The HR Famous Pod – E31 – Should we cancel Performance Reviews for 2020?

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In episode 31 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee discuss Google’s move to a very uncool/unhip annual performance review cycle (called a “perf” which is dangerously close to bad stuff), David Blaine’s recent dangerous endeavor, and the latest CHRO move of the week involving IBM’s new HR leader.

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

1:30 – Did you watch David Blaine’s balloon descension excursion? Tim doesn’t think that he’s human.

4:30 – Do you ever dress up at home just to feel better? JLee dressed up today because she’s sick of athleisure

5:30 – Time for the CHRO Move of the Week! IBM Senior Vice President of HR and CHRO Diane Gherson announced her successor, Nickle LaMoreaux, this week as she has decided to retire. JLee commends IBM for this classy move of publicly passing the gauntlet onto their next CHRO

9:00 – KD points out her former positions at IBM and how that helped her get into the top HR spot at the company.

12:00 – KD talks about how IBM was one of the first to move people to remote work and also the first to take it away, and why it had a number of lawsuits around age discrimination based on allegations of a strategy to bring in younger people that would cost less.

14:20 – The HR Famous crew doesn’t know what IBM does anymore! Does this mean that they’re on the outs?

15:00 – Who remembers the old adage “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? JLee has never heard it but Tim and KD remember those days.

17:00 – Next topic of the day: Business Insider published an article about Google’s performance reviews being resumed and how some employees are concerned that the new 12 month cycle will hurt their chances for promotions.

18:00 – Internally, Google’s performance reviews are known as “perf”… That’s something the HR Famous crew has never seen! Tim sees this as a sign as Google growing up.  The gang also has fun with the word “perf” which borders on the worst corporate slang ever.

21:30 – A lot of companies had to or chose to pause performance reviews during the beginning of the pandemic. KD thinks it was a good move to pause performance reviews for the first months of the pandemic to allow employees to focus on other worries.

24:30 – JLee and Tim comment on how their frustration with the fact that Google employees are so worried about their pay increases when so much else is going on in the world. KD reminds everyone that there are a lot of people in the company that aren’t complaining about their lack of a raise.

27:45 – One of the things that Google is doing to make performance reviews more simple is having employees list up to 5 of their biggest accomplishments/achievements but they must say less than 160 words for each item. KD notes the fact that via this strategy, managers at Google are like everyone else – they’d prefer you write your own review!!

28:30 – Reach out to Tim Sackett if you need help writing your perf!

30:30 – Tim laughs at the fact that the pandemic has forced HR to go back in time to once a year performance reviews, when research for years has shown that more frequent performance reviews are more effective.

32:00 – JLee brings up the fact that those with children they are taking care of at home may be negatively affected by performance reviews right now. Tim thinks that people are going to be judged by their performance during the pandemic anyways and there’s not much you can do to change that.

38:30 – Who else has become a cycler in the pandemic? JLee and Tim are now fans!

Advice for Landing a Job from a CEO (who never hires…)

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I get it, you’re the CEO of a sexy brand so all the media companies want to interview you, but when you give advice out that your HR and TA leaders would never give, you’re basically just spewing B.S.!

Pulled directly from the headlines of CNBC, 1-800-Flowers CEO (wait, is that a sexy brand!?), Chris McCann, has to hire 10,000 seasonal workers for the upcoming holiday season to fill the rush of orders they anticipate:

“The ambitious hiring plans will fill part- and full-time roles in production, gift assembly, customer service and distribution and fulfillment center operations. Openings are primarily in-person jobs on worksites throughout Illinois, Ohio and Oregon. Some work-from-home positions, particularly those in customer service, are available.

Here, McCann shares his best tips for getting hired in a seasonal role right now.”

Are you ready for these great tips!?! Here you go:

  1. Arrive at your interview ready to uphold safety guidelines due to COVID
  2. Have a flexible schedule
  3. Express interest in overtime
  4. Tell 1-800-Flowers who want to return to work seasonally, next season
  5. Tell 1-800-Flowers your desire to stay on permanently after your seasonal job.

Okay, not awful, but here is what, I believe, the head of TA for 1-800-Flowers would actually give as advice to someone, right now, looking to work as a seasonal employee for $13.50/hr:

  1. Show up for the interview
  2. Don’t show up drunk or high
  3. Don’t throw up on the person interviewing
  4. Don’t lick anyone during the interview
  5. Show up on your first day

Hiring seasonal workers, especially right now during a pandemic is hard work! It’s almost impossible in the best of circumstances, Chris McCann is so far removed from hiring a seasonal worker he has lost all touch with reality!

First, these are seasonal jobs, McCann himself said only about 5% will make it to the big leagues of a full-time offer after the seasonal job is done. So, let’s not give out a ton of hope, because you just end up with thousands of pissed off people after the seasonal job is done! HR and TA hiring for seasonal spend most of the interview validating that the applicant actually knows and understands this job is going to end in 3 months!

Second, seasonal hiring is warm body, show up hiring. Calm down, Chris, on making a great first impression. When you’re trying to hire 10,000 people at low wages for three months, if you show up, you get the job!

Third, Chris McCann, did Undercover Boss, which tells you a few things. One, he acted like an hourly worker for a TV show, so he thinks he knows what it’s like to be an hourly worker in his environment. Two, he actually wanted to go on a TV show versus running his business. Some CEOs just like media attention.

Here’s what we all should know at this point. The larger the company, the less the CEO actually knows about the reality of hiring. Once that CEO is working for an organization that has more than 500 employees, there’s a good chance they haven’t hired an hourly worker in years. So, thanks for the advice, Chris, but you’re not helping your HR and TA team fill jobs!

How Perfect is your Perfect Hire?

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There’s a concept known as the “Perfect Premium”. Basically, we over evaluate the value of “perfect” versus almost perfect. What do I mean?

Let me give an example that we are all familiar with, standardized college admission testing, ACT/SAT. A perfect ACT score is 36. If someone scores a 36 on the ACT, they’ll get a full ride, academic scholarship to some college.

If someone gets a 35 on their ACT test, one point lower than perfect, they might get a full-ride scholarship to a college, but that is no guarantee. We assume 35 is that much lower than a 36. Now, what about comparing an ACT score of 35 to a score of 34? Well, in that case, we assume those two scores a virtually the same! Smart, but not perfect!

We do this with employment assessments as well.

We assume the person who scores the highest on the test is the best one, and the people who scored less are really that close. Let’s say you have an assessment that scores 0 to 100. You have three candidates that score 100, 94, and 91. We will almost always assume that the 100 is by far the better hire than the 94 or 91.

If you tell your hiring manager they can’t have the 100 score because that person dropped out for some reason, they won’t really care if you choose the 94 or 91. To them, those are the same, but that 100! She was the magical unicorn!

We exaggerate the distance between the perfect and the near-perfect by an exponential amount from those who near-perfect to almost near-perfect. 

Why does this matter?

Because the reality is, those who are perfect, and those who are near-perfect, are virtually the same when it comes to potential performance. Whether you hire the perfect scoring candidate or the one who is near perfect, you are basically getting the same person, but your mind will lie to tell you and tell you that you’re not!

Your perfect hire might actually be perfect! But, your near-perfect hire might also be perfect!

Also, for those thinking, “Tim probably just got 35 on this ACT and now he’s trying to make us believe he’s as smart as the kids who got 36!” Ha! you’re wrong! I got a 32, and I’m still way smarter than those try-hards who got 36! Or am I…

Are your Recruiters wasting your Hiring Manager’s time?

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I had a conversation the other day with a corporate HR Director and we were talking recruiters, corporate recruiters.  My friend had a dilemma, a classic corporate recruiting scenario. The problem is she has recruiters who are doing a decent job, but they won’t get out from behind their desks and get out into the organization and get face-to-face feedback from the hiring managers. But, here is the real reason:  the recruiters feel like they are “wasting” the hiring manager’s time.

“So,” she asked, “How do I get them out to build these relationships?”

Great question, but she asked the wrong question (was partially my answer).  Her problem isn’t that her recruiters aren’t building the relationships face-to-face with managers. The problem is they feel they are “wasting” someone’s time.

They don’t value or understand the value they are providing to the hiring manager. If they did, it sounds like they wouldn’t have a problem with visiting with the hiring managers.  It’s a classic leadership failure, solving a symptom instead of solving the actual problem.

I don’t think that this is rare, recruiters feeling like they are wasting hiring managers time. It happens constantly at the corporate level.  Once you train your recruiters (and hiring managers) on the value the recruiters are providing, you see much less resistance of the recruiters feeling comfortable getting in front of hiring managers to get feedback on candidates, and actually making a decision.  This moves your process along much quicker.

What value do recruiters provide?  Well, that seems like a really stupid question, but there aren’t stupid questions (just stupid people who ask questions).  Here are a few that will help your corporate recruiters understand their real value to hiring managers:

  • Corporate recruiters are the talent pipeline for a hiring manager. (or should be!)
  • Corporate recruiters can be the conduit for hiring managers to increase or better the talent within their department.
  • Corporate recruiters are a partner to the hiring managers in assessing talent.
  • Corporate recruiters are a strategist for the hiring managers group succession planning
  • Corporate recruiters are your hiring managers first line of performance management (setting expectations before someone even comes in the door)
  • Corporate recruiters are tacticians of organizational culture.

So, the next time you hear a recruiter tell you “I don’t want to waste their time.” Don’t go off on them and tell them to “just go out there and build the relationship”. Educate them on why they aren’t wasting their time. Then do an assessment for yourself to determine are they adding value or are they just wasting time. All recruiters are not created equal and some waste time, and it’s your job as a leader to find ones add value.

A critical component of all of this is building an expectation of your hiring managers of what they should expect from your recruiters.  They should expect value. They should expect a recruiter who is a pro, and who is going to help them maneuver the organizational landscape and politics of hiring. They should expect a recruiter is going to deliver to them better talent than they already have. They should expect a partner, someone who is looking out for the best interest of the hiring managers department.

Ultimately, what they should expect is someone who won’t waste their time!

Pressure is a Privilege

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“Pressure is a Privilege” – Billy Jean King

I’ve been watching the US Open this week and women’s finalist, Naomi Osaka was interviewed and said as she walks out onto the US Open court she pulls inspiration from the quote and sign that hangs just outside the court where the players enter.

In today’s world, we are all feeling a lot of pressure.

Parents struggling to work, teach, care for themselves. People fearful of the virus. People fearful of social and political unrest. People fearful of how they’ll pay their bills. It seems like every day the pressure just keeps increasing around us.

You are feeling pressure because something is expected of you. That expectation might be put on you by the outside world, or by yourself, but either way, here we are. You have expectations and that is a privilege. It causes us to be uncomfortable and being uncomfortable causes us to change and adapt.

Here is how King explains her own quote:

“I have this saying: Pressure is a privilege. Usually, if you have tremendous pressure, it’s because an opportunity comes along. I remember thinking about this, actually, when I was at Centre Court at Wimbledon. And I said, “All right. You’ve been dreaming about this moment. Is it a lot of pressure? Yeah. But guess what? It’s a privilege to be standing here.” Most of the time, in work or play or anything, if you really think about it, usually it’s a privilege. That I-want-the-ball feeling. Not “please double-fault.” Give me the ball. Give me the problem to solve. Let’s figure this out. Let’s go.” 

Let’s Go!

The Weekly Dose: @Workday Ups its Game in Belonging and Diversity!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at Workday’s recent announcement about their new product offerings around Diversity and Inclusion. If 2020 has done anything, it’s brought the conversation of diversity and inclusion to the forefront like never before in organizations. Many HR tech companies have been working on products in this space for a while, but few will have the impact of Workday’s new VIBE Central and VIBE Index.

One of the largest issues faced by organizations in moving the needle around having employees feel a sense of belonging, as well as broader D&I issues, is those front-line leaders and above never truly felt like they had the data to help them make the right decisions. So, we mostly just tried to make change by gut feel and subjective data that was constantly changing.

Workday’s VIBE (Value, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity) Central brings all diversity- and inclusion-related data into one centralized place in Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), enabling organizations to set goals and then monitor progress against those goals. Businesses can assess, measure, benchmark, and manage diversity and inclusion by the dimensions of their choice, such as race/ethnicity and gender. For example, VIBE Central could surface that 10 percent of women in the organization have been promoted in the last three years; in addition, benchmark data could show that promotions for women are well below the median of 50th percentile, which may be 20 percent, for peer companies in the same industry.

Organizations can benefit from the ability to assess talent management, talent development, and employee experience for key factors including:

  • Hiring. Organizations can better understand if hiring practices are balanced or if one group is over- or under-represented.
  • Promotions. Business leaders can look at metrics to determine if their promotion process is inclusive and then view a succession report to gauge if they are planning in an equitable way.
  • Leadership. Companies can look at leadership/management levels and succession planning to compare planning to the actual diversity of management and to see if diversity drops off from one management level to the next—which may indicate a need for more targeted development.
  • Attrition. If hiring and promotion practices are helping to increase diversity overall but there’s a high rate of voluntary attrition for that diverse talent, HR leaders may need to focus on belonging and inclusion.

VIBE Index (being released to Workday customer in Q1 2021) empowers HR leaders to set a B&D strategy and create a tailored plan aimed at driving positive outcomes. It will measure the relative performance and outcomes of an organization’s efforts across talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, employee experience, and workplace culture to deliver a heat map that identifies the highest opportunity for positive change, as well as a VIBE Index score for overall workplace equity.

VIBE Index will allow organizations and leaders to have real-time diversity data, to ensure that progress is being made to the plans and goals. For too long organizational leaders have been making strategic D&I decisions with dated and insufficient data, many times that wasn’t even their own. VIBE Index changes this completely. Your own plan. Your own goals. Your own data. Belonging and D&I isn’t the same for all, it’s very specific to your organization and your culture, and your strategy and data should reflect that.

Workday is drinking its own Kool-aid, as well. Workday’s Chief Diversity Officer, Carin Taylor, announced a bunch of initiatives that Workday will be taking on including:

  • Increase overall representation of Black and Latinx employees in the U.S. by 30% by 2023.
  • Double the number of Black and Latinx leaders in the U.S. by 2023.
  • Invest 25,000 hours in training over the next year to help ensure all people leaders can attract, recruit, hire, and advance employees of all backgrounds.
  • Help ensure less than a 3% difference in belonging for all Workmates across all demographics (as measured by the Great Place to Work questions that power the belonging outcome of our VIBE IndexTM).
  • Infuse VIBE into how we think about and act on our Workday core values.
  • Invest 150,000 hours in career development programs and education that increase visibility and opportunity for Black and Latinx talent over the next year.
  • Donate $10 million, as previously announced, to social justice initiatives over the next year.
  • Create opportunities for Workmates to contribute 250,000 hours toward mentoring and skills-based volunteering in communities around the globe by 2023.
  • Accelerate Opportunity Onramps hiring to fill 20% of our early to mid-career full-time roles by 2023.

No small plan! I love it when organizations put it in black and white. Yes, there is some risk you don’t meet all of your goals, but it’s how real change happens!

E30 – HR Famous – Is Johnny Taylor good for @SHRM and HR?

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(Shout to the Tim Cook, Ivanka, Johnny selfie above – I had to put that one because it’s totally a pic I would have gotten if I had the chance!)

In episode 30 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, and Jessica Lee link up to discuss Senator Tom Carper’s senate hearing mishap, Tim’s most embarrassing leadership moment, and Johnny Taylor’s time at SHRM. In this episode, KD talks about the worst boss ever and the crew answers the question “is Johnny Taylor good for HR?”. 

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)! 
1:30 – Do you like “what’s up?” or “how are you?” better? HR Famous prefers what’s up as a greeting!

2:30 – Do you have any monster.com swag from an HR conference? Tim still has it on his desk! KD isn’t a swag guy and wants to avoid the lines at all costs. 

5:00 – First topic of the day: tech mishaps in US Senate hearings! Senator from Delaware Tom Carper didn’t realize he wasn’t muted and was caught using some profanity in this video. KD wrote about this occurrence on his blog and called him the worst boss ever. 

9:15 – Tim calls this the most embarrassing leadership moment that a leader can have around their staff. What is your most embarrassing moment as a leader?

11:30 – KD thinks the abrupt nature of Senator Carper’s three f-bombs to a staffer gives the signal that he’s the worst boss ever. He thinks the nature of the interaction gives off bad boss vibes. 

14:00 – Second topic of the day: is Johnny Taylor good for HR? Business Insider discusses the reign of the CEO of SHRM in their new article and the cutthroat culture he has created for SHRM employees. 

17:00 – Although some may call Tim a Johnny Taylor fanboy, he praises him for turning a company around and helping SHRM start to turn a profit again. Tim says that the out of touch SHRM of the past is being transformed under Johnny and the new culture he’s creating is trying to update the company.

19:20 – JLee thinks that it’s important to try and bifurcate some of Taylor’s accomplishments from some issues that have arisen at SHRM. She says that it’s hard to deny some of his results even though there have been issues with SHRM’s work culture and their handling of certain situations with their employees. 

22:00 – So, is Johnny Taylor good for HR? KD mentions a past potential book that Taylor was going to write called “Fire half your staff then hire and keep the staff you need”. Tim is glad that the title is up for grabs!

25:00 – Johnny’s wins: financial turnaround, diverse leader of an organization, speaking out about recidivism, DEI programming among others. Tim comments on his charisma and how his dynamic presence may positively affect membership. 

29:15 – Johny’s losses: alignment with the Trump administration, SHRM’s slow response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of George Floyd, and a relationship with the Koch brothers on issues of recidivism. 

32:00 – Tim thinks the messaging about police brutality and the BLM movement is something that SHRM could’ve clarified in order to create a more clear message. 

35:15- The crew answers the question of the segment. What do you think?

HR’s Worst Enemy!

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I’m always amazed to hear about all of the Enemies that HR has!  You have employees, and hiring managers, and the EEOC, and employment attorneys, and staffing firms, and insurance firms, and HR software providers. I mean, if I hadn’t been in HR, I would think that everyone is against HR!

It feels like that some days, doesn’t it?

HR’s real worst enemy, though, doesn’t get that without your organization’s service or product being successful, no one is successful.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that more hurdles to jump through, just means less time for operations to focus on the real business at hand.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that treating everyone the same way, doesn’t create a high-performance culture.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that having employees fill out open enrollment paperwork just so you have a document to prove what they filled out, spends more resources then it saves.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that adding five additional steps to a process doesn’t make it simpler, it makes it more complex.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that not leaving your department to go out and build relationships in other departments isn’t a good thing.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that eliminating all risk isn’t something that is possible nor should it be a goal.

HR’s worst enemy…is itself.

Why are HR Generalists Winning During Covid? #HRFamous

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In episode 29 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee discuss how HR Generalists are rapidly becoming the preferred choice for HR Leaders with shrinking staff/team size due to their “do it all” mentality, and discuss how specialists in the HR field can protect themselves vs further cuts as furloughs turn into layoffs.

The gang also provides a “hot take” round of reactions to recent workforce announcements from Salesforce. We learn JLee doesn’t want a stipend for a printer or a Chromebook.

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

3:00 – First topic of the day: Salesforce has come out this week with a list of announcements including that all employees can work from home until July 31, 2021, the plan of the slow reopening of their many offices, an expansion of benefits for those working from home, and an additional 6 weeks of PTO for parents. KD asks JLee and Tim to react with hot takes on each of the announced benefits.

6:00 – Salesforce is giving their employees $250 to help them buy supplies to work from home. JLee doesn’t think it’s enough to buy too many things of actual value. Hello, Chromebook.

8:00 – JLee says she is not able to use all of her current PTO so she doesn’t need more time and would prefer a subsidy for childcare rather than more time. KD thinks that Salesforce is trying to create a monopoly being an employer of choice for people with kids after the trendy period of their lives “inside the perimeter”.

13:30 – Second topic: KD and Kathy Rapp talked on his podcast Best Hire Ever about the current phenomenon of HR Leaders looking for HR Generalists over specialists as teams are shrinking and people are getting cut. Tim says that to get noticed by an HR Leader you typically have to have deep knowledge in one area and it’s very hard for new people to the HR world to have a lot of knowledge in many areas as required to be a great generalist.

16:30 – JLee shouts out boss president at HRQ, Kathy Rapp! She also comments on how many people working in HR don’t want to be a generalist and they want to specialize with something they’re more fascinated by.

19:00 – Tim thinks that in a low unemployment world, HR generalists are undervalued and are often passed up for promotions due to their lack of specificity in one area. Do you think HR generalists value changes with time?

20:00 – KD asks JLee and Tim to comment on how difficult/easy it is for different HR specialist types to broaden their role and avoid being laid off in a recession. Tim thinks it’s possible for a modern compensation/benefit person to prove themselves because they’re often driven by data.

22:00 – JLee thinks that employee relations specialists have a lot of opportunities to broaden out their experience but think they need to be proactive rather than reactive in their actions.

23:00 – Tim says that recruiters must be knowledgeable about where the money is coming from in their organization and bolster that area to the best of their ability to protect themselves.

24:00 – JLee says that OD/talent management folks need to be seen on the forefront of bringing in talent in order to show their value.

25:00 – KD thinks the ultimate skill for any HR employee to possess right now is the ability to communicate. Tim says that all VP’s and Directors of HR right now need to be driving performance right now in order to stay important within their company.

31:30 – KD thinks that a great HR generalist can come from anywhere and they rise to the top via their ability to analyze data, communicate, and ship actual products rather than talking about it.

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

Happy Global Talent Acquisition Day! #GlobalTADay

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September 2, 2020, marks the third annual Global TA Day!

Global TA Day was an event started by the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (of which I was a proud founding board member!) and it’s a day to celebrate our profession!

Recruiting is hard! What we do in talent acquisition is difficult! Also, what we do has an extremely positive effect on our organizations! Every single day, we impact our organizations by improving talent. That talent will lead our organizations into the future, and we are the first step to making that happen!

Never discount your role in talent acquisition. So many of our peers in HR don’t want to do recruiting because they know how difficult these roles truly are. In recruiting, your performance can’t hide. We either find the talent or we don’t, and there’s no way to hide from that fact. Our level of accountability is in our face with every single requisition we work.

So, I salute you my fellow TA pros! Take a moment today to stop and celebrate yourself, your team, and your profession. Use the hashtag #GlobalTADay on social today and put up a picture of you and your team doing the work you do! Join along with the celebrations online that are going on across the globe! There will be live presentations and panels throughout the day, all free, for you and your teams to enjoy and learn.

Want to join the movement in TA? Sign up and join me as a member of ATAPGlobal and support your profession throughout the year, and not just this one day! The top TA pros across the world work on their craft all year long, and ATAP supports our development!