Taking a step back…but just for tonight!

Not everything is HR related: When I’m busy with something, I get tunnel vision. I immerse myself completely and don’t come out until my skin gets pasty and people stared looking slightly scared of me. So recently, when my sister was visiting and explaining her desire to achieve her Master’s in Psych, I jumped all over it.

“Yes, org dev! You should so look into transitioning military workers back into the civilian world. . .” and on and on until her eyes sort of glazed over. While it is my firm belief that talent and technology drive MUCH of the work being done today, it’s not everything. Just reminding myself. . .

So when is focus too much? When does it cease to be a benefit and start becoming obsessive? How do you pull back from a keen interest to get “fresh eyes”?

Two sites that have been getting a bit of buzz: Glass Door (company snitch) and YelloJobs (referral network)

Also, here is a great article on incentives and referrals, not meant for recruiters/HR, but whatev!

The Power of Social Networking

This past April, I sat down to check my email (after buying my husband a ridiculously priced pair of shoes that he hardly wears, but I digress) and found a message from “Slouch”. It said:

“If you can get to San Diego by Sunday, I’ll get you into ERE.”

WHAT? Being the calm, cool and collected female that I am, I totally freaked out. Jason and I had never spoken, only interacted through the RBC site. I had exchanged emails with Dave Mendoza as well but for the most part, just enjoyed coming to the site to see what was happening, to learn a little (a lot!) about recruiting and see what was working for my counterparts across the nation. But the stars aligned for me and I got to go to ERE, with about two days notice. Read about it here.

While there, I met many industry greats and some awesome recruiters whose names are not as well known, but doing fantastic work nonetheless. I got plugged into Twitter (thx Susan Burns) got featured by Six Degrees (thx Dave Mendoza) won the charity poker kiddie table (thx Neal Bruce) and met untold number of completely awesome people that I still keep in touch with today.

Now, in my own community, a fantastic event is about to take place. Talent Mix, an event sponsored by Jason Davis of RecruitingBlogs.com and local Careerlink.org is happening on July 8! Held in an amazing renovated art gallery with the metro’s hottest HR folk, Talent Mix is for anyone looking to hire top talent, from recruiters to HR to marketing to small business owners. Aptly enough, the topic is social media and how online connections can translate into real and meaningful relationships. Since the event is now being promoted (click here to download flier)on blogs, Nings, Twitter, FriendFeed and through face to face networking, it seems rather fitting.

And because of cross-connectedness (word??) in my geographic community and online community, I’ve found a broader audience and target market than I would have thought possible in the middle of the country (yes, I too sometimes fall into Cornhusker Confusion). Our local SHRM chapter, HRAM has agreed to promote the event with their big event, to create A Day for the HR Professional!

Talent Mix, 4-6pm at The Kaneko, 11th and Jones, Omaha, NE.

RSVP: rsvp@careerlink.com OR maren.hogan@hciresults.com

What’s the magic question??

Once upon a time, I sat down with an engineer from HP (in a social setting) and asked him what his most recent business trip was for.
“Oh it’s something called Six Sigma?” He looked at me with sort of wounded puppy look as if he’d been “stopped-right-there” too many times. Since I had just interviewed several SS experts, I asked him to tell us more (group setting, you know, it’s the WOO in me). He proceeded to open up and explain all the theory behind Six Sigma (which I did not heretofore know) and I realized that in that moment, in asking him to explain a specific skill he had learned, perfected and was proud of, he was showing the best professional side of himself.

Fascinating. Where before no one had asked this friend of mine about his job, now everyone was asking more leading questions and wondering what else he had to share. And because this was a social setting where everyone has different jobs and I am the only recruiter, I was relatively sure that there was no hidden agenda.

So the question is. . .what’s the magic question?

As a recruiter, I am VERY interested in finding out what combination of circumstances can bring out the best in my candidates. I want them to do well and when something goes wrong, even though I know the match is right, I try to analyze and re-evaluate. Was it me? Was it them? Was it the HR pro?

So by identifying a key question (usually something to do with their passion, and the best candidates WILL have a passion) that can be inserted into the interview, I’ve discovered (cuz it works) that you can create a doorway into the candidate’s “best self”. Not only does this break down barriers in the areas of candidate confidence and comfort it makes it easy to show the hiring manager their areas of expertise and passion.

While this is not a “silver bullet” (also, could someone think of a new phrase?) it does strip away yet one more layer of “search” in favor of “humanity”. Maybe a bit heady for Monday. . .oh well.

Millennials Ad Nauseum

I recently wrote a post about how millennials (gen Y, whatev) can manage boome…. It got some people talking. One comment particular interested me as it discussed Millennials on the Edge (no we’re not going to kill anyone). Apparently 26, 27, 28 are on the edge. Like if you were born between 78, 79? There is debate about whether this constitutes a millennial. Since I am contrarian by nature, I will claim the title millennial, just to fight back at those who think millennials are big, fat pain in the you know where.
Fellas like JibberJobber’s Jason Alba, who blasts millennials as big, fat baby, whiners here. Of course, some of his points are aptly made and he does link to quite a few Yers, whose work he admires.

Anyway back to the “edge millenials” which is me and Topher Grace apparently (read the comments lazy!). The blog commenter, which could be punkrock HR grl, Laurie, points out that these kind of millennials are the best because we have the advantages of being totally tech savvy (the fact that I put a DVD in the video slot the other night must be lost here. . .) and have the innovative awesomeness of being the FIRST EVER to discover work-life balance but we’re also oh so humble, hardworking and didn’t grow up with texting and iPods, so we know when to turn off the tech.

Problems with MY (maybe) generation:
-we take too much risk
-we’re lazy
-we’re entitled
-we need too much feedback
-we have odd piercings/tattoos

One of the coolest things about my generation, whatever it may be, is that we take all this so-called “news” (yes, bloggers, you too are part of the establishment!! GASP!) with a grain of salt. Just because everyone is beating the “millennials suck” or “millennials rule” drum doesn’t mean we’re gonna take time out of our busy multi-tasking day to talk about it too (or blog about it??) But the fact that everyone has taken any position at all increases the importance of the issue, at least to so-called recruiting and HR hacks.

Omaha is a great place to be

People outside the area may not know it but Omaha is a fantastic place to be. Maybe you find it odd that I write this mere hours after a devastating tornado. But the truth is, you can see the rally of the community even now. It’s truly amazing. Our prayers do out to the families of those who lost their lives.

This morning, I had the privilege of attending my first YPC event. It was a “Meet the CEO” breakfast. Featured Speakers were: Wayne Sensor of Alegent Health Systems; Winnie Callahan, EXEC Director of Peter Kiewit Institute; and Peg Harriott, newly minted CEO of Child Saving Institute (our gracious host).

First of all, I would love to give a shout out to CSI for building such an amazing facility on the east side of town. Future props to Mutual of OM as well!

Things I have learned about the Omaha community in the this morning:

Alegent came in #1 in clinical quality, over the Mayo Clinic (#2)
Alegent has over 640 open positions, 240 of them nurses
CEO Wayne Sensor visits Washington twice monthly and has spoken to (or will soon) both major party candidates regarding healthcare policy and reform.
Sensor also believe that transformation is a huge issue in healthcare and that it needs to be open to moving away from “consumption” and more toward “prevention”.
Alegent is the area’s largest employer with 9500 (approx) workers and 2000 volunteers.

Peter Kiewit Institute was started 10 years ago.
It’s attempt to prevent “brain drain” in the areas of tech and science in Omaha/Nebraska has worked.
According to Callahan, we are now experiencing “brain gain”.
PKI frequently gets transfers from schools like Carnegie Mellon and MIT. (If so, they should start having free classes like MIT, particularly in the areas of social networking, gaming, etc. Particularly for inner city kids.)
Recently rated in the top 50 for their supercomputer. It did not exist the year before that.
Not only teaching students tech/engineering skills of today but of the future.

Child Saving Institute has been around over 100 years.
They are also working on a preventative model, that while not profitable or easy to raise support for, has been wildly successful.
The have a state of the art daycare which is 50% for low income parents. High quality child care breaks the cycle of poverty, said our tour guide Beth.
They use awesome local art (Blue Pomegranate, Hot Shops) for their capital giving campaigns.

Doing Good is Cool

I am consistently amazed at the generosity and cameraderie I see in the recruiting community (I think part of it stems from all of us experiencing “being on our own” at some point in our career and knowing how great that boost can feel). There’s Gerry Crispin’s Group on RBC. There’s Marcus Mindte’s (Rockstar Recruiting) secret philanthropic projects and Jason Davis’ charity poker events that are always a blast. . . now the other day in my inbox:

SixDegrees for Life: Raising 6k for Jerry’s Kids.

There you have it folks, not only is Dave Mendoza amazingly generous with professional references and influence, he’s now taking it to the next level and giving something back. Go Dave!

I also want to highlight a local young blogger who has caught my eye. His blog : Silicon Prairie News caught my eye a while back and you can follow his tweets here. Very interesting fellow and looking to bring some energy to Omaha. I’m all for that!

Business Speak/Promised Land Part 2

So getting into the promised land is comprised of at least two definitive avenues that I can see, but there are more (of course there are!). As I talk to people in the industry, I find assumptions I had mistakenly given in to (HR is evil, there’s a talent shortage, recruiting is easy) being called into question. So here are some other proactive steps. Obviously, I am just hitting the high notes here. Feel free to comment if you have something to add.

Organization. If anything, the landscape is more cluttered than ever before and it takes skills of paramount organization and prioritization to really take full advantage of the ones that are the most suited to your company, industry or niche. I think when I first started recruiting, I had similar illusions to the ones I held when starting my journalism career. A bustling office, filled with paper flying, phones ringing and the inaudible but palpable cha-ching of deals being done. And while that can feel true, the point has been made that will all the techno-gizmodo stuff we have available (some great stuff and a lot of it FREE) sometimes you can walk through a “recruiting office” and never hear…. An issue? Yeah. But not one of motivation, one of organization. The best recruiters I talk to carve our phone time and use it for that (not email, not sourcing, not generation, not composing offer letters) PHONE CALLS. Beyond that, measuring the ROI of your tools is a large part of organization as well. With recruiters and HR professionals coming together across different social networks (like this one), there’s never been a better time to ask your colleagues for advice on technology, systems, implementations and rollouts. Then, just do it!

Mind your business. Sounds like something my mother would say. And she is usually (not always) right. Maybe it was from her that picked up on the skill of immersion. (Maybe “Learning Practice” is more apt than “Skill”).Yeah, it’s a great way to learn a language but other skills can be equally easy to pick up with immersion. If you don’t know the ins, outs, vision, values, job descriptions, metrics, budget, and goal of your company and/or department, you’re going to have issues. At least when you want to eat with the big boys. If I hear one more HR person tell me that “they’re just not technical” or “I’m not great with numbers”. . . Unless you learn how to speak their language, handle their pain points (oh and BTW, by “their” I mean BOTH candidates and clients/bosses, fun yes?) show them solutions that make sense in the larger scheme of things and articulate all of this along the proper (read: current) chain of co…, you’ll get little accomplished.

More to come. Man this list is getting really long!

Learning the business speak

For years, HR and TA (that’s talent acquisition, which I will be using more as a differentiator between the field of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition, which I believe to be very different but equitable skillsets) has begged for a “seat at the table” (what are they serving at this fabled table anyways, is it Turkish Delight and Mojitos? Must be cuz everyone wants to be there).

Anyway, while we’ve griped, moaned, fussed and fought even GASP, shut up and do our jobs and do them well, it’s never quite got us over that hill and into promised execland. Yes, yes, SOME progressive companies have gotten the message but to an HR or Talent Pro working in a co. that hasn’t started singing the tune, that is about as useful as NOT owning google stock and hearing your bro in law brag about his (unless he’s about to kick the bucket or something).

But now, I think we might be getting close. I will concede that my age, and my newness to the profession can make me seem a bit doe-eyed at times and perhaps is causing me to see trends that are not there. To combat this, I have been doing interviews with some industry greats and hearing what their takes are on the industry. And after talking to several of them, younger, older, male and female, I have come to the following conclusions:

1) Education. It doesn’t have to be a formal college degree, but for the overlooked and oft abused industry of recruiting and talent acquisition, some sort of standard should be established. Something to separate those that want to learn from those who just want to make money. Perhaps, as I opine here, seminars and conferences are the answer. Perhaps, we need a course that is not owned by an RPO, as one interviewee suggested. What do you think?

2) Respect. Only when becoming a talent acquisition specialist becomes slightly harder than falling on your butt on an escalator, will people begin to accord recruiting and it’s acquisition partners some respect. Whether the industry is further segmented to include pipelining, sourcing, etc is another matter (I believe it should be segemented when necessary but that is another post). This means a willingness to learn, to hold to industry standards in the face of powerful and exciting trends and also to choose to be a recruiter even when it’s not as easy as slapping thrice scanned resumes on an HM’s desk. (Bonus: this is something we can all do TODAY!)

Stay tuned for more themes. . . I am notoriously terrible at follow-up in any sort of chronological order (see my firing post, part 1) BUT I will be following up.

Getting into the conversation. . .

Here is a great quote from Dan Schwabel’s Personal Branding Blog:

The only way a company gets cash is through revenues from products or services from customers. It needs cash to pay people, therefore customers are critical. If you look at a corporate balance sheet, you will notice that “customers” don’t appear at all. If you take a traditional way of looking at assets, they don’t show up. We need to move away from that strict financial view because customers are the source of cashflow, which means that they should be treated as assets.

Communication is now much greater both between companies and customers and between customers themselves. Traditionally the company has a message and they send it to a customer (web 1.0). Now with interactive media, there are more customers talking back to companies (web 2.0). That feedback enables them to modify their products and services and attracting and retaining customers. Customers are playing a role in the innovation process. The value that people get from customers is very important. Social media increases closeness between customers and companies. We always know that word-of-mouth is an important aspect of the mix. The media explosion today has made this much greater, so companies are trying to figure out how to use these different devices (facebook, etc). They are looking to get information back from the market. Today, companies don’t have full control over what their customers say.

I know the quote above is a little long but it illustrates a learned mind (Noel Capon) stating what seems an obvious truth to a lot of social media users. As a talent professional, I believe in the above statements but believe they can equally true with the word “human capital” in them.

Companies cannot do what they do without good people in most (if not all, but that would be a bit of a utopia now wouldn’t it?) but as we talked about yesterday in the recruitingblogs.com Talent Talk Cafe (every Tuesday at 2CST), most C-Level executives aren’t even invested in the conversation about how to attract and retain top talent.

You’re FIRED! Part

I’ve seen a lot of folks get hired. Oh happy day, for them and for me! But there is another day that comes all too soon, if the recruiter hasn’t done their homework or if, heaven forbid, you didn’t use a recruiter! It’s the day you’re FIRED. Here are some great tips that I have learned from watching clients and friends go through the complete talent management cycle.

Hire slow. Perhaps this is not the best advice if you are staffing, say, a large shoe store or data center (which many recruiters do and do well, just not my niche) but if you are running a small firm with that is financially solvent and wants to stay that way, then hiring slow is one of the smartest moves you can make. I know this goes against a lot of what I preach as a recruiter about cost to fill etc and so forth. But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be slow just for lack of velocity. You can do a phone screen, check references, do background checks and have a F2F, all in the same week, if you are dedicated to filling the position. Granted, you have to have an excellent recruiter fill that pipeline, but that’s another post! So “slow” could be a month or so.

Have a process. For some clients, that is an immediate tech screen with the CTO, for others it includes both active and passive references. Whatever your process is, have it for every pivotal role in your corporation. Do not skip steps to make way for the “gut feeling”.

Ignore all gut feelings, except the sickly ones. I don’t care how many Wil Smith movies you’ve seen, gut feelings about the “perfect hire” are rare and usually WRONG (warning: this link has nothing to do with the acccompanying text but the blog it links to is really funny). This is particularly important when making a sales hire. Many clients have no idea how to sell and thus when confronted with a pushy or charming candidate, believe them to be a great salesperson. In my experience, the best salespeople will follow all social norms and be willing to role play.

Nip it in the (you know where!). When time management, disrespect, dishonesty, poor performance, slow learning curve, you name the issue, rears its ugly head (or heads if the hire was really bad), find a way to fix it. If the issue was due to the hiring manager and the person is ill suited for the job through no fault of their own, perhaps a reorg is in order, allowing that person (who must be at their core, a good and teachable employee) a chance to use their strengths and really excel. When this happens, it’s great. But sometimes the issue is an employee trait, something that cannot or will not be changed and should be promptly excised, like a tumor. Most retention experts and true HR pros will howl when they see this but that’s okay.

You are not their friend. I know a lot of deep and meaningful relationships are formed at work. This post is not about those. For a great working relationship, it’s necessary to keep the line between employer and friend, very distinct. Failure to do this may result in crappy production, a chubby bottom line (heehee) and inappropriate requests for money. It can also be difficult to nip poor performance in the (you know where).

Just say it. Once you’ve determined that performance won’t change, results will not improve, etc and so forth, just say the words. Tell them why and let them go.

Bounce back. Hiring and then firing, especially when you’re floundering about without a talent professional at your side, can be hard. It can make you distrust candidates and wonder where all the really good talent has gone. But the truth is, they are out there. They are looking for positions, at companies large and small, in towns and cities, there are great candidates with excellent skill sets and a killer work ethic. Just give me a call, I know where to find them.