I’m reminded of a quote by the ever quotable Bill Parcells when he was coaching the New England Patriots back in the 90′s.  When asked about a report that Parcells was overruled during the most recent draft, Parcells famously stated “They want you to cook the dinner; at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”  Maybe, but just because you’re a good coach doesn’t mean that you are a good talent evaluator.  Most organizations face a similar challenge where they have people who are great at their jobs who stink (or at least have very little experience) spotting and hiring great talent.  It would be a mistake to take the hiring decision completely out of the manager’s hands but in my opinion before a manager is allowed to make a new hire they need to have demonstrated 3 things:

1. Successfully managed someone who is more experienced, older, smarter, or a higher performer than yourself. What this shows me is that you aren’t afraid to surround yourself with talent even if the person is better than you in certain areas.  It also shows a level of maturity that you are secure with what you know and what you don’t know so you aren’t worried about the other guy “showing you up.”  Speaking from experience, this is the hardest point on the test to pass.  Most of us have a natural competitive streak and are wired to look out for ourselves first and we end up surrounding ourselves with people who won’t challenge or push us to become better.  The result?  Mediocre talent.  But if you pass the first point on the test, I feel a lot better about letting you hire for the company.
2. Given up something – a person, time, resources – for a project that didn’t directly benefit your work. What this shows me is that you understand the big picture and have demonstrated that you are willing to make a contribution to the success of the organization.  Taking it further, I would expect that you’d hire someone didn’t just fill a short-term need on your team today but had the skill and/or potential to contribute to the broader organization.  In other words, you’re more likely to hire talent who benefit the entire organization.
3. Made a tough people-related decision.  Let’s face it, you can have all the fancy selection processes in the world but mistakes still get made.  The question is what will you do when you make a hiring mistake?  One of the worst things that can happen to an organization is to have people running around that everyone knows aren’t pulling their weight yet nothing is done about it.  So, if you can demonstrate that you can step back, spot the issues and aren’t afraid to make the tough decision then I have a higher degree of confidence that you’ll quickly correct a hiring mistake should you make one.

Until a manager has proven they can do these three things, the final hiring decision should be signed off by someone who has.  Clearly this isn’t the way we would want things to run in the long-term so it’s our job as HR Pros to make sure we develop these skills.

1. Employers Turn to Biometric Technology to Track Attendance. Companies are turning away from traditional devices and implementing biometric time clocks using facial recognition or fingerprint tracking to track attendance.

2. Yahoo Deal Shows Power Shift. Yahoo Inc. has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, a six-year-old company with more than 100 million users but very little revenue.

3. EEOC’s New Guidance Tackles Cancer, Epilepsy, Diabetes, and Intellectual Disabilities. The U.S. EEOC has some new documents out that help when recruiting and selecting people with disabilities.

4. Internal Social Networks Improve Communication + Collaboration When Empowered To Do So. An analysis of companies to introducing a social media platforms to fix internal problems.

5. The value of creativity is crucial for business, here is a list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013.

Have a great week, FOT Nation!

So without further waste of precious space on the internet, here goes my shot at a HR/Talent/Workforce version of King Larry’s column:

WHIPPED BUTTER IS THE BEST KIND OF BUTTER.

WHAT IS ALL THE FUSS OVER ‘SOURCE OF HIRE?’ I MEAN, WE DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT WHERE OUR FOOD, CLOTHES, OR KIDS ARE SOURCED FROM.

YOU CAN SELL ANYTHING  IF YOU PUT THE WORDS ‘BIG DATA’, ‘GAMIFICATION’, OR ‘MOOC’ IN THE PRODUCT BROCHURE.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS IF YOU ONLY HAVE A SUNDIAL AND IT IS A CLOUDY DAY?

I THINK THERE NEEDS TO BE MORE HR-THEMED TWITTER CHATS. I JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF HR FOLKS  REMINDING ME THAT ‘CULTURE EATS STRATEGY’. #IDONTHAVEAREALJOBSOIAMONTWITTERALLDAY

THE ENGLISH ARE TERRIBLE AT BASKETBALL BUT FANTASTIC AT BREAKFAST. MMM… BLOOD SAUSAGE…

I AM NOT SURE EXACTLY WHAT THIS ‘EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT’ THING IS ALL ABOUT, BUT I BET IT IS GOING TO BE BIG.

DIVERSITY PROGRAMS HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR AGES, BUT IT STILL SEEMS LIKE OLD WHITE GUYS STILL MAKE MOST OF THE DECISIONS.

JOE TORRE WOULD MAKE A GREAT COMMISSIONER OF BASEBALL. HE ALSO MAKES A MEAN SPAGHETTI CARBONARA.

COVER LETTERS ARE ESSENTIAL TO A JOB APPLICATION. NEVER MIND THAT NO RECRUITERS READ THEM.

MERYL STREEP CAN PLAY ANYONE.

WHENEVER YOU GET PUSH BACK FROM THE CEO REMEMBER – IT’S ALWAYS THE LINE MANAGERS’ FAULT.

WHAT’S ALL THIS FUSS ABOUT ‘GETTING A SEAT AT THE TABLE?’ I’D RATHER HAVE A SEAT AT LE CIRQUE AT 8:00 ON A SATURDAY NIGHT.

WE NEVER MET, BUT I BET THAT BOB MARLEY AND I WOULD HAVE BEEN FAST FRIENDS.

YOU CAN USUALLY GET AWAY WITH BLAMING ANY SILLY HR RULES ON ‘COMPLIANCE’. THAT WORD ALONE WILL SHUT DOWN THE CONVERSATION.

I SPENT 4 HOURS ON A PLANE STUCK ON THE TARMAC IN FIRST CLASS NEXT TO DAVE ULRICH. THAT MAN KNOWS MORE HR THAN THE REST OF US COMBINED.

ZAPPOS. (HAVE A SHOT).

LET ME TELL YOU, EVERY TIME IT SNOWS IN APRIL THAT DOESN’T MEAN GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX.

ON MY LAST SELF-EVALUATION I GAVE MYSELF A ‘NEEDS IMPROVEMENT’. I HOPE YOU DID TOO.

PLEASE SIGN UP FOR MY FREE WEBINAR - ‘ENGAGING YOUR EMPLOYEES ON MOBILE DEVICES VIA SOCIAL GAMIFICATION’.

YOU ARE IN HR – THAT MEANS EVERYONE ELSE IN THE COMPANY EITHER HATES YOU, THINKS YOU ARE NOT NEEDED, OR CAN PERFORM YOUR JOB BETTER THAN YOU. SORT OF LIKE CARMELO ANTHONY.

TIM SACKETT. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THAT YOUNG MAN.

I’M NOT A GAMBLING MAN, BUT I’D BET $100 THAT MARISSA MAYER WILL GET US ALL SHOUTING YAHOO! BEFORE TOO LONG.

I KNOW I AM DATING MYSELF, BUT I STILL LOVE THE SOUND A FAX MACHINE MAKES.

DOES ANYONE REALLY CARE ‘HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER?’

I DON’T KNOW MUCH, BUT I DO KNOW IF YOU ARE READING AN HR BLOG ON A SATURDAY THEN YOU PROBABLY NEED ANOTHER HOBBY. TRY MACRAME. OR SCRAPBOOKING.

I could go on and on like this forever, which is probably the secret that Larry discovered which allowed him to crank out his column for 20 years, but I need to end it here.

Hit me up in the comments with your best Larry King-style HR observation.

“The most common rebuttal to what I’ve presented so far is likely that we’re living longer today than we were in the past. So, even if retirees have higher incomes and more security today, they need it because they have to finance a longer retirement.  There is some truth to this, but probably less than many assume.  While there has been tremendous progress in life expectancy over the last century, most of the gains have come to the young.

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s actuary tables, someone born in 1950 could expect to live to age 68.2, while someone born in 2010 could expect to live to 78.7.  That’s extraordinary: An extra decade of life expectancy gained inside of two generations.

But the gains have been much smaller for those who survive into their retirement years. A 65-year-old in 1950 could expect to live 14 more years, while a 65-year-old in 2010 could expect to live another 19 years. The gains continue to diminish from there. A 75-year-old in 1980 (the earliest we have data on for that age group) could expect 10.4 more years of life. Today, they can expect another 12 years — a gain of a mere 1.6 years.”

Also – these two charts:

If you put all of this together what you see is a very different tale then the one that is being fed to us by the media.  Workers over 65 years old haven’t significantly increased since the good ‘old days’.  Poverty rates of seniors haven’t increased over the past decades.  Seniors aren’t living that much longer than they have been.  All of these are important for HR Pros to know because we relay this information to our executive teams in the way of how we need to develop our staff for the future, succession planning, etc.  The ‘popular’ information that is being shared with them, is most likely a lie!  Our older workers aren’t living until their mid 80′s and working into their 70′s – that is what our kids can expect.  70 is not the new 60 – that’s only a marketing slogan thought up by a company selling products to make seniors feel younger and buy their crap.

The reality is, HR shops need to push succession.  Baby Boomers, for the most part, are not going to work into their 70′s.  Like their parents they’re going to hit that magic retirement age of 65  – and the majority will retire.  The information above paints a much different picture than what we’ve been hearing the past several years.  Don’t believe the hype or your organization will pay the price of not being prepared!

Let me explain.  Long, long ago…I was recruiting for a very premiere brand in the industry (for the record, said company is not a part of Microsoft).  These people were the cat’s meow (do people still say that?  I bet Laurie Ruettimann does).  They had a huge name brand, bazillions of loyal fans, and an IP people were beating down the door to work on.

I was working with a new hiring manager who was ready to make an impression.  He opened up a new kind of role…a role that was not common in the industry, but that many people were starting to see value in.  During our initial review meeting, I asked the standard question, “Do you have anyone in mind already?”  Why, yes…he did.  A friend of a friend of a friend knew this guy.  So, I called said guy and we chatted.

Immediately, the candidate tells me that he gets 5 weeks of vacation at his current job.  These 5 weeks are very important to him.  Immediately I respond that there is no way he will get 5 weeks vacation out of the gate.  Won’t happen.  But, we both agreed that, despite this, it was worth continuing the conversation.

So, we run him through an interview.  His current pay was rather low.  See…rather than give employees raises, his current company gave them more vacation time.  So, when we put together an offer, we brought him to where we thought he should be and even sweetened it a bit to compensate for the vacation he was losing.  I may have said it before on FOT, I like to give the best offer first.

Here’s where the drama starts.  I call him to roll out the offer.  I give him all the details.  As I am talking, he is silent.  Nothing.  Finally, I finish.  More silence.  I ask what his thoughts are.  He says, “I don’t know.”  And then hangs up on me.

Now… I’ve been hung up on before.  But, it’s usually very early in the process.  You know, “Hi! This is Jason calling from…” *click*.  This was the first time that I had built a relationship, worked with someone through our entire hiring process and then had them completely disregard me in that way.  How freakin’ rude!

Within 5 minutes, I get an e-mail.  In a nutshell, he was ticked because we didn’t give him 5 weeks of vacation.  The significant salary increase… that’s what he’s worth, so it’s no surprise.  The bonus… anyone at his level (which, to be honest wasn’t THAT high) should have gotten one.  And the stock award… well… stock is nothing.  It could be worth zero next week.  Never mind that he doesn’t have to pay anything to get this stock.

I’m annoyed.  I call him back.  The conversation quickly escalates.  I’m mad at his rude reaction.  He’s mad at what he sees is a lowball offer.  I’m mad that our FANTASTIC offer is being regarded as crap.  He’s mad that I am actually thinking such an insulting offer is even worth his time.  The discussion isn’t pretty.  In the end, he says that if we are not giving him his 5 weeks vacation, we need to increase our offer by an additional significant amount of money.  I say No…on the spot.  We end our conversation.

I call the hiring manager to relay the results of this conversation.  I was expecting him to say, ”Damn straight we’re not giving him that money!  That’s ridiculous!  The offer we made was above and beyond already.”

But, that’s not what he said.  Actually, what he said sounded more like, “Give him what he wants.”

Wait… what?

Anywho… following another somewhat heated discussion with the hiring manager, in the end, I got to tuck my tail between my legs, call back Capitan Jerkface and give him what he wanted.

So…what have I learned?  Why the mea culpa (which I am told is Latin for…something)?  To this day, 8 years later, this is a scenario I reference when asked about a time when I failed.  But, for the longest time, I would say I failed because I couldn’t convince the hiring manager that it was stupid to hire this guy.  Now, after time and reflection and a recent discussion with a colleague, I am rethinking that.  Obviously, the candidate could have handled things better.  I’m not letting him off the hook.  At no point did I bait and switch him.  His reaction was over the top.  Still…maybe I also overreacted.  Maybe I should have been nicer.  Instead of getting heated and letting the conversation escalate, maybe I should have tried harder to calm him down and get him back into reality.  Maybe I let my pride get to me.  I look back now and think, maybe, I could have handled this differently and gotten a better outcome.  I could have been the bigger person.

Or… maybe the guy was a putz and we shouldn’t have hired him.  Whatever.

Today’s business activities are increasingly more team-based and more reliant on people working together toward a goal – one person’s output is dependent on another’s and so on.

Read the post over at Paul’s new home, Symbolist (an FOT contributor blog). 

Why do they hate it? Opinions vary, but there’s just too much junk that’s a part of it.  Too much noise.  If you want it to matter, you’re going to have to strip it down.

Now let me give you an opinion. Employees don’t trust you as a manager unless your world view allows you to make the following statement, or have your actions aligned with the following statement:

“John, my job as your manager is to help you get better at what you want to do in your career.  I’ve got to help you build your skills and knowledge up to the point where you’re ready for the next step.  Now, if our company can’t provide that next step for you, then we’ve got to be OK with you leaving for the next step.  Don’t tell HR or my boss I said that.  But the prospect of you leaving isn’t going to stop me from helping you get to where you need to be.”

Is that your approach with your employees, either as a manager or (gasp!) through your performance management system?  I call that philosophy Career Agency, and it’s like crack to the manager/employee relationship.  The more you have that view as a manager, the more the employee is addicted to your approach.

Most people can’t do it.  Some want to, but don’t know how.  That’s why the May installment of the FOT webinar (sponsored by Halogen), “Get My Agent On The Phone: How Smart Managers Position Themselves as Career Agents Via Performance Management” (click to register), is available for you NOW.  Join us on Tuesday, May 21st at 1pm EST, and we’ll hit you with the following ways career agency can happen in your company:

• Making sure the goals you set represent the Five Most Important Things (5MIT) for the employee in question. Smart managers skip discussing the busy work and get to what’s going to change the game – for the company and the employee. We’ll give you the 411 on how to do that as an agent for your employees.
• Offering up ways each of the Five Most Important Things might be measured in the months that follow. You want measurements – we get it. We’ll show you how to set the expectation your direct reports are going to be measured on, without actually taking performance or development off the table. PS – They’ll love you for this if you deliver it in the right way.  Think “employee portfolio”…
• Having Thoughts on what “Good” and “Great” performance looks like in each area. That’s right – we’re going through a goal setting process not because HR told us we had to, but because it can set us up to be a great performance coach for the rest of the year, and help us get the employee where they want to go with their career.
• Including a section that details “What’s In It for Me?” for each area of focus. Being an agent is about talking about how chasing great performance in the area in question could be great for the employee’s career. We’ll show you how to frame this as the agent/coach. It’s the most important thing you can do.
• Putting it all in an easy to follow, informal format. If you go beyond one page, you’re making goal setting too complex. List everything we’ve described to this point in one page, and make the headers conversational in nature, and you win. We’ve got some formats to share with you.

You can be viewed as a career agent for your employees rather than a run of the mill corporate bureaucrat. Join us for “Get My Agent on the Phone“ and we’ll show how the secret sauce to goal setting and follow-up conversations can dramatically change the positioning of what you do in performance management.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

By now we are all familiar and possibly reliant on the crowdsourced reviews and ratings paradigm popularized by sites like Yelp for restaurants and bars, TripAdvisor for travel destinations, and certainly Amazon.com for books, music, heck just about everything. There continues to be tremendous popularity and value for sites…

Read the whole post over at Steve Boese’s HR Technology Journal (an FOT contributor blog). 

This spring cleaning and organizing binge has overflowed into my sourcing as well. I am a self-confessed digital hoarder.  Lovely if you need me to track something down, a bit of a headache for IT.  So…baby steps….I cleaned up Outlook, weeded out duplicate documents and continued to move through the process of “what do I really need”.  I’m closing in on my third anniversary with our firm and needless to say, there’s a lot of digital information.

During all of this, there was a truckload of work to be done.  Which is awesome of course, but it made us look as a team at how I was saving things – and did it make sense?  I’ve always saved search strings that work and quickly moved on from the ones that failed.  But that brings about a certain point, if you don’t categorize the strings that fail as failures, how do you know you won’t repeat them, again and again?

Reality for a sourcer is that we look at thousands of results, pull in hundreds of passive candidates and really funnel down to those that make it to the in person round of an interview process.  Remembering what strings that fail? That’s not realistic.

So now I’m recording what works (and by what works, I mean what candidates get selected into a first round) and what fails (strings that either generate no viable results or generate results that create no first round candidates).  Anytime I have to change my process, I get somewhat agitated.  You know how it is, you’ve got your flow.  But this concept of what works, and what doesn’t work is really working for me.  I’m saving the info in Google docs and sharing with our team.  Yes…it’s boolean crafted and probably gives them an insane headache to see something like:

sql|oracle|crm data|database analyst -administrator

But I can explain it and also reference back to it to see why it failed.  And the team is all on the same page.  We can revisit criteria and quickly troubleshoot a search.  Maybe the string needs to be tweaked…maybe it’s not a realistic search for LinkedIn but does wonders on .Me or G+ profiles, maybe it reveals we should change methodology and hunt names instead of profiles.

But what we’ve found…maintaining the data that fails is turning out to be just as an important as the data that succeeds.

So bizarre. What’s in the water? Well, I needed to find out.

I got digging and it turns out that I stole it from Dr. Phil who stole it from Oprah who lifted it from The Dalai Lama (minus the unapologetic part).

Dammit. Everything is a remix.

Read the whole post and watch the video bonus over at Laurie Ruettimann’s The Cynical Girl (an FOT contributor blog).