E22 – HR Famous Pod: Where do you get your HR News?

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In episode 22 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn are joined by Shana Lebowitz Gaynor to discuss her work at Business Insider and specifically her articles about SHRM’s handling of BLM statements and top HR innovators. The crew also talks about Tim’s Utah adventures, the CHRO move of the week, and KD’s many ideas for HR-related articles at Business Insider.

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:00 – No Jlee this week! We hope she’s having fun on her beach vacation!

2:00 – Tim just got back from another (socially distanced) Southern Utah vacation. Tim and KD talk about how to get into Zion National Park and how Tim works the system to get into Zion the easiest way. KD thinks Tim is getting spoiled with views.

4:50 – Check out Tim’s Instagram for all of his cool Utah excursions and his most recent jet ski and cliff jumping adventure.

7:20 – New segment alert: CHRO move of the week! Eileen Moore Johnson is the new EVP and CHRO at Scientific Games. Johnson moves from an operational role at Caesars to this new role. KD and Tim break down what they like about the move.

12:00 – Time to welcome our guest for the episode! Shana Lebowitz Gaynor is the correspondent and HR insider writer at Business Insider.

14:00 – Where are most HR people getting their news from? Shana thinks most HR people are getting their news like many other industries, on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

16:00 – Tim asks Shana about her experience at Business Insider and what she sees people are connecting most with their content. She says that people respond the most to articles about what to do if you hate your job.

17:50 – Shana says that her time at BI has taught her to get to the point and be succinct in her articles. KD praises BI for this formatting.

20:00 – Tim asks Shana about her article about SHRM and their response surrounding BLM and the response she got to the article. She says she learned about the passion of SHRM members

22:00 – Tim discusses his and KD’s criticism of SHRM and how the toughest critics are often the ones that want to see an organization succeed the most. Shana talks about how she sees the criticism of SHRM as a microcosm of what’s going on in the business world.

24:20 – KD asks Shana what surprised her about SHRM and the HR community that she learned in the writing of her article. She responds by saying that she doesn’t see the demands from racial injustice and other injustices going away.

27:00 – KD has a lot of requests for HR reporting! He brings up an idea to create a list of HR companies that are doing the best work to take meaningful action to get results.

28:30 – Tim brings up Shana’s article “HR innovators who are transforming company culture”. Shana talks about FedEx’s program to hire young tech talent and a tech startup’s effort to make a non-homogenous workforce.

34:00 – KD asks Shana about any grassroots efforts she’s seen that she is excited about. Shana talks about PWC’s training program for new employees and their commitment to better mental health programs for employees.

36:30 – Tim asks Shana about how she foresees company culture changing in our new WFH environment. Shana takes an optimistic view and sees a better and more flexible company culture and increased humanism in the business world.

42:00 – Check out Shana on LinkedIn, Twitter, or read her articles on Business Insider! Thank you to Shana for joining us this week and for all of her great work about the HR industry! Check out their paid membership for all of their content.

This Was Not Plan A!

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My son Cam Sackett graduated from college in May from the University of Michigan. He’s an amazing young man.

His plan A was to start his career in Communications/Marketing/Social Media with a global media company (Viacom/Disney/Netflix/Apple/HBO/NPR/NBC/CBS/Etc.) in a great city like New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., San Francisco, London, etc.

He has an education. He has the internships at big brands, doing the right things, and getting the right experiences. He’s a thousand times more prepared and ready than his old man coming out of college.

This is not Plan A. 

It’s rare that you have once in a lifetime things happen. It’s called a one-hundred-year flood for a reason. It usually will only happen every one hundred years, and there’s a good chance it won’t happen to you. But, it’s going to happen to someone.

Millions of college graduates graduated from college this spring and early summer. They all have hope and aspirations of starting their careers in great jobs they’ll love and will stay with for the rest of their lives! This is their plan A.

Plan B – which we don’t talk about outside of maybe Mom and Dad, was they would accept a job outside of their desired companies, but still in one of my target cities and in their chosen career field. At which point, they would kill the game, and eventually end up at their dream company and in their dream job!

This is not Plan B.

Plan’s C – Z all suck. At least that’s what they believe. Plan C isn’t in the location I want or the company I want or the job I want. Nope. It’s a job. It’s a company that needs your help. It’s in a location that is where the job is. They might not even care that you went to college and graduated, or that you were Summa Cumma Laudda whatever.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. – Mike Tyson

Covid-19 is a world champion heavyweight boxer in his/her prime. And it’s punching the vast majority of folks right in the mouth.

So, you wobble back to your corner and you sit down on that stool. Head still ringing from the shot to the head you took. You instantly get pissed at folks around you. Your school. Your government. Your parents. Your friends. How could they not prepare you for that punch! Why didn’t someone tell you that you were going to get punched right in the face!?

The bell rings and you must get back into the ring and prepare yourself to get punched in the mouth again. There is no throwing in the towel. The older you are the more you smile at this. It’s because you’ve taken punches. You’ve got knocked out. You’ve gotten back up, and you stepped back into the ring. We all will take punches and it sucks! It sucks super hard! I’ve tried with all of my might and wisdom to put my kids in a position where they would not have to take a punch. God damn it! They still are taking punches.

That is not Plan A, but it is the plan you’ve got. Welcome to the show, kids.

The Weekly Dose: An Updated @Workday Recruiting Roadmap!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I dive into largest and arguably fastest-growing recruiting technology on the planet, Workday Recruiting! Workday Recruiting currently has over 2350 clients, all of which would be considered enterprise, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are currently using Workday for recruiting.

Let that sink in a bit. A decade ago, no one was using Workday to recruit talent, and now over 50% of the largest organizations on the planet are using it! You have to be impressed by those numbers and growth of Workday Recruiting.

Workday Recruiting has taken its share of criticism over the years coming out of the date and trying to deliver an enterprise recruiting solution at scale. It’s not easy. Ask Oracle and SAP, no one would consider their recruiting offerings to be world-class. It’s a tough game at scale.

I got a chance to sit down with the Workday Recruiting product team last week to look at where they’ve been and where they are going, and it looks like they are on the right track:

– Workday internal mobility functionality is a clear differentiator amongst its competitors, connecting the entire experience across the platform for both the employee, the recruiting team, and the hiring managers. Also, the ability to post “gigs” internally to staff that might have capacity is great and the design is very modern and user friendly for employees. The internal mobility tech also gives employees a suspected career path based on all of their own data and the data of those before them in similar situations.

– The ability to adjust each hiring process by position was a critical need and now your recruiting team can easily make custom applies on the fly per position, even with the ability to apply to a job with one click if necessary.

– Candidate experience and a candidate home dashboard make it easy for candidates to track where they are in the process and also machine learning push other potential matches they might fit for, as well as assisting them in applying and suggesting things that might increase their chances at getting hired.

– The Recruiting Dashboard has been completely redesigned and now allows each recruiter to build their own custom dashboard by simple drag and drop. Also, adding in the ability to offer and process at scale, which was a must-have for enterprise organizations. Recruiting analytics and reporting continue to evolve as well, and Workday Recruiting has some of the most eye-catching metrics dashboards out there.

– Workday has been slower than most in building out partnerships of add-on recruiting technologies, but that was by design, partly to ensure what they were offering clients in terms of partnerships where products they could fully stand behind (and actually invest in those they feel most strongly about). Workday has two forms of partnership: Venture partners (Jobcase, Mya, Beamery, and Pymetrics) which are technologies Workday has a vested interest in success, and their ecosystem, which are partners that are vetted by the Workday Recruiting team. The four current Workday Venture partners are some of the strongest recruiting technologies in the game right now.

– The roadmap is full of features that current Workday Recruiting clients are looking forward to including: Candidate matching scores, built-in interview scheduling assistance, external candidate referral automation and tracking, and database candidate rediscovery technology.

Workday Recruiting is a large enterprise HCM recruiting module. They won’t apologize for that because large, enterprise organizations need hiring technology that can handle the scope and scale of hiring at massive volumes, that is super secure, and has the ability to hire globally. Workday Recruiting can do all of that, and it’s doing it well based on the large number of clients awaiting implementation.

What can Workday Recruiting do better? I think they have the ability to truly help organizations around D&I hiring. They have the data and the ability to connect the dots for senior executives on what’s going on with their diversity hiring. They do some of this now, but it’s mostly tracking and reporting anonymous data. And will soon be producing the ability for organizations to make candidate records anonymous to hiring managers, but this is clearly something I suspect we’ll see additional roadmap items on in the near future.

I think Workday Recruiting’s strength definitely lies in their ability to pull in learnings from their giant client base and they have extremely active user groups that are jointly developed by both Workday and their clients, providing non-stop product feedback on desires and enhancements. The trick being the balance of delivering features and functions at scale for the good of all, compared to what they believe they want/need individually.

Workday Recruiting has been the one company in the recruiting technology space that folks have loved to hate on over the past few years, but I think they are doing the right stuff and developing the technology that their clients need, without listening to the outside noise.

Dream Gigantic!

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I love this concept. It feels hopeful and aspirational.

I don’t do this enough. I don’t count myself as a dreamer, but I encourage my children to do this.  I want them to be the MLB Shortstop, the famous Fashion Designer, and world-renowned Environmentalist.  They have Gigantic dreams.

I will do everything I can in my power to help them reach those dreams.  I tell myself I won’t be the parent who tells them they are unrealistic.  I won’t be the parent to tell them they are far-fetched.  I will not be the parent to tell them that their dream is out of reach. I have to keep telling myself this because as a parent it’s hard.

I have a career that has taught me to be pragmatic.  I’ve seen the best and worst of people, sometimes all in the same day. When people ask me for career advice I give them the safe answer because I know the reality of life, their dreams are longshots and most people are not willing to come close to the effort they need to exert to reach their dreams.

So, I give them options I think they are willing to work for which are usually less than Gigantic.

Every day I have to consciously turn this off as I drive home.  You see the reason we have dreams is that we have a belief that there is something more, something better.  Dreams can be Gigantic and you reach them through Gigantic effort.

3 Ways You Can Extend the Work Lifecycle of Older Employees

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One of the biggest biases we have as leaders is ageism. If you’re 35 years old and running a department and you are looking to fill a position on your team that will be your righthand person, the last thing you’re looking for is a 55-year-old to fill that spot! That’s just me being real for a second.

You and I both know that 35-year-old hiring manager is looking for a 25 – 28 year old to fill that spot

That’s mainly because at 35 you’re still basically stupid. I was. You were. We think 35ish is the pinnacle of all knowledge, but it’s really when we just start learning for real.

So, we have this core issue to deal with in workplaces right now. Our leaders are mostly Millennial and GenX, and Millennials are increasing into these roles at a rapid rate. Because of the Boomers leaving in large amounts, there aren’t enough talented young workers to replace the knowledge gap that is being left. So, we are left grappling with what we think we want (youth) with what really needs (experience!).

A recent study at the University of Minnesota found that employers need to add programs to focus on older workers:

The study argued that programs aimed at training workers won’t be enough to satisfy the state’s need for workers between 2020 and 2030. New policy directives and incentives may be needed, including offering pathways for baby boomers to delay retirement, drawing in workers from other states and supporting immigration from other countries

“There’s all this focus on workforce development, but none of it is guided to older workers,” said Mary Jo Schifsky, whose business, GenSync, advocates for meaningful career pathways for older adults and who helped initiate the study for the Board on Aging with the U’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “We need career pathways for older workers just as much as we do for younger workers.”
 
In the U survey, managers ranked baby boomers high on loyalty, professionalism, engagement, and their commitment to producing quality work.
Employers need to find ways to extend the Work-Life Cycle of the older employees that work for them until the workforce, technology, and retraining programs can catch up to fill the void. Most employers are only focused on programs that are looking at younger workers.
So, what can you do as an employer to extend the life cycle of your older employees?
1.  Have real conversations with older employees about what they want. Most employers shy away from having the ‘retirement’ conversation with older employees because they think it’s embarrassing or illegal. It’s not. It’s a major reality of workforce planning. “Hey, Mary, Happy 55th Birthday, let’s talk about your future!” Oh, you want to work 18 more years! Nice! Let’s talk about a career path!
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a hiring manager say, “I don’t want to hire him because he’s 59 and is going to hire soon.” Well, I spoke to him and he wants to work until he’s 70 (11 years) and our average employee tenure is 4.7 years. I think we’re good!
2. Stop, Stop, Stop, believing that all you can do is hire full and part-time FTEs into roles. If Mary, my 63-year-old financial analyst wants to give me five more years of work, but only wants to work three days per week, in role ‘traditionally’ we’ve only had a full-timer, I’m taking Mary for three days! HR owes it to our organizations and hiring manager to push them out of the box when it comes to schedules and how we have always filled positions. 3 days of Mary is probably worth 3 weeks of an entry-level analyst in the same role!
We do this to ourselves. I hear it constantly from hiring managers, “HR won’t allow me to do that.” Why? Have you asked? No, but HR doesn’t allow us to do anything. We need to come to our hiring managers with solutions and let them see we are open to doing whatever it takes to help the organization meet its people’s needs.
3. Develop programs and benefits specifically designed to retain older employees. I work with a plant manager who developed an entire engineering internship program around having his retired engineers come back and work three days a week with interns and paid them ‘on-call’ wages for the days they weren’t there, so interns could call them with questions at any time. These retired engineers loved it! They could come to do some real work, help out, and still have a great balance.
It went so well, he kept some on all year, on-call, and partnered them with younger engineers who needed the same support and assistance from time to time. The on-call rate was pretty inexpensive, the support and knowledge they got in return, was invaluable.
It all comes down to flexibility on our part as employers to extend the life cycle of our older employees. We no longer have this choice where we can just throw our older employees away and think we can easily replace them. We can’t! There physically isn’t anyone there!
This is about using each other’s strengths. Younger leaders will be stretched and we need to help them stretch. We need to help older employees understand their roles. In the end, we need to find a way where we can all see each other for the strengths we bring to the table, not the opportunities.
It’s our job as HR professionals to work on how we can extend the life cycle of each of our employees.

Someone is Banking on You Being Lazy!

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I work in an industry where I’ve been told for a decade technology is going to take my job. The staffing industry is half a trillion-dollar industry worldwide. The entire industry is built on us banking on the fact that someone in corporate TA is going to be lazy.

Ouch! That should sting a little!

So, I don’t really bank on you being lazy at my company. We do contract work so we are looking to fill contingent roles, not direct hire staffing, which is an industry almost completely built on lazy! For my staffing brothers and sisters out there, I hear you, I know you’re ‘just’ filling in when ‘capacity’ is an issue. (wink, head nod, wink)

There are other industries that bank you us being lazy. The entire diet industry! You’ve got overpriced awful foods, bars, shakes, workout gyms, at home gyms, etc. Because we won’t eat less and move more, because we are “lazy”, we pay a lot for that! Believe me, I pay my fair share! Just because I’m too lazy! Ugh, it’s embarrassing!

Direct hire staffing as an industry could be gone tomorrow if corporate TA just did what they were hired to do. You have an opening, you fill the opening. We aren’t trying to put a woman on the moon! This isn’t rocket science!

But, we don’t fill the opening. In fact, we do just about everything except filling the opening. We post the opening. We meet about the opening. We send whoever applies to the manager of the opening. We meet some more about candidate experience. We have another meeting about employment branding. One more meeting with the manager to see if anything has changed.

That doesn’t sound lazy, does it?

But, deflection of more difficult work is just another form of laziness.

My kid doesn’t want to go out in 90-degree heat and mow the lawn. It’s a hard, hot job. So, they come up with ‘alternative’ work that they have to do that just happens to be inside in the air conditioning.

As TA Leaders, we have to understand how are others are banking on us being lazy, and then make adjustments to stop lazy. So, how do you do that?

Well, I wrote an entire book on the subject – The Talent Fix – you can buy it here – but until you can get it, here are some tips:

  1. Have clearly defined measurable activity goals set for each member of your TA team.
  2. Make those measures transparent so everyone can see them every day.
  3. Have performance conversations immediately when measures aren’t met.
  4. Course correct as measures need to be adjusted to meet the needs of the business.
  5. Rinse, repeat.

1 -5 above is like page 37 of the book. So, you can imagine what the rest of the 200+ pages will be like! 😉

If you follow the five steps above about half of your team will quit in 90 days. That’s a good thing, those idiots didn’t want to recruit, to begin with, they just wanted that fat corporate check and Taco Tuesdays. They were being lazy and it was costing your corporate bottom line.

The talent acquisition function is not a charity case. I think in the history of HR we’ve done some corporate charity where we let people keep collecting money even though they were costing us money. They weren’t giving back the value we needed for what we were paying. Great leaders stop this from happening.

Great leaders understand that there are people in the world that are banking on us being lazy.

E21 – The HR Famous Pod: We Discuss the Rooney Rule for Inclusive Hiring!

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In episode 21 of the HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee come together to talk about The Rooney Rule and VMware’s new commitment to include a minority and female candidate in every search at the company. The gang also discusses how often they’ve filled up their car tanks during quarantine, and something called Generation Zoom.

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

Show Highlights:

1:30 – How many times have you filled your gas tank during quarantine? Jlee has only filled her tank once since March!

3:00 – Who doesn’t love a best friend duo that runs together? KD and Tim went running in Celebration, Florida together. KD was on Zillow on his phone the entire time they ran in the community and Tim was dying.

5:45 – KD has been reading a lot about “Generation Zoom”; our younger generation that has been learning through distance learning. Jlee talks about how her young kids may have trouble learning in the future since they are losing a lot of development time in school.

9:00 – Do you think there will be a dip in SAT and ACT scores in the coming year? Tim is interested to see where the data falls.

10:45 – First major topic of the day: The Rooney Rule. This NFL rule places interview quotas for minority candidates for coaching positions. Tim talks about how more minority candidates have been put into the interview process and what it’s meant in hiring minority coaches.

16:00 – Jlee discusses her own personal experience getting an opportunity that she might not have based on her resume and how she relates to the experience of Mike Tomlin.

18:00 – Tim talks about some negative views on the Rooney Rule and how often coaching positions are planned and picked out far in advance.

20:00 – KD and Jlee bring up another positive of the Rooney Rule, in that it forces forcing hiring managers to look harder and potentially finding special people that they may not have been able to find before, even if it’s not for that particular position.

22:30 – Second topic of the day: VMware’s CEO (Patrick Gelsinger) announced their company would commit to interviewing a POC and a woman for every single position. KD thinks this sounds similar to the Rooney Rule. KD and Tim praises VMware and other companies who have come out recently with new processes and practices to help diversify their workforce.

26:20 – Jlee brings up potential backlash from recruiters and other hiring managers. She notes that leaders need to give recruiters some leeway in order to reach performance metrics and new interviewing goals.

29:40 – How will this new hiring practice work in practice? KD brings up the self ID process and when it comes into play in the hiring process. Jlee discusses the data recruiters will be giving to hiring managers and how they will report that they are meeting a certain requirement.

33:00 – KD reads VMware’s CEO statement again to Tim and gets his reaction. Tim thinks there are many aspects to this new rule that need to be addressed in order to be successful in finding the best possible candidates.

36:00 – Pat (CEO of VM Ware) is a new best friend of the pod!

36:20 – Jlee and KD praise the leadership at VMware for going ahead with this announcement and implementation of the rule instead of getting bogged down in details and complaints.

38:45 – Jlee and KD talk about the concept of equality vs diversity, with KD bringing up Salesforce’s move years ago to grab the high ground of equality.

41:00 – HR Famous would like to congratulate Patrick Gelsinger from VMware on a job well done with their new version of the Rooney Rule.

The Worst Hire You’ll Ever Make!

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A crazy thing happens almost every day in professional sports, and it’s the one thing that separates great teams from the pack. Talent selection will make or break a team’s success and in professional sports, it’s about getting the right talent for the right price.

The problem with most professional sports teams, regardless of the sport, is they continually try to improve their roster incrementally. “Oh, let’s pick up Pitcher A because he’s a little better than Pitcher B”.

Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

That’s the real issue!

The worst hire you can ever make is one that doesn’t solve your problem but just make it a little better. “We suck at sales, let’s hire Tim, he’s not great, but he’s better than Bob.” Wonderful, now you only slightly suck less at sales!

Never make a hire that doesn’t solve your problem completely that you are having in that specific position. Upgrading doesn’t always fix problems, and many times it actually continues your main problem longer instead of fixing it completely.

We have this belief that all we need to do is continue to get a little better each day, each week, each month until we eventually have fixed it. The problem is that this isn’t how most problems are actually solved, by getting a little bit better over time. Most problems are fixed by implementing one solution that solves the problem.

It’s basically this crappy failure paradox we continue to get sold by seemingly everyone with a platform. “Just keep failing and eventually you’ll find success!” Which is complete and utter bullshit, but we LOVE hearing this!

In hiring, you can’t keep failing and find success. You will actually find failure even faster and be out of business. In hiring, it’s critical you find success and hire the right people who will solve your problem the first time, not just make you a little better.

Another great example of this is in the NFL. It’s critical in the NFL that you have a great quarterback, but they’re extremely hard to find. So, if you don’t have an elite quarterback, most teams will continue to try and upgrade with average quarterbacks.

The better advice is to work with what you have and make it the best you can until you get the opportunity to hire, or draft, that one great quarterback that can truly change your franchise. Constant change and churn, just to get a little better, is slowly killing your organization.

Make great hires. Organizational change hires. Individuals who have the ability to make things right. Too often, and we’ve all been there, we make hires that feel safe, knowing they won’t hurt us, but they probably won’t help us much either. Those are the worst hires you can make.

The Weekly Dose: @VaultPlatform – Workplace Misconduct Reporting Tech

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at a timely technology in a world of #MeToo #BLM #Covid-19! Vault Platform helps organizations resolve workplace misconduct including that related to Me Too, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and all other workplace issues with a safe speak-up app for reporting incidents.

Let’s be clear to start, this isn’t your parent’s workplace 1-800 hotline, where you called some third-party company that would listen to your story, filter it, and then pass it along to HR, who then call you in. Vault is a technology, mobile-first, platform that allows employees to report any type of workplace harassment, fraud, corruption, racism, etc., and document their experience. Then, when they feel the time is right, they can actually send this forward to be responded to.

Each time an employee reports it is dated and time-stamped and the employee has access to their actual record the entire time. Once an employee decides to move forward it gets sent to the appropriate parties within the organization to resolve the issue.

What I like about Vault:

– “Go Together” – when talking about things like sexual harassment and racism, many times an employee does not feel comfortable reporting on their own, but they also don’t trust others when they say they’ll also report. Vault’s “Go Together” allows an employee to report, but only move it forward once another employee reports the same or similar behavior, so they are not making these accusations on their own. It’s really a brilliant idea!

– Vault dashboard works as a case management dashboard so HR, legal, D&I, etc. can check and track that reports are being resolved and how they are being resolved. It allows executives to instant insight access to the real problems that are going on in their organization, unfiltered, right from their employees.

– It allows employees to communicate in a way that is most comfortable to them, mobile messaging, not a phone call talking to a stranger.

– Employees can record for as long as they want without reporting and always have access to their own words, an organization can not delete or edit the employee’s own records. Many times something happens to an employee but they aren’t sure if it’s actually harassment, but as they see a pattern of behavior begin to happen, it becomes clear. Keeping these records makes it easy for the employee to give proof of how long and how much this is happening.

Right now every single organization on the planet is concerned with the experiences their employees are having. Me Too, BLM, COVID, etc. have shown us that our employees are having very drastic differences in their experiences, and we need to give our employees access and the ability to share these with us quickly and easily if we want to truly make changes and improve their experiences.

I first saw Vault at the HR Technology Conference right after Me Too and I liked it. With the additional social and health issues today, it’s even a more relevant technology. Vault Platform happens to be the perfect workplace technology at the perfect time. I highly recommend you take a look and a demo.

It’s Really Hard to Judge People!

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I was out walking with my wife recently (that’s what middle-aged suburban people do, we walk, it makes us feel like we are less lazy and it gets us away from the kids so we can talk grown-up) and she made this statement in a perfectly innocent way:

“It’s really hard to judge people.”

She said this to ‘me’!  I start laughing.  She realized what she said and started laughing.

It’s actually really, really easy to judge people!  I’m in HR and Recruiting, I’ve made a career out of judging people.

A candidate comes in with a tattoo on their face and immediately we think: prison, drugs, poor decision making, etc. We instantly judge.  It’s not that face-tattoo candidate can’t surprise us and be engaging and brilliant, etc. But before we even get to that point, we judge.  I know, I know, you don’t judge, it’s just me. Sorry for lumping you in with ‘me’!

What my wife was saying was correct.  It’s really hard to judge someone based on how little we actually know them.

People judge me all the time on my poor grammar skills.  I actually met a woman recently at a conference who said she knew me, use to read my stuff, but stopped because of my poor grammar in my writing.  We got to spend some time talking and she said she would begin reading again, that she had judged me too harshly, and because I made errors in my writing assumed I wasn’t that intelligent.

I told her she was actually correct, I’m not intelligent, but that I have consciously not fixed my errors in writing (clearly at this point I could have hired an editor!). The errors are my face tattoo.

If you can’t see beyond my errors, we probably won’t be friends.  I’m not ‘writing errors, poor grammar guy”.  If you judge me like that, you’re missing out on some cool stuff and ideas I write about.

As a hiring manager and HR Pro, if you can’t see beyond someone’s errors, you’re woefully inept at your job.  We all have ‘opportunities’ but apparently, if you’re a candidate you don’t, you have to be perfect.  I run into hiring managers and HR Pros who will constantly tell me, “we’re selective”, “we’re picky”, etc.

No, you’re not.  What you are is unclear about what and who it is that is successful in your environment.  No one working for you now is perfect.  So, why do you look for perfection in a candidate?  Because it’s natural to judge against your internal norm.

The problem with selection isn’t that it is too hard to judge, the problem is that it’s way too easy to judge.  The next time you sit down in front of a candidate try and determine what you’ve already judged them on.  It’s a fun exercise. Before they even say a word.  Have the hiring managers interviewing them send you their judgments before the interview.

We all do it.  Then, flip the script, and have your hiring managers show up for an interview ‘blind’. No resume beforehand, just them and a candidate face-to-face.  It’s fun to see how they react and what they ask them without a resume, and how they judge them after.  It’s so easy to judge, and those judgments shape our decision making, even before we know it!