Is it a power play to send someone your Calendly link? #HRFamous

Posted on by
Reply

On episode 96 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Jessica Lee and Kris Dunn come together to discuss a reported uptick in Glassdoor reviews mentioning inflation and the power dynamics (or lack thereof) of making someone use your Calendly scheduler.

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)!

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

3:00 – JLee’s dry January quickly devolved into drinking wine on a Wednesday. She just finished Station Eleven and is watching And Just Like That. 

5:20 – Tim has been loving season 2 of Righteous Gemstones. He says it’s his guilty pleasure. 

9:00 – KD recommends Southside on HBO Max. He calls it “lighter fare” in comparison to the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven. 

11:45 – KD found a Twitter thread from an economist about the rising concern from employees about inflation and how it affects their pay. KD asks JLee how much concern there actually is about inflation. 

18:00 – Tim doesn’t think the average Glassdoor reviewer is mentioning raises due to inflation but the average employe e may be discussing inflation while asking for a raise. 

21:20 – KD poses a situation to Tim where an employee comes in and tells him that his company’s pay isn’t keeping up with inflation. 

23:20 – Next topic: the power dynamics of using automated calendars. KD mentions this tweet about the etiquette behind Calendly. 

26:00 – Tim doesn’t get how it’s a power play for someone to send a meeting link to someone else for a pre-arranged meeting. JLee offers a different power play scenario that fits the bill. 

28:30 – If you click a Calendly link, does that make you somebody’s b****? JLee and Tim don’t see what the big deal is. They also both do not use an automated calendar system. 

33:00 – KD says that the person that sends their Calendly link after someone has already sent one is the true power graber. 

40:00 – We’re pulling for an early summer!!!

You Do NOT Have a Short-term Recruiting Problem!

Posted on by
1

I’ve been trying to preach this for what seems like forever, but we tend to be so short-term focused in almost every business process and decision we make in the modern world. How can we make a profit today, F the future!

Your current recruiting issue is not a short-term problem that eventually will just go away on its own. Also, your current recruiting problem has nothing to do with the “Great Resignation”. That was a made-up term by a professor trying to explain a short-term issue we were currently facing, amongst a much larger long-term problem.

The “Great Resignation” is simple economics. We have more jobs than people looking for jobs, so workers have “buying” power. Other companies will pay me more for the same work or give me a promotion with my lessor skills because they have no other options. Straightforward supply and demand economics.

We are already seeing the “economics” of this situation play itself out with higher inflation driven by wage growth and we’ll see more and more adjustments made by organizations to figure it out. Most likely that involves technology replacing parts of jobs, adding human capacity through technology, etc. Organizations can only eat so much in wages before they’ll find a “better” way to skin the cat.

Our problem IS and will continue to be, we have a shrinking workforce that we are doing absolutely nothing to turn that demographic fact around.

Peter Shanosky, wrote a good piece on our aging issue:

The median age in the United States is currently 38.1 years old — a number that reflects a consistent rise in recent years, but not too terrible. That number has been moving up about .15 per year as our largest generation, the oft-discussed boomers, age…

In our professions, then, we would expect to see a median age of around 38. Naturally, that’s not the case, specifically when you get into some of the trades or other professions that aren’t necessarily glamourous. Still, these jobs are essential to our everyday lives. We should not ignore them.

So how far off are they? Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we’ve got some wide discrepancies. Looking at just a few:

· Real estate agents: 49.1 years old

· Automotive mechanics: 47.4 years old

· Facilities managers: 50.1 years old

· Bus/Shuttle drivers: 55.6 years old

· Housekeeping/Janitorial: 50.1 years old

· Home health aides: 47.2 years old

· Electrical trades: 46.8 years old

Yikes. There were plenty of professions even older than that, but I picked these for a reason — there’s little barrier to entry. You don’t need a $200,000 piece of paper, and they’re located across the country. You don’t need to live in a growing metropolitan area to have any of these jobs. In other words, based on ease of access, they should be younger. But they’re not.

Why aren’t younger people moving into these roles?

Basically, we have a problem with younger generations not actually wanting to work. There are probably a million reasons, social media, NFTs, influencers, Bitcoin, Meme stocks, etc. If you are 18-30 in today’s world, you are inundated with examples, constantly, of how you can be rich, by not really working, and it all looks so easy!

The problem is, we can’t rely on GenX and young Baby Boomers to keep building our shit! Eventually, they’ll be dead and you’ll be sitting there wondering why the fucking lights won’t come on so you can film your next TikTok video about how to make a million dollars trading make-believe money. Turns out, we need folks willing to get their hands dirty from time to time.

The obvious solution is to increase immigration and create a constant pipeline of workers who want to come to America and actually work. Turns out, regardless of want mass media is trying to get us to believe, millions of immigrants still want to come to America! We actually have jobs that pay money and benefits and overtime and provide training, simply if you have a work ethic! Isn’t that a crazy concept!?

I don’t want young people to think this is all their problem, it’s not! Your parents own a portion of this as well. Someone should have made you work when you were younger. Mow a lawn, babysit, work the fryer at McDonald’s when you were 16, but they were doing pretty good and you were basically not annoying them with your face in your phone, so you didn’t get the opportunity to value work. I think older Millennials, GenX, and Baby Boomers all worked when they were 16 for two main reasons: 1. Our parents refused to give us anything, so we needed money if we wanted something. 2. Our parents couldn’t stand watching us sit around and do nothing, so we were forced to leave the house.

All of this rant about how young people suck, still isn’t the problem!

We aren’t having enough babies!

Probably starts with we aren’t having enough sex, but that’s another post.

Turns out, babies and puppies are a god damn lot of work, and if you don’t like work…well, it’s kind of comes around full circle!

There are 3 ways this will be fixed, and I do believe it will be:

  1. More Immigrants, like millions and millions more. (BTW – every industrialized, rich country is in the same boat as the US, we just really such at immigration)
  2. More automation and technology to replace workers. (Already happening, get used to it happening a lot more)
  3. More babies! Won’t happen anytime soon, and I would guess we might never be able to turn that around.

Or, you and your organization can just believe this great resignation thing will play itself out and we’ll all be back to normal by summer. Have fun with that!

And P.S. – Get off my lawn!

Why do candidates ignore recruiters?

Posted on by
2

Oh, Lord, let me count the reasons! Can I get an Amen!?

Basically, candidates ignore recruiters because as recruiters we have sucked too many times for them to pay attention any longer! Also, it’s a lie, candidates don’t actually ignore you, they see you, but they don’t respond, because we can be worse than a used car salesman who’s about to be fired if they don’t sell one more car before the end of the month!

There was a brilliant article written recently by a Software Engineer, Alex Chesser, Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never Ignore a Recruiter. From his post:

“The obvious adaptive response that I suspect the vast majority of us use is to roll our eyes and ignore them. We tell each other jokes about the problem all the time. We’ll gripe and moan about how annoying it is, how obvious and crass it is.

No one ever explained to me that recruiters are also one of the best career resources you can find.

If you think about it, who better to be completely honest with about what you want from your career? Who else has real and direct insight into how much money any given role pays?“

Alex shares the script he uses to respond to each recruiter outreach he receives and it’s brilliant –

BTW! Alex says “Steal This and Use it!”

Candidates Ignore Recruiters Because We Waste Too Much of Their Time!

This is the reality. Because we, as recruiters, don’t really know enough about them, we tend to waste a lot of time discovering if a candidate is right for us or not. Maybe, Alex has found a better way to communicate this back and forth that is valuable for both parties. The candidate gets what they want and we get a response, that might lead to a positive outcome. No response leads to no outcome!

The truth is, every candidate does actually want to hear from a recruiter. Recruiters think this isn’t the case. Candidates mistakingly say this isn’t true. But it is. If I contacted Alex, today, and I had his dream job, he wants to hear from me. If I have a crappy job that is four levels lower than his ability, he doesn’t want to hear from me. But, as he found, you don’t know that until you know that!

Alex’s response to every recruiter, while canned, is perfect in getting positive responses from him. If more candidates did the same thing, I’m sure we would see more positive interactions across the board between recruiters and candidates.

Candidates ignore recruiters simply because far too often recruiters are reaching out to them with positions they wouldn’t be remotely interested in. Why do recruiters do this? Desperation. Ignorance. Overconfidence. Lack of clarity on what the hiring manager wants/needs. Lack of basic worldly understanding of what someone would possibly want given the information they have. All of the above.

Candidates don’t ignore recruiters who deliver the goods and treat them as a professional. As someone who values your time. There’s hope, because of the Alex’s out there helping us be better by being very specific about what and how that looks.

75% of Job Seekers Have Been Ghosted After an Interview!

Posted on by
2

That number seems high, but it’s not. I’m assuming 99% of recruiters will say they have been ghosted by a candidate. My dad used to love telling me when I was a kid, two wrongs don’t make a right!

Greenhouse released their latest Candidate Experience survey last week and it’s packed with some eye-opening findings, but none larger than the one in the title!

Here are some others:

  • More than 70% of job seekers said they will not submit a job application if it takes longer than 15 minutes to complete.
  • Almost 58% of candidates expect to hear back from companies in one week or less regarding their initial application.
  • Over 70% of job seekers want feedback on an interview. More than 60% said that receiving feedback during the interview process, even if they do not receive a job offer, would make them more inclined to apply to future jobs at that company.
  • The most important DE&I investments candidates evaluate when considering a company are:

a.    employee benefits such as coverage for remote and flexible work arrangements and gender affirmation paid leave (49%)
b.    employee reviews on platforms like Glassdoor on progress and opportunities (47%)
c.    diverse leadership team or board (34%)
d.    promoting affinity/employee resource groups on the careers page (34%)

Why are we all being so rude to each other?

I think candidates and organizations are doing this simply because there are no consequences. Ghost an interview and you will probably be “black-balled” by that one recruiter, for that one position, for the time that recruiter is at that company. Ghost a candidate and the candidate will get a bit pissed and might not apply to your jobs any longer unless you have a great brand, then well, okay, they’ll probably apply to your jobs again.

None of us have consequences for our crappy job process behaviors!

We love to say that we do, but really we don’t, or the consequences are so small it’s akin to a hand slap. “Don’t treat candidates poorly or they’ll stop buying your products!” Or maybe they won’t, kind of depends on how good your products and services are.

At some point, there should be a recruiter code of ethics and a measure that follows your around. A RECRUITER BLOCKCHAIN! (contact me privately as I’m currently taking angel investment on this idea! jk) Can you imagine?!

A call is coming in from Timmy the Recruiter, who currently has a 67% reply after interview rating on THE RECRUITER BLOCKCHAIN. F! Timmy, that sucks, I’m not picking up or replying to his outreach, he sucks! OMG – every good recruiter in the world wishes this was a reality! We also wish it worked both ways!

Hey, Timmy, the Software Engineer looks good, I should contact him for our job! Oh wait, he’s ghosted 3 out of 7 interviews in the past 12 months, screw that guy! I’m not taking the risk of putting him in front of my hiring manager with that record!

A boy can dream!

Yeah, but Tim, we didn’t really ghost them!

Yeah, I know! Your ATS automation sent them an email that said, “Thanks, no thanks, here’s a BOGO offer for our products!”

Candidates REALLY love your BOGO offers in rejection emails! Keep it up! (again, jk)

If a candidate interviews, they deserve more than automation. They deserve some personalization around appreciation for their time, some reasoning, next steps, etc. Yes, it does take a full 1 minute and 27 seconds to craft this communication. And, yes, that’s part of the gig. Be better.

We can’t call out candidate ghosting until we clean up our own shop. We stop ghosting, and now we can build Timmy’s Super Blockchain Candidates That Ghost Suck App! Where we track each ghosting and publicly shame candidates! It’s going to be amazing!

Seriously, in 2022 if you can’t clean up your Candidate Experience, you’re in trouble. It’s foundational to great recruiting, and it’s mostly an individual recruiter accountability issue. We get treated like we treat others. Go check out the 2022 Greenhouse Candidate Experience Report there is a ton of great data to support your strategy to become a much better TA shop this year!

Should we reward outcome or effort?

Posted on by
2

I’m a huge believer in results. When I test, my results orientation is off the charts! So, naturally, I’ve always believed you should reward outcomes/results. The world is filled with folks who put in the effort, but in the end, can’t close the deal, was how I’ve thought about it.

Over the past few years, I’ve softened a bit on this. I still love and want results, but I started to believe that obtaining success isn’t about failure, but small successful efforts that lead to success. I was reminded about this recently when I overheard a story.

The story was being told by a parent who was watching his son’s youth soccer match. A boy on his son’s team scored a goal and all of the kids and parents were cheering, but this father noticed that the boy’s dad who scored was not cheering. “Oh, boy,” he thought, “another crazy sport’s parent, never satisfied with what their kids do…”

After the match, this guy really wanted to talk to the Dad, to tell him what he was doing was wrong, and eventually was going to push this kid to hate sports. So, he waited around looking for the perfect time, when the boy walked up to his dad and the dad asked him, “how did you score that goal?” The boy thought a minute and walked through the play, how he got the ball from the opponent, how he ran really fast to get in front of the opponent, and then went as fast as he could dribbling the ball down to the other end, and kicked the ball past the goalie.

The boy’s dad said, “so, you gave great effort, to get that goal?” Yes, said the boy. The dad congratulated the boy’s efforts. “That was a tremendous effort you gave that led to that goal”, said the dad.

The other father stood there listening, now more than ever wanting to talk to the dad to apologize for thinking he was such a jerk. So, he went up and told him what he was about to do, but glad he stopped himself to overhear his conversation with his son. “Well, he will never be able to guarantee the outcome in sports, but he can always guarantee his efforts”, said the boy’s dad.

In the business world, it’s really about both effort and outcome.

My business is recruiting. We reward “outcome” all the time. Did you actually find and hire the person for this job? Pretty black and white!

But, the reality of recruiting is so often the recruiter has very little to do with the outcome. Yes, they have to find a candidate, but ultimately you have a hiring manager who has some say, you have a candidate who has some say, you have others who have input to the final say. So, only rewarding for an outcome they don’t necessarily control, seems like we are missing a piece.

I often see great effort put in by the recruiters I work with to find and uncover talent, to talk that talent into interviewing and getting them interested in the job, the hiring manager, and the organization. The entire process can be measured and viewed in bursts of effort.

It’s one of the biggest failures most recruiting departments, agencies, RPO’s, etc. do in recruiting. We only reward outcomes and not efforts.

I advise people all the time if you want more employee referrals, stop rewarding the final outcome, and start rewarding all the small efforts that lead to an employee referral getting hired. Reward an employee for just giving you a name and contact information, reward the employee when that referral comes in to interview, reward that employee when that candidate they referred show up on the first day of work, etc. Most of us only reward our employees when the referral has stayed on working for us for 90 days or six months.

The problem is, the employee has so very little to do with that referral getting hired, the outcome. They have plenty they can do to help lead a referral down the path to the outcome, the efforts!

There’s a time and place for outcome rewards. Ultimately in business, we need outcomes to be successful. That is just a fact of life. But, if you believe in your process, your training, your tools, etc. Rewarding efforts can lead to awesome, sustainable results, that can be very rewarding to those grinding it out every day.

In a Corporate Recruiting Department, What Percentage of Hires Should be from Outbound Recruiting?

Posted on by
1

I went to hireEZ‘s (formerly called Hiretual) Outbound RecruitCon this week and the big topic of conversation was recruiting isn’t working! Surprise! It’s broke!

Well, recruiting probably isn’t broke, it’s just what we normally do isn’t working as well any longer. The reality is, about 90% of corporate recruiting is some form of posting jobs and waiting for candidates to apply. That clearly isn’t working right now! And, it probably won’t work for a long time to come.

Outbound recruiting traditionally has been something only agency recruiters really did a lot of. It’s why recruiting agencies are a multi-billion dollar industry. Even RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) companies don’t do outbound recruiting, they also, primarily just replace the normal inbound recruiting done by corporate talent acquisition departments.

Why don’t we do more Outbound Recruiting in Corporate TA?

First, it’s exponentially more difficult to do outbound recruiting than inbound recruiting.

Why? It’s fairly obvious, one is just contacting people who have already told you they want to work for you (inbound) and the other is convincing someone to come work for you that might have never even heard of you and your organization!

Second, we don’t really train our recruiters to do outbound recruiting.

And since TA leaders grew up only doing inbound recruiting, their training consists of, “Look, it’s not hard, just pick up the phone and call people!” Which is actually really shitty training! It’s incredibly hard, and it takes skill.

Third, we don’t give our recruiters the technology and tools to do outbound recruiting properly.

Almost all corporate talent acquisition budgets are focused on inbound recruiting. It takes a lot of money to fill the inbound recruiting funnel, and since that’s what most of us do, that’s where the money goes. And, no, LinkedIn isn’t an outbound recruiting technology!

What percentage of our recruiting should be Outbound vs. Inbound?

This is a very organizational, job, and industry-specific question. If you do a ton of hourly hiring, your organization will do more inbound recruiting than outbound. If you hire highly skilled workers, healthcare, technology, etc., you definitely should at a minimum be doing a 50/50 split of inbound and outbound recruiting, and some will be in the 70-80% outbound the more specialized you get.

We all know there are some roles that you can post and advertise and they are so specialized you will never get a candidate remotely close to being qualified. And yet, the money is spent because, “well, you never know…” Actually, yes, yes we do know, and I’m not burning any more cash just for the fun of it! All of those resources should be spent on outbound recruiting.

The key to increasing your outbound recruiting is two-fold:

  1. You’ve got to measure the two, inbound and outbound, separately.
  2. You’ve got to have recruiters who aren’t asked to do both, because they won’t. I’ll add here, these two types of recruiters have to be paid differently and you can’t expect the same outcomes from both types.

What we know today is having a talent acquisition strategy that is mostly inbound recruiting will and is failing for most organizations. It’s hard, but in current times, its what is needed.

Future of Sourcing/Outbound Recruiting with Shannon Pritchett of hireEZ (formerly Hiretual)

Posted on by
3

On episode 95 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leader Tim Sackett is joined by HireEZ’s (formerly Hiretual) CMO, Shannon Pritchett, to discuss Outbound Recruiting strategies and the real struggles of modern TA.

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)!

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

1:15 – It’s a Tim solo pod today! He is joined by special guest Shannon Pritchard. She is the Head of Marketing from HireEZ (formerly Hiretual). 

6:30 – Tim notes that in marketing, we often don’t devote enough resources to building communities when that could be a great strategy for the longevity of a business. Shannon notes that this is something that HireEZ (formerly Hiretual) has learned from being at a start-up. 

9:15 – Tim asks Shannon to explain what HireEZ is to those who might not know. Shannon notes it’s an outbound recruiting process. They want to bring in automation and AI to speed up the recruiting process. 

10:00 – Tim discusses how the modern recruiter will say the most difficult part of their job is finding talent. He says that it’s not really the hardest thing but it’s getting talent to respond to you and talk about your position. 

12:00  – You heard it here first! Hiretual will now be known as HireEZ. 

15:00 – Shannon notes that they’re giving referral bonuses for interviews.

17:30 – Tim tells a story about how a TA leader took several months to get back to him from a LinkedIn message. What are they doing??

20:00 – Tim says that some TA leaders will ask him if they should hire another recruiter or add more tech. He says they will probably need both. 

23:30 – Shannon says that it’s important to not stop advertising but to reinvest in outbound tactics. 

25:00 – Tim asks Shannon to discuss the mini-conference HireEZ is hosting in Mountain View this week. They’re calling it Outbound RecruitCon. It’s only an hour long!

26:50 – Tim thinks the future of TA may be having an inbound team and an outbound team. 

30:00 – Tim says that he doesn’t see himself in a corporate TA role in the future but he would set up an inbound and outbound team if he were in that role. 

36:30 – You can find Shannon on Twitter @sourcingshannon and check out HireEZ.com!

Should NCAA Coaches Try and Save Athletes Who Enter the Transfer Portal?

Posted on by
5

It’s fairly rare that I open up on this blog about my love of college athletics, but there is something going on in college sports that has such a great parallel to our world of work. It’s called the Transfer Portal.

If you aren’t familiar with the NCAA Transfer Portal, it’s basically a site set up that aids a college athlete wanting to move from their current school to another school. For all intents and purposes, it has added free agency to college athletics.

Previously, when college athletes signed with a school and wanted to transfer, they had to get releases and sit out an entire year, wasting a year of eligibility, so it wasn’t done very often. Basically, the colleges sort of owned the college athlete and the college and coaches had all the power. The transfer portal and new rules have flipped the script on this idea completely and the athletes now really have the power.

Across all divisions of the NCAA, there are thousands of student-athletes who entered the portal looking to transfer to another school where they believe the opportunity will be better. Some will elect to stay at their original school, some will transfer and find more success, some will transfer and find less success.

The reality is we are asking 17 and 18-year-old kids to make a giant decision and they are heavily recruited and promises are made, and when it all comes out in the wash, many times the athlete determines they made a wrong decision. You also have kids who had a dream of attending a certain school but didn’t get offered, they have success at the school that would take them, and now they are in a position to reach that dream.

The question is, how should college coaches treat those who are looking to transfer?

If you read this blog, you know I’m a huge fan of re-recruiting and save strategies. I think if you believe in someone and made a commitment to them, we owe it to them to try and keep them. “We didn’t offer you a scholarship thinking you would be awful. We believe you’ll be great and we believe this is the place you’ll be great!”

For all the focus college coaches put on getting talent from the transfer portal, I believe they should be putting as much focus, if not more, on ensuring their own team doesn’t enter the portal. We have yet to really hear much about how college coaching staffs have had to change their strategy around high-level recruits and younger players who didn’t get the playing time they believe they should get, and how they are working to keep those individuals engaged and believing their school is still the school for them.

The conversations seem one-sided right now, but I believe we’ll start to see retention strategies similar to what we see from employers. These colleges invest a ton of time and resources to get high school athletes to sign and every one that leaves is a wasted opportunity. I would think you will start to see more one-on-one development happening where these coaching staffs are bringing in each player, those who are close to them and building a plan of development and success. “Let us show you how we are going to get you to your desired goals…”

We already see universities using NIL agreements/strategies to incent college athletes to come and to stay, so compensation is a part of this strategy as well, just like employers using retention bonuses and promotions. The question is always going to be for college coaching staff how much is too much? How much do we need to do for a third-string linebacker? What about a backup quarterback? You see a value chain growing across each sport and each position.

I foresee a time in the near future where every college athletic department, and some teams specifically, will have departments where their entire job is about athlete retention. Some individuals on athletic staff’ currently have this responsibility, but it’s not enough. When in any given year you can see 10-25% of your athletes leaving, it’s too much investment not to more effort into trying to save them.

Exploding Job Offers!

Posted on by
5

I had a question the other day from an executive outside of HR and Talent. A C-suite type who was frustrated by the lack of hires his “HR” team was making. My first question was, does HR hire for you, or do you have a recruiting or talent acquisition team? He didn’t know. Problem number one.

This guy wanted my opinion, well, he really wanted my agreement if I’m honest, to something he was forcing his HR team to do with job offers. You see, they had many job offers turned down to accept another job offer. Basically, almost all candidates we have are interviewing at multiple places, and these are technically skilled candidates, in IT, engineering, etc.

His plan was to start offering expiring job offers so that the candidate would be forced to accept their offer at risk of losing it!

Brilliant, right!? He asked me…

Here’s my exact reply:

“So, in an employment market where the unemployment rate is around 1% for technical candidates, you feel the best strategy is to force someone to make a decision to come to work for you? Also, who says that they won’t just accept your offer, continue in the process while waiting on other offers to come, and eventually just leave you high and dry? Also, do you really want to start off an employment relationship with someone who felt forced to take your offer?”

His response:

“Well, the hell should we do?”

The Problem with Exploding Job Offers

  1. Expiring job offers only work on candidates who are lower end of the value chain, or have no other vaiable offers to choose from. The best talent, won’t even consider you if you pull that strategy.
  2. If you aren’t a “unicorn” brand (Google, Apple, etc.) you have no shot at getting good talent to accept your exploding job offer.
  3. While it might in theory “end” your hiring process faster, you have a higher chance of a late no-show/decline that puts your team even farther behind in hiring. Especially, if they went back to your other viable candidates and told them they were silver medalist.

What’s a better way? Because it’s not unheard of in today’s world where we put some timing around job offers. The reality is, we can’t wait forever. So, the real question is, how long should we give someone to consider our offer before we have to pull it back?

I like to use this as a great way to find out what I’m up against. Let the candidate tell you a time, and then negotiate it down if you don’t feel like it’s appropriate. First, when I make an offer, I expect a full acceptance the moment I make it! What?! But, you just said…! Yeah, I don’t like exploding job offers, but I also work as a recruiter who has already pre-closed the candidate and knocked out all the objections, so when I make the offer, the candidate and I have already agreed, if I get X, Y, and Z, you’re answer is “Yes”, correct?

That doesn’t mean it works every time!

In the case where the candidate, legitimately needs some time, I give them some time, but also I need reasons to go back to the hiring manager with. Why do you need the time? Are there other offers you are waiting on? What would make you take those other offers over ours? Again, keep closing, with demanding an answer. Changing jobs is one of the top three most stressful things a person does. These decisions don’t come lightly, and we need to respect that.

Offering Exploding Job offers is old advice that has turned into bad advice, similar to not accepting a counter-offer from your employer. Job negotiation has changed a lot over the last few decades, some of the traditional things we did in the past just don’t work anymore.

The Damaging Power of a Bad Idea!

Posted on by
Reply

Have you ever been caught in a downward vortex of a truly crappy idea that at some point you wondered to yourself, “how the heck did we get here!?”

I like to think I’m the kryptonite of bad ideas in my organization. It’s part of my personality of being a bit unfiltered in my thoughts and ideas. If I think something is a bad idea, I’m probably going to say something. Or at least, I hope I will say something.

Why don’t we stop bad ideas in organizations?

  1. We never want to tell someone their idea is bad. We say things like, “there are no bad ideas!” Of course, there are bad ideas! That’s just a dumb statement. There are ideas that can ruin your company and your career. If some idiot openingly shares a bad idea, it should be up to us as peers to point this out and help them out.
  2. The person sharing the idea is in a power position. This one is hard. Well, Tina is the boss! I don’t like her idea, but we have to go along with her or else it will probably look bad and she’ll make sure she crushes my career. This is the worst! If you’re a leader, you need to find someone who will tell you the truth about your stupid ideas.
  3. We all know it’s a bad idea but we’ve got so much already invested we need to make it work. Ugh! My grandmother would call this, “throwing good money after bad”. Well, we’ve come this far, we have to make it work. The best organizations know when to call it quits on a bad idea, take the loss, and begin a new in a better direction.

So, bad ideas grow and prosper basically because we don’t want to hurt feelings or hurt our own careers.

I do think there are some strategies we can use to help get us out of a bad idea. Some things that will allow us to protect our relationships and our careers, and put us on a better path.

If I think of the times that I saw someone’s bad idea blow up in their face, it happened because it was done publicly. If we have the ability to sit down privately with the individual and talk through it, I usually find that together we can create something better, and change a bad idea into something that will work, and it saves face for all involved.

In terms of people in the position of power who have bad ideas, I like, again, speaking to them in private, but also using data and competitive data to try and influence their decision in another direction. I’ve also used a strategy that is a bit risky, but it’s going over their head in a way that seems like you weren’t doing it on purpose. Like, “Oh, I want to share this data with the entire company because I found it so fascinating and thought others would have interest!” Data that shows we should be doing something else, in hopes, it sparks an idea for someone to change.

The reality is bad ideas happen every day in our organizations and it’s up to us to help create a culture where we reward stopping bad ideas. Where we respect each other so highly we are confronting bad ideas as a way to help that person’s career, not point out their failure. If we can get to that point, we put ourselves in a position to take the power out of bad ideas!