Fistful of Talent

17% of Americans Pee in the Pool - And Other Hard Hitting Talent Metrics...

Alright, I know, the title has nothing to do with HR, but it was from an actual article in the Detroit Free Press and it made me laugh out loud.  I mean seriously, who got up in the morning and started to write this article as real news?  It did get me thinking though about other worthless metrics, we might measure in our everyday professional life, that are meaningless.  It's a classic argument that HR Pros and every organization seems to have different metrics they use to measure the health of their people business. So, here's my list of measures you don't really need in HR:

1. Turnover and Retention- notice I didn't say "or" - companies that use both make me laugh, especially when they haven't differentiated between the two (ie., we have 3% turnover, but 97% retention - really, thanks for doing the basic math for me!).  Now, if you measure the retention of your top performers, and have a performance management system that identifies that group - more power to you - you are now in the Top 10% of HR Pros.

2. Days to Fill- When measured as an aggregate.  The majority of organizations in the world hire many different types and levels of talent.  To say our HR/Recruiting Dept. has a 43 days to fill ratio is again meaningless.  This should be broken down by hiring segment - 14 Days for Admin level, 35 for Professional, 67 for Management - or something like that.  Also, have at least some knowledge of industry days to fill for those segments you are hiring for and give your Operations Partners the comparison - even if yours is worse, because you'll then be able to show them improvement!

3. Diversity- when measured as a percentage of the whole.  So, we have 45% diversity within our employee population.  So what?  Again, this is meaningless.  What is the goal and why is that the goal?  If you can show operations that at 63% diversification our business units run 15% more productive - now you are in the Top 1% of all HR Pros in the world - make it happen - you might have to work past 5pm, but it will be worth it!  I beg of you, please stop measuring Diversity if you aren't going to have a goal and reason - otherwise all you're doing is telling every white male on staff that until we get 100% diverse we aren't done - so if you are a white male HR Mgr. - you will have to replace yourself to reach your final goal!

4. Employee Engagement  - I can't think of a more worthless metric!  Once a year we, the HR Dept., are going to justify our jobs for a month as we roll out our annual Employee Engagement Survey and then act like Nazis and throw pizza parties in the attempt to get everyone to fill one out. Then send the next month collecting all the data and making the largest PowerPoint presentation on the planet, so we can show our senior executive team the good, bad and ugly. Finally, we add fat free pudding to the cafeteria menu as a response to our two month project.  Really!? Is this adding value?  Lou Holtz said it best "Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated.”

5. Training and Development Class Surveys- This probably should be #1, if this wasn't a completely tongue in cheek post.  Has anyone really ever filled one of these out, for in-house training - I mean unless you were made to or didn't get paid!  That is the new standard for Organization Development folks, "you must fill out this survey of the class to show that you were here and get paid for the time spent" - if you're in Org. Development and doing this - Stop It!  It sucks, and you suck if you do this. If you have great training, you'll know it, people will talk about it, and other people will track you down to be a part of it. 

What measure would you like to see go away?

Editor's Note - Tim Sackett is the Executive Vice President for HRU Technical Resources, which really means they just ran out of titles between Director and CEO.  Tim's job is to make sure everyone is happy and productive – for those who have worked in staffing firms, you know exactly what that means. HRU is primarily an engineering and technical contingency firm that specializes in the manufacturing sector in defense, consumer products, automotive, higher ed, etc.  HRU is based in Lansing, MI – but has close to 500 employees all over the country. 

What Led To The Recruiting Industry's Current Grapefruit Diet . . . And Why The Detox Is Good For All of Us

I had a rather interesting conversation with Industry Icon, Doug Beabout, the other day.  He let me know that approximately 1/2 of our industry has vaporized over the last 12 months, with many more recruiters to leave by the end of the year.  As he comically put it, "A large majority of our industry will now go back to whatever in the world they were doing before the recession started."  However, he was also sure to let me know that while the current recession has been particularly painful, the massive influx of recruiters (during a boom) and coinciding mass exodus (during a bust) is actually a quite predictable phenomenon.

So I reflected on this for a while and have concluded that the 'normalization' or 'purging of the excess' is good for the Recruitosphere.  Don't get me wrong - I hate to see anyone lose their job or have a contract come to an end.  However, if you've recruited beyond a few years, you probably know what I mean when I say there were truly some characters that parachuted onto to our scene before flopping out shortly thereafter.  "Jokers to the left of me, Clowns to the right . . . Here I am, Stuck in the middle with you."  [Compliments to the band, Stealers Wheel strumming in the background way back in 1972.]

See, during boom-times, companies hire and hire and hire.  They get fat, just like the average American's credit card bill before the bottom fell out of the market and we realized that operating in the red doesn't make good financial sense.  And as the company gets fatter, so does the Recruiting Department.  "Thought Leaders" start suggesting that you don't need to lean out -- nope, you need more division of responsibilities.  You don't need better recruiters -- nope, you need people good at doing individual functions, just like Henry Ford popularized with the Assembly line in 1908.  "Hey, you don't need better full-cycle recruiters -- nope, you need dedicated sourcers and researchers and candidate contractors and candidate developers and professional appointment setters."  That's right, somewhere we were told we needed people good at doing only one thing all day long - "If they hate speaking to candidates, no problem - just place them at station 7."  Then, when we last expect it, we're offered all types of services, tools, technologies, training and additional contractors to increase the efficiency of each resource and/or station of the assembly line.  "Yeah, we understand your total staffing expense just ballooned up 300% Mr. Talent Acquisition Leader, but if you want to get the most out of your newfound investments, you're going to have to spend another 50% on this Recruit-O-Meter Flux Capacitor."

Well, sorry.  That ship has sailed.  We never needed the assembly line, and we didn't need the coinciding bloat, either.  It's as if we just ate that triple cheeseburger super-sized with a large fries and 100 oz. Coke, at which point we sloth down into the couch because we're too stuffed to move . . . wondering why we just did that to ourselves.

So this is what I'm getting at:  We needed then what we still need today - Peter Drucker's notion of "knowledge workers" who specialize in tacit interactions; intelligent people who can handle multiple moving balls in the air, yet have an instinctive ability to understand human psychology . . . and sell all at the same time.  Isn't it funny that every once in a while, the very industry that focuses on people (who have the 'talent') needs the old, "It's the people, Stupid!" wake-up call?

So that's why our current Recruitosphere detox has been a good thing.  It might be like eating a lemon, or going on a grapefruit diet . . . but the weight-loss is necessary and needed for us to maintain our health, not to mention our sanity.

Editor's Note - Josh Letourneau is the owner of LG and Associates, a Strategic Sourcing, Executive Search, and Human Capital Intelligence firm based in Atlanta.  Prior to founding LG & Associates, Josh worked as a Sales & Marketing professional in the software biz and was a hard-charging Sergeant in the Marines.  In his spare time, Josh enjoys shooting at other sourcing and search professionals as available in random paintball games.

You're Not Rational. You're Rationalized...

It's one of the cruel ironies of human nature that we are blind to our own rationalizations. We think we're rational, reasonable, logical... but we're anything but.

True, our brains possess the ability to overrule emotions through something called an "executive process," but the power of the executive processing part of the brain, relative to the power of our emotional processing parts, is, in a word, weak.

How weak? Good question. Remember being a teenager? That should give you an answer.

What this means for those aspiring to be leaders:

--All those rules and processes you have? They were developed by people who surely did their best, yet who still may have allowed their emotions, egos, or parochial interests to impact their decisions. And the higher you go in your organization, the more you'll need to question the rules around you and work to strip out the emotion in them.

--All those meetings you have? Useless. Not because people are bad, but because in a group setting, the same things that cause rational problem solving abilities to be amplified also amplify rationalizations and other emotional processes.

--You—you, you, you—are just as messed up as everyone else around you. Sorry, but it's true.

And in an ironic twist of human nature, you will be unable to believe it. I mean, you may admit it now, but in the moment, you'll tend to forget that you yourself are subject to the same rules of humanity as everyone else... and in that moment, you'll be the one to introduce rationalization, ego, and emotion into the decision making process.

Count on it...

Editor's Note: Editor's Note: Jason Seiden is a career consultant for professionals and managers (http://jasonseiden.com/). He wrote the best dang career book ever (just ask him), called How to Self-Destruct: Making the Least of What's Left of Your Career, and is a master facilitator of the cranial extraction method of on-the-job performance improvement.  And yes, even though we value the intrinsic worth of his writing, we pay him per post.  That makes us part of the problem..

Taking the Easy Way Out - Cutting Hours to Reduce Costs Is Not the Answer...

Ok, I admit it... I read the April 2009 edition of HR Magazine - well at least one article, and a look in the back to see what companies still use their HR Jobs section (which can't be a good use of recruitment dollars). The article that caught my attention was Cutting Hours Without Raising Hackles by Senior HR Mag Writer, Rita Zeidner.  I'm always concerned when HR folks start talking about cutting expenses by cutting hours, primarily because it demonstrates very short term thinking without really understanding the cultural ramifications.  Zeidner shows in her article that some of the benefits of cutting hours vs. layoffs are: smaller unemployment tax hit, spreads the pain amongst all staff, cuts your risk of discriminating against protected classes, could head off certain charges from the EEOC, etc.

I'm still trying to figure how cutting hours reduces costs and helps the bottom-line.  

I do see one positive, in that keeping your talent employed would have huge advantages when your business turns around.  But in the words of Ricky Bobby "that's it, Chip"!   To be an HR Pro who is also a Business Partner, we must recognize the bigger picture for our operations partners.  So, let's look at what we miss when we make the decision to cut hours vs. layoffs:

1. For salaried workers, cutting hours now gives them an hourly working mentality. Think about it - you tell them you're going to cut 10% of their hours and 10% of their wages, and they instantly will know that is a half day a week.  They then begin counting hours - where prior they probably worked more then 40 hours and never gave it a thought - You can now plan on no extra discretionary effort.

2. "Spreading the Pain" - I love that quote, basically because I'm a high performer and guess what I'm going to do while you spread pain. That's right - I will be working for your competition to kick your butt.  Within HR, you need to have courage not to spread pain - but to reduce your staff by letting go of your lowest performers.  Your high performers will respect you for it (and probably give more discretionary effort) and your middle performers will make sure they don't become low performers.

3. In terms of reducing risk, it is our job to help our organizations mitigate risk to the appropriate level - any time you leave someone on because you are attempting to reduce risk - you're making a poor business decision - especially if that person is not performing to standards.

4. Lastly, as savvy HR Pros, we need to build the ROI Value equation for our organizations and our workforce.  Yes, we get some wage expense savings by cutting hours - but is it equal to the value output that person provided to the organization? If it is, you need to question why that person was on to begin with - for the most part every person in the organization should have a bottom-line impact that is greater than their salary and benefits (do you know what yours is as an HR Pro? - You should).

It is time to Raise some Hackles and as HR Pros demonstrate how to add value back to your organizations, and it is not by showing them you can manage and cut expenses better than every other department.

Offshoring is a Natural Product of Recruiting-as-Assembly-Line Thinking

When it comes to Talent Acquisition, cost advantages created by the Global Economy have become quite a taboo subject.  Frankly, many U.S.-based Recruiters and Sourcers avoid this issue because it invokes deep, protectionist emotions.  And despite all the anti-rhetoric, we see more and more (and more) offshoring.  In fact, if there is one thing we know, it's that demand is growing and doesn't appear it will slow down anytime soon.

However, the purpose of my post today is not to say whether offshoring certain components of the recruiting process is effective or not.  Why?  Because doing so will divert the true essence of this conversation, not to mention that it would invite a further cascade of irrational and emotional responses.  Any logical person will understand effectiveness is purely situational - what may work for Company A may not work for Company B, and vice versa.  There are too many individual variables within each circumstance to offer a broad-sweeping conclusion, such as scarcity of talent, employment brand, competitiveness of compensation, etc.

If there is one thing I'd ask readers to consider today, it is the following: It is we who have created this very monster.  The relentless, ongoing focus on process improvement has led our industry to believe that by breaking the Talent Acquisition process into smaller and smaller steps (and then improving the performance of each step), we'll be able to improve overall performance.  Ah, if only we could create the perfect recruiting assembly-line and hire Henry Ford to assist us in reaching "peak efficiency" at each 'station', or sub-step, right?  Wrong.  People don't like feeling as if they're widgets or being shuffled from station to station.  Light bulbs don't seem to mind, but Human Beings do.

Yet, as this belief permeated our industry further, guess what happened next?  Exactly.  Vendors have identified opportunities to exploit through innovation, and in some cases, by offering cost efficiencies.  A perfect example is Fay Hansen's recent reference to iPlace in her Workforce article, "Cash-Strapped Firms Find India Offers a Down-Home Recruiting Touch".

See, somewhere along the road, we adopted a robotically Descartian, mechanistic mindset that focuses more on output than outcome.  The next evolution of this type of thinking is a focus on cost-reduction, or worse, commoditization.  For many of these offshored jobs to come back to the U.S., the Talent Acquisition world must undergo a fundamental shift in the way performance is judged.  If cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, and other reactive metrics continue to dominate conversation, there will always be labor who can do the work cheaper and faster.

Editor's Note - Josh Letourneau is the owner of LG and Associates, a Strategic Sourcing, Executive Search, and Human Capital Intelligence firm based in Atlanta.  Prior to founding LG & Associates, Josh worked as a Sales & Marketing professional in the software biz and was a hard-charging Sergeant in the Marines.  In his spare time, Josh enjoys shooting at other sourcing and search professionals as available in random paintball games.

All My Recruiters.... Live in India.....

As you may or may not know, the world headquarters of the HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent is the lovely city of Birmingham, Alabama, with roughly 1 million people in the metro area.  Great town - I'm not from the Magic City, but my wife and I came to Birmingham right out of undergrad and are approaching the 18 year mark in Birmingham, so it's now home.

Now to the topic - as you might expect, outsourcing to India is alive and well in Birmingham.  The usual suspects are in play - corporate citizens to the Birmingham community, outsourcing call centers to India, tech firms outsourcing development coding to Bangalore.  All the things you expect, because where there is business, there'll be outsourcing.

But let me say this - if the job of a full life cycle recruiter for the Birmingham market can be outsourced to India, outsourcing has gone to the next level.  And it's happening in Birmingham.

Why's this on my mind?  2 reasons:

1. I had a lunch a couple of weeks back with a technical recruiting group (developers for the software industry, etc) I hadn't met before, put together by a connection from my past I hadn't seen in awhile, who was now part of the recruiting firm in question. I asked a couple of questions and was shocked by their business process.  More on that below.

2.  This article at Workforce Recruiting, focused on offshore competition for the American recruiter.

So, here's what I found out in the lunch with the recruiting firm in question, which I consider to be a pretty sharp bunch.  They've long used outsourcing as a means to "source" candidates, but they've now moved to the next level.  In addition to sourcing candidates using resources in India, they've also handed off the next level of activity to outsourced recruiters in India.  That means outsourced recruiters who understand the technologies in play are making the initial calls to prospects, qualifying them, and locking them down for the next step, which might be a phone screen or in-person with the actual recruiting firm, or if the specs are nailed, a phone screen or in-person with the client company in question.

Here's the kicker - low cost, robust technologies like Bullhorn, which allow recruiting shops to manage the lifecycle of the recruiting process for a single candidate from anywhere on the globe, have enabled the manager in question to outsource this function.  All he needs is the right talent overseas, and he pays 20-30% of what he would pay a full life cycle recruiter located in Birmingham to do the same job.

And in a recruiting world where technical candidates are used to getting 5-10 phone calls a week from search firms, hasn't that initial call turned (at least somewhat) into a commodity?  The firm in question dramatically reduces their cost structure and then there's the real kicker --- they feel like they get twice the work for one/fifth of the money when using an Indian recruiter, who by the way, is working crazy hours so they can be available when the Birmingham, AL candidate pool is up and working.

Crazy times my friend, with this lesson.  If you are a recruiter working for other people, you better be really good as globalization continues. 

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's real...

Mushrooms, Grapes & Michael Scott - The Good, Bad & Ugly of Goal Management

It's no secret that I love analogies.  Most of us have heard the one about employees being like mushrooms, I'm sure. "Keep 'em in the dark and feed them bull...umm...fertilizer." This comparison got me thinking about conventional talent management practices that all too often reinforce this notion that the employee is disconnected from the company - kept in the dark.

"People-centric goal alignment" is one of those practices.  You'd think that goal alignment in and of itself would foster teamwork, not disconnectedness.  You might be thinking, if they have goal management "how can they have employees that are in the dark?"  Well, that's easy.  Organizations employing people-centric goal alignment are using a model where employees' goals are tied to their managers' goals.  Often, beyond that point, employees have no clue how their work impacts the organization. And what's worse, they may have their goals connected to a manager like The Office's Michael Scott, as opposed to those of Dunder Mifflin, the company.  Something tells me Michael's goals might not exactly do much to inspire performance.

People-centric goal management is riddled with issues aside from employees not having a holistic view of the organization's goals beyond their manager.  Goals in this model are a complicated web, so while it's easy to set goals on the front end, it's pretty difficult month over month, year over year to track them. When there's little visibility into goals beyond that of Michael Scott manager, there's probably no understanding of why or how work impacts the bottom line. And let's face it, if Michael is your manager, he or she is likely to be fired at some point.  So what happens then to your goals when the person they are connected to leaves?  It can get messy.  This is definitely not the most strategic or straightforward way to drive employee performance.

In keeping with the mushroom analogy above, the "organization-centric" approach to goal management is more like cultivating grapes.  All of the employees are on the vine, connected and contributing to produce an overall, common goal - like great wine.  This model of goal management has employee goals tied directly to overall departmental and organizational goals.  This creates a clear understanding of how they connect to the "vine" and how, as a team, they work together to create something great.  So, if Michael Scott is walked out the door at a company where individual goals are tied to organizational goals, it isn't a huge problem, and personal goals aren't impacted.  Everyone can see the whole vine, and it's easier to ensure all employees are pulling in the same direction.  Each employee is accountable, and on the whole, there are more opportunities for them to flourish.

Personally, I've always been much more partial to grapes, so it's easy to extend that preference to goal management styles.  I'd rather be a grape basking in the sun than a cold mushroom in the dark any day.  And I think smart organizations would rather have happy grapes than miserable mushrooms, because at the end of the day, grapes are going to produce a stronger business result.  When results matter more than ever, organizations with grapes are going to be winners.

Editor's Note - Don't Feed the Vendors is a new series at FOT.  The goal of the DFTV series?  We get hammered by third parties who want to write at FOT, so we give them a challenge.  Write something cool and significant we can learn from/talk about in the FOT style, and you can roll with the FOT crew.  Try to sell our readership your product and/or provide a whitepaper, and we'll openly mock your company in public for not understanding the DNA of our readership.  Many inquire, few follow through once they learn they can't post a workup of their latest "research".  For those that make the cut, we'll offer up associate FOT membership as part of the Don't Feed the Vendors stable.

Sean Conrad of Halogen Software is one of the ones that made the cut.  Show him some love in the comments for being up to the challenge and not writing something that should be read on PBS. 

People Don't Hate Change - They Hate You Trying to Change Them

There is a post on the Manage Smarter website this week that states that 1/3rd of all employees cannot adapt to change at work.  That caught my attention.  33% can't change.  But dig deeper.  Read further into the description of the study.  The study took findings from a survey of 100 senior human resource professionals across North America. The survey asked: Is your workforce able to adapt to change and increase their effectiveness on the job? The results were:

• 31 percent—No, employee engagement and productivity are a major risk
• 43 percent—Somewhat, our workforce gets the job done, but morale suffers
• 26 percent—Yes, our workforce is very agile and responds to new challenges

Do you see the flaw in the findings and the reality of it?  The Senior managers SAY their workforce can't adapt to change.  The survey didn't ask those that would have to change - it asked the HR manager if they THOUGHT their employees could change. 

Let Them Own The Change

Here's the reality of it.  People don't mind change - they just hate being forced to change.  If positioned correctly - and the employee is involved in the change - it is much less difficult to drive change.  But normally what happens is decisions are made in mahogany-paneled boardrooms and passed down to the masses.  "Do this and things will get better."  Too often the employees already know what change is required.  They do the job every day.  They know the flaws in the system.  They know all about the pointless and inefficient processes they are forced to live with each day.  Just ask them.

Seriously, just ask them.  Please ask them.  Don't make the mistake of thinking you know more than them.  You don't.  You may have a bit more information on the direction the company needs to head, since you sit in the meetings where these things are discussed.  Why not tell your employees - "We need to get from here - to here."  Then ask them - "What's the best way to do that?"  You may just be surprised that they can come up with 100's of different ideas.  All of which they will jump to implement.

A huge driver of employee engagement is a psychological principle called "locus of control" - the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them.  Increasing your employees' belief (and reality) that they have control over the outcomes will increase their desire to make changes and increase their engagement with the change.

Don't take HR's word for it... Your people aren't afraid of change - they're afraid of you trying to change them!

Editor's Note - Paul Hebert is the brain behind Incentive Intelligence and a recognized authority on incentives and performance motivation... 

Thinning The Herd...

The term in itself is not as cliche as some of the buzz words in our industry (Jessica Lee and my fellow FOT writers covered this topic on FOTv earlier). But... this buzzword is being used more and more as we work through this challenging economy. To some companies, employee cuts are simply a matter of economics, while others have used the down economy to terminate an employee or employees that were non-performers - and performing poorly well in advance of the economy going south. You may know them as the C player(s) or the "dead wood" in a company. 

Right-sizing, down-sizing, reductions in force or other definitions of human capital restructuring is a reality - and this practice should not be limited only in a down economic environment. But back to my point... Identifying the A & B players while sending the C players out to pasture is going to continue as we look ahead in the coming months. I happen to think the process is good in a growing economy OR one that is contracting. It puts the "X" factor on having every employee deliver more value. Now that's a concept! 

Let's face it - why would any company that manufactures, markets, sells, delivers and services their products and services want any non-performing (C Player) to face their customers and represent their company and brand. I wouldn't!!! The tides have shifted a bit and many excellent employees in industries that have been affected the most have been economically and emotionally hurt. I get that - and my heart goes out to good hard working people that were doing a great job and lost their job - I know they are feeling the sting. What I don't feel bad about are the "empty suits" that have just managed to "get by" who are now under pressure to perform at much higher levels than they ever have before. That's the silver lining I see in this current economy. The downturn in itself is "raising the bar" in personal performance as employees want to ensure their continued employment. Companies continue to "thin the herd" to preserve cash. Not in all cases - but in many - the A and B players have a chance to shine.  

This is a time when employees should step up their game, work hard, represent their company and products in the best way possible, deliver value and raise their level of personal performance. Employees that just continue to get by should look for the the other shoe to drop.

"C players" beware - that shoe will eventually drop. It's only a matter of time...     

Why Evil HR Types Block All Social Media at Your Company....

Why do evil HR types get the heebie jeebies when it comes to allowing access to social media? 

All you need to know is the Twitter message below... More comments after the jump, once this one soaks in a bit...

Now, the guy who twittered this is probably a great employee.  Sure, stuff like this can happen via email, but it generally doesn't anymore - we're all coached up about email to a greater extent.  Social Media just has a casual feel at this point.  You riff a little twitter message for a ha/ha, and the next thing you know you are the lead article at Valleywag....

Social media is casual, and casual comments = liability.  That's why most grown-up HR and Legal departments kill it like the roach scurrying across the floorboards.

Of course, creativity and community also equal innovation and revenue.  The white-paper is still under construction for that argument, however.  Companies know what liability costs... So guess what wins?

I don't agree with killing it, but....I'm just sayin.....