Coaching Gen Y Employees: What to Do When They Think They’re Ready to Advance … and You Don’t

Do you have Gen Y, or Millennial, employees who, in your opinion, think they are more proficient than they are or think they should advance faster than you believe is realistic? If so, join the club. This is one of the biggest frustrations I hear from managers. While it may be frustrating, how you handle this will make a huge difference in whether your Gen Y employees:

1. Listen to, and respect, your feedback now and in the future.
2. Stay.
3. Remain engaged if they stay.
4. Refer their friends to become job candidates at your company.

Just recently, I was coaching a senior executive who was feeling frustrated with one of his young managers, whom I’ll call Jenna. Jenna, a millennial, firmly believed she had mastered her present position and was ready to move on. The senior executive, whom I’ll call Bill, believed that anyone in that position needed several years in the position to experience the myriad of situations required to develop a deep understanding of the department she was in, and the wisdom to make sound decisions. Bill also believed that Jenna overrated her knowledge and ability. Jenna was a classic case of someone who “didn’t know what they didn’t know” — a common challenge for novices, especially young novices with the confidence, and sometimes brashness, that comes with youth. I’d like to share the key points we covered in our session with the hope that you’ll find it useful for your interactions with Gen Y employees who believe they are ready to progress faster than you believe they are. You’ll find that everything covered in the following points will help you with any employee, but doing these things—and being skilled at them—is especially important when dealing with your millennial employees. “It takes time” and “be patient” will douse the flame of enthusiasm and ambition, and leave you with a disheartened, disengaged employee.  You will end up with an employee who believes:

1. You don’t understand their ability.
2. You don’t value their enthusiasm and ambition.
3. Your organization doesn’t provide opportunities for advancement.
4. Growing professionally will require looking for a new job.

You need to first shift your millennial employee from Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence.  Jenna doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, i.e. she has Unconscious Incompetence. To believe her boss’s assessment that she needs more time, and to become receptive to learning, she first needs to realize she needs to learn. She needs to become aware of what she doesn’t know and what necessary skills she doesn’t possess. In other words, Bill needs to help Jenna develop Conscious Incompetence. Helping someone shift to Conscious Incompetence creates cognitive dissonance in the person being coached. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling created when our current viewpoint can’t hold up under the weight of new information (“Oh … I’m not as ready as I thought …”). Helping the Gen Y employee develop Conscious Incompetence also stimulates motivation. They now see a gap between where they thought their current ability could take them and their new understanding that it won’t take them to where they want to go. With this understanding, they’re more open to hearing what they need to do next. This sense of “I don’t know X and I need to know X to get to where I want to go” provides the fuel to power self-directed learning. Therefore, as a manager and coach, you need to make a list of the specific skills and knowledge that your Gen Y employee doesn’t yet know, but needs to, for them to progress.

Give Specific, Crystal-clear Examples

Don’t be vague when describing the areas you believe they need to develop. “I want to see you develop better conflict management skills” might be fine as a start, but it must be followed up with specific situations you’ve witnessed where the Gen Y employee fell short. Then give specific descriptions of what you would like to see them do differently in that situation. As I teach in my constructive feedback seminars: When we give vague, nonspecific feedback, the receiver feels helpless because they don’t have the information they need to remedy the problem. When people feel helpless, it triggers primitive hard-wired responses to helpless — from anxiety all the way up to fear. At a primitive, hard-wired level, fear is linked closely with aggression (that’s why you don’t back an animal into a corner). Thus, when people feel helpless, they often become aggressive. By being crystal-clear with your feedback, you help the listener feel a sense of control: “Ah … I know what he wants, what he doesn’t want, and what I can do to fix it.” So, make sure you’re crystal clear.

State Explicitly How Much You Value the Employee’s Enthusiasm and Ambition

Don’t forget what a gift enthusiasm and ambition is. Since only about 1 out of 4 employees reports being highly engaged, according to Gallup’s landmark study on engagement, you want to make sure your engaged employees stay engaged. You want to make sure they know that you notice and appreciate their enthusiasm and ambition. The executive I was coaching said: “I don’t want to dampen Jenna’s enthusiasm or have her leave.” My response: “Make sure you tell her that. Make sure you let Jenna know that you notice and appreciate her enthusiasm and ambition, and you really want her to stay and grow with the company.” By being this explicit both about valuing Jenna’s interest and about his desire not to dampen her enthusiasm, Bill communicates that he values and respects Jenna at both a professional and a personal level. Addressing both aspects of the relationship openly communicates to the Gen Y employee that you care about them as an individual. While wanting your boss to care about you as an individual is not generation-specific, it’s especially important to the Gen Y generation. Having been raised in a very child-centric time in history where many parents played coach and mentor — along with taxi driver — Gen Y employees are as a group more likely to become demoralized by an emotionally disengaged boss. This point cannot be overemphasized. The last thing you want is for your coaching meeting with your Gen Y employee to come across as cold and “all-business.” Attending to the human and relationship aspect of the conversation, doesn’t just increase your ability to get commitment to change from your Gen Y employee. It also helps to build a stronger, more productive relationship. This stronger, more productive relationship will make future conversations easier and more effective. Because they can see you care about them and want to understand their perspective, they will care more about you and your perspective. Also, because they feel respected, valued, and heard, they will most likely care more about pleasing you in the future. Isn’t that true for you? Haven’t you been more interested in pleasing bosses who care about you?

Remind Your Gen Y Employee That You Want to Help her Grow Professionally

This is important for three reasons. First, as Gallup’s Q12 research shows, having a manager who cares about your professional development is a major driver of employee engagement. Second, professional development is a huge priority among Gen Y employees, so it’s especially important to remind them you want to help them in this area. Third, showing that you care about their development helps frame the discussion in terms of “We have the same goal here” rather than you and your Gen Y employee sitting on opposite sides of the negotiation table.

Add the “My Responsibility to You and …” Frame

When someone sees us differently than we do, or they’re not giving us what we want, it’s easy to take it personally. You can mitigate this by emphasizing that your responsibility to your Gen Y employee is to help them grow and succeed. Doing that involves helping them get the experience they need — rather than promoting them too early and setting them up to fail. Thus, you’re communicating that you recognize this isn’t just about you and your job. You’re saying “I really am thinking about what I believe is best for you, which is one of my responsibilities.” Also, by stating that you obviously have a responsibility to your employer to grow employees — and not prematurely promote — it helps frame your position as you being a responsible manager, rather than you simply withholding something they want because you’re unreasonable. A quick caveat: I understand that saying these things doesn’t guarantee your Gen Y employee will understand or appreciate your position. They might even question your sincerity. But, as with any difficult discussion, all we can do is everything we can to increase the odds that the conversation will go well. We can guarantee it will work.

Provide a Vision of Hope

You want your Gen Y employee to see that there is hope — that there is a path to get to where they want to go. You do this in part by being crystal-clear about what you want them to work on. You give examples of how you would want to see them act or respond. I like the term “videotape descriptions” when describing the way to communicate clearly what you want. When describing what you want, imagine you are describing what you are seeing and hearing on a training video depicting the desired behavior. The more clear and specific you are, the more hopeful your Gen Y employee will feel about their chances of success. They know what the target is; they can see the goal. You also provide a vision of hope by making it clear that you want to help them get there and by working together to create a professional development plan. You don’t want to leave it as “OK, here’s a laundry list of things you need to get good at. We’ll reconvene in six months to see how you’re doing.” Working together to create a plan not only creates greater confidence that they’ll achieve their goal, it also makes it far more likely they will succeed.

7 Things to Remember

1. “It takes time; be patient” will douse the flame of enthusiasm and ambition, and leave you with a disheartened, disengaged employee.
2. You need to first shift your millennial employee from Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence.
3. Give specific, crystal-clear examples.
4. State explicitly how much you value the Gen Y employee’s enthusiasm and ambition.
5. Remind your Gen Y employee that you want to help her grow professionally.
6. Add the “My responsibility to you and…” frame.
7. Provide a vision of hope.

So, Let’s Apply This…

Think of some conversations about an employee’s distorted perception of their readiness to advance that you’ve been avoiding. Think of how you can use these guidelines to increase the odds of that conversation going well. And then have that conversation.

How to Be Sure Your Job Req Attracts Anyone and Everyone

One of the things that frustrated me when I was a recruiter was a poorly written job description. This was just one of many puzzle pieces that provided the impetus for me to leave recruiting and work on aligning talent strategy with corporate strategy. For those of you who are responsible for writing job descriptions and/or approving them for your company (hiring managers, corporate recruiters, RPOs), what guidelines do you follow to produce exceptional and accurate job descriptions? Do you even follow any guidelines? Has anyone ever taught you how to write an effective and accurate job description? Have you thought about what’s necessary to attract the “right” candidate for you and used these things to recruit those top performers so they want to come to work for you? Do you just throw the job description onto your “careers” page, a job board, or social networking site, and hope (I always say “hope” is never an effective strategy) great candidates find you? But most importantly, is your job description a reflection of an aligned executive team, benchmarked employees, and well-thought-out recruiting practices that are directly in line with executive alignment and culture? One of my LinkedIn connections passed on a job description through his network for one of his connections who’s looking for inside sales folks. The individual who wrote it is a VP of Sales & Marketing. I’m not sure if he’s responsible for all their recruiting or if this company also employs corporate recruiters and/or 3rd party agencies. Either way, this is a wonderful teaching example of what won’t work, unless you’re looking for low-quality employees. I’ve included the entire job description (click to enlarge) with the company’s name removed, for obvious reasons. As you read this, can you see some of the main the issues I’m seeing? It occurs to me that they are just casting a very wide net to see what they may catch. Let’s look at the most important items. The company’s name is listed in the first sentence but there’s no indication of what this company does, a brief description of who they are, what makes them a company you would want to work for, etc. Is the writer of this job spec “assuming” the reader knows what they do? Do they think this is going to attract top talent? If they aren’t going to take the time to put together a well-thought-out description, how will they be to work for? This is the type of job description that will probably attract candidates who are just looking for a job because they need one. Maybe this job can tide them over until the economy improves … What does this company sell? It says that they want someone with experience selling the “SAAS Model,” specifically Sales 2.0 Tools. Is this the product? They are looking for an inside rep … Where will this candidate be located? Will they be required to work at the corporate office or from home wherever they live? What’s the territory? Is it vertically focused? Is there a quota? What’s the average deal size? What about the comp plan? Why is it missing? Leaving the plan out may cause the reader to assume some things.

• Candidates who aren’t looking for work will probably not even waste their time looking at this. If the plan range is not there the plan may be lousy.
• Leaving a comp plan out of a description makes me wonder what they’re trying to hide.

Putting the comp plan in the description like this can also do a number of different things:

• It may attract candidates who have never earned anywhere near the plan.
• It may keep higher quality candidates from looking at this if they’re already making more money than the plan. They don’t know if the plan is negotiable based on experience, talent, quality, etc.

Five years of inside sales required. Do you know anyone in inside sales who is just waiting to move to outside sales once they have enough experience? Granted, not all inside reps want to move outside, but many do. You may capture candidates who are happy in the status quo. What percentage of time is spent qualifying inbound leads vs. outbound target account penetration? It takes very different types of sales skills to farm (qualify inbound leads) and hunt (outbound penetration). It would be valuable to the candidate reading this to know where they need to be stronger. Lastly, and most importantly, they say they want a “team player with an entrepreneurial spirit …” Does that sound like an oxymoron to anyone else? I’m not saying one can’t be a team player and be entrepreneurial. Culturally, candidates (and companies) will be more heavily weighted to one or the other. I suspect this company has never invested the time to look at their culture and even attempt to align it to be sure they are all on the same bus headed to the same destination. That should be enough to get you thinking more broadly about what you should be doing internally to be able to generate a high quality job description. I’d love to hear any thoughts, comments, concerns, or questions about this topic.

Why You Must Kick the Sourcing Habit

As many of you know — I announced it at the ERE Expo in San Diego — I’ve decided to bring recruiting back to recruiting. This is my new old mission. Somehow this has been lost in the past few years when overall candidate supply exceeded demand. Hiring top talent is not the same as finding top talent. While sourcing is a step in this journey, it is only a step, and one getting easier each passing day. Consider this: at the current rate, by March 11, 2012, everyone will be connected by one degree of separation with everyone else either via LinkedIn or Facebook. (FYI: I define sourcing as the process of name generation only. If you pick up the phone and call a person who did not apply, and convince him or her to consider your position, you’re recruiting. If the person applied for a job and all you’re doing is qualifying the person, that’s screening, not recruiting.) While sourcing is getting easier, recruiting these now-more-visible folks is getting harder. This will become even more challenging as the demand for top talent accelerates, and everyone makes a wholesale shift to contact the same passive candidates you’re contacting. In this case, good recruiting skills will make all the difference as to who attracts and hires the person. Here are some interesting stats by way of a LinkedIn survey we conducted in late 2010, to validate this point. First, only 8% of the fully employed professional pool of candidates were actively looking and open to considering a lateral transfer. Another 10% were causally looking, but only interested in a better job than the one currently held. Everyone else needed a significant bump in compensation or a significant career move to even consider engaging in a conversation. Without a big employer brand, recruiters need to make the case that the jobs they’re representing offer something better. This is the first step in real recruiting. As part of this “bring recruiting back to recruiting” mission, I put together this quick list of things modern-day recruiters need to be able to do to recruit top passive candidates. While they’re all important, which ones would you select as your top three?

1. Know the job
2. Know the industry and competition
3. Partner with the hiring manager
4. Market the job via voice and email
5. Network, network, network
6. Accurately screen and assess talent
7. Recruit and influence top prospects
8. Negotiate and close the offer
9. Don’t take no for an answer
10. Sell a career move, not a lateral transfer

Your top three might be different, but here’s mine. Although the ability to partner with the hiring manager is essential, it’s second on my list, since in order to be a partner you need to know the job. That’s why knowing the job is first on my list. Third on my list is not taking “no” for an answer. To some degree these three in combination with all of the rest all represent a chicken-and-egg-type problem. (You can download a flyer with a more complete version of this Recruiter Circle of Excellence you see in the graphic, including a ranking scale, on the Recruiter’s Wall.) Without knowing the job, there is no way either a hiring manager or a top candidate will respect your judgment or be swayed by whatever eloquence you manage to muster. Without knowing the job, persistence won’t help much, either. It will be like pushing on a rope. While there’s more to it than this, this is the reason I consider real job knowledge as No. 1. Job knowledge is not simply knowing the list of skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. It’s understanding the actual work the person actually needs to do to be successful. For example, having a CPA, 5-10 years in corporate reporting including SOX, and strong international reporting experience is not knowing the job. Moving the company to the international financial reporting standards in two years, building a team of eight staff and professional accountants to assess and upgrade the current, cumbersome domestic SEC and SOX reporting process, and quickly developing a worldwide set of accounting policies, is knowing the real job. Without this type of detailed job knowledge, you’ll get little respect from the hiring manager, and top people with other things to do will dismiss you out of hand. Of course, to obtain this critical information you need to get it directly from the hiring manager. One way to better understand the job is to ask these questions during the intake meeting:

• What are the big things the person will need to accomplish in order to be considered a top performer?
• Why would a top performer who is not looking, who is fully employed, and has multiple opportunities, want this specific position?
• What are the biggest challenges the person will face on the job?
• What are the big areas of leadership and/or strategy the person would need to successfully handle?

After you have these answers, then go through every critical skill on the job description and ask, “What does the person need to do with the skill as part of the actual job?” For example, for strong communications skills, you might get something like “make weekly presentations to the design review committee.” If the manager asks why you need to have this information, tell him or her that this is the information passive candidates who aren’t looking need to know in order to decide if they just want to enter into a conversation. Then as a real zinger, ask the hiring manager if he or she would agree to see a person who could perform all of the work listed, but didn’t have exactly the same background listed on the job description. If the manager says “of course,” you now know the job. In parallel, you are moving toward partnership status. If the manager says no, persist and ask the questions again, or read this article before you ask the questions again. The key: do not start looking for a candidate until the hiring manager says the real job as defined is correct, and also agrees to see all candidates who have done comparable work. Otherwise everything you do afterwards will be problematic. With this “new age” job profile in hand, start contacting passive candidates and ask this question: “would you be open to talking about a possible career move, if it was significantly better than what you’re doing today?” They all will say yes. If not, persist and ask the question word-for-word again. When they say yes, you must then get these candidates to tell you about themselves first. Use this time to determine if the candidate is highly qualified and would see your job as a career move. If so, recruit the person. If the person is not perfect for your spot, network and get three names of some great people who are perfect. This is where persistence and all of the other skills listed in the Recruiter Circle of Excellence above will come into play. But if you don’t know the job, and aren’t a partner with your hiring-manager client, all of the persistence and skills listed won’t help much.

Know What Your Recruiting Competitors Are Up to

It blows my mind how the subject and function of competitive intelligence falls by the wayside in most HR/recruiting departments. Just what exactly is competitive intelligence and what is it used for? Let’s start first by defining it:

Definition: the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization (Wikipedia.org)

A couple weeks back, I participated in a webinar about strategic recruiting methods along with over 400 HR/recruiting professionals. During the call, the host took a live quickpoll on the topic of competitive intelligence; here is the question that was posed to the participants, “Do you know today how your organization’s recruitment performance compares to other organizations in your industry?” After a quick minute of tallying the results, an overwhelming 70% of the participants did not know how their own organizational recruitment performance stacked up against their competition, which leads me to ask: why not? When I contemplate the concept of competitive intelligence and how it can impact a company’s recruitment strategy and performance, I cannot see how more companies are not incorporating this subject into a core strength of their recruitment strategy. I began to think further into some other industries/professions that I have strong interest in, where competitive intelligence is the starting point for strategies and plans. Professional football is the industry at the top of my mind when it comes to competitive intelligence. NFL teams step on the field every Sunday during the regular season with real-time intelligence of the opposing team’s playbook, tendencies, tricks, coaches, and players. They want to know ahead of time what the opposing team may do: what play will they run, and what personnel package they will have on the field, for example. They want to gain the advantage on the competing team. NFL teams typically spend the equivalent of a few days watching film, studying pictures, and reviewing playbooks and players before the first game whistle is blown. Former head coach Jon Gruden went as far to make it a point to know what types of shoes the opposing players were going to wear. Companies that sell products use competitive intelligence on a massive scale and on a daily basis. A perfect example is the competitive intelligence war in the soda industry. Coke & Pepsi are two industry leaders that use demographics, psychographics, consumer data, research, and numerous other data sources to locate their ideal consumers and then target consumers in various methods. So why is competitive intelligence not a larger part of the recruitment functions of companies? Why did 70% of HR/recruiting professionals on the webinar have no idea what their competitors are doing? There are numerous tools and resources available to help companies and organizations gain competitive intelligence when it comes to the recruiting function. For example, there are reports available that provide real-time business intelligence for the marketplace. If you don’t know where to look or how to get your hands on these reports, there are agencies out there that specialize in such technology and can help you. Cutting edge HR/recruiting departments use such reports and intelligence to analyze employment trends, gather competitive intelligence, forecast economic conditions, and source hard-to-fill positions. The same principles of competitive intelligence can be use within the recruitment functions and activities of companies. Using competitive intelligence can provide a dashboard of the competitions strategy. Give your organization a recruiting advantage. Use competitive intelligence to gain a step up on the competition and beat your competitor to the talent you desire. Don’t be one of the 70%’ers that are lost in the sauce.

Is Your Organization Optimized? 8 Questions to Ask Yourself

Our country has gone from conversations about how to recruit and retain quality employees in a market with low unemployment just a few short years ago to conversations about how to find a job in a market with record unemployment numbers. What’s missing is the most important conversation, regardless of our economic situation. No one is talking about what needs to be done by companies to optimize their organization with the highest number of “A” players possible. What percentage is possible? If done properly, 80-90%. In our current economic climate it is especially important to move away from mediocrity. The 80-20 rule, as it relates to sales, is just not acceptable if you truly want to be successful in today’s market. For those who aren’t familiar with the 80/20 rule, it says that 20% or your sales organization will produce 80% of your revenue. Is this really what you’re company is committed to? Have you considered the possibility of what your revenues would look like with 80-90% of your sales organization achieving quotas vs. 20-50%?

Optimization Checklist

These questions are just some that you need to be asking yourself. If you’re not asking these questions, you are headed for mediocrity or possibly even failure. 

1. Have you calculated the costs of your hiring errors over the past two to five years? This is truly the only way to know how many millions of revenue dollars you’ve lost.
2. Do you really know what type of people you’re looking for? Have you created a specific, measurable job spec using your current and past A players as the benchmark? Is the executive team aligned with regard to revenue and growth plans and how the sales organization directly helps to bring this revenue plan to fruition?
3. Are you clear on your corporate culture, and have you put a process in place to assess candidate fit with your culture?
4. Do you have a plan in place to assess your current employees and remove all your under-performers, as well as a timeline in which to complete this task?
5. How are you finding candidates? If you employ an internal recruiting organization, are they posting ads on job boards or actively searching out quality candidates? Are you using contingent recruiting firms to find your candidates? Have you retained a firm for the search?
6. Are you paying your internal recruiters at the same level you pay you’re top salespeople? If not, do you actually expect a 60-80k/yr recruiter to have the ability to find and attract a 300-400k/yr performer? If they had that ability, they’d be working for themselves, not for you.
7. Do you have a plan to retain top talent?
8. Have you created a list of questions, both open ended and closed, to qualify the competencies you require of your sales executives and management?

You’ll Figure it Out

A holiday message …

I’ve been thinking all year about something our accountant said when he visited us in February of this year to have us sign the final paperwork for our taxes.

During our meeting Bob had been moaning about how our 2009 business was off so much over 2008 and things just seemed to be dragging along interminably. I usually sit through our meetings quietly, ask a couple questions about tax issues I’ve read about, sign the paperwork, and leave the two of them to talk about guns or whatever it is two guys talk about.

This time was different. I joined into Bob’s alarmed cacophony, looking to someone anxiously for answers to something I’ve never experienced being in business for myself these last 35 years.

Steve listened keenly and patiently as he always does and relayed some news from some of his other clients who were experiencing the same frightening downturn. It helped somewhat to hear that we weren’t the only ones in a sinking boat.

As he prepared to leave and we walked him to the door still chattering nervously about the diminished state of our estate, Steve turned, looked at us (I think he was looking at me/Bob thinks he was looking at him) and quietly said, “You’ll figure it out.”

I felt better.

I felt like he had confidence in me and my ability to figure this thing out.

That alone is worth far more than the few thousand dollars per year that we pay him to keep us out of tax trouble.

You know what?

I did figure it out. I figured out that though these weren’t the best of times, these were still the times of our lives, and the lessons being handed out, although not easy, were valuable.

I realized that sometimes it’s the simplest of things that bring home the bacon.

Even though our sourcing business was off 87% in 2009 over 2008 and 2008 was 46% off 2007, it was still possible to stay in business. We filled some of the gap by doing things we didn’t do so much of when we were busy phone sourcing: things like building out company telephone directories for salespeople who find value in call lists where people have good-paying jobs and the ability to purchase goods and services.

It’s simple stuff that was time consuming and it sometimes felt inane, but it kept the lights on.

So did cleaning up the decimated databases of others who saw value in paying us to help them prepare for better times. In ordinary times databases age about 20% a year. During the extraordinary last three years we’ve seen databases age out/away at over 50% per year!

What else did we have to do? We spent the time we had doing something that brought in dollars; maybe not the greatest dollars, but dollars nonetheless.

Those dollars helped us through.

Of course we still had our dyed-in-the-wool customers who kept on doing what they know how to do best, and I can’t thank them enough (you know who you are!) for keeping the faith and continuing to use us even when I think some of them could have done what we do themselves.

As hard as it was through these hard times we invested in our business. We took advantage of lower prices and tax incentives that encouraged us to buy new phone systems, computers, office equipment, etc.

It wasn’t easy to do, but we believe in the future, and if you have faith, that faith will deliver courage.

The good news is that in mid-May, 2010 we surpassed all of 2009 revenue. 2010 has continued to deliver and it looks like 2010 will be up maybe even 150% over 2009. It’s not nearly what we did in 2006 and 2007 but things are headed in the right direction, and I’m happy to report it.

That’s encouraging and I hope it is for you, too.

I suspect though, that one reason we’re up smartly is that so few are left in the sourcing/recruiting business.

Many gave up, turned the lights off and went home. We didn’t.

A big part of that (for me) was because someone else had faith in us to figure the damn thing out.

I hope to make this piece a sister/companion piece to the “But That’s Not My Job” series. Much of what we did during this recent downturn wasn’t part of our ordinary jobs.

But we did it.

We figured it out.

So can you.

I hope you have a happy holidays and a prosperous New Year!

Newly Aggressive EEOC Sues Over Credit Checks

With the U.S. beginning its fourth year of a sour economy that is taking its toll on consumer credit scores, the EEOC signaled this week that it is taking a hard look at employers who use credit checks as a screening tool.

Kaplan Higher Education Corp. was sued Tuesday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its use of credit checks. The suit claims Kaplan denied jobs based on credit histories in such a way that it had a disparate impact on blacks.

The EEOC said Kaplan “engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination by refusing to hire a class of black job applicants nationwide.”

“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity.” The types of jobs at issue weren’t disclosed.

A company spokeswoman denied the charge, saying background checks are conducted on all potential employees. Credit checks are part of the screening for jobs involving financial matters, including advising students on financial aid.

A “disparate impact” case doesn’t require an employer to have intentionally discriminated against a class of applicants. Instead, discrimination can occur by the use of background criteria, experience, education, or other job requirements that appear neutral on their face but which more heavily impact a protected class of applicant. Unless the employer can demonstrate a “business necessity” for the requirement, it may be found guilty of discriminating. Even where business necessity can be established, a violation may still be found if there is another alternative available that is less discriminatory.

Labor lawyers and industry experts have been predicting that the EEOC is becoming more aggressive. Employment attorney Jon Hyman, who blogs at Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, warned last month that, “The EEOC is no longer an agency where charges go to die. Employers can expect more thorough investigations, quicker resolutions, and more aggressive enforcement.”

Nick Fishman, chief marketing officer, VP and co-founder of EmployeeScreenIQ, blogged about this same thing recently on ERE. In his look ahead at the background screening trends for 2011, Fishman listed the EEOC aggressiveness first, writing: “The EEOC is especially targeting ‘bright line’ hiring decisions that automatically exclude candidates with criminal records, arrest records that don’t result in a conviction, and/or poor credit.”

After reading about the Kaplan suit this morning, I called Fishman to ask about the issue and for advice about what recruiters can do to insulate their company against EEOC action.

He wasn’t surprised that the EEOC had sued someone over the issue. “They’ve become a lot more active in the last year,” he said.”We’re going to see a lot more out of them.” And, he pointed out, there is no way to protect against someone filing a lawsuit. However, no employer should be deterred from credit or background checks where the job demands it and there’s no intent to discriminate.

Fishman offered this guidance:

• Assess the exposure the company has for each job.
• Make sure there is a legitimate business purpose to conduct a credit check. Do the job responsibilities involve financial records or access to them? For a CFO position, the connection is clear. For a janitorial job, maybe not. Though there might be situations where a janitor has access by virtue of a master key to money or records.
• Have a written background policy for each position, including a description of the business purpose.
• If adverse credit information turns up, don’t automatically reject the candidate. Instead, ask about it.

Through conversations with clients and others in the industry, he has learned that employers these days are more sympathetic to credit problems. Even in the gaming industry, where many employees routinely deal with large amounts of cash, applicants with credit dings are getting more consideration than in the past, if for no other reason than credit problems are so pervasive.

Nevada, the gaming capital of the U.S., has the lowest average credit score in the nation. At 668, it’s 24 points below the national average of 692. No wonder, considering that Las Vegas has the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

Two months ago, the EEOC held a public meeting on the use of credit histories as employment screening devices. It heard from a number of organizations including SHRM, which concluded its presentation saying, “SHRM has significant concerns with efforts to eliminate the ability of employers to consider relevant credit information during the employment process.”

Most of the speakers at the meeting represented private organizations and advocacy groups; however, the comments by Richard Tonowski may foreshadow just what the EEOC wants to see from employers using credit checks and background screening generally. Tonowski, the EEOC’s chief psychologist, summarized the day’s proceedings listing four distinct reasons why employers use credit checks.

These are:

• To identify productive employees, a use he said that has “little evidence” to back it up;
• To identify reliable employees. Conceding there is “some evidence” correlating good credit with reliability, he said, “Similar results might be obtained through personality tests or their close cousins, integrity tests.” Interestingly, these, he noted, may soon be examined by the EEOC for having a potential adverse impact on protected classes;
• To confirm employment history, which, though “a credit report can confirm basic information” the same  “might be obtained from background screening providers without the applicant’s financial details”;
• To identify those with incentive for major fraud or theft.

When used to identify potentially dishonest employees, Tonowski said, “This is perhaps the most problematic use, because — fortunately — serious crime is likely a rare event for most employers. It is thus hard to establish a predictive relationship between credit and crime.”

While hearing from the EEOC is enough to cause any HR professional to shudder, even if it decides not to proceed, private actions may be allowed. Two weeks ago the University of Miami was sued over the denial of a job to a black applicant because of a credit check.

Serious Recruiting Games: 6 Tips for Using Games and Simulations for Recruiting Success

Maybe all you need for an attraction and sourcing strategy is a good game.

The U.S. Army was one of the first organizations to pioneer video games for attracting potential recruits. A couple of years ago the Army launched its highly successful recruiting game called America’s Army, which has significantly helped raise recruitments. The Army has also created a multi-million dollar U.S. Army Experience Center located in Philadelphia where potential recruits, using computers and Xbox 360 controllers, explore different army bases and occupations using video games.

L’Oreal has launched Brandstorm, which is a competition across national boundaries to help candidates determine their marketing skills. Many other organizations have launched interactive games, including IBM’s game that has made the press recently with its free simulation, CityOne, an interactive game targeted at business leaders, city planners, and government agencies. The game allows players to react to a variety of crises and see how their decisions affect outcomes.

Realistic job previews, video tours, and game-like activities are becoming standard on leading recruiting sites because more candidates come and stay longer when the process of learning about your organization and your open positions is fun and engaging. Recruiters are learning from the game world that elements such as awarding points, giving out badges, showing progress toward a goal, or using an avatar increase results.

Gaming elements drive behavior, as many retailers have learned. Even when there is no formal “game,” we are often using the gaming elements when, for example, we participate in Frequent Flyer or other loyalty programs. Counting points is part of what makes Weight Watchers successful and millions play World of Warcraft  or Facebook’s Farmville for nothing more than gathering points or unearthing treasures. Whether the challenge is to collect points, win badges, score goals, or kill avatars, we alter our behavior in some way to achieve goals that are often intangible and not even important (e.g. collecting ears of corn in Farmville).

And game-playing is growing and attracting more people of all types. One survey found that up to 35% of C-suite executives play video games (even though this study was funded by PopCapGames.com), while 97% of 12-17 year-olds play them, according to the Entertainment Software Association.

Over the next decade, gaming concepts and technology will become a standard element in your recruiting strategy.  Websites will become more interactive and offer a more compelling reason to engage than they do today. More organizations will discover that their ablity to find and hire good candidates will be partly because they found ways to engage, entertain, and entice them to learn more about the organization and the job available.

Here are six ways you can begin to “play the game” of gaming.

1. Provide candidates who come to your recruiting site with rewards. Offer candidates rewards such as gold stars or badges when they have viewed a video, taken a poll, completed an assessment, or left a comment in your chat room. Encourage them to come back and get more points by learning more about your company. Provide a progress bar so they can see how much of their profile they have completed or how much of the recruiting site they have viewed. You have seen these progress bars when you first created a profile on Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of us want to have profiles that are close to 100% complete so we are motivated to come back and add details over time.
2. Investigate using virtual worlds such as Second Life. KPMG, IBM, and other organizations have experimented with virtual job fairs, interviews, and tours with varying degrees of success. Part of the issue with using virtual worlds is that the technology is very new and still has interface issues. On the other hand, it offers a glimpse of what I think will be a normal part of online life in a few years.
3. Develop video-based job tryouts. Shaker Consulting Group has pioneered developing job tryouts using video to provide candidates with a realistic idea of what it is like to hold a certain type of job. At the same time, these act as a way to screen candidates for those jobs. Organizations such as Starbucks, Key Bank, and Sherwin-Williams have used these with a high level of satisfaction.
4. Hold virtual job fairs. There are several tools that allow you to create interactive job fairs, including those from 6Connect and Unisfair. By using virtual job fairs you can offer more candidates an opportunity to discover what you have to offer as well as provide them with more in-depth information about your positions and organizations than you can at a face-to-face job fair.  By creating an interactive and fun experience, candidates remain engaged and spend more time with you than they would at a conference. It also gives you more time to assess the candidate.
5. Use Tests, Puzzles, and Simulation. The Secret Service of the United Kingdom has perhaps one of the cleverest simulations I have seen. You become an Operations Officer and have to digest information quickly and make decisions. The simulation shows you what is involved in intelligence work and gives the Secret Service a good assessment of your judgment and decision-making capabilities. Another fascinating approach is being used by Gild, a Tech Crunch disruptive startup that combines gaming and job boards. By using polls, short tests, asking candidates to solve problems, provide ideas or solutions, or by having them take part in multi-person discussions, you can learn a great deal about the candidate. They can learn about what you do in your organization, how decisions get made, and what issues arise. Generally this knowledge will lead to a candidate who better fits your culture and who is happier in the work they are doing
6. Develop a Full-Fledged Game. If you have between U.S. $50,000 and $3 million, consider developing a truly interactive game similar to those of produced by L’Oreal or the U.S. Army. Costs range from as little as a few thousand dollars for a Flash-based web-embedded solution to several million for a dedicated, X-Box controlled one. But, by creating a simulated environment where candidates can experience and actually get involved in the work you do, you can raise engagement and success to a new level.

There are few limits to what is now possible on the Internet. Technologies and techniques that were way too expensive or even impossible even five years ago, are now easily and cost-effectively available.  A new world awaits you.

Is LinkedIn Becoming a 21st Century Job Board?

LinkedIn introduced a resume building tool a while ago that, even though it’s slick, simple to use, and creates attractive resumes, would be otherwise unremarkable.

Except that it’s LinkedIn offering it. And it’s a step better than what Monster and CareerBuilder offer. And, more to the point, it’s another step in the LinkedIn transformation from a business-oriented social network to … something else, like a job board for the 21st century.

The LinkedIn people don’t necessarily agree with that. Francois Dufour, senior director of marketing, LinkedIn Hiring Solutions, wrote to tell me that “LinkedIn is a professional network.” It’s “a platform for helping professionals manage their careers.”

“Whether you’re looking to hire or be hired, LinkedIn is becoming top of mind for a lot of people,” Dufour says in his response to my email about what LinkedIn is becoming. “Yet the reason we continue to thrive is that we offer so much more than a job board.”

True enough. Being public, a profile is a marketing and brand-building tool. Participating in groups and building a network furthers those objectives, as well as gives participants a place to get help with professional problems.

Traditional job boards have their discussion groups, but nothing even remotely approaching what LinkedIn has. Yet with what we’ve been seeing from LinkedIn over the years,  the camel’s nose is getting further and further into the job board tent.

Recruiters began sifting through the profiles years ago. So adding LinkedIn Jobs in 2005 was, as Jeff Clavier described it a “natural extension.” Since then, the network has refined its candidate sourcing tools, improved the targeting of its jobs listings, added company profiles in what might fairly be described as a response to Facebook and, in the last two months, LinkedIn has added Jobs For You and Referral Engine (which ERE wrote about last month).

Along now comes Resume Builder. Technically still in the experimental stage and without a release date (though it is fully usable), it’s another natural extension of LinkedIn. From what Dufour says, LinkedIn agrees. “We want the LinkedIn profile to be the professional profile of record, whatever the context – personal and professional brand-building,” Dufour writes in his email.

He rightly points out that, “We are a leading source of quality candidates for corporations…” Indeed the public nature of most of the profiles provides a higher degree of confidence in their accuracy than do the private resumes of a job board. And because of the value the professional groups and contacts offer, the sheer number of participants — 85 million a month ago —  is well beyond what any of the job boards has.

So Resume Builder — did I mention how cool it is? — is a good thing, right?

Not necessarily, says Gerry Crispin. Partner in the recruitment consultancy CareerXroads, he told my colleague Amybeth Hale that LinkedIn could end up rebranding itself as “the new job board of the 21^st century.”

Should that happen, he told her, then professionals who want the business connections, but don’t want to be thought of as job-seeking, will go elsewhere.

“You want to find people who are actively engaged in work,” Crispin pointed out. “What you find out about them is that they’re looking to improve their capability on the job. It (makes) them great for recruiting. But if LinkedIn focuses solely on the recruiting aspect, it will drive those other people (non-actives) underground.”

There’s a thin line there that LinkedIn is walking. It’s adopting some of the best of what the job boards have to offer, and has so far done it successfully. But, as Crispin observes, it faces a risk if it becomes thought of primarily as a job-search site.

LinkedIn’s Resume Builder doesn’t tip that scale. The difference between resume builders on job boards and on LinkedIn are all about their reason for being. You use a resume builder on a job board for job hunting.

The LinkedIn tool is a convenience. It takes the profile you already have and turns into a resume.

It may be a subtle difference, but it is a difference that recognizes all of us (OK, most all of us) are passive one day, receptive another, and active the fourth Friday in a row that the boss drops a project on you that absolutely, positively, has to be done for the meeting on Monday.

At Cisco, Many Top Recruits Are Already on the Payroll

Cisco Systems has been quietly doubling up on its recruiting efforts, but with a twist: the target market is made up of the company’s own employees. In particular, it has been making it easier for employees to get promoted into different departments, rather than first moving laterally from one division to another and then getting promoted.

This all began in November of 2008 when people like then-staffing-chief and now Chief Learning Officer Don McLaughlin, the HR SVP Brian Schipper, and others realized it really needed to keep the talent it had as the company grew in areas like virtual healthcare and smart grids. In January 2009, Heather Yurko, Amy Buck, and a 30-person team of others in Cisco — from the compensation, staffing, operations, and other departments — ran a prototype test. If all went well, the program, called TalentConnect, would expand.

It went well, and it did.

Over and Up

Essentially what traditionally went on at Cisco was that to get a Cisco promotion, you had to move horizontally first, from one department to another. With the new plan, you could move two steps at once — to a different division, and up. Cisco had to change its way of thinking to make this happen, Yurko says, taking into account skills and experience more than knowledge of a given area.

She gives the example of Cisco’s technology group, which was where this 2009 pilot was done. If a program manager job was open in the technology department, instead of seeing which program managers were available, what Cisco would do under this pilot program is analyze what skills it would take to do the job well: working with multiple clients, for example, as well as balancing priorities, and having a passion for great customer service. Perhaps an account manager in a different division has these skills, and could move into the technology group, and up into this manager role, all in one fell swoop.

The initial pilot worked. From March through May 2009, nearly 80 percent of positions were filled by internal candidates, and the time to fill a position dropped by an average of 22 days. Satisfaction in the program ran high.

Yurko, who works out of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, acted as a program manager, and Buck, working remotely from the Sierras in California, the executive sponsor. The 30-person team dissolved, and born later was what I’d call an “HR R&D group.” Cisco calls it a Staffing Innovation Organization; Buck is the senior director. Formed in July of 2009, it got the green light from HR leaders to move full speed ahead with expanded testing of the recruit-and-retain employees program.

Going Global

Turnover at Cisco runs somewhere around 5%. But the company has been watching various studies (from Deloitte, for example) showing that large numbers of employees will start looking for new jobs as the economy picks up steam. It also learned in a 2009 internal survey that 36% of employees did not know of additional opportunities within the company. It wanted to change the mindset at Cisco into one that Yurko calls an “open marketplace of opportunity.”

So this year Cisco ran a new and bigger pilot, from January to August of this year, using employees in the operations and finance departments globally, as well as some of the European sales staff. A lot had to be done, and tinkered with along the way, according to Yurko. Compensation had to rewrite policies. Employee engagement folks needed to alter their mindset and their messages — basically, the employee value proposition. Relocation policies needed to change also.

Cisco’s back-end system that manages employee resume-type information, from ADP, had to be modified (such as adding fields and new metrics to use in evaluating the program). Employees use the system to complete profiles and opt-in to receiving inquiries about internal jobs.

A big part of what has been happening, however, at Cisco, has been softer. It’s less about policies, and more about change. “A lot of active, ongoing, change management, organizational adoption training,” Yurko says.

Recruiters were and are encouraged to actively source Cisco’s employees. The Staffing Innovation Organization and others in recruiting and staffing and human resources have been talking to recruiters and managers about why this is important, why it’s in the long-term interests of the company. Yurko says the message is: “You may need someone to do a job, but you’re hiring someone for Cisco, not just your team.” She says that “moving from the concept of ‘my talent’ to ‘Cisco talent’ — we know this will be ongoing, for years.”

Anyhow, this 2010 pilot was deemed another success, like the one in 2009. But this summer HR leaders suggested that rolling it out to all employees needed to wait a few months, as a ton seemed to be happening at once at Cisco, from performance management to management training initiatives.

The program was launched worldwide this September, to all 70,000 employees (the exception being that if you’ve been on the job less than a year, you’re not yet eligible). The Staffing Innovation Organization now has 11 members, three added over the last couple of months. The TalentConnect program was mentioned briefly in the company’s corporate responsibility report. And after two months of this September’s launch, 33% of all internal positions were being filled by recruiters actively sourcing employees, as opposed to people applying directly to the role. Employee satisfaction with the recruiting process is on the rise.

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