You're listening to the HR Mixtape. Your podcast with the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well, like work. Now, your host, Joining me today is Tim Sackett. He's the president of HRU Technical Resources, has 20 years of combined executive HR and talent acquisition experience, is a sought-after international public
speaker, and is the author of The Talent Fix Vol. 2. So Tim, we are here at SHRM Annual, one of our favorite events to be at, networking and connecting and learning. What Oh gosh, I'm like year 12. Wow. So yeah, we were just trying to figure that out. So it's 2024, it might be even longer. I think my first one was 2009. Wow. Is that 15 years? That's amazing. It's a I think my first was 2012. 2012? Yeah, I I've still got my head. I know. It's too many. It's like four cities, right? Yeah.
It's Chicago, Vegas, New Orleans, maybe Orlando. Yeah, we used One San Diego, a little bit. Yeah. So we are sitting down today to talk about your book. It is called The Talent Fix, Volume 2. What Like I did the first one five years ago. So Sherm goes, hey, we need to update this because it's still selling, but it's old. And so I was like, wait a minute, there's so much more here. There's so much more here that like, there's new stuff I want to write about. I
just don't want to update. There's a lot of updates that had to happen, but like I had 40% new content. Wow. Because there's so much more that's happened with AI and different things and stories. They let me get really aggressive. One of the titles is like the white guy's guide to diversity recruiting. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to put it in there as a placeholder, but they're going to make me change. Yeah.
And then they go, yeah, that's on you, brother. Do whatever you want. OK, Like there's all these concepts that I had that have been fishing around in my head that I just wanted to talk about. Um, and they were just like, yeah, go do it. So how do you think talent has evolved then in the last five years compared to when you wrote it before? I mean, obviously you mentioned some things, but you had a passion to bring new content to it. What were you Because hiring out of COVID, hiring was
so crazy, right? Every company, all the money was there. The candidates got in control. They actually, before COVID hit, actually the candidates were kind of in control then too, but we forget about that. Yeah. So we started to see this evolution of what happens when it's a candidate-driven market versus employer-driven market
and all the things that have to take place. And just knowing that there's an ebb and flow the crazy part for me is like as writing the book like we still are crappy to candidates Like we still haven't figured that out and now it's like starting to churn So now like all of the research is showing like all the like survey stuff is coming back going Now we're even treating him worse like it's getting worse. I
No, because it's not fair. It's an experience my son just went through as he has been coming out of the military and looking for a job. So he started with this organization. He'd worked two days and then the owner let him go. And I Right. And he's like, well, apparently they were interviewing two people that had this similar first name. There was some miscommunication No way. Yeah. And he told me this and I was like, wow. He's like, is there anything I can do? I was like, not
really. And I wouldn't even recommend you do anything because An amazing miscommunication. It's crazy. About 25% of the workers we hire in my company and we hire about 500 people a year are veterans. And people always go like, Oh my gosh, how do you hire like a quarter of your workforce as veterans? And literally by chance, I had a friend of mine, his brother was leaving the military tanker, like out of the army. And he was working for like for a credit union or something as
a teller. And he's like, I didn't, like, I didn't think I went in the, like, I didn't, this sucks. And I go, I don't know if you all like recruiting, but I can teach you how to recruit. It's good living. Yeah. And we do a lot of defense stuff. He came in and immediately he could talk the language of all these military guys and they immediately had credibility with them. And like, I was like, Oh my God, like somehow we hit on this magic thing. And like every
company that comes to me and says, how do you hire more veterans? I'm like, hire veterans They're so good. It's amazing to me, and I don't want to go off too much on a tangent about the military, but it's amazing to me that there's all these amazing skills that our military learns teamwork, leadership, conflict, resilience, all these things. And we're like, we don't really know where they would fit. It's like, what do you
mean slap them anywhere? Literally, they will learn. They're fast learners. But when we came into the workforce, if you think about 20 years ago, that was not the concept employers had of veterans. It was like, they're soldiers, they do what they're told, but you have to tell them to do something. That's not today's military.
Like, it's totally different. It's changed, evolved. Um, and I think a lot of employers understand that now, but you still have too many employers going, Oh, we're going to hire, you know, all these veterans and we're going to stick them in these crappy hourly jobs. And you're like, that's really, come on. Yeah. Like I literally, like when we, again, we hired for a bunch of defense clients and we'll have people come in and
they're like, Oh yeah, I was whatever title. And then I'll like, I'll ask my guy like, what does that mean? Like that means he had a billion dollar budget and had like a 1500 people in his command. And like, And some public-traded manufacturing company wants them to come and supervise 15 people. And they're like, I don't know if you can handle it. And you're like, oh my gosh. Are you so dumb?
Yeah. What are some of the other There's a lot of AI talk now, and you're going to hear that, like Sherem, we're going to hear that a lot. I think a lot of people believe, because you know, the content cycle runs so fast now that we're already going beyond. So we already think people know what AI is. They already think that they get it all. And what I find is people are still really, really behind on even what it is. So
there's a lot of fear mongering out there about it. It's going to take everybody's job or it's going to turn you into a 10 X person. And there's not every in like, I will have people like I have like heads of HR going like, Hey, we need to get Asia AI. Like what AI should we buy? And you're just like, I mean, it's not, that's not
how this works. It's not how it's going to impact you. But like, so there's so much more like we have to slow down and back up and educate, um, around like, where's this getting impact and, and how it could be like, I did a, um, a Sherm webcast and it got like 25,000 people today. Like, and it was literally chat GP one-on-one. Almost half of that was not even talking about chat GPT was just literally the basics of AI like let me teach you what this is and what it's not in
the number one question. So like 1500 of the same question was, how do I use AI in my job every single day today? And then there's actually some use cases, but they're pretty narrow. It's like, Oh, you can help it write an email. Like, you know, it can help you do like any other, some stuff you wouldn't want to do. Like you don't want to put like your company's data into a public language
model. But again, if you don't tell people that they don't, you're like, what do you, I don't understand. Why would you say that? Because it's just doing this for me. Well, yeah, but if I'm a competitor and I asked for your data and you put your data in, the AI doesn't know not to give it to me and it's going to give it to me. And that's why you see some of this fear-mongering from legal teams around that. So AI is a big thing. You know what I see a lot of?
We've kind of transitioned from DE&I to mental health. And it's not a bad evolution, because I think we've talked for DE&I for a long time. We didn't solve it. But we're educated about it. We're talking about it. So it's out there in the vernacular. Companies get it. But like, I think all of a sudden we had this new
generation come in. We had COVID, we had all this stuff. And we have a workforce coming in that has a lot of like anxiety and mental health issues from not working with teams, you know, having to work, having to go to school remotely, now having to come in the office and all this other stuff that happens. And so mental health is a big one. You hear a lot of that here, uh, because we think like, I'm a Gen Xer. I don't know about you. You might. I
am. Okay. We're on that fringe of geriatric millennial. We grew up with parents that were just like, shut your mouth and go to work and just rub some dirt on it and you'll be fine. Drink out of the water hose, let's pick it. And we like to make fun about that, but it is a different for every generation coming through. And whether right or wrong, we have a
generation of workers that's going to be a really large generation. As HR professionals and leaders, We have to know if we want really productive workers, then we have to actually care about that, do things about that.
Have you seen organizations putting into their, either their talent acquisition practices or their onboarding practices, this idea around, business acumen isn't the right word for it, and it's not really business etiquette, because I don't think that the new generation should act like the old generation, but there's something there that is being lost in translation that some of this younger generation is coming in and they're asking like, Wildly
inappropriate questions and not just questions to challenge because I genuinely think that the younger generation asking the tough questions is amazing and we need that in our organizations. But how have I think you need it if it's productive. Yeah. But so often it's unproductive because they've been able to go online and social media and say things out loud to the universe that either will get challenged or they won't get challenged, but it doesn't necessarily end
their life kind of thing or whatever. In, in, in organizational dynamics, it could end your career with that company. And that's just a reality. And someone's, Oh, I'm going to get, I'm going to lose my job over asking a question. You might, if it's the wrong question at the wrong time, that's not productive. It's not helpful to the situation. It's not going to help your clients. It's
not going to help other employees. You have to have a little bit of a corporate filter that I think the younger generation still has to learn, but we all did. I mean, that's just time in life, some of that. You're going to have some bumps around that for sure. Back to the business side too, it's kind of that political savviness. right? We kind of maybe had too high of a filter on political savviness and
then it kind of went away completely. I always tell people it's weird like in HR because like we're considered a cost center and then other things are like a business center or I mean a profit center. We all need to be business centers. We have to be like, who's the steward of our business? It's our employees, it's our clients, it's all these things. And we have that no matter if you're nonprofit or profit. And I think, you know, that's where I start to like, take a look at HR going, how do we
teach our people? Like we're a business center. We are going to spend some money. There's some ways we can save some money. We actually might even make some money, but that's a reality that we have to think of. We can't just be going, Oh, we're a call center and they're our client. I hate the client like relationship, internal client stuff, because what you're saying to them is I, You're more important than we are. Like, no, we're peers. Like, you know, um, and I've
never felt that way. I've never treated somebody like, Oh, I'm, you're my clients. I'll do whatever you say. Like, no, that's wrong. And I think younger people, that's one of those issues, right? We come up with like, you're like, well, wait a minute. What they're doing is wrong. Shouldn't we say something? And you're like, Man, maybe two decades ago we didn't, and then we just let this crap go,
Yeah, I think that's definitely needed. I also think that there needs to be a little bit more education around business models. I've seen employees who work in publicly traded, stakeholder-owned organizations who have had different feeling cultures, and as their organizations have grown, they've had to transition, they've had to do more things for their stakeholders, all those kinds of things. But unless you kind of know the dynamic of how a business works, you're like, why do we care about
our stakeholders? Why aren't we, like, why don't we just do what we wanna do? You know, the one thing that I haven't seen here, and I might over the next couple of days, but I haven't seen it in the titles. So you think about college graduates today. So 2024, 61% of college graduates are female, and that's increasing, right? So it's gonna get bigger. And we go, oh my God, that's so cool. Because we've been, again, D&I focused, gender focused for so long. By
the way, that's also inequity, right? It's inequity to a male gender. And it turns out in history, when males are less educated and have a lot of time on their hands and they feel disenfranchised, bad things happen. But that's not a problem for females. But what I'm starting to think is, are we really discussing how our workforce dynamics are going to change? And again, some in a good way. I do think we're going to see way, way, way more female leaders. We haven't
seen that at the Fortune 500 executive level yet. But I can foresee a time in my lifetime where the majority of Fortune 500 leaders will be female. And how is that going to change work? How is that going to change measurement, accountability, all of those things? No one's talking about that here. It's almost like we're seeing this drastic change in demographic and we're all just like, Because it was a predominantly female conference. I'm
shocked that no one's talking about this going, hey, wait a minute. Are our organizations prepared for all these women leaders? And are we preparing the women to lead? Because you know what's going to happen. The market for the publicly traded companies is going to come after them if they don't feel like you're profit-focused and all the other things.
Because they always think the guys are that way, but the women aren't. Even though the high-level executive women I know are exactly like the dudes, there's no difference. But I'm shocked that we're not specifically talking about It's interesting that you brought that up, because I was just telling my husband the other day. So
he's a battalion chief in the fire service. And we were talking about the young generation coming into the fire service and how it's not being presented the way it was when he joined the fire service. When he joined, it was very, you're a hero, and you're going to run into fires, and all that kind of stuff. The reality is most firemen paramedics spend 90% of their time being paramedics. And a huge part of that is dealing with mental
health crisis. And I said to him, I said, all right, I'm making a crazy, wild prediction. Here's my prediction. The fire service is going to become more female in my lifetime because they have the skills of empathy, of resilience in a different way, of understanding. We already know that female police officers can handle male Um, so you're absolutely right. There's also the male, um, like motherly relationship there too, where like, like
if a guy comes at me aggressively, I'm probably going to be aggressive back. A female comes at me from a male perspective. I'm not going, my first inclination is not to be aggressive. It's like you go, oh gosh, my mom's like scolding me. I feel bad. It's so unique. I was in Australia about a month ago, and I noticed this, it's the second time I've been to Australia, because the population's so small and they're like a lot of rich countries, they don't have
enough people, so they bring a lot of immigrants in. Most of their immigrants are female Asian. Because unfortunately in China, if you're a Chinese female, you're still not super popular in your own country because they all wanted males, right? And so you have all these young Chinese, Japanese women And when you go and you start to see police and construction workers and all this other
stuff, you see so many females in positions you don't see in America. And as an American, it kind of shocks you a little because you're like, oh God, I'm not used to seeing so many females in these positions. But it's a little bit of a glimpse into what America could be a decade from now, Wow. All right. We started with talking about what you've seen as far as trends
and that you're seeing from the candidates. I want to flip the script a little bit and ask about, you know, I've heard HR people talk about struggling to keep candidates engaged, not necessarily that they're not engaged with the candidates. What advice do you have for that? I mean, because people are, Either people are putting a ton of applications in and not getting calls back, or they're getting a lot of calls back right away. So how do we keep candidates interested?
Yeah. Again, it's one of the things I love about potentially about AI, because especially in the natural language sense is that you could actually have really great conversations with candidates, like updates, right? So, you know, when someone got moved to a status instead of a crappy email, maybe it's actually a conversational text out to a candidate that says, Hey, by the way, hiring manager just told us that they would like to interview you,
right? I'm going to send you a link, you know, so you can self schedule yourself, blah, blah, blah, all those kinds of things. And that's going to happen naturally. So like right now, the problem we have as recruiters, we just don't have the capacity to keep up with 50, a hundred, a thousand candidates and let them know. So all these candidates go, it's a black hole. I don't hear anything. Like I have like, um, three sons in the workforce now.
And one of them is very like organized, kept a spreadsheet, applied for out of college spread for 125 jobs. 17% of those actually sent him a message back that they actually got his stuff. And you're like, what? 17%? Only 17%? Only 17%. Wow. And he literally, he logged every communication, what it was. Was it like just a form email? Was it from somebody? And like, it's shocking how low it
is. Like to win right now in recruiting and talent acquisition. And I talked to so many senior executives, like in operations, CEOs, CIOs, and they always talk about like, we're just, we suck at recruiting. It almost, it's always about follow-up. They don't know that, but that's really what it is. And part of it is also they don't understand how to actually fund the recruiting function. So they're like, oh, well, our recruiters have 75 openings,
or 50 openings, or whatever. And you're like, you're not recruiting at that point. You're literally surviving on a daily basis, just managing rec load, right? And so I do think AI now, we've become, we actually for the first time have this ability to actually network and talk with a
lot of people. My hope is at some point, the future of recruiting for me is recruiters actually really going to understand the talent in the marketplace and having real conversations with real people about why you should come work here, why you should trust us with your career. And we always talk about that like, oh yeah, I've done that before. We have like our best story ever in recruiting. That should be a daily occurrence. where you go, look, you're at your, you're at
like ABC company. Now we want you to come here. I have a guy, it's like two more years before he retires. And then we have this kind of thing that's going to happen. He's going to move up. I want you to be on our bench, but I don't need you right now. I need you in 24 months. How do we make that happen? What conversations? How do we bring you in? And you start that flirting, dating process of saying, eventually we're going to get married. Right now, what we do is you apply. And
then you go, well, I want you to marry you. You have to marry us right now. And then like candidates are like, wait a minute, like what the hell's going on? Like, why? I don't want to be married. I just want, I was just kind of like, I want to, can we Wow. You know, it's interesting to think about, um, so one of the reasons I came to Pumlacity is I was a client and I just, I fell in love. I fell in love with the company. I fell in love with the product team.
Um, that's really what we should be creating these sticky brand ambassadors ish that just get excited about working with us and the work that's going
Yeah. And AI is not there now. It might be at some point, like I've seen some beta stuff that's, that's very, you know, like interactive and I think it can get to a point, but at the end of the day, if it allows us as humans to go and connect with other humans, because we've like, we, we automate ourselves so much that we lose all that connection, you know? And I think, well, like when we see this at Sherm, what
is it? 25,000 people here. It's insane. If you think live events are going to die, you're way out of touch because as humans, we want this. We want all these conversations that are happening around us. And as recruiters and talent acquisition people and HR people, we should be trying to figure out how can we leverage technology that we can have more face-to-face How do you see that changing remote work? I have a
statistic in my head. I don't know where it came from, so I feel bad about saying it. But somebody was like, well, 86% of employees have gone back to work. And I was like, OK, maybe that's true if we think about hybrid, right? Like, they're in the office at some point. That makes sense to me. But I think that fundamentally, there has been a shift. But I agree. So many people are craving that. personal connection, maybe not necessarily in person. How do you see
So there's a lot of numbers. Like if we think about, if we go back to pre-COVID, there was about 12, 13% of the workforce that was remote. That got up to about 28% or so is now down to like that 16, 17%. And the reality is if we would have went pre-COVID and said like potentially how many, how much could go remote? In reality, those numbers came back around 16 or 17%, which is where we're at. I
think we're having the wrong conversation around remote. As HR leaders, our conversation should be, how do I help you as an employee be the most productive you can be, measurably? And that might be that you're remote. That might be that you're hybrid. That might be that you're in office. But it's my job to help you be the most productive employee you can be. Now, you might choose to opt out and say, hey, I don't wanna be an in-office productive employee for you. Because I had that happen,
right? I had an employee, everybody, we all went back and we had these great, we measure everything, so we had all this data stream, had somebody that was failing remotely, and he knew it. So we said, hey, how about we come back in the office? He's like, I don't, I love working remotely. I'm like, but you're not working. You're not. It's not working. Yeah. And so like, but he's like, but I, I want to find a job where I can be successful working
remotely. Cool. You go do that. But it's not with us. If you want with us, we have to figure out how to make you productive, how to make you successful. So for me, the conversations that we should be having as hiring managers and HR leaders is do you want to be successful with us? almost all your employees will say yes. Some will hesitantly say yes, like maybe not. They're like, okay, how about we get you off the bus? And
if that's the case, understand like this is the conversation we're having. It's not remote versus office. It's, you show me that you can be where you can be the most productive, and if that most productive isn't remote, like I have someone working for me now that was in office, was a great employee. She's a super employee remotely, and I would tell her all the time, I go, I will fire you if you try to come in the office. Like,
you never come to the office, and she like laughs, because she's like, well, I wanna come once in a while. I'm like, okay, once in a while, but I'm gonna send you right back home, because she's amazing Well, and you just described how we should be thinking about the word flexibility. Like, I think people get stuck on, like you said, like these boxes, you're hybrid, you're remote, you're this or that. It's like, how do we become more empathetic to
people's situations? But you highlighted something very important. You have to do the work and you have to meet the clear expectations that are laid out for you. As long as you've done those things, I always tell people that because it's so often when we say like we talk about someone who's like, where are you most productive? The employee who they will tell you they're most productive in whatever situation they want to be in. Yeah. And you know,
like, so I always say I had measurably most productive. Yeah. And All right, let's get back to the book as we kind of finish out our discussion. What is something in the book that you are either most proud of or think it is like the chapter people need to read, I'm actually doing my talk on it here tomorrow. So it's a chapter around building the hiring machine, a perfect hiring machine. It was based on some research. It was based on doing this with a number of companies. And
it's not just about technology. It's not just about process. It's a lot of about you as the right leader and the challenges and risks that you're willing to take. Because so often when I get into a company and I find that they're not recruiting the way they should be recruiting or could be recruiting, it's almost always because I, one of the things I do is
just say, Hey, I need to meet with your full leadership team, CEO, CI. And if they say, I can't make that happen, Then I'm like, then I go, I can't work with you because that's critical for this. Because what happens every single time, it's happened 100% of the time, is when I get those leadership team in the room and I say, here's what you have to do, and I always give competitive data and benchmarking and all this stuff, the CEO or the CIO, whoever they think is the roadblock, CFO,
will look at me and go, I'm like, yeah, why aren't we doing this? Like right now. And I don't like, But that's their ticket to say, now we can make this happen. But most of the time when I go back, they're like, Tim, I've had this, and I understand. A consultant comes in, and they say this, and they're like, yes, we need to do this. They don't trust, right? So there's a lack of trust, and I tell them before we go to have the conversation, look,
I expect they're going to say, oh my God, yes, do all this. And you're going to go, I've been asking for this and they wouldn't let me do it. And this just sucks. And usually it's a female leader, right? Not always because it happens with the male leaders too. So females always want to go, it's because you're a male. And I'm like, no, it happens with almost all of them because they just lack the trust in you to spend the money appropriately. And when you come to them with a very concrete
plan with data, all of a sudden they're just like, heck yeah. It's just like their sales leaders come and go, hey, if I do this, and we're going to do this, and I need 13% more in my budget, and we're going to deliver 20% sales increase. And then they fail and they give 7%. They don't go back the next year and say they need less money. They go back, OK, now I need 15% more in budget, and we're going to do this, and I'll give you 21%. That's
all part of the corporate game. But they trust the sales leader. They didn't trust the HR leader, TA leader, whatever it might be. And so I'm giving that talk tomorrow. It's a lot about leadership behavior. It is about technology as well, right? There's some of that. It's about process. It's about treating the candidate well. There's 10 components to it. Well,
I like that chapter. It's a brand new chapter in the book because it was, it was based on actually seeing this happen with companies and then doing some like meeting with these companies afterwards, it got, became successful and said, okay, let's look at every single thing we did to change. And it was the leaders coming and saying a lot like, God, like this is me. It was me that changed the most. Right.
So there's a lot of leadership, like learnings in there as well that I'm like, I really like, Well, and you hit on something that I think we don't do super well in HR still, and it makes me sad, but it's leveraging data. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is how we have conversations with our leadership team. And what I mean by that is, Get to learn how your leaders speak, how
they want you to speak, how they want you to present. You know, I've worked with leaders who want a giant deck, lots of story and data, and that's great. I also have leaders who want, give me the bottom line on top of the deck, and if I have questions, we're going to dig into it. Figure that out, because if you can come into the room prepared to speak the way they speak, And And I think you have to be ready with all of it, right? You have to have your deck, you have to have your data
and you have to have your stories because you don't know. I mean, I'm hoping you're going to know what your leader wants, but sometimes they switch on you and they'll just like, they abruptly stop you and start asking their questions and you better be ready to like know your stuff. And so often what we find is that they just don't know. They can't speak confidently. And what I find is they can't speak confidently about
the technology and it's usually the CIO that screws them up. And then the CFO looks at that conversation and they don't trust you to give you the money. And so, so often when I'm in the room, the CIO starts to ask me stuff and I'm bringing up a lot of stuff they have no clue on. And then the CFO is like, that guy knows more than you, which I can, I better know more about recruiting technology than a CIO of a company. Like they know technology, they don't know recruiting technology, you know. Um,
and a lot of times they don't even know their HR stack very well. Right. They just was like, Oh, we have, you know, whatever. And you're just like, you know, they know like the, they know the architecture, they know the networking, but they don't know like the software. It would be like me going to my CFO and going, Hey, I know you like Workday, but I've decided we're going with Oracle. I like their financials better.
They will look at you like you're insane, but somehow they can come to us and go, hey, I'm going to give you this HR program. Well, no, I don't like, well, then why, how you're a CFO, shut your mouth. I'll tell you what I need. I'm the expert in HR. I'm the expert in talent. I'm going to tell you what we need. And when I come to you, by the way, I already know what our core systems are and I'm going to give you something that I know will work with
us. Right. Cause I'm smart enough to understand that story and that you can't tell But that point right there, though, is you are confident enough to say, hold on a minute. I am the expert. Let me have the expert conversation. If you don't want to listen, then that's one thing. But like, you're not the expert in this situation. So. No. And like, it's so we get just so often like we let an IT person push us around because they're like, well,
that won't work because it won't work with our architecture. And you're just like, I'll get back to you on that, because I don't think that's true. I actually think it will. And then you'll be like, uh. That usually works. That shuts them down. Because they look at it as more work, right? They don't want change. They're like, hey, we finally
got this thing working, and we just want to keep it the same way. And I say right now, like a decade or two decades ago, to change a payroll system like Paylocity, it was like heavy lifting. It was a nightmare. We just went to Paylocity. This is a commercial Paylocity. We went from one of your competitors, and we literally shut them down one payroll, turned you guys on the next payroll within a week. Because you can run both systems till
you know that they're working, right? And then you go, oh yeah, we're good. Bam, shut them down, turn them on. There was zero pain moving over. And again, most technology today is like that. But the technology companies that we're working with, they still sell the fear to you Yeah, I agree. Well, Tim, as always, this was a great discussion. I'm looking forward to the rest of the conference and your session tomorrow. So best I hope you enjoyed today's episode. You can find show notes
and links at thehrmixtape.com. Come back