Things…

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I was reminded of this from Fight Club this week – it’s my favorite scene from the movie…

Fight Club – Being clever by peromocibob

So, I probably don’t have anything clever to say, but this has been working out for me just fine –

1. Professional Athletes Who Do Charity work: So, if you read my blog you might think, oh boy Tim’s going to go off on these Rich SOBs – but I’m not.  You see I think people earn their money and they have the right to do with it what they want.  You might argue, well no one deserves to get million of dollars to play a game, but again, I’ll disagree with you – the market determines what they get paid – so they do deserve it – if they didn’t the market wouldn’t pay it.  So, I have true respect and administration for those professional athletes, in any sport, who make the choice to give their time and/or money to worthy causes.  They don’t have to do this – but unfortunately too many people feel like Athletes have to do this. Well, they don’t, just like you don’t.  I have the same respect for anyone who chooses to donate their time or money to what they believe in.

Here’s the one difference I see with pro athletes.  For many kids, these athletes are their heroes – they look up to them, they want to be like them. So, it’s special when an athlete comes to a hospital or school to visit children.  I could do that all day, and while I’m sure the adults at the organizations would appreciate my donation – the kids really don’t care too much.  But watch a kid when his favorite pro sports star comes to see them, and you’ll see Joy in it’s purest form.  I respect those athletes, actors, etc. who make the conscience choice to bring this joy to children.

2. The Michigan side, Lake Michigan Shore Line: Now I might sound like a Pure Michigan ad here – but I’m sick and tired of listening to people around the country tell me how nice their beaches are – Door County, WI can suck my sand bucket, Jersey Shore – please don’t even go there, any Ocean beach – too salty, and sharks.  I’ve been to all these places and no other beach in the country comes close to Lake Michigan beaches during July and August in Michigan.  From St. Joseph to Mackinaw City there is an endless supply of perfect sand beaches (literally hundreds of miles), snug up against clean, blue, fresh water Lake Michigan.  People who haven’t been here are missing one of America’s truly great places – it’s my number 1 thing about living in Michigan.   So, if you can’t get a hold of anyone in Michigan on a Friday afternoon between May and September – now you have an idea why.

 

 

Why Being a Fair HR Leader Won’t Get You Promoted

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Look out HR Leaders – this one is going to sting a little – from The Harvard Business Review:

“In management, fairness is a virtue. Numerous academic studies have shown that the most effective leaders are generally those who give employees a voice, treat them with dignity and consistency, and base decisions on accurate and complete information.

But there’s a hidden cost to this behavior. We’ve found that although fair managers earn respect, they’re seen as less powerful than other managers—less in control of resources, less able to reward and punish—and that may hurt their odds of attaining certain key, contentious leadership roles.”

Wow, that really flies in the face of all that we’ve been taught by our HR Heroes, doesn’t it!   Well, not exactly, just because treating employees fairly and with respect might not get you promoted, it doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do.  That’s a hard pill to swallow thought, right?  How many times in your career have you looked at someone who was promoted and said to yourself “how the hell did they get promoted!?”  It’s usually the leader who is pushing people around, and no one likes, and the CEO taps them on the shoulder for the next VP role.  Some more from the HBR article:

“We’ve long wondered why managers don’t always behave fairly, because doing so would clearly benefit their organizations: Studies show that the success of change initiatives depends largely on fair implementation. Our research suggests an answer. Managers see respect and power as two mutually exclusive avenues to influence, and many choose the latter.  Although this appears to be the more rational choice, it’s not always the correct one—and it poses big risks for organizations.” 

Do you know why managers choose “Power” over “Respect” as a leadership style?  It’s easier!  I mean way EASIER!  Positional power makes your job so much easier to move things through organizations and get things done – but you burn a lot of bridges and relationships on that path.  Getting things accomplished through mutual respect and influence can take time, but ultimately is more rewarding.  Time tends to be the big factor with this, though.  In today’s organizations we frequently feel pushed by time to get things done – Now – and that “now” tends not to work well with “respect”.   More from HBR:

“Companies can benefit from placing more value on fairness when assessing managerial performance. Our early follow-up research suggests that managers whose style is based on respect can gain power. Their path upward may be difficult, but it’s one worth taking, for their company’s sake as well as their own.”

Thus, this is the key – want to build Great leaders in your organization? Give them this time to get things done through leading with a style based in respect.  Want to get something done tomorrow, and not care about how your employees are getting treated?  Let positional power rule the day, and be comfortable with your leaders throwing their weight around the office to get things done.  Let’s face it, this isn’t an all or nothing exclusive thing.  We need our leaders to do both – treat employees with respect, and get results quickly.  That’s why we have HR!  That is a tough thing to accomplish, but HR Pros can help leaders accomplish this task.

Do your employees get paid more for referring Diverse Candidates?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” there workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.  Clearly by bringing in more individuals from under represented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification” – but for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors – diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in most circumstances, then I homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, is you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral – Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.  First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not  I’ll tell you why, is very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this figure is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you get reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic – you will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.  Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person – when you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.  Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or an Hispanic – over a similarly qualified white male – to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.   Work group performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.  What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity – and start educating them on the performance increases we get with diversity.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

 

 

Things…

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After 41 years on this planet I’ve come to know a few things…

1. Parents have no ability, whatsoever, to evaluate their own child’s ability to do anything.  I don’t have to tell you this, you know it – you hear them at the water cooler talking about how great little Johnny is at everything from scoring touchdowns to wiping his own butt.  In my personal estimation, I think 1 out of 100 parents can even come close to truly being able to come close to evaluating what their children are actually good at.   I think it must be some crazy law of the universe, like the Law of Parenting, in which, parents only have the ability to truly and honestly believe their kids rock at everything they attempt.  I guess in Leave It To Beaver sense, that’s probably a nice little world to live in. The irony of all this is the majority of parents would say the exact opposite of this – so here’s the caveat – if a parent is talking about their own kid in a critical way, well that’s OK, but try and talk to their parent about their child’s short comings, and they’ll lose their f’ing mind!  I call this the Mama Bear Syndrome. (I can call my kid ugly, but the heck if I’m going to let you call them ugly!)

2. People tend to carry around negative stuff way to long, like luggage – they just won’t throw it out.  But throw positive stuff away on a daily basis.  One of my super powers is to throw negative stuff away very quickly and move on – but I also probably hold onto to positive stuff for too long!

3. If someone needs water during an interview – they probably aren’t going to do well in the interview.  Let’s face it, if you don’t have the ability to sit in front of another person and talk for an hour without a drink of water – do you really think I should give you a job?!  I think that last line is funny, because if I know anything – I know that HR Pros are the best at coming up with arbitrary reasons for not hiring people, that make absolutely no sense, whatsoever.  Like: not hiring someone who wears white socks with dress shoes,  Not hiring someone who has deeply, embedded wrinkles in their shirt, not hiring someone because they said “Um” to many times (an they have an over/under number on how many “Um”s are acceptable), not hiring someone because they are from a rival university, not hiring someone because they had a typo on their resume (this one I don’t understand at all – so the candidate is a perfect fit, but missed one typo, and they’re out? Really! So, short-sighted.), not hiring someone because they chewed to loudly during the interview lunch, etc.   Makes my – I’m not hiring you if you need a drink of water during the interview, not seem so bad now, doesn’t it?  BTW – if someone asks for and needs to drink a Diet Mt. Dew during the interview – I’m totally hiring them.

 

 

 

7 Hard Truths HR Must Learn To Accept

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In a perfect world we all get a seat at the table,  all of our employees go online and fill out their open enrollment forms on time, and all of our hiring manager give us immediate feedback on each candidate resume we send them.  Unfortunately, none of us live in a perfect world, there are some hard and fast truths in our profession that we have to accept, and by accepting those truths, it allows us to let go and move on with trying to better our organizations each day.

Accepting these truths doesn’t mean we are giving up, and not trying to change our profession, our organizations and ourselves for the better.  Accepting these truths gives us permission to accept our reality, and it allows us to work towards, little-by-little, making the HR profession better.

Here are the 7 Hard Truths HR Must Learn To Accept:

#1 – Focusing on compliance, will never allow you to become strategic.  Operations in our organizations have long known this, and this alone allows them to control most of the decision making power in your organization.  A compliance focused department, will never be innovative, it will never creative, it will never be Strategic.

#2 – Your Performance Management system, will not fix everything.  In fact no system or process will fix everything – we drive a people business – thus we deal with a very nebulous product – people.  As soon as you create a process or implement a system, some hiring manager or employee will find a way to find a flaw in it. It’s OK not to be perfect.

#3 – You’ll never get all the resources you need to do the job you want to do.  People are your most important asset, but shareholders/stakeholders need a return on investment.  Thus, resources are always going to first go to where that return is highest, and sorry but HR isn’t first on the list.

#4 – Your companies Deepest Secrets are only a Tweet away. And your social media policy and lock down of social media sites isn’t going to stop these secrets from getting out, if you have a rogue employee who wants to get them out.  This is similar to the reality of you will probably more likely die on your way to work in a traffic accident, then in a plane crash on your way to vacation – but we tend to worry more about the plane crash.

#5 – Your employees and managers will never fully support themselves on Self-Service Modules. It’s a dream, sold to you by software vendors, and you buy into it because you hate dealing with the daily administration of HR.  No matter what, we’ll always have some of this to do – it also, is OK, it’s not what we do all day, every day – no job is perfect.  Pull up your big boy pants and help them out – you’ll live.

#6 –Fraternization will always happen.  We manage adults (even if they don’t act like adults), and until the end of time adults, put in close proximity of each other, will eventually be attracted – blame G*d, blame laws of the universe, blame your parents – I don’t care.  It’s a fact – deal with it.

#7 – You’ll Never get the full respect you deserve.  This is a function of organizational dynamics.  HR doesn’t make the money, operations makes the money – respect will be given to those who actually keep the doors open and the lights on.  If you got into HR for your deep need for respect, sorry, you picked the wrong career.  On the plus side, we get a lot of conference room cookie leftovers!

 

We’re puttin’ the Band back Together

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Classic line from the movie Blues Brothers, that is used more than once as Jake and Elwood good around and visit past band mates in the attempt to – well – put the band back together.  I was reminded of this concept last week when I got a call from a former peer I worked with at another company.  This peer just got a new position as an HR Executive for a large company – and he was attempting to put our “HR Band” back together!

I’m not sure if I was the first call or 5th call – doesn’t really matter – what matters is the concept of how you build a great HR Team.

Here are the ingredients:

1. Great Leader – this is someone who has organizational influence (hopefully right or left hand of the CEO) and has a vision of what makes an organization a great place to work, and the desire and passion to take the organization there.  The last part is important – I’ve worked for leaders that had the vision, but didn’t have the passion to get it there – you need a leader who is going to carry that flag!

2. A Talent Guy/Gal – If you only have money for 2 ingredients -I’m spending my money on someone who understands how to bring great talent into an organization, and has shown in their past the ability to do this.  Again, this is about getting leaders aligned under a talent-mindset where everyone is working under one guiding principle – To Increase The Talent of the Organization.   You don’t get to great (your leaders vision) with average talent – it just doesn’t work that way.

3. Top HRIS Pro – Every organization has limited resources, and a great HRIS person is worth their weight in gold – for the simple fact, they’ll help you do more with less better than any other person you hire.  If you are building a top notch HR team – you need the best HRIS person you can find!

4. HR Brand Manager – Many organizations let Marketing do this – on my team, I’m not giving this away – it’s to important.  Don’t get me wrong – this person must be aligned with my marketing department – I don’t want to go off the reservation on my messaging between my employment brand and corporate brand – but I also don’t want marketing controlling my employment brand completely.  Great places to work, get there by attracting the kind of person your organization seeks to make it great – and this happens through marketing.

5. HR Process Manager:  I don’t want my leader to be a process person – they are the visionary – but I need the details, I need the process – I need this baby running like a clock!  That takes a special personality to dig into and perfect all those details – I need a process person.  A person who isn’t going to roll over, but fight for every dotted “i” and crossed “t”.  A person who is going to make me sit through a 3 hour process flow meeting on my hiring process – so that we know every piece is going to work perfectly. Why? Because that gives you high credibility within the organization.

You give me these 5 individuals and I’ll change your organization into a great places to work in 12-24 months – depending on how screwed up you are!

 

Things…

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Summer is in full swing in Michigan which means we have about 6 more days to enjoy before winter, but here are some summer things that I’m enjoying right now:

Slip-N-Slides: I have an 8 year old son, and about 37 kids under 9 in my neighborhood and my wife recently went out and got the side-by-side racing slip-n-slide – so you can imagine the amount of kids losing their minds at my house right now!    One Warning slip-n-slides aren’t made for adults, there is nothing about running and diving onto a wet piece of plastic that an adult should attempt – you’ve been warned.  Now a fun game that the Dads can put together is slip-n-slide race betting.  It’s pretty simple, here is a list of what you need: lawn chairs, cooler of adult beverages and money.  Then you sit around bet on kids winning slip-n-slide races and just really enjoy the quality time with your kids – who says Dads aren’t involved!

Dad Ball: Let me do this with full disclosure – my name is Tim Sackett, and I’m a Parent Coach…I feel like I have to give the AA introduction, because I’m definitely going to need therapy once my kids are all through the parent-coaching stage!   Coaching your own kids is probably the closest thing to child-parent-abuse without physical contact that I can imagine.  Dads completely lose their freaking minds when coaching their own kids – but not all in the same way – so I’ll give you run down of types of Dad Ball Coaches:

– Coach Moses: This is the Dad who thinks his kid walks on water!  You know the type, this is the Dad who has a kid who is probably a decent player, but there are other kids who are better, but he continues to put his kid in prime positions in the field and batting lineup – even when they don’t produce.  Coach Moses will tear apart a team faster than any other type of coach.  The only time a Coach Moses can be successful, is when their kid is truly the best kid on the team – and it’s very apparent.

– Coach Dalai Lama: This is a Dad who tries to make it all about the “experience”.  This Dad is all about fairness, and equality – winning isn’t the goal, learning is the goal.  After all these are just children, and we’ve been given this gift and opportunity to mold them, and we need to protect this opportunity like the fragile butterfly out of the cocoon.  This is also the team that get’s beat by hundred runs every game!

–Coach Knight (as in Bob Knight):  This is the Dad who yells – yells – and yells.  He yells at the players, yells at the umpires, yells at the other parents, yells at his mother – you get the idea.  These are the guys that believe the only way you get the most out of your kids is by yelling at them to keep them motivated.  This is usually the most hated of all Dad Ball coaches – but from personal experience, I’ve had some Coach Knights that were actually the best coaches.

– Coach Bobby Boucher (pronounced Boo shea):  From the Adam Sandler movie The Waterboy – This is a Dad Ball Coach who played the sport in high school, but wasn’t any good – thus the “waterboy” reference…  You can imagine, this coach is trying to re-live their failed youth, but driving their team to win the league championship.  This coach is usually the main figure on the team – out in front of the actual team – the winning is all about their job as a coach, the losing is all about those idiot kids failing.  Nothing like a grown man re-living this life’s failures through the blood, sweat and tears of adolescent boys!

50 Ways to Piss off an HR Pro

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I actually don’t have 50 ways to piss off an HR Pro – well, let me take that back – I could easily come up with 50 ways, but you don’t pay me to do this and that would be a lot of work (well, probably not that much work, but you still don’t pay me) – BUT, I do have one major way to Piss off an HR Pro – but liked the title from Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover:

The Wall Street Journal had a pretty cool article this week called: The Unemployed Worker’s New Friend: Outsourcers which dives into a relatively new industry of offshore companies that are mass sending a person’s resume to as many job openings as possible, for very little investment.  Now don’t get me wrong, resume services have been around for a long time, but add off-shoring to the mix and some language barriers – and what you get is a recipe for a bunch of unqualified resumes coming across your desk. From the article:

For a $10 monthly fee ($40 for the first month) an automated service called MyJobHunter.com sent out more than 500 job applications in five months on Mr. Moomjean’s behalf. Within a day after a job opening hit the Web, the service scanned it for certain keywords. In Mr. Moomjean’s case, the words included “sales” and “retail.” If the listing was a match, the service would fire off a résumé to the employer without so much as showing it to the applicant…

In a span of 240 hours over three months last summer, JobSerf’s staff applied to 711 jobs on behalf of IT manager Colin Campbell, 34, of Cincinnati. Mr. Campbell said he got dozens of calls from potential employers. But he didn’t get his current job that way; he got it through a personal connection.

On a single day last summer, Greg Moffitt, 47, of Houston, sent out more than 100 applications via MyJobHunter. An irritated recruiter, who got his résumé three times, eventually called to ask him to stop.

“I knew that 20% of positions were a complete miss, but I’d rather have too many submissions than too few,” Mr. Moffitt said.

So, here’s the #1 way to piss off an HR Pro – send them a resume for a position that you are not remotely qualified for!

Look, I get it – when you’re out of work, sending out 500 resumes to any job seems like the right thing to do – and what the heck – if I can get a 9 year old in China to do it for $4 a day – well, that’s just the good old lazy American way!   But it’s not.  There aren’t easy ways out in finding the “right” job. Sure a resume service will find you some opportunities, but mass sending resumes isn’t going to find you that perfect fit – you need to put in the research and make the calls and tap your inner circle of contacts.  Plus, I truly believe there is some value that you gain from the sweat equity of looking for a job, and sending out those 500 resumes on your own.  You gain some empathy, some respect, some appreciation – for which many of us take for granted – Being Employed!

So, do it yourself – you don’t have a job, so you have 24 hours a day to spend to look for one. You don’t have a pay check, so even $10 per month is too much to spend on something you can do yourself.  Plus – you won’t piss me off when I get your resume sent to from a bot in India for my sales position, when you haven’t sold anything since that lemonade stand you had when you were 8 – and even then only your mom bought.

No Call, No Shows

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Yep, it happened again – I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am – I can’t stop myself!  As long as I’m in HR/Recruiting I will never understand how a candidate can accept an interview and then not show up – and worst off, not even call to tell you they are not going to show up.

Is there a worse feeling as an HR Pro?

You have your hiring team assembled, copies of resumes and interview decks, hot coffee, cold water, and then you wait, at first you start to think something must have happened – car accident, bad directions, alien invasion! – there is no way the person wouldn’t have risked life and limb to make this interview – you fear for their safety.  Slowly but surely it started to hit you, you got stood up – No Call, No Show.  The next feeling is a little embarrassment – you have peers and clients you support taking time out to come to an interview you set up, your reputation is on the line – how dare they!  Next comes the anger.  I’m going to black list this person from ever getting a job at my company!  Hell, we should put a list together of people who do this and share it professionally – in fact I’m going to start a website for HR Pros to publicly reprimand individuals who No Call, No Show – it will be called – www.NoCallNoShowsSuck.com!

I think the final emotion I feel when someone No Call, No Shows is sadness.  In what kind of a world do we live in when someone can’t extend the basic courtesy of calling beforehand and cancelling the interview?  It’s so simple, so understanding, just basic common courtesy – “I know I said I wanted to come, but things have changed and I need to cancel, I know longer want to interview with your company.”   Short, sweet, simple. Easy.  Yet, every single person in HR has had at least 1 No Call, No Show.

So, how do you make sure this will never happen again to you?

The only way that you can make sure this won’t happen to you (and even then it might not be 100%) is to get each candidate multiple outs.  The talking points go something like this:

“Mr. Candidate, I know you are probably getting calls daily from organizations – your background and experience is very impressive.  We would like to bring you in for a personal face to face interview with our team.  We want to make this work out for you, etc., etc. etc….(you know the drill – but here’s the important part)  I know you probably have multiple irons in the fire, if at any time you decide you no longer want to pursue our position – can I ask one small favor from you? (yes, make it a question, and wait for an answer)  I’m going to give you my personal cell phone number, could you please call me and tell me you won’t make it?  I have many people taking time out of their schedule to meet with you, and if you decide not to come, I owe it to them to give them this time back for their schedules.”

It’s one paragraph and yes, you have to do it for every single interview.  But you won’t – you know why?  Because you assume that every person will be courteous, that every person you set up for an interview has no better potentials than yours, that every single person has the emotional ability to put you through rejection.  But they don’t!  The above paragraph is letting the candidate know that it’s alright for them to reject you, that you get it and you are fine with it.  It’s not 100%, but it works about 99.9% of the time.  Let candidates know its alright for them to reject you – and you’ll have less rejection!

Things…

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Spent about 10 days away from the office between attending SHRM11 and going on vacation with my family to Colorado, so here are my takeaways from those 10 days:

Vacations: Only rich people go on vacation – or at least how I like to go on vacation – it’s crazy expensive.  Here’s a conservative run down on 5 days in Colorado for my family of 5:

  • Flights – $1250
  • Hotel – $750
  • Rental SUV – $450
  • Food – $600 (included one trip to Cheesecake Factory as the “big” night out! That’s how Team Sackett rolls!)
  • Entertainment: $500 (Breckenridge Fun Park, Cave of the Winds)
  • Shopping: $700 (mostly my wife, but that isn’t normal – it’s usually for me, she deserved it after having the boys by herself for my SHRM trip!)
  • Total cost: $4250 roughly

$4000+ dollars for 5 days!  That seems crazy to me, I mean that could have paid for 6 months of community college to one of my kids! And the best part of the whole trip – watching my 7 year old son get completely engrossed in looking for gemstones in a fake panning for gold setup – cost – $8 (he could have done that all day).  I want someone to tell me how people go on multiple trips per year – I have people I know that do this 2-4 times per year – and my only conclusion is the must make way more money than I do!

Vegas: 5 days in Vegas seems like 3 months.  The time change doesn’t help – going from EST to PST kicks you in the butt, but the energy surrounding Vegas just sucks the life out of you after a few days.  I don’t understand those people who love Vegas and want to return again and again – you are not my people. Give me a calm lake on a warm day with a sanding beach – and those are my people.

Connections: I’m always open to meeting new people and look forward to it.  This social media thing gives me a chance to meet people I normally wouldn’t and I continue to be pleasantly surprised and amazed at the people I meet.  Last week I got to have dinner with Ryan Estis and Michael Long, we were brought together by Smartbrief’s, Mary Ellen Slayter – who is completely awesome herself.  Prior to meeting both I would describe Ryan as this Marcus Buckingham-Man-crush-wanna-be, pro speaker, probably doesn’t really get HR type. Michael was the faux HR superhero The Red Recruiter, who seemed bigger than life to me with the whole red shoes thing and seemingly trying to save the world one recruit at a time.  A funny thing happens when you finally get to me people in person, your perceptions sometimes get blown away – that is what happened to me.  Ryan is what I want to be when I grow up – but for the simple fact we are the same age – although he looks 10 years younger than I.  He gets it – not just HR – but business – if you have a change to see him speak you have to check him out.  Michael is that guy trying to save the world one recruit at a time – and that’s completely awesome – he has “real” passion for what he does and it’s so refreshing to see that in a person.  Both were as down to earth people who you’ll ever meet and we talked and laughed through the entire dinner. Thanks Mary for the setup!