EP120 | Why Hiring Is Broken & What Elon Got Right - An Unfiltered Session with Tim Sackett

[00:00:15] It's Tim Sackett, and I'm back with another episode of the best HR podcast in the land. Like I don't know what to tell you. Partly it's probably because of me, probably it's the guests I have. But like I told you, if you've been kind of paying attention and following along, today's just me, it's all you got. No guest, just Tim, unfiltered, which could be really dangerous to my career, but we're going to try and we're going to see what's going on.

[00:00:39] I got three things I want to talk about today that have been kind of on my mind. Last week I had the invitation to go and speak to a group of SHRM members, right? And I guess it's like a SHRM group, so it's members, non-members, whoever they can get to come in for the meeting.

[00:00:58] And it was interesting because we were talking about kind of talent acquisition and building this hiring machine and all these things. And then afterwards we have kind of a really robust kind of Q&A, which is really my favorite thing. Again, I love sharing like, hey, here's the tech you should look at and here's things to try. But like at the end, then you get to really hear the questions. And one of the questions that came up was one that I think is so foundational in recruiting and we broke it.

[00:01:24] And so that's why I love to talk about this one, which is the lady had said to me, she's like, hey, Tim, like, you know, you've talked about like, you know, sending these, how many candidates and, you know, setting up interviews and all of this stuff. And she's like, look, I like, I can't get a hiring manager to like, if I send them one, like I find a good candidate, you know, somebody applies and we screen them and I send it to the hiring manager.

[00:01:49] I'm like, okay, hey, let's interview this person. And they're just like, they won't just interview the one. They go like, well, let's wait till we get some more. And she's like, I know we're going to lose this person if we don't interview now. And it's this weird dynamic because every ATS in the land right now will show you that like the average number of applicants, right, has doubled in the last like 12 to 18 months. Like we see more and more. Now, a lot of reasons for that, right? We have candidates using AI to apply.

[00:02:17] We have, you know, companies that have gotten a process that's better. So it's allowing candidates to apply faster, easier, right? And so we're getting better. At top of funnel, which, but it actually creates more work on us. But we also know as recruiting TA leaders, HR leaders, that just because the average number is big and doubled and blah, blah, blah, we always have those openings where we struggle to get hardly any traffic.

[00:02:47] And there's a lot of reasons for that, right? I mean, it could be a job that just doesn't have a ton of skill sets out there, right? So you're always going to have less. It could be you're underpaying for that job. It could be you're not well known, right, for being somebody to go to work for the brand. Like if I'm a, sometimes I'm an IT person and we see this a lot and you're a manufacturing company in the middle of the Midwest, you're going to struggle to get good IT talent because they don't view you as great for their career.

[00:03:15] Even though the job might be great, the pay might be great. Like everything, the balance might be great. The work is they get to work on is great. They just don't know. Right. So I go back to the initial problem of not being able to get a hiring manager to move on a candidate to interview. It told me a couple of things. One, this person, while caring about her job, caring about the company, caring about the hiring manager, blah, blah, blah, definitely doesn't have a great trusting relationship with this hiring manager.

[00:03:44] If that was the case, she easily could have called and said, you know what, I'm going to work on getting you some more. But in the meantime, I need you to interview this person now because this is how good I think this person is. And that hiring manager 100% would have said, heck yeah, let's do it. Like go, let's get it done.

[00:04:01] But the bigger foundational issue isn't necessarily the trust. It's what TA has done over the last two or three decades to create this behavior from hiring managers, which is we've gotten to, and again, you're going to go, that's not us, Tim. Here's what I'm saying. 90% of most talent acquisition functions do this one thing. They post jobs and then they collect people that apply and then they jam those people onto a hiring manager.

[00:04:31] And again, this is over decades, right? And you go, oh, Tim, we screen people. Okay, great. You screen people. Most people don't. They just, they actually throw them to the hiring manager. Now, again, a lot of reasons for that. Sometimes the hiring manager is just like, let me see everybody. And again, if I am a functioning TA leader, HR leader who knows my stuff, I'm going to say, no, that's a waste of your time.

[00:04:56] And it's a waste of our expertise to just to throw every single candidate at you. And we know half the people who are applying don't even come close to this job. Why would you ever want to see those people? That's a waste of your time as a leader, right? And I would have that exact conversation with that person. But what we've allowed happening is this behavior of, hey, I'm going to send you 10 qualified screened candidates. And they'll go and they'll look and they'll go, oh God, no garbage. Send me 10 more.

[00:05:24] Well, no, I didn't send you 10 people with the understanding that I'm going to send you more. I sent you people believing these are the people that are right for the job and you should interview these people. But what happens is all that kind of unconscious bias, sometimes conscious bias falls into play and they end up going to send more, send more. And here's what I think is the holy grail of all corporate TA and recruiting is simply this.

[00:05:52] You should be able to get to 90% perfectly. You're going to interview the person that I sent to you. It should be 90%. If I send you 10 candidates, I'm going to give you one that you go, yeah, I actually know Tim. Good candidate. Understand why you sent him. But understand the reason that we're not going to interview him is because he doesn't have the front end experience that we're looking for, whatever, right?

[00:06:19] I only know that because I know. Cool. Gotcha. The other ones automatically you're going to interview. And here's my reasoning is we are wasting resources within the company every single time that I go through and I post a job and people apply and I screen those people. And then I go, yeah, this person would be good. Good for our culture. Good for this job. You know, I've done the intake. I know what they're looking for.

[00:06:46] And I send it to the hiring manager and they go, no. Well, you just wasted all of that time, energy, resources that we spent to find that candidate. Why would you say no? Well, I, you know, they, they went to ABC school and I don't like that school or whatever. I just know that school is crap. And you're just like, well, just because you have that bias doesn't mean that this person couldn't be great.

[00:07:08] Right. And so for me, I think the Holy Grail is every time I send you a candidate, you should interview that candidate. I'll give you the one knockout, the 10%, but we should be batting around 900. If you are batting 300, you could be a hall of famer in the major league baseball and in recruiting, you should be fired, right? There's no reason that when you send a candidate that shouldn't happen.

[00:07:31] Now I go back to like this Holy Grail concept of the perfect TA function and experience would be, I'm not even going to send you candidates. You and I have this great relationship. We trust each other. You know, all I want is to find a great candidate for your position, success of this company, success of you as a manager. So I'm going to just basically, you tell me, you give me openings on your calendar and I'm going to fill those with great talent that you're going to interview.

[00:07:57] Understand we're adults. There's going to be false positives that happen. I'm going to send you somebody and they're going to completely crap the bed in front of you. And you know what? I'm sorry about that, but that happens. By the way, if I just send you every single candidate and you personally pick each one you want to interview, the same exact thing is going to happen. Somebody's going to come in and they're going to throw up on your desk and you're going to go, oh my God. Well, now you're to blame because you chose them.

[00:08:26] Like, let's get away from the blame thing. These are human beings. False positives happen. For the most part, though, we should have a trusting relationship where I send you somebody and you don't even question whether or not you want to interview them automatically. You want to interview them because you know I put the work in to find them for you. That's the first thing I wanted to talk about.

[00:08:47] I think we are failing at corporate TA when we don't get to that realm of saying, hey, I don't need to send you more. Now go back to this hiring manager that wouldn't interview this one candidate. How can you get around that? You know, again, you can't just, you know, push people to get to this holy grail concept. You get to work your way there, build that trust, blah, blah, blah.

[00:09:09] I think one thing you could do is just say, hey, I'm not going to just send you one candidate, right? I'm going to send you three and I'm not going to send you any more until, you know, I get you to, you know, actually interview these people or tell me exactly why these three actually won't work for you or whatever that means.

[00:09:26] I'm never, ever, and I'll have this conversation with every executive all the way up. I'm never going to send every single person who applies to a hiring manager who thinks they know more than I regarding the job, the culture of the company, what we're looking for in terms of talent, blah, blah, blah. Like, I'm just not going to happen. Now I will think, I mean, you happily sit down with you as a leader and go through every single one. So now I can learn, right? That's that trust building. But like, we have to get beyond that.

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[00:10:22] You can catch Hashtag Gen Z on the Work Defined Podcast Network and wherever you listen to podcasts. The other thing that happened that's like people are losing their minds, especially in HR, is Elon Musk going out to the federal government and sending out the email that said, Hey, what did you do last week? Give me five bullet points on what you did last week.

[00:10:45] And oh my God, people are losing their minds that how could somebody do that? And I'm like, what do you mean? Why haven't we been doing that? And so here's the, again, I'll go back to the foundational issue of what Elon has found in government. By the way, we all knew this was an issue. Like, let's not act like somehow Elon is the evil or the devil for finding out that government was inefficient.

[00:11:15] We all knew it. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Green Party. We all knew that the government sucked and was inefficient and that they were wasting money and we had to get better, right? Bill Clinton knew this. That was what he ran on as president. He was a Democrat, right? Like, again, this isn't a Democrat-Republican thing. This is performance-based. So Elon comes out, says, Hey, send me your five bullet points of what you did last week.

[00:11:40] By the way, this should take you all of 30 seconds to say, by the way, I have way more than five. I'll give you the top five. But if you want 50, I can give you 50 because there's 50 things, right, that I worked on last week, if not more, blah, blah, blah. Here's the foundational issue. We suck at managing performance as managers. There's a few things here.

[00:12:02] We don't want to go out to somebody that we're managing, right, that's on our team and go, Hey, by the way, give me five things, you know, the biggest five things that you worked on last week. Because we feel like, I don't want to micromanage Tim, right? Oh, my God, he's going to feel micromanaged. Okay, I don't give a shit if that person feels micromanaged. I'm paying them to do a job. They should be able to easily tell me and not feel like I'm micromanaging them around five stupid things that they did last week.

[00:12:31] So we suck at that, right? That we can't even manage the performance of individuals that are out there. That is hugely problematic that that's the case and that we feel that way, right? Part of that would be, as a leader, I would never go out and just say that. I would say, Hey, by the way, we have a high-performing culture. And I want to know the five things that are most important to you that you were working on last week. So I can know I can support you on those things.

[00:12:58] Also, if there's another priority that I know comes from top down that some leader says, Hey, by the way, this has become like the biggest hot button in our company. I also want to be able to redirect and help you understand, Hey, by the way, this wasn't in your top five. Let's make sure we figure out a way to get it there over the next week or month or whatever, you know, the focus is going to be like, that's just good leadership management conversation to have.

[00:13:24] But foundationally, somehow we feel like we shouldn't be able to go out there because we're micromanaging somebody. Or here's the other pieces we go, well, I'm leading this team. I should already know what they're working on. So I don't have to ask them. Okay, cool. If you're that kind of leader that already knows and you're having great one-on-ones and blah, blah, blah. Good for you. You go do that. By the way, like it was, I can't remember. It was some tech CEO is like railing on the one-on-one concept.

[00:13:53] And he was like, it's so inefficient. I would never have a one-on-one. And I've always been an advocate for one-on-ones. He was saying he doesn't have one-on-ones because it slows the process down. Instead of having one-on-ones, I have my entire team together and we just put it all out there, right? Now, again, that's great if you think like you have this open and honest environment where everyone's going to share openly.

[00:14:18] But if I'm having a one-on-one with somebody and they're struggling with something, they're more likely to actually tell me, hey, I need some help here. In a group of their peers, are they going to come and say they're struggling? Maybe, but most likely probably not, right? So again, back and forth on, you know, everyone's going to find their own kind of leadership style that works for them from this standpoint. I just think it's comical that we're losing our minds, right? Regarding this kind of thing.

[00:14:46] And at a high level, I think Elon's just like, look. And a part of this is because he's on the spectrum, right? Is that he's very straightforward in his conversational style and in his communication style and how he comes at people. And we're not used to that. It's very like, it's like, you know, you kind of like, oh, it's like a slap to the face. But from a performance management standpoint, if you strip out all the feelings and empathy and blah, blah, blah, what you get is, tell me what the heck you're working on.

[00:15:15] Tell me what the heck you're actually accomplishing. That's all performance management is. And we're terrible at it. And our executives actually want us to be better. And at government, for sure. Like, if you think like your own company is like, well, we're not great at performance management. We're average. The vast majority of government is way below average in performance management.

[00:15:37] In every single story that you hear and everything that's out there, you know, do we have great people that are working in government that are putting in more, you know, than we ever thought, blah, blah, blah. For sure. It's a broad stroke. But when you have something so large and so big, you have to start somewhere in digging into that, you know, from that standpoint. So the other thing that kind of goes with this, because my wife actually called me out on this weekend when we were driving. We were talking about this Elon thing and all this stuff that's happening.

[00:16:07] And we actually had went to dinner with some friends and they were, you know, upset about how they, you know, how you can't just cut an entire organization. And I was trying to explain like the concept of, well, sometimes like when everything is so big and so broken and you have fraud happening, but you don't know where. Where if you shut something down and then you wait to hear the panic and the yells and the screams, you kind of know where to turn things back on. Right.

[00:16:35] Like, but if you shut something down and then you hear nothing, you kind of like, oh, maybe we shouldn't have ever had that thing on. Right. And so there's this weird concept of like that. Anyways, I keep like, I was kind of railing on like younger workers today are just soft as compared to right millennials, Gen X, boomers, greatest generation, blah, blah, blah.

[00:16:58] By the way, every generation thinks that every generation thinks the generation coming up under them is softer than the one, than you were, blah, blah, blah. So I'm like, I'm not sharing anything like that's ground shattering that way. But my wife said, you know, that use of the word soft immediately puts people on the defense. It immediately makes people feel like you're against them or you think less of them, blah, blah, blah. And she was right.

[00:17:24] As we started talking, what it really came back to was lack of consequences. And we even talked about it from, you know, with our own upbringing and then our upbringing of our kids is we felt like we had consequences for our kids when they didn't do what they were supposed to do or didn't behave. But even then I could look at those consequences and said, like, holy crap, they weren't the consequences I had.

[00:17:47] If I, you know, one of my kids talked back to their mother, we might, you know, make them go to their room and take away their screen time. My dad whacked me. Like I had an immediate consequence. You talk back to an adult. You talk back to a teacher. You talk back to a coach. You were going to face physical violence. And again, right or wrong, it was a different time, right? Judge all you want. Different time. Now, would I do that? No. But so we put on different consequence and things of that sort.

[00:18:16] But as we start to see younger generations coming in, it seems like the consequences are less. We were talking about some of the campus kind of protesting things. And you have a campus, you know, a college student go on campus and they're protesting and their protestors decide, I'm going to face a building. That's destruction of property. You should be arrested. You should be put in jail. But if you go on social media, people are like, well, they're just a college student and, you know, they didn't really understand.

[00:18:45] You know, they were just protesting. They're passionate. And you're like, there's no consequences. We believe that they should just be let off. And then what does that tell them? It's like, oh, I can do anything, right? And then you see, you know, hateful speech happening. You see violence happening. And again, it just escalates when there's no consequence. You see this escalation of behavior that happens.

[00:19:08] And so I have to change my own kind of wording and how I talk about younger generations being soft. Because I truly believe, like, there's no better time for a younger worker to be successful than there is today. Because you have so many other people in your generation who are just like, I just want to work from home and I just want to do this. And they don't really want to grind hard. They don't really want to come into the office and, you know, be that victor.

[00:19:35] Or instead, they just want to, you know, complain that, you know, I'm working from home and somehow my company doesn't give me free lunch. And you're like, what? Like, I don't understand. Again, I said, hey, that's soft. Consequences. Lack of consequences creates opportunity for people who are willing to actually do what others aren't willing to do, right? And be that person that's going to be the victor and be that person that's going to come in and do more.

[00:20:03] So, yeah, I got to change my own kind of way that I talk about that. I understand that's defensive, calling somebody soft. There's a piece of me that likes that, right? Like, there's that kind of hustle culture mentality that I have in me that I don't necessarily love all the social hustle culture. Like, I get up at 245. Like, shut up. You don't. You don't. You don't do that. I spark my day by running a marathon and then sitting in an ice cold bath for an hour.

[00:20:32] And then I eat, you know, wood. Like, shut up. Like, I don't like that kind of hustle culture. But I like the opportunity to say, hey, we should get out there and actually stop complaining. Just work hard and good things are going to happen for you. And I truly believe a younger generation right now has more opportunity than ever. As you start to see baby boomers leave the workforce, as you start to see Gen Xers, which is a pretty small kind of generation, leave the workforce.

[00:20:57] And you have these millennials and you have kind of the Gen Z coming up and alpha underneath them. The ones who are willing to work really hard and just put their head down and bust ass have such an advantage. By the way, every generation, those people have had such an advantage. But it seems like even now, right, they could have more. So that's what you got. That's HR famous for this week. If there's something that you disagreed with, leave a comment.

[00:21:26] I would love to have an online fight with you. I'm just kidding. I won't do that. If there's something that you agree with, leave a comment because I love affirmation. Also, if there's things you want me to talk about like this and you want my opinion on, it's the one thing you know that you'll get pretty straight. So that's it. That's HR famous pod for this week. I will be back and we'll do better next time. See you guys later.