It spelled out the idiocy of believing that only the best were hired by startups, let alone unicorns, and everyone else was second caliber. As I said then, what a crock.
Throughout a long career as a recruiter and since I’ve said the same thing and it hasn’t changed.
The right place for you to work is the one that satisfies what you want — whether that’s the opportunity to work on bleeding edge technology, build a network, upgrade your resume or even plain, old curiosity.
The wrong place is the one you join with an eye to getting rich quick or for bragging rights.
For some people those reasons still stand, but a lot has changed.
That’s understandable, considering the cost of living, but when you add the aspirations so many consider “necessities” then salary becomes even more important.
The problem, for both employers and employees is the same.
Money is not and never has been a source of loyalty — in either direction.
When companies feel the necessity to lower their burn rate the highly paid are often the first to go.
And my old adage that people who join for money/stock/perks will leave for more money/stock/perks still holds true.
Loyalty is the result of managers and companies giving a damn and employees invested in a mission that has meaning beyond money.
Silicon Valley is big on smoke and mirrors; the two biggest are
Startups, including unicorns (think WeWork), will make you rich is the smoke.
(‘Jerk’ is used here as an umbrella term for bullies, manipulators, bigots, rotten attitudes, rudeness, cruelty, etc.)
Jerks have been around since the dawn of man.
In today’s workplace you can find jerks at any level of an organization.
It’s always been difficult to call out the jerks, because they are usually bullies and good at intimidation.
The rise of individual jerks, some of them extremely powerful, has fostered the rise of institutional jerks, also very powerful.
Some are in tech and run for companies that are household names — Facebook, Google, Amazon — others aren’t as well-known, such as Palantir.
However, you can find them everywhere, in politics — national, regional and local. In religion — any of them. And any other arena you want to focus on.
Their power is more far-reaching and they believe they are untouchable.
Sadly, they often are.
But how much worse is it when the institution itself is the jerk?
The company acquired and plans to monetize software that tracks employees throughout a company.
Euclid’s website says the company is “focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future.” Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive.
Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It’s all done over Wi-Fi.
While the legislation varies slightly from state to state, it generally requires contractors to install software that allows “automatic verification” of their hours billed. Some bills, such as those being considered in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, are as exact as requiring a software solution that takes screenshots of “state-funded activity at least once every three (3) minutes” and store that data for seven years. The New Jersey and Pennsylvania proposals also require logging “keystroke and mouse event frequency.”
Now comes the question that the jerks never seem to think about.
How do you recruit talent, let alone top talent, into an environment that says up front, “we don’t trust you”?
As for the private sector, there is no way that any kind of monitoring or surveillance will remain secret — any more than salaries did.
Companies that choose not to go down that road will enjoy a more productive, creative and loyal workforce, not to mention one heck of a recruiting edge.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Diversity hiring is focused on women and minorities (we’ll be talking more about this during the week), but there are other categories that are the focus of negative bias.
Obviously, one is age, school bias is still front and center, and, of course, GPAs. As an ex headhunter, i.e., recruiter, I can tell you that GPAs are a total joke when it comes to great candidates. It’s not that good grades are bad, it’s that GPAs don’t tell much of the story — or at least not the parts that really count. Sam’s story below is a good example of what you miss when you focus mainly on GPAs.
I have a post today at Leadership Turn (a blog I wrote for b5 Media) that focuses on college student’s grade expectations for “trying really hard.” It’s worth clicking over to read because these are the same people you will be hiring over the next few years. Scary thought.
I said at the end that hiring managers might find it of more value to look at grades a bit differently.
Historically, managers and corporations have considered overall GPAs to be a significant factor when recruiting.
But based on current attitudes towards grade inflation, combined with federal, state and local governments’ focus on funding numbers as opposed to learning, perhaps there is a more useful use of grades.
Let me give you a real world example, I’ll call him Sam.
Sam has a 2.7 GPA, but if you look closer you see a different story.
Sam said that when he started college he not only didn’t bother studying he didn’t really know how. He said his grades in high school were mostly Bs and a few As, but that he never really put out much effort. His first semester was totally in the toilet and he almost flunked out when his GPA hit 1.8.
That was a wake-up call.
Sam buckled down. He started by learning how to study and how to learn and really applied himself.
Third semester his GPA was 2.5; junior year GPA was 3.1; senior year isn’t over. Additionally, the GPA for his major is a solid 3.5.
Sam isn’t getting a lot of interviews; he believes it’s because of that 2.7 GPA and he’s probably right.
But for a manager with an entry level position, Sam is solid gold.
Think about it,
he knows that he doesn’t know it all;
he enjoys learning and understands the value of hard work;
he knows that showing up every day isn’t enough; and
he realizes that he needs to perform at a high level to have value.
Sure sounds like a valuable employee to me—and one with a lot of potential loyalty to those who can see past the trappings to the real value.
Are you smart enough and confident enough of our interviewing skills to find the Sam hiding in that stack of resumes?
Technically I am a millennial, but on the older side of the generation. One thing I read a lot about my generation is the fact that we job hop and are never content.
I think this is a simplified observation by others as there are a lot of factors at play when deciding on leaving a company. This can range from the simple event where a better opportunity presented itself to the those leaving because the company is toxic.
I have been in the situation where I have started looking around, but also hold back out of loyalty to the current role. I am often curious though, is loyalty enough?
I think loyalty is an admirable quality when used in the right cases. Obviously you want to be loyal to a partner or family. Being loyal to friends is also welcomed.
In some cases loyalty can burn you. We all have that friend who drags us down that we stay loyal too. Jobs can do that as well. We feel guilt for looking elsewhere.
I often wonder why that is.
In my personal life I try to remain truthful to myself and my career regardless of the circumstances. When I am viewing other roles I remind myself that I still have a job to do and I want to do my best.
However, guilt remains.
I have thought about it I have reached the conclusion that, for myself, I try to keep people happy. As a result I hate to let people down and know that happens when people quit.
What are your motivations when leaving or job hunting?
I doubt it is as simple as people make it seem from the outside.
Most of my writing is based on what is going on in my life right now. I have found it’s easier to write about what I know and tap into the emotion of it all. One thing I learned recently is culture can be a double-edged sword and should be respected as such.
If any of you are reading more than Entertainment Weekly I am sure you have seen the meltdowns that are occurring at Uber, the falling stock prices at Valeant Pharmaceuticals and maybe the second bankruptcy of Radio Shack. All of these are a result of a culture that betrayed the very members it was meant to protect.
How do we watch out for that in our personal lives?
One way I do it is by seeking constant feedback. I have found I have a significant blind spot when it comes to measuring myself, so I suck up my pride and go to those I know will give me a real answer. Perhaps these companies could have done the same?
When looking at these three cases I have found one commonality, pride. Let’s examine each and see what you think.
Uber is pretty public at this point. The CEO had a history of being bold, in your face and decisive. This has its place but can also become unbalanced. Additionally, somewhere from the top down the idea that women should not be treated equal came out and as a result you have cases of sexual misconduct and favoritism playing out.
Valeant was a darling of Wall Street for many years. Its former CEO was incentivized to get his stock to a certain price point. If he did that he was rewarded with stock options that were incredible. Harvard did a study on it and thought the scheme was amazing. What people didn’t know though was the CEO was utilizing accounting methods that favored the stock price. He also utilized a private pharmacy that was undisclosed to the public to deliver his prescriptions. This had an added benefit to the stock. Both methods were found to be unethical, the stock crashed and shareholders lost billions.
Radio Shack recently filed for a second bankruptcy. They have been unable to turn around their stores to get to a profitable point. I am not too old to remember going into these stores as a child and enjoying them. They offered some great products, were knowledgeable and if you were a radio geek you could find just the part you needed. Unfortunately they didn’t expect a rise in cell phones, online ordering and other buying trends. These have all contributed to its losses. They are still around but I wonder for how much longer.
I bring all of these up as examples where the culture of each led to misses and failures.
Culture in my mind is the mentality of a company — its thought processes.
On an individual basis are you allowing your culture to betray you?
It’s about Bill O’Reilly’s twisted thoughts on what constitutes loyalty.
“I’m not interested in making my network look bad.”
Later that day, he continued the thought in a commentary on his own show in which he appeared to question Ms. Kelly’s loyalty to Fox by saying, without naming her: “If somebody is paying you a wage, you owe that person or company allegiance. If you don’t like what’s happening in the workplace, go to human resources or leave.”
Agreeing with O’Reily means that if your boss hits, grabs, gropes, insults, harasses, etc., your only recourse is to tell a person/department that too often has little-to-no power, and sometimes no interest, in fixing the problem or get out of Dodge — even if it means breaking your contract.
Read anything about professional loyalty and you’ll find that it is the company’s responsibility to give people a reason to be loyal.
Reasons include a workplace that don’t tolerate any type of harassment no matter who it is from — up to and including the CEO.
Additional reasons include fairness and respect, although there are many others.
We do owe loyalty (and protection) to ourselves, but I don’t believe anyone owes loyalty to a a person or company where they have to constantly look out, whether for a knife in the back or death by a thousand cuts.
“Ownership” is the difference between having employees who care and those who are just along for the ride.
Jim Haskett, Harvard business School professor emeritus, hosts lively conversations around current research he and his colleagues have done. The comment period is roughly two weeks and the ideas/comments are as interesting as Haskett’s original post.
In our work, we found that an “owner”—either a loyal employee or customer who takes responsibility for improving relationships, products, and processes as well as referring new employee candidates or customers—can be worth more than a hundred “renters—”those who are only involved with the organization to complete one or more transactions.
Think about it; why would Uber drivers care about the company — to use Haskett’s terms, they rent the job.
It isn’t just the so-called on-demand jobs that hire renters. There are plenty of them in full-time positions and, surprisingly, even in companies such as Google and Facebook.
In a recent Golden Oldie we considered the truism that “you get what you give” when it comes to respect and that’s true about most things.
Another old saying is also very true — people don’t quit companies, they quit managers.
In companies with “real” jobs, it’s the managers who determine whether employees are owners or renters.
Be sure to click over, read the comments and add your own.
Do you use or are you familiar with HireAthena? It provides professional services, such as HR, benefits, payroll, FSA and 401k management, accounting, bookkeeping, monthly financials, and taxes, using a subscription model priced according to size and needs, dominantly for startups, non-profits and other small biz.
However, unlike most on-demand providers HireAthena is not using 1099 contract professionals.
In a unique twist in the on-demand labor market, HireAthena offers its professional workforce the best of both worlds: they receive a competitive salary, 401(k), and medical/dental/vision insurance, but they can also work from home. (…) “We’re committed to the idea that employees are loyal if we’re loyal to employees, even if you’re part-time,” said Kristen Koh Goldstein, founder and CEO of HireAthena.
What’s more, HireAthena is specifically targeting professional stay-at-home moms and dads, which gives them a significantly under-utilized source of candidates.
And in case you think that HireAthena’s model only applies to higher-end professional, you have a short memory.
Managed by Q hires its “operators,” as it calls them, as employees, offering full-time and part-time employment with benefits and stock options. The work is flexible, and Managed by Q works with operators’ schedules.
While HireAthena is a spinoff of Backops and Scalus, which have raised $12 million, it hasn’t taken any funding directly and expects to be profitable later this year.
“Our mission wouldn’t be taken seriously unless we were profitable. This is not a charitable organization. We’re employing moms and dads in order to provide a very affordable service to small businesses.”
Henry Ford figured it out in 1914 when he doubled his workers’ daily wage. He did so on the assumption that they would spend the additional money on stuff beyond subsistence needs and he was right — they bought Fords.
Companies today still haven’t learned that lesson and continue to treat workers as disposable, fighting the idea of a living wage and crying that the cost will destroy them.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Technically I am a millennial, but on the older side of the generation. One thing I read a lot about my generation is the fact that we job hop and are never content.
Henry Ford figured it out in 1914 when he doubled his workers’ daily wage. He did so on the assumption that they would spend the additional money on stuff beyond subsistence needs and he was right — they bought Fords.
