In part one of this article series, HR Works sat down with RecruitCon 2018 keynote speaker Bob Kelleher to discuss hiring and engagement issues. Here is the remainder of that interview.
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Steve B.: If any of the listeners want to evaluate their current hiring practices, what would you recommend for them to see how they’re helping or hurting long-term engagement?
Bob K.: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of doing some laboratory interviewing. Have some of the managers go through a typical interview process. Put them through a process in which they are interviewing for a job. Have them be asked the same questions that the recruiting department would normally ask. Ask them to be interviewed by firstline managers. Have them give their take on what the process was like.
I recently gave a talk to a large group of healthcare professionals, and there was a hospital that was in Florida that had best practices on the customer experience. It now requires all new hires to go through the process that a patient would. So, the new hire on day 1 will go to the emergency room and wait in a waiting room for 30 minutes, with no one coming to tend to him or her. And then, it puts him or her through a laboratory where two of the medical folks in the emergency room will start talking about him or her behind the fabric curtain, where the poor patient can now hear the medical folks. And it’s such a powerful customer service eye-opener.
I think we can do the same thing on the employment side, right? How do we have our managers experience what candidates experience? Because, especially if a process is still in transition, you know some of the bugs are still left in. Now you get the senior leadership support because they’ll give feedback themselves and say, “Hey, this really didn’t work. There’s something broken. We need to reevaluate this.” So, bring them to a laboratory themselves to see what the process was like.
Steve B.: That’s great. I understand that you have what you call the Golden 10? Ten hiring and selection best practices? Could you share a few of those with us, maybe ones that listeners wouldn’t expect?
Bob K.: Yeah. Well, I’m a huge fan of employee referrals. If you’re going to hire the types of people who are going to succeed in your culture, getting referrals from your current employees I think is an absolute way to go. If you have an engaged culture and you’re currently studying it, I would look at your employee referral percent. If it is under 25%, I can almost guarantee you that you have some engagement issues. Best-in-class organizations will be at least 50% employee referrals. And again, you know the studies are overwhelming that employees who enter a firm as referrals tend to be more engaged and tend to have a higher level of retention.
I think another great practice is to have a peer participate in the interview process. Don’t just have managers participate in the interview process. If I’m a new grad and I’m interviewing, please don’t have me talk to the Baby Boomers or three Gen Xers; you know, have me talk to some of the new grads who got hired last year.
I’m another fan of inviting the candidate to stay for lunch and encouraging him or her to sit at any of the cafeteria tables, unsolicited, to really get a sense for what the organization is like. I think that’s a best practice for the firm; it can also be scary for the firm if you’re a bad employer, right? Because he or she might hear things. But I believe that, aren’t you better off having employees hear that before they join rather than after they join and they realize they made a mistake?
There’s another great best practice that was really made popular by Zappos. Zappos will now give every new hire, during onboarding, a $3,000 bonus to quit. So, think of that for a second. You join Zappos, and within that 3-month window, you are offered a $3,000 bonus to resign. I think that is a brilliant best practice.
Tony Shay, who is the Zappos CEO, has concluded it is way more costly to have me hire you and have you identify yourself as a misfit and start a job search and be disengaged—that is way more expensive than the $3,000 that I will give you. Now, coincidentally, it hardly ever pays that out because it does an amazing job in understanding who will succeed in its culture—and so it can make such an offer really recognizing it is not going to be writing many checks.
Steve B.: He also says that everybody who comes to work there starts out on the phones.
Bob K.: Absolutely.
Steve B.: So, they have to experience it. It’s all about the customer.
Bob K.: It’s all about the customer experience. In fact, if you go to YouTube and type in Zappos employment video, you’ll actually see its phone room and see what it’s like, and it’s a very different personality type, right? Because it understands the behavior and traits that will succeed in Zappos are going to be a different person who might apply and succeed at GE. It’s a different person. But some of these firms just really get it; they really understand their employee value proposition.
Steve B.: So far, we’re talking about engagement and retention as two things that are for the organization. But the title of your new book, I Engage, suggests an individual can take a personal approach to his or her engagement also. Is that right?
Bob K.: Yeah, Steve. One of the things that has been disappointing to me and, in some ways, discouraging—I spent all my waking hours in the space of employee engagement, right? You know I own the domain EmployeeEngagement.com. I’ve been in the space now for the past 20 years. And you want to think you’re making a difference, right? So, Gallup continues to come up with its studies showing that the levels of employee engagement in U.S.-based business continue to be incredibly low. In fact, its last, I think 2017, report indicated 67% of the employees in corporate America are disengaged or actively disengaged. Last year, we spent $74 billion in engagement-related products and services, and yet, Gallup is telling us we’re still not making a difference.
I believe we’ve been looking at engagement all wrong. I think we’ve been looking at how we engage the employee, and I think we need to refocus the engagement efforts on how we engage the person because what we’ve seen in our research is that often, what happens after work is what drives someone’s engagement during work. So, if you have a working mom and she has three little kids whom she has to drop off and pick up every day, and you’re a boss trying to get her to go above and beyond right now—well, she probably can’t go above and beyond right now.
Fifty percent of your listeners will end up going through a divorce. There’s elder care. There’s day care. There’s health and welfare issues that are taking place in the workplace, but yet, we don’t address them. We look to engage just the employee. And this is why this thing called empathy, I think, is such an important characteristic for a manager these days.
Technology has really knocked down the walls between work and life. This isn’t work and life balance—this is work and life blending right now. So, how do you really get your managers focused that hey, you’re now managing a holistic individual, not just the employee?
Now the employee piece that you asked about—there’s the personal accountability, right? Don’t wait for the manager. Don’t wait for the culture. Don’t wait for your leader to do something for you. What are you doing? One statistic I saw indicated that 48% of the disengaged employees in the workplace have no plans to change jobs. I find that so sad. So, I’m going to be disengaged, and I’m going to stay and make everyone’s life miserable, including my own. Why in a million years would I want to be miserable inside a job? Life is way too short.
So, I Engage has proven to be a terrific road map for someone to go through 23 career rest stops, to pause and ponder. I’ve had people write me letters that say, “Hey, I read your book, and I’ve identified the problem. It’s not leadership. It’s me. I’m unhappy. And I’m unhappy because I’m not a fit here.” And so trying to get people to really be accountable for their own engagement is a key part of engagement. And a key part of I Engage in getting managers to manage employees in such a way that it’s this holistic look at hey, this person who I’m managing—he or she has something going on that just isn’t his or her life that I need to at least be aware of, be concerned about, because I can never get him or her to go above and beyond if I don’t even know who he or she is.
Steve B.: Great. This has all been so very helpful.
Bob K.: Well, thank you, Steve.
Steve B.: Any final tips for listeners about engagement and retention?
Bob K.: Yeah. A shameful free plug alert: My website, EmployeeEngagement.com, has a resources section. I’m a junkie of putting tools up there; articles, videos—it’s all free. I truly view part of my work globally is to be an ambassador of engagement, and the more I can arm your listeners, your conference attendees, with practical, easy tools that I can put in your hands, free—that can make a big difference. I actually feel that’s my responsibility as I’ve aged in my life. So please visit EmployeeEngagement.com, go to the resources section, and download some really cool things.
Steve B.: Well, that’s great. That’s great help for the listeners. We appreciate so much all your insights today. Thanks so much for being here.