Is it the end of HR Famous? #HRFamous

Posted on April 5, 2022 by Tim Sackett

On episode 98 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Jessica Lee, and Kris Dunn come together to discuss coffee rules of the office, KD’s new job, and changes to the podcast!

Listen below (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

EP124 | Agentic AI Is Changing Recruiting – And Steven Jiang’s Leading the Charge – HR Famous

The future of recruiting isn’t coming. It’s already here. And if you’re still relying on your legacy tech stack and spreadsheets, you’re already behind. Enter Steven Jiang, CEO and Co-founder of HireEZ, who just dropped one of the most important AI launches in the recruiting space – EZ Agent, their agentic AI companion built to fundamentally reshape the recruiter’s role. Forget everything you know about “copilots” and “gen AI assistants.” EZ Agent is not just another AI tool bolted onto your ATS. It’s a fully-integrated, always-on agent that plans, reasons, executes, and evolves – empowering recruiters to get out of the weeds and back into real talent relationships. Steven joins Tim Sackett to break down: • Why agentic AI isn’t just better – it’s a whole new operating system for recruiting • How recruiters move from task managers to true talent strategists • What it means to create a white-glove candidate experience at scale • And how EZ Agent is solving the “black hole” problem by giving 100% of candidates a shot at the plate Steven’s built more than a product – he’s building a movement to re-humanize recruiting with AI doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. If you care about talent, inclusion, and the future of work – this is the conversation you need to hear. Connect with Us: Steven Jiang Follow Steven on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenhireez/ Learn more about HireEZ: https://hireez.com/ Book a Demo: https://hireez.com/customer-success/ Tim Sackett Follow Tim on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timsackett Need Help with Technical Recruiting: https://hrutech.com/ Read Tim’s Blog: https://timsackett.com/

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

1:30 – KD still isn’t playing Wordle. Quite late to the party still…

3:30 – Dawn Burke sent the crew her husband’s coffee routine. This made Tim wonder when free coffee at work became a thing. He wants free Diet Mountain Dew at work!

6:30 – Tim has some observations as a non-coffee drinker. He observes the dynamics of bad coffee makers vs. good coffee makers.

8:50 – KD recently visited Tim’s home base in Lansing, MI. He thought it was a lot smaller than Tim makes it sound.

11:20 – Big announcement! KD accepted a new job at Marriott, joining JLee! He’s staying in Alabama but visiting Bethesda, MD every couple of weeks.

14:15 – KD says that he didn’t do the LinkedIn post that talks about leaving a company but without giving an update. JLee and Tim hate those posts.

17:30 – In the very first episode of this podcast, KD got hate from JLee for saying Marriott wrong. It’s Marriott, like a chariot.

22:45 – KD has noticed that some partners at Marriott have been eager to come to Birmingham instead of having him go into the DC area. He says he’s fine to travel to them instead of hosting others.

29:00 – Next big announcement of the pod, KD is going to be leaving. JLee and Tim are going to continue on with the mission! He’s leaving but not gone forever.

Mailbag: Can an experienced Recruiter be any good with 378 LinkedIn Connections?

Posted on April 4, 2022 by Tim Sackett

I had a Talent Acquisition Leader reach out to me this week. She is having a hard time hiring recruiters and was looking for some insight. Now, she was looking for more of a professional generalist recruiter. Someone who can hire some hourly, but also corporate positions that include: finance, IT, operations, marketing, etc.

She mentioned she had gotten a resume of a recruiter who had four years of experience, but when she looked her up on LinkedIn, she only had 378 connections. Could this recruiter be any good with so few LinkedIn connections?

The Answer

No.

Okay, before you become unglued, let me explain.

Let’s say this four-year recruiter was only hiring high volume hourly. That would mean this person would never spend time on LinkedIn, since hourly workers, for the most part, do not have profiles on LinkedIn. So, now you’re thinking, “yeah, Tim, LI connections don’t matter for this person so they could be a great recruiter!”

Still, I say no!

Because, for me, a great recruiter builds a network of other recruiters and sourcers to constantly learn from. It basically takes almost no effort or skill to connect with 500 other recruiters, sourcers, HR pros, and your personal network on LinkedIn. Once you get to the 500 mark, no one knows if you have 501 or 30,000.

I challenge my own entry-level recruiters that have no recruiting experience to get to 500 connections as quickly as possible. Within six months, they should be able to do this very easily. So, if you run into a recruiter who is three or four years into their career, and they are under 500, they are showing you that they probably have very little interest in expanding their network and learning from others.

500 LinkedIn connections are like training wheels for a recruiter. I don’t expect every profession to have over 500, but recruiters, sales pros, and people looking for jobs should always have over 500. There’s no reason not to, it’s literally the easiest professional networking available to everyone for free.

Do more LinkedIn connections then equal someone is a better recruiter than another?

No.

But, wait, you just said…

Recruiters, of all types, need to get to 500. After that point, it really becomes more about the quality of the connections that you build. If you just accept every Open Networker on LinkedIn, that network will be full of Life Coaches and Pyramid Scheme sellers!

Great recruiters build networks that help them learn more and recruit better. I would say once you establish a network, you then become much more selective about who you invite and which invites you to accept. Right now, with my network that runs over 20,000, I only accept about 1/3 of the invitation requests I get based on the criteria I want in my network.

I know recruiters that quickly maxed out their LinkedIn networks with garbage and had to go back and scrub their networks, and it’s very time-consuming. But, I also see recruiters who switch industries and skills who do this as well. Your network should grow and change with you based on where you are at in your career.

So, LinkedIn connections matter and they don’t. That’s just reality in today’s world of recruiting. Whether you are recruiting doctors or truck drivers, you should still be using LinkedIn for your own professional development on an ongoing basis.

Could You Buy Yourself Out of a Metric You Rely On?

Posted on March 25, 2022 by Tim Sackett

Here’s the thing, any metric you can buy your way out of probably isn’t a great metric to measure you or your team against.

Why?

First, if money is going to help you get better at something and you have the money, then by all means make yourself better.

But the most helpful metrics are the ones where money has little impact on the ultimate success.

Example:

If you can’t get enough candidates in the top of your funnel you can always spend more money to solve that issue. It’s a simple advertising spend issue. You can buy yourself into great top-of-funnel results.

What you can’t buy is the number of screened candidates you send on to your hiring managers. That’s an effort metric. You have to do that work. The metric is achieved will always lead to more results and more success.

Top Speed is Overrated in Recruiting!

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Tim Sackett

I have this tendency to get up on a soapbox and tell HR and TA leaders that measuring “Days to Fill” (Time to Fill, Time to Hire, Applicant to Hire, etc.) is a complete waste of time! I do this knowing that this is primarily the main recruiting metric used by the vast majority of organizations. So, I’m kind of calling them dumb, and I don’t like that, because that’s not what I believe!

I find the majority of HR & TA leaders to be hardworking, caring folks who want to do the right thing, but no one is showing them the “right” thing. I mean, I did in my book, but no one wants to read a full book!

Why is speed overrated in recruiting?

First, there is absolutely no correlation between how fast you got someone hired to how good of an employee they will be. Zero! Nil! Naught! None! So, you are measuring something, and telling people is massively important, but it has zero correlation to whether or not you hired someone that will be good for your company.

Awesome! Wow! Let’s hire faster! The faster we can get these walking zombies in here the faster we can fail! Yay! Fail faster! #WinkyFace

Second, I’ll give you that some sort of speed of recruiting metric as correlated to your industry benchmarks might be a good indicator to let you know how well your function is running or not running. Meaning, if your average days to fill is 40 and the industry benchmark is 30, you probably have some work to do. But, if you are at 29 and the benchmark is at 30, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are better at recruiting, just a bit faster.

Third, you can hire too fast. We tend to never think about all the false-positive hiring we do by moving too quickly. If we are rushing our process, we open the door to letting bad hires into the organization. We also open the door to filling roles before we can truly see what’s available in the market. Oh, Timmy is interested, let’s hire him quickly! And then the day after, Mary, applies and she’s much better, but you already hired Timmy.

Fourth, a large portion of the time in a day’s-to-fill metric isn’t even owned and controlled by recruiting. Hiring managers and the candidates themselves, control upwards of 50% of a time metric in any recruiting process.

Why do we focus so much on speed in recruiting?

Because “speed” is something c-suite executives get all excited about. If we are doing it faster, we must be doing it better. Plus, most c-suites think it takes too long to hire, so slower recruiting validates their belief that recruiting is broken. But, 99.99% of c-suites never recruited, so they are stupid. I mean, they are stupid about recruiting!

Because this is the metric we’ve always used to measure recruiting success in our organizations. Throughout the history of recruiting this is the metric that was measured, so this is the one we use. Kind of like how sports used metrics like points per game, and then advanced analytics came out, like plus/minus and now we look at older metrics as rudimentary in describing the performance of athletes.

Because we don’t know a better way to measure how or if we are successful in recruiting in our organizations. This is a tough one because we don’t know what we don’t know. I wish our ATS and recruiting technology vendors would do a better job of measuring and teaching advanced metrics to TA leaders. (Shoutout to vendors like SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, Gem, and Predictive Hire – they all have some good stuff if you choose to use it.) The reality is, you would make your technology stickier if you did this.

What should recruiting focus on, rather than speed?

You know what’s coming. The funnel dummy!

We have certain actions that lead directly to recruiting success in our organizations if we analyze our recruiting funnels. The recruiting funnel will show you directly individual and team performance. But, let’s set that aside for a second. The funnel will ultimately give your organization the first truth about recruiting it’s ever had, the actual capacity it can rely on in recruiting. Your c-suite is dying to know this, and all you can tell them is, “we’ll work faster and longer and harder”.

Knowing your actual recruiting capacity will set you free and make you look like a genius as compared to every other TA leader that has become before you in your organization.

Cost of hire by source. Source effectiveness. Quality of applicant by Source (No, not the quality of hire, that’s not a TA metric), candidate experience metrics, recruiter experience metrics, etc.

Most shops run a classic 6-3-1 funnel. Meaning, it takes six screened candidates passed onto a hiring manager, who will then choose three of those candidates to interview, and then make an offer to one. If you take the billions of hires done at all organizations each year, it will almost always, on average, fall into a 6-3-1 model. Top of funnel, I.E., how many applicants to find six screened candidates, is a different story. That is dependent on a number of variables.

So, should you stop focusing on speed?

Yes. And, No.

Yes, you should stop focusing on speed if you are in a cycle where this year’s recruiting speed goal was to reduce your days to fill from 37.1 days to 36.8 days. At that point, your speed goal is worthless. You are only incrementally getting faster and you’ll see no real positive outcome from such a small time savings, even at enterprise and a million hires. Yes, I know the math says different at scale, but you are also forgetting the most important part. THERE. IS. NO. CORRELATION. BETWEEN. SPEED. AND. QUALITY. IN. RECRUITING!

No, you should not stop if you know your recruiting is flat-out broken and you are not even in the ballpark from a speed perspective. If it’s taking you 50 days to fill a position that your competition is doing in 25 days, you’re broken, and while speed isn’t the cure to your ills, you’ve got to catch up on the process side of things.

Okay TA Peeps! Tell me I’m wrong in the comments!

Do you want to find more happiness at work? Here’s how!

Posted on March 23, 2022 by Tim Sackett

In 1942 Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist, was taken to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, his pregnant wife and parents had already been killed by the Nazis. He survived and in 1946 went on to write the book, “Man’s Search For Meaning“. In this great book, Frankl writes:

“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”

What Frankl knew was that you can’t make happiness out of something outside yourself. Riding a Jetski doesn’t make you happy. You decide to be happy while doing that activity, but you could as easily decide to be angry or sad while doing this activity (although Daniel Tosh would disagree!). Frankl also wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I get asked frequently by leaders about how they can make their employees or workplace happier. I want to tell them about Frankl’s research and what he learned in the concentration camps. I want to tell them that you can’t make your employees happy. They have to decide they want to be happy, first. But, I don’t, people don’t want to hear the truth.

Coming up with ‘things’ isn’t going to make your employees happy. You might provide free lunch, which some will really like, but it also might make someone struggling with their weight, very depressed. You might give extra time off and most of your employees will love it, but those who define themselves by their work will find this a burden.

Ultimately, I think people tend to swing a certain way on the emotional scale. Some are usually happier than others. Some relish in being angry or depressed, it’s their comfort zone. They don’t know how to be any other way. Instead of working to ‘make’ people happy, spend your time selecting happy people to come work for you.

In the middle of a concentration camp, the most horrific experiences imaginable, Frankl witnessed people who made the decision to be happy. Maybe they were happy to have one more day on earth. Maybe they were happy because, like Frankl, they discovered that the Nazis could take everything from them except their mind.

Provide the best work environment that you can. Continue to try and make it better with the resources you have. Give meaning to the work and the things you do. Every organization has this, no matter what you do at your company. Don’t pursue happiness, it’s a fleeting emotion that is impossible to maintain. Pursue being the best organization you can be. It doesn’t mean you have to be someone you’re not. Just be ‘you’, and find others that like ‘you.’

Want to be more competitive in this candidate market?

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Tim Sackett

Of course, you do! It’s one of the only things people want to talk about right now. How the heck can we hire more people, our competition is killing us for talent?! Then ten minutes later I talk to their competition and they say the exact same thing!

So, I’m going to tell you what a state government is doing to find talent, and most of you will say you can’t do this! By the way, state governments and federal governments are historically awful at hiring! Like the worse in any industry awful! They put tons of unnecessary rules and processes in place that make it almost impossible to hire, and then to fix it they create more rules and processes!

The State of Maryland, though, just broke ranks in government hiring and announced that they will be dropping educational requirements for many jobs that used to require various degrees!

“As an alternative qualification, Maryland will seek out “STARs” (Skilled Through Alternative Routes) — those who are “age 25 or older, active in the labor force, have a high school diploma or equivalent, and have developed their skills through alternative routes such as community college, apprenticeships, military service, boot camps, and most commonly, on-the-job.”

Okay, first, as HR pros, can we realize how funny it is that a state government HR office actually named their new hiring process (STARs) when since forever the most popular behavioral interview process is called “STAR”!? Only in government would you see something like this happen! “Hey, we need to come up with a cool/hip acronym for this new program! Let’s call it STARs!? No one has ever used that before in HR!”

Okay, enough making fun of our peers in Maryland, because this idea makes 110% sense and that is completely against the norm in government hiring and it should be celebrated! Also, thank you to all the tech companies that started doing this five years ago and showed big hiring entities, like governments, that education might be the most over-valued criteria in candidate selection!

Seriously, this is big news! If the great state of Maryland can change in such a major way so can your stupid hiring managers who are demanding degrees for positions that actually don’t need them! I mean, we should be screaming this from the highest hills! Someone actually has common sense in Maryland government! That is no small feat, for a government or a company!

If you are finding it super hard to find qualified talent and using degrees as criteria, eliminating this requirement could really open up your candidate pool, and without losing any quality! It’s called having the right skills to do the job, not a random four-year degree that is almost useless for that job you have open.

Don’t take this as I think education is worthless. I don’t! I love people going through formal education. I will force my three sons to get degrees. Yes, I said force. That’s how highly I value education in my household. So, I do not take the elimination of degrees lightly. I also have seen the light in my own company, as I use to require degrees and stopped and found amazingly talented people that were intelligent and had great learning agility and could perform as well or better than similar folks with degrees.

I also will never allow my family to get surgery from someone who doesn’t have a medical degree! Education still matters in many fields, but it also has no correlation to performance in most professions. So, like Maryland, we adjust and try new things. I think Maryland made the right decision and I really like where this trend is heading for so many people!

Loyalty is not Dead!

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Tim Sackett

Today will be the first day that I will not be working with the person I’ve had the single most tenure together as co-workers. Lori Johnson (LJ) has been with my company, HRUTech.com, for 22 years! She was a kid when she came here and I had the chance to see her get married, have three kids, grow into an amazing person. We have worked together for 15 of those 22 years. I got to see her on her first day of employment and on her last day of employment.

Now, you might be thinking, she’s leaving you! So she’s not loyal! Loyalty is dead, Tim!

But it’s not. Her 22 years of employment prove loyalty isn’t dead. While I’ve been there for her, through her ups and downs, she stood by me through my own. She believed in me and my vision when others didn’t. She never wavered. I’m proud to call her a co-worker and peer, and I’ve talked about her and her loyalty in so many talks I’ve given.

I would tell people that LJ would kill for me if I asked, and I was only half-joking. She has my back and I have her back. We are now family. I love her. I know that sounds weird to say you love a co-worker, but that is where this relationship has grown. She is moving on to an opportunity that she is very excited about and I’m excited for her. I’m heartbroken but excited! That’s part of life and work.

If we are lucky we’ll have some amazing people enter our lives through work. We will grow with them and at some point that work relationship ends and what you are left with is now a friendship. And I keep telling myself I’m okay with that! On Friday this past week, I walked into the office and said “Good Morning, Lori!” for the last time. I’ve done it thousands of times and she was always happy to see me and I was happy to see her. If I was ten minutes late for work she would call 911 believing something must have happened to me on the way to work!

Lori is one of the most loyal people I’ve ever met. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her because I believe there is nothing she wouldn’t do for me. To me, that’s loyalty.

Now, you might say to yourself, Tim, how the heck could you let such an amazing person leave your company? I’ve asked myself that same question about million times over the past two weeks. I could have offered her something that I know would have got her to stay, but that’s not what she wanted. She wanted to challenge herself, to prove that she can do this after only working one job her entire adult life, and as her friend, I want to support her and cheer her on to reach this goal. It’s important to her. More important than me keeping my comfort blanket.

Loyalty isn’t dead in my mind, because I’m being loyal to her by not trying to buy her to stay. Her doing this will make her stronger and better, and as her friend, I think that’s awesome. The first time I left HRU it made me exponentially a better person and smarter professional. When I came back I was a different person. My hope is the same thing will happen to LJ and when she comes back, she’ll be even more amazing! (Yes, I will hold out hope of a return!)

For all the HRU alumni, LJ leaving will come as a shock. She’s already told me of folks contacting her wanting to know the juicy details of why! That’s our nature, we think it has to be something, she would never leave HRU! What I know is we are stronger because of her and her tenure as a company, and I will always have a spot open for her because that’s what you do for the most loyal person you’ve ever worked with.

Good luck, LJ. I will always be here for you in life and work.

How to Not Suck at Recruiting

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Tim Sackett

If you ask people who are recruiters that work in an agency, RPO, or corporate TA, 90% would say “they” (meaning the organization they work for) don’t suck at recruiting. But, if you asked them about whether another organization sucks at recruiting, a much higher percentage would say others suck. Not surprisingly, you get this with most functions – IT, Finance, Sales, Marketing, etc.

We all love to believe we are awesome and others suck. At least they suck as compared to us!

If you ask a CEO if their recruiting sucks, way too many say “yes”. Now, there are a couple of reasons for this. First, they have no idea how to recruit or what’s being done in recruiting in their own barns. Two, CEOs usually come from a function within the business, and 99.99% of the time, that wasn’t recruiting! So, if you ask a CEO who came out of Sales if their Sales function sucks, absolutely they would say it does not suck! There’s a little functional bias at play with all of us, no matter our level.

I got a very simple question the other day from a webcast I did over at SHRM titled, Recruiting 2022: How Not To Suck! (just kidding – it was called “Recruiting 2022: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times) and you can see it on demand, it got a very strong reaction. That mostly speaks to how hard recruiting is right now. The question? “Tim, I’m brand spanking new to recruiting, out of HR, and I have no idea what I’m doing. How can I not suck!?”

How to Not Suck at Recruiting, a Primer

Sell! Sell yourself, sell your organization, sell your jobs, sell your hiring managers, sell the dream! Your stuff might not be what everyone wants, but someone does want it. You just have to sell it to those people.

Advertise the crap out of your jobs. We buy stuff not because we need it, we buy it because the power of advertising makes us believe we need it. Job advertising works in the same way. The grass is greener at your place!

Make candidates feel wanted. Respond to them. Pursue them. Tell them they are wanted, until you don’t want them, and then be honest enough to tell them that.

Don’t allow your hiring managers to F around. If they aren’t doing what you need, let them recruit on their own and tell them that’s what is happening. If they want to take that to people up the chain, welcome the opportunity to tell your executives what’s really happening in recruiting.

Use any recruiting technology you have to it’s fullest. It’s the only way you’ll know what you don’t have, what you need, and what you desire. Using your ATS 60% of the way, tells you nothing about whether it sucks or not.

At the end of the day, recruiting is about getting people in front of hiring managers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a hiring manager to interview a 60% of the way candidate that they ended up hiring and that person was amazing. Of course, that’s not ideal, but that’s reality. Find good people, who have skills, and want to work, and make hiring managers talk to them.

Almost every organization is a market recruiting organization. Meaning, you are only going to attract talent within your market who is looking to move. Unicorn brands can blend markets and pull from anywhere. You are not a unicorn brand. Remote helps, but it’s not perfect. You can find just as many crappy people in another state willing to work remotely as you find in your own market. I like to start hyper-local and slowly move out.

What I find is that recruiting functions that suck are ones that have given up. They think they have nothing to offer, that no one wants to work for them, etc. I never find an engagement recruiter or recruiting team that sucks. They might not have super high skill, but they are doing everything they can with high energy and hope, and so often that is enough to be average!

It’s hard out there right now. You have an entire global recruiting community will to support you and help. Keep the faith. Keep smiling. Know at any moment of any day in recruiting, you have the power to change someone’s life for the better!

Is Humor in the Workplace Dead?

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Tim Sackett

I have at times in my career been a part of teams where each day I laughed. The team was a joy to work with and while we still had work and stress, we found times to laugh. I had a group of folks I worked with in Omaha, NE that I specifically recall laughing so hard each week that my stomach hurt, sometimes daily!

I’m not known professionally as someone who is frequently serious. I joke a lot. I love humor and making fun of all the dumb stuff we do. It’s how Kris Dunn found me and I started my blogging career over a decade ago at Fistful of Talent. My entire job was to make people laugh on a Friday.

This past week I posted this tweet on Twitter:

Now, if you know me, you know this is a joke. If you don’t know me, but you spend twelve seconds looking at my feed, you know this is a joke.

Way too many people thought this tweet was serious and took offense to it!

Let’s dig into how strange it is that someone would believe this was an actual exercise I would do professionally:

Your on Twitter and you see this guy with 40K+ followers say he makes candidates write wedding vows and recite them back to him, and you immediately think to yourself, “Well, that’s not good! Why would he ever do that! I must comment! This offends me!”

At this point, you’re eihter clinically naive or flat out stupid.

What’s the offense you ask? “Well, if you only do this with “attractive” people, you have BIAS!” Okay, I’m listening, but understand, we all judge attractiveness in our own ways. Someone I might find attractive, you might find ugly. So, you’re fighting for a view that is nebulous at best. There was no gender attached to the tweet, so if you think that I’m talking about females, now you are showing your own bias. Maybe in this clearly hypothetical exercise I only do this with attractive men, or attractive non-bianary people!

The joke is really around the concept of an interview and wedding vows. That’s what makes it funny. Imagine being asked to write wedding vows to someone you’re interviewing with and then reciting them, in a sense, actually getting married in an interview? Which is in a sense what interviewing is all about, do I want to spend the rest of my life with this company.

Foks were beside themselves that I would actually have someone do this. They were OFFENDED! Of course, I would never actually do this, it was always a joke. And if I can pat myself on the back (which I love to do!) it was really well written! It was tight. Not overly wordy. It was, what I thought, fairly innocent, so clean fun in the workplace. It also made fun of crazy interview questions and exercises we make candiates jump through. All in 26 words.

Where are we at with Humor in the Workplace?

We are in a very strange place.

I grew up in my career where very offensive jokes were told in the workplace all the time. Stuff that would get you immediately fired and most likely canceled today. Thankfully, most of us are away from most of that today.

Today, we can basically have humor around very certain topics and can only be told by very certain people. The vehicle of humor is very important in today’s world. Here’s kind of how it’s broken down:

People of the same gender, ethnicity, etc. can fun of each other, to each other.
White dudes can make fun of white dudes, but nothing else. (Oh, there it is, Tim’s Fragility is showing!)
Everybody else can make fun of white dudes, and their own identifiers.
We can all make fun of people and things we’ve deemed culturally fair game – Putin, Kanye, Trump, old white men, Dudes getting yelled at by their spouses, the CEOs of big companies – but only the bad ones, not the ones we like, etc.
You can’t make fun of anything someone would ever, at any time in histroy, find offensive in any slightest way. Like the color purple. “OMG! TIM! Purple stands for safe spaces for puppies! How could you!”
You can always make fun of yourself! (hat tip: Patricia in the comments)

We right ditched, left ditched humor in the workplace, and in many cases socially as well. I hated that people in the workplace could feel attacked by what someone would consider ‘humor’ early in my career. I also hate that humor Nazis are now the norm in our lives believing they can regulate everything that can be considered humorous.

There’s a fine line with humor in the workplace and that line has gotten even thinner in recent years. The problem with humor Nazis is that many employees want to work in environments and cultures that include humor. They want to laugh each day. it helps with engagement. Of course, that humor must be appropriate.

Maybe we just have the dial turned so far up on our offensive meter we struggle to even recognize humor anymore. The best part of this is all those who found my tweet offensive would also say they love humor, just that I’m not funny, and nor was my tweet. That’s their right for sure, but I would argue they’ve lost context around what’s funny.

Bitter Recruiters, Hire Miserable Employees!

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Tim Sackett

Want great employees? Hire great recruiters, who love your company and love recruiting!

There are over 40,000 recruiter openings right now on LinkedIn. You are currently running lean because it is so hard to find talent. Every single employee you have, and every single new employee you hire, better be really strong, or you are going to be hurting.

During the most recent ten-year run of good fortune that most organizations have had, we’ve made some really crappy recruiter hires. Recruiters who don’t really like recruiting and most of them don’t even like working for you. They are miserable. Miserable, but need a job, so they aren’t going anywhere.

The pandemic actually helped some organizations weed out miserable recruiters, at first. But the last year has burned out a ton of recruiters that were left and many are flat out miserable. They hate you. They hate candidates. They hate hiring managers. They hate the job.

Sometimes you need to give someone a gift. If they are miserable working for you as a recruiter, they will recruit other miserable people.

On the opposite side, people who love your organization make the best recruiters even if they have never recruited before. That doesn’t mean run out and make those who love your company recruiters! That might actually make them miserable! It’s the balance of loving your org and loving to recruit which is the secret sauce! But I do think you can grow recruiters, especially if you use employees who love your organization!

I keep hearing about organizations that are paying insane salaries for average and below-average recruiters, simply because they have recruiting experience. I would rather hire two people with no recruiting experience that I know will actually, at a minimum, tell people how great it is to work with our organization.

When I work with organizations to improve their recruiting I usually find a few common threads. First, they do some dumb process elements that actually detract from recruiting not add to better recruiting. Second, they don’t use their technology to its fullest, Third, and this happens every single time, they have people recruiting who hate their job and hate the company! Every. Single. Time.

So, be better!

There is actually one more common mistake organizations and Talent leaders are making, they are not investing in developing their recruiting teams. In fact, on average, recruiting teams might get fewer development dollars than any other department in the company!

Why?

That one is easy! Because no one knows how to recruit to begin with so they don’t know what to do when delivering recruiter training!

Great TA leaders are recruiting great recruiter talent right now like no other time in history. Most are overpaying for that talent, but that’s what the market is demanding. They are also investing in their recruiting teams with great training. When I’m speaking to recruiter training technology companies and stand-alone recruiter trainers their phones are ringing off the hook!

The last piece that makes you better, faster, is dropping those recruiters who hate their job and hate your organization. You think you can’t because you’re so desperate for recruiting capacity, but losing this dead weight will actually help much more than you know!

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team