@LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting Survey says the #1 Skill for Recruiters in 2020 is… @LinkedInNews

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I know you hate clickbait headlines, but they work, plus I know you want to know, so why give it away in the title! I mean I don’t get paid for my dashing looks and witty charm! Thank goodness!

LinkedIn launched its 2020 Future of Recruiting survey results today and it’s one of my favorite content pieces to comment on. Click through the link to download it for yourself, it’s packed with interesting data around talent acquisition and recruiting!

The #1 Skill for Recruiters in 2020 is…Adaptability!

Did you guess that? I didn’t. I think I could have probably could have had 50 guesses on not got that one. Here are the others:

Fastest growing skills for recruiters in 2020:

● Personal Development +44%

● Diversity & Inclusion +42%

● Talent Pipelining +37%

● Decision-Making +34%

● HR Strategy +30%

Okay, I can see personal development being high on the list, since 2020 has brought a lot of quality time working in remote settings and high unemployment numbers for recruiting pros, I think most people have been thinking about their personal and professional development.

I actually would have guessed D&I would have been #1. 2020 will be remembered for a few things – Covid, Social Justice, and the U.S. finally getting a sane person in the White House. So, from a talent acquisition perspective, I would have guessed diversity and inclusion recruiting to be the top priority.

HR Strategy actually makes zero sense to me! So, you’re in talent acquisition and your most needed skill is HR Strategy? Quite frankly, it makes you question the results overall. How could that be? Talent Pipelining? Yep! HR Strategy? Nope! But, it’s 2020, weird times.

Another big eye-opening stat from the report:

70% say Virtual Recruiting will become the new standard!

Okay, this one will take some explaining and background. First, what do you mean by “virtual recruiting”? So, for this data, that basically means, the process we have for recruiting can be done virtually. Sourcing, video interviewing, online assessments, etc., can all be done virtually, so I guess, yes, in that case, “virtual recruiting” is the new standard.

But, honestly, most of that stuff was already fairly standard.

I think the bigger aspect is Recruiters believing they’ll continue to be virtual/remote after Covid. I think Covid has shown organizations that in a pinch, yep, recruiting can be done virtually. But, every organization will have to truly decide is it better or the same as before, or possibly worse?

I’ve spoken to a number of F500 executives who aren’t super keen on remote recruiting because the relationships with hiring managers are worse, synergies amongst the TA team aren’t as robust, and brainstorming around testing and how to improve seem weaker in remote settings. Some of that can be improved, but it still comes down to leader perception.

We’ve been automating recruiting since the first Caveman needed a new assistant to track dinosaur migration patterns, so the fact that we’ll continue to automate and be able to recruit from anywhere in a mostly Saas environment should not be surprising to anyone.

Go download the new report. Some really good stuff around TA budgets and everyone’s favorite new topic, Internal Mobility, as well.

Could Employee Data Portability be the Future of Employment?

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Do you remember when cell phones first came out? If you were with Verizon and you wanted to switch to Sprint, you actually had to change phone numbers! Think about how that would impact your world today. We switch from company to company, go-between social apps all day long, never worrying that our “profile” our data, won’t follow us.

In the mid-2000s the FCC finally made the determination that we should be able to move our phone number from one carrier to the next. Our phone number was part of our personal data. It’s how people recognized us.

Now, think about how our jobs are similar to our phone number, in terms of data.

You go and work at company A. You do a great job. You want to use that great work to get a new job at company B, but company A is restricted from telling company B anything about you, besides maybe some dates of employment.

What if we had a full digital file of everything we did at company A. Our performance records. Our training and development records. Maybe even records of peer reviews, etc. Exactly which jobs you held and what you did.

Do you think that would help you get that next job?

For most, it would help a bunch. If you sucked it might hurt your chances, but hey, you sucked, get better at your current job and turn it around!

Workday has been working on making employee data portable between Workday customers. That is close, and it’s definitely a step in the right direction, but so far you can’t take your Workday record and take it to a competitor HCM solution like Oracle or SAP. But, if you worked at three Workday HCM shops in a row, theoretically they are putting into place the ability for you to make your employment data portable.

That’s really cool! Because one of the biggest issues we face as candidates and as employers is truly knowing what someone has done previously, and letting a potential future employee know what we have actually done. Unfortunately, way too many people flat out lie on their resume/application/LinkedIn profile, that it’s hard to take any of those things as concrete proof of work.

I actually really like the idea of employee data portability. We allow employees to have a copy of their employee file, but so often, there isn’t really any substance in those files to help an employee get their next job. I also, get that if you had a negative job experience, you might not want that, but let’s face it, most people have some negative job experiences along the way, and I think all of that would come out in the wash.

We are the collective of our experiences, not just our most recent experience. As a hiring manager, I’m looking for trends and growth, understanding an individual might have made a bad job choice that didn’t fit well, and that might pop out. But, I also like the fact that if someone is truly a bad apple, that will also pop out.

We are all quickly becoming portable data sets. Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, Twitter, etc. already know this. Most consumer marketing pros already know this. Employer technology tends to lag behind, but I think we are all headed down a path where one day getting hired will be less about your resume or profile, and more about your complete data set you can show an employer with a simple click.

Should You Tell An Employee You Consider Them High-Potential? #HiPo

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The Wall Street Journal had an article saying that only 28% of companies tell their employees what they are ranked in terms of future potential (i.e., High Potential, Low, etc.).  From the article:

According to a report released Monday by consulting firm Towers Watson, just 68% of companies formally identify high-potential employees, and only 28% actually tell the employees they’ve been labeled as such. The survey was based on a study of 316 companies across North America.

“This is really a missed opportunity,” says Laurie Bienstock, co-author of the report. “You need to wonder how [organizations] are fostering the development of these high-potentials if they’re not informing them.”

Don’t you just wonder!?

Let me tell you a little HR secret Laurie, employers don’t need to tell Hi-Po’s they are Hi-Po’s because Hi-Po’s already know they are Hi-Po’s, that’s one reason they are Hi-Po’s they have great self-awareness.   What employers need to do with Hi-Po’s is the following:

1. Pay them.  Above the market, above average and low potentials within the same workgroups and make sure they know it.

2. Challenge them.  Lead positions on projects, putting them in positions to communicate to senior leadership and shine, getting them into the organizational “circle of trust”.

3. Treat them differently.  Yep, that’s right HR Pros – treat your Hi-Po’s differently than you treat your Low-Po’s – they expect, they want it, they’ll appreciate it.  It will tick off your Low-Po’s, and that’s a good thing – you need your Low-Po’s to be uncomfortable – you’re in charge of making your organization’s talent better, not running a charity event.

The other fact from the article that only 68% formally identify employee potential is surprising to me – and not that it’s low – that number seems high to me.  Hi-Po, No-Po, Low-Po, etc. is a big HR shop game that is a luxury for most organizations.  Is it critical for successful succession planning? Yes.  It is also something that takes a ton of organizational resources to accomplish and maintain.  Once you get that data, you then have to do something with it and keep doing it.  That usually means the development of an entire group within HR, depending on how big your organization is.  So, 68% seems like an inflated number – I’m guessing the survey was given to only large corporations.

Should you tell an employee what they are ranked?  I have and I would – but it really depends on the culture and engagement of your organization.  The one thing I will tell you is, if you have no plan on what you are going to do with this data, don’t start – it will be a waste of time.  I see so many HR Pros run down this path of determining who their Hi-Po’s are without any idea of what they are going to do next.  It’s like “Hey! We found out Joe and Lynn are our Hi-Po’s! Isn’t that great?!”  No, not really – so, what?  The real work comes after the identification in developing your Hi-Po’s into their next level position and building succession, the real work is not in the identifying.

 

This One Factor is Reducing Your Diversity Hiring by 30%!

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Employers discriminate in hiring. This is a fact. It’s been a fact for generations. It’s the main reason anti-discrimination statements show up on job postings. That and it’s the law for Public employers and Government contractors who are required to have these statements. Many private employers use these as well to show they don’t discriminate in hiring.

For fifty years we’ve seen these statements on job descriptions and job advertisements. Recently, two Economists from the University of Chicago did a study looking at the impact of candidate behavior when these statements are added to a job posting and their findings were shocking!

In their study, the two economists posted advertisements for an administrative assistant job in ten large American cities. Of the 2,300 applicants who expressed interest, half were given a standard job description and the other half were given a description with an equal-opportunity statement promising that “all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, colour, age or any other protected characteristics”.

 

For racial minorities, those who received the pro-diversity statement were 30% less likely to apply for the job—and the effect appeared to be worse in cities with white majorities (see chart). In a follow-up survey, the prospective applicants said the statement prompted worries that they would be token diversity hires.

30% Less Likely To Apply!!! 

What the what?!?!

This isn’t a study that was done decades ago. This was done in the past twelve months!

So, what should we do? 

One thing the study found that had a positive impact on increasing diversity application is to show your senior executives, including your CEO, talk in a ‘real’ transparent way on the impact that diversity has on your organization.

No, not some overly-produced puff piece about how we are all part of the same rainbow. Include video on your career site with your CEO telling stories about how D&I isn’t just a marketing tactic, but how it’s really impacted the organization in a positive way.

Have diverse employees ask the CEO question that gets to the heart of where D&I is in your organization. Don’t be afraid about keeping this conversation open and maybe a bit uncomfortable. The more real, the more candidates will understand that you’re really trying to make a difference.

If you really want to make sure you’re not missing great minority applicants who are skipping even applying to you, embed these videos right into your job postings!

Don’t think that when you put an “EEOC” statement at the end of your job posting is letting a diverse candidate pool know you’re a great place for them to work. They don’t buy it! You have to be better than that!

Does Your Work Mandate You Tell Them Who You’re Sleeping With? #HRFamous

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In episode 35 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee discuss their favorite Halloween candy, dig into BlackRock’s recent policy change that mandates employee report all romantic relationships, including those with all company partners and vendors, and wrap it up with a discussion on Performance vs. Trust via a famous Simon Sinek video.

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

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

1:30 – Halloween is right around the corner! JLee is modifying the normal Halloween routine for her two young kids. She’s excited because her kids are getting into Star Wars and they’re doing a Star Wars family costume.

3:00 – Tim’s family is doing a Michigan vs. MSU football/Halloween neighborhood tailgate. He is trying to decide if he wants to be Biden or Trump for his costume.

4:15 – What is your favorite Halloween candy? Tim is team Reese’s pumpkin because of the peanut butter to chocolate ratio. KD likes the bite-size (better known as fun size) Snickers. JLee likes a classic Kit Kat.

6:45 – First topic: BlackRock is now requiring all employees to disclose any sort of romantic relationship with anyone in the company or anyone related to the company, including all vendors and partners, which includes 1/5 of the known world by definition. The company may make alternative work arrangements depending on reporting from employees.

8:00 – Tim, the HR Famous workplace harassment expert, thinks that this new policy is stupid because it limits so many romantic or sexual relationships.

9:30 – JLee doesn’t want to know every possible relationship between employees from an HR perspective. She says it’s TMI!

10:30 – KD says that this policy follows a few scandals with relationship reporting at BlackRock involving high-level employees.

14:30 – The gang suggests a hashtag for Blackrock – #sexlessnation

15:00 – JLee tells us what questions would have to be asked about these relationships.

16:20 – The HR Famous crew wishes the best to the BlackRock HR crew with this new policy. #sexlessnation

19:30 – Second topic of the day: Simon Sinek’s video Performance vs. Trust. In this video, Sinek talks about the Marines and how to value trustworthiness vs. high-level performance.

22:40 – JLee thinks that this is a hard lesson for a leader to learn because you often only learn you can’t trust someone once someone has made a mistake.

23:30 – Tim brings up Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book Talking To Strangers and how humans tend to default to trust when often people are not being trustworthy.

26:00 – Shoutout to Ed Baldwin and the book The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman. He defines trust in his book as sincerity, reliability, and competence.

27:00 – KD and JLee would love if Simon would button up his shirt one more button!

What do you value most? Time or Money?

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If I work less, you will pay less. True?

I’m assuming your answer to the question, what do you value most, time, or money? Your answer was time. Given enough time I can make more money. No matter how much money I have, I can’t necessarily buy more time.

So, if I do my work faster for you, that should have a higher value, right?

You see, it doesn’t work both ways. We want our employees to be more efficient doing world-class work, but if they don’t work the amount of time we expect, “we” feel like we got cheated. But, wait, I did what you wanted in half the time, you should be happy to pay me, in fact, you should want to pay me more!

Let me give you a real example.

Let’s say you’re paying me to find you a world-class employee, that will be super valuable to your organization. I’m billing you 25% of this employee’s first year’s salary of $100,000 if I successfully find you this talented person.

Turns out, I was able to find this person in 5 minutes. You owe me $25,000.

I’m so happy I was able to find you the person you wanted to hire! We are both extremely happy!

But you are not! Are you?

Why?

You feel cheated. You feel like if it only took me 5 minutes to find this person, that can’t be worth $25,000.

So, let’s break this down:

  • You said time is your most valuable resource.
  • I just gave you weeks, maybe months of time, since this search only took 5 minutes.
  • In fact, getting this hire on so quickly will allow your organization to close millions in additional project work.

Do you still feel cheated that I did my job so well, it gave us both more time and more value to both of our organizations?  Yes, most likely…

Great leaders would be extremely satisfied with this outcome. Average and emerging leaders would accept it, but still have some slight heartburn (how will I explain this to my executives? I’m paying $25K for 5 minutes of work!). Awful leaders will fight not to pay the invoice and ruin the relationship.

Now all of this has nothing to do with staffing, that was just the example. It has to do with what we value more. Time or Money.

We fail as organizations when we can’t define what is most valuable. This is how we get leaders who still value “asses in seats” over people delivering great work quickly. World-class organizations set great deliverables, reachable goals, and reward employees for meeting those goals on time, or ideally sooner!

The reward employees get is time and flexibility. The reward the organization gets is employees who want to continue to blow goals out of the water.

What do you value more, time, or money?

Politically Incorrect Post of the Week: Pay Inequality Persists!

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Pay inequality persists? Well, that’s not politically incorrect!

What if I told you, gender wage gaps persist even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely?!

Whatcha you talkin about, Tim!?

Female Uber Drivers make 7% less than male drivers, even though, none of us even know if a male or female driver will pick us up. The algorithm specifically doesn’t allow us to request or know. So, how can Uber Drivers have a gender pay inequality issue?

Okay, so here’s where this might become a bit politically incorrect for those who want to make it that and ignore facts. Turns out, Men, more than women, drive faster, so they will make more on average driving for Uber than women. Also, Men are more likely to on request for rides in more congested, riskier areas, which tend to carry higher fares.

You can call it pay inequality. Some will call it a performance difference, in this particular position, in this particular profession.

One more example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a gig worker site, which also only measures users performance and does not measure gender, also shows gender pay inequality across it’s users to the tune of 10.5%! Amazon’s Mechanical Turk pays men 10.5% more than women for the same work, even though they have no idea the person doing the work is a man, woman, non-binary gender, etc.

So, what gives!? Again, it comes back to performance. Researchers found:

“For 22,271 Mechanical Turk workers who participated in nearly 5 million tasks, we analyze hourly earnings by gender, controlling for key covariates which have been shown previously to lead to differential pay for men and women. On average, women’s hourly earnings were 10.5% lower than men’s. Several factors contributed to the gender pay gap, including the tendency for women to select tasks that have a lower advertised hourly pay. This study provides evidence that gender pay gaps can arise despite the absence of overt discrimination, labor segregation, and inflexible work arrangements, even after experience, education, and other human capital factors are controlled for. Findings highlight the need to examine other possible causes of the gender pay gap.”

Okay, don’t shoot the messenger! I’m only reporting the news!

Funny thing is, the authors (both male and female) of this Northwestern University study also were very concerned about people thinking they were being politically incorrect, actually making a plea within the published paper telling people they weren’t being politically incorrect!

Here’s the problem with all of this. Men can and will do certain jobs, on average, better than women. Women can and will do certain jobs, on average, better than men. I haven’t seen a study on non-binary genders, yet, but I can guess that Non-binary genders can and will do certain jobs, on average, better than both men and women!

This is why we have to be very careful when looking at gender pay inequality data at a macro-level. Of course, we have gender pay issues. But throwing out macro numbers does not help solve the problem. As leaders and HR professionals it’s our job to find the specific pay issues we have and correct those.

We love to believe, especially in our overly charged social climate we are in currently, that there are always bad actors at play when things like this happen. That’s not always the case, and we (the collective we) lose credibility when we make things like gender pay inequality a macro issue to leaders and executives who don’t have those issues or have them in very narrow categories which they were unaware.

Let’s find the inequalities. Let’s discover the reason for these inequalities. Then, let’s make things right that need to be made right. Right now, we have a lot of righting to do, but my hope is that won’t always be the case. So, assume positive intent, first, and let’s make our world better for everyone.

The HR Famous Pod – E34 – Is it legal to only hire cute blondes as Flight Attendants?

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In episode 34 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee come together to discuss a recent employment lawsuit that claims United Airlines grants assignment privileges to young blonde females and discusses the stock price of Slack tanking once Wall Street determined it’s growth wasn’t going to blow up in the WFH world aka Zoom.

Listen (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

2:45 – WTF is WFT? KD teaches us what the Washington Football Team is. Formerly known as the Washington Redskins, WFT is the new name for the team that didn’t have a name ready for a rebrand, and all Tim and KD want to know is how Jlee, a DC native, feels about it.

5:45 – KD takes a shot a what his company’s name would be if they had to turn to something generic like WFT. Spoiler alert – It’s bland.

7:15 – First topic of the day: United Airlines has taken a lawsuit from flight attendants. Bloomberg reports this lawsuit has to do with preferential treatment to young blonde females based on physical attributes on flights chartered by major league sport teams. Shocking.

11:00 – JLee talks about how she gets upset about reviewing creative collateral due to the lack of size and physical diversity. She also wonders about the role the unions play into who gets the more coveted charter flights.  KD covers what the collective bargaining agreement says, turns out the flight attendants union bargain the right away.

12:30 – The website Live And Let’s Fly published an article saying that clients can request specific flight attendants to work their flights if their schedule allows. The same article includes unnamed sources who provide some information provided by United Airlines in the initial discovery.

16:00 – Tim talks about how he thinks most judges won’t get into collective bargaining agreements and will try to push it back to the union to deal with.

19:15 – The HR Famous crew gives their favorite profile of flight attendant. KD likes the middle aged women who are afraid to push back on people. Tim likes the ones who recognize frequent flyers.

22:30 – Last topic of the day: Slack! Slack recently reported quarterly results and it was in line with analysts expectations for their growth but their stock tanked.  The gang discusses whether Slack is must have work tech, compares it to Zoom and talks about how the greatest generation – GEN X – likes to communicate, which is all that really matters to Gen Xers. The gang identifies JLee as non-Gen X, but bets she can still muscle on on email without ever signing into Slack or the equivalent.

29:00 – Time for the CHRO Move of the Week! Nadia Rawlinsen is the new CPO of Slack! She comes from companies like Live Nation and Groupon and colleges like Harvard and Stanford. The gang takes a look at her career and thinks out loud about what’s in front of her at Slack.

Resources:

Jessica Lee on LinkedIn

Tim Sackett on Linkedin

Kris Dunn on LinkedIn

HRU Tech

The Tim Sackett Project

The HR Capitalist

Fistful of Talent

Kinetix

Boss Leadership Training Series

Future Jobs in HR and Recruiting with @Kris_Dunn and I! (Video)

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Here’s what we know for sure! The jobs we are doing today, quite possibly will not be the jobs we will be doing down the road! How do we know this? The world changes and evolves and while we once needed a ton of Blacksmiths in the world, we no longer need that profession as widely as we once did.

So, are HR pros going the way of the horseshoe!? I just lost all of the audience under 75, but let’s talk about the Future of HR and TA jobs!

Shout out the great folks at the SHRM Store for sending me the cool green I Love HR polo! To be honest, it fits super great and people say the green looks great on me! In fact, if you click through the link, I think they should have used me for the model! Tell me I’m wrong! I’m way HR Sexier!

By the way – I love the tagline “World’s Largest HR Store!” Like who else is going to have an HR Store! Amazon!?! Wait, don’t tell Bezos, he might start one!