Recruiting Tips for 2016

Let's face it, recruiting is inefficient. Especially for the small to mid-sized company that still states at the bottom of its ads, send resume and cover letter to hr@xyzcompany.com. This means that someone at XYZ Company has to open every email, open two separate attachments in every email, and decide what to do with them. Ugh!

Recruiting is part of a two-step process. Recruiting is how you go about stocking the pond with viable candidates. Selection is how you go about choosing which candidates to invite to join the team and which ones you toss back into the pond. 

While I am much better equipped to help clients with selection, I am frequently asked to participate in the recruiting phase simply because of this inefficiency. No one at XYZ has time to open all those emails! 

Since I am an HR consultant and not a full-time recruiter, I often recommend alternative solutions to my clients:

1. I know many industry-specific recruiters who maintain deep databases of technically competent candidates who might be passively looking, but may not reply to one of my ads. These recruiters can be ideal for construction, engineering, finance, IT and healthcare roles, just to name a few.
2. I know several staffing agencies that do a wonderful job helping stock the pond for general administrative, office, warehouse and general labor roles on a direct hire or temp-to-perm basis. They have a steady stream of applicants coming through their doors that may also not answer one of my ads on a job board.

For a variety of reasons, some folks are reluctant to partner with an industry recruiter or a staffing agency, or see this an expense of last resort. So I set about trying to find a solution that would meet the needs of this population. 

It was clear that the core tool that would immediately improve the efficiency of the recruiting process for these clients is an applicant tracking system (ATS). So, I investigated several and found that many miss the plot when it comes to smaller organizations with relatively low turnover. They insist on a per-employee-per-month subscription. This is not an attractive solution to a firm that hopes it won't need to hire again anytime soon.

I eventually partnered with a company that has an excellent, easy-to-use tool that allows its clients to pay for ads on an a la carte basis. We can set up a branded portal so that candidates who see your ad on Indeed or one of the dozen other sites it goes to click to a page that is branded for your company (not mine). Candidates complete the application, answer screening questions that I help you create, and the only emails that end up in the hiring manager's in-box are from candidates who have been pre-qualified by the ATS. The hiring manager can always scroll through the rejected list, if they choose, but even this is much more efficient than looking through emails in a rejected folder as they are displayed in a manner that makes it easy to take a quick peek and label applicants as rejected, a maybe or someone to pursue.

This ATS is a very economical solution for companies that are confident that they can find their star from active job seekers and want internal control over most of the process. It may not be as effective as utilizing industry recruiters or staffing agencies, who often have access to passive job seekers as well, but it may make a reasonable first step for some organizations. Contact me for more information.

  

If It Weren't For Employees, This Would Be Easy!

I've heard so many variations of this from small business owners:

      If it weren't for employees, running a business would be easy.

      I spend way too much time dealing with petty employee matters.

      Why can't they just do their job?

Unfortunately, running any kind of business where your customers pay you for deliverables generated by employees means having to deal with human beings. It's easy to understand why large companies are using robots, technology and automation whenever and wherever they can. Robots don't get sick, don't have petty jealousies, are never in a bad mood and are programmed to do one thing - the company's work.

People are much more complex. Most work to live, unlike their bosses, who live for their work. But one thing that these troubling employees and their bosses have in common is that they are both primarily motivated by their own self-interests. This is where bosses miss the plot so often - they can't understand why the employee isn't as motivated to achieve the bosses goals as the boss is. 

Bosses are typically motivated by money - that's why they started a small business to begin with - to work for themselves and create an opportunity to earn more than they could working for someone else. Your employees, however, may not be motivated nearly as strongly by money as you are. That may be why your efforts to incentivize the behaviors you want primarily through monetary rewards may not be working.

Business owners will benefit from pausing to think about what motivates their employees to come to work. Or more importantly, what motivates them to give discretionary effort. Understanding what motivates the individual employee will give you the opportunity to create a culture that stimulates star performance from that individual. Assuming that everyone is motivated by the same things you are motivated by may result in a sizable chunk of your workforce being misaligned with the rewards you've established. And aligning the rewards of the job with the motivators of the individual is the key ingredient to employee engagement.

How do you find out? You could just ask them... Or, you can contact The Davidson Group and we can help you assess what's working and what's not with your workforce. 

HR Priorities for 2016

Here are some suggestions for your HR priorities for 2016:

1. Make sure you are compliant with wage and hour regulations
This is one the most common and potentially costly infractions I run across when conducting HR compliance audits. Here are the three most common mistakes:

• Paying by 1099 when the relationship clearly doesn't qualify. The Uberization of the workforce has been a hot topic of late, and make no mistake, utilizing 1099 labor can make strategic sense. But remember, the government doesn't like it and it is increasing its enforcement efforts against what it considers abuses of this practice.
• Failing to account for bonuses in overtime calculations. If Jane makes $10 an hour, earns a $50 commission for the week and works 42 hours, her gross pay is not $480, it's $481.18! Missing by only $1.18 doesn't sound like much, but over a two year period, multiplied by a number of miss-paid employees, it can add up and is subject to additional penalties. (Contact me if you need help with the calculation).
• Incorrectly classifying employees as exempt. Just because the company decides to pay an employee a weekly salary rather than an hourly wage doesn't automatically mean that the employee is exempt from overtime compensation. The employee must qualify for an approved exemption.

2. Conduct an employee survey

It's amazing what you learn when you bother to ask. A lot of small business owners don't conduct surveys because they think they have a good enough relationship with the employee base that they're already aware of what they like and don't like about the company. Don't underestimate the employee engagement benefits of simply asking in a forum in which employees can give anonymous feedback. And don't screw it up by compromising the anonymity. Utilize a third party if you need to.

3. Make sure your feedback and your rewards are aligned

The traditional performance review is giving way to performance dashboards that give more timely and more relevant feedback. If your organization awards performance bonuses and commissions based on achieving certain individual, group or company goals, take a look at how that information is communicated. You may have an opportunity to increase the motivational impact of dollars you are already spending by aligning the performance feedback and the rewards with better, more visual employee communication tools.

4. Adopt an applicant tracking tool

If your job ads still say, send resumes to hr@mycompany.com, you're living in the dark ages. You're having to open every email, then open at least one attachment for every applicant, whether qualified or not. This is a hugely inefficient way to keep up with applicants when there are low cost alternatives available. The Davidson Group can set you up with a branded applicant tracking site, post your jobs for you and help you establish screening criteria. The only applicants that arrive in your in-box are the ones that meet the criteria that you've established. An applicant tracking portal also protects you from certain EEOC compliance risk that you're exposed to if all you have is an Outlook folder full of emailed resumes. 

The Lost Art of Management

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Frederick Taylor helped business owners understand how effective management of workers could lead to increased productivity and profitability. Taylor showed that if managers planned the work and defined the most efficient processes, workers would perform better than when they had to figure things out on their own. The ratio of managers to workers grew in most industries as a result in the years leading up to World War II.

Peter Drucker defined management in the 1960s as getting the right things done through other people, but the ratio of managers to workers has been steadily declining since he printed that. Today, not many people have a role that is 100% managerial. Most managers I know maintain individual contributor roles and perform their managerial duties in their "spare" time. For example, a sales manager might have a personal sales quota that is 70-100% of what her sales reps have. This means that she's spending the majority of her time cultivating her own sales pipeline rather than helping her team be more effective in the way Taylor and Drucker envisioned.

I had the same challenges when I was an operations manager. I once calculated the number of weeks of vacation our operations team was eligible for during a year and figured out that our supervisors must spend at least 50% of their time doing nothing but covering for workers who were on vacation. In addition to covering vacations, they also had to manage new account start-ups, address any customer dissatisfaction issues, and cover any accounts left unserviced due to employee turnover. This left very little time to work directly with, mentor and develop our existing team. And most troublesome, the first thing that got squeezed out each month was time they planned to spend with our strongest technicians.  

One unintended consequence of the evolution of management into the 21st century is that companies promote people more and more based on their technical knowledge - which makes sense when you consider that managers are spending most of their time performing technical, not managerial work. But this has lead to increased job dissatisfaction and decreased levels of engagement from workers who consistently say they wish they received more feedback and had better interaction with their "technician" bosses.

The economic realities of this trend are not likely to change. Few companies can afford managers whose only responsibilities are to plan for and monitor the work of others, like Frederick Taylor recommended. But companies shouldn't forget the benefits of effective management and the costs that go along with devaluing management skills. 

The answer is not necessarily investing in more management. The answer is investing in better management. Helping those technical experts become better managers through training and coaching is one way. Promoting people into management roles who have a stronger management skill set to begin with, even if they don't have the strongest technical skills is another. Imagine promoting your 4th best sales rep into the sales manager role because she has a stronger management skill set than numbers 1-3 on the results board. This would send a definite message that the organization values management skills, not just individual results. 

Either way, the benefits of effective management are the same as they were in Frederick Taylor's day - workers will perform better and the firm will have higher productivity and profitability if workers have effective managers. The trick is figuring out how to equip managers to be effective within the realities of modern time constraints and aligning their rewards to include managerial excellence in addition to technical or individual contributor excellence.

We're Hiring....Again!

Bob was sitting at his desk staring at a stack of resumes. It's deja vu all over again, he thought to himself, both as a tribute to the late Yogi Berra and as an appropriate description of how he felt. Bob was in the process of filling the same job for the third time in two years. He has another job that has been vacant twice during that time. If you asked him if he had a turnover problem, he'd quickly point out that 7 of his 9 direct reports have been with him for many years, but he just hasn't been able to find the right people for those other two spots. 

He was about halfway through the stack when his phone rang. It was his new Regional VP, Mary. I heard your new hire didn't work out. Bob answered the way all managers answer, Yeah, he just wasn't right for the job.

What wasn't right about him?, Mary asked. Once again, Bob gave the answer that Mary was used to hearing, He seemed perfect in the interview, but it's like a different person reported to work on his first day. He began showing signs of frustration almost immediately and he was mentally checked-out by the end of his second month. We tried to salvage him, but he gave his two week notice on Monday.

What are you going to differently this time? This was not a question Bob was used to being asked. His old boss would have just said, tough luck and wished him well on the next try. When Bob didn't answer right away, Mary followed-up, This is the fifth time you've had to stop doing productive work and go through the interviewing and selection process for these two jobs in the past two years. Stop to think what the inability to fill those two roles has cost you and your branch. Not just your time, but the time and frustration of the other people on your team who must keep covering for those vacancies. If you missed out on five critical sales opportunities, you would make adjustments to improve your chances next time. This is a similar business problem, so what are you going to do differently?

When it was apparent to Mary that Bob hadn't really thought about his staffing problem as a business problem with real costs, she said, Bob, whenever a unit is experiencing targeted repetitive turnover, it usually has its roots in one or more of four problems. One, it could be the boss. Two, it could be the co-workers. Three, it could be the job description. Or four, it could be the candidates, themselves. 

What I'd like you to do is have Sam from HR visit your unit. I'd like him to do three things: 

First, I'd like him to conduct an employee engagement survey and a job analysis with your people. This might help us figure out if one or more existing members of the team are contributing to the repeated failures of new hires and to what extent the combination of duties assigned to those two jobs are a contributing factor. 

Second, I'd like for you take our Executive Coaching assessment and let Sam walk through the results with you. I can tell you from personal experience that I became a much better manager after working through some of my own issues identified by this assessment. Those improvements are a big part of the reason I got this promotion and I'm sure it'll help you as well, even if your behavior is not linked to the turnover. 

And finally, I want Sam to benchmark our new pre-employment assessment against those jobs. When I began utilizing a benchmarked assessment with top candidates, my good-hire percentage improved significantly.

Two years later, Bob and Mary were sitting side-by-side in Bob's first executive meeting as a Regional VP.  I've got to tell you, Mary, I was skeptical and nervous when you sent HR into my operation two years ago, but that visit from Sam and the exercises he put us through were a major factor in the improvement in my branch's financial performance. I owe you a debt of gratitude for helping to position me for this promotion.

Mary smiled and said, You earned it, Bob. Just help some branch manager who reports to you learn the value of getting the strategic HR foundations of their operation right, and we'll be all square.

Puppies, Sticks and Carrots

My wife recently got a new puppy. I guess technically we both got one, but if you came to our house you'd quickly realize it's hers. We're in that stage of teaching the little guy what behaviors are OK and what behaviors are not going to be tolerated. 

It's amazing how quickly he has learned behaviors that can be reinforced by rewards. I taught him to sit in just a few minutes. As part of his housebreaking training, we reward him with a treat when he's outside, and we reward him with a treat when we go back inside and he sits on command. Now, every time he crosses a threshold, he sits and looks up for his treat. All-in-all, teaching him positive behaviors through positive reinforcement has been pretty easy.

On the other hand, getting him NOT to do what we don't want him to do has been more challenging. We can't give a treat for not chewing a shoe, for example, and expect the reward to be understood. Correcting shoe chewing, jumping and other violations must be addressed through corrective action. And behavior modification by corrective action just doesn't "take" as quickly nor as solidly as those reinforced by rewards do. 

Humans are more like puppies than we care to admit. Give us a treat for something and we'll do it again! Tell us not to do something and we might or might not. Have you ever said, How many times have I told them not to... 

When managers learn that behaviors that can be reinforced through rewards should be reinforced through rewards, they discover that rewarded behavior is repeated and repeated and repeated. Carrots beat sticks every time.

The other thing that's frequently misunderstood about carrots is the belief that the reward must be tangible, like cash or a gift card or a lapel pin (or a doggie treat). But recognition and feedback can be motivating without any tangible reward attached at all. For example, if you can incorporate a graphical representation of the performance that's desired and a graphical representation of employees' actual performance that they can compare to, this simple feedback will be motivating even if there is no financial incentive attached to the goal. Achieving the goal is carrot-enough oftentimes.

Unfortunately, too many managers are much more comfortable with the stick than with the carrot. The stick is easy - an employee messes up and I reprimand them. Coming up with appropriate carrots that don't seem hokey or manipulative is harder. 

But carrots work...and work better! Organizations that make the investments to develop the proper carrots and managers who recognize how to use carrots will ultimately develop more productive teams. So try to increase your use of carrots by 50% and decrease your use of sticks by 50% and see if you don't get improved results.

DOL Delays Important Ruling

We HR folks have been waiting on a ruling that was expected to come late this year or early 2016. The issue is the salary test for most Fair Labor Standards Act exemptions. The Department of Labor proposed some important changes to overtime laws in June and closed its comment period on those proposed changes in September. The new rules were expected to become law in the first quarter of 2016, but fortunately for small and mid-sized employers, the DOL has delayed announcing the final rule until late 2016.

The DOL received approximately 270,000 comments on the topic, giving them pause to consider the impacts of their proposal a little more thoroughly. There is likely an election-year political component to the delay as well.

The DOL is primarily targeting employers who "promote" people into jobs with management titles, but still require them spend the majority of their time performing non-exempt duties. Picture a cook who's making $10/hour working 40 hours per week at a restaurant. He gets "promoted" to assistant manager and gets what he thinks is a nice raise to a salary of $500 per week. But now he finds himself working 60 hours per week, and spends most of them cooking, just like he did before. The employee thinks he got a raise, but his effective hourly rate dropped to $8.33. These are the abuses that the DOL is trying to curb.

Unfortunately, their proposal also affects millions of small company office managers, department managers, and non-profit agency employees who currently earn a salary between $24,000 and $50,000 and work extra hours occasionally because they are engaged employees who are committed to their organizations. The DOL proposal as it stands today will force them into punching a clock rather than allowing them to work a flexible schedule as they are used to now.

It's a shame that the DOL still operates as though our economy is dominated by manufacturing jobs. The current rules work pretty well for people who show up at a plant and are either clearly on the clock or clearly off. But they simply don't work very well for many organizations in a service economy with constant connectivity. Unfortunately, bad employers who abuse employees to improve productivity have created the need for reform. Many HR professionals wish the DOL would revise the entire FLSA to make it work better for service providers, but they've chosen to continue to put band aids on 1930s legislation.

I'm still advising my clients to have a plan in place for the new rules, even though it will be late next year before they are released. The only thing likely to change is the final salary test number.