Top HR Products for 2014!

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I like new technology, which is why I’m headed out to the HR Technology Conference this week.  HR tech has continues to transform how we deliver HR and Talent solutions to our organizations.  I’m always amazed at the new stuff that comes out each year.  Human Resource Executive named their 2014 award winners for Top HR Products last week, and the awards are given out at the HR Technology Conference.  I’ll be checking all of these out for sure, but here is a preview of the award winners:

Appcast.io – www.appcast.io

A recruiting marketing platform that helps organizations fill their hard-to-fill requisitions by marketing it to 6,000 career and consumer sites on a pay-per-applicant basis.

Entelo Diversity – www.entelo.com

Entelo claims to have a program that will help you hire black people! Or women, veterans, Hispanics, etc. Basically, you can stop trying to search job boards using words like “Black” and “Spanish”.

Halogen 1:1 Exchange – www.halogensoftware.com

Halogen takes performance management to the next level with Halogen 1:1 Exchange.  This is a one-on-one meeting-management tool that works with other Halogen TalentSpace modules and is designed to spur greater communication, collaboration and coaching. The module tracks the frequency of these one-on-one meetings to provide employers with evidence these discussions are occurring. It also correlates the impact they are having on performance ratings, engagement scores and turnover.

Health E(fx) – www.healthefx.us

Health E(fx) is a stand-alone solution designed to help employers avoid penalties while optimizing their benefits strategies, decisions and costs within the Affordable Care Act environment.

HireVue Insights – www.hirevue.com

I’ve seen this one live and it’s awesome, can’t say enough about it! Basically, it analyzes your digital interviews to automatically give you the best candidates based on 15,000+ attributes. All your candidates.  Have 1000 apply, and you know you’ll only really look at the first 25 you applied, even though number 999 might be your best? Insights solves this! Plus, tells you which hiring managers are your best at selection!

IBM Social Learning – www.ibm.com

IBM Social Learning, powered by IBM Kenexa learning solutions and IBM social-collaboration and analytics tools, is designed to help people engage with one another, contribute expertise and learn from others using interactive media in near real-time.

Match-Click – www.match-click.com

Match-Click is a video-driven recruiting platform designed to let employers give job candidates a preview of their new corporate environment and potential supervisor and co-workers, through short, 20-second video clips featuring hiring managers and would-be colleagues describing the position and the organization.

QUEsocial – www.quesocial.com

Another one I’m really interested in seeing live! QUEsocial blends employer branding and social recruiting into a social talent-acquisition Software-as-a-Service technology platform. The idea is to enable recruiters and — by extension, employers — to “amplify and extend” the employer brand through individual recruiter and sourcing networks.

RecruitiFi – www.recruitifi.com

RecruitiFi is intended to offer organizations a new way to source talent by letting them select and post jobs to 250 expert recruiters from its membership pool of approximately 2,000.

Skillrater.com – www.skillrater.com

Skillrater.com is a cloud-based performance-feedback tool that incorporates social networking and collaboration.

There will be hundreds of other companies as well. I’ll make sure to give you a run down on some companies and technology that you haven’t ever heard of, yet, when I return.  The coolest part of HR Tech is finding a company that is nothing today, but will be industry leading in 3 to 5 years.  Last year I saw Blackbook HR and their Sense product and they are blowing up – such a great piece of technology to help us with one of HR’s biggest issues – Turnover!

Who will it be this year? I can’t wait to find out.

Why Your Best Performers Make Horrible Leaders

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We all make this mistake, and we’ll continue to make this mistake.  It’s the same old story.  One of your employees performs really, really well, and because of their performance you move them out of the position they are in and put them in a leadership position. Then, they fail and become a lousy performer.

The best companies in the world make this mistake, and keep making it.  The worst companies make this mistake as well, and every other company in between. We can’t stop ourselves, it might be the largest single failure of business in the history of the world, and we can’t stop ourselves.

I like sports and it’s easy to make this analogy with sports.  Larry Bird, one of the all time NBA greats, couldn’t handle being a head coach.  But he was one of the top basketball players of all time.  He couldn’t take that those players he was coaching weren’t as good as him, couldn’t do the things he could do. He couldn’t understand this.  For him, it was easy…

Great performers are great because they do or have something no one else does.  It might be superior work ethic, it might be G*d given talents.  Regardless, they have perform better than everyone else.  Therein lies why they struggle to become great, or even marginal, leaders.  They can’t understand why you can’t do the same thing. I did it. What’s your problem!?

We take our best and brightest and we ‘reward’ them with management positions.  We believe this is what they really want.  In reality most don’t actually want this.  They really love what they are doing, shown by the tremendous performance they are giving you.  And, as an organization we want to reward that great performance, but we have structure and the only way we can really reward them, to give them more money, the big money, and the big title, is to promote them.

So, we promote them.

And we hope. We hope they’ll be one of the few who can make the transition and not be a total failure when it comes to leading other people, but rarely does it really happen.  Usually, it’s just a slow death of another great performer into the mediocrity of leadership.

A few organizations are beginning to just stop this.  They leave their great individual performers in position and just pay them like they would pay a leader. They give them a leader title. But what they don’t do, is give them people to manage!  They reward them for truly great performance, and put them in a position to keep performing great.

Your best, most talented person is worth more than your average leader.  But we struggle with this because it doesn’t fit nice and neat to a compensation pay band, or any job description we have in our HRMS system. We feel this undeniable desire to force people into positions we know they won’t do well in, because it makes us feel better when we pay them more.  Justification of value.  We value leadership more than great performance. That’s 1950 talking.  Stop listening.

Fall In Love With Ideas

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I use to have this issue.  I would come up with an idea.  I really, really good idea!  I would then work to make this idea a reality.  I would spend a lot of time, energy and resources making this idea come to life.  The work became more important than the idea.

Someone really smart would come along and want to change my work.  It would frustrate me. It would anger me.  I didn’t like them messing with my work.

I fell in love with the work.  With the process.

The work and my processes became more important to me than the original idea.  I was blind to see that those who were coming to me, to try and get me to change my work, were in love with my idea, but not in love with my work.

It took me along time to understand the value wasn’t in the work, it was in the idea.  Anyone can do the work.  The work can be done a number of different ways to get the same result. But the idea was the creation, the start.  Without it, there wouldn’t be any work.

So many of the HR Pros I know have this same issue.  We take great pride in our work, so much so, that we don’t allow others to come in and help make our ideas better.  We don’t allow them to get on board and be a part of something special.  Our pride, blinds us to see just maybe there might be even a better way to make our ideas become reality.

Fall in love with the idea. Don’t fall in love with the work.

What Messaging Tool Should You Pick To Tell Off Your Boss?

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The messaging technology today is ridiculous!  There are so many ways to communicate it sometimes becomes really difficult to determine which technology to use for which messages. Think about it terms of breaking up.  I remember the first girl I had to break up with in middle school.  I had basically three ways to tell this girl I no longer ‘wanted to go out’, which entailed see each other at school. It wasn’t so much of going out, as it was meeting at school.

I could go right up to her face and tell her like a man.  But I wasn’t a man, I was a boy, and that seemed like a really awkward way to communicate, face to face. I could write her a note, give it to my buddy, who would give to her best friend, who would then give it to her.  This was the popular way but fraught with peril, as the message in these notes seemed to travel faster than the actual note.  I could call her on the home phone. This always seemed best to me, but you still risked her mom or dad picking up, and that was a fate worse than the death!

I was listening to a couple of people talk the other day in a coffee shop, and the one was telling the other, she was finally going to tell off her boss. She had enough! You go girl! But, there was a problem. No way did she want to do this face to face. She had to determine the exact right way to do it, that came across professional, but also got the message across she was serious.  (Yes, I listen to your conversation when I’m at a coffee shop acting like I’m working on my laptop)

I wanted to break in and help this poor girl with this problem, but that’s super creepy, so instead I’ll just fill you in on my take on each method:

1. Email – Seems like the logical communication method, knowing you don’t want to speak face to face. The problem is, it’s also very easy to copy and forward to HR.  From a professional standpoint it’s hard to really give it to your boss on email, because you know it’s will be used against you.  Still, I believe most people would use email.

2. Twitter – Probably the passive aggressive way to tell off your boss that is now in use!  Twitter has become the playground for the disengaged workforce of our generation.  You can tell off your boss and there is a 97% chance they’ll never see it, but many of your coworkers and friends will, and you’ll feel better. Plus, how much trouble can you actually get in with only 140 characters?

3. Facebook – First off, are you really ‘friends’ with your boss on Facebook!?  If so, Facebook messaging could actually work for telling off your boss. Definitely a bit more personal than other methods, and it’s likely your boss would probably take it that way as well.  It’s really more of a scream for help, than a tell off, though.  If you actually post the tell off of your boss publicly on Facebook, well that’s just career suicide.

4. SnapChat – Smart move, because chances are your boss is older than you and will have no idea what’s going on until it’s too late to really do anything to copy it. But it’s logistically a nightmare, because you first have to get your boss to sign up with a snapchat account, which seems like a lot of work and hand holding to eventually just tell them off! But, I can still see this being better than doing it face to face for many people!

5. Skype with video – Better than just a telephone call, this one they can at least see you, and you them but you can always click off quickly and claim technology problems.  This way you get all the benefit of telling them off to their face, but don’t have to wait around for their awkward measured responses.

6. Yammer – Okay, I’ll wait, go look it up.  It’s like your own personal social network for your organization.  Kind of like Twitter, but only for your own employees.  This would be an epic way to get yourself fired, but probably not a great tool to tell off your boss!

I still like my 13 year old boy way the best.  Tell one of your coworkers, who you know can’t keep a secret (you know the ones), all the issues you have with your boss.  Wait about 3-4 hours and go in casually to ask your boss about a project.  Your boss will ask you to come in and be super, super nice for some odd reason, almost like someone went and told him or her that you had a problem with them…

I’m Hiring! Are you sure you want to work for me?

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Okay, I’m adding a Recruiter to my team.  At hru-tech.com, we do mostly engineering and IT contract recruiting, some direct placement recruiting and some project RPO work for clients around the country.

I would put my team up against anyone.  They’re that good, and most are homegrown!  That’s right, the majority of our staff came in entry level and we smacked off that new car smell like an old bag of Taco Bell that’s been sitting in your back seat for three weeks in the summer.

I started looking around and getting the word out a couple days ago.  You would think it would be easy.  I don’t really ask for a lot, but I sure know it when I ‘hear’ it!   Recruiting is a pretty good gig.  It’s transferable. I’ve worked in 5 different states, 4 different industries and my recruiting skills I can take with me anywhere.  It’s the one thing I can guarantee you if you come work for me. You’ll always be able to find a job and make money.  Every economy needs good recruiters.

The pay is way better than your normal crappy sales jobs selling cell phones or renting cars to people that bring in their phone bill and a report card. The hours are pretty good. No weekends. A few nights here and there.  You get to interact with a great group of people. The latest and greatest recruiting tools.

What’s crazy to me is how hard it is to find people who want to do this job, and that can be good at it!  I like for people to have a four-year degree.  The actual degree isn’t as important, as the process of gaining that degree.  I find those who worked their way through college, tend to be better recruiters.  Bartenders might be the best previous job if I was forced to pick one. Any kind of job that had you on the phone talking to people would be second.

There’s also a need for people who don’t freak out when they are held accountable for results.  That eliminates most people who want to work in government or big companies.  My recruiters don’t sit around and wait to get paid.  So, self-motivation is important, as long as it’s targeted in the right direction.

Work-life balance is really important to me.  Hold on, let me define work-life balance.  Work-life balance is when you do enough work that I pay you so you can have things and do things you want to do.  It’s not you doing whatever you want at any time you feel.  That’s not balance.  Balance means equal both ways, work and life.

We aren’t saving the world.  For some people that’s really important.  We do find people some really, really good jobs.  Some people find that cool and rewarding.

I care about you as a person, and I want to see you be wildly successful.  I’ll treat you like family. The family that you actually like, not the ones you try to forget about.

The position is in Lansing, MI. No, you can’t work remote or virtual or on a boat, unless the boat is in the parking lot of our building, then you can work on a boat.

So, if you’re interested send me a note – sackett.tim@hru-tech.com.  

If you are interested, and I don’t think you’re a fit, I will actually tell you why I don’t think you’re fit.  Some people like that. Some people think they’ll like that.  Some people don’t like that at all!

Are You Tired of Your Employment Brand?

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You might be tired of your employment brand…but your candidates aren’t!

That’s real.

This happens all the time in organizations.  Talent acquisition isn’t feeling successful, or they’re getting pressure to do more/better/faster, and they start looking for excuses.  The one excuse that always comes up is ‘our employment brand is old/tired/sucks, etc.’   It might be that it is old/tired/sucks, but it’s usually just an excuse.

Here’s what happens internally at your organization.

1. You have an employment brand. If you say you don’t, you’re lying to yourself! You do, you just didn’t have a part in making it!

2. You’re having trouble attracting the talent you want.

3. You believe having a really cool new employment brand will help attract the talent you can’t attract.  Which it might, but most likely not.

4. You use your old employment brand as a crutch to why you can’t be successful in talent acquisition.

The real problem has nothing to do with your employment brand.  For most companies, your candidates have little knowledge of what your actual employment brand really is.  Most candidates equate your employment brand to your consumer brand.

So, externally your employment brand is what it has always been.  The real problem is we get tired of our employment brand really fast because we are dealing with every single day.  We forget that most candidates only will engage our employment brand usually once in a lifetime.  So, they aren’t tired of it at all!

Any time I hear a talent acquisition pro tell me they can’t attract talent, and blame their employment brand, I question their ability to actually recruit.  Being able to attract talent has very little to do with your employment brand, and more to do with your own perception of your employment brand.  Our reality is most candidates have hardly any idea of our employment brands, until we engage them with it.  If you are great at selling your brand, the candidates are more than likely going to have a positive perception of your employment brand.

If you believe your employment brand sucks.  More than likely so will the candidates you’re contacting.  It comes back to your attitude about your company.  I’ve never seen or heard from a recruiter who desperately loved their organization who said they couldn’t find talent!   Coincidence?  I think not.  If you love your organization, and you recruit, you usually are pretty successful.  If you don’t like your organization, and you recruit, you usually are pretty crappy at it.

Just because you’re tired of your employment brand, doesn’t mean everyone else is.

 

The Crappy Job Badge of Honor

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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 – 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 have 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 – people always think they’ll leave those companies and they’ll fail – they don’t.  Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed.

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.

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 every 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!

Make HR Suck Less

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Are you working in a HR department that sucks?  You know if you are, it’s alright, you can admit it – it’s the first step of changing it.

I bet I talk to over a hundred HR Pros a year that begin the conversation with – “our HR department sucks!” or “my company doesn’t get it when it comes to HR” or “Our HR department is terrible”.   It’s not the outlier, it’s the norm.  So, many HR Pros working in HR functions where the organization has the feeling that “HR” sucks in our company.  If you’re not in one now – great – but chances are you have either been in one before, or eventually you’ll make a “grass is greener” decision and put yourself into this situation.

You know what?  We have the power to make HR Suck Less.  Yes, you do.  Stop it, you do.  No really, you do. Alright that’s enough, just play along with me at least!

Here are the 3 steps to making HR Suck Less:

1.  Stop doing stuff that Sucks.  But Tim! We have to do this stuff.  No you don’t – if your HR shop blew up tomorrow – your organization would still go on.  Over time you’ve “negotiated” to do all this sucky stuff – thinking it would “help” the organization, or give you “influence”, etc.  Stop that.  Give it away, push it out to other departments – start doing stuff that doesn’t suck, more than doing stuff that does suck.  It’s not easy, but it can be done, little by little.

2.  Get rid of people in HR who Suck.  Some people get real comfortable with sucking.  They wear their suckiness around like a badge of honor.  You need to cut the suck out of your department – like cancer!

3. Stop saying that you Suck.  We brand ourselves internally with everything we do – and if you say that you suck at something – the organizational will believe you suck at something.  If you say we are the best in the industry at recruiting our competitions talent away from them – you’ll be forced to live up to that – and little by little you will live up to that and the organization will begin to believe it as well.  Signs and Symbols!

Every single HR Shop who feels they suck – doesn’t have to suck.  If you feel you don’t suck, but everyone else tells you that you suck – you suck.  You’re just delusional and you keep telling yourself things like “we have to do this stuff”, “it’s the law”, “we don’t have a choice”, etc.   This is the first sign you’re comfortable with sucking – you aren’t listening to your organization.

No one has to suck – you can decide to do things in a complete different way. Perception is reality in terms of sucking.  You need to change perceptions, not reality.  You can still accomplish the exact same things, just do it in a way that people think you rock.  Start saying “Yes” to everything – not “No”.  “No” sucks.

Sucking less is a decision – not a skill.  You all have the skills – you just need to make the decision – to stand up and believe – Today we will no longer Suck!

What Do You See When You Look In The Mirror

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Was at ERE last week and got the chance to see John Robinson speak.  Here’s his story:

Very cool story and great example of a person who rises up over all that life can throw at you.  We all need these reminders, more than we usually get them.  Think your life is hard?  How about needing 30 minutes each morning to just be able to put on your clothes. Every. Day.

John said one thing that stuck with me.  After getting dressed in the morning and brushing your teeth, etc. We all at some point take a look in the mirror.  John asked, “What are you looking for when looking in the mirror?”  Do you know?  Ask yourself that same question. What are you looking at?

We are all looking for something wrong that is wrong with us!  That is a conscious decision we make, each and every day, before beginning our day.  We are looking for something wrong with us!  It’s so true, and so crazy!

We get ourselves looking good, ready for our day, all positive stuff, but we take one last look.  Before I leave is there anything wrong with me?  Did I miss something with my hair?  Leave some toothpaste in the corner of my mouth?  Does this shirt look right with these pants?

John’s point is that there’s nothing wrong with any of us.  We are who we are.  Some of us are tall, some are fat, some are black, some have no arms, some have scars.  This makes us different from each other, but not better or worse or ‘wrong’.

So, when you look in the mirror today, do me one favor.  Find something that is right with you, not wrong with you.