Keyword: job candidates

They have decided to leave, now you have to decide how long to keep them around.  In general, there are two schools of thought:

• Get them out the door as fast as you can.
• Get as much work out of them as you can.

There are a lot of variations in between, and a lot of contingent factors to consider, of course.  But in general, all the choices boil down to something approaching these.

I’ll cut to the chase scene and tell you, I’m firmly in the “show them the door” camp, unless there are some extenuating circumstances.  The key reason is that the person has already committed to the new job, they are mentally there already.  Also, they are a short-timer, and even the most dedicated and faithful of employees gets “short-timer syndrome”.  They will introduce, even unintentionally, an “I’m outta here” mood with it’s lax attention to detail, a poor attitude toward their peers, and worst of all, make others think about leaving.  So, most of the time, I’m in favor of “thanks for playing our game” and a quick exit…  measured in hours.

The only real exception is when the person holds essential responsibilities that simply no one else knows enough to handle, and you think the extra time will help train a replacement.  In this case, where the outgoing person essentially has your organization hostage, a little extra time is worth the downside.  But I rarely see value in more than the customary two weeks, and always recommend that you keep your options open and monitor the situation on a daily basis.  If the mood is going south, cut the person loose, immediately.

I talk about replacement training elsewhere, but it’s important to be realistic, if not pessimistic about it.  In my experience, short-timer syndrome takes over and completely engulfs any potential knowledge transfer you may gain from the departing employee.  They usually are leaving their job because they don’t like it, or see it as a dead end, and there is zero chance they won’t (even unintentionally) pass this attitude on to their replacement.

And as a side benefit, I usually find that a complete re-think of the job, with the new employee revitalizing the position, can work wonders for both the effectiveness of a position, and the morale of the incoming replacement.  So don’t rely on the outgoing person for knowledge transfer.  Assign a new employee, give them the essentials, and tell them you are looking for their input on how the job would best work.

So, unless you have done a very poor job in providing backup on an ongoing basis, or you have allowed an employee to develop unique and secret knowledge about their work (both mortal sins — on your part), prompt exits are the best.  Simply thank people for their work, and offer to help them clean out their desk.  Seriously.

Same day exits are the best.  This leaves the least amount of time for morale damage to the rest of the team, for questions from all concerned (and not concerned) about why, where, how much, etc., and perhaps often overlooked in this information age, the least amount of time for them to steal or damage essential information.  Change their password immediately, get them out the door with the least amount of stuff possible, and offer to settle up on all other issues (pay, COBRA, personal items left in the office, business items still at home, etc.) later.

And, for your amusement, it usually catches people off guard and sends a wonderfully strong signal to the rest of the organization: Thinking about leaving?  Fine, but don’t expect me to beg you to stay.  That’s never a bad signal to send.

The Ubiquitous Stanley Steemer Truck

Stanley Steemer is running ads (at least in the Seattle area) that are the first I’ve ever seen where a company is using their employee drug policy as a marketing tool.

In the ads, a pretty woman (housewife?) is shown with concern over letting strangers into her house, and with obvious relief that, because she called Stanley Steemer, there aren’t stoners invading her space.  The line is that not only do they get your carpet clean, but their employees are clean too.  I’ve got a FAQ that deals with the whole issue of employee testing, but this ad campaign raises a lot of questions for me.

First, although I’m not a marketing expert, I wonder about all the standard marketing questions: is this a real concern for potential customers, is this a differentiator (do their competitors have an obvious problem with this), and do people believe the message?  Even further, isn’t this making people who wouldn’t have otherwise thought about the issue of drug-impaired carpet cleaners now wonder about it and want to avoid it altogther (rent a machine and do it themselves)?  I certainly didn’t think of the carpet cleaning business as a particular hot spot for the drug crowd…  until this ad…

Then there’s the whole host of procedural questions:

• What do they test for?  Illegal drugs only?  How about alcohol?  What about prescription drugs?  Performance enhancing drugs?
• How often do they test?  Only on hire?  What if the person changes?  So do they test every month?
• What kind of a test is it?  Urine, which misses a lot of drugs, or blood which is invasive?
• Who do they test?  Just the people who clean the carpets?  How about sales people?  The people on the phone?  The managers?  The CEO?
• Are there exceptions?  Can I get out of it on religous grounds?
• What do they do with the long-time employee who suddenly goes dirty?  Fire them?  Keep them in the office?  Rehab?
• How much does this whole testing effort cost?  Could it ever be worth the expense?

Of course there are the many privacy questions.  What right does my employer have to know what I do in my off time?  And who sees the results?  Just HR?  My manager?  The health insurance provider?  The police?

Then there’s the issue of their relationship with their employees. “That’s right Sally, you have to pee in the cup before you can go to work.”  That sure builds a wonderful trusting relationship between employer and employee. “Yep, Bob, you have to be more sober to clean carpets than to play major league baseball.”  Please don’t get me started there…

But perhaps the most stunning part of all of this is that they don’t tell potential hires about this.  That’s right, nowhere on their web site is this drug policy mentioned.  I scoured their entire site, and especially their employment section, and there’s not a word about drug testing.  There are lots of flowery words about how wonderful it is to work there, plenty of encouragement for you to apply, but not a word about peeing in a cup when you do.  The first sign you see when you walk into many stores is “we drug test all applicants”.  But at Stanley Steemer, they apparently keep that a surprise for the potential employee while touting it to potential customers.

All in all this seems like a really bad move, and shows remarkably poor judgement on the part of the Stanley Steemer leadership team.  I’m sure it will be short-lived, quickly forgotten in the market, but long remembered in the company.

When people ask about recruiting, one of the first questions they ask is “where do I find good people?”  One of the first straws they grasp at is an online job site such as Monster, CareerBuilder and other more local sites.  I think this is a mistake.

I have a number of things to say about sourcing candidates elsewhere, but this question comes up so often it deserves special mention here.  Online job sites (and their older relatives, the newspaper classified ad) are lousy places to look for job candidates.  There are several reasons why.

First and foremost, they are far too broad-stroke, casting a net nation- or world-wide, and including every human looking for work in the world.  While at first blush that may seem like a good thing, in reality, it’s a disaster.  Start with the fact that 9 out of 10 responses you get for your ad will be worthless, and separating out the good ones is a painful chore.  Most are simply unqualified, and they have skirted the site’s filters.  If you are looking for things to do, and enjoy getting unintelligible emails from all over the planet, this may be fun.  But for most of us, this is a royal pain.

This broad stroke also has another downside, you don’t effectively reach the people you want to reach.  Think of it in terms of your normal product advertising.  If you sell, let’s say, electrical connectors (like AMP, for example), the last thing you would do is advertise on the SuperBowl.  Sure it would be expensive, but the real problem is that only 1 out of 100,000 people you reach is your customer.  So the vast majority of people you reach are saying “huh?”  You are killing an ant with a sledgehammer.  Most people would agree that, for AMP, an ad in a trade journal would be far more effective.  The same is true for job candidates.

But, you are saying, the cost is negligible (the ads are really cheap), so what’s the harm in casting a wide net?  The harm is that you waste time, energy, and goodwill, and you don’t effectively reach those you do want to reach.  You look desperate, unfocused, random, and unprofessional.  And for all your trouble, you don’t get the quality message across to the candidate you really want.

Also important is to consider is who you do reach.  By definition, people who post to Monster are looking for work.  Why?  Because they are either (a) out of work or (b) about to be out of work.  In either case you don’t want them.  Sure, some very small percentage of people (<1%) are out of work because of no fault of their own — they were laid off, or they quit because their job situation was untenable.  But I think you may not want even them — again, consider why they got laid off vs. their peers.  Surely the company doing the layoff kept the winners...

It has been my experience that the people trolling online job sites are the losers.  They are the perennially out of work people, the difficult people who get fired or laid off first, the unmotivated who can’t keep a job and can’t understand why, and the totally unqualified grasping at jobs well beyond their reach.  In short, the first people you would weed out of your candidate pile.  So why add them to the pile in the first place?

I have lots of ideas for where to search for good candidates, I’ll post them here soon.  In the meantime don’t grasp at the straw of online job sites.