Easter candies, ranked

In preparation for the imminent arrival of everyone's favorite Bunny, your entirely unscientific, incomplete, and 100% accurate ranking of Easter basket candies:

398 - Spiced jelly beans

397 - 11 - <big list of forgettable candies>

10. Solid chocolate bunny

9. Lindt Chocolate Carrots

8. Peeps

7. Milk Chocolate Peeps

6. Mini Robin Eggs

5. Reese's Peanut Butter Egg

4. Hollow Milk Chocolate Bunny (the best part is the hard candy bunny eyeball)

3. Cadbury Creme Egg

2. Russell Stover Marshmallow Egg

1. Jelly Belly Jelly Beans

Have a great, long weekend!

CHART OF THE DAY: How's your retirement fund?

Real quick shot for a busy Thursday...

In the last year I have hit the entire topic of the tightening labor market from a few different angles (companies reporting jobs are hard to fill, candidates control the conversation, more people are voluntarily quitting their jobs than at any time in a decade), and today I wanted to share one more data point that suggests a tougher market for employers.

Many folks retirement piggy banks have come back from the lows of the 2008/9 financial crisis.

Here's the chart, courtesy of Financial Planning, and then of course some FREE commentary from me.

Some quick thoughts:

1. US retirement assets (from all sources) stood at $24.7 trillion at the end of 2014, an all-time high. And a remarkable comeback from the huge drop in 2008 when so many folks had to dip into their savings after they lost a job and the markets themselves were in free fall. 

2. One of the reasons older workers have been unable or unwilling to consider either retiring or moving to some kind of reduced work schedule in the last few years, that their 401(k) balances were in the dumpster, has for many, disappeared. Sure, there might be other compelling reasons someone will extend their working career, but a rock-bottom retirement account balance is less likely to be one of them.

3. There is no doubt in my mind that in just about every organization there are older workers who will open their 1st quarter 2015 account statements and think to themselves, "Hmm.... Maybe it's time to hang it up." And for most of these folks, it won't matter if they are the only person at the company that knows how to do XYZ or they are the one with the key relationship with important customer ABC. For them, it is just about totally a decision about $ and quality of (retired) life.

4. HR/Talent pros - keep one eye on the S&P 500 and one eye on your voluntary termination trends this year - particularly with your experienced, senior-level, 50+ employees. I bet the two lines are going to move in the same direction, and if you don't want to be the one who has to explain what is going on in November when the CEO asks you why all the VPs are retiring at once.

Happy Thursday.

In Soviet Russia, (and America), Job Finds You

For a 'don't believe anything you read on the internet' April Fool's Day, I submit for your consideration a really interesting, (and totally not made up), conclusion about how people in the United States find jobs courtesy of a recently published Economic Letter from our pals at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Let's start with the researcher's money line first, then we will try and unpack it a little bit:

More than three-quarters of workers who switched employers did not report active job search in the previous three months.

Did you take a second to process that statistic? 

Of all the 'new hires' that the researchers examined, 77.6% of them had not reported being in an active job search in the previous three months. And we are not talking about internal job transfer types of moves here, these are employer-to-employer job shifts. So the vast majority of job-to-job transitions do not follow the standard interpretation of a labor market that matches workers who are actively seeking out job openings with the positions that are posted by employers.

So essentially, according to this research, over three-quarters of hiring is coming from direct recruiting/poaching, referrals, and informal networks.

Probably not a great surprise/finding for experienced HR/Talent pros, but a good reminder for folks who are still out there beating down doors in an active job search. Here's a summary of the data from the research, then one last point before we sign off.

The researcher's data shows that while 77.6% of hires are coming from employed folks who were not searching for a new job, that still only constitutes about 2% of all employed people. Translated - your recruiting/poaching/referral processes are still only nabbing less than 2% of folks out there, underscoring how hard it can be to identify, engage, convince, and finally hire people out of existing jobs into new ones at your company.

Net-net: At least according to this research, most jobs find people, not the other way around.

Have a great April Fool's!

Candidate Advice You Should Not Share With Your Candidates

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s after a spate of run-ins with the law and arrests and general bad behavior amongst members of his Oklahoma University football team, then-coach Barry Switzer was asked by a reporter what he planned to do about better controlling player's off-field conduct. Switzer, probably out of frustration, and the fact that that morning another player had been arrested for assault, is said to have replied "Frankly I am not sure what else I can do, short of putting up a sign in the locker room that says "Committing a felony is against team policy"."

Switzer's point was that he should not have to remind the players of really obvious things - things every decent person just knows to be true, regardless of who they are or how experienced they might be. I thought of that old story when I saw another version of the endlessly repeated 'Advice to job candidates' tips pieces, that includes, among other nuggets, a recommendation to 'Be nice to the receptionist' when showing up for a job interview.

That advice is terrible. Not because candidates shouldn't be nice to the receptionist, rather because no decent person, yet alone candidate, should have to be reminded to be nice to the receptionist, or anyone else. In fact, as an employer you would not want to artificially inject fake 'niceness' into a candidate who otherwise would not be nice. It would be better to catch them being an ass and reject them up front, rather than get duped by some fake interview day charm and learn only later how much of a jerk they really are.

So with that said, here are my Top 3 pieces of candidate advice you should not share with candidates:

1. Be nice to the receptionist/security guard/limo driver - sort of covered above, but worth repeating. No one, once they are older than about 9, should have to be reminded to be 'nice.' In fact, 'nice', needs to be the default setting. You should expect more than 'nice' from people that you really want to be around for more than 3 minutes at a time. Translated - I can accept 'nice' from the Starbucks barista, people I am going to work closely with for 40 hours a week had better be damn nice, if you get my meaning.

2. Show up on time, be dressed appropriately, take a shower before the interview - Everything that falls into the category of 'Basic rules of conduct in a civilized society' should not be repeated under the mantle of candidate advice. The only exception possibly being when advising students preparing for their first experience in an interview setting, where some coaching on dress/conduct might be warranted. For everyone else though, if a candidate needs to be reminded to skip the flip-flops for the interview, then you should just let that candidate flip-flop on out of your office.

3. Research the company/industry prior to the interview - 'Normal' people will read 27 reviews on Yelp before choosing a lunch restaurant and scour page after page of Amazon ratings while considering which pair of earbuds to buy. So we have to remind candidates to know something about the company they are about to interview with? If a candidate turned up for an interview less informed about your company than they were about the last season of The Walking Dead, then again, you want to catch that lack of intellectual curiosity and conscientiousness up front.

I am sure if we really wanted to we could dredge up several more pieces of 'Candidate Advice' that are really just 'How to behave like a decent human being' tips, but you get the idea. Not taking a cell phone call in the middle of the interview probably deserves a mention too, but I think you get the idea.

You don't want to coach your candidates to be decent human beings, you want your process to allow those 'not decent' folks to reveal themselves before you make the mistake of hiring them.

Otherwise, you could find yourself tacking a 'Committing a felony is against company policy' sign on the break room wall.

UPDATE: The Microsoft Band and the Future of Wearables at Work

Do you wear a fitness tracker like a Fitbit or a Jawbone? Or maybe you are planning to jump on the Apple Watch fanboy train in a few weeks and take advantage of that device's ability to track your activity. Lot's of folks are keeping closer track of their workouts and activity today.

A few months back Microsoft launched its first entry into the wearables market with the Microsoft Band, a wearable tracker that possesses a variety of sensors including a microphone, a GPS location sensor, motion sensors, an optical sensor that measures heart rate, a sensor that tracks skin conductance, which can reveal levels of stress, and even a UV sensor to calculate sun exposure, delivered in a black bracelet with a rectangular touch screen.

At that time, your humble blogger, (me), shared some thoughts about why this particular wearable smart device could be the one that has the greatest potential for near-term impact and relevance to work, workplaces, and employees. Namely, because Microsoft has such a choke hold on most organization's email, calendaring, and document management that it would be both natural and powerful for a Microsoft wearable to be integrated with these existing and traditional workplace tools.

You can read my entire take here, but at the risk of getting too meta and quoting myself, below is the gist of my argument back in October 2014:

I can think of a couple of really compelling use cases for this kind of integration right off the top. 

One - how work itself effects employee health. Does someone's heart start racing in every staff meeting? Do they begin to get twitchy when called upon to present to a group? Does a certain interaction with a colleague result in three nights of poor sleep? And then what can organizations then do to better understand and potentially align individuals with projects and team members that can aid their ability to perform, while not making them crazy? How do schedules, (and in particular over scheduling), impact employee health and activity? Do we need to be more mindful of how overworked and over scheduled many of our people are?

Two - Insights into who in the organization inspires, challenges, and lifts people up, and who serves as essentially the corporate buzzkill? Imaging a meeting with 10 people inside, all wearing the MS Band. One person dominates the meeting, maybe it is the boss, and immediately after the other 9 people begin to show signals of nervousness, irritability, or even lethargy. Maybe email and collaboration patterns in the team begin to show signs of changing as well. Perhaps some members of the team skip their normal workouts for a day or two in the aftermath. Maybe some folks don't even turn up the next day. 

Clever stuff, right? Why bring that back up again today? Well, check the comments from a recent piece from a few days ago that was posted on the MIT Technology Review site - Microsoft's Wristband Would Like To BE Your Life Coach:

During a recent interview at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, Matt Barlow, general manager of marketing for new devices, said the company is investigating the kinds of insights it can share with users by matching up biometric data with other sources of information like their calendar or contacts to show things like which events or people may stress them out.

In the coming months, the Microsoft Health app is poised to gain the ability to compare calendar or contact information with your physical state as measured by the band—your heart rate or skin conductance level, for instance—so the app could nudge you with detailed observations about how those things might relate. For instance, the app might send you an alert like, “I noticed you have a meeting with Susan tomorrow, and last time you met with her your heart rate went up 20 beats per minute and stayed elevated for an hour. How about trying this deep-breathing exercise that you can use with the Band?”

Initially, these kinds of scenarios are expected to become possible through an integration with Microsoft Office services, though over time it may branch out to include other services as well.

Hey - the Microsoft dude is essentially touting the same kinds of capability and interesting workplace data integrations that little old me talked about in October. But not to say I told you so...

But the real point of resurfacing the old post and topic was just to remind you that even though wearables and fitness trackers have been around for a while now, we really are just still in the first inning of a long game. Trackers and biological/physiological sensors won't really start impacting the way work gets done until they actually are integrated with the tools of work - email, calendars, meetings, etc.

Stay tuned...

Have a great week!