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.

 

 

Better Employee Relocation Design in 4 Easy Steps!

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I have to admit I’ve been one of those HR Pros who has had to design and develop relocation policies a few times in my career.  My philosophy on relocation has changed somewhat over the years. In my career, I’ve accepted positions 4 times in which I went through “professional” relocation for various HR positions in my career.  That fact has more impact on my philosophy of relocation than all other issues combined.

So, Fact #1 on getting a better relocation policy for your company: force those designing the policy to relocate, at least once.  If you haven’t relocated, you can’t design the policy, it’s that simple.

People who haven’t relocated to another state for a job have no idea what impact it has on your life.  It’s not the same as moving to a new house in another part of the city you live in.  For the most part, if you have a significant other and some kids thrown into the mix, it’s probably one of the most stressful events you’ll go through in life.  You get hired, Yeah!  You now have to go show up at the new job, without family, belongings, etc. You’re trying out the new position, culture, etc., all the while your spouse is home trying to run life, now without 50% of her support resources. That person, you, is now living in a hotel or furnished the apartment, eating out each meal, sitting around doing nothing, etc. You’ll only understand if you’ve been through this!

You need to find a new house, but not until the old house is sold, find the right schools, etc., etc.  Oh, and, by the way, you probably have some HR administrator going over your relocation expense reports like they’re a Zapruder Film. Oh, I’m sorry Mr. Sackett, you seem to have spent $1.32 too much on parking at the airport last week. Really!? I haven’t seen my wife and kids for two straight weeks, and we’re talking about $1.32?  DON’T UNDERESTIMATE FACT #1.

I know the talk, lately, about relocation, has been about how difficult it is to get people to relocate because of falling housing values.  Workforce Management’s article Recruiters Get Creative with Relocation in Sluggish Housing Market by Leah Shepherd speaks specifically to this dilemma. Clearly, it’s more expensive to get people to relocate, but I will argue that it isn’t more difficult.  HR folks are classic in confusing expensive and more difficult – finance people don’t have this same issue.  It’s not more difficult to get some to relocate, it’s just more expensive.

Here is where Fact #2 comes in: Never allow your Hiring Managers to get involved with Relocation.

Believe me, they will want to. It’s interesting how people who already work for a company tend to view relocation dollars spent, like the person receiving the relocation is getting a huge bonus!  All of sudden your hiring manager believes they are personally responsible for every penny that is spent.  They aren’t, and you the HR Pro understand this, and that’s why we keep our hiring managers out of the picture.  We need them to have a great first impression of the new person, so take the money out of the picture so they can focus on the fit and skills.

HR/Recruiting Pros are in the business of increasing talent of their organizations, and this fact has to be paramount when discussing the finances of corporate relocation.  This brings us to Fact #3 on how to make your relocation policy better: don’t budget relocation as a single annual amount, budget relocation by the percent of hires you anticipate in having to relocate.

Look, it’s way too easy for finance and executives to look at the HR budget and say, “Wow, $1.5M in relocation budgeted for 2010? You need to cut that by $500K.”  Great, I’ll do that, but tell me which people we won’t be hiring?

Recruiting Pros need to come to the table with market data supporting why relocation is necessary and at which roles and levels.  Cutting relocation isn’t a question about saving money; it’s a question about which talent is less important to the company, because that’s the real cost.  Also, budgeting by hires forces departments and divisions to answer to their talent management strategies, instead of throwing it on HR’s back. Hey, it’s August, and we’ve already spent our Relocation budget for the whole company!  No, Mr. Hiring Manager, it’s August, and we’ve spent your department’s relocation budget. You better talk to Mrs. CEO and tell her why you couldn’t manage your budget.

And lastly, Fact #4 – Don’t come to a Relocation Gunfight with a knife.  Know what the person brings to the table and be able to show the alternatives to hiring that person, but either way show what the impact will be to the organization no matter what decision is made.

The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros

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If you’re like everyone else in the free world, March brings a little bit of a grind.  The hope and promise of the new year has settled into a familiar routine, and you need something fresh to keep you interested at work as a high-end HR pro, right?

Of course you do – that’s why Fistful of Talent is back with a webinar that’s designed only for the real players in HR who like to think long and hard about talent/performance in the companies they serve.  Join us on Wednesday, March 25th at 2pm EST for The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros and we’ll show you how to take the next step in your performance management platform by sharing the following goodies:

—A rundown of how smart companies create 2-dimensional performance management systems using performance vs potential, and how that approach sets the table for a host of talent management activities using something called the 9-Box Grid.

—A deep dive into the differences between performance vs potential in any company, including a roadmap for how any company just getting started with performance vs potential can begin building the process to consider both inside their organization.

–We’ll break up the seriousness of the topic by considering where Individual Members of the Jackson Family, the 3 Versions of Van Halen and Husbands/Boyfriends of the Kardashians fall on the performance vs potential scale.  You know, just to help you relate.  And to stop taking ourselves too seriously.

–Since most of you have more experience with performance than with potential, we’ll share some thoughts and data related to common traps and derailers when you build out your definition of potential at your company (hint – the more you tie it to what it REALLY takes to be successful at your company across all positions, the better off you are)

-We’ll wrap up our time together by sharing a list of 5 Things You Can Do From a Talent Management Perspective Once You’ve Launched Performance Vs. Potential/The 9-Box.  Hint – All of the things we’ll share make you more strategic and less transactional as an HR pro, and they let you have high level conversations about talent with the leaders of your company.

You’ve been aware of the ying/yang relationship between performance and potential for years – why wouldn’t you want to help your company get started to understand the same set of truths?  Join us on Wednesday, March 25th at 2pm EST for The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros and we’ll give you a great roadmap to refreshing how your company views performance and talent.

REGISTER NOW

T3 – HarQen

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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 had the chance to demo two recruiting efficiency tools by Harqen.  Harqen has both their flagship product, Voice Advantage, which is a digital interview platform for both voice and video (Yes, I asked them to change the name!), and their newest product called Hot Sheet that I’m really excited about.

First, Harqen does things a bit differently than most Recruiting technology companies.  They have a great leadership team that has been in the talent acquisition game for a long time, so before you can demo, you have to have some business outcomes conversations.  The last thing they want to do is waste your time, and their time, if their products aren’t really what you need.  This is a must, because while we all want the new, cool tech to help us out, so many of us are just not ready for this change from a business processing state.

Harqen’s Voice Advantage is like many of the digital interview platforms that are out there, with the advantage that they don’t just assume you only want video. They also offer a voice/phone screen option, which is still the standard in many industries and professions. The platform is also mobile optimized and allows you do taped live interviews as well. Clean dashboard and UI, it’s simple and easy to use.

Harqen’s Hot Sheet is a real game changer. The one thing none of us in Recruiting and Talent Acquisition do well, is mine our own internal databases. You put a candidate in there two years ago and haven’t touched them since. You interviewed a gal last year, she was second choice by a hair, but you’ve never reached back out.  Hot Sheet is a process that Harqen takes your internal candidate data and reaches back out to your database. These potential candidates then can respond via the interview platform and your recruiters have interested potential candidates ready to go when they come in the next day.  One of the best parts of Hot Sheet, is you only pay for the candidates that actually show interest!

5 Things I really liked about Harqen:

1. One of the best management teams in the planet selling recruiting technology.  These people have actually recruited and know the pain recruiters feel, which shows up in the products they’ve created. They listen to you, and even if you don’t end up working with them, they’ll give you great advice on what you should be doing.

2. The key to their Hot Sheet product is the Harqen team putting some great marketing touches and creating a campaign when reaching out to your internal database. This isn’t just a mass email campaign, this is a recruitment marketing campaign to re-engage one of the most valuable resources you have in your shop.

3. You only send the people you want Harqen to go after with Hot Sheet, so it’s not some spammy program killing your database. You use as much, or as little as you want.  You can also shut it off at any point. Since you only pay for those that respond, this is one of the economical pieces of recruiting technology on the market.

 4. Harqen’s VoiceAdvantage digital interview product is one of the more flexible interview tools on the market. Video, audio, screen, live, etc. But you can also use for performance management, onboarding, etc. Harqen’s team is smart enough to show you how to fully integrate and utilize the tech for other things than just interviewing.

5.  I can’t say it enough, when you work with Harqen, you aren’t just buying recruitment technology, you’re buying Recruitment Consulting at no additional cost. Others will tell you they do this, but it’s only to make the sale. Harqen does this, at certain points, to talk you out of the sale, so they don’t have to work with bad companies that won’t utilize their products in a way they actually work! This is a rarity in the industry.

Check them out. The Hot Sheet is something that almost any shop should be using. It’s something my own shop will begin using soon, and I’ll update everyone on how it is working.  It’s just too good of an idea not to do, and a very inexpensive cost.

The Random Shit They Leave Us

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You know what one of the greatest things about firing or laying someone off is?  The free crap people just leave in their desks when they leave!

Someone at my company left a long time ago and left this ladies brown, kind of chunky, cardigan sweater.  It was one of those that was really comfortable, but not the best looking.  That thing just gets passed around amongst any of the ladies who are cold.

I had to pack up the desk of a guy who was fired for performance once and found an almost full fifth of vodka.  That was a really nice find! And probably the reason his performance wasn’t so good.  Sure you get a ton of pens, staplers, tape dispensers, etc. Office supplies seem to be the bulk of finds.

At one employer I was at after a major layoff the head of HR had what was left of our HR team go collect all the office supplies from all the empty desks.  There was over a hundred people left go that day and the mountain of office suppliers was enormous! We could have opened our own Office Max!

Office lunch and snacks are probably the second most left item. You can a lot of microwavable soups and such.  Candy. Crackers. Chips.  Don’t think that stuff gets thrown away!  Office workers are a direct descendant of Piranhas! You throw random desk food into a break room and that stuff is gone in minutes.

There tends to be a lot of business books left in offices and cubes after someone leaves. I guess that 7 Habits and Good to Great weren’t working so well, so why take them along with you.  I, myself, have an entire bookshelf in my office of business books that I’ve read over the past two decades. I really don’t need them anymore, now they’re basically decoration.  I also have three text books from my master’s HR program that I’ll never crack open.  keeping those were a solid choice.

The one thing you can count on is there are always some clues left behind of why the person is no longer with you, especially those who are terminated.  Usually, you find something thing that helps this person waste eight hours per day. Crossword books, magazines, video game console, workout bands, etc., basically anything you can do at work, except work.

Half used calendars are another thing people tend not to take with them on their journey through life. I could make an entire memorial of past employees by just pinning up their cat and muscle car calendars.  Nothing shows appreciation and tenure like August’s motivational quote of the month!

Of all the random shit past employees leave us, it’s the stories that are the best.  I think you can measure your impact on an organization by the number of stories you leave behind.  If you go to a group lunch or office party, a year later, and there are no stories being shared about you, you probably didn’t have much impact.

What’s your best shit that people left behind?

HR So Fast You’ll Freak

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Have you guys tried Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches (err, subs)?  My family loves Jimmy Johns! Way too much of my annual income goes to this company!

Little known fact, I was once offered the head HR position at Jimmy Johns.  Back in 2007 I was working for Applebee’s and we were bought out by IHOP (International House of Pancakes) – which was much smaller, but it was a recession and Applebee’s stock was down and the IHOP folks were sitting on a pile of cash, and the rest is just good old American capitalism.

The uncertainty of a takeover had me open to new opportunities, and a headhunter called me about Jimmy Johns.  I was familiar with them, plus it was the top HR spot.  The founder of Jimmy Johns was no longer in the picture, he groomed at young man, James North, to take over the company (read his story in the link, it’s fascinating). The ‘kid’ was like 28-29 when I went to interview. He was running around the place, full of energy, looking to change the world one freaking fast sub at a time.

The total interview lasted about 30 minutes.  He threw me the keys to his Cadillac Escalade and told me to go find a house.  Head of HR position, thirty minutes, go find a house. I had five hours before my flight left.  I drove around Champaign, IL thinking it wasn’t East Lansing. James scared me, because he wasn’t like the big company operations leaders I had at Applebee’s.  I turned the position down, to the chagrin of my sons.

Fast forward to two weeks ago. By social media chance I get connected with the head of HR for Jimmy Johns, Amber Rhoton. I had to share my story! I mean what HR pro gets keys thrown to them of a Cadillac and is told to find a house! It’s a brilliant story, part of her organization.  She loved it, and confirmed James is still running the show, and the company is exponentially larger and more successful than it was in 2007.

Amber had the guts I didn’t have.  We (my ragtag group of brothers and sisters in the HR thought leadership space) tell HR people to have courage all the time.  I didn’t.  I thought I did.  But when push came to shove to prove it, I went back to the nice cushy well developed HR department at the largest casual dining company in the world.   James had the vision I couldn’t see.  Operations so tight that you can barely pay for your food when some kids is telling your sub is ready.

Building something from scratch and taking it to the next level is not easy, and it’s not safe.  A position like that might not be for you. It takes a level of courage many people don’t have.  It’s much easier to keep something on top, than to get it on top (people on top don’t believe this, but it’s true). Being number one has built in advantages, you don’t get chasing number one.

I envy HR pros like Amber, and operators like James.  Those are the people you want to learn from. The knowledge level is higher for those who made the journey versus those who arrived at something already on top.  We listen too much to those on top that did nothing but show up to an organization that was on top.  I like the grinders. I like HR so fast, you’ll freak!