The Most Brilliant Talent Tips Condensed Into Tiny Sentences!

I wrote a book with a lot of words. One I discovered is that people love for you to have a book, but no one really wants to read 60,000 plus words. They want you to break it down to about 500. “Just tell me what I really need to know!”

Okay – Here you go:

  • Always give personal feedback to candidates you’ve interviewed but didn’t hire. 
  • Make every candidate believe you desire them until you don’t. 
  • Job advertising works. Programmatic Job Advertising works best. 
  • You don’t hire the best talent; you hire the best talent that applied to your jobs. 
  • If your team only uses 50% of your ATS, it’s not an ATS problem, it’s an adoption problem. (which means it’s a leadership problem) 
  • Measuring the recruiting funnel will give you far better results than measuring days to fill. 
  • Only hire Sourcers if you truly have recruiters willing to do outbound recruiting. 
  • 90% of your recruiting is inbound recruiting, but your hiring managers believe 50% of what you do is outbound recruiting. 
  • Your diversity hiring woes can be tied specifically to certain hiring managers, but we are too afraid to connect the dots politically. 
  • 99.99% of candidates will never accept a job without first talking to a real person. Call volume, in recruiting, matters. 
  • If your sourcing tech is failing, it’s not a failure of the tech, it’s your recruiters hate doing outbound recruiting. 
  • They key to being a great recruiter is getting someone who doesn’t know you to trust you with their career. 
  • A candidate will always respond to a hiring manager more than a recruiter on average. They’ll respond to the CEO of your company even more than a manager of a function.
  • On average, there are worse selection strategies than hiring the most pretty people you interview.
  • The most underutilized recruiting resource you have is your own database of clients.

What is your favorite tiny piece of talent advice? Put it in the comments, and I use it in my next book which will only be 2,000 words!

It’s Actually Easy to Hire the Greatest Talent! Here’s How!

If you had the best technology, the best recruiting talent, best assessment science, great hiring managers who were visionaries, charismatic, and engaged, if you led the market in total compensation and had amazing perks, then hiring the greatest talent in the world is simple.

The formula is simple. 

The hard part of hiring is doing it at scale when you don’t have all those advantages. 

General Motors is playing catch up with Tesla. Is Tesla better than GM? Hard question to answer because Tesla is making a fraction of the cars per year that GM is making. It’s actually way easier to make an expensive low volume automobile than to make a million competitively priced automobiles per year. Tesla sells to a tiny fraction of the world, the elite of the elite. GM sells to the masses and provides automobiles that way more people can afford. 

Building a hiring process for the masses is difficult.

You now bring in competition, and at that level, candidates have more choices, brands are harder to differentiate, etc. You now have to do “other” stuff to get candidates to accept your offer. Being the best, paying the most, having the best tools and products, and the best leaders make it super easy to hire the best.

So, what’s the use of even trying to hire great talent if we aren’t the best?

That’s the right question!

First, it’s easy to hire the greatest talent, but we f*ck it up constantly because we actually suck at knowing who the greatest talent is! We are actually exceptional at picking good talent that we really like. But we suck at actually knowing who’s the best and then hiring them.

This means, if you become exceptional at knowing who is the best, you can actually pick off some really great talent, because those with all the power, all the resources, get cocky. They don’t do all the work they could. Often they assume someone is the best, without really doing the work. There’s this weird corporate psychological thing that happens. Basically, the thought process is, “if I’m here, I must be great, so if I find someone who’s like me or better than me, they also must be great”.

The problem is, just because you work for an outlier brand has no correlation to the fact you’re great. You may be great, or you may have just won the job lottery.

So, what did we learn?

Hiring great talent is super easy. But, it’s also not.

Virtual Standing Desk Etiquette & When Is It Time to Get a Coach? #HRFamous

On episode 97 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Kris Dunn, Jessica Lee, and Tim Sackett come together to discuss Station Eleven, standing desk etiquette, and the phenomenon of life coaching.

Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:45 – Any Station Eleven fans? Tim feels some kinship because it takes place around his home, the Great Lakes. 

5:30 – JLee remembers KD’s commitment to do 100 pull-ups a day. He says he doesn’t do them every day but he can do 120-150 reps.

7:30 – JLee asks a question about work from home etiquette. She was on a call with someone that was at a standing desk. She felt like the person standing was being imposing.

12:30 – Anyone else eat spaghetti on Zoom? JLee does. And tomato soup…

13:00 – Coaching is all the rage. JLee asks why it’s so popular and who the type of person is that becomes a coach. Tim thinks it’s all the boomers that early-retired during the pandemic. 

17:00 JLee wonders when a coach is even necessary and if an AI bot would just be a better option to chat. 

19:00 – Tim went to a coach once and he just felt like all the coach was doing was agreeing with what he was already thinking and doing. 

21:45 – KD wonders what percentage of coaches can actually deliver what someone needs. He thinks only 10-20%. 

24:45 – JLee wonders why people want to separate the pay conversation from a performance review. Tim agrees and doesn’t understand it either. 

28:00 – Tim’s first pay increase in a corporate environment was 3% and he was furious. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. 

32:00 – KD starts doing a mock performance review/pay conversation with JLee. The pay will never be what you want. 

34:00 – KD says people don’t contrast good vs. great enough. 

Want a Smarter Workforce? Hire More Gay Dudes!

Okay, before the entire LGBTQ community becomes unglued for me saying “dudes” and not every segment of the LGBTQ community, you have to understand the study we’ll dig into below! In this study, gay men stood out as extremely high academic achievers over every other part of society, gay or straight, and other genders.

From the Washington Post:

In new research made possible by questions recently added to U.S. household surveys, I found that gay men achieve stunning success across every level of higher education. This accomplishment comes even as men’s overall college completion rates have fallen further behind women’s for every generation born since the 1960s.

I found, for example, that about 52 percent of gay men, age 25 or older in the United States have a bachelor’s degree. For context, about 36 percent of U.S. adults 25 or older have a bachelor’s; this ranks the United States ninth in the world in college completion. If America’s gay men, however, formed their own country, it would be the world’s most highly educated by far.

Organizations are constantly searching for the “silver bullet” when it comes to talent. Every so often some research comes along and says, “Hey, over here, we found a silver bullet!” The ironic part of this silver bullet is I think most organizations will ignore it, even though it’s fairly straightforward and clear. Why? Normal bias, primarily, that gay people of all genders have faced when it comes to hiring.

Why are Gay men off the charts when it comes to achieving academic success?

This is where it gets interesting because the reasons can be somewhat subjective, but they actually feel accurate. If you’re a gay boy growing up in America, in public school, you are in for a tough life of bullying. You can’t control that. What can you control? You can control how well you do in school.

Who do teachers love? Kids who care about what they are teaching and do well. Gay kids who aren’t widely accepted by their straight classmates, find a higher level of acceptance from teachers, especially when they are high performers. So, I can control the asshole bullies, but I can control how much I study. It’s a unique form of resilience to be sure. “I became smart and worked super hard at school because that was my avenue of acceptance within public education.”

And, as it turns out, doing well academically in high school, leads to more opportunity in college where gay kids find even more acceptance in a predominately liberal higher education system. The flywheel keeps turning, and the gay smart kids, become even smarter gay young men, who then move into the corporate world as high achievers.

But, now these intelligent, high-performing gay men, also have a community of their own who can support and care for each other in a professional capacity. Recommendations for jobs and promotions, inside information on projects, sharing of creative ideas, etc. The “Old Boy” network, becomes the “Not So Old Gay Boy Network”. Don’t hate, you taught them the system!

Just because you’re smart and gay doesn’t stop bias.

It’s still far easier in our world to be a straight white man than a super-smart gay white man, for the most part. The interesting part of the study was that gay men of all ethnicities have shown this academic prowess. It’s not just a white male thing, it’s a brown male thing, a black male thing. Turns out, gay men of all colors, achieve higher levels of academic success, leading to higher levels of professional success.

It pains me that gay kids have to deal with bullies in school. That any kid has to deal with bullies is awful, but when you’re “different” than the majority of your peer group, it can be especially cruel. I love that on average gay boys have found an outlet in academics because that will lead to way more good outcomes than bad.

I’ll go back to this one quote that I think is very powerful: If America’s gay men formed their own country it would be the most highly educated country in the world! In. The. World. I’m also guessing that would be a pretty amazing country to live in.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite introduces “Evolve” Talent Acquisition Suite

Today on the Weekly Dose, I dig into applicant tracking system provider Jobvite‘s announcement of their new Evolve talent acquisition suite announcement. Jobvite is a top best-of-breed ATS provider who in recent years has been on a buying spree!

Jobvite has acquired Talemetry, RolePoint, Canvas, Talentgy, Predictive PartnerJazzHR, NxtThingRPO, among others in a rather short period of time and the big question everyone was asking was what the heck are they going to do with tall these pieces!? Which makes today’s announcement of Evolve the answer a lot of folks have been waiting for.

I’ve been a fan of many of the acquisitions Jobvite has done over the past couple of years. Many of the point solutions they gobbled up were the top point solutions in the market for recruiting technology. But just having the pieces is one thing, making them all work together is a whole other challenge to conquer.

Here’s a bit from the Press Release:

Jobvite’s acquisition of Canvas, RolePoint, and Talemetry in 2019 allowed the company to execute its vision to become the premier TA solution on the market that addresses the complexities of the entire recruiting lifecycle, moving well beyond the ATS. Jobvite has spent the last few years fully integrating these technologies and building new functionality to create this powerful end-to-end TA suite.

Today, the reimagined Evolve TA Suite offers the most breadth and depth of any TA technology for attracting and sourcing talent, from engaging and recruiting to hiring, onboarding, and promoting talent. It also easily integrates into a broader HR Tech stack and offers 350+ integration partners to extend the suite’s capabilities to better meet an organization’s needs.

What does this all mean?

Jobvite took all of this technology and reworked it to fit under one dashboard, and reconfigured it into really four main segments recruiters work with day-to-day:

  • ATS
  • Recruitment Marketing
  • Analytics
  • Intelligent Messaging

You don’t need to bounce back and forth between many point solutions and you can reach and use each of the main areas from within anywhere in the suite.

The reality is, Talent Acquisition shops are moving to some sort of full recruitment platform. No one really wants to bounce from ATS, to CRM, to Interview Intelligence, to you name the point solution. Recruiters want to be able to work within one system as much as possible, and that is what Evolve is attempting to do.

It’s a unique product mix that allows Jobvite to span, effectively, SMB to Enterprise, like no other best of breed ATS on the market. JazzHR, will stand alone and service SMB. Jobvite pulls in mid-enterprise to enterprise, and NxtThing RPO sits in the background waiting to pounce when you need additional recruiting assistance over and above what your team and technology can handle.

The growth of full end-to-end talent acquisition suites was inevitable. It takes a similar path to what we saw with ERP/Supply Chain/Financial software, then HR software, now recruiting. People doing the work don’t want to work in ten to twenty different programs, plus we truly need all of our data flowing into one place as much as possible to make strategic business decisions. Which is still mostly lost in the talent acquisition technology space, but we are getting better.

I think Jobvite is on the right path. Others in the space will take different roads to get there, but in the end, full recruiting suites are what most of us will be working with, in the near future. if only to make it simpler for the end-user, the Recruiter.

How do Candidates Evaluate Companies?

It’s the age-old question we’ve been trying to answer since the beginning of recruitment!? If you look at TA team resources allocation (time, money, etc.) you would be led to believe that it must be our career sites. I can’t think of another thing we do in talent acquisition that takes more of our time and effort, as a single piece, than our career site!

Based on this, candidates must evaluate us on our career site! False.

The Muse did a study where they asked candidates directly to rank the resources they have available to them on they evaluate a company and this is what they said:

Highest Importance in Evaluating Employers for a New Role

The Career Site actually does have real value!

So, it turns out, our career sites are actually valuable, or at least can be if we put the right information on them that candidates are looking for. Actual photos and videos of real workspaces and real employees, not stock content. Videos of employees talking about company culture, not your CEO explaining what they think company culture is. Details of your perks and benefits, not a list of things like: Full Medical Coverage, Paid Time Off, etc. Those aren’t details! Those are titles of details!

Job descriptions that entice someone to want to apply, not fall asleep. I get it! JD’s are legal documents! That doesn’t mean they have to be boring and awful. Make “Job Postings” and put a link to the actual legal job description. Hire marketing, content producers to build your job postings, and let your legal council write your job descriptions. No one gives a shit about your JD, except legal. Everyone cares about your job posting.

Give your employer brand social media feeds to your interns and let them have fun with them. The best-case scenario is they say something wrong and it goes viral and you have to apologize for an intern making a mistake. That’s the BEST case! Candidates don’t care. Your employees don’t care. It’s noise and you’re too damn buttoned up to get anyone to pay attention.

Glassdoor isn’t as important as you think!

Man, did Glassdoor do a job on us for like a decade! We were all running around scared of what someone might say about us! Turns out, candidates don’t care. I mean, they did when it first started, but then the world went sideways and now we all kind of understand Glassdoor is basically a site for corporate terrorists to hang out.

What candidates really want are real testimonials from real employees, not anonymous b.s. from someone hiding behind a platform that we assume got fired and is now hating. Pro tip: get an employee that left, but still loves you, to give you a testimonial! We all have those folks. Mary decided to leave and focus on her family, but if she was going to come back to work, it would be with you. But, also current employees who aren’t completely scripted in their response. It’s okay if they say some real stuff, as long as they also say the good stuff.

I hated to see employers being held hostage by anonymous reviews. I love to see employees fighting back with real, open, and honest content that people believe.

Finally! Elon Musk Weighs In on America’s Birth Rate Crisis!

Say what you want about Elon Musk, he tends to be years ahead of the curve around what the world will want and need. I get it, he’s a polarizing figure, people either love him or hate him. I don’t own a Tesla, and I don’t really have the pull to want one, but I get the fascination. I get the fascination with building a company around private space travel, and he just recently said he could care less about electric cars because he now wants to build “real” robots like the ones Will Smith fought in iRobot!

BTW, I totally want my own Tesla Robot. The friend that will always be there for you and I would get the algorithm where they never try to give me life advice, just support my craziness! Also, my “Tesbot” will have an English accent, because I’m a dumb American and I really like that accent.

Elon’s robot idea came partly because of a real-world problem he faces, and truly all of us are facing at this moment, around talent shortages. He needs workers to build EVs and Rocketships. For a dude that doesn’t put limits on what is possible, it seems almost impossible to hire great, productive workers, who enjoy that type of work. So, let’s build robots!

Elon came out recently to clarify the real problem we have in America, really most industrialized countrys’, in that our birth rate is a major economic problem no one is paying attention to:

He went on to talk about world population estimates, etc., and the trends we are on are not positive when we truly look way out into the future. The problem is, in almost every country, our political systems are not built to address the future, they are built to address the next election cycle.

If you voted for Trump in the last election, you probably believe we have a “major” problem at our border to the south with immigrants flooding into our country. Honestly, we should be hoping immigrants are flooding into this country because we need them to work in all the jobs that Americans are refusing to work in!

We do have an immigration problem! The problem is, we don’t allow enough immigrants to come into our country and work legally, pay taxes, and be a part of this great experiment we call America. I’m not a liberal. I’m a raging moderate who sees what is really going on in businesses across America! We need more workers! Or, as Elon believes, more robots…

What are potential solutions for our birth rate crisis?

1. Pay people to have more babies.

You know, stuff like paid family leave and tax incentives to have more children, great education and paid daycare, etc. Let’s make it easy for families to have great families. Right now, in America, having kids is a wealth deterrent for people.

2. Massively expand immigration.

This is not a scarcity problem. Immigrants are not taking jobs away from Americans. We have way more jobs than we have Americans! Plus, immigrants now have more options than coming to America, since there are about 20 other countries with worse birth rate issues than we have. We are now in competition for immigrant talent, skilled and unskilled, and we have half our population who still are being told by politicians that immigrants are bad.

3. Help Elon build his robots!

Honestly, because of our birth rate crisis, if Elon doesn’t get there first, someone else will. We have already seen so many jobs get eaten up by automation and robotics and it’s not stopping, it’s accelerating. Self-driving semi-trucks. Touch screens to order your Big Mac. Self-checkout lanes at the grocery store. Etc. The problem is, robots are only good at certain things, and we still need humans for a lot. Unless Elon figures out my Tesbot and then look out! Timmy is going on vacation!

Talent Hoarding is Real! And it’s getting worse…

Talent hoarding has been around since the beginning of time. If you were good at hunting and gathering, some bigger stronger caveman was going to keep you around and not let some other cavemen lure you away!

In today’s world, talent hoarding begins when a manager doesn’t identify someone who works for them as promotable when they most likely are. The organization uses its leaders to understand who is ready for that next-level position. Certain managers, tend not to openly report they have such a candidate in their group, so they can keep that talent performing for them. This makes their life easier.

But, let’s not just blame these managers of people. There’s another organizational design issue that causes talent hoarding. Manager performance, and often parts of their compensation, are based on “team performance”. That being the case, it’s to a manager’s advantage, and the team’s advantage to keep talent. Almost no organizations incentive managers to promote people off their team into other parts of the organization.

There was a study just released in 2022, appropriately titled, “Talent Hoarding in Organizations” that showed that:

“Temporary reductions of talent hoarding increase worker’s applications for promotions by 123%. Marginal applicants, who would not have applied in the presence of talent hoarding, are three times as likely as average applicants to land a promotion.”

What the study determined, was that if you did not have any barrier to letting someone apply for promotion, your way more likely to be promoted! Things like you must first have your manager sign-off on your readiness, or things like having managers put names forward, etc.

Organizationally, we know also that talent hoarding often pushes talent to leave. Basically, if you aren’t going to promote me, I’ll use the free market to get a promotion somewhere else. In a talent market, as we have right now, that is happening at a massive scale. We see organizations implementing new internal mobility strategies to help counteract this, but it’s barely making a dent still, primarily because most of these strategies still rely on some sort of manager performance metric to allow someone to move internally.

Can we eliminate or reduce talent hoarding?

Short answer, yes. The longer answer, it’s hard!

First, we are talking about centuries of institutional dynamics at play. Generation after generation of leaders were raised under this framework. Thus, we have major change management issues to conquer.

Second, we would need to eliminate the negative side, or at least counteract the negative side of team promotion, with a positive side for the manager and team. This is the “coaching tree” analogy. Great coaches hire assistants and teach them how to be great coaches and those coaches go on to peer level roles. When you talk about the greatest sports coaches of all time, one major factor is their coaching tree. How many other coaches did they create? And, how good were those coaches?

If we can find a way to reward, and not punish, managers for promoting talent within the organization, which is greater than the reward for keeping great talent, we will have a much better chance at stopping talent hoarding. That is difficult. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an organization that has figured out the value of the theoretical “coaching tree” for a manager. Meaning, if I promote someone off my team, what is that worth to me, as the manager?

It’s a hard question to answer because it’s very specific to position and organization. If I’m at Apple and I “grow” a new Engineering Manager, from a Software Engineer, that I’ve mentored, there is considerable value in that happening! If I’m managing a fast food restaurant and mentor an hourly worker into a salaried manager, that is less valuable, by dollar amount, but still very valuable to the organization.

The reality is, you have no shot if you don’t try and answer that value equation!

You can have some success, by just eliminating all barriers to promotion and allowing anyone to apply. You will still have some that won’t, as managers will still have formal and informal influence over those that work for them. So, it’s not perfect. But, you’ll get more, than by asking your managers alone.

Also, just eliminating barriers could create a gender issue as we know through many studies men or more willing to apply to jobs they aren’t qualified for than women, so barrier elimination will most likely get you more male applicants, who you will promote, leaving more women behind. We actually need our leaders to help us identify and promote our great female next-level hires.

When talent is scarce, like it is now, talent hoarding will be worse. Talent hoarding is bad for your culture and it’s bad for your talent. And it’s happening right now in your organization.

The Weekly Dose: @TheRecruitBot – Recruiting is tough, Recruitbot is here to help!

Today on the Weekly Dose I review the recruiting technology and machine learning-based sourcing tool, Recruitbot. There are a handful of really good sourcing technology tools on the market and each of them is working to carve out how they are unique and stand out from the rest. Recruitbot definitely has some key characteristics that help them achieve this.

RecruitBot uses machine learning to understand your hiring preferences, so you can intelligently source from our exclusive database of 350+ million global candidates, as well as every resume in your ATS. But, wait, Tim, I’ve seen others say they have 700+ Million candidates!? Isn’t that better? That’s one of the first things you notice about Recruitbot is the candidates you source from their database are constantly being verified for active email addresses. So, yes, the number is smaller, but all have been validated!

What do I like about Recruitbot?

  • The great thing about sourcing tech is that you can literally find millions of candidates! The bad thing about sourcing tech is you can literally find millions of candidates! Sourcing tech is not a resume database, the vast majority of these profiles have no idea who you are, so this really takes you back to true outbound recruiting.
  • Recruitbot has a very efficent and easy to use interface that allows day-to-day recruiters to build simple and effective nuturing campaigns in minutes to reach out to these candidates and work to get them to respond.
  • Recruitbot has a unique feature that allows a recruiter to pull a search and then easily send those profiles to a hiring manager who can then “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” each one, so the machine learning can quickly begin to learn what it is your hiring manager likes and doesn’t like, and it will continue to learn over time making it even more effective.
  • I mentioned above, but it can’t be understated, it’s not all about the number of profiles, but the number of profiles you can actually connect with! This is a Recruitbot strength.

My team got to test out Recruitbot for the past six weeks so we got a great inside look at what works great and what the challenges are using sourcing tech.

With any outbound recruiting/sourcing tool, you can not treat it the same as inbound. It’s awesome to be able to pull a great list of potential candidates, but you then just can’t spam them and think you’ll get any kind of decent response. You might, and it’s worth a try, but don’t hold your breath. It’s very “profession” and “market” specific. I can send out a mass campaign for “Sales Pros” and I”ll get a decent response. If I do the same thing for “Software Engineers” I might get zero response.

The key is personalization, on a mass scale, which is an art form when sourcing at a large scale. Being able to word your outreach in a way that feels and sounds personal, but that can also be sent to 25 potential candidates. You learn very quickly with Recruitbot, you need this still to take full advantage of the tech.

One of the great things my team loved about the tool was the ability to source a list of candidates, build the campaign and then just let it run and forget about it, while they sourced and recruited on other things, and then through the next days candidates would pop up from the campaign that had an interest. This did change their workflow a bit, but it was welcomed. We get so set in source, contact, source, contact, repeat. Instead of sourcing a bunch, then letting the tech do its thing!

Recruitbot is well worth a demo if you’re in the need of some sourcing technology, and your TA team has made the decision that some outbound recruiting is needed at your organization.

Performance Feedback for a New World of Work!

It really is a choice.

Either you can decide to perform the job you have, or you can decide to work someplace else. Maybe that someplace else is working for yourself. Good luck with that, truly!

Either you believe this is the right company for you, or you can decide another company is right for you.

Either you treat your coworkers as peers, or you are welcome to go treat someone else’s employees like crap, but you can’t treat these coworkers like crap.

Either you follow our rules, or you will follow someone else’s rules, or you can follow your own rules. I find most people who want to follow their own rules, struggle at following their own rules.

Either you make a positive contribution to the organization, or you make me make a choice about your future and the contribution, or lack of contribution, you’ll make somewhere else.

Earning the right to work here isn’t hard; it’s just a simple choice that you control. Losing that choice is up to you until you make it up to me.

This new world of work is amazing! It’s your life! It’s your choice. Really, just like the old world of work, but you just didn’t see it that way…