1st Timers Guide To Buying HR Technology and High Priced Handbags

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STOP! Calibrate and Listen…before you go, “Ugh! Tim’s doing another webinar!”, check this out – it’s different than other stuff we’ve done.  Negotiating job board contracts, annual ATS service agreements, knowing what new technology to buy, etc. It’s all way frustrating and confusing…for me, and I’m guessing you.  I want us all to get better at this stuff, and this webinar is going to put us all back in the power buyers position!

Buying HR Technology (System of Record/HRMS, Applicant Tracking Systems, Performance Management Systems, etc.) should be as easy as buying a high-priced handbag or the latest pair of Jordans!  You see it. You like it. You know it’s going to fit and work for your needs. GO! Make the purchase. But it’s not that simple. Buying HR Technology is hard, confusing and frustrating.  A miss can potentially stall your career and undermine your creditability.

Fistful of Talent is here to help.  In classic FOT style,Steve Boese, the Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference, and I, will break down the issues surrounding buying HR Tech in our latest webinar on August 28 at 12pm ET (sponsored by BambooHR), entitled Buyer’s Remorse: The  FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology.

Join us on August 28 at 12pm ET for “Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology,” and we’ll hit you with the following:

  • The Difference between a Suite or a Best-of-Breed Product: Why you should care? Which one is right for you to buy? We’ll break it down based on your unique needs.
  • The Decision Tree/Process That Helps You Arrive at the Right Decision Regarding Which Solution to Buy. Yes, we can tell you exactly what to buy! But we won’t, because great HR Pros need to understand how to make these decisions. But don’t worry—we’ll show you how!
  • 6 Tips and Tricks the HR Vendor Community Uses to Get You To Buy Their Product—which might not be the product you actually need. Learn how to make sure you don’t succumb to these tactics when making your next buying decision.  This section alone will ensure you take control of your next buy like a pro!
  • The Secret for Getting Your Organization to Invest in HR tech and How to Build ROI for your Executive Team. Every buying decision comes down to the why and ROI, and your ability to persuasively and concisely get your organization to support your recommendation.  Sometimes the hardest part of an HR Tech buy is your ability to get approval to buy!

    Bonus Feature: CEO     Ben Peterson, from BambooHR (an HR solution specifically designed for small-to-medium-sized HR departments), will stop by and do a quick Q&A with Tim and Steve to discuss the biggest mistakes he sees HR buyers make when making HR Tech purchases… and how to avoid making those same mistakes yourself!

Things that are hard:  Riding a bike on a freeway. Getting your kids to eat peas. Buying HR Tech. Join us on August 28 at 12pm ET for “Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology,“ and we’ll make buying HR Tech easier. You’re on your own with the other two.

REGISTER TODAY!

There Are Only 6 Ways To Engage Employees

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We think there are millions of ways to engage, or disengage, employees but there aren’t.  Truly, there are only six.  The six basic emotions we feel as humans, which are:

1. Anger

2. Disgust

3. Fear

4. Happiness

5. Sadness

6. Surprise.

Knowing there are only six doesn’t necessarily make it any easy for us to figure out how to raise engagement, but at least it will help you giving you a concrete starting point.

Let me help get you started.  Of the six, only one really help you engage in a positive way: Happiness. The other five can all be very disengaging factors: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Surprise.

So, you want to raise engagement?  Well, that seems easy, happy employees will equal engaged employees.  But, you’ll have your haters which will say, “Tim! Just because I’m happy doesn’t make me ‘Engaged’!” Yes, you’re right.  But, have you ever tried to engage an employee who was angry, disgusted, fearful, sad or unexpectedly surprised?  It’s tough.  If I need to increase engagement, I would prefer to start with happy employees.  Makes my job easier.

In the short term you could ‘engage’ employees by the negative emotions as well, but that never plays out well long term.  I can make employees fearful for their jobs, their livelihood and they will perform better, for a little while and seem very engaged. Until they find another job.  All the negative emotions can be played out like this.

So, I’m left with Happiness.  It’s not a bad emotion to be stuck with if you can only have one that helps you.  I like happy people, even on Monday mornings.  It’s better than assholes for sure!

We focus our engagement on so many things that have little impact to the emotion of happiness. We spend millions of dollars a year on leadership development, because better leaders raise engagement, we’re told.  We spend millions of dollars on building better environments because $800 office chairs raise engagement.   We spend millions of dollars on increasing wages and benefits, because more raises engagement.  But none of these really raise happiness.

“But, Tim! You’ve told us before you can’t ‘make’ someone happy.”

Ah, now we’ve come to something important.  If you can’t ‘make’ someone happy, how can we positively raise the engagement of our employees?!?

You can’t.  It’s a dirty little secret the engagement industry doesn’t want you to know (oh boy, can’t wait for Big Papi Paul to kill me in the comments on this one!).

You can raise engagement of your organization, though.  Hire happy people.  Happy people aren’t just happy some of the time, they’re predisposed, for the most part, to be happy.  Hiring happy people consistently over time will raise your engagement.  Do you have a pre-employment assessment for happiness?  Probably not. HR people hate happy people.

 

10 Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make In HR

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I thought it was time that I randomly start listing mistakes we make in HR and letting those coming into HR what not to do.  So, here you go, enjoy!

10 mistakes you don’t want to make in HR:

1. Hiring someone who reschedules their drug test more than once.  I’m willing to give someone one reschedule, stuff happens.  After one, if you’ve got a druggie trying to find out how to keep his Mom’s pee warm long enough to make it to the testing center.

2. Creating a leadership training program when it’s really one bad leader who just needs to be canned.  Everyone knows who the problem is, and now ‘HR’ is making everyone go through training one person needs.  They hate us for this.  Just shoot the one bad leader and move on.

3. Changing policy or making a new policy, when it’s really one idiot who is taking advantage of the current situation. See above.  We do this because *93% of HR Pros and Leaders are conflict avoidant (*Sackett Stats, it’s probably higher!).  Come join the 7% of us who aren’t, this side of the pool is really enjoyable!

4. Designing health benefits that are better for you, but worse for everyone else.  Don’t tell me this doesn’t happen!  It happens all the time.  The person in charge of plan design sees something that will help them, and believes it will also help everyone else.  Oh, look! We now can go see the Chiropractor for massages, but I can’t get my kid the name brand Asthma medicine he needs.

5. Talking about how much less money you make in HR, as compared to a bad performer in any other area. No one cares that you make $25K less than Mark in sales who is a buffoon.  It just makes you look bad and petty.

6. Throwing a fit about hiring an executives kid, or anyone else they want you to hire.  Just hire the executives kid.  This is not a battle you want to fight, it’s not worth it.  In the grand scheme of things this one hire doesn’t mean a thing.  The kid will either be good, average or bad.  Just like the rest of hires we make.

7. Designing a compensation plan which, by peer group, puts you higher than other functions.  I don’t care what the ‘Mercer’ data says, you shouldn’t put out there that you should be making $15K more than the person in Finance at your same level.  No one believes you, and they don’t trust you can handle this when the data doesn’t seem right.  This is especially sticky for Compensation Pros, who always believe they should be paid higher within the HR function.

8.  Thinking you can be ‘friends’ with people you work with, outside of work.  I’m not saying it can’t happen, it might.  It just becomes really bad when you have to walk into your BFF Jill’s office and ‘can’ her one day.   You can have very friendly relationships at work without inviting those folks over to the office for Girls Night Out.

9. Believing it’s not your job to do something.  In HR we fill the voids left by every other function.  It’s our job to do everything, especially those things no one else wants to do.  Never believe something is not your job!  It is.  Plus, that actually adds value to the organization.  Be the one function that doesn’t bitch and complain when they need to do something that isn’t on their job description!

10. Telling an executive they can’t do something because ‘we’ll get sued’.  Our job in HR is not to tell executives, or anyone else, they can’t do something.  It’s our job to tell them how they can get it done, while making it less risky to the overall organization.

What mistakes do you see HR makes?

 

The Corruptible Effect of Praise

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This is a quote from Albert Einstein:

“The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.”

 

That’s pretty powerful.  When I first read the quote I thought to myself, Albert believes praising someone for their work is a bad thing.  He was a really smart dude, so I tend to read his quotes with a sense of he probably knew more than I do, there must be some truth.

Praising someone for their work is bad.  It just doesn’t seem right, does it!?  Could Albert have been wrong?

I didn’t write this post as soon as I read the quote, I gave myself a day or so to let it sink in.  The longer I was able to digest it, I think Albert was saying something different.  I now believe he was speaking to our ego, not to the praise.

Praise itself is not corruptible.  The effect is has on the participant is corruptible. If you allow yourself to buy-in and believe your praise, you tend to stop doing what got you the praise to begin with.

How do you combat this corruption.  Go on working.

I love to the phrase, “Dance with the one that brung ya.” I use it often.  To me it means, you have to keep doing what you did to get you to where you are, assuming you want more of what you got.  If you don’t, stop doing what you’re doing and do something else.   If I’m doing well, I’m going to keep dancing with the one that got me to the dance in the first place, I’m not changing to another more sexy dance partner.  That’s corruption.

We like to blame praise.  Tell someone they’re great enough times and they will begin to believe they’re great.  If they believe they’re great, they’ll stop working to be great. Praise must be to blame.  But it’s not praise that is to blame, it’s ego.

Now get your ass back to work, you’re not as good as your praise has you believe you are.

 

I Hate Buying HR Software!

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I’m your typical HR buyer.  Each year I negotiate contracts on a number of products, from ATS, HRMS, Recruiting Tools, Selection Tools, etc.   I usually demo and look at 6-10 new products each year.  Okay, I’m not typical that way, I love new stuff and what it can do, so I like to check it out.  Beyond that, I’m very much your typical HR buyer.

Every single time I go through a buying decision I feel like I’m buying an expensive car or a house.  Hell, that’s usually the cost of the contract of whatever product I’m buying!  Therein lies the problem.  I hate buying cars and houses.  It’s stressful and I always have this deep feeling I’m getting taken!  You know the feeling.  The feeling like you paid too much, and someone else buying the same exact product as you paid less!

I hate that feeling!!!

I don’t mind paying what everyone else is paying for a product.  I feel like a failure, as a HR Pro, when I find out I paid more than someone else, and I check!  That’s the one cool thing about writing for talent and HR blogs, I have a Big network (that’s what she said)!  This allows me to connect with other HR and Talent Pros and ask them what they paid.  I have a deep urge to know whether or not I got a good deal and a bad deal.  And, I’ll be honest, if I got a bad deal, it really affects how I think about the company.

Because these decisions are so stressful for me, I decided to do something about it.  I called the one guy that knows more about HR Technology and industry more than anyone else I know, Steve Boese!  Steve is the co-chair of the annual HR Technology Conference (want $500 off? Use the code: SACKETT14 when you register), which is the 2nd largest HR conference to SHRM national, but arguably becoming the must-see HR conference of the year.  HR Tech has all the players in one spot and all the HR decision makers, it’s a very cool place to see the future of HR unfold in front of you!

I asked Steve to help me put on a webinar, that would not only educate me on how I should be buying HR Tech, but also uncover all those tips and tricks to make sure I don’t ever again have that bad feeling I have when I buy!  The webinar title: Buyer’s Remorse: A 1st Timers FOT Guide To Buying HR Technology and High Priced Handbags!  You see, I feel buying HR Tech, should be as easy as buying a handbag without the buyer’s remorse!

This one is personal to me!  I think all HR Pros can learn from all the mistakes I’ve made in buying HR technology and from Steve’s brilliance!

Come join us on August 28th at Noon EST for this FREE webinar:

Can Corporate Recruiters Poach?

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Before we get right in and answer this question, let’s all get on the same page.  What is Poaching?  Wiki defines it as:

“Poaching has traditionally been defined as the illegal hunting, killing or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights.”

It can also be a cooking term, like Poached Eggs or Poached Salmon, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t like the term ‘Poaching’ when it is used regarding talent acquisition.  Business Insider loves to use this in titles when they are talking about normal recruiting activity (Here, Here, and Here to share just a few).  There’s nothing illegal about ‘recruiting’ someone from another firm. Nothing!

Google has a talented group of Software Developers. Facebook needs Software Developers. Facebook recruits Google developers to come work for them.  That’s Recruiting at its most basic.  Nothing illegal about that.  That’s actually the basis of our capitalist society.  Free market economy.

So, why is it that we use the word “Poach” when describing something that is just basic business?

It’s because when an employee leaves you for your competition it pisses you off!  You feel robbed.  You feel like it should be illegal.  “Wait!  I spent so much time and effort to get you hear and now you’re just leaving me, for her!!!”

But, it’s not illegal.  It’s not ‘poaching’.  It’s business.  You either do it well, or you use words like ‘poach’.

Can Corporate Recruiters ‘poach’?

Let me put it to you this way.  If I was running your corporate talent acquisition department, and we had a recruiter who felt like they shouldn’t ‘poach’ from the competition, I would ask that recruiter to go work for the competition! At that point, that’s basically what they are doing anyway!

I feel so strongly about this, I truly believe a really good corporate recruiting function can cripple your competition. Truly!  If your corporate recruiters take the best talent from your competition and bring them to your team, your competition isn’t long for this world.  “Oh, yeah, but that’s poaching, Tim.” No, that’s Capitalism. That’s free market. It’s what our country is built on.

So, what I’m trying to say is this, if you don’t poach your competition’s talent you’re not American!

 

The Candidate Fade Away

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There’s this thing that happens with dating nowadays, called the Fade Away.  I know this because I have teenage sons.  The Fade Away is when you’re dating someone and you know it’s not for you long term, but instead of just telling that person you start the Fade Away process.

You stop talking, and start texting.  The texting slowly becomes less frequent, spread out and shorter in length, to eventually stopping altogether.  No finalization.  No uncomfortable exchange of items. Just fading away into a life without that other person being in it.

You see, back in my dating days, well, we didn’t have texting.  You had phone calls that you could duck for a while, but let’s face it your parents were not going to cover for you, so eventually, you had to face the other person.  Those conversations were awful, I so wish I had the fade away!

Because of how we treat our personal relationships today, candidates are now using the Fade Away on companies.   Recruiters talk to a candidate, they seem excited, they call you back every time you call them.  They give you their cell phone number and you begin to text. All is right in the recruiting world.  At some point the candidate decides that the position, or the company, or you just isn’t right for them and they stop returning calls and texts.  It’s not all at once, it just gets less, until it fades away completely.  Just like we were dating.

Here’s some ways to stop the Candidate Fade Away:

1. Be the understanding Girlfriend.  You know the type: “No! No! Really!  I get it! At any point you aren’t cool with this, I’m totally cool with this, let’s just make sure we are straight with each other and tell each other!”  Then you tell her and she loses her effing mind! Okay, ladies, I know, it works both ways!  As a recruiter start out the candidate relationship like this, be a pro. “Tim let me tell you how I work up front.  There is going to come a time when you might feel I presenting you something that you just don’t want for some reason. I’m completely cool with that, I’m presenting you.  I’m your Jerry Maguire. Let me know right away, and I’ll make sure we both look good when speaking to the company and hiring manager.  But I need to know up front what’s going on.”

2. It’s about you, not me.  Find out how the candidate prefers to communicated to and have them set the terms.  This usually works out well, because they become invested.  You told me this is how you wanted to be communicated to, and I’m following what you wanted.  Experienced recruiters usually hate this route because they’ve been trained to ‘control’ the candidate.  Used in the right manner it can be very effective.

3. Call out the Fade Away!  Making fun of what is going on won’t connect with everyone, but it will definitely connect with some.  Many folks will get defensive if you call them out on the Fade Away, but if you have fun with it, you’ll get some to come back around and laugh it off. “Timmy! Are you trying to break up with me!?  Come on, let’s talk this out, we could be so good for each other, at least talk to me before you break up with me!”  You’ll get a response to this, trust me!

 

The 5 Most Common “I Missed My Interview” Excuses

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There’s one thing that happens to all recruiters when the job market shifts from employer driven to candidate driven: candidates accept interviews, then don’t show or cancel at the last minute.  Many times the candidates come up with the lamest excuses on why they have to cancel. Rarely, will they just come out and say, “Hey, I just don’t like you guys that much!”  It’s the one thing, no matter how good of  a closer you are, as a recruiter, you have to deal with almost daily in our business.

Since I’ve been in the business of recruiting for twenty years I’ve heard all the cancellation excuses. I’ve become numb to the entire process. Great HR Pros have to.  While it is upsetting to have someone cancel, it’s not surprising.  Our reality is we offer a potential candidate an opportunity and the best of us make it sound very enticing. Many times once the candidate comes back to earth, they realize for whatever reason, the opportunity isn’t for them.  Being that most people are super conflict avoidant, they won’t just tell it to you straight, that make up little white lies that seem believable.  Believable only to themselves, that is!

Here are the 5 most common “I missed my interview” excuses from candidates:

1. My Grandfather died! Really!  Really. Really…  In twenty years of recruiting I’ve had more candidates have someone die in their family than I believe is statistically possible, and I’m not just talking agency hires, this is corporate as well!  At a point, I want to laugh out loud on the phone when they call in and say it.  Not that I think death is funny, but it would be comical to them if they were sitting in my seat, knowing how many ‘death’ calls I take annually!  Also, grandparents are the most common death, because it seems to make most sense. This is all a good excuse because most people believe they won’t get a call back from the recruiter because they won’t want to deal with the death issue!

2. I got into a car accident! But, I’m okay, just can’t make the interview.  This one is a good short term excuse, but it still sets them up for a follow up call to reschedule.  Still, it’s used a lot!  Besides my staffing agency business, I also want to open up a body shop and funeral home all right next to each…

3. My kid got sick, I can’t go to the interview.  Another very believable and understanding excuse, but, again, it sets them up for the reschedule.  The problem with any of these types of excuses is they seem great when you’re leaving a message, but then you have to put up with a recruiter leaving thirty voice mails asking you to reschedule the email.

4. My employer needs me to travel out of state!  We work in tech so we actually get this one a lot.  This also comes with a built in reschedule excuse, “Can’t reschedule now, not sure how long I’m going to be, gotta go, big emergency, the data center is down!”  Ugh.  This one is tough to combat from a recruiter perspective.

5. I had to have emergency surgery!  Another good excuse that doesn’t have to be as bad as it sounds because they’ll add in the ‘dental’ component. “I had to have an emergency root canal, can’t talk, will call you when I can.”  Can also use it for ankles, knees, etc. Which gives the built in excuse of not being able to walk.  Plus the added benefit of, “I probably shouldn’t change jobs right now, with insurance, with this going on…”

If, and after twenty years in recruiting that’s a huge if, I was a very trusting man, I would have a view of the world that I must be the most unlucky person ever to have all these bad things and unfortunate timings happen to me!  But, since I’ve been in recruiting for twenty years, I get the game.

What’s the most used excuse you get from candidates who no-show or cancel out on interviews?

 

Dad’s Don’t Get Work-Life Balance Empathy

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Max Shireson, the CEO of mongoDB, turned in his resignation this past week.  That announcement in itself isn’t really that big of a deal, CEOs turn in resignations every day.  The reason he turned in his resignation is huge.  I’ll let him tell it in his own words from a letter he sent to mongoDB’s workforce:

“Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.

While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation:

* I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever.

* I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and  of course unexpected) emergency surgery.

* I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training  program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and  infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing    that patience.

Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.”

When we talk about ‘inclusion’ we aren’t really talking about everyone.  That’s the problem.  We wonder how possibly a woman could handle the pressures of being a CEO and being a Mom, but we never wonder, or even care, how a man handles the pressure of being a CEO and a Dad.   It’s expected a man can do both, we question if a woman can do both.  

There is a cultural expectation, wrongly, that as a man I can be CEO and a Dad and perform just fine. As a woman, I’ll have trouble doing both jobs, because the Mom does more than the Dad.  The mom cooks and cleans and nurtures and schedules and kisses booboos and, well, does everything for the family.  The lazy asshole Dad comes home and waits for the Mom to fix him dinner and his drink.  Really!?! Is that where we are in 2014?

I’m a Dad and a President of a company.  I feel for Max.  My wife does a ton, it can’t even be measured.  I don’t expect her to do everything and help out a ton with parenting when and where I can.  I assume if the roles were changed and my wife was a CEO, I would have to pick up more of her home and parenting duties.

This goes beyond just duties, though, this is about emotional connection.  As a Dad, like Max, why should I have less of a connection as a parent than my wife.  Why do we throw that cultural expectation onto our employees, on to our executives?  As a father I frequently feel failure.  Maybe it’s because I missed being able to have lunch with my son at school.  Maybe it’s because my wife has a stronger relationship with my kids than I do.  Maybe it’s because I trying to live up to a cultural expectation that I should be less of a parent.

No one ever wants to talk about how hard a man has it, trying to be a father and work.  It’s not ‘politically’ correct.  Men have it easier. End of story.  That sucks sometimes.

Why Changing How You Recruit Is Really, Really Hard

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Very quickly we are entering candidate driven markets in almost all segments of job categories, in almost all segments of the country.  Obviously, a better economy and increasing retirements from Boomers play a major role in this.  This is causing most companies to recruit differently than they have in a number of years.  I’m hearing the pain from corporate talent acquisition pros daily.  All over the country recruiters are having to actually recruit for the first time in a long time!

Getting recruiters to recruit is really hard.

Let that sink in for a moment.  Getting recruiters to recruit is really hard, when they haven’t really had to recruit for 10 years.

This will take change and here’s a glimpse of what most Talent Acquisition executives are facing right now:

1. We can’t get talent, we need to start doing this differently (Big Change, Uncomfortable).

2. Those who will have to change (Recruiters) immediately voice their displeasure, at a minimum. “Wait! What! You’re going to start measuring our activity!? Oh! You don’t trust us!”

3. Those who will get the benefit of change (Hiring Managers) sit quietly and watch, partially disbelieving anything will really change. Welcome to organizations.

That’s why changing how you recruit is really hard.  Those who have to do the recruiting don’t want change and are letting you know about it.  Those who need you to change don’t believe you can do it, and want you to prove it.    Neither side, seems to be on your side.

Changing how you actually recruit is very easy.  Getting people to change how they actually recruit is really, really hard.