No matter what the organization, or what the industry this holds true.
You will never be ‘considered’ smarter by your boss, then you are on the first day you’re hired.
Take advantage and change as much as you can, as fast as you can.
It only lasts as long as the next hire into your department.
Then you’re back to being the idiot.
I’ve been told that fear can only create short-term success. That’s a lie.
You see I grew up with a single mom. She probably didn’t sleep most nights, and the nights she did it was probably helped by a glass of cheap boxed wine. She had a mortgage and she had two kids to feed. She lived every single day in fear. Fear of losing her kids. Fear of losing her house. Fear of her check bouncing at the grocery store.
She did the one thing she knew how to do, recruiting, and started her own business. She started as a branch manager for a local temporary employee company. Learned the business in the hardest way possible. Temp staffing is the lowest common denominator in the staffing world. It is the definition of ‘grind’! She knew technical staffing, high end bill rates, was a much better life, but she was a woman and it was the 1970’s. Fear.
She built a successful technical staffing business that has lasted for the past 35 years. Never has the fear stopped.
You see she grew up in an era where you managed by fear. It seemed normal. If I’m living in fear, why shouldn’t I share some of this fear. It was a very common management tactic in the baby boom generation. You had Opec, the cold war, recessions, etc. People didn’t believe they have the choices they have today. If you got a job, you had to keep ‘that’ job, and if that meant a little fear, so be it.
If you didn’t do what you were told. If you didn’t make your monthly goal. If you talked back. All of that could get you fired, and you never wanted to be fired. Fear.
I took over the company five years ago. I’m a man. I also have fears. I fear I won’t be able to pay my mortgage if I don’t have a good job. I fear how I’ll pay for my son’s college education. I fear I’ll have enough money to ever retire. Different fears than my Mom. But I live with some fear in my heart. Maybe I was wired that way from growing up the way I did.
Fear pushes me out the door to work every single day. Fear isn’t my enemy. Fear of failure motivates me to succeed. If I didn’t have fear, I’m not quite sure how I would perform.
I tend to believe businesses and business people who succeed have embraced living with this fear. They’ve decided to become partners in a way. Fear is their life coach. I won’t call fear a friend, but I know it’s something I can count on. Rarely a day goes by when we don’t meet for some reason or another.
Here’s what I know from 35 years of sustained profitable success. Fear isn’t what you believe it to be. We believe fear can only motivate for short bursts, and then people will fall down in a puddle and be less productive. That’s a lie. The unmotivated are selling this version of fear. Those who don’t want to reach levels they never thought they could, are selling this version of fear.
Fear can create sustainable success, but it might not be as comfortable as you would like it to be.
By now everyone has seen former Baltimore Raven running back, Ray Rice, knock out his wife with two punches to the head in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino. My question is, why didn’t anyone in the Baltimore Raven’s organization see this before agreeing to bring him back initially, with only a two game suspension?
The Raven’s claim no one in their organization saw the video from inside the elevator until it was leaked to TMZ this week. Do you buy that? I don’t. Twenty years in HR and I would have put a stop to this with one decision. “Ray, you want to be a part of this organization, we need to see what happened from inside the elevator before that happens.” But, I can’t get the tape, the casino would release it, it’s not mine to get, etc. Bullshit.
Then, I guess you don’t want to play football very badly. It’s a very simple HR problem. You have an employee (Mr. Rice) who does something you believe to be really bad, but you can’t fully prove it, but you know he can. Make him prove he’s innocent. Make him go get the tape. An innocent person will do that. A guilty person will give you excuses about why they can’t.
I truly think that someone on the Ravens knew what was on that tape, but had the casino’s word that it would never get out, and they believed them!
Once it got out, yes, they did the right thing. But, it never should have gotten this far. Good organizations get the information they need, or they stay conservative as possible. The video footage was out there. If TMZ can get it, you better believe the Ravens could have gotten it. It’s all about money and pressure. The Ravens have both and decided not to use it to get to the truth. That’s an example of a poorly run organization.
I’m guessing this guy will never get a chance to play football again in the NFL. I can’t believe another team would ever take the publicity hit to bring him in, even if he ever gets reinstated by the NFL.
It begs the question: what if this happened to one of your employees? Yeah, you would fire them, but do you believe they should ever get a chance to work again in their chosen profession?
It’s messy. It’s HR. Ray knocked her out. She forgave him and married him. Life is really screwed up. My guess is eventually he’ll have to work somewhere, or he’ll end up in prison, probably where he should have ended up in the first place.
I know one thing, the NFL pays better than prison.
At one point in my career, over a decade ago, I was working with a company where we hired a high percentage of foreign born applicants based on the technical skill set they had. Many of the names of these applicants were extremely hard to enunciate. Most of the hiring managers I worked with would spell the names out or say “the guy that worked at…” A few would try and say the names and butcher them badly.
Internally, in our recruiting department, we would ‘joke’ about asking these candidates to change their name to something it was easier for the managers to say, ‘Joe’ or ‘Charlie’ for instance. Deep down we knew we had some managers who would be more willing to interview if the name came across as ‘Joe Vishay’ or ‘Charie Xjang’. The manager would assume that because the candidate ‘choose’ an American name they must have better English skills.
It’s racism at a strange level. You want to hire the person, but you feel because you can’t say their name, they must not be worthy.
Check out this video –
This Man Changed His Name From Jose To Joe And… by buzzfeedvideo
I know if I asked 100 HR and Talent Pros if they were ‘racist’, 100 would say they were not. But, at a certain level we are. We won’t interview Jose, but we’ll interview Joe. You won’t interview Marcus, but you’ll interview Mark. My hiring manager wouldn’t interview “Arjun” but he would interview “Al”.
How do you stop this?
Hire Jose and Marcus and Arjun to do the hiring. That’s a start, at least. Call out those hiring managers who continue to not want to interview qualified candidates because they can’t pronounce the name of the candidate. You know who they are.
Also, educate your hiring managers, and give them the phonetic spelling of the candidates name. Let your hiring managers know the pride they feel about their own surnames is shared by cultures all over the world. I’m proud to be a “Sackett”. I get asked almost monthly by someone if I’m related to the Louis L’amour ‘Sackett’s’, and rarely do I point out those were fictional books!
Take the names off all your resumes you send to managers, as a ‘test’, and replace the name with a code number. Did it make a difference in who they chose to interview? It’s a great inclusion exercise to have with your leadership team.
No one ever wants to admit they are racist. The truth sometimes is very sobering. This isn’t about blame, this is about fixing what’s wrong. Great leadership teams will understand this.
For those who aren’t big Major League Baseball (MLB) fans you probably don’t know what the “September Call-Up” or “Expanded Rosters” mean. Each year on September 1st, as the MLB season goes into its final month, the league allows teams to invite players from their minor league teams and the roster number expands from 25 to 40. For teams who are out of the playoff race, this allows them to give some younger guys an opportunity to perform on a larger stage. For those in playoff races, or teams that have already solidified a playoff berth, the extra players allow them to rest some regulars. For playoff teams these extra 15 players can’t play in actual playoff games, only in the final regular season games.
Ok, Tim – why the hell should we care about Major League Baseball’s September Call-ups?
In any HR shop I’ve ever worked in, or with any HR Pro I’ve ever had a conversation with, Succession Planning is always an issue HR Pros struggle with in their organizations. Many times sports shows us there is a way that it can be done. You just need to find a way to tailor it to your environment, and I think the MLB gives us a window to how a competitive organization attempts to get this done.
Succession is difficult and costly, there is no way around it. If your organization is truly trying to do succession and not spend money, it won’t be pretty and it probably won’t be effective. To really know a person has the ability to step into someones shoes when they leave, you have to see them actually do the job. In most organizations this just isn’t an option. How many of us have the ability to pull out a high performer from their current position, and put them into a new position, while the other person is still in that position? Not many of us! It’s just not a reality most of live in.
Baseball’s September call-ups is one strategy that you might be able to use within your organization. While pulling someone full-time into a new position, might not be something you could do, could you do it for 30 days? Before telling me you can’t what would you do it that same person had a medical issue and had to be hospitalized or home-bound for a month? You’d make it, you’d get by, that’s what we do in organizations. The team would rally and make it work. So, giving someone a 1 month succession stint into a new potential role – full immersion – would actually give you some decent insight to whether or not the person could actually handle that role in the future, or at least show you some great development needs that have to ensure success.
Is it perfect? No – but that’s why it works. We don’t get perfect in HR – we get good enough and move onto the next fire. We don’t get million dollar budgets to formalize succession and have a bench full of high performing talent to just step in when someone leaves our organization. It’s our job to figure out succession, while we figure out how to keep the lights on at the same time. I love the September Call-Up – gives me insight to the future of my team, shows me how someone performs in an environment that doesn’t pigeonhole them forever, and let’s me know if they show some potential for The Show!
Black, white, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim, Furry, Jock…
We went to the same school.
We vote for the same politicians.
We both loved Breaking Bad and our burritos with pinto beans instead of black beans.
Equals hired.
Hired doesn’t equal the most skills, it equals the most connections made with those interviewing you.
Unless you know you’re hiring people who, specifically, think different than you, inclusion is a mirage.
Here’s the staffing game has taught me over the past 20 years.
1. Great candidates get hired.
2. The difference between a great candidate and a very good candidate is one hiring managers gut feeling (usually).
3. The very good candidate that didn’t get hired, is someone elses great candidate.
This means that many of you are just sitting on another organizations great candidate! This means you’re sitting on something very valuable to someone else. Something that others would probably pay for.
Question:
Would you be willing to pay to have access to Google’s ATS?
Yes. Yes you would. More than you pay for LinkedIn Recruiter, I’d gamble!
This begs the question: would you be willing to sell your backup candidates? The ones you didn’t hire, but would have if your first choice didn’t accept.
So, what if your organization, your talent acquisition department, decided to start calling up other organizations that you know of who had similar needs and say, “Hey, we got what you want!” Do you think you could turn your corporate in-house talent acquisition department into a money maker? Yes. Yes, you could. Will you? No.
It really wouldn’t take much. Within your staffing process you add a little disclaimer, you know the ones nobody reads, which gives you freedom to ‘sell’ the contact information to those submitting for your jobs to other companies who are also looking for similar talent. From there you establish some relationships with other companies. Negotiate a price. Sign some simple agreements. When communicating with your backups about not getting the position, you pass along some good news. While they didn’t get the job they applied for, you have another position, with another company they might have interest in.
Bam! You’re printing money.
Very little extra effort, and almost no extra resources needed. Your talent acquisition department just turned into a profit center.
No organization would do this because they believe it will ‘hurt’ or ‘damage’ their employment brand. “Tim! If candidates knew we were going to sell their information to other companies, they wouldn’t apply to our jobs!” Or, maybe they would because they actually want to work for you! If that’s your process, what option do they have? Plus, all your doing is potentially giving them more options. How many people do you know that don’t want more options?
While no one is doing this publicly, I’ll tell you it is happening privately. I’ve been approached by corporate talent acquisition pros who are willing to ‘sell’ me access to their database for a fee. I pay them. They deliver to me candidates who applied to their positions that they never wanted to begin with, or couldn’t use. I haven’t ever did this for the simple fact that each time I was approached, the person was doing this behind the organizations back, with them wanting the check made out directly to them, personally. That’s shady.
But, if a company was willing to do it all above board as a paid service…I can’t tell you I would be in!
In athletic recruitment there are these things called ‘Prospect’ camps. Depending on who you talk to these are either just coaching staff supplemental income, or serious recruitment functions needed to get prospective student athletes on campus.
Whatever they are, they’re a little genius!
Here’s how the entire system works. Usually an assistant coach emails your kid, who has a dream to play college athletics, that they are having a prospect camp and you’re invited to attend, for $150. Two things just happened: 1. Your kid just got an email from a college coach; 2. That coach insinuated that your kid is a ‘prospect’! Either way, there’s a good chance you’ll bite and pay the $150.
A couple of things happen at these camps. Coaches actually invite players they really do have interest in, and they invite anyone else who is willing to pay $150! So, a hundred kids show up, two or three which have actual ability to play college athletics, and they go through drills and modified games. You instantly know who has ability because the coaches spend time with those kids. If your kid doesn’t have a coach talking to him or her, they don’t have ability. It’s a real quick and easy way to set your own expectations.
These camps are a necessary evil of the function of recruitment. While most parents don’t like them, they all pay the money and have their kids attend.
These prospect camps got me to thinking if we in HR could do this in our organizations. Could we charge $150 to have potential employees come in and check us out, while we check them out? We run them through some tests, show them our facilities, make them compete against others in their same job function, spend time with our employees. At the end of the day, we offer a couple of them jobs.
Could it work? Maybe not for the average organization, but what about Google or Apple or some other big organization that has thousands wanting jobs with their company? I think it could work. The one issue we face is the expectation. “Well, I paid $150 what do I get for this?!”
We would have to deliver $150 worth of ‘value’ in these Prospective Employee Camps. I think that is probably the easy part. Think interview skills, resume skills, leadership skills, some hardcore job function skills based on what they actually do. It’s part self-development, and part dating game. People pay millions of dollars per to sites to find their perfect romantic match, with most failing to do so.
Prospective Employee Camps might just be a way for your organization to set itself a part from all the noise, and get candidates to come in that truly interested in (I’m willing to pay to be here, truly) and want to be a part of your organization. I know, crazy idea, but when you see it work in one area it just begs to be tried in another!
HR 101. If there is one thing I could give a new HR Pro it would be this simple advice. No matter how prepared you think you are, you really only need to prepare yourself for one thing, being surprised.
You don’t really get judged on your daily stuff. Let’s face it, 99.9% of the time that goes off without a hitch. You get judged on how you handle surprises.
Surprises make and break great HR Pro careers.
There’s really only way to prepare for surprises. You need to expect that a surprise will always happen. That one employee you can’t lose or the entire project will blow up, be prepared to lose them. Talk about it, plan for it, and basically come to grips that it will happen. Then it will happen, and you’ll be the only one not surprised by it.
The best HR Pros I’ve worked with had this one common trait, they were unshakeable when surprised. Almost like they expected it.
I got asked to be a mentor for someone recently. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked, but I found myself wondering what ‘Tim Sackett’ as a mentor should look like. Maybe it’s where I’m at in my career, but I found myself wondering what is it that I could really give someone coming up in our industry.
I would assume anyone asking for a mentor doesn’t really want me to show them how to recruit. They’ve probably got that down pretty well, at least the basics. The advanced stuff is probably best taught by some folks much better than me (Glen Cathey, Jim Stroud, Amybeth Quinn, Paul DeBettignies, etc.).
Maybe I could offer up some help on the employment branding/marketing side on HR and Talent Acquisition. I’ve had to do that for the last 20 years, I probably know just enough to better than most, but not as good as folks like Laurie Ruettimann, William Tincup, Maren Hogan, Lance Haun and Matt Charney.
I’m just dangerous enough with HR Tech that I could probably help out in that area for sure. I’ve bought and implemented systems and tools at every stop in my career. I know the game, but I certainly don’t know it as well at Steve Boese, William Tincup (again), John Sumser, etc.
It could be my mentee could use me for just straight HR generalist knowledge base. If I know anything, I know a little about almost anything in HR from my stops in my career. While I love talent acquisition, I really consider myself more of an HR pro. Probably not as good as Kris Dunn, Dawn Burke, Robin Schooling, Jessica Miller-Merrell, etc.
Compensation and Benefits, maybe that’s should be my ticket? Um, no, probably not. I probably know the least about this area as a whole and Ann Bares is my go to person for all things compensation.
There’s got to be something I’m the best at, worthy of being a mentor. What about employee engagement? From small companies to organizations with tens of thousands I’ve had employee engagement as a major measurable, I could do some damage here. But, again, not as well as someone like Paul Hebert.
Talent acquisition as a function might be something I’m most comfortable with. In my career, I’ve been constantly pulled into TA no matter what organization I’ve been in. It’s been the one constant in my career, start in HR, and end up in Talent Acquisition. Moving an organization from old school, post and pray, to one that hunts for talent is right up my alley. I don’t really know anyone I would recommend over myself on this.
As a mentor I think the most valuable thing I can give someone is the network I’ve built over the years. It’s something I discovered a long time ago. I’m probably not going to be the best at any one thing, but I can know people who are. Having the ability to know you need to surround yourself with people who are better than you, especially in areas you’re weak, is the key to having success in any stop you have in your career.
As a mentor I’m probably going to find out what you’re bad at, then introduce you to people who are really good at those things. You don’t need to the best at everything when you surround yourself with the people who are the best at everything!