By HRU President Tim Sackett
I was asked at a conference recently to give one word on how HR can make a difference in 2023.
What was my word?
What do you think? Hat or no hat?
Attracting & Retaining Engineering Talent
Engineering is a vital component of innovation and development, with engineers playing a crucial role in the growth and success of many organizations. However, attracting and retaining top engineering talent is harder than ever, and is a challenge faced by many companies across various industries.
To help organizations overcome this obstacle, leading-HR expert and HRU President Tim Sackett is giving us ten essential tips that companies can implement to attract and retain skilled engineers. From micro sourcing events to building an engineering specific employer advocacy group, these tips can help organizations create a workplace culture that is attractive to engineers and fosters their growth and development.
Check out our infographic below to learn more about these ten tips that organizations can implement to attract and retain top engineering talent.
How do you “practice” HR?
We are constantly told that if we want to be good at anything in life, we must practice. It starts when we are kids, and we want to be our heroes. If you want to be good at sports, or dance, or computer games, you must practice. Not just “play” but specific steps that lead to success in the endeavor we’ve chosen.
Tyler Cowen released his book “Talent” in 2022 and I really like this quote from it:
“What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practice scales?”
What do you do each day to practice your profession?
What I find when I ask HR and TA professionals this question, and we really dig in, is there “practice” is showing up and doing the job. That is akin to an NBA player just showing up and playing games but never putting in time and effort outside of the game to increase or maintain their basketball skill level. They wouldn’t be successful for long.
Just showing up and doing the job isn’t practice. That’s the job.
Are we talking about practice…
YES!
Let me tell you how I practice my skill in HR and TA:
- I write on this blog that has nothing to do with my paying job.
- I design and present content for roughly 20+ webinars every year.
- I design and present content to present live on stage for around 20 different talks every year.
- I consciously reach out and schedule calls with experts in our industry to “talk shop” each month that has nothing to do with my paying job.
- I network on sites like LinkedIn to expand my professional network and ask and answer as many questions as I can.
- I will do upwards of 100 tech demos per year in the technology that impacts my industry.
- I will attend upwards of 12 HR and TA professional conferences.
Okay, I’m a complete freak around personal development, primarily because I actually really like this stuff. That makes it easier to do, for sure.
But, I rarely get into a professional dilemma where I don’t feel prepared to handle the situation. I believe that is because I’ve “practiced” a whole bunch!
I get asked frequently, “How did you learn this stuff?”
Practice.
Honestly, my hope is one day, I’ll take this love of practice in my professional life and turn it into some other sort of practice in my personal life. Like, someday, I’ll roll out of bed and be like, “okay, today is the day I stop being an out-of-shape dough ball and get back into shape like I was in college!
I mean, if I can put this level of practice into my professional life, it stands to believe I could put that same level of practice into any part of my life.
Do you want to be “Great” at your Career?
I find almost 100% of people I would ask this question to will say, “Yes, of course!”
But like my lazy butt sitting on the couch at night watching Netflix, they are willing to put in the practice of being great. They are just showing up to work and doing the job. That usually doesn’t lead to greatness.
Don’t get me wrong. Some folks can show up and be great, just like freak athletes. That is about .001% of our society. So slow your roll. That isn’t you.
I want to be great at my job, but I don’t really do anything other than the job to ensure I’ll be great at it. Doesn’t that sound funny? It goes against everything we know about greatness in our lives.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe I’m great at HR and TA. I think I’m pretty good at certain parts of it, but I know people who are so much better than me at so many parts. When you compare yourself against the top 1% in your profession, you feel small. You feel like you need more practice.
When you compare yourself against Kevin in payroll, that constantly loses his way back to his cube, you feel like you’re a giant. Practice isn’t needed to be greater than Kevin. That’s our problem. Most of us are surrounded by average players, and your slightly above-average performance makes you feel like you no longer need practice.
Pick higher performance targets. Chose to emulate someone who amazes you in your profession. Chase greatness through practice.
America’s Greatest Threat is Lack of Labor!
By HRU President Tim Sackett
I spoke to a group of upcoming high graduates yesterday, and it got me to thinking about the future. I don’t dump on young kids like most people do today. My feeling is we all sucked when we were young. We grew up. Got experienced. And we suck less. But we look at young people and we are shocked they suck at mostly everything. We. All. Did. When. We. Were. Young!
Businesses, big and small are desperate currently for workers. Low-skill, semi-skilled, people who have no skill but are willing to be trained. The hourly rate is anywhere between $12-22/hr. I’ve spoken to companies in every market and industry, many of whom will tell me they’ll hire as many people as they can find, they just can’t find anyone!
Now, I don’t want to get into all the reasons why organizations are struggling to find hourly workers. There are many, and it’s a complex situation that isn’t going away anytime soon. I want to focus on how not having enough hourly workers puts America at a competitive disadvantage in the world.
What Happens When America Can’t Hire Enough Workers?
First, organizations will do what it takes actually to hire talent. They increase wages and benefits, which initially seems like a big win for workers. Businesses will also raise prices to pay for those additional expenses. Say hello to inflation. The supply and demand dynamics of labor all happen fairly quickly.
Organizations will look to become more efficient and add technology that, in the long term, can be a better value than workers. Let’s be honest, this has been happening since the beginning of time, but in times of true pain in hiring, all this speeds up and happens faster than normal. Say hello to the robots!
Companies will offshore more more than they already do to countries with an abundance of hourly workers. China, Mexico, India, and various countries in Africa if they can get politically stable, will gain millions of jobs from organizations looking to sell their products in America. Say hello to more jobs leaving our shores. Also, as we’ve seen with the Pandemic, this will cause further issues with our supply chain in critical times.
What Should We Be Doing In America To Ensure We Have The Hourly Talent We Need?
Okay – I’ve got some ideas. Some you’ll agree with, some you’ll hate, but something has to change. American demographics are not changing. Our labor force is shrinking and we are getting older as a country. We have a crisis staring us in the face, and we are too divided to even see what’s really happening!
- Major investment into trades and apprenticeship programs at the high school and post-high school levels. Free College? Screw that. Rich folks can pay for college. Let’s have Free Trades and Apprenticeship programs. Let’s start these in Junior High and High School and continue their post-high school. Let’s have 22-year-old kids making $40-60K a year in skilled occupations.
- Blow up public education as we know it. It’s broken. Can we all admit to this? About 70% of kids are not college kids, but we force them down the path of college. Let’s have public education that promotes our best and brightest but also promotes kids who want to work with their hands, who want to work in the arts, etc. If we are the most powerful country on earth, why can’t we have multiple avenues for our kids, whether they are rich or poor?
- Encourage our children to once again be firefighters, police officers, home builders, big truck operators, cooks, delivery drivers, etc. Both boys and girls. I was struck when I was in Australia how many construction workers and road workers were female. You rarely see that in America. Our children should feel proud to have an occupation that is helping their community and others, but instead, we, as parents, talk down these occupations. Our children are constantly listening.
- Open the Mexican border. Uh oh, he didn’t just say that!? Yeah, you know who has millions of people who want the jobs that Americans don’t want? Mexico. If you don’t want to work that $15/hr job, step aside, there are people that do want those jobs. Plus, actually having a great labor force strengthens America! Would you rather have Mexican citizens come to America and make American products, or have American companies go to China and have the communist government of China make the products sent back to America and much of the profit goes to China or India, or somewhere else outside of America?
- Pay Equity laws limiting the spread of pay between the highest-paid executive and the lowest-paid employee. I’m not saying that entrepreneurs and executives don’t deserve great salaries for their efforts and their risks. They do. But should a CEO of a company make a $100M a year and the workers make $17/hr? That just seems a little bit out of line, right? Should a college football coach make $5M a year? It’s a stupid game. A game I love to watch, but come on! We’ve got a bit out of line with the haves and the have-nots.
- National Occupation Corp. What if every single American child upon graduating high school, put in one year of service into a select list of hourly occupations? Road workers, infrastructure projects, building affordable housing in their community, building parks, etc. Mormon kids do a two-year missionary to spread their word, and it doesn’t seem to harm them one bit, in fact, most would argue it actually helps them become better adults. Doing a national occupation corp would show some kids they actually love this type of work.
- End or fix programs that encourage workers not to work. We need people collecting unemployment to prove they can’t find a job. They can’t get work. Because, for the most part, it’s a lie! There is work everywhere! Our Unemployment Insurance system is broken and needs an overhaul.
How do you like those ideas!? A little GOP, a little Dem, a little socialism! If you’re a regular reader of the blog some of those ideas, coming from me, probably surprise you. This is how desperate I think this situation is! We are facing an economic meltdown in the future if we don’t fix this issue, that will make the great recession look like child’s play. America can not be without a great labor force, and right now, we are quickly trailing the rest of the world in the one thing we always hung our hard hat on.
3 Things You Can Start Today and Be Instantly Better at Recruiting!
You’re not as effective as you could be right now! Do you know why? If you’re like me, you might start blaming some things: your tech, your boss, your company, your co-workers, etc. It’s easy to blame others for our inefficiencies. It’s incredibly difficult to own it and fix it!
I’ve got some fixes! Heck, I wrote an entire book called “The Talent Fix!” What I’ve found as I work with talent acquisition departments and TA leaders from all over is that most of us fall into some traps around inefficiencies. So, today, I want to give you three things you can start doing that will increase your capacity immediately:
1. Give Your Candidates a Gift!
We, as TA pros, waste more time dealing with candidates we’ll never hire and try and tell ourselves we are doing this for ‘candidate experience.’ Do you know what sucks as a candidate? Being led on by a company that will never hire you! Stop doing this! If you know you won’t hire a candidate, let them down fast but professionally.
“Look, Charlie, I’m going to level with you. I don’t see you as a fit for our culture/position/organization. This doesn’t say anything about you. It says a lot about us and how we are looking for something very specific. Thank you for your time and professionalism. We will not be moving forward with you.”
This is short and sweet, and 99% of candidates will get the “gift” of being able to move on and find the job and the company that does want their unique gifts they have to offer. This isn’t being mean to a candidate or providing a poor candidate experience. This is helping them and saving you time by not having to deal with this candidate continuing to contact you thinking they have a shot. They don’t.
2. Don’t Get Stuck in the Middle!
I don’t set up interviews with hiring managers for candidates. What I’ve found is the majority of hiring managers and candidates find it annoying that I’m stuck in the middle when two adults just need a quick thirty-second conversation to figure out how to align their schedules! Or, maybe even use technology to do this!
We like to think setting up interviews provides great ‘service’ for hiring managers, but it doesn’t. It’s a really inefficient process to drag in multiple parties to something very simple. Any hiring manager, who is marginally effective at their job, will be able to see this if you have a simple conversation to explain the process inefficiencies.
3. Stop Starting from Scratch!
Here’s how we go about filling most new job openings. The hiring manager informs us they need to hire. We get the job description and information. We post the job everywhere. We wait for candidates to apply. We screen applicants. We pass these on to the hiring manager and await further instructions.
Every. Time. We. Do. This.
Add one additional step to this process before you post the job. Go into your ATS database and send a quick mass email to each candidate in the database that meets the requirements of the job (if you have the tech, also send a quick text message!). We spend an enormous amount of resources building our ATS database, then we ignore it when it’s filled with candidates who have applied and said, “I love you! I want to come work for you!”
Our first step to finding talent starts in our own database, not out in the wild to see what ‘fresh’ meat is looking like today. If your ATS sucks at search, there are many new technologies on the market labeled as “talent rediscovery” that will reach into your database and do this for you.
So, there are three. The reality is, if you really dig into how you’re doing what you do, you can probably come up with a hundred improvements to make your recruiting more efficient! The key is to look at your processes, not as the one who built it and owns it, but always through the lens of constant improvement.
I don’t have a set recruiting process in my shop. I have a process I’m constantly testing to make better. We try stuff. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn’t, we end that test and try something else. The most effective recruiting shops in the world are effective not because they have the best process but because they continually improve their process!
Should You Ever Ask About Pay During a Job Interview?
NO! YES! I DON’T KNOW! WHY ARE WE YELLING!?
This question gets asked so often by all levels of individuals who are going through a job search. From entry levels to seasoned professionals, no one really knows the correct answer because, like most things in life, it depends on so many factors!
First off, you look like an idiot if you show up to an interview and in the first few minutes you drop the pay question!
“So, yeah, before we get too deep into this, how much does the job pay!?”
Mistake #1!
First, if you’re asking about what the job pays in a real face-to-face interview or virtual interview, you’re doing it wrong! The time to ask about pay is almost immediately, even when you’re desperate for the job. Usually, this happens during a screening call, email, or text message from someone in recruiting or HR. Talent Acquisition and HR Pros expect this question, so it’s really not a big deal.
The problem we get into is this belief that somehow asking about pay and salary looks bad on us as a candidate. “Oh, all you care about is the pay and not our great company!?”
Mistake #2!
Actually, TA and HR would prefer to get this big issue out of the way right away before they fall in love with you and find out they can’t afford you. Doesn’t matter if you make $15/hr or $100K per year. Everyone involved needs to understand what it’s going to take to hire you. As a candidate, even when you desperately want the job, you still have power. You can still say, “No.”
The best thing you can do is get the pay question out of the way, upfront, so both you and the company can determine if you will truly be the best hire. The worst thing that can happen during an interview is you both fall in love with each other, then at the end find out it won’t work financially! That’s a killer!
Mistake #3!
As a candidate, you get referred to a position, and you have a pretty good idea of what the pay will be. Your friend works at the company, even in the same position, and makes $45K, so you’re not going to ask because you feel you already know.
The problem is the company might not see your experience and education the same as your friends, or the market has shifted (like a Pandemic hit, and now the market pays less for your skills). For whatever reason, you are thinking of one number, and they are thinking of another. This gets awkward when it all comes out at the end of the hiring process.
So, once again, be transparent. “Hey, my friend actually referred me and loves her job and the company. She also told me what she makes. I’m comfortable with that level, but I just want to make sure we are on the same page for a starting salary/wage before we keep going.” Simple. Straight-forward. Appreciated.
Yes, ask about Pay!
Yes, ask about pay, but “no,” don’t ask about pay as the last step of the interview process. Calm down. You’re not some wolf of Wall Street expert negotiator who’s going to wow them with your brilliance and get $100K more than others doing the same job. Most jobs have a set salary range that is pretty small, so you might get a little movement, but there is really no need to play hardball.
In fact, from a negotiation standpoint, getting your figure out early with a statement like, “I just want to make sure we are in the same park. I’m looking for $20-22/hr in my next job. Does this position pay that?” It gives you and the company some room to negotiate, but it’s a safe conversation since you both put some bumpers around where that conversation will go.
Also, if you decide you want more, it’s a great starting point. “Yes, I really like the job and the company, and I’m interested in working for you. I know I said I was looking for $22/hr, but Mary told me I would also be doing “X,” and honestly, I think that job pays a bit more than $22/hr. Can we discuss?”
Discussions of pay can be difficult because we often find talking about how much money we make taboo. I blame our parents! They never talked to us about it, and if the subject was ever brought up, we got hushed immediately! Raise your hand if you knew what your Dad made when you were 12! Not many hands are up!
The reality is it should be a very transparent, low-stress conversation. This is where I am. This is what I want from this job. Are we on the same page?
Does working for a bad boss help your career more than a good boss?
By HRU President Tim Sackett
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably worked for some good bosses and some bad bosses. The best bosses I worked for were supportive and empathetic. They cared about me as a person and supported me as a professional. The bad bosses usually just focused on themselves and what I could do for them.
I know many people who will talk about working for a terrible boss and actually show signs of professional PTSD! We joke, but sometimes the experience can be that awful. There was a recent study done with refugees who are survivors of torture. I’m not saying working for a bad boss is “torture,” but I know I can find some people who would argue it is!
Here goes, Tim! Good bosses, bad bosses, and torture survival!
The study mentioned above found that refugees who were tortured, compared to those who didn’t get tortured, became more resilient. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, comes to mind.
I think the same can be said about working for a bad boss compared to a good boss.
Employers are constantly looking for resilient employees. We try to measure resiliency in pre-employment assessments. During the past few years, resilience as a hiring competency has been very hot.
I have this theory that working for a bad boss or a bad company that treats you poorly, in many ways, makes you a better employee than you working for a great boss and a great company. And it all has to do with raising your level of resilience! You see, when times are good, and things are relatively easy, you are exercising that resiliency muscle.
I’m not saying you get soft working for great leaders and great companies, but you might get a little soft!
We see this constantly in the world as we go through great economic times. Everyone gets a little softer. Hard economic times force us to work that resiliency muscle. To harden up a bit, to grow a thicker skin, put up with some stuff that we wouldn’t normally, to survive.
Bad Bosses and Bad Companies Make More Resilient Workers!
There’s a fine line between becoming resilient and getting broken. That’s the hard part. Like the study found, in some cases, a person just gives up and accepts their fate. They begin to believe this was somehow deserved. The key is to find the “survivors,” those who wouldn’t give in or give up. Those who actually become more resilient from their experiences. Those are your diamonds in the rough from an employee perspective.
Too often, we only want to hire from winners. “Well, they worked for Google. They must be awesome!” And they might be. But I want “awesome” and “resilient” when I know we’ll face tough times. When we have to dig ourselves out of a hole, from a business perspective, I want to have some people who have been in a hole before and found their way out!
Another option is looking for strong workers who work for a bad boss at a good employer. We all know the world, at every company, is littered with some bad bosses, no matter the brand. I have a feeling the same resilience is built up over time. Having to “deal” with a bad boss for a while, and figuring out how to be still productive and get things done is an amazing skill to have acquired in your career. Even though it won’t feel that way at the time!
Yep, today Tim wrote about how refugee torture victims and working for bad bosses is similar to how we build resilience. Now to work on a case study with my own team…
Stay hard.
Is More Efficient Recruiting Always Better? #TruthBomb
If you’re in HR or TA and read this blog on a regular basis, you know I’m all for making our recruiting process as efficient as possible! Primarily because so many of us are woefully inefficient in using our technology and the belief that a more involved process must be a better process.
I’m a little nervous about the future and recruiting efficiency.
I think in our rush to become ever more efficient. We might miss out on some great talent. At this point in the recruiting tech stack, I can actually automate every single piece. Anything you have a person do in recruiting, I can automate. I can even ensure that candidates “don’t” get dispositioned if that’s how you like to play it! I mean, about 50% of you don’t do that now, so it seems like that is probably the way you like it.
If recruiting was only about taking a requirement, matching that requirement to available talent, screening that talent, interviewing that talent, assessing that talent, and onboarding that talent, well then, technology can do that better and more efficiently than humans at this point. But, I think recruiting has always been about getting the best talent for your organization.
Available vs. best is where the technology starts to fall down if talent truly makes a difference in your organization. Honestly, for many, “best available” will work just fine, and it has for decades. The vast majority of organizations are hiring the best available at this point.
Technology is exceptional at hiring the best available. Technology hasn’t figured out how to hire the best talent that isn’t openly available at this point. If you don’t have that talent in your database, and that talent isn’t active on LinkedIn or other job boards, technology has a really hard time getting your message in front of them.
The future of recruiting isn’t about efficiency. That is already here. The future of recruiting is about your organization’s ability to actually go out and discover who is the best talent for your organization. That person might not actually be on the “jobs internet,” or they were, but that was five years ago, so you’ll never see them as someone you want because the five years ago person isn’t the person you need today.
Efficient recruiting is great until it isn’t. If you suck at recruiting, then becoming more efficient at best practice recruiting (which recruiting technology can definitely make happen) will elevate your function for sure. But efficient recruiting isn’t world-class recruiting. It’s just efficient.
The best talent acquisition in the future will be able to go out and discover the talent that hasn’t been discovered by everyone else. We like to believe that everyone who is anyone is on LinkedIn, Indeed, or you name the site. But they are not, or they haven’t been active for a long time, so this is a hidden talent.
Too many TA shops are currently working too hard at becoming efficient and not hard enough at becoming experts of the talent for their industry and their marketplaces. You know I love technology. So, be great at technology, but don’t forget to be great at recruiting.
Join us at DisruptHR Lansing!
We’re hosting DisruptHR Lansing 2.0 on September 28th at the Lansing Brewing Company in downtown Lansing. We want you to join us!
What is DisruptHR Lansing?
DisruptHR events are held in over 150 cities worldwide. It’s a two-hour event with 12-14 speakers, and each speaker only talks for 5-minutes! Big ideas in a short time brought to you in a unique format. Each speaker gets 20 slides, each slide automatically moves every 15 seconds, and the math tells me that’s 5 minutes! It’s HR Nerd Super Fun!
This year we are excited to be partnering with the Greater Lansing SHRM chapter for this event. We expect a sell-out as seating is limited to around 150 – you can get your tickets now to save your spot:
Here is a link to the DisruptHR Lansing 1.0 talks from 2021! It was a very fun night!
The Sponsors
Main Sponsor: HUB International
Food & Drink Sponsor:
Event Sponsors:
How do we stop boring conference sessions?
For decades I think we all had a hard time imagining conferences in a new way. Most followed, and still follow, a basic format of a full group morning keynote, followed by hour-long sessions throughout the day, followed by an afternoon day-closing keynote. Most of the design was directed by the continuing education community, which is why most conferences started.
You need one credit per session, and those sessions need to be at least one hour of ‘training’ or education.
Then TEDx came around, and people had 18 minutes to produce some of the most amazing content any of us had ever seen! DisruptHR-like events sprung up, and we got to see great content happen in 5 minutes! Many people started wondering, why the heck are we sitting here for one hour listening to people drone on endlessly when they could tell us all of this in half the time!?
There was a small study done around this concept. A researcher went to a conference and sat in 50 sessions. Within four minutes, he made the decision was this content was boring or not. Based on that, he also looked at the time the speaker went over or under their time, and his data showed him that boring speakers were more likely to go over their allotted time!
“For every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on (over their allotted time), the odds that their talk had been boring doubled.”
So, if you ever sat in a boring session and thought, “Oh my, this is so boring, and it’s taking forever!” You’re right! The boring stuff does take longer!
As a speaker, all of these changes that conferences are making and testing are really exciting. Here’s what I’ve learned over the past 12 months with some of these new content configurations that are being tested:
– The shorter amount of time you have to speak, the more time it takes to prepare really great content! It seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? It should be harder the longer you have, but it’s not. If you have a short amount of time, your talk has to be really tight and practiced. If you have a long time as a speaker, you can wander around and come back to things.
– Shorter segments of live content that are good are much deeper and less wide. The best short-range content goes really deep on one item, not surface level on many items.
– The audience pays closer attention to shorter content. If you have an audience for an hour or more, they tend to come in and out. If you have them for 20 minutes, you are more likely to have them the full time, which means they’re more likely to call you out if you try and slide some B.S. by them!
– Most non-speaker speakers really struggle with short content. Most speakers at a conference aren’t professional speakers. They’re practitioners. They need more time, not less, because they aren’t on stage enough to practice short, tight sets of content. So, they’re more likely to fail when doing short sessions.
Get ready for some exciting conferences in 2022 and 2023! Conference producers are really working to change things up and keep modern attendees engaged with the content at conferences, most now both in-person and virtual, and I personally love the challenge and the changes! If you’re building our budget for 2023, make sure you try and hit an in-person conference. To me, it’s one of the best ways to sharpen your saw and build a great professional network!