Boston Marathon: HR Heroes

In thousands of companies across the United States, and especially in Boston, the first phone call that company CEOs and Presidents made after hearing about the bombings at the Boston Marathon was to their head of Human Resources.

I recall an event about 20 years ago when I was a General Manager for a company in Colorado. I came into the office around 7:00 AM and as I started to settle into my routine I received a call saying that one of my employees had just shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself: Both dead.

I called HR.

As HR Directors do the world over, she rushed into the office and took over the task of finding out more details, making sure our employees knew what was going on, and taking time to talk to the friends and co-workers who knew this individual the best. I don’t think the HR Director was trained in psychology, or disaster response, or managing human emotions in the face of unbelievable circumstances. But you couldn't have proven that to me or to any of the people she (and the others in her small department) helped that day. They seemed to know exactly the right things to do.

The HR department is the emergency response group that spearheads how companies will help their employees respond to tragedies.  They do this without fanfare and without questioning whether it is in their job description. They know helping people cope is a key part of helping keep the company performing.  But it goes beyond that. The little appreciated fact about most HR professionals is that they care about how people are doing. They want to help. Period.

That is just what HR does. They help. They try and make whatever life sends our way a little more tolerable.

In the aftermath of Boston the day was met with a lot of silent HR heroes. 

I'm Melting: The Woes and Worries of an HR Entrepreneur

My new product goes into Beta Test next week (or for those of you initiated into the ways of Lean Start Up: The Minimum Viable Product). After all the work we've done thinking and re- thinking, testing, designing and finally building the MVP you would think I am excited.

I am scared out of my socks.

I stopped sleeping about a month ago. Now I wake up and think about the product. Usually at 2:06 A.M. I question every level of my sanity: What in the world was I thinking. By morning I am less pessimistic, but still rather saturnine. It takes a few hours to pull the manic back out from the deep recesses of my depressive.

There are days I feel like the Wicked Witch in a room full of Dorothys:

I'm melting......

My wife did not sign up for this. She thought she was doing me a favor when she agreed to let me spend all of our “rainy-day-fund” to start a new business from scratch. Now she is searching for a therapist (I am not sure if that is for me or her).  I am quitting when she starts to Google divorce lawyers!

But man I’m having a lot of fun.

It is hard work, and very risky to embark on building a new tool for HR. But HR is an exciting space with so many things going on. Being in the middle of that is what keeps me going. This product may not work – at least not at first. But if the money doesn't run out and I delete all search criteria for divorce lawyers: I’m there.

Now back to worrying so much that my headaches, my back hurts, my stomach feels sketchy, and my neck has a serious kink: The true badges of the entrepreneur!

Finding work at 60: Is HR Failing a Generation?

Upper middle-management and out of a job.

Too qualified,

Too set in your ways

Not right for the job

Too old fashion for our hip new company

And too many other things you aren't allowed to say.

How many really talented people are out there looking (and looking) for work who can’t find a job because the 30 (or 40) something that is in charge of hiring has a pre-conceived notion that the person they are looking for is “younger.” How many automated resume screening tools see someone who was highly successful for 30 years as not qualified for the new product manager position that just opened up? 

I am closing in on that generation. I know a lot of people who are there (guess when you've been around a long time, a lot of the people you know seem to have aged on you). My brother is 59 and just got laid off from a career of 25 years as a successful disc jockey. Seems they don’t need disc jockeys much anymore and really don’t need old ones. He’s applied to sell cars, drive trucks, work at most anything that a 20-something might apply for. Nothing, Nada, No reply.

I just got off the phone this morning with an old (sorry for the use of that word) friend of mine who was a very successful business man. Built a company from scratch and made himself and a lot of other people a lot of money when he sold it. He doesn’t need a lot of money now, but he wants the stimulation of work. For 4 years now: Nothing, Nada, No reply.

Seems to me that we have a lot of talent out there that current hiring (and recruiting) processes don’t know how to deal with. The Great Recession put a lot of talent on the street, but the great boom in new business processes leaves them out of the picture.

That’s a shame: A generation lost. 

Resource Management: Yahoo Got It Way Wrong

Yahoo’s decision to stop letting employees work from home is about as smart as most of the product decisions they have been making lately: Way off the mark.

Was Marissa Mayer hibernating in some cave for the last several years then woke up and said: “Where is everybody?”

They are at home working very well thank you – and if you make them all come back to work every day, you will be losing some of the best resources you have, plus losing out on a very creative way to maximize your employee assets.

Simon Kennedy in a recent blog post on DNA writes: “Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo! Inc staff to work in the company’s offices runs counter to new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.” He goes on to quote the National Bureau of Economic Research whose results “showed home-working led to a 13% increase in performance, mainly reflecting reductions in sick days and breaks. The rest was attributed to making more calls per minute thanks in part to the quieter working environment.”

 And this didn't even take into account the fact that people who work from home spend time on work activities well beyond the normal 8 hour work day.

I can understand a leader trying to turn around a company by taking some drastic measures to improve performance. But I think this was a knee jerk reaction based on faulty data. In the long run this will be just one more stupid move Yahoo has made. Yahoo is traditionally 2 steps behind in their marketplace, and apparently they are at least two steps behind in employee workplace trends as well.

I guess, in the end, this decision (along with many others at Yahoo) will serve as great case-study fodder for future MBAs. I would suggest a title for the case study should be: Yahoo: A study in Bad Timing.

Guess they won’t be making next year’s 100 Best Places to Work List.

Read more blogs by Jerry on Toolbox For HR

Give A Con A Break

The City of San Francisco was one of the first to take up a measure to ban the use of criminal histories as part of the pre-employment process. Several other government jurisdictions are considering similar legislation. This trend is born of the idea that criminal histories may be racist (because minorities tend to be convicted at a higher rate than non-minorities) and that it exacerbates the unemployment problem – especially among those with criminal records.

But for me the more interesting question (and more difficult challenge) is how do we truly assess that risk and make smart hiring decisions about people with previous legal or drug problems. Should they all be damned forever and a day? Story ended. That would be the easy way to handle the problem. No need to worry about complex hiring procedures or concerns that people won’t follow the exact dictates of the company. We hire no one with a previous conviction or a previous problem with drugs. Period!

We’re better than that.

A previous conviction does not have to be a permanent sentence of unemployment. The real solution to the problem is that criminal history alone should not be the only reason for rejecting a candidate. Yes – I understand (I used to be in the background checking business after all) that there are very real circumstance that mean zero tolerance (access to vulnerable populations like children or elderly for example) where the risk is just too great. But that is what I mean when I say that a criminal history record alone should not decide the hire/no hire choice. A criminal history record PLUS a high sensitive position – should mean no hire. Other situations such as repeat offenders, people with a pattern of multiple problems, a conviction along with lying on your resume might all be reasons for rejecting a candidate.

Patterns and context should dictate hiring risk – not just single data points.

It's people we are dealing with and people can make mistakes and still move beyond them. This is where our professionalism as recruiters and human resource people comes in. We use data to help make decisions – we don’t let data make the decisions for us.

Are there Republicans and Democrats in Your HR House?

Bickering, drawing lines in the sand, creating controversy where none really exists, refusing to compromise, perceiving slight, grandstanding: Sound like the national political scene, or does it sound like one of your staff meetings!

I have never really understood people who have to win an argument at all costs. It has never made sense to me why some people make things personal so easily or have to take exception to everything certain people say. I also don’t get why people get so stubborn about a topic they become irrational and immovable.

Sure, I believe strongly in things. Sure, I can get pretty assertive about my agenda when I am passionate about the topic. But I have never felt that I had all the answers. I don’t take other people's input personally and I don't tend to set my feet so firmly in the ground that I cannot be moved. Don't call me Speaker of the House.

Why do people get so obdurate that they are willing to sacrifice success to win a point?

The example set in Washington lately brings the point to a national spotlight. The leaders of both parties have become so entrenched, are trying so hard to make sure the other side looses they are guaranteeing that nobody wins.

Do you have people like that in your company? Are there people like that in your HR department? My bet is the answer is yes.

In my experience this atmosphere of irrational competition is at the heart of most dysfunctional companies.

Just chill

I wonder, do we teach this to our children at an early age? Do we model this behavior in ourselves or in our society?

How many people will suffer in our nation because of the stubbornness of a few? How many will suffer in our companies for the same reason?

An Ode to SEO for Recruiters

If I were to SEO

What would be the way to go?

Would I blog or would I write

A mighty pen to make me bright?

Key word phrases all strung out

Makes my writing all flung out.

Search for hires

High and low

Better with my SEO

20 key words and long tails to sell

If I try and say them all,

will you promise not to tell?

My marketing Director does insist

That all my writing should consist

Of random words

Thrown to and fro

Just so Google loves me so.

And then there’s Mack

I love her too

She’s our queen of SEO

But write a word that sounds just right

And suffer wrath at all her might

So homage to the SEO

Throw those words in, watch them flow.

Add some funky phrases too

Let them know that hiring is what we do.

Have some job postings

And offer up a referral or two.

Get alumni in the game

Contact everyone fit or lame.

Company name, best hires too

JAVA, Lava, and Code Blue

I’ll get those words in as I can

And hope you understand my plan.

So if what I say seems out of sorts

Trust my words to the Google courts