America’s Greatest Threat is Lack of Labor!

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America’s Greatest Threat? Lack of Hourly Workers!

I spoke to a group of upcoming high graduates yesterday, and it got me to thinking about the future. I don’t dump on young kids like most people do today. My feeling is we all sucked when we were young. We grew up. Got experienced. And we suck less. But we look at young people and we are shocked they suck at mostly everything. We. All. Did. When. We. Were. Young!

Businesses, big and small are desperate currently for workers. Low-skill, semi-skilled, people who have no skill but are willing to be trained. The hourly rate is anywhere between $12-22/hr. I’ve spoken to companies in every market and industry, many of whom will tell me they’ll hire as many people as they can find, they just can’t find anyone!

Now, I don’t want to get into all the reasons why organizations are struggling to find hourly workers. There are many, and it’s a complex situation that isn’t going away anytime soon. I want to focus on how not having enough hourly workers puts America at a competitive disadvantage in the world.

What Happens When America Can’t Hire Enough Workers?

First, organizations will do what it takes actually to hire talent. They increase wages and benefits, which initially seems like a big win for workers. Businesses will also raise prices to pay for those additional expenses. Say hello to inflation. The supply and demand dynamics of labor all happen fairly quickly.

Organizations will look to become more efficient and add technology that, in the long term, can be a better value than workers. Let’s be honest, this has been happening since the beginning of time, but in times of true pain in hiring, all this speeds up and happens faster than normal. Say hello to the robots!

Companies will offshore more more than they already do to countries with an abundance of hourly workers. China, Mexico, India, and various countries in Africa if they can get politically stable, will gain millions of jobs from organizations looking to sell their products in America. Say hello to more jobs leaving our shores. Also, as we’ve seen with the Pandemic, this will cause further issues with our supply chain in critical times.

What Should We Be Doing In America To Ensure We Have The Hourly Talent We Need?

Okay – I’ve got some ideas. Some you’ll agree with, some you’ll hate, but something has to change. American demographics are not changing. Our labor force is shrinking and we are getting older as a country. We have a crisis staring us in the face, and we are too divided to even see what’s really happening!

  1. Major investment into trades and apprenticeship programs at the high school and post-high school levels. Free College? Screw that. Rich folks can pay for college. Let’s have Free Trades and Apprenticeship programs. Let’s start these in Junior High and High School and continue their post-high school. Let’s have 22-year-old kids making $40-60K a year in skilled occupations.
  2. Blow up public education as we know it. It’s broken. Can we all admit to this? About 70% of kids are not college kids, but we force them down the path of college. Let’s have public education that promotes our best and brightest but also promotes kids who want to work with their hands, who want to work in the arts, etc. If we are the most powerful country on earth, why can’t we have multiple avenues for our kids, whether they are rich or poor?
  3. Encourage our children to once again be firefighters, police officers, home builders, big truck operators, cooks, delivery drivers, etc. Both boys and girls. I was struck when I was in Australia how many construction workers and road workers were female. You rarely see that in America. Our children should feel proud to have an occupation that is helping their community and others, but instead, we, as parents, talk down these occupations. Our children are constantly listening.
  4. Open the Mexican border. Uh oh, he didn’t just say that!? Yeah, you know who has millions of people who want the jobs that Americans don’t want? Mexico. If you don’t want to work that $15/hr job, step aside, there are people that do want those jobs. Plus, actually having a great labor force strengthens America! Would you rather have Mexican citizens come to America and make American products, or have American companies go to China and have the communist government of China make the products sent back to America and much of the profit goes to China or India, or somewhere else outside of America?
  5. Pay Equity laws limiting the spread of pay between the highest-paid executive and the lowest-paid employee. I’m not saying that entrepreneurs and executives don’t deserve great salaries for their efforts and their risks. They do. But should a CEO of a company make a $100M a year and the workers make $17/hr? That just seems a little bit out of line, right? Should a college football coach make $5M a year? It’s a stupid game. A game I love to watch, but come on! We’ve got a bit out of line with the haves and the have-nots.
  6. National Occupation Corp. What if every single American child upon graduating high school, put in one year of service into a select list of hourly occupations? Road workers, infrastructure projects, building affordable housing in their community, building parks, etc. Mormon kids do a two-year missionary to spread their word, and it doesn’t seem to harm them one bit, in fact, most would argue it actually helps them become better adults. Doing a national occupation corp would show some kids they actually love this type of work.
  7. End or fix programs that encourage workers not to work. We need people collecting unemployment to prove they can’t find a job. They can’t get work. Because, for the most part, it’s a lie! There is work everywhere! Our Unemployment Insurance system is broken and needs an overhaul.

How do you like those ideas!? A little GOP, a little Dem, a little socialism! If you’re a regular reader of the blog some of those ideas, coming from me, probably surprise you. This is how desperate I think this situation is! We are facing an economic meltdown in the future if we don’t fix this issue, that will make the great recession look like child’s play. America can not be without a great labor force, and right now, we are quickly trailing the rest of the world in the one thing we always hung our hard hat on.

ChatGPT 101 for HR and TA Pros!

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n “Making HR Tech Easy,” work tech expert Tim Sackett, SHRM-SCP, makes complex HR technology understandable for all HR professionals, because having a high competency in HR technology is critical to moving your HR career forward.

It’s been really hard not to hear about Open.AI’s ChatGPT over the past couple of months. It seems like everyone has been talking about it since its recent release in 2022. But if you’re just now encountering it, ChatGPT is a conversational SaaS artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that understands the intent of complex, specific questions and has the potential to produce human-quality responses. Yes, really human!

I say “potential” because it’s still learning. Although it’s already pretty good, and it gets better every minute as millions of people use it.

Why should you care about an AI chatbot that can answer questions like a human? Because it will most likely change work in both significant and minor ways in the near future, similar to what we saw during the first industrial revolution.

Are chatbots going to take our jobs? Well, if I’m honest, some jobs will be lost for sure, at least initially. But it will also create new jobs, many of which we don’t even know yet. Again, similar to the first industrial revolution.

Will ChatGPT Take HR Jobs?

ChatGPT can…

Click here to read the rest of this article on the SHRM website. 

Utilizing your PTO get 40 days off per year! Yes you can!

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We all know of that one co-worker that just finds a way to take advantage of every possible benefit to the fullest extent possible! These are the folks who, when on a work trip, will find a way to use every single penny of that per diem! “Hey, can I get a $3.27 gift card added to my dinner bill?”

Well, I think I found one of those folks who cracked the code on PTO! Take a look:

@johnsfinancetips Here is how you can take 40 days off with only 15 vacation days. If you had 19 vacation days, you could take up to 47 days off. Also, do you take all your vacation days every year? #pto #vacation #paidleave #work #vaca #timeoff #personalfinance ♬ original sound – John Liang

So, there’s some creative PTO math in this video for sure, but I love it. Of course, how he’s doing this by also adding in paid holidays and weekend days with his PTO, which I hate to tell a young millennial that workers have been doing this since the advent of paid time off, but he’s so excited I don’t want to burst his little bubble.

I wonder what he could do if he added in his “work from home” days! OMG! He would have like 400 days off a year!

What is your favorite PTO trick? Hit me in the comments!

Can you freelance your HR shop? #HRFamous

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On episode 111 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee, Madeline Laurano, and Tim Sackett come together to discuss 2022 and give their thoughts about this year in HR and talent. 

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:00 – Tim asks the crew what their favorite TV show, movie, or book from 2022 was. Madeline is a big Euphoria fan, JLee loved Ted Lasso, and Tim couldn’t choose one (House of Dragon, Peaky Blinders. 2022 was a great year for TV!

8:00 – The crew name some of their favorites (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is Madeline’s). Tim loves Talent by Tyler Cowen. 

10:00 – JLee tried to get Cowen to come speak at a Marriott event and she found that he isn’t too fond of HR folks. She wants to dig in with him and see his real feelings about people who work in HR. 

12:00 – It’s time for the HR and talent year in review! JLee mentions the transition from The Great Resignation into Quiet Quitting. She found that we can get worked up over things that end up not being as noteworthy in the long run. 

14:00 – Tim tried to make “The Big Regret” happened but it never took off…

16:50 – Tim thinks that the HR and talent community needs someone that we can trust for facts and information. He shouts out Roy from SHRM for his journalism work. 

19:00 – Madeline brings up how the biggest topic that isn’t being discussed in HR is the rise of freelancing within the job market. She notes that by 2030, 50% of an organization’s workforce will be freelancers. 

24:00 – Tim says that he thinks there has been a de-emphasis on DEI in 2022. Madeline thinks that within the HR technology space, DEI wasn’t the hot topic of the year. JLee notes that in 2020 there were so many topics culturally that forced the conversations around DEI to be at the forefront. 

26:00 – As we look ahead to 2023, Tim asks the team what points of emphasis he sees coming to the head. Madeline thinks the skills conversation has surprised her in its prominence. She thinks it’s the topic that everyone is obsessed with. 

28:00 – Tim asks JLee where they are at Marriott with skills. She thinks that organizations can be intimidated by the topic and that people are over contemplating where to get started. 

31:30 – JLee’s focus for 2023 is AI and how it will affect content creation.

3 Things You Can Start Today and Be Instantly Better at Recruiting!

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You’re not as effective as you could be right now! Do you know why? If you’re like me, you might start blaming some things: your tech, your boss, your company, your co-workers, etc. It’s easy to blame others for our inefficiencies. It’s incredibly difficult to own it and fix it!

I’ve got some fixes! Heck, I wrote an entire book called “The Talent Fix!” What I’ve found as I work with talent acquisition departments and TA leaders from all over is that most of us fall into some traps around inefficiencies. So, today, I want to give you three things you can start doing that will increase your capacity immediately:

1. Give Your Candidates a Gift! 

We, as TA pros, waste more time dealing with candidates we’ll never hire and try and tell ourselves we are doing this for ‘candidate experience.’ Do you know what sucks as a candidate? Being led on by a company that will never hire you! Stop doing this! If you know you won’t hire a candidate, let them down fast but professionally.

“Look, Charlie, I’m going to level with you. I don’t see you as a fit for our culture/position/organization. This doesn’t say anything about you. It says a lot about us and how we are looking for something very specific. Thank you for your time and professionalism. We will not be moving forward with you.”

This is short and sweet, and 99% of candidates will get the “gift” of being able to move on and find the job and the company that does want their unique gifts they have to offer. This isn’t being mean to a candidate or providing a poor candidate experience. This is helping them and saving you time by not having to deal with this candidate continuing to contact you thinking they have a shot. They don’t.

2. Don’t Get Stuck in the Middle!

I don’t set up interviews with hiring managers for candidates. What I’ve found is the majority of hiring managers and candidates find it annoying that I’m stuck in the middle when two adults just need a quick thirty-second conversation to figure out how to align their schedules! Or, maybe even use technology to do this!

We like to think setting up interviews provides great ‘service’ for hiring managers, but it doesn’t. It’s a really inefficient process to drag in multiple parties to something very simple. Any hiring manager, who is marginally effective at their job, will be able to see this if you have a simple conversation to explain the process inefficiencies.

3. Stop Starting from Scratch! 

Here’s how we go about filling most new job openings. The hiring manager informs us they need to hire. We get the job description and information. We post the job everywhere. We wait for candidates to apply. We screen applicants. We pass these on to the hiring manager and await further instructions.

Every. Time. We. Do. This.

Add one additional step to this process before you post the job. Go into your ATS database and send a quick mass email to each candidate in the database that meets the requirements of the job (if you have the tech, also send a quick text message!). We spend an enormous amount of resources building our ATS database, then we ignore it when it’s filled with candidates who have applied and said, “I love you! I want to come work for you!”

Our first step to finding talent starts in our own database, not out in the wild to see what ‘fresh’ meat is looking like today. If your ATS sucks at search, there are many new technologies on the market labeled as “talent rediscovery” that will reach into your database and do this for you.

So, there are three. The reality is, if you really dig into how you’re doing what you do, you can probably come up with a hundred improvements to make your recruiting more efficient! The key is to look at your processes, not as the one who built it and owns it, but always through the lens of constant improvement.

I don’t have a set recruiting process in my shop. I have a process I’m constantly testing to make better. We try stuff. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn’t, we end that test and try something else. The most effective recruiting shops in the world are effective not because they have the best process but because they continually improve their process!

Mailbag: Should I round up my 2.95 GPA to 3.0 on my resume?

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I had a question come in this week that I wanted to address publicly because it’s one of those strange norms we’ve allowed to go on for too long. Here are the details:

  • A newly graduated college student has a GPA of 2.95.
  • This person’s parents are telling them no one will hire them because their GPA is under 3.0, and they should just round it up to 3.0
  • This new grad does not want to get caught in a lie.
  • This new grad worked almost full time to pay their living expenses while going to college and has major loans for the vast majority of tuition costs.

What should this person do? My advice:

First, your parents are dumb. You are right. You do not want to get caught in a lie, even one as small as “rounding” 2.95 to 3.0. Second, at 2.95 or 3.0, major brands and companies that are seriously concerned with GPA aren’t going to hire you anyway. They are hiring grads with 4.0 and 3.95s.

The better thing would be to add a few words to your resume directly after your 2.95 GPA. Something like this:

BA Basket Weaving, State College, 2022, GPA 2.95 (I worked 30+ hours per week while holding down a full-time credit load to pay for my own living expenses and took loans out to pay for my tuition).

Yo! I might put that on after my GPA, even if my parents paid for my expenses because it’s so desired by companies! I mean, if you really want to add some lies to your resume!

Most hiring managers will kill to have new grads who have a high work ethic and grinded their way through school. What I find is most new grads don’t want to use this fact to their advantage on their resume.

Who do you think a hiring manager wants to hire? A grad with a 3.3 GPA where Mom and Dad paid for most of their expenses or a grad with a 2,95 GPA where the individual found a way to make it through college on their own? 100% of hiring managers will hire the 2.95 over the 3.3! 100%!

Show the grind! Don’t be embarrassed you couldn’t drink your way through school on your parent’s AMEX card. Be proud you ate Ramen and rode a bike to class! The world needs more people who found a way to do it without a lot of help.

Underperformance is not an employee problem, it’s a leadership problem!

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So much conversation around remote workers underperforming, or at least some corporate leadership believes remote workers are underperforming. They might be right. They might be wrong. The reality is this has little to do with remote employees!

What would you do, as a corporate leader, if your on-premise employees were underperforming? Would you send them to work at home?

Sounds stupid to say that out loud, doesn’t it?

Underperformance by any worker, regardless of where they are, is a function of the leader responsible, not doing something about it. You could fire a worker who is underperforming. You could work with that employee and give them extra training and tools. You might give them a mentor. You might adjust their goals and ask them to do extra work to make up for underperformance. You can do so many things that can actually impact performance.

Moving their location of work might actually have an impact on their performance. This is true. But as a primary step, it’s a silly strategy.

Here’s an idea!

Instead of telling remote employees they must return to work because you “believe” they are underperforming, what if we told our leaders it’s your job to ensure the performance of your team? If your team doesn’t meet the agreed-upon goals, we will fire you.

To help you, as a leader, get the best performance out of your team, we are going to give you leadership training and make sure you and your team have the tools they need to perform. If a remote employee isn’t performing to the standards that were set, we will deal with that individual underperforming employee.

I think you’ll find some people will perform up to the level you know equals good performance. You will also find you made some hires of people who are incapable of meeting the performance you need for the resources you are spending on them. You will also find that some remote employees, while they really like being remote, don’t have the personality capable of being effective in a remote environment. You will also find some employees who actually perform better when working remotely.

Here’s the thing!

Great employee performance is very individual in how it is obtained. Great leaders will recognize this and find the best recipe for each individual to perform their best. I have three sons. My first son, I could yell it and push, and he would try harder just to show me up. My second son would literally shut down if I tried to parent him the same way I did my oldest. My third, he just managed me.

Working remotely is great for those people who can perform well working remotely. Some can. Some can’t. Most will fall into the middle and probably perform similarly regardless of where they are sitting.

The problem we have right now is we no longer manage performance. We have a bunch of snowflake bosses who believe if they manage performance, people will quit. Yes, some will. Thankfully! Otherwise, you’ll have to fire them. But, most will actually perform well because most people you hire actually want to be successful.

You see, performance, when done correctly, is about both the company and the employee finding success. I find most employees want to be successful, and if you design your goals correctly, that will make the company successful. I have no desire to work with people who don’t want personal success, regardless of where they work.

What’s Your Favorite Layoff Tech?

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Yeah, this isn’t something we like to talk about! We love talking about technology that helps our employees be better employees or technology that helps us find better and more talent. But the technology that helps us get rid of people, well, that seems a bit depressing, right?

In 2022 there have been public debates about what a recession is. We haven’t had one since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, so there is a very large part of our workforce that has never seen a downturn in the economy. We are on the precipice of an economic downturn, and companies will be laying off workers. Are you ready? How will you handle this? Spreadsheets?

Offboarding will be a major buzzword in 2023!

God bless the marketing pros who try and make termination software sound sexy! We don’t call it firing software or a termination process, we now call it “offboarding”.

At the HR Technology Conference this past year, I was a judge of the startup competition Pitchfest and one technology that was pitched was Onward HR. They actually did a great job and I really liked their pitch, but they were going up against a bunch of software that “helped” employees, not help you offboard them. Not fair to them, they had real HR software, helping solve a real HR and employee problem. A lot of the software pitched sounded positive and sexy, but it was mostly vapor. Onward had real HR stuff!

Big HCM software and payroll software will tell you they also do offboarding, but honestly, what they really do is basically just help you with the process. True offboarding should be about how do we humanely help our employees transition out of the company and quickly become re-employed. But also, a giant part of offboarding is ensuring those same employees actually might want to come back and work for us again at some point.

You see, layoffs, are an inexact science. Most organizations are bad at it because we don’t practice layoffs. We practice hiring. We practice developing employees. We practice performance management. We do not practice layoffs, so we mostly suck at layoffs. Quite frankly, I’ve never met a leader who wants to be good at layoffs!

That means the technology can help. For the most part, layoffs run like this:

  • We make the decision of how many heads we need to cut.
  • We then ask managers of people to make decisions of who specifically.
  • We then try to find a way to let people know where everyone will basically know at the same time (this almost always fails and is terrible).
  • We then try and move on and forget it all happened.

The problem with the last step is we basically move on from those departing employees, and those employees feel that, and it becomes very personal. We try not to keep a connection with previous employees. Then, two years from now, you try and launch an alumni recruiting campaign because you’re growing again and can’t figure out why so many previous employees hate you.

What is my advice for your upcoming layoffs?

Be better. Treat people like humans. I mean treat people like humans you will once again in the future want to have a positive lastly relationship with!

Recession Proofing Your Career w/ @kris_dunn #HRFamous

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On episode 109 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn come together to discuss the rise of tech layoffs, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and how to be a recession-proof recruiter.

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:30 – Tim shares that it feels like the world is on fire with tech layoffs everywhere around us. KD says Marriott is still hiring strong. KD is finding that the “recession” is impacting particular industries more than others unlike any other recession before. 

4:30 – Tim shares some stats around hiring and unemployment. The projected unemployment rate isn’t expected to increase that much in the next 10 years. Tim notes that we’re not making enough people to fill jobs. 

6:40 – KD has a rising senior in college and he is nervous about an impending recession so he made a move to secure a job at a past employer for post-grad. 

11:40 – As we all know, Elon Musk bought Twitter and gutted the Twitter staff. There have been a lot of rumors swirling around that Twitter is on the edge of shutting down any day. 

16:00 – Elon made an email to the Twitter employee saying that it’s going to be a hard place to work at. KD references Tony Hsieh from Zappos when he would give his employees money to leave if their company wasn’t for them. 

20:00 – Tim notes that these are mature companies, not start-ups and they have to be cognizant of their burn rates. 

21:45 – Tim asks KD what recruiters aren’t going to lose their jobs. KD notes that it will be highly dependent on the type of positions being recruited for and the culture of the company they work for but ultimately, it depends on how many positions they close. 

24:20 – Another trait that KD notes in a recession-proof recruiter is the handling of a hiring manager relationship. This depends on how they handle updates and how they help and influence the efficiency of the process. Tim also thinks it’s important to have the skill set of an HR generalist. 

29:30 – Tim thinks it’s vital to be visible as an employee. Although that doesn’t mean you have to be in the office, you have to put yourself out there in whatever space you’re in. 

I’m Your King for Pretty Research!!! #HireMorePrettyPeople

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If you read this blog for a while, you know I’m absolutely fascinated, almost to an unhealthy level, with research about pretty people. First, as a society, we throw way too much praise and privilege at attractive people. Take a look at Instagram follower numbers. Take a look at TikTok follower numbers. We love to pay attention to pretty people!

So, the world of academia did not disappoint, and once again came out with another study that proves my point. Pretty people, on average, are better than ugly people! But this one has a nice little wrinkle that I think most of us will like.

First, I have to come clean with a confession.

I have a disorder. I think it would probably be considered mental, but it has to do with the physical body, so it’s in a confusing space. I have Reverse Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Stop! Before you go all crazy and try to cancel me, I’m not making fun of people that have Body Dysmorphic Disorder! As Taylor Swift poetically says, “You need to calm down.”

100% True Story. When I look in the mirror, I honestly think to myself, “You know what, kid, not bad. People could do worse. Have a great day!” I look at myself getting ready in the morning and think I look pretty damn good!

I then, later that same exact day, will see a picture of myself that someone took and go, “For the love of God! How did I turn into Shrek on stage!” That my reverse body dysmorphia. Some people look in the mirror and see Shrek when they should see a prince. I see a prince when I should probably just see some middle-aged dude who needs to work out more!

Why do I share this confession? Because this new research as it helps me make sense of my own dilemma. The University of Missouri and DePaul University researchers found that pretty people have better lives! Okay, it’s a little more involved than that, but that is my layman’s take on the research! Surprise, surprise! Pretty people’s lives are better! Who knew?!

From the research:

Three studies examined the association between physical attractiveness and meaning in life. Study 1 (N = 305 college students) showed that self-reported physical attractiveness positively correlated with meaning in life. Study 2 (N = 598 noncollege adults) replicated the association between self-reported physical attractiveness and meaning in life and extended those findings, demonstrating that outside perceptions of attractiveness are linked to outside perceptions of how meaningful a person’s life is. Study 3 (N = 331 targets, 97 raters) replicated these findings and probed the nuances of the relationships between outside ratings and self-reports of attractiveness and meaning in life. Across the studies, existential significance, or the feeling that one’s life matters, was the facet of meaning that primarily explained the link between attractiveness and meaning in life. In addition, a person’s view of their own attractiveness is more indicative of their well-being than outsider ratings. Implications for our understanding of meaning in life are discussed.

Turns out, your perception of your own attractiveness is key to your life outlook!

I think this is why our mothers tell us we are all pretty and handsome, even when we aren’t. There’s a chance we just might believe them, and in the end, that’s all that matters! The key is you truly have to believe it. You can’t just be like, “Girl, I slay!” and then ten minutes later, look in the mirror and see flaws.

I love pretty research because it’s all truly based on this concept.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You might not think you’re beautiful, but if a majority of people you surround yourself with think you’re beautiful, well, your world will be a better place. If you truly are attractive, but you surround yourself with people who make you feel ugly, well, your world is awful.

I’m not blind, but I’ve met some blind people and have had this conversation about pretty. Their definition of pretty is way different than mine, and it makes me envious. I would love to “see” the world through their non-seeing eyes for a bit to understand the power of that ability. To see someone as attractive based on non-physical attributes would definitely make our world a better place. We get a bit of this when we meet someone who we feel is of average attractiveness, but the more we get to know the person, the more they become attractive to us. Or, meeting someone who we find very attractive and they open their mouth, and immediately you view them as less attractive.

So, maybe my hypothesis about hiring more pretty people needs to change a little bit. The new hypothesis will be “hire more people who truly believe they are pretty”!