PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 342 - Sports and HR with The 8 Man Rotation

HR Happy Hour 342 - Sports and HR with The 8 Man Rotation

Sponsored by Virgin Pulse - www.virginpulse.com

Host:Steve Boese 

Guests: Kris Dunn, Lance Haun

Listen HERE

Today on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve was joined by two of the founding members of the 'Sports and HR' crew known as The 8 Man Rotation. Kris, Lance, and Steve broke down three recent HR and workplace issues taken from the world of sports.

The crew discussed the recent harassment and hostile workplace charges at the NBA's Dallas Mavericks organization, how the City of Pittsburgh is implementing a form of the NFL's 'Rooney Rule' to try and improve diversity and representation of underserved populations in City's workforce, and how one innovative technology is moving from the football field and into corporate America.

Sports were the source of these topics, but the true topics were harassment in the workplace, the responsibility of leaders to respond to harassment reports, diversity in sourcing and hiring, and how modern technology is changing workplace training - all 'real' HR issues.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, on your favorite podcast app, or by using the widget player below:

This was a fun, interesting, and engaging conversation about how these important workplace issues have originated in the world of sports, but have relevance and importance in the 'real world' too.

Additionally, we broke down budget hotels in the southeast, the best dining options at Publix, and Tim Sackett's shameless use of exclamation points in blog post titles.

Thanks Kris and Lance for joining us!

Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts - just search for 'HR Happy Hour'.

HRE Column: Making Better HR Decisions Using HR Tech

Yes, you may have noticed that I have been writing a little bit less frequently here on the blog. The combination of a ton of travel in September, helping deliver the largest HR Technology Conference ever, and keeping the growing HR Happy Hour Podcast Network going are all taking up quite a few cycles lately. But I am still writing over at Human Resource Executive where my latest column just posted.

The piece is titled How Technology Helps Us Make Better HR Decisions and is a reflection on some of the more important topics in HR and HR Tech today - data, and making sense of data, and understanding how modern HR tech can help us make better HR and Talent decisions.

Here's an excerpt from the piece on HRE:

With the HR Technology Conference just completed a few weeks ago, I have had some time to attend a few industry events, record new episodes of the HR Happy Hour Podcast, and give a presentation on data, technology and decision-making in HR and talent management.

In preparing for that talk, I referenced two highly recommended books, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellberg; and Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb. While neither book is “about” HR—or even the workplace—both provided some excellent frameworks for thinking about information, data, technology and AI, and had great examples of how understanding these “non-HR” concepts can help those of us in HR get better at making talent decisions.

I thought I’d devote this month’s column to sharing a few ideas from those books and my own personal thoughts on how we might want to view our people challenges a little differently.

1. Data don’t always mean what you think they mean.

How Not to Be Wrong opens with an extremely interesting tale from World War II. As air warfare gained prominence, the challenge for the military was figuring out where and in what amount to apply protective armor to fighter planes and bombers. Apply too much armor and the planes become slower, less maneuverable and use more fuel. Too little armor, or if it’s in the “wrong” places, and the planes run a higher risk of being brought down by enemy fire.

To make these determinations, military leaders examined the amount and placement of bullet holes on damaged planes that returned to base following their missions. The data showed almost twice as much damage to the fuselage of the planes compared to other areas, most specifically the engine compartments, which generally had little damage. This data led the military leaders to conclude that more armor needed to be placed on the fuselage.

But mathematician Abraham Wald examined the data and came to the opposite conclusion. The armor, Wald said, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are; instead, it should go where the bullet holes aren’t, specifically, on the engines. The key insight came when Wald looked at the damaged planes that returned to the base and asked where all the “missing” bullet holes to the engines were. The answer was the “missing” bullet holes were on the missing planes, i.e. the ones that didn’t make it back safely to base. Planes that got hit in the engines didn’t come back, but those that sustained damage to the fuselage generally could make it safely back. 

Read the rest at HRE Online...

You can also subscribe on HRE Online to get my monthly Inside HR Tech column via email here. I promise it will be the most exciting email you will ever receive. 

Thanks for checking out the column, the blog, the podcasts, the 'Alexa' show, and all the nonsense I'm now in my second decade of churning out. 

Have a great weekend!

PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 341 - The Evolution of Talent Branding and Candidate Experience

HR Happy Hour 341 - The Evolution of Talent Branding and Candidate Experience

Sponsored by Virgin Pulse - www.virginpulse.com

Host: Steve Boese

Guest: Kathryn Minshew, The Muse

Listen HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve was joined by Kathryn Minshew, CEO and Founder of The Muse, a career platform used by over 50 million people to navigate their careers and by hundreds of companies looking to attract, hire and retain great talent. She’s also the author of "The New Rules of Work," a Wall Street Journal national bestseller.

On the show, Kathryn discussed how candidates have become increasingly discerning in their careers, how they expect more and more authentic information from prospective employers, and how organizations can leverage new technology and media to deliver these talent brand messages and create better candidate experiences.

Kathryn feels we are in the 3rd phase of the talent branding and candidate experience journey - where employers have to be specific, accurate, and use their 'real' people to tell the organization's stories and deliver an authentic message about how they experience their work environment. She also shared how some of the more effective employer attraction strategies have parallels to marketing - by sourcing great stories to share with prospective candidates, inserting more information and authenticity when interacting with candidates on sites like LinkedIn and email, and by making job descriptions more thoughtful and interesting to candidates. 

Listen to the show on the show page HERE, on your favorite podcast app, or by using the widget player below:

This was a great conversation, thanks to Kathryn for coming back on the show!

Subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show wherever you get your podcasts.

One way legacy companies can change the recruiting and retention equation

One challenge most older, 'legacy' companies can face when recruiting and attempting to retain their most desired people and keep them from flocking to the newer, more exciting, and often more lucrative startups in their industries is their very own legacies and brands.

One could argue that 25 year old hotshot developers are not that interested in joining say an IBM, when they could jump on a new AI or blockchain startup. Or in finance, the allure of say a JP Morgan Chase might not hold all that much resonance when that same 25 year old has been immersed in crypto currency exchange technology for the last few years. Or in retailing, what would draw someone who has many options to a company like Walmart or Target, when modern, fast-moving, and tech-driven startups like Stitchfix seem to be much more exciting?

Well, one 'legacy' company is trying a really clever strategy for to address this challenge - the legendary auto manufacturer GM is looking to improve its success in recruiting and retaining talent for its new self-driving unit named Cruise, by offering new employees equity directly in the Cruise unit, and not in legacy GM. From a recent piece in TechCrunch describing the plan:

In what will be seen as a big recruiting and retention win for Cruise, employees will be offered equity in GM’s self-driving technology subsidiary rather than shares of GM. The securities offering was disclosed in a recent SEC filing for GM Cruise Holdings LLC.

The equity structure gives all Cruise employees the chance to own actual shares of Cruise, not in GM. It’s a critical development for a company, even one flush with new capital like Cruise, that is working to deploy autonomous vehicles on a commercial scale.

“The goal was primarily to create a new equity structure so that we could recruit and retain the best talent by giving them direct participation in potential upside in Cruise through owning actual shares in Cruise, which we didn’t have before,” Cruise CEO and co-founder Vogt told TechCrunch.

So how does a company like GM better compete for in-demand talent, that may be drawn to their smaller, upstart competitors? By making it seem for the most part that this talent doesn't really work for GM, they work for a self-driving car startup called Cruise that just so happens to be subsidiary of GM. And this allows GM not only to get a lift from not being wed to 100+ years of GM history from a branding perspective, it allows loosens up the compensation purse strings for these Cruise employees, as large, legacy companies like GM have much more rigid and formal methods of allocating compensation - ones that their startup competition usually are not encumbered by.

And if things work out for Cruise, the prospect for employees of really cashing in with a spinoff and an IPO add the carrot of potential future millions that 'legacy' GM would never be able to match. It's a clever way to combine the strengths of GM's legacy and history with some new ideas that shore up some of the weaknesses in that legacy.

And yes, I am a GM owner. But I am still driving my own car. For now anyway.

Have a great day!

Expect Great Things

The other day I caught an interview with Kevin Dann, the author of 'Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau'. I don't know any more than the average person about Thoreau, I read Walden Pond I am pretty sure back in high school, but that is about it.

But the interview with Dann, the most recent of Thoreau's many biographers really resonated for me, and mainly for the author's reasoning behind the book's title.

Here's the section from the interview, courtesy of the Art of Manliness Podcast:

Kevin Dann - And you’re pointing to my contextualizing Thoreau in this way. A big part of that was a signature I found right away was this sense, you know, I used it for the title of the book. “Expect great things”. So his mantra was, that he said in a hundred different ways, “In the long run, we find what we expect. We shall be fortunate then if we expect great things.” And whether it’s astrology, or reading tea leaves, the operative principle of magic is that what we think manifests in the world as being real, and that’s what his mantra was. “Expect great things”.

I pretty much stopped really taking in the rest of the hour-long conversation after hearing that. The 'Expect Great Things' concept I just could not stop thinking about. Maybe because it is so different than what I am comfortable or used to doing. I might, on a good day, 'hope' for good things to happen, but I have to admit it is the more rare situation that I 'expect' great things. 

And Thoreau's point, as far as I think I understand it, is that eventually we find what we expect to find. We find what we think or believe we are going to find. There is also at least a bit of mysticism in what Thoreau was talking about. We also, I came to learn, communicated with faeries out in the woods.

But if Thoreau was right, and we do indeed, eventually, find what we expect to find, then it makes perfect sense to expect great things. Who would expect less?

Ok, I am signing off for the week. I am going to try better to expect great things in work, at home, for my Liverpool FC team, and for the folks that I hold dear. I hope you will too.

Have a great weekend!