spend time, live, with a real person, in a real company, who is working in Talent Acquisition. Plus, the job seeker can get ‘verified’ by these individuals on skills, and use that to help promote themselves to other companies.

4. The live versus taped screen I’m sure is up for debate. You’ll get more volume with taped screens.  I have a feeling the better the talent, the more personal touch they want. This feeling is based on twenty years of pimping great talent.

5. We all suck at interviewing, most of our hiring managers suck worse. Honeit really gives you a quality control mechanism to help get your hiring managers better, by allowing you to actually hear both sides of a real, live interview. This tool can give you invaluable coaching material.

Honeit is fairly new, and still working on perfecting what they have.  That’s a benefit for you, because new companies tend to be inexpensive companies and want to work with you more and give you more one on one attention.  We have a client we are going to test Honeit out with, and I’ll follow up and let you know how our test works out.

Stop Hiring Generics

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I know, I know, you only hire ‘top talent’.  The problem is you don’t have a top talent brand. You have a generic brand.  So, while you keep telling yourself you hire top talent, you don’t. You hire generics.

That’s okay, generics are just like top brands, right?  I’ve tried generic drugs and name brand drugs and I have to be honest, I didn’t see (err, feel) a difference.  So, based on my formal study of generics, you have nothing to worry about! Yay!

Generics suck. You know it, and I know it.

You are hiring generics.  Most organizations are hiring generics.

Here’s how you can tell.  Ask yourself why you hired one of your recent hires.  If it was because they had the skill to do the job, and a really nice personality, didn’t smell funny, you hired a generic.  If you hired them because they can do the job and  you can specifically say why they fit your culture, you hired a brand name!

Therein lies the problem, you have a generic employment brand.  It doesn’t have to be generic. You made it generic because it sounded safe and professional. Because it sounded like every other boring brand you have heard or seen. “Tim, you don’t get it, we aren’t Google or Tom’s”.  Thank G*d. No one really likes those crappy shoes and Google probably hires worse than you.

The question is, who are you? Really?

At my company, we’re grinders. We’re a little more blue collar, than white collar. We might swear in a meeting and no one will notice. We like kids and dogs and both are welcome to come visit the office, and no one will ever feel odd about that.  We like making money, and we love watching each other succeed.  We don’t get sick on Mondays or Fridays.  We like to try stuff. We probably hold on to bad clients longer than we should, but that’s because we get involved and relationships are hard to end.  Most of us like Michigan State, the ones that don’t get brutally harassed as much as possible.  We like to give everyone nicknames.

That’s not generic. That’s specific.  We don’t hire generic. We hire folks who fit our brand. The ones that get hired that don’t fit, get weeded out pretty quick.  Generics don’t fit well in with Brands.  There’s always something that just isn’t right. Strong brands build strong cultures. Generic brands build cultures where people don’t feel any connection.

Stop hiring generics.

3 Things You Should Say When Resigning

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I have people ask me to help them write a resignation letter – which is a little funny because it really doesn’t matter what you write – only two things are going to happen:

1. They’ll freak out that you are leaving and try and talk you out it.

2. They’ll go “Oh, that’s too bad, we will hate to see you go”

For your ego sake, you want #1, not #2. #1 means your boss/company perceives that you’re valuable and more than likely doing more work than most and they don’t want to see you go, because they don’t want to take on your work.  #2 means they were probably looking at cutting you anyway in the next layoff and you just made their job very easy, plus they got a free intern for the summer that will probably do your job better than you did, or create a new process eliminating your job all together.

Now, about that all important resignation letter…

I tell people there are 3 things to say when you resign, whether you believe them to be true or not (and for all my former bosses that I resigned, this isn’t what I did to you, I really meant what I said):

– “You are the best mentor I’ve ever had; I want to thank you so much for all you’ve given me.”  (there’s a got chance you’ll need them as a reference later on in life, so even if your boss is a tool – make them feel like they changed your life forever!)

– “You can always call me and I’ll help you out with anything you need, after I leave.”  (They’ll never call you, and you won’t ever pick up – but it makes everyone feel like the world won’t end when you leave. Plus, the new person they hire to replace you could care less about what and how you did things.)

– “I’m really going to miss working here.” (Even you aren’t and leaving will be the happiest moment of your life – say it.  They might be the only option you have some day to go back to work when you fail at your new job.)

People have this glorified vision of what happens after they leave a job – like somehow the company will implode and business will stop as they know it.  The fact is, business doesn’t stop, the sun comes up, people show up to work, and they find ways to carry on.  That’s life – organizations move on, even when they lose their best.  Don’t make resigning some historic event, it’s not.  It’s part of this dance we do as employees of organizations.  Be appreciative for the opportunity you were given. Keep your options open.  Don’t burn a bridge.  It’s pretty simple.