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HR Strategy

7 Steps to develop an effective HR strategy

Develop an effective HR strategy

Have you ever found yourself wondering why and how some companies have all the luck getting the best people? That’s how Mark felt when he reached out to me last year. As with anything in life, luck has very little to do with finding and keeping the best talent. What does help is an effective HR Strategy. In this blog post, I’m going to give you a step-by-step plan on how to develop an effective HR strategy for your business. 

Mark started a private equity firm three years ago with two partners. They each had their roles defined and their motto was “work hard and play hard”. Within a year, they had grown their small team of three into a team of twenty with analysts and researchers at junior and mid levels. 

That’s when the problems started. The work was grueling and the analysts started dropping one by one, claiming long hours, inadequate pay, and a career-stifling work environment. The one female they had hired quit after only two months claiming she’d “had enough” of the misogyny. Furthermore, the work the team was producing was riddled with errors and the partners were reviewing every piece of work. This was a huge time drain.

So, what went wrong? 

Mark and his partners made the classic mistake of “winging” their talent strategy. Mark said to me, “We knew what we wanted to hire and we went out and got it. We figured the work would be interesting enough for everyone to stay motivated and engaged. The truth is I didn’t expect to oversee every little thing our analysts produce –  we just don’t have the time for it.”

No matter how sexy the company or the work, if leaders don’t prioritize working conditions and employee development, good people will leave. So, when Mark came to me, one of the first things we did was develop an effective HR strategy that would work for his company. 

Before we begin, download out our  HR Strategy Creation Guide. Now, let’s go through the steps.

 

Develop an Effective HR Strategy Step 1: Defining the Business Strategy

 

Before we start working on an HR strategy, we need to examine the business strategy. Your business strategy will have your vision, mission and values, as well as a high level overview of what your business objectives are and how you will achieve them. The good news is that most companies spend a decent amount of time on a business strategy and Mark’s team was no exception. 

Typical business strategic plans are over a 3-5 year period. Lately, more and more companies are shortening their strategic planning process because the external landscape changes too quickly for a long time horizon. Seeing 5 years out into the future is virtually impossible these days. If you don’t have a business strategy, I suggest this resource for steps to develop one.

 

Step 2: Figure out what work needs to be done

 

Before you post that first job, you’ll need to know what work needs to be done over the strategic planning period. This is breaking down your business strategy into key buckets of work. It could be one broad task that encompasses all others, or it could be several buckets. Typically the work that needs to be done centres around revenue generation.

In Mark’s case, they needed to close 5 deals, at least one every year, within the strategy plan period. Everything they did needed to centre around that one strategic objective.

When they initially thought about hiring people, it came from a sense of need, rather than any strategy. The three partners were swamped and needed someone to help them. Their first few employees were referrals from business contacts and friends. The rest of the employees were hired during peak busy times when deal work was in full swing. It was no wonder they didn’t work out. 

Mark, his partners and I sat down and hashed out all the work that was involved in closing a deal, from the deal origination to managing portfolio companies. We ended up with five main buckets of work: business development, research, finance, deal negotiation, and portfolio company operations. Keep in mind these are not roles, but groups of roles.

From there, we move on to breaking down the skills needed for each group of jobs.

 

Step 3: Determine what skills are needed to do the work

 

Once you have your buckets of work defined, it’s time to figure out what skills are attributed to each bucket of work. In Mark’s case, we needed people with sales experience in business development, we needed finance and analysis experience for the research and finance buckets, we needed legal and private equity experience in the deal negotiation bucket, and finally, we needed people with board experience, or specific functional experience for the portfolio company operations bucket.

 

Step 4: Determine which people are needed for the jobs

 

Once you know the broad skills needed on the team, it’s time to group those skills into the people needed for each role. At this point, we’re not looking at headcount yet, we’re simply looking at what sort of person we would hire (i.e. what education, experience and personality) in each of those buckets. Doing this exercise upfront makes going through the following steps easier. 

One interesting thing that emerged during my discussions with Mark was that in some of the roles, experience at Mark’s firm was critical to success in the role. So, for those roles, we decided talent had to be homegrown. Getting external people for those roles would only set them up for failure and wouldn’t benefit the company in any way. “Promoting from within” was then a key component of Mark’s HR strategy and we needed to consider how to make it work.

 

Step 5: Evaluate the existing organization

 

Once you know the broad skills needed on the team, it’s time to evaluate whether you have those skills on the current team. This is an important step to developing an effective HR strategy. You need to know what’s happening inside before you outside for talent. In Mark’s case, we looked at his existing team of 17 people, excluding the partners, and assessed the skills they brought to the table. In most cases, the skills matched the roles they were in. For the ones that didn’t, we needed to have a plan to either train and develop them or exit them out of the organization.

 

Step 6: Do an HR SWOT analysis

 

Once steps 1-5 are completed, you’ll be in a position to complete a SWOT analysis. This resources explain what a SWOT analysis is.

Doing a SWOT for your HR strategy is slightly different from doing it for your business strategy. The main thing you need to remember is the strengths and weaknesses are those of your existing internal talent. And opportunities and threats are of the broader labour market. 

Swot Analysis

In Mark’s company, the main strengths were that they already had some homegrown talent. Their weaknesses were that there was virtually no diversity on the team and the partners wanted to correct that. The opportunities in the marketplace were that there was a program dedicated to private equity at the local university and a ready source of fresh talent to choose from. The threats were the other private equity firms in the financial district of their city that were competing for those same resources and losing talent to those companies was a real possibility they needed to account for.

 

Step 7: Put the Strategy together

 

With the SWOT analysis done, the HR strategy pretty much writes itself. You now know what skills you need on your team to successfully implement your business strategy and you know what your internal strengths and weaknesses are as well as your external threats and opportunities. Here is an example of HR strategic objectives

In Mark’s company, we ended up with the following HR Strategy:

  • Attract, develop and retain top talent to facilitate closing 1 deal a year

With these HR strategic objectives:

  • Develop and implement a diversity and inclusion plan
  • Develop and implement an internal promotion plan to keep good employees for as long as possible
  • Build a partnership with the finance program at the local university to get new talent in
  • Develop a compensation plan that rewards high performers and exits poor performers

 

Conclusion

 

Our 7 steps to develop an effective HR strategy is a requirement for any company. With a strong strategy in place, you have a plan for attracting the talent you need to for your business to be successful. The HR strategy also helps to structure your HR practices in a way that is aligned with your business objectives. Download our HR Strategy Creation Guide before you begin this exercise on your own. It will help you keep your notes and thoughts in one place.

One question many leaders ask is how long it takes to develop an effective HR strategy. Developing an HR strategy doesn’t take long, however, the one key to building an effective HR strategy is ensuring that all decision makers in the company are at the table. So, if you’re an HR professional and are facilitating these discussions, this is a non-negotiable.

I’d love to know if this was helpful. Comment below and tell me if you used these steps to create your company’s HR strategy and if you have any feedback. Is the HR strategy you developed helping you attract and retain the talent that you need to execute on your business strategy?

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Executive onboarding

3 Clues That Reveal Company Culture

3 clues that reveal company culture

There are 3 clues that reveal company culture: the people, the processes and the technology.

If you think this sounds too simple, then you would be right. See, the trick isn’t in learning the company culture. The trick is figuring out what to do after you’ve learned it, but that’s a topic for another blog post. 

In today’s post, I’m going to walk you through the steps I take to learn a company’s culture. This is the process I use when I’m called in to do a cultural assessment. The process to learn culture is not complicated, but it does take time and by the end of it, you’ll have a lot of information. This is why I encourage executives to take at least 2 months to go through these steps. Any less and you’ll risk not gathering enough information. Any more and you’ll risk alienating your team because of inaction.

Another suggestion as you go through this process is to keep a notebook for your notes. Believe me, there is no way you’re going to remember all this without recording it in the moment. I use OneNote because I can update it wherever I am. Plus, I type faster than I write. In meetings when it’s not reasonable for me to type away in front of the person, I take a photo of my handwritten notes and upload them to OneNote.

Alright, let’s dive in.

 

Company Culture Clue 1: The People

The first component of culture is learning about the People employed at the company. Now, you’re likely thinking “People” is a pretty broad term, and you would be correct. When I say people, I mean the following things:

  • The personalities
  • The skills
  • The education
  • The experience
  • The mannerisms
  • The treatment of each other
  • The communication style
  • The tone of voice
  • The humour
  • The language
  • The facial expressions

Those are the attributes that make up the “people” part of your organization’s culture. For that matter, these attributes make up the culture of anything. It’s a handy list if you’re a traveler or people-watcher. Figure out what makes people tick, and you’ll have them eating out of your hands in no time. But that’s a blog post for another time.

Next, you’ll make a list of people you’re going to meet. You’ll need a relevant sample of the employees. Include people you would interact with on a regular basis as well as a few others outside your day-today. The idea is to get as broad a perspective as possible. So that you have all the information you need to make up your own mind on the company’s culture. 

At the least you should meet with the following people:

  • your boss
  • your direct reports
  • a sample of your indirect reports
  • all your peers
  • all the board members (if applicable)
  • a sample of suppliers, vendors and partners. 

Your goal at these meetings is to gather as much information as possible around the attributes mentioned above. I have a set of questions I ask, but my all-time favourite is this one: “Tell me about a recent challenging project.” The answers I get back from people is pure gold. You can figure out their personality, how they treat others, and how they communicate with others. Pure. Gold.

 

Clue 2: The Processes

The next thing you need to figure out is the processes. Now, you gather this information in one of three ways:

  1. Ask people about the process
  2. Observe people following the process
  3. Experience the process

The easiest way is to ask people when you’re meeting with them. I like to ask different people the same process question to see if there’s consistency. Inconsistency in following or describing a process tells a lot about the culture. 

One word of caution. I sometimes find executives are too focused on their own area of the organization. They don’t make the effort to ask about other areas or about how different departments interact. When you’re attempting to determine company culture, it’s important to see the full picture.

So, if you’re in operations, you must know the sales and marketing processes. If you’re in HR, you should ask about all the processes in the company. The more senior you are in the company, the more you need to know about how the whole company operates.

Some of the processes I tell my clients to learn about are processes in:

  • the annual budget cycle
  • accounts payable
  • sales
  • marketing
  • operations
  • HR
  • customer onboarding
  • vendor management
  • customer termination

Once you know these processes, you’ll get an accurate picture of the company and its inner workings. If you’re looking to make changes, you need to know how the company currently operates. An added benefit of taking the time to learn and understand these processes is that it shows people you respect them. It shows them you respect where they’re at and how they came to be at that point. There’s nothing more distasteful to current employees than a new leader who starts making changes without acknowledging history.

By now your notebook is no doubt bulging with notes. Or, if you’re like me, you’re OneNote notebook is very colourful. In a future blog post, I’ll show you a neat trick I use to keep all my notes organized.

Ok, we’re at the final stretch of determining your company’s culture. By now you’ve gathered a fair bit of information about the people and the processes.

 

Clue 3: The Technology

Finally, you focus on the technology.

In the past, I didn’t give technology its own “section” in my cultural assessment process. But, over the years, how much and how well a company uses technology tells a lot about its culture. I’ve also realized a company can have the best technology and systems, and still have its people and processes stuck in the 1960s. Vice versa the company can have outstanding people and lean processes and backward technology. 

I’m not going to go into too much detail about which technologies you should evaluate. As you go through your tenure, the effectiveness of the technology should be evident. The main thing you’re looking for is how many of the processes use a technology solution. If the answer is most, then you should look at how effective the technology solutions are. I’ve had clients who depended on technology, but the technology was weak. The CIO had greater aspirations than he had operational excellence in that client’s case!

There you have it. The 3 things that tell you everything you need to know about your company’s culture.  As I mentioned earlier in the post, the process to learn the culture isn’t difficult. What’s complicated is figuring out what to do once you learn everything. 

One thing is clear, though. When you do introduce change, you’ll be able to do it in a thoughtful and respectful way. By the end of this process, you will have met with more people at your company than most new executives. And as a by product, you’ll earn people’s respect because you took the time to listen to them.

Now I’d love to hear from you. What are some of the steps you’ve taken as a new executive or employee? Do you have a process you follow to learn your company’s culture? Comment below and let us know!

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Executive onboarding

Executive Onboarding works

Executive Onboarding

Studies show 40% of executives fail within 18 months on the job due to poor or non-existent executive onboarding.

Not getting a solid executive onboarding means new executives are left alone to figure out “how” things are done at the company, delaying, or worse completely missing, their ability to deliver the results they were hired to deliver.  This is particularly problematic when companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on executive recruitment.

The three things that take executives from a tentative, overwhelmed new executive to being a respected authority in the company:

  1. Research the company before you start – when you walk into the company knowing more than most of its long service employees, you’ll feel a confidence that automatically brings out your “A” game
  2. Take the time to relearn critical skills – knowing things like how to listen, change management, influencing without imposing will serve you well.  As leaders go higher up the corporate ladder, it seems those critical skills are forgotten or diluted in the process.
  3. Zero in on three things in the first 6 weeks: the people, the processes and the technology. These are the only 3 things you need to observe to understand the company’s culture: who is employed at the company, how do they do things and what tools do they use to facilitate their work.

This is how one of my clients was able to exceed expectations and get max bonus in her first year while winning over her team and her peers, gaining their respect in the process.  Executive onboarding works and executives need to take back control of their own success in their new job.

If you’ve started a new role in the past 3 months and are ready to fast-track stellar results for yourself, message us for details on how we can get you there.  Our program includes weekly coaching calls for the first year of your employment.  Download our free guide here. Click on our About page to learn more about our history.

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Recruitment

How to Juggle Recruitment With Your Day Job

How to juggle recruitment with your day job - blog

When I started my HR career, perhaps one of the most surprising things I found was just how much there was to juggle. Now, I came form an Executive Assistant role, supporting 3 SVPs and the President, so I was no stranger to juggling multiple tasks. But going from supporting four executives to supporting a client group of over 200 employees was like going from floating in a pool to navigating class 5 rapids with no training. No one teaches you about time management in HR school. For that matter, I think time management is a grossly underrated trait that school simply does not teach, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

The first three months in HR were the hardest months of my entire career. A big part of my job back then was recruitment, and in my rush to fill roles, I stretched myself too thin and got behind on my other work. It was enough to land me in hospital for a stress-related chronic condition!

When I returned to work three months later, I put some mechanisms in place to ensure I was never that overwhelmed again. Over the years, as I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve refined these to fit with my job. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that I urge all HR Business Partners to do some recruitment in their roles. And you’ve also read that recruitment takes anywhere from 20-25 hours of work over a 6-week period. So, how do you stay on top of it all? Read on for tips on how to juggle recruitment with your day job.

Put it in Your Calendar

I can’t stress this enough. This is tip #1 for hiring managers in my blog post on how hiring managers can fast-track recruitment. If it’s not in your calendar, it won’t get done. I know the weeks when I don’t block off time in my calendar for recruitment, I don’t move the needle on my open roles. If I go one week without making progress on my open roles, the weeks to follow get even crazier. Two weeks without progress, and I’ve got hiring managers beating down my door. Plus, I’ve learned the hard way that if I take too long to move through the recruitment steps, I lose candidates.

My suggestion is to block off recruitment time in your calendar indefinitely, not just for the 6-week recruitment period. I’ll explain why a little later in the blog.

But Don’t Block Off Too Much Time

This may sound counter-intuitive, but the title of this blog post is how to juggle recruitment with your day job. The key is to not neglect your day job in favour of recruitment. Remember earlier in the post I mentioned that I landed in hospital for stress? It was because I decided, in my zeal, that to close my roles quickly I had to book back-to-back in-person interviews. Now, you know my tactic on back-to-back 15-minute phone interviews, but in-person interviews are a whole other thing altogether. They take a lot out of you, and if you’re bringing people in, you want to show them your best side. It’s as much a sales game for you as it is for them. When you block off too much time, your other work will suffer and that doesn’t serve anyone.

My suggestion is to block an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon for in-person interviews. In other words, I don’t do more than 2 in-person interviews per day. If you use my 15-minute phone interview process, you won’t have too many in-person interviews anyway. And the ones you do have, you’ll want to give them your 100% and you won’t be able to do that if you’re constantly watching the time!

Develop a Solid Process

I believe in processes. I could devote an entire blog to processes. You can have the best people in the world, but without solid processes, your business will be mediocre at best. I believe that with a set process, you stay on track, you overcome procrastination (chronic procrastinator here!), you check things off your list, and you avoid distraction. James Clear, someone I’ve followed for years now and the author of the bestseller Atomic Habits, says that setting goals is great, but the key to achieving goals is refining your process to get there. Sure, you can tell your clients that they can expect to fill their role in 6 weeks and you can give them a timeline and weekly tasks, but if you don’t have a process to get those tasks completed, you will not achieve your goal. Or if you do, you’ll be winging it. Not the way to establish yourself in your career!

I’ve talked about a process for screening candidates in my 15-minute phone interview. I encourage you to establish a process for your full recruitment cycle from start to finish. Everyone does recruitment a little differently, but if you want some inspiration, post a comment below and I’ll send you my process.

Communication is Key

You can have the best process, but in order to stick to the process, you need to make it public. You need to communicate the process and timelines to your clients and any other stakeholders involved in recruitment. It’s all fine to have your own timelines and schedules, but if your hiring manager is going to be on vacation for 2 weeks, your process will only go so far.

I remember one time I was hiring for an urgent role. It was the end of June and we needed someone in place asap. Well, I did everything I was supposed to do, blocked off my calendar, put a timeline together, and had an airtight process to fill the role in 4 weeks. The problem? I didn’t share that plan with the hiring manager; I simply said we could fill the role in a month. I didn’t share the timeline with him because if I had, he would have seen that he wasn’t going to be there for 3 out of the 4 weeks because he would be hiking in Asia with no cell reception!

Share your timelines and key dates with your clients. It will save unnecessary delays down the road.

Do Recruitment When You’re Not Recruiting

When you’re managing recruitment for multiple roles, it’s relatively easy to stay on track. You have a vacancy and you work towards filling it. But you can reduce the time you spend on recruitment activities if you work on recruitment all the time. Remember earlier I asked you to block off time in your calendar indefinitely? When you don’t have a vacancy, use that time to source and network with candidates. I posted on why all HR Business Partners should do recruitment for their clients. The benefits of keeping your finger on the pulse of your client’s industry are innumerable.

To be fully transparent, I’m not great at this. When I don’t have vacancies, there are plenty of other things to fill up my time. But I have seen other HR Business Partners do this with much success. And when I work to get ahead of recruitment, I see the results ten-fold. When a vacancy does pop up, you will already have a couple of good candidates to start with. If we all recruited even when there was no vacancy, the time to fill a role drops and you have quality candidates that you have got to know over several months, and maybe years. The likelihood of that hire being a successful one shoots through the roof.

There are a lot of ways to juggle recruitment with your day job and be amazing at all of it. I’d love to hear what you do to stay on top of it all. Post a comment below and let us learn from you.

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Recruitment

What Every Successful HR Business Partner Does

The one thing every successful HR Business Partner does

I’ve learned over the years that there is one thing every successful HR Business Partner does in their role. I’m going to tell you what that is in this post.

Before the wide embrace of the HRBP/COE model in HR teams, most of us were HR Generalists. There were a few Specialists, mainly in compensation, learning and development, and benefits. However, a vast majority of us were Generalists and we had at least basic knowledge of all functions across the HR spectrum.

Then HR departments started moving to the HR Business Partner/Centres of Excellence model, where a core group of HR Generalists would be the liaison between the business and the Centres of Excellence (previously known as Specialists). The unfortunate reality is that while this model was widely popularized by Ulrich et al, there was never a training manual for HR Business Partners. The COEs had their respective designations, conferences and other avenues to perfect their craft, but nothing for HRBPs.

And so, the unfortunate consequence of this became such that there was never a standard for HRBPs to work towards. Never mind that recruiting HRBPs has become a nightmare at best because no two HRBPs have the same skill set or expertise. Some have knowledge of all areas of HR, some are more like Account Managers to the business with no special knowledge aside from translating business objectives to HR action plans. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just that there is no consistency is how HR Business Partners operate.

As I had mentioned in a post earlier this year, HR has a reputation problem. And a big part of that comes from the fact that the group that is most client-facing has no playbook. I think Ulrich has since come out with theoretical approaches and consulting firm, Gartner, has come out with playbooks and guidelines for HRBPs, but these are largely for companies that are big enough to afford them. Small and medium sized companies, without deep pockets, are mostly left to figure things out for themselves. LinkedIn Learning has a couple of HRBP courses, and the HR Professionals Association in Ontario has a course.

In my mind, this is a glaring gap for which our profession desperately needs a solution, but in the absence of a fulsome solution, I’m writing these blog posts to help HR Business Partners with the day to day execution of their job. Today’s post highlights one thing HRBPs can do to almost guarantee their success. With this one thing, we can immediately get our finger on the pulse of our organizations, and quickly see gaps in leadership, policy, employee experience, and process. This one thing has helped me learn more about my client groups’ business and helped me learn more about the leaders of those client groups.

Yes, it’s Recruitment.

I’m not sure when exactly Recruitment separated from the HR Business Partner role, but I see it more and more. Perhaps it was always that way. Managers and Directors and even VPs of Talent Acquisition are hired to lead teams of recruiters. It has become a sort of mini-agency model. There was only one problem. Recruitment agencies, unless you’re looking for a very senior executive or someone you’ve worked with for a long time, are rarely effective.

I remember the days when I used to work with agencies. I was always frustrated with the model. I would speak to the account manager and explain everything we needed in the candidate. The account manager would then relay that information to their recruiters. More often than not, the account manager would not meet with the candidates and would blindly forward resumes from the recruiters. The end result would be candidates that were not a fit for the organization for various reasons, and a supreme waste of time for me.

I see a similar trend with this new Talent Acquisition team within HR. They’re perhaps slightly better because they’re in-house and have more knowledge of business needs. All that aside, even when the Talent Acquisition team is amazing and high performing, with this model, HR Business Partners are never involved in getting people into the company. Which becomes a problem when they’re then trying to deal with employee relations issues, motivating people, helping leaders with their team, and providing insight into the person. Plus, you can’t support leaders in executing on their objectives without knowing who is coming through the door.

Recruitment takes a lot of time… but it’s worth it

Now, I understand that recruitment can take up a big chunk of time. Over the years, I’ve calculated that it takes, on average, approximately 20 hours of work over a 6-week period to bring in one person even with my 15-minute phone interview process. A little more for senior roles, and a little less for junior roles. And if you have even 5 open roles at a time, that’s 15 hours per week over and above your day-to-day job. That’s a lot of time by anyone’s standards, but, in my view, the benefits far outweigh the cost. Keep reading, I promise you, it’s worth every minute you spend on it.

You learn the business faster

When I joined Oxford Properties back in 2012, they had a Talent Acquisition Adviser to support recruitment activities on the team. Having come from a generalist role, the concept of “outsourcing” recruitment was foreign to me. Almost all the other HR Business Partners let the Talent Acquisition Adviser manage their recruitment for them. I would have too, had it not been for sound advice I received from an HR Director at the time. He said, “Take on recruitment. We have a fabulous recruiter on the team, but my advice is to do some recruitment for your client group, at least for a little while. You’ll learn the business much faster and you’ll get unique insight into your clients.”

It was the best advice I received in those early days of my new job. I did indeed learn a ton about my clients’ business and got closer to my business leaders in less time than if I hadn’t done recruiting for them. The best compliment I got from a leader about four months into my job was that he thought I’d been there for years!

You know exactly who your clients are hiring

A big part of a leader’s job is to bring in the right talent. HR Business Partners have unique insight into the company’s corporate objectives and how well their clients’ goals align with the business goals. The people your clients hire have a direct impact on their success. It bears arguing then that hiring good people is the cornerstone of achieving business objectives. This is especially true in the knowledge economy where the success of a company is more reliant on people rather than machinery.

Aside from measuring your client’s success, the added benefit to being involved in your clients hiring is that you can help them shape their team. A big part of the HR Business Partners role is to help their clients with strategic workforce planning and be clear on the client’s goals to then help them staff and structure their organizations. If you’re not involved in hiring their people, you can’t influence hiring decisions.

Let’s face it, hiring is only a small portion of the employee life cycle. As an HR Business Partner, chances are, you’ll be seeing and hearing about new hires long after onboarding ends. This is one of the primary reasons I suggest HR Business Partners get involved in recruitment. You need to know what exactly, and who exactly, you will be working with in the future. As custodians of the company’s culture, it’s HR Business Partners’ responsibility to safeguard that culture.

You get a broader perspective of the industry and market

This is by far the best side effect of doing recruiting. Sure, it takes a lot of time, but when you’re hiring candidates from the outside, you inevitably have your finger on the pulse of the industry. You start to speak in an educated manner not just with your clients, but also with your COE partners. Whether you’re trying to help your compensation partners match jobs inside salary surveys, or help your L&D partners develop a specific program for your clients, you will have a much better idea of what your client group does when you’re involved with recruiting for their team. Plus, how cool is it to meet someone at an event and immediately know whether they’ll be a good fit for your client’s team.

It’s certainly a tall claim to say that Recruitment is the one thing that all HR Business Partners must do to succeed. Yet, I see the most successful HR Business Partners not only have immense knowledge of their clients’ business, but also have a huge network of people that they can match up with the right job. And it’s those HR Business Partners, the ones who incorporate recruitment into their roles, who climb to the senior-most HR positions and become industry leaders.

It takes effort to incorporate Recruitment activities in your day-to-day and the payoff is definitely worth it in the end. Next week I’ll be talking about how to stay sane while managing recruitment activities. I’m going to share my own process plus some tips on how I have consistently managed 10+ open roles along with a full HRBP job.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what you think about my claim that HRBPs must do Recruitment to succeed. Comment below and share your thoughts.

If you like this post, you’ll love our 15-Minute Phone Interview Guide – the tool that has saved me hundreds of hours during the interview process.

Categories
Recruitment

How Hiring Managers Can Fast-Track the Recruitment Process

How Hiring Managers Can Fast-Track the Recruitment Process - blog image

Many say that recruiters are the key to bringing in talent into an organization. I would argue that hiring managers are the real heroes of the story. Recruiters facilitate recruiting, but the hiring managers make the final decision. Recruiters will bring forward a number of good prospects, but hiring managers have to acquire the skill to close the deal.

There are many aspects to becoming the hero of the talent acquisition story. In keeping with last week’s blog post on expediting the screening process with the 15-minute phone interview, today I’m going to focus on speed and efficiency on the hiring manager’s part. This blog post works for hiring managers with or without a recruitment team.

If you know us over at Caras, you know that we value efficiency but would never compromise quality for the sake of speed. So, no doubt, while I give tips and advice on how to make things quicker and faster, these tips also ensure you’re getting a better way of doing things. A way to get more done in less time – everybody’s dream!

The hiring manager has many jobs in the recruitment cycle, but there are certain things a hiring manager does that provide more value than others. This blog post will talk about the few things a hiring manager can do to fast-track the recruitment process and bring in quality people in the shortest possible time.

Define the selection criteria

Your candidates are only as good as your criteria. I’ve worked on hundreds of positions and the best candidates came in the door in the fastest possible time when my hiring managers knew without a doubt exactly what they wanted in their hire. Of course, part of the responsibility rests with the recruiter too, but hiring managers who consistently hire well ensure they specify, in detail, everything they need in a hire, as well as the things that would be nice-to-haves.

Putting that information into a job description is key. However, it’s equally important to keep that selection criteria front and centre during the interview stage because it’s too easy to rely on the first impression of candidates. Here’s how I’ve seen it play out: hiring manager and recruiter spend hours writing up the perfect job posting. They tee up interviews and the hiring manager starts to meet with people. Hiring manager and recruiter take a liking to someone they meet, and they hire based on how well the person presented in the interview, instead of matching their responses to the selection criteria.

Now, presenting well under stressful situations may well be required for some roles. It’s when presentation skills and a gregarious personality are not a requirement for the job that we get into sticky situations. There’s nothing wrong with extroverted people, but extroverted people need people around them to energize them. When you stick them in a remote working location with minimal interaction with their energizer, the hire, no matter how good, is bound to fail. They simply won’t stick around, or they’ll be disengaged.

Defining the selection criteria is crucial to making a good hiring decision. It’s equally important to remember that selection criteria when making your selection.

Set aside weekly time for activities

If you know me at all, you know that it couldn’t be too long before I started talking about time management. I’m a productivity fiend because of one simple fact that I realized about myself. I am a procrastinator. There’s a misconception that highly productive people don’t procrastinate. In fact, us procrastinators absolutely need to be highly productive in order to get anything done, because if we’re not constantly doing things, we fall into a state of inertia that’s too hard to break out of.

So, my fellow self-aware procrastinators, I can’t stress this point enough. You must schedule recruitment activities into your calendar. It’s the only way you’ll make progress. I know it sounds simple, but I can’t begin to tell you how many hiring managers have told me that getting a person in the door is critical to the success of their team, and then they sit on various recruitment activities for weeks at a time.

If you don’t schedule weekly time in your calendar, recruitment activities will fall to the bottom of your interminable list of to-dos. Block off 2-3 hours per week in your calendar for recruitment activities. And if you’re not hiring at the moment, use that time to build a pipeline of people.

Communicate with the team

Setting aside time in your calendar is a great start, but it’s just the start. You need to fill up that time with meaningful activities. This means you and your team need to be on the same page. By team, I mean the recruitment team. I assumed at the beginning of this post that you have a recruiter helping you. You and your recruiter would have established the interview format and process. Your recruitment team consists of you, your recruiter, anyone else you want the candidate to meet and other stakeholders such as your HR Business Partner (if that person is not the recruiter), your boss, your peers, and your clients.

Part of your weekly activities should include a standing meeting or call with your recruiter. At that meeting, you can both go over your progress from your weekly recruitment activities. I also suggest keeping everyone in the loop on your progress. Hint: that’s something you can ask your recruiter to do for you.

Be decisive

You’ve met a few candidates, you have your selection criteria nailed down, but you can’t decide. So, you schedule another interview, just to be sure. A couple of weeks pass and you finally decide, only to have the candidate pull out of the race. This is not a story; this really happens. The worst is when both your top candidates end up taking other offers because the process was taking too long.

I get it, hiring a person is a big decision. You want to make sure you get someone with the right skills and the right personality to fit perfectly with your existing team. And in fact, the smaller the team, the harder the decision because one bad apple can completely sour the field. Yet, the longer you wait to make a decision, the longer your team suffers and the more revenue you lose (or less time you save).

Your HR Business Partner or recruiter can also double as your accountability partner. When you find yourself struggling to make a decision, pull out your selection criteria and go through each of your top candidates against it. Take 20 minutes to do that and then make a decision. Once you put out an offer, there are still plenty of decision points that may discount the candidate, but at least you’d have taken steps in the right direction.

Trust your instincts

I’m a bit of a unique bird. I make decisions based on my intuition, not analysis. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me because everything I read said I needed to make data-driven decisions. There was, it seemed, no place for my intuition at all.

Then I discovered that I made the best decisions when I trusted my instincts and followed through. And it was particularly obvious with recruitment decisions. I’ll never forget one time I was recruiting for a VP of Finance position. It had taken us months to find candidates that met our selection criteria and finally we found the perfect person. He went through the process and all the stakeholders liked him. There was only one piece of feedback that came back from everyone: he was a little on the arrogant side. No one said it was a deal-breaker. It was just a consistent piece of feedback that came back to me.

We were about to put an offer together when the hiring manager looked at me and said he was unsure about the candidate. The arrogance issue was noisy enough for the hiring manager to take notice. The only problem was that we had no number 2 candidate. Which meant that if we didn’t proceed with this person, we’d be back to the drawing board. His first inclination was to ignore this feeling he had. It would be easy to ignore because the need for a VP was immediate. I told him to trust his instinct and we went back to the drawing board.

Your instincts tell you something that cannot be defined in words and numbers. The skill you need to master is the one that allows you to quiet all other noise and really listen to what your instinct is trying to tell you. And recruitment is exactly one of those times when you can and should rely on your instincts.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I’d love to hear your strategies for fast-tracking the recruitment process as a hiring manager. And if you’re a recruiter, how do you help your hiring managers make better and faster decisions. Comment below and let us know.

If you like this post, download the 15-minute phone interview guide to really fast-track your recruitment process

Categories
Recruitment

The 15-Minute Phone Interview for Employers

What you can learn from a 15-min phone interview - blog headerWhat you can learn from a 15-min phone interview - blog headerWhat you can learn from a 15-min phone interview - blog headerWhat you can learn from a 15-min phone interview - blog headerWhat you can learn from a 15-min phone interview - blog header

If there’s one complaint I hear from Hiring Managers and HR Business Partners most often it’s how much time recruitment takes out of their already-busy days. I know, I’ve been there. After years of struggling with scheduling hours for screening resumes, phone interviews, in-person interviews, assessments, offer letters, etc., I finally came up with a way to shave off some of the time.

Just one thing before you read too far. This blog post is for recruiters who either don’t have access to AI-equipped Applicant Tracking systems, or don’t want to rely strictly on AI or the ATS’s screening system. In my personal opinion (and, yes, it’s an opinion), these ATSs can sometimes eliminate people who don’t fit the minimum criteria, but who would be a good fit nonetheless because they bring some other element that would help them succeed.

Ok, with that said, let’s get to it. You can check out the video version of this blog post too (complete with screenshots of my process)

I found that the screening and interviewing process took a big chunk of time in the recruitment process. In fact, screening always took more energy out of me than anything other aspect of recruitment, and I ended up procrastinating more than I’d like to admit, causing the whole cycle to length, frustrating my hiring managers. So, I had to find a better way.

The 15-minute phone interview

I find that recruiters use phone interviews as a method of screening candidates, however, most recruiters don’t do them right. They usually narrow the phone interview candidate pool too much because they feel they need to spend half an hour or more per candidate. And they end up spending the 30 minutes only to rehash the same questions at the in-person interview. Certainly not an efficient use of time.

I use phone interviews to screen my candidates, but I only spend 15 minutes per interview. I don’t use it as a full-on interview, just enough to get the basics down and see if I want to get to know the person some more. And by doing that, I can get through more candidates to ensure I really have picked the best of the best applicants.

The idea of the 15-min phone interview is simple. You’re only asking them a few short questions and the key things you’re looking for are:

  1. Can they stick to the time they’ve been given?
  2. Can they convey their point concisely and explicitly?

The key to doing this without compromising the candidate experience is 3-fold:

  1. Have a structure
  2. Set expectations
  3. Provide feedback

And it can all be done in 15 mins, plus a minute to spare.

In the following sections, I’m going to outline my exact phone interview process.

Of course, depending on the position you are hiring for, the questions will change, but I keep a few questions consistent to easily evaluate and compare the candidates.

Phone Interview Structure

Here is the basic structure I follow:

  • I ask them to summarize their resume in 2-3 minutes
  • I ask them to tell me why they’re interested in this specific position at this company in 2 minutes
  • I spend 1 minute talking about the role, the manager, the team, and the company
  • I pick 2 job-specific questions or the non-negotiable things that they need for the role. For instance, I ask them for an example of when they used a particular software, or an example of when they had to deal with a difficult employee. The key is to ask them for an example. Again, 2 minutes per question. Remember, the purpose of this phone interview is just to screen them. You’ll invite them in for an in-person interview if you like these answers they’re giving you.
  • I ask them to tell me what their salary expectations are. If it’s way out of range, I’ll let them know and ask if they want to proceed with the process. Some people will back out at that point, and you’ve only spent 10 minutes of their time. A note here, even if you have asked salary expectations in you applicant tracking system, ask this question again. I find sometimes people will change their answer.
  • Finally, I leave 3-4 minutes for them to ask me any questions and letting them know what the next steps will be and timing. At this stage, it’s important to let them know right away if they don’t have a key skill or qualification. For example, if you need strong software skills, let them know that you’re looking for someone more proficient and that you will not be proceeding with their application at that point. It’s best to give people immediate feedback if possible. It’s not always possible, but if it is, then please be human and do it so they’re not waiting around for you to call them.

What you learn in 15 minutes

The idea of the 15-minute phone interview is to get to the lowest possible level in the shortest amount of time. What I mean by this is you’re trying to get as much detailed information from a candidate without spending too much time. 15 minutes is enough time for you to give a high-level overview of the role and the company to the candidate. This is valuable if and when they come in for an in-person interview.

I’ve done phone interviews in many formats over the last 12 years of my HR career. Sometimes I’ll do a longer 30-minute phone interview, but over the years, I have learned that I don’t learn much more from a person in 30 minutes than I do in 15 minutes. In fact, because of the time crunch of the 15-minute interview, both the candidates and I are “forced” to get as much information in as possible. Believe me, there’s nothing like a deadline to get the most out of people.

Now, there is one caveat to that. Some people simply can’t deal with the pressure. I have had candidates with impressive, mind-blowing resumes completely bomb the 15-minute phone interview because they couldn’t find the right words. If this happens, it’s important to keep an open mind. I have, at times, brought them for an in-person interview and about 80% of the time I’ve made the right decision.

That said, I make a lot of decisions based on intuition (rather than data), so this works for me better than it would for someone who needs data to decide. I find there are limitations with data, and when you’re dealing with human beings, you need to look deeper than a statistic. That said, I did mention only 80% of my intuition-based candidates give a drastically different interview in the in-person. So, there are definitely limitations when I do it my way too.

In the end, the thing that most of us know as recruiters is this: Recruiting is no more a science than it is an art. And that means that you have to use a process, but you also have to use judgement and intuition. The best recruiters use both with comfort and expertise. Relying on your intuition to guide you is a topic for another blog post, but I thought it’s worth mentioning here.

The 15-Minute Phone Interview Process

Now that you have the basic structure and timing of the phone interview, let’s dive into a more detailed process. How exactly do I screen over 30 people over 2 days?

Prepare for the Phone Interview

Believe it or not, you do need to prepare for phone interviews. A little bit of preparation will help you do them back to back and you’ll remember who you spoke to. Believe me, after doing 30 of them, all the names and response will be a big jumble. To avoid that, you have to prepare.

First, determine the questions you’re going to ask. I’ve created a handy pdf one-pager for you to use during your phone interviews. Download the form here.

Remember, we’re only spending 15 minutes with the candidate. You won’t need to type more than a page of notes (if you’re handwriting, I’ll allow you two pages!).

I like to have all the resumes printed or opened up in tabs on my computer so I’m not wasting time looking for them while I’m going from one interview to the next.

Schedule the Phone Interviews

Block off 2 2-hour time slots in your calendar. That will cover 16 phone interviews. You can repeat the process the following day, or a day later in the week for additional interviews. They key is to block the time off in your calendar. I find time-blocking most effective because I can put a sign up on my cubicle wall or on my office door. This is a perfect activity for your work-at-home days.

Next, start putting the interviews into 15-minute chunks into your calendar with each candidate’s name. I put this in the meeting/event title: “Phone Interview – [JOB TITLE] – [CANDIDATE NAME]”. At this stage, I mark these meetings as “tentative”.

You might be wondering why I put in the candidate name before scheduling anything. This is where the beauty of my system comes in. My phone interview scheduling process is perfected to the point that it only takes me only a few minutes to set up interviews.

Here’s what I do:

  1. Send them an email with the following language:
    1. Thank them for their application and resume.
    2. Tell them their experience looks interesting and you’d like to speak to them.
    3. Tell them you want to schedule a quick 15-minute phone call with them.
    4. Give them the date and time (from above) and ask if that works for them. Do not give them multiple options because 99% of the time people will say yes to my suggestion. Mainly because I mention it’s only a 15-minute call and they usually rearrange stuff. This method is 100x better than asking them what date/time works and going back and forth. This one trick has saved me hours over the years.
  2. I send out multiple emails one after the other to each of the candidates I selected

As people respond saying yes, you can mark the meeting status “confirmed” or remove the colour if you colour-coded above. I then respond to them and tell them I’ll call them at the number on their resume. Or if they give me another phone number to call, I put that into the “location” area of the meeting invite. You can also send them the meeting invite at that time.

On the odd chance they say that the date/time does not work or them, you can move to another time slot somewhere else in the calendar. However, as I mentioned before, 99% of my candidates accept the initial date and time I put forward.

During the Phone Interview

If you’ve already set up the questions in the preparation phase, then there’s not much for you to do here. I usually launch right into the interview saying I want to ensure I get them back to their day within 15 minutes. Download the handy guide I created to facilitate this step.

Final Steps

If you’ve followed the structure above, you’ll have exactly 1 minute before you move to the next phone interview. Take this time to jot down 1-2 points that really stood out for that candidate, followed by an A, B or C (or whatever scale you want. Yes, No, Maybe also works).

This method of phone screening has helped me manage 10-15 open recruitment positions along with a very full HRBP work load. It has also helped ensure I’m not leaving good candidates in the ATS.

Your Turn

Now, it’s your turn. I’d love to hear how you implement this system. Or if you have other handy ways to screen candidates before brining them in.

Don’t forget to download the 15-Minute Phone Interview Guide I created just for you. It contains this entire process in a neat visual and includes a worksheet with space for putting in your own questions (along with space for answers). You can use it every time you recruit. And make sure you send me an email with how you’re using the guide!

 

Categories
Leadership

Why Leading Without Authority is Easier Than You Think

Leading Without Authority

If there’s one profession in which people are expected to lead without authority, it’s Human Resources. We have clients, not unlike many other professions, however, our clients are our colleagues, and sometimes people more senior to us within the organization. HR professionals have a hand in changing culture and enhancing the employee experience for leaders and individual contributors. Above all, we are expected to be the standard for professional behaviour at work.

Last week I spoke about taking advantage of the opportunities to put ourselves out there and get noticed by senior leaders. Today’s post will build on that because any good HR Business Partner knows that it’s not enough to impress senior people. In our work, we have to work with others across the HR team and other departments in order to fulfil our mandate. We have Centre of Excellence partners, finance partners, legal partners, administrative partners, and others across the company that we have to work with and negotiate with to get our jobs done.

A big part of leading without authority is influencing skills. How do you influence people when they absolutely do not need to listen to you? More importantly, how do you influence people to act in a certain way, or do things a certain way, when you have no authority over them? It’s actually more straightforward than you think.

An Art Form

I’m not minimizing the efforts of really good HR Business Partners. Influencing and leading without authority is an art. And like any art form, it requires practice and patience. Above all, it requires a genuine desire to create an outcome that’s pleasing to the artist and the receiver. So, this blog post is not about coercing people to do things they wouldn’t do. This is about showing people that another way is a better way. Or simply showing them alternatives and guiding them to make the choice that makes most sense in the situation.

One thing to keep in mind as you read this: when you influence people or convince them to behave in a certain way, you will rarely, if ever, get any credit for bringing them along. So, you need to have a genuine desire to simply do the right thing when you start practicing this art. Influencing and leading without authority is not about personal glory or gain.

That said, you will get noticed and you will grow personally and professionally when you show that people are willing to follow you even when they don’t have to.

Peer Influence is More Effective than Authority Influence

I remember when I was in middle school, grade 6, I befriended a girl in my class. She was new to the school, and from the first day, we just clicked. She was a quiet sort of person, much like me, an introvert, and we had long philosophical discussions about life. As much as you could when you were 11 years old. She quickly became my best friend and over the course of grade 6, we were inseparable.

Perhaps what I liked most about her was that she was an honest, hard working, diligent person. She was kind and she was gentle-mannered, and she cared about other people. Not necessarily what they thought, but she genuinely wanted to please others, in a selfless manner. In other words, she was exactly the type of person I wanted to be.

Now, I should clarify that I grew up in Dubai. Dubai was back then much as it is now: a vain, showy sort of society. Girls in my class were all about the pretty hair, the best notebooks, the fanciest pens, the coolest lunch boxes (and the lunch that went into it). I didn’t go to a fancy private school, but it was private school nonetheless. And this girl was rich. To put it into perspective, I lived with my parents and sister in a very comfortable two-bedroom apartment in a nice building and neighbourhood. She lived in the same neighbourhood, in a fancier building, in a six-bedroom apartment. Yet, she was more down to earth and spiritual than anyone else I knew.

Up until that point, I never really studied for exams or tests. I paid attention in class but pretty much winged tests and exams landing squarely in the B zone. It was sheer laziness and boredom.

She showed me, not through her words, but through her actions, that being respectful of the education we were getting was our only job at age 11. My grades skyrocketed that year. My final report card was all As that year and I attribute that, not to my smarts, but to her ability to show me that hard work was not only not all that bad, but also our responsibility for the time, money and effort our parents and teachers were putting into our education.

Two points here: First, an eleven-year-old girl influenced me to study and subsequently get good grades without any authority, when my parents, who had full authority and power, could not. Two, while my parents praised me for my grades, they knew it was my friend’s company that helped lift me.

When you think of your own career, how much have people shown you, rather than told you what to do? When kids find themselves stealing or cheat, it’s not because someone told them to those things. It’s because that’s what they saw worked for other kids to avoid a negative situation or get something they wouldn’t have the legitimate way (in their minds anyway). So, if we use that power of peer influence for the betterment of our workplace, imagine what the organization would look like?

A Point on Selflessness

I couldn’t talk about influence and leadership without talking about selflessness. It’s the foundation that the entire art form rests upon.

The thing is, when you lead without authority, you’re not telling anyone to follow you. People gravitate towards you because they know, like and trust you. I followed my friend and studied with her because I wanted to spend time with her. I wanted to spend time with her because I liked and admired her. It’s really as simple as that.

When you lead without authority, most likely you don’t even know you’re doing it. You simply do and people follow. You’re not actively telling people to follow you and they’re under no obligation to follow. When someone does something that they’re not forced to, it’s because they believe in that thing. When they start believing in something, that’s when change really happens. And if you want change to happen in your organization or within a client group, that’s the place you need people to get to.

How to Lead Without Authority

 The cornerstone of leading effectively with or without authority is trust. Trust is a big word and a complex concept. It’s an elusive thing too, not really definable. Why are some people inherently trustworthy while others are not? Why do we get a “feeling” about someone’s trustworthiness before we even know them. When you’re building trust in a relationship (no matter what kind of relationship), there are a few things to expedite the process:

  1. Be consistent

Have you even encountered a person who did something really nice for you one moment and then threw you under the bus the next? Would you trust that they would have your back? What about a person who was always late to a meeting? Could you trust them to be there for you in a time of crisis? Or what about the person who is super sweet to you one day, and then ignores you the next? Would you dread interacting with them because you wouldn’t know their mood that day?, The answer to all is a resounding no.

Trust is earned by being consistent. Period. Consistent in your behaviour, your attitude, and your actions. It’s as simple as that.

  1. Be credible

Have you ever met a person who told tall tales of how wonderful they were and how they climbed every obstacle and never seemed to mess up at all? Did you tend to be skeptical of their stories because you were never quite sure if they were true? Credibility is being truthful and genuine in everything you do. If you accomplished something great, you’ll gain people’s trust faster if you also tell them what went wrong. You’ll gain credibility faster when you show a vulnerability. Because no one is ever perfect. And people who appear to be perfect are not trustworthy.

Trust is earned by being credible. In your actions, in your words, and in the stories you tell about your life.

  1. Be reliable

If there’s one word that seems to be synonymous with trust, it’s reliability. Do you do what you say you are going to do it and by the time you say you are going to do it? Nothing diminishes trust like telling someone that you’re going to deliver by Friday and then not delivering by Friday. Now, things happen and sometimes we genuinely can’t deliver by Friday because of unforeseen circumstances. But if those “unforeseen circumstances” seem to always come up when we’re up against a deadline, then we’re not reliably accounting for those circumstances. People can’t trust us if we don’t learn from our mistakes.

Reliability and trust are synonymous. If you make a mistake, learn from that mistake and do better next time so that people can count on you. No one trusts someone who can’t be counted on.

Trust is the cornerstone of leading without authority. You can’t lead anyone without gaining their trust first. And trust is gained easier than most people think. Focus on these three areas and practice mindful selflessness. You’ll see people gravitate towards you and you’ll have the added benefit of seeing people succeed.

 

Beginning next week, we are starting a new format to the blog. We will have a monthly theme and weekly blog posts to focus each week on 1)managing the function, 2)working with the business on the function, 3)elevating your career with the function, and 4)self care while performing the function. I’ll also sprinkle in some personal experiences as I run my consulting practice.

 April’s theme: Recruitment

 

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Categories
Career

Elevate Your Career

How to Get Noticed by Senior Leaders

There comes a point in your career when it seems like you’ll never get out of that obsequious layer of the company that is neither too junior for people to notice and not too senior to be taken seriously. And far too many people remain there, sometimes their entire career, because they don’t know how to get out.

That was me back in my early thirties. I had just started a wonderful new job at a much larger organization than I was used to. By then I had 5 years experience in HR and another 8 years as an Executive Assistant. The first few months were overwhelming to some extent. I had previous industry experience, so there was a very little learning curve. But my boss had a very different management style than I was used to.

So, in order not to upset her and subsequently get fired from this dream job, coupled with a sense of insecurity and lack of confidence in my aptitude, I kept my head down a job and did the best I could. I was diligent, detail oriented, organized and slowly but surely my new boss took a liking to me.

However, what I hadn’t anticipated was that this boss had insecurities of her own and rarely gave me the opportunity to get in front of people outside our immediate department. So much that her boss didn’t even know me, and we were a department of 13!

Despite my confidence issues at this job, I was ambitious. Always had been. I never thought that I could ever take matters into my own hands. Didn’t think I could stop relying on her to shine the spotlight on me.

It was inevitably something I read (something I can’t remember right now) that finally jolted me out of inertia. The article said that people wait far too long in their lives for the universe to align so they can make their move. In truth, getting to the destination is a series of small steps, not a giant leap.

So, here are the little things you can do to get noticed by senior leaders, or anyone else for that matter.

Know what you believe in

The first step is to figure out is what you stand for. People who agree with the majority rarely get noticed. Now, I’m not saying you need to be contrary for the sake of it, but if you genuinely don’t agree with a point of view held by most, then acknowledge that. At this stage, you’re not even going to voice it to others. You’re simply going to say to yourself “I disagree”. That’s it. The first step is done.

Now keep that with you and start building on it. What other things don’t you agree with? What other things do you think could be done differently and why? Put words to your feelings. Articulate them in your head. Have that argument with yourself. Writing works for me, so I put things on paper. It could be voice recordings for you.

Make the first move

With sufficient knowledge of what you stand for when you have an opportunity to say something, say it. Do not wait for someone to call on you. This takes an inordinate amount of courage. I know because the first time I spoke up at a large meeting, my heart was ready to explode, my voice kept catching in my throat, and my face was beet red. That particular meeting was with the Chief HR Officer (CHRO) from the parent company and a room full of HR Business Partners. And I was contradicting him. It was the scariest moment of my life.

But that comment was the catalyst for me. At that meeting, the CHRO didn’t even know my name. Within a year, he had become my biggest sponsor. That comment started my change process from hardworking wallflower to respected, sought-out professional (at least in that company).

The best part was that after realizing that I wasn’t going to get fired for saying what I did, I started to make more “first moves”, culminating in my final meeting at that company – debating with a room full of lawyers and winning.

Know that you can’t please everyone

Since starting my own company, I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing. There are lots of marketing tenets, but one universal truth about marketing is “When you try to please everyone, you please no one”. And by pleasing someone one, you’ll inevitably turn off someone else. The idea is to please someone fully and unequivocally. This applies perfectly to our professional lives too.

The purpose of this blog post is to teach you to get noticed by senior leaders. I can say this without a doubt – when senior leaders start noticing you, there will be others who will be jealous and upset by the attention you’re getting. Or there will be others who will wonder what you’re up to or where you came from. Know this and be prepared to experience this.

When I encountered my first condescending comment from a senior leader’s then-favorite, I was so taken aback and hurt by the comment. It set me back because I was not prepared for it. The next time it happened, I simply smiled. Above all, avoid the urge to be bitchy back unless you have something humorous to say.  I’m decidedly bad at witty comebacks so I resort to smiling or ignoring. If you have an example of when you dealt with a snarky remark, I’d love to hear it – go ahead and comment!

The plus side is that there will also be plenty of others who will be pleased to see you elevate. Keep those people close to you.

Be honest

Once you start getting noticed, people will ask your opinion on things. I cannot tell you how many people give up this golden opportunity to speak the truth because they’re afraid. Afraid to look unpolitical, to look like they’re complaining, to throw someone under the bus, to look helpless, that people won’t want to hear about their problems.

Now I’ll be the first to say that there is a fine line between being honest with no filter (like children are) and being honest when someone asks your opinion on matters. I’ve worked with so many people who complain about their circumstances, their boss, the workload, the little insanities at companies. But when they get the opportunity to voice these concerns to the senior executive of their group whether that’s in a town hall or a one-on-one meeting, they clam up.

If there is one thing you take away from this blog post, take this one away.

If you don’t voice your thoughts on how to make your company a better place, you are doing yourself and your colleagues a disservice.

I remember at one point, the same CHRO was trying to learn about the subsidiaries of the company. He invited a small group of people to talk to him about HR processes, practices, and other such matters. He selected me along with a senior manager on my team as well as a few others from the other companies. I was excited because there was a LOT wrong with our department and the way we did things and I was happy that someone was finally asking the right questions.

As we were walking over to the meeting, my colleague said that we should not be fully honest about what as happening at our subsidiary. I was surprised because this person was, I thought, a fearless leader. She said it was because no one else was going to be honest and we would make our company look bad in front of the other subsidiary HR people.

Now, think of this from my point of view. This senior manager was 10 years my senior. I was only an Advisor. I stumbled and second guessed myself. Maybe she was right. And if she was, was I ok with bringing my department down? If I spoke up, the team would hate me.

It was the first time I’d heard the “we shouldn’t say bad things about our team because it makes us look bad”. But it certainly wasn’t the last time.

In the end, I followed my instincts and spoke my truth. And because I did, others in the room followed suit. It was an incredibly freeing feeling. Even if nothing changed, at least I’d given voice to what could be instead of suffering silently.

By the way, lots changed after that, not just in our group but across the HR department, because so many of us spoke up that day.

Do the right thing for your career

Today, I get paid to be honest. As an independent consultant, I can be that voice for people within organizations when they’re afraid to speak up. I use my voice to the fullest extent possible. And the more honest I am, the more senior leaders want to work with me. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, for all the aspiring consultants out there (and I know there are many of you), practice this skill and it will serve you well when you make the leap into consulting.

Today’s post is about how to get noticed by senior leaders to elevate your career. However, getting noticed and elevating your career will produce the inevitable side effect of being in a position to change things. It will start with your small world – your work, then your team, then your department, then your division, your company, the industry, your country, and the world. Change happens when you’re ok with the negative, jealous people and comments because you have your eyes on something bigger than them, bigger than even you.

Next week, I’m going to talk about leading without authority and how you can influence things even if you don’t have a title. Stay tuned!

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Categories
Productivity

Dealing with Email After Holiday

email after holiday

It’s March Break for many kids across Canada. This means that parents have the lucky task of thinking up meaningful things for their kids to do this week. For some, it’s traveling out of town. According to Toronto’s Pearson Airport, Friday, March 8th was the busiest March break travel day with almost 200k people traveling out of the city.

Vacations for me have always been a mildly stressful event. The organization and drive needed at work both before and after the vacation are sometimes more trouble than the vacation is relaxing. Yet, vacations and unplugging are a vital part of keeping your creativity and productivity up. We need to disconnect to continue to perform and function at our best.

So, in the absence of never taking a vacation, the pre-vacation and post-vacation trauma is something we just have to deal with. In January’s post on productivity, I talked about the 3 foolproof ways to streamline your work. Today I want to delve a bit deeper into managing emails, specifically before and after vacations. Dealing with email after holiday doesn’t have to be stressful or traumatic.

For most of us, emails are the bane of our existence. We love it because it allows swift communication, and we hate it for the fact that it effectively attaches us to our phones 24/7. And when we go on vacation, the fact that we can’t quickly respond means that we come back to maybe 1000 emails on the Monday after vacation.

Most of us have simply accepted that fact, however, there are ways to reduce the email overwhelm with some steps you can take before you go on vacation.

Set up a Good Out-of-office Email

This is a no-brainer strategy to dealing with email after holiday, and I’m sure most of you do this already. However, most out-of-office emails are not written to deter the sender from sending the email. They say something like “I will be out of the office until March 18 with limited access to email. If your matter is urgent, please contact Samantha Sweets at ssweets@abccompany.com.”

There are two things wrong with this auto-reply email. First, it says that you have limited access to email. Now, that may be true, however, when people write that, what the receiver reads is that you will be checking your emails periodically. Which means that you will likely reply to this email while you’re on vacation.

Second, it tells them that you will be back from vacation on March 18, which is the Monday after your week-long holiday. When you write this, people will expect a response from you on March 18, the first day back from your vacation. Now, you and I both know that this is an unrealistic expectation.

Here’s an alternate message for your out-of-office:

“I am currently out of the office with no access to emails. I will reply to your email upon my return to the office on Tue, Mar 19. If your matter requires an urgent answer, please contact my colleague Samantha Sweets at ssweets@abccompany.com.”

In the second version, you’re telling them that you will reply upon your return on Tuesday which is the day after you’re back in the office. Now, if you happen to reply on a Monday, they will be delighted, and if not, you’re meeting their expectations.

Also, you’re emphasizing that they should contact your colleague if they require an urgent answer. Most things do not require an urgent answer, but if they do, Samantha Sweet is available.

Don’t Tackle Emails as Soon as You Return

Our first instinct upon landing and unpacking our stuff on the Sunday night before returning to work is to look at our emails in case we missed something earth-shattering. I would urge you to resist the temptation of doing so. It only causes anxiety when you see a thread of emails without any context.

And, let’s be honest, we’ve all been there where we answer to an email only to read a bit more and find out that things were resolved and your email today will cause more confusion than help.

Here’s what I suggest instead to dealing with email after holiday. First, sort all your unread emails by subject line. This is helpful because you can quickly glance over and see where each email conversation was left off. Most likely you’ll see that many, if not all, of the emails, were already resolved. And if they weren’t, you’ll be able to see where things are at.

Second, schedule a meeting with Samantha, your out of office contact, as soon as possible on your first day back. Bring your laptop with you and ask her for a rundown of all that happened while you were away. I can’t stress this enough. In fact, I would suggest that you pre-book this meeting in both your calendars before you go on vacation so it’s in both your calendars.

It’s only after these 2 steps that I recommend you sit down to answer your emails.

Respond to the Last Email of the Conversation Thread

Once you’ve sorted the emails by subject line and have got the rundown from Samantha, you can start your responses to the emails.

My suggestion is to respond to the last email of each conversation thread. A simple response like, “Adam, I see that your question was answered. I’m back from vacation now and we have our next 1:1 schedule on Thursday. Looking forward to catching up then.”

Your time is your most valuable asset as an HR Business Partner (or any professional) and you need to guard it with everything you’ve got. Most people would say “give me a call if you want to chat” (I know I did that for years). But it’s not necessary.

If you’ve been listening to my advice over the past several weeks, you already have regular 1:1 meeting scheduled with your clients ahead of time. There is very little need then to deviate from that schedule with an unscheduled chat that you could easily cover at your next 1:1.

File Emails as Soon as You Respond

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I’m a stickler for a clean inbox. There’s nothing more overwhelming than seeing thousands of emails in your inbox that have already been actioned.

As soon as you reply to that last email in the conversation thread, highlight all the emails in that conversation (you can do this quickly by clicking on the first email, then holding down your “Shift” key, click on the last email in the thread. This will highlight all the emails).

Then simply drag them to the appropriate folder that you’ve already set up. That way, you don’t have to think about or see those emails again and you can focus your energy on the things that matter.

Sit Back and Enjoy the Rewards of Being Organized

Repeat the process for all your conversation threads. There may be some emails that have not received a response. In this case, you will need to get back to the sender, but again, as soon as you’ve replied to the email, file it away.

Then, revel in the empty inbox and go grab your much-deserved beverage of choice. Dealing with email after holiday – piece of cake!

Vacations don’t need to be overwhelming. If you set up a process for dealing with email after holiday before you leave and have a solid process to deal with them when you return, your time away from the office will be a non-issue.

You can set up a similar process for the projects that you’re responsible for too. I don’t have space in this post to talk about that, but you get the idea. Prepare for milestones and deliverables during the week that you’re away. My recommendation would be to put someone else in charge such as Samantha Sweets.

If you’re an individual contributor or don’t have an acceptable backup person, then build your vacations into the project plan and give your team a heads up that there will be no movement on the project during the time you’re away. I know this sounds drastic, but you’ll be surprised at how little a week matters in the grand scheme of things.

Are you a leader hiring to build your high performing team? Did you know, the number one reason new hires don’t work out is because of their inability to fit within your company culture? I have a handy recruitment guide “Top 10 Interview Questions to Assess Culture Fit” to ensure you hire the right person every single time.