I shared a few things with him which I am glad to say were published in this month’s magazine along with some other good, insightful thoughts from both local and national employers.

If you don’t receive Business Connect Magazine (which I strongly recommend), you can read Peter’s article online here: How to Retain Your Employees.

Just for fun, I’ve listed the more verbose responses to some of what Fretty asked me:

What do you see as the most effective means of retaining employees?

The most-common reason people leave their jobs is because they don’t like their boss. This takes on a lot of forms from not feeling challenged, to feeling micromanaged, passed over for opportunities, or not being trained well. It’s regular for new managers to completely change over much of their staff within a year after they take a new post, generally because of these personality factors.

It’s not about the money, it’s not benefits, it’s not getting a shiny car for being employee of the year like Doba did last year*. At the end of the day, the employee’s direct supervisior has more power and ability to help and employee feel liked and encouraged or disgruntled and dissatisfied than any other thing a company can do.

We all know that the cream rise to the top, and in business, the superstar talent will always keep their eyes and ears open through active and passive networking. Even the least-talkative or outgoing employee likes to work where they feel liked and appreciated, and even they will seek new opportunities when they feel their relationship with their direct supervisor is strained. Superstars are savvy enough to not complain about their boss around other people, but they will sing their praises, and your company’s, if they like what they’re doing, and they feel satisfied with their job.

That being said, the best boss in the world will lose employees hand-over-fist if the company is not:

• Paying well (by the way, which means ahead of the curve, not right at the median pay-range),
• Doesn’t provide adequate (read: liberal quantities of) tools to help employees succeed at their jobs
• Misses opportunities to praise and reward employees for the hard work they do (recognition is more important than money, but money talks very loudly).
• Provide all of the required and some over-the-top benefits to make sure their employees (and their families) feel appreciated as more than cogs in the machine.

What mistakes do people commonly make when trying to keep employees?

1. Hire the wrong bosses.
   People are promoted to management for the worst reasons. They look the part, they have the right degree, or they’ve been there the longest. Just like a brilliant doctor without any bedside manner, the most accomplished, credentialed, superstar manager will fail miserably if she can’t incite enthusiasm and success in her employees.
2. Don’t give bosses tools for retention.
   Corporate policies always play their heavy hand when employees want flex time, or to try out a special project, or even take an extra day of vacation to see their kid’s last soccer game of the year. Google’s 20% rule, where employees get one day a week to work on any approved project of their choosing has produced some of their best creations. Why not?  This is much better use of “water cooler” time anyway, isn’t it?
3. Don’t ask people what they want to do next.
   People will jump companies in a heartbeat for new challenges. Companies are usually horrible at actually helping people accelerate through their careers internally. Challenge them, ask them for help with special projects, allow them to be creative and try new things with your blessing.
4. Pay exactly the “market rate”.
   Duh. This one is easy to fix, but hard to approve through management. Yes, employee costs are high. But replacing an employee costs up to 70% of that employee’s annual salary. It’s your choice: You can lose them every 8-16 months (current averages for non-executive transitions), or you can pay them an extra 10% or even 30% over the market, with regular, meaningful raises.
5. Stifle creativity by maintaining the status-quo.
   Doing more of the same, but hoping for something different is the definition of insanity. People will either go insane or go somewhere else if you don’t allow them to have input to your processes and take on difficult projects. Toyota championed this, allowing any factory line worker to stop the whole plant if they saw something that needed to change.
6. Don’t Talk.
   The old joke is, if you hear from your CEO more on CNN than in your own business, there’s something wrong (See GBAT #16).  Maybe your CEO isn’t ever on CNN, but this is the age of transparency, and if your employees don’t know what’s really going on behind the brass-handled doors of the C-suite, they will go elsewhere.
7. Don’t Listen.
   Gatekeepers, assistants, and other executives are great at keeping the bad news and feedback from getting to the top. That’s bad. Engage in conversations. Real, honest, and serious ones. Your staff will respect you for listening, and likely respect you even more when you recognize where you’re wrong, admit it publicly, champion the better ideas, and make sure you always pass credit where it’s due. Likely, when people know that if they talk to you, you will act… they will make sure they only talk to you about really crucial things in the first place! P.S. If your employees blog, comment on them!
8. Don’t Relax.
   Companies that let their hair down once in a while and do something fun–take your employees to the premier of a new movie, send them to lagoon for a day, host a staff retreat that’s actually about retreating–will retain employees longer because people will like working there.  Do something once a quarter… maybe two smaller events and two significant onces. Make them memorable, fun, and for everyone.

* Don’t get me wrong, Doba did an AMAZING thing by doing this, but not everyone can/should.  I’d be open to it, personally though…

You’re a busy professional. You have a lot on your plate, your team is working overtime, and that ugly deadline is fast-approaching.

Finally, the recruiter calls you with an interviewee. They send over the resume, and you skim it, but mostly, the recruiter sounds confident this person is the match, so you have them setup the interview.

Days go by, and your calendar reminds you that your interview is about to start in 5 minutes.

“Oh, yeah…. the interview…” you say absently as your mind races to find the resume you are sure you printed off.

After a few minutes of fumbling, you think to yourself, “hey, its not my interview… they should have a copy of their resume, if they want this job…” and you head down to the lobby to meet them.

Sound Familiar?

If it does, then you’ve got a serious train wreck about to occur. You, being unprepared for an interview, may be the absolute worst thing you can do for your company apart from posting those New Years Party photos on the Internet (you know, the ones that mysteriously appeared on your camera).

Here are three things hiring managers often forget when they are interviewing and, yes, these things really do matter:

1. Read and annotate the resume beforehand:
   Chances are, they spent hours, and possibly some money on getting that “resume.doc” in your email.
   • Are you sure everything they say is real? Is it relevant?
   • What can you learn about them by the way they phrased the objectives and accomplishments of their last three positions.
   • What does their cover letter really say about them?
   • Don’t you think you should make a note to clarify what they mean by “some coursework completed” next to their claim to a Harvard MBA?
2. Prepare Questions:
   If you don’t know what you’re going to ask, the truth is, you won’t ask the right ones. “Going with your gut” should be reserved for the craps table, not your organization’s retirement account’s future.
3. Pay Attention to them:
   The interview is as much of an opportunity for the candidate to investigate YOU and your company. If you rush through, don’t seem interested in them as a human being or that you’re not really listening, they will translate that to mean you will overwork them, not appreciate them and, in the long-run, they won’t be satisfied with working for you very long.

Summary:

By their 30s, most people have had enough “bad bosses” to write long, lengthy books on the matter (not fun, nice-to-read books, but enough content to fill them up!).

Make no mistake about it, before they make any kind of move at all, superstar employees today are sizing you up as what kind of boss you are going to be.

Superstar talent want thriving, engaging, challenging environments and bosses that will help them thrive and flourish and introduce them to the right people that will help them make the next two or three career moves.

The upside, for you, is that you will forever be known as “the one who finds the superstars”. Don’t forget, when that new hire is getting recognition from the top level of the company, YOUR NAME will be in lights right alongside them… but, the slightest whiff from you that you don’t care, you’re “very busy”, or that you don’t appreciate or value what they, as a human being, bring to the table… well, kiss the chance to hire that person goodbye.

Isn’t that worth 10-15 minutes of prep time on your part, and asking two or three relevant “human” questions during your interview?

1. Real and Wage Inflation
2. Intense Competition for Talent
3. Corporate cost-cutting
4. High Energy/Commute Costs

The hardest part to pin-down is that the economic indicators show a market that is schizophrenic. Utah’s high tech job market is part recessionary and part booming. There’s both signs of weakness, but signs of boom-cycle madness.

If there were ever a time to unveil the invisible hand and see what’s really going to happen to this economy over the next six-12 months, now is the time… those who navigate this juncture well stand to gain a lot of opportunity, while these massive icebergs of clashing forces might very well crush entire sections of our economy and workforce if we’re not paying close attention.

Real and Wage Inflation

The Fed won’t admit there’s inflation yet, even though everyone else is worried about it… but one trip to the grocery store tells you a dollar doesn’t go as far these days. This plays into issues 3 and 4, and is the driver for issue 2.

Bottom-line: If the same amount of money you made last year isn’t cutting it, talented people will demand higher wages for the same jobs they were doing a year ago.

If the company they currently work for won’t pay up, no problem, they’ll just move.

Intense Competition for Talent

As a recruiter, I use every tool I can find. The job boards, these days, are as silent and un-exciting as a Hillary Clinton rally in Payson. The war for top-talent has moved from remote, tactical operations using unmanned email probes and remote-controlled resume submittal to (continuing the analogy) hand-to-hand, street fighting. Candidates are being approached at every angle, from every recruiter, in very creative ways…. and they’re getting hired, too!

At the Blogger Dinner last Thursday, Steve Spencer quipped something like: This is just like the late 90s. It doesn’t matter if you can actually do any of the stuff on your resume, but if you have the right acronyms, you’re hired!

(And, yes, Steve’s company is hiring… tell ‘em I sent ya)

Corporate Cost-Cutting

Client after client of mine has issued cost-cutting warnings. Several more companies are putting in-place hiring freezes, readjusting their priorities, laying people off or closing down all together.

This hyper-sensitive focus on costs can be unacceptable to a workforce already in high-demand.

One jobseeker for a Salt Lake-based IT Outsourcing firm told me last Thursday that his current employer has”implemented a new performance-based pay plan where you get a “very low base wage” and, if you hit certain quotas every day, you will get paid more.

The story goes that these employees, if they are industrious little busy bees, can earn even more than they have been making, but the employees don’t quite see it that way.

“Its a joke,” my jobseeker friend told me. “I’ve done the math. It is impossible to make anything close to what I have been making. I am outta here.”

There’s bound to be losses when a company needs to refocus. A recent article by Tiffany Hsu in the Baltimore Sun explains this very well:

“It costs a lot to let someone go,” said Don McNamara, president of Heritage Associates Inc., a management consultant company based in Laguna Niguel, Calif. “So we’ve got to circle the wagons and pull in a little bit.”

Businesses, he said, can cross-train employees in multiple roles to boost productivity and restructure to remove inefficiencies…. but employers can’t cut too many expenses and perks without risking driving workers away.

“You’ve got to be sensitive to your people and make sure morale isn’t one of the things you cut,” McNamara said. “If this comes as a surprise to them, they might be tempted to update their resumes at another company.”

High Energy/Commute Costs

Even thinking about high gas/energy prices makes me exhausted, but the simple fact is we are receiving regular calls and updates from our candidates seeking more commute-friendly work options, telecomuting, shorter commutes, or other benefits to offset the incredible rise in fuel costs this last year has seen. For once, the State has taken a lead here, generating (I predict) pressure on many new fronts to allow employees to have more control over when, where and how much they work.

On the flip-side, a lot of people who otherwise want to keep their current job are interested right now in part-time, flexible, contract-based work options too. That is an unforeseen consequence of these higher prices.

Summary

At the end of the day, companies are asking their employees to do more with less, while these same high-demand employees are not afraid of feeling out their options and making a more lucrative move if needed.

I fear, for companies too cost-conscious, this will become a race to mediocrity unless they very creatively examine their work demands, and be very open and honest with their employees. Find out what they need/want and even while cutting costs, you can make work fun and, heck, maybe even more productive.

The Green Autoblog reports that the US workforce may be switching to a four-work-day week in response to higher gas prices and pressure to be smarter about requiring commutes. They point to this reuters article explaining how the four-day week is becoming a benefit in otherwise cash-strapped areas of the economy:

In America’s struggling automaking heartland, the shorter workweek offers employers a way of rewarding employees when the budget does not allow a salary increase, said Oakland County, Michigan, executive L. Brooks Patterson.

“By allowing employees to work four 10-hour days it will save them 20 percent on their commute costs and ease the financial pinch of filling up their cars,” said Patterson, who last week proposed the compressed week for county workers.

Some ways to introduce four-day work-weeks:

• Offer your employees one day a week to work from home.
• Allow your workers to put in four 10 hour shifts rather than five eight-hour ones.
• Simply close your office one day a week, and ask your employees to accomplish their work in the alloted time. This rewards them for efficiency.

Who would have thought that something as simple as allowing your employees to self-adjust their commute just might be the best benefit you don’t have to pay for.

A few days ago, I wrote about how hard it is for good, employed job seekers to search for new work while retaining anonymity.

But what if a candidate is not really “looking”, but also wouldn’t pass up the right opportunity if it, well, fell in their lap…?

Sometimes the difference between someone “happily employed” and “happily employed… but listening” isn’t very much.  As an employer, how can you be attuned to those subtle shifts in perception of both your company as an employer, and their outlook as a candidate?

As far as I can tell, there is no way for someone to easily, passively and privately tell a company, “yeah, if you had something great for me, I would be interested.”

Is there?

The Anonymity Problem for Job Seekers

The simple fact of the matter is, the Recruiting Industry has long been too sympathetic to the employer or hiring manager, and far too hard on the seeker.

Regularly, I have HR/Hiring managers confess to me their worst sins… like throwing out a whole stack of resumes or deleting their whole “candidates” folder in their email program “on accident” because they needed to clean up space on their hard-drive to make room for their grandson’s little league photos.

At the end of the day, I do believe job-seekers work too hard to have their careers tossed into black holes, set to puree, and hopefully something turns out at the other end.

More than that, McGovern is right–truly excellent, talented candidates who are currently employed can’t afford to be found looking around.  In an economy like ours where “bouncing back” from being fired would be relatively hard… passive candidates need better tools to keep their identity private when job-seeking until they are ready to reveal it.

ItzBig’s subtitle says it all: “Be Found — Not Found Out” I wish them all the luck.

It’s a pretty funny ad, but you instantly… I mean INSTANTLY get what it’s saying… while you’re laughing about it.

• We (the radio station) are the benevolent guardians of good rock-n-roll.
• We share it freely with all those who tune in.
• Listen to us. We rock.
• If you do, you will rock, too.

(The guy walking by here MAKES this image work)

What does this have to do with RECRUITING and RETENTION?

Well, its my blog, so it doesn’t have to mean anything other than I like it. But, I did take the time to post it here to maybe cause you to think of a few things about your company culture:

• What is UNIQUE about you?
• What cool/oddball/funny things do people do with your product, brand or product?
• What do you STAND for?
• It’s likely that there are people out there that would LOVE to be a part of that. Use it to attract them to you:
  • Comcast gives free HD, Internet and Phone to their employees. Duh.
  • I was the man my senior year in HS because I worked at a movie theater and I could get all my pals in for free.
    • (Full disclosure: I was still a geek, but I felt like the man)

Why not lighten up and have a little FUN with what you do for people? Then, maybe your top talent will stick around a little longer and burn-out a little less often.

The Donald made a big mistake last night firing Tiffany Fallon and not Omarosa (links to video), but I don’t blame him. Everybody’s doing it.

[NOTE: I really have no idea if Tiffany Fallon, the first Celebrity Apprentice contestant to be fired (last night) by The Donald officially fits in the age category of "Millenials" or "Gen Y". According to Wikipedia, if she was born as early as 1976 and late as 2000, she is... and we'll give her the benefit of the doubt.]

What’s more interesting to me, however, is that she displayed several key attributes of Gen Y/Millenials in the workplace:

• Passive-Aggressive: When Omarosa made it clear the task would be done without using celebrity (links to video), Tiffany clearly didn’t agree. Omarosa wouldn’t hear anything other than her own mission, though. So Tiffany stopped fighting back. And, surely, she was from that point forward just “putting a face on” to get through the task.
  • The Millenials who work for you already don’t trust you. Give them reasons to shut up and they will… but they won’t give you 100% either.
  • If you complain later that they’re not giving you enough, its because you didn’t give them enough at the outset. And, frankly, they don’t really care that you didn’t get everything you wanted. It’s only fair that nobody wins, after all.
• Want Facts to Speak for Themselves: When Omarosa blamed everything on Tiffany in the boardroom, she didn’t fight back as well as she could have there, either.
  • She’s a southerner, so of course, she’s going to be polite.
  • More than that, the VIDEO was proof to everyone watching except maybe DONALD that Omarosa stabbed each of her teammates in the back, successively. Tiffany failed because of Omarosa’s direction to NOT do what Tiffany does–be a celebrity, but the instant the issue came up, Omarosa both blamed it on Donald by saying he wouldn’t approve of them using sex to sell, and simultaneously blamed it on Tiffany for not using her sex to sell.
  • Millenials want you to do your research. If you won’t let the facts stand up for themselves, fine. They don’t want to work for you. Donald seems to know everything about the show other than what really mattered last night–that “Omarosa’s a survivor like a cockroach.”
• You Only Win If I Win, Too. Donald made it clear in his closing remarks before firing her (links to same video as above) that he was frustrated she didn’t play “all out” and call in a favor from her friend Hugh Heffner for a super-star donation to “the cause” which, of course, would have gone to Omarosa’s charity, not her own.
  • Duh!??
  • Why would she want to play her best cards in the first hand?
    Donald, in The Art of The Deal, show me the page where do you write that you should go into your negotiations without doing any research, in a field you don’t know (she’s not a hot dog salesperson, she’s a model!) with all your guns out, blazing, and lay it all out on the table for your opponents to take advantage of?

What does this all boil down to for managers not looking to make the mistake that Donald did? Well, it’s a bit humbling, but frankly, millenials are just not that into you.Whatever you’ve (the boss) got on your plate… your (corporate) goals and mission… unless you’ve taken the time to enroll your GenY/Millenial employees into your purposes, they’re just not that interested in pleasing you unless it’s clear they’ll get what they’re looking for simultaneously…. not eventually (as in paying dues, like you did).

CBS’s 60 Minutes’ story recently, The “Millennials” Are Coming highlights this as well as anybody:

Stand back all bosses! A new breed of American worker is about to attack everything you hold sacred: from giving orders, to your starched white shirt and tie. They are called, among other things, “millennials.” There are about 80 million of them, born between 1980 and 1995, and they’re rapidly taking over from the baby boomers who are now pushing 60…

“The boomers do need to hear the message, that they’re gonna have to start focusing more on coaching rather than bossing. If this generation in particular, you just tell them, ‘You got to do this. You got to do this. You got to do this.’ They truly will walk. And every major law firm, every major company knows, this is the future,” Crane explains…

“We’re not going to settle. Because we saw our parents settle,” [Jason] Dorsey says. “And we have options. That we can keep hopping jobs. No longer is it bad to have four jobs on your resume in a year. Whereas for our parents or even Gen X, that was terrible. But that’s the new reality for us. And we’re going to keep adapting and switching and trying new things until we figure out what it is.”

Make No Mistake About It

Some might see this as arrogance or that this is a generation of slackers (as if you weren’t called a slacker when “you were their age”), but make no mistake about it. It may be that they’re simply more on-purpose than you ever were at that age.

• They want to be involved. They don’t have nothing to say, they have very much to say… and it’s GOOD. Listen for a change.
• They want to stay connected (link to Fallon’s mySpace page, may not be safe for work).
• They want to change the world. (Didn’t you?)
• They want to have wealth and fame (P.S. They are smarter with money than you were.)
• And juggling all of that, they don’t really have time to hear about how the snow was really neck-deep when you walked to school, barefoot, uphill both ways, as a homeless child of a broke farmer on the streets of New York. Sad story, but who cares??

All they hear is blah, blah, blah.

Tell ‘em what’s relevant, and give them the opportunity to tell you why it matters to them. Leverage their irreverance, and their desire to mashup what is into something completely new.

And, for Fallon? In the cab on the way off the set, she said what many Millenials will say when their ego-driven bosses choose the back-stabbing self-defending Omarosa’s of the world over those with untapped potential and passion that runs deeper than just “winning this task”:

“…Moving on.”

“Currently, we’re not using external recruiters, but as we get more established, it’s something we might look into…”

Which is secret code for:

“No.”

Which is secret code for either:

• We don’t have a lot of money, and we’re scared you’ll take it all.
• We don’t have a lot of time on our hands and we’re scared you’ll take it all.

Of course, there’s other things it might mean, but in essence, these are the exact reasons WHY small/startup companies should look at leveraging external, 3rd party recruiters: TO CONSERVE TIME & MONEY.

Economists have proven that specialization is the best way to achieve maximum returns given the investment of your resources. This comes from the concept of the Production Possibilities Frontier or PPF (see diagram). The basic idea is that:

• Resources (assets, time & money) are scarce.
• You can only do “so much”. As in, no matter what, you can’t get more than what is possible.
• Most people and organizations fall under the PPF curve (I admit that I do) by trying to do stuff they’re not specialists in doing.
• Every unit of a resource you put into one thing is, by definition, taking away from something else.
• Doing what you’re BEST at, and leveraging others to make up the difference is how you maximize returns.
• You can push the entire PPF curve outward, meaning you “enlarge the pie” of possibilities, but only after first maximizing returns via specialization.

Think about it: do you ask your friend, who is a pediatrician, to operate on your broken wrist? Well, she is a doctor, isn’t she?? Of course not. She’s not “that kind of doctor.”

Neither should you have your organization spend valuable time, energy & money doing the mundane, low-level recruiting tasks that third-party agencies are excellent at doing. Every dollar you pay your managers to recruit is a dollar you’re NOT getting your best returns from.

Yes, they should interview and hire. No, they should not do the rest (see below).

Using an external recruiter is easy. They boil the search process down to the really crucial part: Interviewing only the top candidates, from a much wider field of possibilities, and making the right candidate selection. Outsource where possible and get your high-dollar returns where it really counts.

Services a 3rd party recruiter should provide to you:

• Free consultation about fees and how to fit their services in your budget.
• Free consultation about exactly what problems you’re trying to solve, and what kind of candidates you’re looking for.
• Job Posting (free).
• Candidate Sourcing (first step in recruiting — determine who is out there).
• Preliminary candidate interviews and skill match.
• Submittal of only highest-qualified candidates along with descriptive reasons thy rise above the rest.
• Coordinating interviews or other screenings you determine.
• Coordinating additional and final interviews.

If desired:

• Coordinating presentation of the offer.
• Informing all “other” candidates that have not been selected, and ensuring they feel good about your company.
• Salary negotiation.
• “On-Boarding” or administering hiring paperwork.
• If contracting: Timecards and payroll administration.
• If contracting: Consolidated invoicing and payment terms.
• If contracting: Free consulting about benefits and permanent-hiring best-practices.

Depending on if you want to use the firm on Retained or Contingency basis, other or different services will be available.

Stephen Lynch writing at the NY Post got fed up with everyone complaining about the entitlement and know-it-all-ness of the globe’s next generation of leaders, movers and shakers, and I know what he’s talking about, from both sides.

Like Lynch, I’ve been watching this whole carnival of consultants from my perspective as an X-er, “which means, as the consultants of my youth said, as an angst-ridden slacker.”

Since I’m on the cusp of millenialness (born two years early by some experts’ analysis), and yet prone to geekery and connectedness, I’m amused to no end at how the walls go up whenever the taboo topic of Gen Y Workers comes up around who Lynch calls “management elders” I come across in my various activities.

The rub? Millenials are just that–a new generation–faced with a new global landscape, tools nobody has really used before, and the challenge to understand, overcome, and succeed in all of it. They don’t trust corporations thanks to years of 5:00 news reports telling them not to…. and why should they? Hardly exposed to anything other than a relative gorging of wealth and opportunity in the world’s developed countries, tell me why they should wait around for “management” to thumbs-up or thumbs-down their career path?

As I work in various roles of my life around the millenials I know, I am impressed with their creativity and passion, but also worried about their application of knowledge and willingness to broadcast everything. I’m a fan of being OPEN, since I blog (obviously), twitter, facebook and even share my own calendar with anyone who wants to peek (why anybody would is beyond me), but OPEN is not necessarily equal to ALL. iJustine would obviously disagree somewhat with me… but even she wants privacy occasionally, I am sure.

The irony is that we always told our children in school that “You can do anything you put your mind to”. Now, those of us out in front, which should be leading and encouraging are exactly the ones found mother-hen-ing and doubt-casting.

Every generation will have its rebels, its leaders, is outcasts and its fearmongers. I just hope we work with our new colleagues instead of complaining about how their parents manage their career, or how in the world they could txt msg so much on that teeny tiny keypad.