2 Reasons Women Don’t Get Hired or Promoted

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The New York Times had an article recently regarding hiring practices and succession practices at Google – and G*d knows if Google is doing it – it must be important, and we must try and do the same thing. What I liked about this article was it didn’t necessarily look at practices and processes – it looked at data – and the data found that Google – like almost every other large company – does a crappy job hiring and promoting women. Shocking, I know, if you’re a man – we had no idea this was going on! In America of all places… Beyond the obvious though, Google was able to dig into the data and find out the whys and make some practical changes that I think most companies can implement – and that I totally agree with.  From the article:

“Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

Google now asks interviewers to report candidates’ answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.”

Here are two selection facts that impact both men and women:

1.  We like to surround ourselves with people who we like – which usually means in most cases people who are similar to ourselves

2. We tend not to want to brag about our accomplishments, but our society has made it more acceptable for men to brag.

This has a major impact to your selection – and most of you are doing nothing about it.  It’s very common that if you run simple demographics for your company – ANY COMPANY – you’ll see that the percentage of your female employees does not come close to the percentage of your female leadership.  Why is that?

Here are two things you can do to help make the playing field more level in your organization:

1. Have women interview women.  Sounds a bit sexist in a way – but if you want women to get hired into leadership positions you can’t have them going up against males being interviewed by males because the males will almost always feel more comfortable with another male candidate. Reality sucks, buy a helmet.

2. Ask specific questions regarding accomplishments and take detailed notes. Studies have found woman don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t “sell” or brag enough about their accomplishments giving their male counterparts a leg up – because the males making the hiring decisions now have “ammunition” to justify their decision to hire the male.

Let’s face it – Google is doing it – so now we all have to do it.  What would we do without best practices…(maybe innovate and create new better practices – but I digress…).

The #1 Rap Lyric that Shaped My Leadership Style

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For the background of this list – see my original post from 2-10-12.

All right kiddos we’ve reach the mountain top! 

As Casey Kasem would say –

That just makes me laugh – I remember getting up at 7am on a Sunday morning to tape Casey’s Top 40 just so I could hear the songs they never played on the radio -#30 thru #40!  I was cool that way – I knew all the “songs” that were going to be popular before the other kids.

The #1 Rap Lyric that Shaped My Leadership Style is from Notorious B.I.G. and from his album Life After Death that was posthumously released after he was gunned downed.  The song – Mo Money Mo Problems and the actual Lyric:

“It’s like the more money we come across
The more problems we see “

Check out the video of Biggie when he first said the quote:

I’m not sure what’s more amazing Biggie getting shot, or that someone was able to shoot him before he died from a heart-attack!

Here’s the actual song:

Here’s the deal – why is this one #1 – because in HR all of our problems can stem directly back to money.  It’s really that simple.  If you pay properly – if you make pay  a non-factor to your employees – you will have very few “employee” problems.   Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the ability to do this – pay is an issue – markets are an issue.  We go out and pay our developers $125/hr and now we have managers of these folks making $30-40K less.  We dig into our compensation and we realize we actually do pay our female employees 15-20% less than males in the same position – but we don’t “have” the money to make it right. So we try to justify it.  More money – more problems – that’s HR in a nutshell.

Think about your turnover and retention – if you had money this wouldn’t be an issue.  Succession planning – money takes care of this.  The best talent? Yep, money again.  Performance Management?  You would be amazed what people will change for the right price.  What about Ethics? You would be amazed at how ethical folks are that get paid well! (Ok, don’t give me all the bad executive stories out there! There’s always outliers. Plus “paid well” is relative to your position in the world.) Engagement? It’s not about money – it’s about “Leadership” – Bull shit – it’s only about leadership if pay is being taken care of.  Ask any HR Pro who is trying to raise their engagement while trailing market compensation – it’s an uphill battle!

So why do we (HR) keep telling everyone it’s not about pay?  Because we have to.  We don’t have the money. Our organizations can’t run in the red (for long). Profit runs decisions.  Mo money, Mo problems…

WANTED! People who aren’t stupid

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I’m looking to hire an additional Recruiter for my team – business is brisk, we are growing, blah, blah, blah.  We’ve been in business 31 years, profitable all 31 years.  Part of that profitability is we don’t overpay for talent.  That is a good way of saying, we’ve been very good at hiring entry level college kids and turning them into very good recruiters.  Basically, I have some upfront investment into teaching them the trade and that investment pays off in the long run.

I hear that there are millions of people out of work.  What I don’t see are people who actually want to work to get paid.  I wrote a job description, qualifications, etc. and put it up on one of the Big Job Boards to see what I would get – see below:

Here’s the JD:

Technical Recruiter:
What the heck is a Technical Recruiter?  We find great talent for our client companies.  You need to be part private investigator, part blood hound and part jealous girlfriend – basically you will be using the training we give you to get out and find Rock Stars – the best of the best – in the fields of engineering and Information Technology.

You spend a lot of time on the phone and on the internet tracking down and networking to find these types of folks.  Then once you find them – you put them through the 3rd Degree on why they might be good enough to get passed onto to our client.  It’s a fast pace environment and every day you never know what you’re going to run into.

Why this might be for you?
1. You’re smart (i.e., you have a Bachelor’s Degree – no a real bachelor’s degree, not one out of the back of an airline magazine)

2. You’re are self motivated (Look, we don’t want to babysit you, we’re busy – you need to be able to push yourself)

3. You can take rejection (Recruiting isn’t easy – you spend all day tracking down the perfect candidate and they tell you to take a hike – that’s life – time to put on the big boy/big girl pants)

4. You’re a networker (this means you have probably have more than 1000 Facebook/Instagram/Twitter Friends combined – and most actually know who you are and haven’t blocked you)

Requirements

Ok, Let’s recap – here’s what you need to work here:

1. Smarts – Bachelor’s Degree

2. Motivation – I want to be successful, and willing to do more than show up and wait for someone to give me a trophy

3. Business Sense – we negotiate and sell all day – that’s the real world.  We sell people on why they should want to go to work for a company, and we sell the company on why they need the person we have. It’s fun!

4. Guts.  Yeah, that’s right – you’re going to have to pick up the phone and talk to real people that you don’t know – scary right – you mean I just can’t text them? No.

This is a Big Girl job – business cards, your own phone extension, 1 hour lunch breaks. Welcome to the show.  We expect that you’ll actually work.

If you send me your resume and you don’t have all the stuff above – we might ridicule you publicly on our blog.  The End.

********************************************

Seems pretty straight-forward right?  You need to be out going and have a BACHELOR’s Degree – and probably a sense of humor.  If you don’t have that, don’t send me a resume.

Guess what I got from my Ad?

19 responses with Resume.  Of the 19 – 6 had a bachelors degree (No, having 82 credits towards a Bachelor’s degree does not constitute you having a bachelor’s degree).  6 were female, 13 were male – 4 out of 6 females met the requirement, which tells me Females are less stupid than males.  One female was currently a Licensed Attorney with her JD – which tells me all I need to know about that profession right now.

We don’t have a jobs problem in this country.  We have a candidate problem.  People are mostly stupid.  Employers don’t want to hire stupid people.

So, I’ll ask you – my overly smart and snarky readers – Was I clear enough on my Job Descriptions and Qualifications on what I was looking for?

iRecruiter – How to Recruit more like Apple

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Open position… Job posting… Mass distribution via automation… Rinse, repeat.

What’s that?  You took a flyer on social recruiting and it hasn’t delivered any real results for you?

There are a million things for people to read on the web.  With that in mind, if you want the right people to stop, read and take action on an open position at your company, your goal should be to entertain them with your recruiting pitch – or at least not bore them to death.

Join Fistful of Talent for our August installment of the FOT webinar, “That’s Your Pitch?  How to Raise Your Recruiting Game By Acting Less Like ACME and More Like Apple”, as hosts Kris Dunn and Andrew Curtis (from iCIMS) deliver the following:

1.    The Top 5 Traits of Successful Marketers and Advertisers recruiters should use to raise their promotional game.  We’ll deliver this in true Mac vs. PC style.  What do great marketers do to generate interest?

2.    How to Prevent Your Job Postings from Being Lame.  We’ll show you what to include with live examples ripped from the companies we love.

3.    How Cool Companies are Experimenting with Elements Beyond Text (including video, audio and more) to deliver some pop to traditional recruiting campaigns.

4.    We’ll play a game we like to call, “That’s Your Freaking Pitch?” – where we peel back the cover and take a hard look at traditional messaging that flows through your recruiting function today after the job posting goes out –  including ATS messaging, live call recruiter scripts and more

5.    A Plan to Customize Your Social Distribution Message Across the Big 3 (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook). You know the same message doesn’t work across all social channels, we’ll tell you how to do it.

Stop thinking like a recruiter and start thinking like your marketing friends down the hall.  Join us for this webinar (sponsored by iCIMS) and we’ll help you breathe some life back into your candidate outreach.

Register Today – Click Here!

Employment Branding – I love the brochure

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I have a feeling that Employment Branding has jumped the shark.  This probably happened around the same time we stopped really caring about what our employment brand truly was, and we started designing the brochure about what we wished our employment brand was – and started selling the “idea” as the “brand”.  When it isn’t.

I’m a true believer in HR Pros having Marketing Chops – I’m no a true believer in HR trying to be marketing.  Marketing sells the “idea” of your organizations product or service – not the reality.  No one wants to buy reality – they want to buy the dream, the vision.  That’s why we have marketing.  They sell the crap that no one would buy if they really knew what they were buying – there’s a reason your sales and marketing folks get paid more than you – besides the fact they’re better looking.

We buy the brochure.  It’s pretty, the sun is always shining, the people are always smiling and there is a perfect ratio of white, black, male, female, wheelchairs and tattoos – and everyone is pretty. We buy the idea.

I think this is where employment branding went to die.  It just walked out and laid down next to authenticity and closed it’s eyes.

I guess I need to go back and sit down next to the coffee breath, pit stained, loud mouth, but he writes good code, reality. He’s annoying, but I can count on him to do good work – plus he’s loyal.  It’s not much of a brand – but it’s the truth…

 

(this all makes me think of the Jay-Z song Forever Young:

So we live a life like a video
When the sun is always out and you never get old
and the champagne’s always cold
and the music is always good
and the pretty girls just happen to stop by in the hood
and they hop their pretty ass up on the hood of dat pretty ass car
without a wrinkle in today
cuz there is no tomorrow
just some picture perfect day
to last a whole lifetime
and it never ends
cos all we have to do is hit rewind)

Rap Lyrics That Didn’t Shape My Leadership Style

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For the background of this list – see my original post from 2-10-12.

But that I like…

As I put together the 25 Rap Lyrics That Shaped My Leadership Style, I kept coming up with a number of lyrics that I liked, but didn’t really fit into the “Leadership” category.  So, before I give you the #1 Rap Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style – I’m going to give you some of my favorite Rap Lyrics of all time – even if they didn’t shape my leadership style! Check them out:

“I’ve got 99 problems, but a B–ch ain’t one.” Jay-Z (99Problems)

“Pay us like you owe us for all the years that you hold us
We can talk, but money talks so talk mo’ bucks” Jay-Z (Izzo H.O.V.A.)

“I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven/ When I awoke, I spent that on a necklace.”  Kanye West (Can’t Tell Me Nothing)

“Every bag, every blouse, every bracelet
Comes with a price tag, baby, face it
You should leave if you can’t accept the basics
Plenty hoes in the baller-nigga’s matrix”  Pusha T (from Kanye’s Runaway)

“When I talk about money all you see is the struggle/ When I tell you I’m livin’ large, you tell me it’s trouble.” Tupac (I Ain’t Mad Atcha)

“Out on bail fresh, outta jail, California dreamin’/ Soon as I stepped on the scene, I’m hearin’ hoochies screamin’.” Tupac (California Love)

“Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis
When I was dead broke, man I couldn’t picture this
50 inch screen, money green leather sofa
Got two rides, a limousine with a chauffeur” Notorious B.I.G. (Juicy)

“Throw dirt on me and grow a wildflower But it’s fuck the world, get a child out her Yeah, my life a bitch, but you know nothing ’bout her Been to hell and back, I can show you vouchers” Lil Wayne (No Love)

“Cause I am, whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?
In the paper, the news everyday I am
I don’t know it’s just the way I am” Eminem (The Way I Am)

“Man they treat me like a legend, am I really this cold?/ I’m really too young to be feeling this old.” Drake (Over)

“On the oak tree, I hope we feel like this forever
Forever, forever, ever, forever, ever?
Forever never seems that long until you’re grown” Outkast (Ms. Jackson)

“Two lil’ kids with a flow you ain’t ever heard
And none faking you can understand every word
As you listen to my cool, smooth melody
The Daddy makes you J-U-M-P”  Kriss Kross (Jump)

“This is another public service announcement
You can believe it, or you can doubt it” BDP (Beef)

“But that’s okay ’cause I Wait for my cue and just listen play my position like A short stop, pick up everything mommy hittin'” Nelly (Delima)

“Now Peter Piper picked peppers but Run rocked rhymes
Humpty Dumpty fell down that’s his hard time” Run DMC (Peter Piper)

“My Adidas
standin on 2 Fifth St.
funky fresh and yes cold on my feet
with no shoe string in em, I did not win em
I bought em off the Ave with the tags still in em” Run DMC (My Addidas)

“I told em all – all them little gangstas Who you think helped mold ’em all? Now you wanna run around talkin bout guns like I ain’t got none What you think I sold ’em all?” Dr. Dre (Forgot About Dre)

“Never let me slip, ’cause if I slip, then I’m slippin’
But if I got my Nina, then you know I’m straight trippin'” Dr. Dre (Nuthin But A G Thang)

“Sixteen in the clip and one in the hole
Nate Dogg is about to make some bodies turn cold” Warren G & Nate Dogg (Regulate)

Ok, I’ve got to stop, I could turn this into a 10,000 word dissertation! Hit me in the comments with your favorite Rap Lyrics.

Great HR Doesn’t Come from Big HR Shops

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We here it all the time:

“They’ve got to much to lose to take that kind of a risk.”

Or statements similar to this.

As I travel out and about on the fall HR conference tour (most State level SHRM conferences happen in the fall) I’m reminded constantly that Big HR Shops (Fortune 500 companies, Big Government, Giant Non-Profits, etc.) are not who you should be turning to for the next great HR ideas.  Maybe you can turn to them for Best Practices – but is best practice – where you want to be?  Best Practice is by it’s nature – solid and fully vetted – for years.  It’s great HR from 5+ years ago. Safe. You can’t go wrong with Best Practice HR.  But please stop trying to act like it’s “great” HR – it’s not  – it’s more of the same HR.

There’s actually a name for this, it’s called Loss Aversion theory, which is basically:

“people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.”

What this all boils down to in HR is what you have to lose by taking a chance.  Want a industry changing benefit program?  You have to get way out of the box.  Big HR Shops don’t get way out of the box.  By the way – Google is a big HR shop – Giant.  So are most of the other companies you continue to use as examples of “Great” HR, but they really aren’t “great” HR.  I say this because I’m tired to hearing “more of the same HR” practices at conferences being played off as “Great HR” practices, and seeing my HR peers buy it as life altering HR. It’s not – unless you have a Delorean that can’t go back in time to when it was.

So you want Great HR, you want HR that will change industries in 5 years? Don’t get caught up with a brand – get caught up with an idea.  Too often we want the “brand” – “Oh, look Southwest Airlines HR is going to be talking – I MUST go see them!”  Stop!  Southwest was great 20 years ago – they aren’t anymore – they are the same now – which is still good – but not “Great”.  You don’t want to be like Southwest Airlines right now – you want to be like Southwest Airlines 20 years ago.  You’re goal is to find that session with that person you’ve never heard of – they have nothing to lose – they will probably have better ideas.

I’m probably on an island with this one.  Because everyone wants to hear about how the “Big Boys” are doing it – because if they are doing “it”, “it “must be good.  But you know I’m comfortable on this island – this island is full of start-ups you’ve never heard of and they are fighting to make it ever day and that fight propels them into a space the “Big Boys” won’t go.  This island has a bunch of creative HR pros who don’t have books published and aren’t paid to speak  – they get their hands dirty, they make mistakes – they – make – great HR.

3 Steps To Getting Stuff Done

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There are times when I struggle to get things done.  I’m a really good starter of things – I love starting things.  I can always see how I want it finished (a little shout out to Covey – Begin with the end in mind).  But like most things you start, eventually things get bogged down, and getting them over the finish line can be hard.  It’s probably why most projects fail, it gets tough, so we stop and move onto the beginning of something else – because that’s fun and exciting.  I’ve learned this about myself over the years and I do two things to help myself. First – I surround myself with people who have great resolve to getting things done, the type of folks who don’t sleep well at night because they know there was that one glass left in the sink, and they should really get up and put in away.  I love those folks – they aren’t me – I hire them ever time I get the chance.  I even married one of those types – she makes me better!  Second – I force myself to not start something new, until I finish what I’ve already started.  This can be annoying, I’m sure, for those around me because sometimes projects have to go on hold – while you wait for feedback, or other resources, etc.  This makes me antsy – I like to get things finished!

I was re-introduced recently to a quote from the novel Alice in Wonderland that I think really puts in perspective what it takes to get something done.  The quote is from the King of Hearts and it is quite simply:

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Your 3 Steps:

1. Begin

2. Go till the end

3. Stop

We make it much harder than that – but it really isn’t.  I like simple stuff – it fits into my mind quite well.  It might be the best advice I’ve gotten in a really long time.  I don’t need pre-planning, or post project assessments, or update meetings, or budget reviews, etc.

Naive?  Probably.  But, sometimes you just need to Begin, go to you come to the end: then stop.

 

#2 Rap Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style

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For the background of this list – see my original post from 2-10-12.

The #2 Rap Lyric that Shaped my Leadership Style comes from rapper Ice Cube, from his 1993 Predator album, and the song “It Was a Good Day“. The song was ranked #7 all time by VH1 for hip hop songs and had a great video! The Lyric:

“Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K.
I got to say it was a good day.”

In HR we carry a gun with us all the time – don’t kid yourself – your gun is your ability to influence hiring managers and supervisors to terminate an individual in your organization based on the policies and practices that most HR Pros know inside and out.  Leadership in your organization look to HR Pros to help them “do the right thing” for the organization when it comes to terminations and/or discipline.  That is a big, giant gun you are carry around – and it’s heavy!

I’ve had to terminate hundreds of employees in my HR career – and I’ve never once felt good about it.  Some certainly deserved it – without question – but I’ve never once hired someone to fire them.  I hired them to be a great employee – so to have to fire them is a sad event.  It means I/we/us failed – maybe part of that equation was a larger piece of the problem – but don’t kid yourself – 99% of the time it’s a team failure. I really spend a great deal of time self-reflecting when I have to terminate an employee and to determine where I failed them – how could I have saved them – where did it all go wrong.  This is very important – because we only get better if we can keep and grow our teams.

Each and everyday, in my HR career, that I have not had to use my “AK” – I can definitely say was a good day!

10 Reasons HR Thinks Employees Are Crazy

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I don’t know of one HR Pro I’ve ever met who didn’t say, behind closed doors, “My employees are Crazy!”   It’s like school teachers when they go into that mysterious “Teachers Lounge”, once the door is closed and they are all in there with the other teachers – didn’t you want to know what the heck they talked about!?!?  I can tell you  – before I was in HR – I was a teacher.  Guess what?  Teachers talk about the exact same things that HR Pros talk about – how crazy the kids/employees are that we have to deal with all day!  No difference – just physical age (certainly not mental age!).

So, I wanted to come up some of the reasons we think our employees are crazy – to hep out those crazy employees who want to come off less crazy at their next interview.  It can happen! I don’t think employees are crazy, all the time, just at certain times – the problem is, HR Pros have to deal with all the employees so there is a good chance a crazy one is going to come across your desk at least once a day – thus the reason HR Pros think all of their employees are Crazy.  We deal with crazy every day!

Here’s why HR Pros think Employees are Crazy:

1. Your Boss tells us about all of your weird anxieties.

2. Your co-workers, that hate you, tell us about all of your weird anxieties.

3. We know your medical history – mental and physical – sorry, it’s part of the gig.

4.  We find out every time you cry or lose it at work – every time – almost part of the gig.

5. Your crazy-ass emails find their way to our inbox – thank your “work” friends for that.

6.  We spend too much time talking about you in succession planning meetings, uncovering all that is wrong with you.

7.  You rate yourself as “Great” on your self-assessments, and we know you are barely “Average”.

8.  I know more about your divorce then your divorce attorney.

9.  Your stories about your kids haunt me at night.

10.  I know everyone you’ve slept with in the office – or tried to sleep with – or want to sleep with.

It’s a function of the job – we see and hear the worst and the best of all of our employees.  Just like the school teacher who spends more time on a daily basis with your kids than you do as a parent,  that teacher is probably going to know some things about them that you are unwilling to accept.   HR Pros know some things about our employees – many of which they aren’t willing to accept – that’s human nature.  I’m only saying this so that you understand why we think you’re crazy – you are – you just can’t accept that you are!