Playing Telephone

Do you remember playing the game Telephone when you were a kid? You would sit in a circle. Someone would start off by whispering a phrase to the person next to them. That person would then repeat the phrase to the next person in the circle, and so on until the phrase got back to the originator. A phase that started off as "I like pancakes" would end up as "try my cornflakes."

As we moved on through school and into the workplace, we've continued the game of Telephone. A leader expresses what they want, a couple levels of management interpret the request, then a message is delivered to those who are assigned to execute the task. Most of the time this works well. The idea of the organization's leader having 1:1 conversations with all their employees does not work. However, the message is sometimes lost in translation.

One of the rules of the Telephone game is that the receiver of the message can't ask for the messenger to repeat themselves. Sometimes it looks like we've carried that rule into the professional setting. The reticence to ask for clarification from leaders puzzles me. I love leaders that allow space for their employees to be creative, but if the employees are uncertain about the intended outcomes desired by the leader, it's time to go back to the source. It doesn't look incompetent to come back to a leader for clarification, it does look incompetent to deliver a final product the leader was not asking for.

The game of Telephone is necessary in organizations due to their size and structure. To balance that, let's normalize seeking clarity and not see that as a sign of failure. Because if I receive cornflakes when I wanted pancakes, we have a serious problem.

Who Is Your Tom?

Friday I had the honor to serve as the keynote speaker for Cleveland State University's TRIO Annual Graduation Celebration. The TRIO program is designed to help first-generation college and/or low-income students progress toward graduation.

The speaker before me was a graduating student named Koya. Years ago, Koya stepped away from her pursuit of her bachelors degree to raise her son. During her remarks, Koya talked about her current boss Tom, who hired her with one condition: that she would return to school to complete her bachelor's degree. So here she was Friday evening, in her mid 30’s, back to complete what she had started. She pointed to Tom, who came to the event, as she told her story. Her son, now a high school student, was in the audience to witness his mother receive a standing ovation as his mother finished her speech. 

We all need a few “Toms” in our life. The people that will hold us accountable to make ourselves better. The people that won’t allow us to let our potential remain untapped. The people that will show up to celebrate us.

I’m not sure what we can do to increase the number of “Toms” in our life. And because life isn’t fair, some people receive plenty of “Toms” while others don’t seem to have any. Here is one thing I do know: we can all serve as a “Tom” for someone else, because there are always people in need of a “Tom.”

Getting Lucky

There is a significant amount of luck involved with career progression. I've been a luck box my whole career. My high school track coach connected me with my first internship before I even knew what an internship was. My boss at my internship connected me with my first real job (I was looking at some fake jobs during my search, Jackie Boesinger saved the day for me). I was lucky enough for my first real job to be at a Fortune 500 company. I was lucky enough to not get restructured out when plenty people in my department did. I was lucky enough to be in a place that gave me the opportunity to switch careers. Since I got into this new career (human resources) the luck train has accelerated down the track.

We have to be prepared to take advantage of luck when it strikes. The more that we continuously upgrade our skillset, the more likely we are going to be ready to contribute to the next innovative project our organization will do.

We also have the opportunity to make ourselves luckier. The more people that we have solid relationships with, the better the chance that great opportunities will be brought to our attention, so go ahead and strike up a conversation with a stranger.

Volunteers get all the luck in the world. They step in to fill a gap helping others, then all types of doors open that they didn't envision. So go ahead and help that nonprofit you care about. It will benefit you more than you could imagine.

I've also been very lucky to not get get derailed by some of my poor decisions. I did a few things in college that most likely would have got me kicked out had I been caught. You probably wouldn't be reading this right now had that been the case. So while it's great to celebrate where luck brings us opportunities, it's also important to acknowledge when luck shields us from well-deserved consequences.

Luck plays a vital role in career advancement. Do the work on your end to make yourself a bit luckier.

Evolve or Evaporate

AI is taking some jobs. Before that, computers took some jobs. Before that, automation in factories took some jobs. Before that, offshoring took some jobs. Before that, it was something else taking jobs. There will always be something that makes a portion of today's jobs disappear. 

On the other side of the loss of older jobs is the creation of new jobs. Today's knowledge work economy is so advanced that it looks like magic compared to our economy 50 years ago. 

The skills needed to fully participate in the economy keep changing. We should not assume that we have a place in the economy if we are not constantly updating our skills. Gone are the days where we can expect to do the same thing the same way for years and expect to be handsomely rewarded. 

Upgrading our credentials is great, but this isn't even about credentials. There are enough free resources online for us to enhance our knowledge, skills, and abilities so that we can expand how we deliver value. 

If you're in a skilled trade, this message doesn't apply in the same way (plumbers gonna plumb). If you're not in a skilled trade, after a few years in the same role it's time to start looking over your shoulders. When organizations have to reduce salary, the conversation often starts by discussing the stagnant people. And we don't want to find ourselves in front of a recruiter trying to explain why we've had the exact same responsibilities for the past ten years. Evolve or evaporate.

Beware of the Chair

One of my best friends Erin runs very far. I mean like marathons are a warmup. One of the things she says is to “beware of the chair.” When a long distance runner sits down to take a break, it is very hard to get up. What the runner thought would be just a stop turns into a quit.

How often do we turn a break into a quit? “I need to take a break from school.” “I need to take a break from writing this book.” “I need to take a break from this side-hustle that I hope to be my primary business someday.” Sometimes we have to take a break. The problem emerges when the break goes too long, when we struggle to get up from the chair that we sat down in.

It’s better to keep moving. I’ve talked to many professionals that are in grad school while they have their full-time job. Oftentimes there are some significant family commitments in the picture as well. They will start talking about how they need to take a break from school because the overall load is too heavy. I’ll tell them to just do one class at a time to keep their momentum going. Slow progress is better than no progress. There is also the psychological element of knowing that you’re getting closer to your goal.

If you find yourself to be currently sitting down, consider this your sign from the universe that it’s time to get back up, and I do mean today. One of my favorite quotes is “Tomorrow: a mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored." We love to delay to tomorrow what we should be doing today. It’s hard to get out of the chair, maybe you can just roll out of the chair onto the floor, then get your momentum going with a crawl. It doesn’t matter how, just get going.

If you find yourself to be currently going, keep that momentum going. If you get tired, it’s okay to slow your pace to a walk. But whatever you do, beware of the chair.

Circle of Trust

I remember the first time I received results from a 360 survey. I thought I had received someone else's results. Part of me thought "this isn't true" while another part of me thought "why didn't anyone tell me." From that point forward, I made sure to be active in cultivating a few sources for regular feedback. In order for us to advance professionally, we need a few types of truth speakers around us.

We would imagine that our Boss would be loaded with truth telling for us, but this is an inconsistent source. If you have ever arrived at your annual performance review and received new perspectives that you didn't hear all year, you know what I mean. Sometimes our boss is more focused on preserving our feelings or avoiding conflict than they are focused on sharing their honest feedback. We have to make it clear that we need their perspective to assist with our continued growth.

Feedback from our direct reports is on the other side of the coin from boss feedback. For people that report to us, our whispers are yells and our suggestions are commandments. We have to build trust over time with our team. Our team is watching closely during meetings to see what happens when people disagree with us. If we consistently demonstrate that constructive conflict is okay, we're more likely to receive helpful feedback from our teams.

Peers can be an outstanding source of feedback if we properly empower them. A significant factor in the usefulness of peers in our feedback process is our organization's reward structure. Does the reward structure encourage our peers to work with us towards the same goals, or are we competing against each other for limited resources? Are there limited promotional opportunities that we have to fight with our peers for? If we can develop trusting relationships with our peers, they have a point of view that can be significant in helping us plot our actions.

Everyone should have coaches and mentors to round out their circle of trust. Coaches give us an unbiased perspective to help us work through situations. Mentors are valuable because they have been there and done that, so they can speak from experience as they deliver feedback to us.

Don't allow yourself to get blindsided. Do the work now to build your circle of trust, so that the next 360 evaluation has no surprises.

Fire Drill Management

Cheers to the leaders that will cast a vision for their team, then stay singularly committed to that vision. They stand to avoid the pitfalls and fire drills that befall many teams. To be certain, some emergencies are unavoidable. However, we too often serve as both the firefighter and the arsonist.

The solution for you, my fire weary friend, is to ensure your time is fully committed to projects that support the vision of the leader. When you look at the work that must get done in any organization, there will be a certain portion that directly supports the vision, and a portion that is basically administrivia. Volunteer early and often for the projects that directly support the vision. When the inevitable fire is making its rounds, you will be fire resistant due to the "nature" of the projects you are on. There will be the occasional fire drill that you want to hop in, from an exposure standpoint or skill building standpoint, but you will want to have positioned yourself to be selective. The unsavvy employee, working on lower value work, will often be drafted.

When it's time to award promotions and bonuses, no one is getting kudos for a great job on administrivia. Most of the random fire drills will be a distant memory. People will remember those who were significant contributors on work that supported the vision. Strategically manage your fire drill participation to position yourself for true success.

Who Called This Meeting?

I'm not a fan of excessive meetings. Most meeting requests come devoid of agendas. That's the first indication that an hour of my time is about to go up in flames.

We need to touch on the etiquette surrounding meeting start and stop times. If you schedule me to attend a meeting that starts at the exact time another meeting ends, I'm going to be early to leave or late to arrive at somebody's meeting. Seriously, I can't transport myself Star Trek style at the top of every hour. We need something akin to the between class hallway time found in most universities.

Speaking of higher education, can we get back to awarding points for participation? Everyone was invited to the meeting because they allegedly have something to add to the proceedings. If you came to the meeting, and didn't talk, you weren't at the meeting.

If I'm at your meeting, and your slides are in english, please assume that I can read them. If you're going to read off the slides word for word, it's not a presentation, it's a report. Just email it to me, and I'll email you back with any questions.

Along these same lines, if there is verbiage on the slide that I need to read, fifteen bullet points at 6 point font is probably going to be a challenge for this guy.

Whoa on that color scheme. If the background is navy blue and the text is black, Stevie Wonder and I will be seeing your presentation the same way.

Stop bar graph abuse. We all know that 230 is not twice as much as 215. But when you put these numbers next to each other on a bar graph that starts at 200 and tops out at 250, 230 looks twice as big as 215. Stop lying to my eyes.

So yes, the next time you're getting ready to fire off that meeting invite, please consider the points referenced above to avoid any meeting violations. Especially if my name appears on that invite list.

Do You Create Value

Many of the resumes sent to me read like a job description. The person lists the roles they had along with the responsibilities of the role. If I know a person well, I will tease them by saying they downloaded their resume from a Google search. After we enjoy a good laugh, we discuss how the resume should illustrate the value they have provided. Saved the company a chunk of money? Value. Taught a group of employees a new advanced technique? Value. Convinced your office to do a paintball outing as a team building activity? Plenty of value.

As employees, we are all on a continuum that starts at "Order Taker," and proceeds up to "Value Creator." Order Takers do exactly what they are told to do, they answer exactly the question you ask of them. Value Creators take ownership of items, figuring out the intent of the requests they receive, then going beyond the request to help people create the future. Order Taker and Value Creator are the two extremes between which most of us exist. Do yourself, and everyone around you, a favor. Create as much value as possible.

According To Your Faith

"Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you." - Matthew 9:29

You have to believe it before you see it. It's a faith principle, but it's also human nature. The hiring manager has to believe you can do the job before it is given to you. The customer has to believe you can deliver on what you promise before you receive the sale. You have to believe in you before anything of real substance can happen for you.

I coach and mentor many people. I can tell you that impostor syndrome is more rampant than any flavor of covid. I spend plenty of time helping people re-examine their own experience to convince themselves that they are the right person for the opportunity they are considering. These are people that have all the experience and all the qualifications needed for the opportunity. It's like they're waiting for some external source to give them permission to be great. You have to remember that what you receive is "According to your faith." You have to believe.

We all know the action oriented-person with endless optimism. They are like magicians. They believe they can make things happen, they take every action within their power to make it reality, and more often than not, they're right. They believe it before they see it.

Call it The Secret, call it manifestation, call it prayer, call it the energy of the universe, call it a genie in a bottle, call it whatever. Your belief....your faith....regarding what is in store for your career is a necessary prerequisite for you to receive all that is in store for you.

How To Join Amazing Project Teams

There is a portion of work at any organization that is pointless busywork. We've all been stuck on some of these. The idea starts off as something useful, but once the idea goes through a few meetings or committees, it gets whittled down to some atrocity of a project that bears little resemblance to the original awesome idea. Those who are sentenced to work on the project have their soul slowly siphoned from their body. We would like to have as few of these experiences as possible.

The best way to avoid getting roped into projects that don't matter is injecting ourselves into projects that do matter. This is easier said than done. First of all, it's not always apparent that a project is going to be a colossal waste of time from the onset. But even after we have tuned up our lame project radar to avoid the ducks, we need increase our influence skills to shimmy our way onto the awesome projects.

The biggest indicator of the potential success or failure of a project is the leader of the project. Some leaders have figured out how to marshal the resources and relationships to get pretty anything done within their organization. They are seemingly a never ending win parade. These people are easy to identify.

Once you have identified this titan of commerce, you have to prove yourself worthy of inclusion on the gravy train. Leaders that produce consistent wins are great at identifying top performers to collaborate with. Volunteer some of your time to assist with a project they have going on. Often this will mean more time at work for us, as we will be adding this project to our current work queue. If we deliver quality results in a timely fashion, we will earn invitations to do more work for awesome leaders.

At this point, it's usually time for some negotiation with our boss. Most bosses allow for a bit of extracurricular exploration into projects outside their portfolio, but we don't want just a little bit of that awesome project experience, we want the awesome project buffet. You can handle this negotiation yourself, or.....

Have the awesome leader negotiate a shared custody arrangement. This is easier to do in situations where leaders in our organization are aligned with the shared interests of the overall enterprise. Remember, the awesome leader understands how to get the resources they need for success. Once we have proven ourself as one of those resources in limited time, the awesome leader is more likely to advocate for us spending more time on their valuable projects.

Avoid the busywork, identify the superhero leader, prove ourself to be valuable, then join the Avengers. We owe it to ourselves, we're only doing this career thing once.

Handy Guidelines For Complaining

When the complaint train starts rolling, it's hard to not hop on and settle into a cozy seat. Everyone does it from time to time, and sometimes it's cathartic. We need to ensure we're not a frequent passenger on the complaint train. The following guidelines will help us determine when taking a ride to complaint town is appropriate.

If you have a firm understanding of the situation and ability to influence the situation, take action. We often underestimate the levers we have to influence a situation. Leaders and decision makers don't want to be seen as incompetent. If you can give them council that will help them look good, you can influence the situation through their actions. If you're the decision maker, no need to complain about the situation, start shaping it in the image you desire. Once you start heading in a direction, the next steps will become more clear.

If you have a incomplete understanding of the situation and inability to influence the situation, ignore it. 9 out of 10 studies show that the #1 cause of headaches is listening to people talk about things they clearly don't understand (I made that stat up, but you get the drift). Have you ever had a conversation about sports with someone were you wondered if they even watch the sport? If you don't understand something, and you can't influence it, don't let it raise your stress levels.

If you have a incomplete understanding of the situation and ability to influence the situation, please sit down, you are dangerous. These are the most frustrating folks in the workplace, those who have not taken the time to understand the situation in front of them before sending co-workers down a non-productive path. We don't need to wait for 100% of the information on a situation, but we also shouldn't make decisions in the dark. Our colleagues are complex, so making a categorical decision about their character and potential based on limited interactions creates the potential for disaster. Organizations are made up of the aforementioned colleagues, so organizations are very complex. Decision makers need to invest the bulk of their time understanding the people and relationships around them to have a hope of understanding any given situation.

If you have a firm understanding of the situation and inability to influence the situation, feel free to complain. Caveat: we often have much more influence on situation than we realize. If the decision makers for a situation are anywhere in our orbit, we have to be willing to tactfully suggest adjustments. Done the right way, this can make us a hero. In the event that we truly do not have any access to those that can influence the situation, and we have a firm understanding of what's going on, hop on that complaint train and have a wonderful ride.

Build Your Own Sponsor

Influential leaders in your organization need to advocate for you in order for you to advance up the corporate ladder. This practice is called sponsorship. Some companies have sponsorship programs that match high potential employees with company executives to facilitate sponsorship. That's awesome for employees who are selected for the program, but what about the other employees?

Many of us need the do it yourself version of the sponsorship program. That means being the type of employee that is exciting to the leadership in your organization. Bring new ideas, work on cross functional teams, be interesting (you would be surprised how valuable it is to just be interesting). Engage with the leaders of your organization and be yourself while doing so. You also need to have a understanding of your organization. Early in my career at Lubrizol, I told my boss that I wanted to be CEO one day. She set up 1:1 meetings for me with the CEO and COO. Early in the conversation with our COO, he asked me to explain how Lubrizol makes money. I gave some basic answer. He said "you don't know shit about our business. How are you going to be CEO?" He was 100% right. I did not build a sponsor in that instance. I realized that I needed to first do the work necessary to be worthy of sponsorship.

Leaders want to magnify the rising stars in their organization. This behavior is driven by the expectation that leaders can identify and develop talent in their organization. If you are excellent at what you do and keep your company leadership aware, you are making life easier for them. So for you, figure out how your organization delivers value to the universe, figure out how you help that happen, then create ways to expose your value to company leaders. Eventually your ears will burn as sponsors make you their topic of discussion.

Negotiation Tip: Create A Connection

People help people that they like. People like people that like them.

You would be surprised at what is possible in your interactions with people in customer service types of roles. The first person you encounter often has the discretion to make things happen for you. However, they’re only going to use that discretion to your benefit if you first value their position and power. You demonstrate that you value their position and power by being friendly and genuinely interested in them. If you create a personal connection and they don’t have the authority to grant your request, they’ll tell you exactly who to talk to and exactly what to say to give you the best chance of success with your request.

Since I know that nobody reading this post has ever started arguing with a customer service representative, how many times have you watched someone try to argue their way into something they want? They create a situation where there needs to be a winner and a loser. If a win/lose scenario is created by the requester, the requester is often going to come up empty.

A different approach is to enlist the customer service representative as an ally in your quest to jointly solve a problem together. 99% of customer service folks really would like to be helpful to their customers. If you’re creating a personal connection, then positioning your request as a challenge that you’re working to jointly solve, your chances of success improve. On the other hand, those who are demeaning to customer service folks and take an adversarial stand position themselves to get less from the customer service rep and the manager that they will subsequently request to see.

Create a connection whenever possible. And even if you don’t receive the outcome you seek in this situation, at least there is one person who’s day has been made a bit better by your kindness.

Love Your Craft

Have you ever committed to becoming excellent in your craft? I don’t mean that you’re merely naturally talented in the craft. I mean that you have decided to intentionally get better at your craft everyday. On the good days, on the hard days, on the days where you feel like your craft is no longer your thing. 

Are you taking your craft seriously? Halfway effort is going to get you halfway results no matter what your craft is. How many people do we know that were extremely talented, but did not think enough of their talents to do the work required to refine their talent into elite skill?

Are you working to intentionally improve at your craft? Continuous learning is necessary for us to advance in our pursuits. We’ve all heard from the person that touts their thirty years of experience in a field, but they demonstrate limited growth in their field over that time. The craft always evolves. Are you learning enough to evolve with your craft?

Are you organized in your approach to your craft? We all know the absentminded genius that surrounds themselves with chaos of their own making but is still amazing at their craft. Assume you are not that person.

Do you have urgency about your craft? You’ve probably seen the following quote: “Tomorrow - a mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement is stored.” We need to give everything we have to the current day. Then wake up the next day, giving it all again.

Do you love your craft? I’m not saying you have to love a craft to be good at it, I’m saying you have to love the craft in order to have a chance of being your best at it. We’re all born with certain talents. After we’re born, it’s up to us to maximize the talents we have through work and discipline in order to shape talent into skill.

When we commit to our craft in all these ways, we earn the opportunity to become excellent. If you have not yet committed to your craft, today (not tomorrow) is an excellent day to start.

How Are You

Our co-workers are suffering right next to us, but we don't know it. How did we arrive at the situation where we can be shoulder to shoulder with a person for forty hours a week, but not feel okay telling them that we're sad today because of any number of reasons?

For a long time, corporate wisdom was to keep our corporate lives and personal lives separate. This is impossible unless we have a separate brain that we will put in our body once we get to the office.

When our co-workers are experiencing crisis, either their own or the crisis of someone they deeply care about, there is rarely enough time away from the office for full emotional recovery. Part of their recovery should be a workplace where there are people that they can connect with in an authentic and vulnerable way. Employee Assistance Programs are valuable, but we can't replicate the comfort of knowing that the people we labor with care for us beyond the utility of the work we produce.

We all must do the work to ensure our offices are emotionally safe places. We don't need deep relationships with every coworker, a few close relationships will do for most people. We need an environment where it is okay to share what pains us without being judged or diminished, without being seen as weak or overly emotional. We need our office to be a place where humans show each other compassion.

Becoming Ghostbusters

Over the past few years, candidates ghosting an organization during the hiring process has become a regular thing. This is frustrating for organizations, as the talent acquisition process is time consuming with eager hiring managers providing plenty of additional "motivation." Organizations have been ghosting candidates since the beginning of time, but that's a post for another day.

Once we have decided that a candidate should advance in our hiring process, we have to begin making the process special for them. When we make the process special, we reduce the chance that the candidate will ghost us. Making the process special means treating them as an individual, reminding them at every turn that they are advancing in our process because they have the potential to add something special to our organization, something that is unique to them.

Once a candidate accepts our offer, we need to keep making them feel special. Between the time the candidate accepts our offer and their first day of work, we should be in constant contact with them, helping them to reaffirm their decision and preventing them from turning into Casper. Personalized welcome videos from leaders or peers are huge. Don't wait for them to arrive on their first day to get company branded swag, send it to their home. Send them a detailed schedule of their first two weeks so they know you are committed to providing them an amazing work experience.

The first day working at a new organization feels like the first day of middle school. We hope we don't dress funny, we hope we find kids to sit with at lunch, and we hope the other kids don't think we're weird. Zero percent of this changes when we become adults. And just like middle schoolers, sometimes we make the decision to transfer early. Our organizations have to immerse the new employee in our culture immediately so they can feel like they're one of us. Take the time to have them meet everyone. Give them detailed tours of every part of the operation. Make sure they clearly understand how their work is vital to the organization achieving its mission. Only then can you feel like you've done everything you can to avoid getting ghosted. Congratulations, you're now a ghostbuster.

Barbarians At The Inbox

I was having a coaching conversation the other day with an exceptionally high performer. As you could imagine, this person takes great pride in working long hours and getting plenty of stuff done. After a while, I asked my client to tell me how much value they’ve provided for their organization. They started to go back into the volume of email requests they receive and their list of action items when I stopped them again: “how much value have these activities provided for your organization?”

I don’t believe that everything that is important can be measured, however, we should be able to measure the value of some of this activity. In too many situations, we have substituted busyness for value creation. We feel that every request that lands in our inbox is validation that we are valuable and that we, and only we, have the ability to deliver on these tasks. Sometimes we skip asking ourselves “are these the right tasks to be delivered on?”

It’s easier to decide which tasks we should deliver on if we understand how our role is connected to our organization’s financial outcomes. What are the key parts of our role that deliver our organization the most value? Can that work be 60% of our time as opposed to 40% of our time? It’s true that we sometimes have to just do what we’re told, but we usually have the opportunity to give input on our work product. Especially if we have demonstrated that we will put forth significant effort for the organization.

We all need time and space to think. We need the opportunity to be thoughtful about our work and why we inhabit the role we do in our organizations. Let’s determine the highest and best use of our time, then dedicate more time in that direction. There will always be barbarians at our inbox ready to overrun us. We need to find more time each day to hold them at bay.

Supercharged Recruiters

Have you ever been an applicant for a role and felt like you didn’t receive enough communication from the organization? If yes, welcome to a club inhabited by most professionals. It’s frustrating for an applicant to navigate some clunky applicant tracking system, where your resume never uploads correctly, and the only message you receive is the automated response from your initial submission. 

On the other side of this equation, we have the recruiter. The position you applied to is one of 20 positions the recruiter is responsible for. Each of those positions has 50-100 applicants. Each of the positions is in a different phase of the hiring process, so every day the recruiter is reviewing resumes, doing phone screens, scheduling panel interviews (this circle of hell deserves its own blog post), and a gaggle of other tasks that are required in the recruiter position. So if the recruiter doesn’t have a snapstreak going with you, it’s not because they’re ignoring you.

Here is where AI has entered the recruitment picture in a major way, as the technology has made recruiters more efficient. Companies are now facing a choice when it comes to addressing the recruitment efficiencies created by AI: reduce its recruitment staff or enhance its ability to attract top-tier talent. Leveraging AI tools gives recruiters the opportunity to spend more time connecting with candidates. We have to remember that in the recruitment process, the company is marketing itself to the candidates just as much as the candidates are marketing themselves to the company. If recruiters can leverage AI tools to lighten their load on certain parts of the role, they can commit more time to the parts of the process where they add the most value: talking to candidates.

The companies that leverage the opportunity to supercharge their recruiters with new AI technologies will reap long term benefits in the quality of their workforce. The companies that justify reducing their recruiter footprint due to advances in AI will be left behind in the talent market. Choose wisely.

Love In The Air

For as much time as we spend talking about emotional intelligence and corporate culture, we don’t spend much time discussing office relationships of the romantic type. The Society for Human Resource Management sent this infographic out on Valentine’s Day. Apparently, there are plenty of folks exploring team building activities beyond those provided by the company.

It’s not a surprise that workplace romances happen, given that we spend so much time at work. However, if a break-up does happen with a co-worker, are you okay with seeing their stupid face every other time you go to a meeting? According to the SHRM survey, 10% of folks would rather take their talents to South Beach.

Most employers hate employee relationships. All they see is a harassment suit getting ready to happen. And if one of the employees has the ability to influence the conditions of employment for the other employee by virtue of their role in the organization, mayhem.

I’ve seen plenty when it comes to relationships in the workplace. “Love Contracts” where the two employees in a relationship have a signed document stating that their relationship is voluntary and consensual. Employees being transferred to a different department because neither of them can stand the thought of working with their ex. “Work Spouses” that go beyond being “Work Spouses.”

Wherever there are humans, romantic relationships will form. If you’re an employer, it’s your job to ensure your policies and procedures protect you as much as possible when relationships inevitably go bad.