E105 – HR Famous Pod – Work Spouses and Service Awards!

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On episode 105 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Madeline Laurano, Jessica Lee, and Tim Sackett come together to discuss work spouses, length of service awards, and the best new candle to buy as a gift!

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

2:00 – Tim’s headed on vacation to the Cayman Islands. Although it’ll be hot, he’ll be by the ocean!

5:00 – JLee loves these candles, and Tim sent a cheeky one to the crew.

7:20 – JLee asks Tim about his 2 work wives. They’ve been working with him for over 10 years and have been through a lot together. She wonders how he has work wives when he’s in charge of the company. 1

0:00 – Madeline said her work relationships have changed since she started her firm. Now, her work wives/husbands are other industry people, not people that work for and with her.

12:30 – Tim talks about someone who he worked for a long time with that left recently and how her leaving was a lot harder than he expected.

15:00 – JLee brings up the topic of “length of service” awards and how people want to be recognized. She asks the crew what we should be doing with these awards.

18:30 – Madeline did research in 2021 if they had received any recognition in that year for their work. She found that only ½ employees received a “thank you” in the first year of the pandemic.

21:30 – Tim likes the “points” system where you give out other recognition gifts and points to people you find doing a good job at the company.

24:00 – JLee notes a study where at their hotels, smaller gestures are more impactful and meaningful than really big events and “wows” that require a lot of time and work.

25:30 – Amazon color-coded their badges to reflect how long they’ve been at the company. JLee says that they got a lot of hate for this, but Tim says that he likes the idea.

30:00 – Tim mentions that when he’s doing recognition with his team, he tries to get them something they would never get for themselves and something that is really high quality. He thinks recognition gifts should be good quality regardless of price point.

Michigan Recruiter’s Conference – Nov. 10! Tickets OnSale Now!

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FYI – Due to limited seating capacity – this event will sell out quickly, and this will be the only event in Michigan this year. Sorry to my TA friends in West and Mid-Michigan, but we will work to have an event closer to you in 2023!

The only specifically designed Recruiter conference for corporate Talent Acquisition Pros and Leaders in Michigan! The Michigan Recruiters Conference is designed to be an annual event that will bring in the brightest recruiting minds in the country to nurture and develop corporate recruiting as a whole in Michigan. The event organizer is Tim Sackett. 

The 2022 Michigan Recruiters Conference will be held on Thursday, November 10th, in Detroit at DTE. Registration begins at 8 am, and the conference begins at 8:45 am sharp!

For the 2022 Michigan Recruiters Conference, we are bringing in some of the best talent acquisition thought leaders in the world:

  • Global TA Leader, Marriott, and Author, Kris Dunn.
  • TA Expert and Analyst, Aptitude Research, Madeline Laurano.
  • Global TA Leader, General Motors, Cyril George.
  • LinkedIn and Branding expert Brenda Mellar.
  • Branding& Conversational AI Expert, Paradox, Josh Zywien.
  • Director of Recruitment Ops, Beaumont Health, Charlotte Byndas.
  • Site HR Director General Motors, Stephanie Zywien.
  • Senior Sourcing Expert, Guild Education, Hunter Casperson.
  • Author of The Talent Fix and TA Execution expert Tim Sackett.

We also have sponsor presentations from the folks at HireEZ, Paradox, Greenhouse, and DTE! Not to sell us but to teach us! We don’t feed the vendors! 

Also, you are getting the greatest opportunity in Michigan to network with your talent acquisition peer group to connect and share! 

This is, for sure, our best lineup yet! National conferences would beg to get this group of folks in one room for one day! You don’t have to beg, we pulled every friend card we have to get them here for you! 

Register Here for Michigan Recruiter’s Conference 2022

Check it out at www.MichiganRecruits.com!

Why Does Spam Recruiting Work?

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I just got done deleting the 17th phishing email from my personal email inbox today. Comcast, Amazon, Princes from far-off lands, I’ve never been more popular and, apparently, soon-to-be rich!

I was asking our Cyber Security company why phishing is still such a big deal. I mean, don’t we all know by now that some Nigerian Prince isn’t going to give us a million dollars or that Amazon doesn’t send us emails asking for our credit card numbers or passwords!? There is no way someone can be this stupid, right!?

Apparently, I’m way wrong, we are all still a lot stupid! 

The reason phishing and spam are not because they are really tricking us. It’s the sure volume of messages and cadence. While we can all spot a fake fairly easily, can you always spot a fake when it’s sent a thousand times, all different times, with all different designs and strategies? Scammers will send a million to get one click. That one click will pay off.

Therein lies the strategy of why Spam Recruiting still works. It’s not about being good or the best. It’s about being there all the time, knowing a certain percentage of the time will be the right time! Do we like it? Well, I guess that depends on who you are. If you happen to be that one person who gets the spam recruiting message at the exact time you’re desperate for a job, then yes, you will like it!

If you are the superstar performing software engineer getting twenty spam recruiting messages a day, you hate our industry!

Spam Recruiting Works Because It Works Some of the Time

I have never met one American-based TA Leader who believes that Off-Shore Recruiting firms (you know, the off-shore RPO spam emails you constantly get all day long) actually are good. For the most part, they don’t recruit. They spam. Because they pay next to nothing to their workforce, they can spam a whole bunch and still make money, even if the entire process truly sucks.

They don’t have to be good. When you’re being paid like $10 a day, all you have to do is spam a couple of thousand people a week to get one placement a month, and you’re making a profit for the “man”! Any company engaging in off-shore recruiting for hiring in the U.S. is basically engaging in slave labor. But I digress. Back to crappy recruiting.

Bad recruiting is a lot like bad sex. If you really need a job, you don’t care how you get it. Which perpetuates you just continuing to be bad.

Spam recruiting works, and will always work, because the world will always have candidates who just need a job. They don’t care that you’re awful at your job. They don’t care that you are spamming them. All they care about is getting the job. Also, if you do care. If you do hate bad, spammy recruiters. It turns out you also are fine with them being awful when you’re out of a job!

Spam works because we are all vulnerable at some point. It feeds on us being weak, naive, and desperate. But, at the end of the day, it works. It doesn’t work well. But it does work. And that sucks.

The US has Relatively Low Rates of Hiring Discrimination. But you don’t believe it!

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Do we have hiring issues in the US? Yes. Are many of those issues really bad? Yes. Is the US worse than most other countries? Hmmm…

There was a meta-field study done with over 200,000 job applicants (that’s a massive data sample) in 9 counties in Europe and North America. The study found there is hiring discrimination in every country, but some countries are worse than others:

What did the study find?

– The USA has one of the lower rates of discrimination while France and perhaps also Sweden have very high levels.

– If you travel the world, the findings are very surprising. If you have just sat your butt in the US, this is hard for you to comprehend with the US’s history of slavery, and you probably find this surprising. Turns out, many other parts of the world still act like discrimination isn’t happening and ignore they have a problem.

– Capitalism, in fact, is likely to predict less discrimination in hiring. Again, competitive hiring practices actually help decrease discrimination in the labor market.

The authors of this study are Lincoln Quillian, Anthony Heath, Devah Pager, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, Fenella Fleischmann, and Ole Hexel. A very diverse group of academics from some of the top educational institutions in the world. Here is what they had to say about the study:

“National histories of slavery and colonialism are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a country to have relatively high levels of labor market discrimination. Some countries with colonial pasts demonstrate high rates of hiring discrimination, but several countries without extensive colonial pasts (outside Europe), such as Sweden, demonstrate similar levels. Likewise, the lower rates of discrimination against minorities in the United States than we find for many European countries seem contrary to expectations that emphasize the primacy of connection to slavery in shaping the contemporary level of national discrimination. These results do not suggest that slavery and colonialism do not matter for levels of discrimination, rather they indicate that they matter in more complex ways than suggested by theories that posit simple, direct influences of the past on current discrimination.”

And

“Low discrimination in Germany could be a result of distinctive hiring practices in Germany: Employees typically submit far more extensive background information at initial application than in most other countries—including, for instance, high school transcripts and reports from apprenticeships (Weichselbaumer 2016). This may reduce the tendency of employers to assume lower skills and qualifications among nonwhite applicants, which is one potential source of discrimination. If so, this suggests the importance of high levels of individual information about applicants as a method to mitigate discrimination (c.f., Wozniac 2015; Auspurg et al. 2018).”

So, France and Sweden are the most Discriminatory Countries in HIring?!

Well, not exactly. They are the most of this study of nine countries.

I would bet you would see higher rates of hiring discrimination in places like Japan, China, South Africa, etc. Why? How many non-Japanese do you see on the Japanese national team? How many non-Chinese? One non-Chinese, an American snowboarder, was in the winter Olympics, and that was the first one in their history. Now take a look at the US and the other European countries. All of them have multiple people from other countries on their national teams. Is that hiring? Nope, but it shows a willingness to welcome and evolve people from other countries in a very transparent way.

Just because other similar Capitalist countries tend to be more discriminatory in their hiring practices than the US also doesn’t make us better. There are still massive improvements that need to be made. I point all of this out because you will never see this type of study highlighted by the mainstream media most HR and TA leaders and pros read. This won’t be on CNN and Forbes. We love to act like every other country is so much better. They aren’t, and we aren’t. We are all struggling with getting better and closer to the same than most of us realize.

Does working for a bad boss help your career more than a good boss?

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If you’re like most people, you’ve probably worked for some good bosses and some bad bosses. The best bosses I worked for were supportive and empathetic. They cared about me as a person and supported me as a professional. The bad bosses usually just focused on themselves and what I could do for them.

I know many people who will talk about working for a terrible boss and actually show signs of professional PTSD! We joke, but sometimes the experience can be that awful. There was a recent study done with refugees who are survivors of torture. I’m not saying working for a bad boss is “torture,” but I know I can find some people who would argue it is!

Here goes, Tim! Good bosses, bad bosses, and torture survival!

The study mentioned above found that refugees who were tortured, compared to those who didn’t get tortured, became more resilient. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, comes to mind.

I think the same can be said about working for a bad boss compared to a good boss.

Employers are constantly looking for resilient employees. We try to measure resiliency in pre-employment assessments. During the past few years, resilience as a hiring competency has been very hot.

I have this theory that working for a bad boss or a bad company that treats you poorly, in many ways, makes you a better employee than you working for a great boss and a great company. And it all has to do with raising your level of resilience! You see, when times are good, and things are relatively easy, you are exercising that resiliency muscle.

I’m not saying you get soft working for great leaders and great companies, but you might get a little soft!

We see this constantly in the world as we go through great economic times. Everyone gets a little softer. Hard economic times force us to work that resiliency muscle. To harden up a bit, to grow a thicker skin, put up with some stuff that we wouldn’t normally, to survive.

Bad Bosses and Bad Companies Make More Resilient Workers!

There’s a fine line between becoming resilient and getting broken. That’s the hard part. Like the study found, in some cases, a person just gives up and accepts their fate. They begin to believe this was somehow deserved. The key is to find the “survivors,” those who wouldn’t give in or give up. Those who actually become more resilient from their experiences. Those are your diamonds in the rough from an employee perspective.

Too often, we only want to hire from winners. “Well, they worked for Google. They must be awesome!” And they might be. But I want “awesome” and “resilient” when I know we’ll face tough times. When we have to dig ourselves out of a hole, from a business perspective, I want to have some people who have been in a hole before and found their way out!

Another option is looking for strong workers who work for a bad boss at a good employer. We all know the world, at every company, is littered with some bad bosses, no matter the brand. I have a feeling the same resilience is built up over time. Having to “deal” with a bad boss for a while, and figuring out how to be still productive and get things done is an amazing skill to have acquired in your career. Even though it won’t feel that way at the time!

Yep, today Tim wrote about how refugee torture victims and working for bad bosses is similar to how we build resilience. Now to work on a case study with my own team…

Stay hard.

I’ve Got a Great Business Opportunity For You!

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No. No, you don’t. You have a great business opportunity for you, and you need me to make it happen.

Email Subject Lines in the Past Week

  • “Business Opportunity”
  • “Potential Opportunity”
  • “Great Business Opportunity for You!”

There was one common theme with each one of these messages sent to me. Not one of them was an opportunity for me to make money, but each was an opportunity for me to pay someone else money!

Idiots Using these Subject Lines

Do you seriously believe that these subject lines are working? That people are reading them and going, “OMG! I’m the Luckiest Girl alive today! This beautiful human chose me for this opportunity that I was neither looking for nor really even wanting! #Blessed”

I have a feeling there is something clinically wrong with the person who uses this subject line. I want to get them professional help. Medication, therapy, a punch to the throat, whatever it takes, I’m a giver, a helper of sorts.

I would love it if we could have a law where if some moron uses a subject line like this, we can send them away for a while. Like prison, but more used car sales lot they have to live in for eternity. Every day, all day, just wandering the lot and getting approached by an overly aggressive used car salesman that won’t leave them alone.

Look, I Get It 

I run a company that has to sell our services. Every morning I get up, shower, get dressed, and head off to work. “Gotta make the donuts!” They don’t make themselves. Our world is predicated on someone buying whatever it is we’re selling.

So, I feel for you, but I’ve got a few words of advice –

Be Better! 

Be someone who you want your kids to be. Be someone you want your grandmother to talk about at bridge club. Be someone who will get referred by one client to a future client.

Also, I get you can’t just put up a subject line that says, “Hey, buy my crappy lead generation tool!” (Although, I bet your click-through rate on that is a minimum of 100% higher than “Business Opportunity.”

The world isn’t looking to do work, to make you money. Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe your subject line of “Business Opportunity” was just one big miss by me. You were saying, “Hey, I’ve got a business opportunity for me. I just need a sucker like you to bite” if that’s the case, my bad, continue being an awful person.

Great Business Opportunity

As always, I’m here to help fellow sales pros. Here are some subject lines that are guaranteed to get some click-through:

– I’ve got your bag full of puppies!

– You need to verify your Pornhub password

– BOGO on Wine, Chocolate, and Jimmy Choos

– Is this your Mom on Facebook?

“But, Tim, these are all lies!” I know, and I’m super excited you found the commonality between my subject lines and yours. Good luck!

Career Advice My Mom Gave Me

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My mom passed away a couple of years ago, but I’m constantly reminded of advice she gave, or more accurately, things she told me, but at the time, I probably blew off as stuff your parents tell you that you believe they have no idea about! Sound right, parents!?

I had someone come into our office recently to interview. Right before this person came in, I was driving into our parking lot, and it struck me that every single vehicle in the parking lot was newer and clean. A bunch of nice-looking cars! How stupid is it to notice something like that?

That’s when I remembered my Mom telling me that when you go on an interview, pay attention to the cars in the parking lot. She said you want to work at a company where the employees drive nice cars because that means they pay well. If there are a bunch of junkers and a few nice ones, only a few people are getting paid well!

And there it is, Mom’s advice that I thought was stupid at the time it was given, and all of a sudden, it was pretty accurate!

I’ve given out a lot of career advice over the years. Some are probably based on my own experience, and some were given to me by all those mentors in my life (parents, grandparents, respected leaders, and peers).

Here is some of my favorite career advice:

– Don’t chase titles. Chase responsibility. I chased titles, and I missed out on some great career outcomes by not being patient enough. All along, I had the responsibility I wanted, and that should have been enough.

– Culture always wins. We think as leaders, we can just come into any company and make the culture our own. You can’t. You can make the culture something new, but it will be a mix of the old and what you bring to it. It will not be just yours entirely.

– Find ways to stand up for your trusted advisors publicly, and never break that trust, privately. Professionally, you are the measure of your circle of trust. You will have times when you can demonstrate that trust both publicly and privately. Make sure you do both as often as you can.

– Don’t be a disgruntled employee, ever. If you are underpaid or underappreciated, just leave. Being disgruntled will follow you in ways you don’t even know. Being a strong employee that leaves to pursue other employment will not follow you.

– Hire people who are so talented they scare the sh*t out of you. I want to be surrounded by people who should have my job. That’s how I will continue to push myself to be better and actually create the greatest outcomes for all involved. I’m scared because they are so good, they will take my job unless I get better! One of my mentors once asked me, before she hired me, “Are you better than me?” The only way she could hire me was if I said, “Yes.”

What is the best career advice you have been given by someone close to you that, at the time, you might not have agreed with, but over time you’ve come to appreciate?

Hit me in the comments!

Is More Efficient Recruiting Always Better? #TruthBomb

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If you’re in HR or TA and read this blog on a regular basis, you know I’m all for making our recruiting process as efficient as possible! Primarily because so many of us are woefully inefficient in using our technology and the belief that a more involved process must be a better process.

I’m a little nervous about the future and recruiting efficiency.

I think in our rush to become ever more efficient. We might miss out on some great talent. At this point in the recruiting tech stack, I can actually automate every single piece. Anything you have a person do in recruiting, I can automate. I can even ensure that candidates “don’t” get dispositioned if that’s how you like to play it! I mean, about 50% of you don’t do that now, so it seems like that is probably the way you like it.

If recruiting was only about taking a requirement, matching that requirement to available talent, screening that talent, interviewing that talent, assessing that talent, and onboarding that talent, well then, technology can do that better and more efficiently than humans at this point. But, I think recruiting has always been about getting the best talent for your organization.

Available vs. best is where the technology starts to fall down if talent truly makes a difference in your organization. Honestly, for many, “best available” will work just fine, and it has for decades. The vast majority of organizations are hiring the best available at this point.

Technology is exceptional at hiring the best available. Technology hasn’t figured out how to hire the best talent that isn’t openly available at this point. If you don’t have that talent in your database, and that talent isn’t active on LinkedIn or other job boards, technology has a really hard time getting your message in front of them.

The future of recruiting isn’t about efficiency. That is already here. The future of recruiting is about your organization’s ability to actually go out and discover who is the best talent for your organization. That person might not actually be on the “jobs internet,” or they were, but that was five years ago, so you’ll never see them as someone you want because the five years ago person isn’t the person you need today.

Efficient recruiting is great until it isn’t. If you suck at recruiting, then becoming more efficient at best practice recruiting (which recruiting technology can definitely make happen) will elevate your function for sure. But efficient recruiting isn’t world-class recruiting. It’s just efficient.

The best talent acquisition in the future will be able to go out and discover the talent that hasn’t been discovered by everyone else. We like to believe that everyone who is anyone is on LinkedIn, Indeed, or you name the site. But they are not, or they haven’t been active for a long time, so this is a hidden talent.

Too many TA shops are currently working too hard at becoming efficient and not hard enough at becoming experts of the talent for their industry and their marketplaces. You know I love technology. So, be great at technology, but don’t forget to be great at recruiting.

Does Your Average Employee Tenure Matter? (New Data!)

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I keep getting told by folks who tend to know way more than me that employees ‘today’ don’t care about staying at a company long-term. “Tim, you just don’t get it. The younger workforce just wants to spend one to three years at a job than leave for something new and different.” You’re right! I don’t get it.

BLS recently released survey data showing that the average employee tenure is sitting around 4.1 years.  This speaks to my smart friends who love to keep replacing talent. I still don’t buy this fact as meaning people don’t want long-term employment with one organization.

Here’s what I know about high-tenured individuals:

1. People who stay long-term with a company tend to make more money over their careers.

2. People who stay long-term with a company tend to reach the highest level of promotion.

3. People who tend to stay long-term with a company tend to have higher career satisfaction.

I don’t have a survey on this. I have twenty years of working in the trenches of HR and witnessing this firsthand. The new CEO hire from outside the company gets all the press, but it actually rarely happens. Most companies promote from within because they have trust in the performance of a long-term, dedicated employee over an unknown from the outside. Most organizations pick the known over the unknown.

I still believe tenure matters a great deal to the leadership of most organizations.  I believe that a younger workforce still wants to find a great company where they can build a career, but we keep telling them that is unrealistic in today’s world.

Career ADHD is something we’ve made up to help us explain to our executives why we can no longer retain our employees. Retention is hard work. It has a real, lasting impact on the health and well-being of a company. There are real academic studies that show the organizations with the highest tenure outperform those organizations with lower tenure.  (here, here, and here)

Employee tenure is important, and it matters a great deal to the success of your organization. If you’re telling yourself and your leadership that it doesn’t, that it’s just ‘kids’ today, we can’t do anything about it, you’re doing your organization a disservice. You can do something about it. Employee retention, at all levels, should be the number 1, 2, and 3 top priorities of your HR shop.

The Only Interview Questions You’ll Ever Need!

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A while back, Forbes had an article Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only 3 True Job Interview Questions, that shared the “wisdom” of a handful of Executive Dinosaurs Recruiters on the only things that you should really have to ask a candidate. 

These 3 questions were:

1. Can you do the job?

2. Will you love the job?

3. Can we tolerate working with you?

Simple enough and straight to the point, and you can assume for the $75,000 you’re paying, this is probably the extent of their screening as well!

In my Recruiting/HR career, it’s probably the single most often asked question I get from other Talent Pros, Hiring Managers, and random people who know I’m in HR. “What are your best interview questions?”  Then you get to hear their questions and how Google has some really great ones, and I even heard once about a company that asked people if they were an animal which animal would they be, and if you only pick one vegetable to eat for the rest of your life, would it be carrots?  It goes on and on until you want to vomit!

The actual interview questions have very little impact on the success of the interview.  If you are interviewing anyone with some decent smarts, they are going to be able to ace your questions with little effort. What is important in interviewing is what you allow the candidate to get away with.  I find that most recruiters and hiring managers are way (I mean WAY!) too easy when it comes to questioning candidates.  See if this example sounds familiar:

Interviewer: “John, it looks like you left your last next to last company in May but didn’t start your current position until July. Can you explain that gap?”

John: “Sure, you know I was doing a great job, and I didn’t see myself moving up in that company, so I wanted to go find somewhere I could move up the ladder.”

Bam! At this point, most interviewers move on to the next questions. When clearly, John deflected, and someone needs to rip into some Gestapo interrogation tactics and find out what’s really going on. But they don’t. It would be conflict, and he might think we are rude. We’ll move on…

Follow-up questions to original answers during an interview is a skill in itself. 

The only interview questions you really ever need are the questions a Jealous Girlfriend asks when you come home on a Saturday morning around 3 am. Shoot, just hire Jealous Girlfriends as your interviewers they’ll get to the bottom of a candidate’s background! 

The hardest interview I ever had was with a woman that was eventually my boss, who was a former U.S. Army interrogator, and it was exhausting, it was painful, and it was Awesome. I actually lost my voice (after the 7th hour – True Story!).  She was the ultimate Jealous Girlfriend. In fact, I think she trains Jealous Girlfriends in her spare time. There wasn’t an answer I could give her that she was satisfied with, she just kept at it until I would slip and say something I really didn’t mean to, and once she smelled the blood, it was over. The result? She hired the best talent (excluding me) in the entire organization by far! Bad hires did not make it past her interviewing technique.

So, don’t worry about having the “best” interview questions, really. Any will do just don’t accept the first answer you get!