Busting HR Out of the Box

I have the privilege of working with some incredibly talented HR professionals.    People who are really integral to, and transformative in their organizations.  But until recently you would never hear their stories.  My blog (the one you are reading right now) is about recruiting and hiring – not about being a transformative HR leader.   

So when John Sumser asked me to join the Editorial Advisory Board for the HR Examiner I jumped at the chance.  The goal of the HR Examiner is to “illuminate the amazing power of HR – well executed” and to help you “build an HR operation that is a competitive weapon.”   I like the sound of that, and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about people who are doing exactly that, like Mary Kitson at Mitre Corporation and John Murabito at CIGNA.

You can also read my first post  “Get Your Own Yardstick to Beat Your CFO (In An Argument, That Is.”

Who Else is Heading for the Door?

When a top executive leaves an organization, everyone scrambles to fill that key vacancy.  But in the hurry to do that, a far bigger turnover problem is often overlooked.  

When a key executive leaves, everyone who reported to that executive should be considered a “flight risk” – because the second tier of managers are at a significantly increased risk of leaving the organization for at least a year after a key executive leaves. 

So what causes that?

• Sometimes the second level executives were hoping to get the top job and feel snubbed when they were not selected.
• Uncertainty rises when a key position is vacant.  Many executives put feelers out in the job market during that interim time because of a (legitimate) fear that the new boss will bring in their own new team.
• Sometimes people had a personal loyalty to the old boss, or simply prefer the old way of doing things and they are not eager to make the changes to adapt to a new boss.
• No matter what the reason, most people stop and reassess their own career when a key person leaves - they ask themselves ”I wonder if it’s also time for me to make a change.”  They may ultimately stay, but they invariably ask the question.

Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote an intriguing post about the psychology behind hiring an outsider for a top position, and why so many fail.

“Filling senior-level positions from outside sends a clear message to the current executive team-sorry, you’re just not good enough.  And since outside CEO succession almost invariably results in turnover in top management as the new person brings in his or her own team, the current senior-level managers get disheartened.  They naturally begin thinking about how to find a new job instead of concentrating on improving results at their current company.”

So when it comes to executive turnover, just remember the adage “When it rains it pours” … then go bolt the exit doors.

The Staffing Advisor Now in Alltop

What’s happening in the world of HR?   It can be hard to keep up.  Now Alltop makes it easier by collecting the latest stories, best sites and blogs on all things HR related.   And now you can find us there too … right along side the people who actually belong there.

HR Blogs at a Glance

It’s difficult to keep up with the latest thinking in any field.  Heaven knows I struggle mightily to keep up with the latest thinking in staffing and performance management, and frankly, I don’t even try to keep up with the wide range of laws and issues that HR generalists must grapple with. 

So if you don’t have time to load up your Google Reader with blogs to follow, or if you are new to blog reading and you don’t know who to follow, just check out Halogen Software’s HR Blog Search Engine.  It’s all right at your fingertips.  It’s the “easy button” for the latest thinking on any HR topic.

Never Doubt Your Ability to Change the World

I am inspired by people who take on the impossible. It’s why we love to serve entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders.   I’d like to tell you about one of our clients today.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

In 1983, a report called “A Nation at Risk” warned about the “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education.  Yet there remains a huge achievement gap between the US and other countries.   It’s not only a moral outrage, it’s economically disastrous.  A recent McKinsey study just calculated the cost of that failure.  The lost productivity costs the American economy trillions of dollars every year.  Trillions of dollars in GDP is an incomprehensibly large amount of wasted human potential.. and a bigger moral outrage.

In 1998 a group of thoughtful, committed citizens decided to do something about public education.  And they weren’t going to tinker around the edges, or start with something easy.  They were going to solve the toughest, hardest, most unfair part of it – they wanted public education to work for everyone. Everyone.

So they opened the nation’s first urban, public, college preparatory boarding school.  Their innovative model combined a rigorous academic program with a nurturing boarding program that teaches life skills while providing a safe and secure environment for the students.  The SEED schools provide disadvantaged, at-risk students a pathway to success in college and beyond.  They do not select their students – it’s open to everyone. 

So how did that audacious experiment in public education work out?

This week President Obama came to the SEED School of Washington to sign the National Service Act.    You can read more on the White House blog, but in his remarks, the President said:  “This school is a true success story, a place where for four of the last five years, every graduate from the SEED School was admitted to college. Every graduate.”

So, like I said, never doubt your ability to change the world.

HR Pros: Don’t be a Twidiot

Most HR professionals are swamped right now. The new COBRA rules are a mess. Lawyers say you better plan your union avoidance strategy now before the EFCA bogeyman gets you … and of course you heard that from your lawyer recently because you had to call them after one of your managers botched a termination. Yeah, business is great lately … for employment attorneys.

Oh, and don’t forget, benefit plans should be cut or kept the same or changed or something depending on your finances or your strategy or something. 

And oh yeah, your employee morale is tanking as your employees trade rumors and worry about losing their jobs instead of working full throttle to keep them. 

So in the echo chamber of the social media crowd, everyone asks why you don’t waste spend more time on social media. Heck, even Oprah is now on Twitter … but wait, didn’t some clever soul poke fun at TV news people, calling Twitter a  “gateway drug to full-blown media  narcissism?   Yup.

But so far, I found a couple of hundred people around the world who inspire me, who challenge my thinking, who share smart strategies to thrive in the recession, and answer questions.  I’ve followed hundreds of links to great articles and resources – more than I can keep up with – an astonishing flow of information.   In fact, I started a job seeker blog just to share all the good ideas I’ve seen. . . on Twitter.

Twitter has grown explosively to about 4 million users in the US – but, as Steve Boese astutely points out, that’s only about 3% of of the people employed in the US, so you are not too far behind the curve … yet.    Hey, I sometimes feel twidiotic even mentioning tweets, and the lingo some tweeps use to talk about Twitter can be twidiculous -really twagic.  And Facebook also has it’s own language, as does LinkedIn and bloggers.  It’s like you need to be a rookie many times over, but you’ll soon learn the rules and norms and etiquette for each.

And yet, and yet, and yet, busy overworked HR pros … engage you must - and begin to learn the social conventions of social media or you will surely become just like the last person posting ads in print newspapers 5 years after the job boards came out.  You’ll be the last person to type your resume on a typewriter instead of a word processor.  And you’ll be using that resume when you are the last person in line for your next job, but of course you won’t even be in the line because you submitted your resume by mail instead of online, and you heard about it too late because you never set up a news feed for jobs.  And you never used an insider connection to get an interview, because you never built your LinkedIn connections.  And if your future employer did happen to check you out, a quick Google search would reveal no online references or profile, so it was assumed that you were not a leader in your field anyway.  And that’s a twagedy you can avoid.

HR pros, on top of all your other work – your employees and your future employees will all expect you to understand social media.   I don’t know if Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn will even exist in 5 years, but something like them surely will.  The rules are new, you cannot learn it all in a weekend, it takes time to build, and the people who are engaging right now will have a HUGE advantage over you if you wait to get started.  And if you don’t learn the game soon, you really will look like a twidiot - an unemployable twidiot.

At the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers – Project SAME - I’ve been running meetings all year long on how HR can use Social Media. We’ve already drawn standing room only crowds for Kelly Dingee and Jessica Lee.  In May and June we’ll have  Mark Stelzner and Ben Gotkin coming to speak.  I’m on a mission to raise awareness of how much more effectively you can do your job if you learn these tools.

Not to worry, if you try, you’ll catch on,  just like you learned how to use Careerbuilder, Google, Outlook and MS-Word.  Soon this will be just another tool in your toolkit.  By the way, Jennifer McClure did a fine job providing a social media starter kit in a recent presentation/blog post “Social Media for HR Professionals Beyond LinkedIn.”    Be sure to check it out.

Pssst. Job Seekers. Want the Insider Advantage?

Let’s face it, when you are a job seeker, you get a lot of well meaning, but terrible advice – mostly from the people who love you most – your friends and family.   Even after I was working in the search business for over a decade, I still got regular career advice (unsolicited) from my mother-in-law…but that’s another story.  

Because the blog you are reading right now is geared for employers, we started a second blog exclusively for job seekers – The Search Firm Insider.    As search firm insiders, we know how the hiring process works, and more importantly, how it does NOT work.   So every day we plan to share one worthwhile idea that we hope will be useful to job seekers.

Are you on Facebook?  You can also follow the new blog on our fan page.

HR, Don’t Let The Crisis Go to Waste

I was meeting with a senior HR leader recently, asking how she was navigating the economic storm.  She mentioned that in a recent senior staff meeting, her CEO wondered aloud if they needed to consider across-the-board pay cuts.    When she took her job, the CEO used to just make those kinds of decisions, perhaps in consultation with the CFO.  Now, the CEO asks her. 

And so in the meeting, she said “Let’s assume we go with your approach, you know that star player we just recruited from our biggest competitor?  Do YOU want to tell him about the changes you just made to his compensation plan?”  

That put a new spin on things.   Naturally she did not come unarmed to the meeting, she had a long list of other places to cut back before the tired old chestnut of across the board pay cuts.  In the end, she found the savings they needed, communicated it clearly to hundreds of employees and avoided creating a new problem beyond their need to reduce expenses.  

Score one for using HR strategically.   

I’m not suggesting that across the board pay cuts are a bad idea, indeed, they might be brilliant for your situation - your employees can be amazing.  22,000 Montgomery County School employees recently agreed to forego their contractual pay raises to balance the school budget, rather than cut classroom jobs. 

But before you make big HR decisions, you need to look at all your options and choose wisely.  Few CFOs have the tools to do that.  But HR does.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that this is HR’s Golden Moment - a time to shine, to earn that “seat at the table” and really make a difference.  And now I read, in the Huffington Post, an article about a national conference of HR professionals held in Australia.  The writer, Juliet Bourke seems to agree with my viewpoint, observing that now is the time HR leaders need to pull back business from “knee jerk retrenchments.”  So she went looking for how HR pros were helping their companies to avoid layoffs and other damaging across-the-board actions. 

“Our bottom line proposition was that the global financial crisis provides HR with a unique opportunity to demonstrate its value to business — namely, how to survive, if not thrive, under extremely challenging conditions. One hundred percent of the HR attendees agreed that talking about flexibility was relevant to their business’ needs . . .”

But sadly, she found that more than three quarters of the attendees were nowhere near ready to lead this effort.    ”It’s as if they are looking for someone else to lead the way.”  So sad. 

If you are a CEO and don’t feel like you are getting sound HR advice for your big decisions, grab your phone and call me.  Right now.  That’s easy to fix.  And if you are an HR professional please know that I, for one, hope you don’t let this financial crisis go to waste.   Send me a private note, or post a public comment, tell me how you are using your golden moment to step up and make a difference in the future of your organization.

Think Twitter is a Waste of Time?

A lot of HR professionals tell me they have no idea where they can find the time for learning social media.  And I get it.  Really. We’re all running full throttle these days.  But I’m finding Twitter has an amazing capacity to make small slices of time really productive.

So yesterday I had an amazing, productive day.  Connected with dozens of HR professionals who were asking for more information after one of my two presentations this week.  We talked about real issues facing their companies, and looked at ways they could do more with less - faster, better, cheaper…on their way to perfect, free and now – the mantra of our age.  

I picked up some new search work (I LOVE working in DC, always something new going on).   I talked to my Project Managers who are bringing home some other searches in record time.   And I read alot of news, analysis and research – because that’s what I love to do. 

But at 11:00 pm when I took out my recycling bin, I realized my morning newspapers were still in the driveway.  Yesterday, I got all my news from on Twitter, from reading blogs on my google reader, and from Google news.

If you are new to it (as I am) you may find Twitter is not all “my cappucino did not have enough foam” and “my dog did the funniest thing.”  Bloggers are all not all polarizing jerks (although other search professionals get plenty irritated with me from time to time).

So if you are not on Twitter, here’s a thin slice of what you missed:

From John Sumser - this intelligent and worthwhile video on the origins of the credit crisis.  Astonishingly well done.

From  SmartBriefJobs - The Secrets of Super-Productive CEOs - getting more done in less time.  And Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. 

And from somewhere on Twitter I came across this BusinessWeek gem Debunking Six Social Media Myths.

Waste of time?  Not so much.

10 Suggestions for the Job Seeker

My niece’s roommate was a miserable, depressed,  unemployed, self-absorbed wretch of a recent college graduate.  Slept till noon, never left the apartment, never saw friends.   Then a couple weeks ago she “caved” and took an unpaid internship in her field.  Got up early, got dressed, went out in the world and did some work.   Within days, her mood brightened, she made some new friends and reconnected with old ones.  She reengaged with life.  So yeah, work matters.  And while you are looking for work, you need to find ways to engage and connect with others . . . and there are A LOT of new ways to do that.

I’ve been there.  Looking for work is scary, lonely, emotionally draining and can feel much harder than actually working.   It’s inefficient, uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success (just like, you know, having a job in these turbulent times).

But if you are a job seeker listen up.  I talk to A LOT of you.  And almost all of you make at least two serious mistakes when you look for work.  You either expect recruiters to find you a job, or you expect your friends to sympathize with you  and agree with you that your approach to job hunting is fine.  Both expectations are wrong.

First, please realize that search firms don’t exist to help people find jobs, we exist to help companies find self-reliant people.   Heck, even career counselors don’t exist to help you find a job – they exist to teach you the skills you need to find a job on your own.  Most people are simply terrible at looking for work, and even if you did it before, the way to look for work now is different than it was before.  It’s not just about resumes and cover letters and meeting people for lunch and coffee to network – you need to do MORE.

Your approach to job search is NOT fine, and I won’t tell you it is.   I will, however, happily share with you some tools and resources you need now, to help you on your path toward self-reliance.  If you take these actions, I will be terribly impressed with you and absolutely delighted to help you in any way I can.    So here are my top 10 suggestions: 

Australian Island Dream Job

Australia knows a thing or two about tourism.  In a brilliant marketing ploy, they are advertising an island dream job.  Annual salary is $100k (but the “job” lasts just 6 months, so really it’s just a sweet, sweet temp gig).   You have  a flexible schedule and oh yeah, you get the use of a free home. 

It’s billed as the “best job in the world.” 

Responsibilities include cleaning the pool, feeding the fish and exploring the area.   You must be a good swimmer and enjoy snorkeling.   Applications close February 22.  News coverage is heavy, so unsurprisingly, the website to apply is often crashed, but keep trying!    www.islandreefjob.com

Nonprofit Governance Made Easy

I had the pleasure of catching up with Keith Greene today.   Everyone knows him as the phenominally successful VP of Member Relations at SHRM, but now he’s doing some really interesting work at Boardsource – the mecca of information about nonprofit governance.

I wish I knew of Boardsource back when I was serving on 3 different nonprofit boards – they have an astonishing array of resources for boardmembers, from “10 Smart Things Your Board Can Do Now” to “Fearless Fundraising” to “Taming the Troublesome Board Member.”   Individual membership is only $99/year and the publications are practical, useful and dirt cheap. 

Dont’ know Keith yet?  He is speaking at the January 28th dinner meeting of NOVA SHRM on Emerging Trends in HR.  He’s always informative and entertaining; come join me there!