The Great Recession Fall out on Talent Acquisition

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I have a feeling I’m about to preach to the choir.  I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with a hiring manager lately, that just don’t get it! (I hear you saying “What do you mean “lately” – does a hiring manager “ever” get it!)   The Recession has made our job very hard, especially if you are currently trying to hire anyone with technical skills (engineers, designers, IT professionals, Scientist, etc.).   During the Recession we had candidates coming out of our ears!  Today, it seems like, almost overnight, technical jobs across the country have turned on like a fire hose!  Everywhere companies are trying to find technical talent, in all industries, all at the same time.   Remember that baby boomer Tsunami of retirement we were suppose to see?  This feels like the first waves are hitting the shore in terms of technical hiring!

I’ve spoken to engineering schools that 100% graduation hires, plus companies now paying for engineering seniors, senior year of tuition!   I’ve spoken to companies that have had to double their payroll projections, mid-budget year, just to have enough money to hire the same amount of projected hires at the beginning of the year.  In HR and Recruiting we get this, the market moves, sometimes very quickly, and organizations have to be prepared to adjust and move with it, or risk causing some very bad outcomes to our operations.  But, do our hiring managers get this?

I’m hear to say, not enough have gotten the message!

Over the past few months, it we are now having daily “conversations” with hiring managers who are still wanting to see the same 20 candidates they saw during the height of the recession, and turning down candidates for minor things like “he seemed a little shy”, “she was from Tech and I like State grads”, or “he’s had 2 jobs in the past 10 years!”   I’ve had hiring managers have interviews, come back and say they like both candidates really well, but would like to see some more! When I don’t any more!   It all sounds familiar doesn’t it!  The Recession did this to them!  It made the greedy, it made them ultra picky, and it made them believe there is a never ending pool of great candidates who only want to come work at your company.   Ugh! I hate the Recession!

So what?

In HR/Recruiting this is where we become marketers.  We have to start selling, and what we are selling is an idea.  An idea that the world is different, they sky is falling and there’s only one person left to hire.  “That person, is the stupid candidate I just put in front of your face!!!” (wouldn’t that be great if we could say that!?)  Look, I understand you and your hiring managers “only want to hire the best talent”; by the way so does everyone else.  But times are changing, if you want to hire the best, you better be paying the best, or at least offering the best value proposition as compared to your competitors.  Lines of candidates aren’t out there just waiting for calls any longer.

It’s really just simple addition, more technical job openings than candidates + baby boomers now beginning to feel like they can retire = our job just got a lot tougher!

Do your hiring managers get this equation?

3 Ways To Make Your Office Productive During March Madness

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For those that know me, I’m a huge basketball fan.  Pro, college, AAU, high school, hell, if you really dig into my past you would probably find me hanging out at some playground breaking down the defense effort of a pickup game between grade school kids.  So, when March Madness time comes around each year I’m like many of your employees.  I’m trying to find the best ways to work and watch basketball, or at the very least stay up on my brackets and see who is getting upset!

With all the hype over the past few years about lost productivity, do to March Madness, in the workplace.  I felt it was my duty to provide HR Pros with some helpful tips and tricks to get the your staff to highly productive during this time of year.  Here’s my ideas:

1. Put up TVs throughout the office.  Let’s face it, you really only have one or two hoops junkies in the office, and those folks usually spend vacation time to ensure they don’t miss a minute.  Everyone else just wants to see scores and highlights.  They’re a casual fan.  They’re willing to work a perfectly normal day, and will probably be just a productive, if not more, with the TVs steaming all the games in the background.  Plus, if you get a close game or big upset, you’ll get some team excitement in the air.  This also stops most of your staff trying to stream the games on their desktops for the entire afternoon.

2. Call off work those afternoons.  Let’s face it, March Madness is pretty close to a national holiday as we will ever get.  Doesn’t matter if you’re female or male, young or old, what religion you are, we all love the drama and excitement of March Madness.  Just close the office.  Make a deal with your staff to reach certain goals and if they’re met, take them to the local watering hole yourself and have some fun with it.  Employees like to rally around a fun idea.  You don’t have to make everything fun, all the time, but once in a while it helps to lift productivity.

3. Shut off all access.  Yep, you read that correctly. Have IT shut down all access to anything related to March Madness.  Threaten to fire any employee caught checking scores on their smart phone, or calling a friend to see how it’s going.  Fear!  Fear is a great short-term lifter of productivity.  Whether we like to admit it, or not, it’s true.  If you went out right now into your office and told the entire staff at the end of the day you’re firing the least productive person, you would see productivity shoot through the roof!  You would also see about half your staff, the half you want to keep, put in their notice over the next 4-6 weeks.

The reality is, most people will do business as usual.  While the CNNs of the world love to point to the millions of dollars American corporations lose during March Madness, it’s no different than so many things that can consume our thoughts in any given day.  I do think HR and leadership, each year, lose out on a great way to have fun and raise engagement during March Madness.  It’s something most of your staff has some interest in, and depending on your city and the schools your employees went to, it can get heightened pretty significantly.

For the record, I’m not picking Michigan State.  I want to with all my might, but I’m nervous that my bracket mojo would work the opposite, so I’ll pick someone else, and feel awesome when Sparty wins and I lose my bracket!

 

The 3 Minute Hire

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Let’s look at how 95% of people are hired. Besides a little variability, almost every person, at some point in their career, has been hired in this manner.  Interview someone for an hour. If you like them, you make them an offer.  Sound about right?  Sure you might actually add some other steps, like phone screening first, a second one hour interview with someone else, but your reality is, it’s an hour interview, and the decision is made!

We’ve taken the one hour interview and expanded it with science.  We add pre-employment screens, cognitive testing, background screens, personality profiles, etc.  But, we still go back to the one hour interview.  “Well, Tim tested off the charts, all the data says, he will be a rock star, but I didn’t connect with him in the one hour interview.  I don’t want to hire him.”  We allow our hiring managers to do this, often.

A much better way to hire would be to have the actual candidate work with you for like four to six weeks, before you actually hire them.  An extended job tryout.  Pay them to come interview with you for 4 weeks.  That would actually be a better way.  It would probably limit your options for candidates.  It would leave you with people who are unemployed, the under-employed, those working consultant or temporary type of jobs, or those people who love your brand so much they would be willing to risk it all to prove to you, that they are the one you really want.

Or, you can continue on the one hour interview platform.  But take away all the other stuff.  In fact, take away the one hour, and just do an initial impression interview.  It might take about 3 minutes.  “Initially I really liked Tim!  Let’s do this.”  You would virtually get the same exact candidate as you do with your one hour process.  But you would save so much time, effort and resources.  Your hiring quality and retention would almost remain unchanged.  That would be the second way.

1. Extended Job Tryout Hire

2. 3 Minute First Impression Hire

Reality is, most would be more willing to do the 3 minute First Impression hires than the Extended Job Tryout hires, even though one leads to actual better hires, and the other does exactly what you have now.    We fear that changing to something we view as ‘radical’ will be worse than what we have.  Even though, we know it won’t.  So, we keep doing what we do.  Scheduling one hour interviews and hiring those people who we ‘felt’ the best connection with.

If I was you, I’d go with the 3 minute interview.  It’s simple.  It’s the same. Your hiring managers will actually like the new process.

 

Client Respect and Love

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I dropped a vision on my team a couple weeks ago.  I think it’s important for any leader to do this, but it’s also important that it be completely authentic and transparent.  I say ‘dropped’ on my team, because that’s exactly what I did.  I didn’t let anyone know I was ‘working’ on my vision, because I wasn’t.  It came to me.  Like a vision.  It took me about a week to get the thoughts down in my own style, and add a grammatical error or two.

I’m not sharing my vision with you.  It’s for me and my team.

I will share a concept from it.  I want to work with clients who want to work with us.  Not just work with us, but want to partner with us.  Now, I know we throw that word ‘partner’ around a bunch.  My vision of a partner is a client who respects us and loves us.  We have to have both, love and respect, to get to my vision.  Respect isn’t enough.

In HR many times we will say something like “I don’t need that hiring manager to like me, as long as they respect me.”  That’s just a nice way we lie to ourselves that this will be a functional relationship.  It’s not.  You need more than respect, to be wildly successful.  You need Love.

I want love.

I want respect.

I want to work with clients who respect what we bring to them from a skill and support side.  But I also want clients who love us, and we love them.  That I look forward to talking to them, to seeing them, and they feel the same way.  That isn’t easy.  But it is something I think we owe to ourselves.  To work with people we love to work with, whether it’s those sitting next to us as coworkers, or those clients we work with daily.

I don’t care if I was selling staffing solutions, or the cure for cancer, my vision would not change.   I don’t care if I’m running a business or running a department, my vision stays the same.  In HR you have ‘clients’, all those who you support.  Are you trying to get your clients to love and respect you?  If you reach that level, where they do, it will make your job, your life, glorious.

Great is the Enemy of Good

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You know what I find really funny?  That we take a really interesting concept like “Good is the enemy of Great” from the 2001 book Good to Great, and we make it law.  It’s now wildly held belief by most well-read leaders that Good is the enemy of Great.  That is you truly want to be Great, being Good hurts you because it gives you a false sense of accomplishment.

I think this is bullshit.

In fact, it’s such B.S. that I think the opposite might be a more true statement: Great is the enemy of Good!  Think about this for a moment:

  • Great performers are usually difficult to deal with:
    • They are more demanding
    • They tend to share diva qualities
    • Many will ostracize their coworkers because they don’t understand their relative ‘lower’ performance
  • Great performers tend to blow up your compensation bands and raise overall compensation of the position they’re in.
  • Great performers want preferential treatment.

From a corporate sense many great performers are a major pain in the butt.  Plus, great performers don’t raise the bar for everyone else, this is another false premise, just for themselves.  Great performers also raise the expectations of your leaders on what performance should be on average performers which tend to drop engagement of the majority rank and file.

Don’t get me wrong.  Great performers do add their value.  Remember what this post is all about, not great performers, but good performers.  “Good is the enemy of Great” sounds proactive and sexy, but it doesn’t stand up to reality.  The reality is, as corporate leaders, we want to surround out great performers with a bunch of good performers.  Saying good is the enemy, goes against this entire mindset.

To be wildly successful in any organization, I don’t need great performance,  I need good performance from everyone.  I could have a few great performers, and no good performers, and still the great performers, or more precisely our organization, will end up failing.  Give me no great performers, and everyone else are good performers, as we’ll do really, really well!

Next time you find your mouth saying “good is the enemy of great” think about what you’re really saying.  That isn’t leadership speak, it’s just being naive to your reality.

What Kind of Person Are You?

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Today, is Friday March 14th.  I’m currently in Indianapolis at The Big Ten Men’s Basketball tournament with my oldest son.  We’re going to have fun.  We were given free tickets to attend from my Dad.  My Dad works in marketing and he constantly gets some pretty cool tickets for many events.  I’ve become accustom to a few things in attending events:

1. I like good seats.

2. I like to go to good events.

That causes problems because that usually means you have to pay big money in some way or another.  You either have to pay a ton for tickets, or have business connections who have access to corporate tickets.  Either way, you’re paying one way or another.

Also, when I say ‘good’ tickets, I’m not saying the tickets somewhere in the lower bowl.  I’m saying I want to be able to smell the sweat coming off the players.  I want to clearly hear every cuss word coming out of the coaches mouth as he’s yelling at the players and officials.  I want JayZ tickets.

So, here’s the kind of person I am.  I’ll sneak down to those seats if I have to.  Yep.  One of the cool things, let’s face there aren’t many, of being a middle aged white guy, no one asks you for proof when you want to go places.  “Oh, hey, Mr. Middle Aged White Guy, you must belong here, otherwise, why would a professional middle aged white guy try and sneak down to front row seats!?”  He wouldn’t! Until he does.

That’s the kind of person I am.  I’m not afraid to go sit in an open seat closer to the court.  The worse that can happen is they ask me to go back to my seat (I tell myself as I walk past the usher).  Sitting close is really cool.  I suggest you give it try, just not while I’m in the building, there are only so many seats up front.  I don’t want the competition.

That’s the kind of person I am.

Becoming A Victim Of Can’t

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I spoke in Huntsville, Al this week to a group of around 175 HR and Talent Pros for North Alabama SHRM.  It was a fun group. They had a ton of energy and were willing to put up with me and my fast talking northern ways! My wife told me to be more respectful, than usual, on my way down to Alabama.  She said southern women expected more manners than I was use to!

For those who don’t much about Huntsville it is a big military town, which means most people either work on the base, or work for a contractor supporting one of the many military contracts coming out of the base.  There are literally hundreds of companies in Huntsville that are considered military ‘contractors’.  That’s really just a big fancy term for companies that won a military contract, which is just a scope of work they need to do or deliver to the military.

If you haven’t worked a military contract before, they come with as much red tape and rules as you can expect from the U.S. government.  That becomes a very big problem for HR Pros who love to follow rules!  One thing that was apparent very early into the day was that some Huntsville HR and Talent Pros became very comfortable with saying the following statement:

“We can’t do that, we are a military contractor!”

You can probably guess what my answer was to that!  “Yes, you can! You just have to find a way to do it!”  What they didn’t expect was that my company was also a military contractor, I was going to accept any victim statements.  Yes, you are a military contractor.  Isn’t it great!  Now, let’s find out how we can use Facebook to recruit and find you some really good talent!

But, Tim, OFCCP! OFCCP won’t allow us to social recruit!  Really.  It really says within OFCCP regulations that you can’t recruit on Facebook!?  Well, no, but…you just don’t understand.  Yeah, I understand more than you really know.  I understand it’s going to be hard, but it can be done.  I also understand that it’s really easy to fall the victim and use OFCCP as a crutch to why we can do our job.

I actually spoke to two pros who were going through OFCCP audits.  Scary stuff for any HR or Talent Pro.  But I didn’t even let them use it as a crutch.  I asked them if they would get through it. Yes, was the answer.  Did you get fined? No.  So, now you just have to figure how to make it the sourcing you need to do, work within your OFCCP process.  Not easy. But doable and needed.

The most dangerous thing we’ll ever face in our career is becoming a victim of can’t.   I’m a firm believer you can try to do anything.  We might not succeed, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Things like OFCCP are there to catch bad companies, doing bad things.  I’ve never spoken to a good company, with good people, trying to do the right things, that ever had an issue with OFCCP! Ever!

Go do the right things for your organization, and in the end trust that why you might get audited, you are doing what is right.  That’s ultimately all you really can do.

Why Do We Hire Horrible Leaders?

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Have you ever worked for a boss that was horrible?  That’s an easy question to answer, isn’t it!  The person came immediately to your mind (for my staff reading this, if I came to your mind first, you’re fired! I tease – you’re not fired – just come see me after your done reading this…) Almost all of us, probably 99.99% of us, have worked for a boss/leader we thought was just God awful.  It’s the perplexity of leadership.  I like to blame the entire leadership book industry.  Someone gets a promotion to a leadership position and they instantly get online for the latest leadership babble that’s being sold by some idiot that was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time of a successful company and now she or he is going to tell us how to be a great leader using 7 simple steps!  BS!

But, really, why do we hire such bad leaders?  CNN had an article recently that looked into this:

“The short answer is, we focus on all the wrong things, like a candidate’s charm, their stellar résumé or their academic credentials. None of this has any bearing on leadership potential. And despite claims to the contrary, even a candidate’s past results have little bearing on whether the promoted individual will succeed once promoted.

At best, a “track record” tells only half of the story. In a new position, the candidate will have to face new obstacles, deal with a new team, manage more people introduce new products and do it all without a clear road map.”

Ok, so we aren’t focused on hiring the right traits that makes a great leader.  The reality is, in most of our organizations, we hire “next-man-up” philosophy.  “Hey, Jill, is the best producer in the group, congrat’s Jill! you’re now the next boss!”  About 90% of leadership hires happen like this!  Most of you will attempt to call that “Succession Planning”, but it’s not, it’s “convenience planning” and it’s bad HR.

Can we all agree to one thing (this statement is a setup because I know we can’t agree to this!)?  Being able to do the “job” (meaning the specific tasks of the functional area you’re a leader for) has very little to do with one’s success at being a leader.  Can we?  And yet, it becomes the first thing we focus on when going to hire a leader.  “Well, how good of a coder are they? How do you expect them to manage coders if they aren’t the best coder?”  You’ve had this conversation haven’t you!?  Most of the best leaders of all time, had very little functional skill of the leadership position they were successful in.  What they did have, were these things:

  • Integrity
  • Passion
  • Courage
  • Vision
  • Judgement
  • Empathy
  • Emotional Intelligence

We pick bad leaders because we don’t focus on the traits above.  It doesn’t matter if the person can do the job of those they are managing – great leaders will overcome this fact very easily.  If that’s your biggest worry, they probably won’t be a good leader anyway.  When you have a great leader – the conversation never goes around whether the person can do the job of those they manage – it’s a non-issue.  They can lead and leaders know how to engage those who can do to make their departments great.

First Marijuana Job Fair. No Drug Testing Required.

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Want a job?  Like smoking pot?  This is your day!

Doesn’t that sound like a bad Hollywood movie script!?  Unfortunately, it’s real world, as Colorado is in the middle of a talent bubble after legalizing marijuana.  From Time:

This Thursday, March 13, a very special, first-of-its-kind job fair is being held in Denver. It has been dubbed “CannaSearch,” and as the name indicates, it’s a marijuana-themed gathering intended to match job seekers with Colorado employers in the cannabis industry—a field that one is now all but required to cutely describe as “fast-growing” and/or “budding.”

At last check, 15 employers were scheduled to participate in the event, being held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Denver headquarters of the job fair’s sponsor and host, O.PenVAPE, a company that specializes in vaporizer pens that get filled with cannabis oil—and that also bills itself as the “the largest national brand in cannabis.”

No advanced registration is necessary for job seekers. Everyone in attendance must, however, be 21 or older. And to answer the question on everyone’s minds: The event is strictly smoke-free.

So, what does it take to get a job in the Pot Industry?  I’m guessing some of the skill sets would be the following:

1. Like weed.

2. Knows stuff about weed.

3. Likes to talk about weed.

4. Willing to bring your own Doritos to work.

5. Don’t steal the weed.

Doesn’t that sound like every stoner you’ve ever known!?  You know they are all going back to those high school guidance counselors who told them they’d never amount to anything if they kept smoking pot and say “See, smoking pot got me somewhere!  I’m now head manager at Smokes-A-lot!”

It’s all fun and exciting now, wait until these companies really start to ‘grow’ and they need to hire an HR lady to come in and start setting up policies. That will be a ‘drag’.   Can you imagine!?  Margo comes in from her dental office HR manager gig in Pueblo and now is trying to build process and practices for Smokes-A-Lot world headquarters.  First, a few ground rules from the burned out CEO Steve.  No drug testing.  Unlimited smoke breaks.  50% employee discounts.  Go Margo!  Can’t wait to see those insurance premiums come in!

I would actually pay money for the ability to show up at the Marijuana Job Fair and interview potential hires!  They don’t even have to pay me, I’d have blog fodder for the rest of history!

How to tell your Work Critics to “Suck It”!

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In the corporate world everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior.  No longer can we just send out a final product the first time. Why?  Because everyone wants to trash it and change it, so it can be this really nice piece of plain old vanilla cake!  Welcome to Corporate America. But you know what? This isn’t new. Critics have been around since Jesus, and critics have been wrong since before Jesus!   I wanted to share with you some famous things that critics got wrong:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)

What the critics said in 1825: “We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a frightful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…” –The Harmonicon, London, April 1825

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)

And the critics response: When Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dickhad moved a grand total of 3,715 copies…in 40 years! The below was typical at the time of the book’s release:

“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition…Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…” -Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25, 1851

Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)

What the critics said about the book we all had to read in high school: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” –Publisher’s rejection

 

Here’s what I know, true creativity in what we do, does not come from running our ideas through everyone and their brother for approval.  If your organization wants your employees to be truly creative and innovative, stop pushing teams.  Teams don’t make masterpieces. They can do some pretty cool stuff, but pure creativity isn’t one of them.  We push “Team” so hard in HR and in most organizations it sometimes makes you think like this the only way everyone in the world must work, but it’s not.  An HR Pro that can determine the proper work structure throughout their organization is truly valuable.  “Team” isn’t always the answer, and you should have other tools in your toolbox.

 

You hear artist all the time say, “I don’t listen to my critics”. This is valuable in that they know listening to a critic will hurt their art.  Unfortunately, in business, we don’t always have the ability/decision to not listen to our critics (who could be bosses, peers, friends, etc.).  In business telling your critics to “Suck It”, could be a big career derailer!  So, when do we go all “Suck It – It’s my project” in the workplace?

 

First, I would never suggest you approach it beginning with “Suck It”!  While it will get their attention, it will also shut off communication.  I think we all need the ability in our work environment to push back appropriately when you truly know you have something that will make a difference.  But, it’s really about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your indicator,  “am I willing to put my career/credibility/bank of influence on the line for this idea/project/etc.?” If you are, it’s time to pull out the “Suck It” card and push forward.  For most of us, this might never happen in our work lives.  It’s rare to have to do this, if you find yourself doing it often, you’ve got an interpersonal issue to deal with!

 

I think what we learn over time is that not all of our critics are bad, and some actually might help truly make us better.  The key is to continue to have confidence in what you do, without it, your work critics will make your work life less than artistic.