Although I won’t be traveling to every show I want to attend, I will be going to some great conferences that are all in my neck of the wood. If you haven’t been to Portland or Seattle before, now may be a great opportunity. And if you’re an out of towner, I’d be more than happy to buy you a drink at some of our great microbrew joints.
#socialrecruiting summit – September 13th – Seattle, WA
I went to my first one last spring and had a blast. While I was speaking at the last summit, this one I’ll be all ears. And I certainly won’t be wearing a t-shirt that tight again (seriously).
This year’s #socialrecruiting summit is being held this year at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA (just east of Seattle). It’s full of great sessions and our chairperson this year is Chris Hoyt, The Recruiter Guy himself.
We’ll also be having a tweetup and charity poker tournament as well.
I honestly can’t wait for this event. Since I won’t be speaking, I’m going to be focused in on the presentation content and networking with some of the best and brightest in social recruiting.
If you haven’t made plans to come yet, there are still some spots available and airfares are still affordable from most major airports to Seattle ($200 roundtrip from LA!).
Let me know if you have any questions. Our company ERE Media is putting on the event.
SMA Staffing Symposium – September 23rd – Seattle, WA
The Staffing Management Association of Seattle is putting on a one day symposium a week and a half after the social recruiting summit so I’ll be burning up I-5 like mad in September.
The event is being keynoted by someone you may have heard about: Laurie Ruettimann (of The Cynical Girl, formerly of PunkRockHR). It is also being chaired by John Vlastelica who chaired ERE’s Spring Expo and features a great number of fabulous speakers.
There is still time to check it out and register for the conference.
NHRMA Annual Conference – September 29th-October 1st – Bend, OR
I put on my HR hat and head down to beautiful Bend, OR to present not once, but twice to my HR colleagues at the Northwest Human Resource Management Association annual conference. My hope is that it is fantastic because it’s the reason I’m missing the HR Tech conference. I’ll be presenting on social media and HR as well as a tutorial on getting the most from blogging.
If you’re in the Northwest, this is one of the best networking opportunities anywhere. You’ll get to meet HR directors from all over the place and attendance is large enough that you’ll be able to find a group of people at around your same skill level or industry.
Still plenty of time to register too. Bend is about three hours by car from Portland but you won’t believe how lovely the drive is.And if you’re a skier, you can gameplan a trip to Mt. Bachelor later this winter.
SWHRMA Employment and Legislative Conference – October 19th – Vancouver, WA
My home turf! The Southwest Washington Human Resource Management Association conference is a great value for folks in the Portland area. I’m presenting for my local chapter for the first time a report on social recruiting methods being used by top employers.
There isn’t a ton of detail posted yet but I’ve seen the agenda and it looks to be great with some great voices from people in the greater Portland area and legislative updates from the folks up in Olympia.
If you’re in Portland, this is a great opportunity to make it across the river and see me live and in person.
There are three great events this fall that you must attend if you can that I won’t be able to make.
I know. Me not make a conference. But I’ve got other commitments. Real commitments, people.
HR Technology Conference – 9/29-10/1 – Chicago
The first one I’m mentioning is the HR Technology Conference put on by HR Executive Magazine. This is a really fantastic conference co-chaired by the one and only Bill Kutik (the Obi-Wan Kenobi of HR Technology).
I loved the hands on feel of the conference which focuses on practitioners, consultants and analysts (always the analysts) sharing best practices, findings and other help guidance to get you through the confusing world of HR technology. And the crowd is great too with both technology geeks and HR generalists filling the halls between sessions.
I made some of the best connections at the conference last year and I know it is going to be even better this year (even without my presence). If you are in any way involved in HR technology or need to get educated on it, this is the conference to attend. Period.
If you do decide to attend, use the discount code REHAUL10 to score yourself $500 off the on-site registration. I get absolutely nothing out of the deal but maybe if enough of you use the discount code, Kutik won’t have to use the force on me next time.
SourceCon DC – 9/28-9/29 – Washington DC
So you’re in the sourcing business and you’re wondering where you can get some education and networking with the best in the business? Sometimes being a sourcer feels like a lone wolf. Hey, maybe you’re attracted to that lifestyle? I won’t judge!
SourceCon is the premier event for sourcing. I went to my first SourceCon this spring and was absolutely stunned by some of the cutting edge ways these folks can find people (and maybe I was just a bit paranoid too). For someone with very little experience with sourcing, it was a lot to eat up in a couple of days.
This fall’s event is being held at the International Spy Museum and is being chaired by the great Eric Jaquith. While that alone may be worth a trip for me, you’re going to have some of the best in sourcing give you the latest tips and tricks to find that needle in the haystack.
Register before the event to save yourself a couple hundred dollars.
ERE Expo – 10/26-10/28 – South Florida
Last but not least is the big daddy of all recruiting conferences, the ERE Expo. The fall expo is typically held in South Florida which I hear is the polar opposite of Portland in late October (must be tough to have sunny weather about 60 degrees, right?).
But you’re not going for the tan, you’re going for the great educational and networking opportunities. The expo has it.
Headed up this fall by Tony Blake, VP of Recruiting & HRIS for DaVita, the conference is going to be hands on with sessions led by the thought leaders and innovative practitioners you’ve come to expect from ERE. We’ll also have a trade show where you can hobnob with our generous sponsors and trade show exhibitors.
After this spring’s ERE Expo, I went home and slept the weekend after. There is a lot of great information and networking packed into 2.5 days to absorb and just like SourceCon, it invigorated me even more about the challenges of recruiting more than ever.
You can still save $300 off the on-site registration price if you register soon. And if you’ve got a specific need for either the ERE Expo or SourceCon like a group or something else, let me know and we’ll see if we can accommodate you.
Editor’s note: I work for ERE Media, the company that puts on SourceCon and ERE Expo. They are still great shows to attend but feel free to call me biased. I’ve been called worse.
Last week, I was in Alaska. My sister and her husband live there, she just had her first baby and I really wanted to go see them. So I took off a week and headed up there. You can see the pictures on Flickr if you’re really that interested.
But this post isn’t about my vacation. It is about isolation from the internet. We stayed with my sister (who has very limited internet access) and a cabin north of Denali National Park with no internet (or TV or radio).
If you just follow me online, you didn’t know about the trip. I was content to not be connected this trip. And I thought it would be hard. I’ve been wired for sharing my experiences with others virtually for nearly a decade. Whether it be a crappy website, LiveJournal, this blog, Facebook, Twitter and on and on and …
It wasn’t though.
In fact, it was ridiculously easy. I turned off notifications on my phone and I used the little internet I had for frighteningly ordinary things like researching our travel route, looking up restaurants or learning about our destinations. I read for recreation, my wife and I talked about everything imaginable and we soaked in one of the last frontiers of isolation from a hurried life.
Entire days were made up of interactions with a handful of people. Like a waitress at a seemingly abandoned diner that smelled like she had bowled a dozen games at the smokiest bowling alley in Fairbanks. Or a guy who has been driving a bus for 35 years in Denali NP with a raspy voice and a beard with all of the colors between red, black and gray. Or the flagger at one of the hundreds of construction stops along our way who wanted to tell us his life story.
There are many stories like that I’ve shared in the past with you all in my travels around. It is good to share. And it is great that I can share it all the instant it occurs.
All of that sharing is at the cost of a full experience though. I have been so focused on the rewards of sharing that I often miss out on the rewards of experiencing fully everything that is going on. As we vacationed this time around, we would observe and experience the things we were doing first. We would talk about the people, places and things we had seen. We discussed amazing experiences that happened that day and reflected on them. We were thoughtful and irreverent all the same.
My experience in Alaska was vivid and fantastic because of this. I could write about it endlessly, talking about otherwise mundane details brought to life through conversation or viewing it in a different light. All of this is remembered because I chose to focus on sharing my experience as a secondary force instead of it being first.
So now I wonder…
- What else have I missed from being so focused on just the sharable parts of my experience?
- Is live twitter and blog coverage shallow and often lacking subtleties and real insight?
- Does my writing suffer when I focus on getting a story to share?
- Do I miss significant lessons from speakers when I’m focused on pushing stuff out?
- If I’m not being fully contemplative, am I really bringing my best to my readers?
I’m not leaving social media but I think my approach (and the approach of others) is shifting with these realizations.
What’s your take?
At some point this last year, I was posting to my blog 2-4 times a week and all was right in the world. A couple of months ago, that stopped. I’ve still posted about once a week but that was it. I’ve received a couple messages about the drought and thought I would give you an update.
Back in the olden days, I was barely writing anything. So it was easy to do 2-4 posts a week with no sweat. With my new position at ERE, I was doing a bit more writing but it wasn’t significant. As we were talking about launching TLNT, I knew I’d be involved but I didn’t know how much. That’s where the shift occurred.
I was committed to doing three posts a week on TLNT. I still did a SmartBrief poll (which seems a lot easier than it is), this blog, occasional posts on ERE as well as adding or featuring content from the community. This blog is left out in the cold a little bit. Sometimes I figure out what people want to still talk about here and other times I don’t.
In any case, many of you aren’t subscribed to TLNT yet and if you like what I do here, I think you’ll really like what I’m bringing to the new site (it’s even edited for clarity!). Here are excerpts from a few of my recent pieces:
Thanks For Doing Your Job, Now Here’s Your Pink Slip: So people that worked for the Miami Heat the last couple of years probably thought it was a good gig. The team was a bit up and down and the fan base is generally dispassionate about basketball. After the LeBron acquisition though, the job was really quite good for a couple of weeks — until you ran out of tickets to sell.
Sometimes, HR Should Plan The Office Party: I’ve got news for you: sometimes a party needs planning, and sometimes, you’re the somebody that’s going to make that happen. Now, I don’t know many people who like planning parties. And pre-HR, I didn’t know anything about planning a party outside of what we did in college. That primarily consisted of securing a keg of the cheapest beer, spreading the word, and keeping freeloaders from the tap. This experience didn’t help me that much unless I was going to be working with a bunch of other college students.
Want to Retain Good, Young HR Pros? You Better Recognize Them!: As a young HR pro, you get hammered with the worst kind of work. I remember doing weeks of number crunching on our self-insured benefits data only to find my boss taking credit for discrepancies I found. When I pushed for several changes in a single department to help with retention and culture and got them approved, guess who took credit for the changes he was once fighting? The department manager, of course.
How Will Employee Training Change in Free Agent Nation?: And that’s why, for the most part, that sort of long-term, external training or tuition reimbursement will simply just go away. It will disappear from offer sheets and policy handbooks and then out of the memories of the few people that remembered a time when a company wanted you to develop on their dime. Now I’ve been with companies that don’t do tuition reimbursement or external training and personally, it doesn’t bother me. But I’ve talked to many folks who have lamented this change and blamed every generation, company, and even unions.
Check them out, check all of my posts out and last but not least subscribe (e-mail or RSS is easiest).
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Patty Azzarello and covers how to get a raise (even in this economy). Azzarello is the founder and CEO of Azzarello Group, a unique services organization that works with companies and individuals to build success and develop talent. You can check out her blog and connect with her on Twitter.
When I was in my early 20’s I learned an important lesson. I was working in a start-up company and had gone 3 years without a raise.
Learning the wrong way
So I went to the CEO and asked for a raise. He asked why.
Among other things, I said that I had been working for 3 years without a raise, and that I had taken on more and more responsibility over that time, and that I always delivered and often exceeded expectations. I told him it was becoming un-motivating to feel I was working so hard and not moving forward in pay, and peers in other companies were making more money than I was…
He said he didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem. He only cared about what the cost was to replace me, and he could replace me for my salary or less – so no raise.
Your job is a contract with your company. You don’t get a raise for good attendance, or because you feel like you deserve one. You earn a raise by increasing the value of your contribution.
And if you want to get that raise, you need to re-negotiate your contract on terms that are relevant and valuable to your company, not based on what you want or need. And you have to ask.
1. YOU Drive the process
Know that you are at a disadvantage by not having this conversation.
It is vitally important that you and your boss share a common view of your performance and your expectations for promotion and compensation, even if your boss does not drive this discussion. Of the 20-something years I worked in a corporation for a boss, I did my own performance review 17 times, just to make sure that there were never any disconnects.
2. Understand how you and your role are perceived
It is important to know if you are perceived as a high, average or low performer. Don’t ever guess about this. There should never be any surprises about this. Find out.
Also make sure you know how much your ROLE is valued by the company. For example you don’t want to be the superstar performer leading the support team for an obsolete product. You may be great, but need to move into a higher valued role to get a raise.
Once you confirm that you are a high performer then go on to build your case for what you want. If you are not perceived as a high performer – fix that first. Understand what it takes, and focus on adding value, before you start asking for things.
3. Discuss your raise as part of a business outcome
The basic premise here is: If I do this, what is it worth to the company? Here are some things you can say:
- Last year, this is what I accomplished and this is my current compensation.
- I would like to raise the bar for the upcoming year, and deliver more value to the company.
- And If I were to add these additional business outcomes, exceed these goals, etc, would that be worth more to the company? How much more?
- What business outcome would I need to accomplish that would be worth this level of pay, or this promotion?
- Can we agree that if I deliver this, you will give me that?
4. Follow up on the specifics…
- 9 months ago, we agreed on performance objectives which if accomplished would result in increased compensation.
- I believe I have delivered on all of these and then some, and I also took on this additional project which has benefited the company by increasing our margin on this product line.
- Do you agree? Can I get your feedback on my accomplishments? … (Assuming it’s very positive then…..)
- Will you be increasing my compensation for next year, per our agreement?
If the answer is, No, for some reason outside performance, you need to get a next agreement. As long as you keep focused on business outcomes, you are on the high ground.
- If your hands are tied right now, I would like to understand the timeline of what is possible, and if it’s not a raise, is there [stock, bonus, promotion, etc.] that could be possible?
- I’m very motivated, but I think you can understand that at some point this level of performance will be hard to keep delivering if it is not recognized by the company, what do you advise?
- You have my commitment to keep delivering for you, but I can you help me understand what I can expect over time in terms of the company being able to hold up our prior agreement about my performance and compensation?
- And my personal favorite… If you were in my position, how long would YOU keep performing at this level with my current compensation?
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with this approach? Do you have something else that has worked in the past? Let us know in the comments!
I was at a family reunion this last weekend and we were talking about recruiting issues. They were mentioning that despite unemployment numbers, they still had a hard time finding the right people for the most critical positions that were open. And it isn’t a question of technique, or pay or anything along those lines. It’s a situation where there is a genuine labor shortage. Only a few people could do this job in the country. They’ve done research and it is under 1,000 people.
This company has spent millions of dollars on talent acquisition alone in this one critical area of their business. Their problem isn’t going away anytime soon. And they are doing things to help but it isn’t enough.
So I asked who is going to blink first: the people that need to hire or the people that need the jobs? Whose will is going to break in order to make the tough decision that maybe it is time to retrain the workforce since many of the positions that existed a decade or two ago aren’t coming back.
No response.
Is there a third option? As I discussed with someone else, there is a short term solution. Importing talent has been going on for quite a while. The person I talked to said his company got 5% of the temporary visas they asked for though. And they certainly didn’t advertise that fact.
I was thinking later that to someone outside of the talent industry, this has to be a maddening conversation. And maybe I am starting to agree with them a bit.
So let’s say you’ve got one of these positions where there are a very limited number of people for the role. And you’re spending millions of recruiting dollars and you’re still falling short. What’s the solution?
Some recruiters would say devote more budget and more energy into recruiting.
Yuck. Talk about diminishing returns.
How about becoming a real talent pro and looking at the broader picture? Maybe it is time to do a lock down on your retention efforts. Every person you lose not only means another search, it means a person with institutional knowledge leaving the workplace.
What about internal training? You’ve got people interested in moving into this role but they don’t have the skills they need. You make it as easy as possible for them move up by offering training classes, education incentives, whatever. And that retention program will come in handy when you sell this to your boss.
How about external programs? Working with colleges, scholarships, adult educators… We could go on and on.
The current war for talent isn’t like it was hyped in the past. Right now, there are too many people with the wrong skill sets to do anything more than drift from contracting/freelancing, side jobs and occasional full time work below their level of experience. We were hoping for a war where finding is the difficult part, not a true shortage.
So if you’re one of the few companies looking for people and you’re having trouble finding them, wouldn’t it be great to alleviate some of that confusion by showing that you’re thinking outside of the box? That you want to hire people, that you don’t want to be constantly behind in those critical reqs.
Isn’t it time for us to stop waiting for candidates to blink and actually take some action?
Rich DeMatteo in cooperation with Brazen Careerist published an e-book called What I Know About Getting A Job (1.5 MB PDF).
It’s a good looking book, full of short but good takes from many of the folks on John Sumser’s top HR digital influencers list.
If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know the advice I give in the e-book isn’t any different than what you’ve seen here in the past. In fact, I checked it out and my answer is simply a variation of a post I did on the subject nearly two years ago about interview advice. I said then:
Answer their ultimate question at every point possible: how do you uniquely fill their need and meet/beat their expectations for the position?
I said in the e-book:
At every point in the job seeking process, understand, communicate and market yourself based on the value you will bring to the companies you want to work for.
A little less company centric but basically the same concept. If you understand what you do and how you bring value to organizations you work for, you hammer that every time you interact with people. When you network, when you’re putting together a resume, when you’re interviewing, when you talk to customers, clients and competitors… everything.
And it isn’t like this is easy. Or that I’ve figured this all out how to do this myself. But I’ve done better by focusing on what can I bring rather than trying to encompass everything I’ve ever done ever. That’s just a losing strategy.
I used to say I knew very little about getting a job. I knew what worked for me but I realized that many HR folks didn’t share my views on quite a few things. After two unexpected job losses in a year (and two total weeks of unemployment between them), maybe I know more about it than I thought.
Knowing something about yourself and not being apologetic about marketing yourself is key. Everything else is just details.
This weekend was my ten year high school class reunion. You know the drill: hang out with the same people you hung out with in high school, make fun of the same people you made fun of and get made fun of by the same people you got made fun of by. Only most of the fun making is behind the person’s back and everyone’s a little bit wider around the waist.
A few people that I hadn’t talked to or seen in a long time asked me what I was up to and conversation eventually turned to work. I told them I was the community director for a trade publication and conference organizer called ERE Media. We talked a little bit of shop about our conferences and publications and they asked what sort of things we covered in a publication about the recruitment industry?
So I talked to them about the .jobs issue since it was something fresh (I covered the .jobs issue here in April). I talked about many of the issues surrounding the problem and I realized that most of the information was either provided by and/or linked to by ERE’s own John Zappe (you can see a complete run down of the .jobs issues on ERE’s site and you’ll find most are by him). So when I got home, I start looking for other pieces on the issue from independent journalists and bloggers and I find very little. Of those that are out there, many of them referenced one or more of ERE’s stories on the matter too.
The problem is that one of the main players in the story (Society for Human Resource Management) also has the largest reach of any single publication out there. The other is that many of the other publications were people that covered a range of domain issues (thus not touching on the primary stakeholders of this issue) or they were bloggers that worked in their spare time (and thus, had neither the time nor the resources to do investigation into the matter).
Now John is a kind man but he doesn’t work for free. No professional should (but that’s an entirely different post altogether). So ERE pays him money to do this work for us. What does that enable him to do?
- It allows him to go after a story or lead that may end up as a dead end (but also could prove valuable)
- It softens the blow as he deals with unresponsive or uncooperative people in public relations
- When an interviewee misses a time slot, he can make a judgment whether to run a story or not
- When he needs to drop a story because not enough is known, he can do so rather than run a speculative rumor
- And most importantly, he can independently cover a story with little to no financial implication to the publication itself but a world of impact on the audience ERE seeks to serve
Now to get this, ERE has to make money. So you see advertisements on the website or e-mail newsletter. A whole host of other ways help as well. It pays the bills, we’re all happy and you get coverage of an issue that would be sparse otherwise.
I know it is hip to lash out against the professional media. When I was on the HR blogger panel at SHRM’s annual conference in 2009, we were asked whether (assumingly amateur) bloggers were media. At least in my mind, they won’t be until they start covering issues like .jobs. That doesn’t mean that we as bloggers don’t have value. On the contrary, I think blogs add a rich context of information on a given subject matter. I couldn’t imagine my day without reading some of the blogs I read.
But bloggers don’t have to see the professional media fail in order for them to succeed. That seems to have been the attitude for a long time. As we all continue to evolve in our understanding of media is transforming, I hope we can think about rooting a paid media in addition to the blogosphere.
I love all of the discussion centered who should report to which department. Whether it is a HR department arguing they should be reporting to the CEO and they should have a seat at the table to recruiters arguing that they should be in any department except HR, it gives me a broad smile. Someone is building excuses for performance deficiency.
I don't care how you hold the hammer, just make sure the nail is down
Now some of my colleagues who specialize in organizational development will tell me that bad organizational design will ultimately lead to performance deficiency. I won’t completely dismiss that point but ride with me for a second because it is more than that.
Where I hear the excuse more than anywhere is when someone is going after HR or recruiting for not doing something they are supposed to be doing.
So I’ll ask why they aren’t following up with candidates in a timely matter, they point to an ATS and pine for a place under marketing where they can get respect and budget to implement a better one.
Or I’ll ask why employee relations is completely reactionary rather than proactive and they’ll mention that managers don’t respect them because they report into finance or operations so their hands are tied.
These aren’t organizational criticisms, these are excuses. If getting back to candidates is a priority, you get back to them. If employee relations is important, you make the call to be more aggressive. If you are absolutely getting no traction, you better be the squeaky wheel at every opportunity until the problem gets fixed. And until it gets fixed, you better be doing the best damn job you can do (even if it means working a little longer to compensate for it). And if it doesn’t get fixed and it is literally keeping you from doing your job, it is time to move on.
That other option is complaining about organizational dynamics while the work you should be doing is left undone. It shouldn’t be any option at all.
I’ve advocated increasing your influence in an organization. You should always be looking to do that if you want to change things up and be a disturbance (the good kind). But that doesn’t always entail changing organizational structure or moving up to that seat at the table. Building influence is often more than just the title (though, in some organizations, the title is important). And no matter if your organization loves or hates titles, you’ve got to do your job before you gain respect in your company.
Period. End of story.
We all struggle with politics and roadblocks at work. The good ones find ways around them and get their job done. Sometimes those good ones can push hard enough to make their job a little easier. Others leave, only to find roadblocks awaiting them at their new home. The rest complain and find a way to make them not getting their job done someone else’s problem.
Let’s see how well that works out for you in the long term.
I went to my first one last spring and had a blast. While I was speaking at the last summit, this one I’ll be all ears. And I certainly won’t be wearing a t-shirt that tight again (seriously).
