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Your HR Guy Hates Games

Whenever your HR guy asks you a question, he expects an answer. As you might have guessed, I am a blunt person and there is one particular question that almost ALWAYS gets to be readdressed.

“What are your salary requirements?”

All kinds of interview guides tell you how to answer this question without actually answering it and I am here to tell you that those guides are wrong. End of story. You answer the question because I know you aren’t willing to work for minimum wage. There is some minimum level you will absolutely not work for. If I have posted a salary range for this position, then it shows your level of education about the position. If I have not posted a salary range, you should probably know the pay you would be looking at in the industry you are looking. If you don’t give a salary range and the interviewer doesn’t grill you, you probably lost the job and you should be prepared for that if you’re that stubborn of an ass.

People might raz me for giving advice that totally screws the applicant out of a bargaining position. That is pure nonsense. Salary negotiation has to start somewhere and that gives you a chance to set the starting point. If you are nervous about your negotiation prowess, why not add on 20%-25% to the bottom of your range? 20% isn’t going to kill your job chances, especially if the salary range is unknown. So instead of giving a range of 80–100k, you give a range of 100–125k. Be prepared for the recruiter to go below what your salary requirements are and be prepared to negotiate. What’s the worse that could happen in that scenario? They offer you a position in your original salary range? You get scoffed at by a cheap skate company? Please!

It just seems like a no brainer but almost everyone tries to get out of this question. This interviewer won’t let you so you better give me a number, especially after I have made it clear the responsibilities of the position.

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Your HR Guy Thinks You’re Nice

Most people that I interview are nice people. Some of them are incredibly nice. More than likely, you are a nice person and your HR guy is an optimist: he thinks most people are pretty nice people. Granted that I’ve had an interview with a jerk or two and while it can be fun to make those guys sweat, it is pretty useless otherwise. But here is the problem with “being nice”:

Nice doesn’t get you the job.

How mean of your HR guy! Being nice isn’t a job skill though. It isn’t portable equity nor is it remarkable. Being nice in an interview is like wearing nice clothes and not smelling bad. It is expected of you and it is really a matter of respect and being polite (which isn’t the same as being nice by the way).

While I wish I could hire every nice person I interviewed, I can’t. And while I don’t particularly like the part of the job where I tell nice people that they aren’t going to be employed with us, it is necessary so I deal with it. Even if I say no, I probably still think you’re nice. So when a candidate (or hiring manager or the co-worker that referred him or her) uses this as a reason why I should hire them, I laugh a little to myself. While being nice is…well, nice…it isn’t a job skill and nobody will hire you for it.

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Be Memorable

If you’ve ever seen Stonehenge (either in person or in photographs), an image comes to mind that is unavoidable. So what HR guy? There are lots of works of man that are inspiring, what is so special about Stonehenge? Well, here’s my logic. Can you draw a picture of the layout of Stonehenge that would be any closer to 10–20% accurate? Do you know the history of the people that put it together? Not likely. It is a lesson about what makes anything memorable. Your resume full of job duties, history, education and skills doesn’t make you memorable (well, sometimes it does but it isn’t usually positive). Here are four things that job seekers can learn from Stonehenge to make them memorable.

1.) Have vision beyond what you can do by yourself. Your strongest asset is what you can accomplish with the right people and is usually not what you can accomplish on your own. Your ability to work and lead other people to make great things happen is memorable.

2.) Do things that are great. Stonehenge could have been smaller. In fact, there are replicas around the world that demonstrate that principle. The people who built Stonehenge wanted to make it memorable. They wanted to do something great. They did it.

3.) Be unavoidable. This doesn’t mean be a pest (I don’t want to get in trouble with stalker candidates). This means be so good that you are unavoidable in being considered. It means building your reputation and portable equity so that you become the Stonehenge in your recruiter’s mind. If you are anywhere near Stonehenge, you can’t ignore it. In a good way.

4.) Be passionate. Historians estimate that it took 20 million man hours to construct Stonehenge. These people had to be passionate abot what they were doing. There was quite a bit of work to be done and it must have been hard to see the final picture but they had the vision and the passion to make it happen.

Have a great weekend.

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Your HR Guy Wants You to Perform


I had an employee at an old job of mine who thought I was out to get him. I’ve had many “come to Jesus” talks over the course of my career but the one I gave him was simply brutal…brutally honest. Performance wise, he was the worst employee consistently. He might never be at the very bottom of the list but he was constantly in the bottom 10%. Finally, during one of my meetings with him, he asks me a question:

Why do you pick on me?

I paused. I took a breath and realized my initial response wouldn’t work. I was going to answer “What makes you think that?” but it came off as defensive. Plus, I already knew the answer. I was picking on him. What he didn’t understand is my motive. That was the question he was wanting to be answered. So I answered him:

I want you to perform. I don’t want to see you fail nor do I want to hire a new person and go through training and the added expense. The thing I want you to understand that despite me not wanting to do these things, I will go through with them and that all hinges on how you perform. So if you feel that I am picking on you, that is why.

Maybe not the most fantastic answer but the understanding it brought between the employee and myself cemented for me that posturing doesn’t work when dealing with your employees. The defensive answer I was going to give (that I am sure would tempt anyone in the heat of the moment) was the wrong one for the situation. It is a good lesson to learn by practicing conversations with pauses.

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Building portable equity

I reviewed Radical Careering here several weeks ago and while I thought the book was average, one point that stuck with me and has continued to do so is the building of portable equity. Portable equity is defined as skills, experience and education that you can take with you from job to job. These days, nobody would be attracted to a retirement plan that you lose if you get laid off. Employees want portability because they don’t see themselves as employees for life (and most employers, if they are honest, don’t either). The same is true with job skills that translate to the field you have chosen to work in. Building portable equity in your career takes work. As a recent graduate, you may be stuck with not-so-sexy job assignments and duties. Here are five ways you can beat the rap on those duties and become a superstar:

1.) You must do the job. The key to beating it straight out of the gate is to enthusiastically hit a home run with those not-so-sexy duties and every time you do, inform your boss that you are ready for your next challenge. No need to be annoying about it but no need to take it sitting down. It should be apparent from your actions that you can easily and competently take care of these minor job duties and you can start fitting in some projects with sex appeal.

2.) Be patient but don’t be a pushover. If you are on your second day, now is probably not the time to ask for more responsibilities and a raise. If a year has passed and you are doing the same thing you did your first month, you probably need to take control of your career. Don’t be a clock-puncher (a.k.a. the type of person that sits around years after his last promotion wondering why his promotion hasn’t come), go to work excited to do your job and present it as evidence to your boss that it is time to move up.

3.) Be prepared to take risks and experience failure. That doesn’t mean you falsify financial results until you get what you want. It is that you are prepared to risk falling flat on your face for both the possibility you might hit a home run or that you will learn something valuable once you dust yourself off. The best possible opportunities are the one’s that your boss thinks can’t be done. Taking on a project like this with enthusiasm is as near to “no risk” in business as you get. Figure out a way to make it work and knock your boss over.

4.) Build your resume now. Think about what you would want on your resume if you were forced to leave your job the next day. If you haven’t done it yet, do it. Stop putting it off and make it happen. The key to building portable equity is making sure you can use your experience and education to move (either within your company or to a different one). Try finding more projects that make your superstar status apparent.

5.) Be prepared to use that portable equity. While job hopping is not something I would ever promote, sometimes it is the only option in a dead end job. Before you go though, make sure you aren’t job hopping from a bad situation with no room for portable equity growth to another one with a nicer boss. You won’t be happy there either and then you’ll look like a job hopper. While you seek that next opportunity, spend time in your current job building whatever limited equity you can.

Maybe some other HR folks think I am throwing them under the bus here. I wish I had a room full of superstars but I won’t. The problem is that thinking in the above way is extraordinary. It is easy to find people who want to come in, punch a clock and get paid to do the basic requirements of the job. Finding people who are truly hungry for challenges is the difficult part.

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Your HR guy has caller ID

I know it comes to a shock to some of you but the HR guy has technology that has existed for the past 15 years known as caller ID. That means when you hit redial every 30 seconds for 20 minutes straight, I know about it. And guess what, it isn’t going to get me out of my meeting, lunch or interview sooner by calling me every minute. So here is what I suggest: leave me a message and send me an e-mail confirming the fact that you left me a message, a callback number and the best time to reach you. If you do this and do not annoy my co-workers, you will get the equivalent of a gold star next to your name on the board. If you do not follow my advice, I will furrow my brow and think mean things of you. Will it disqualify you from a job? Not entirely (unless of course when I do answer, you simply breathe heavily and then hang up). But remember, your HR guy is going to be working with you and more importantly, he is going to be working very closely with your direct supervisor who will rake the HR guy over the coals, throw him under the bus, etc… if he hires a stalker-lite person (again).

I am all for being forward in your job search but there is a fine line between being a good job candidate and being an obsessive job candidate. Find it, learn it, love it.

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SimplyHired and MySpace together at last

SimplyHired has pulled off quite the deal here.

There is going to be a lot of “old money” companies saying this isn’t significant. “Who cares? These kids on MySpace don’t have any skills we need. Plus the whole lot of them are probably child molesters anyway.” The good thing for these “kids” on MySpace is that they will have one of the most effective job searching tools out there easily accessible to them. Even the old money will be benefiting tremendously through this marriage of sorts (since SimplyHired aggregates millions of job listings including many of old money’s newspaper ads). MySpace has consistently ranked in the top 10 websites since the beginning of the year.

It is all a matter of people eventually figuring out that MySpace has a job search. It will be used and it is really only a matter of time.

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Don’t Offer Copious BJs at Work

It’s not a joke, it’s one of the first problems I had to deal with as a manager. I was working as a manager in an administrative portion of a major university. I worked with a mixed group of classified employees and student staff. Since there were shifts between students and things always came up, we had a way of students requesting for people to take their shifts. We basically had them send out a request to the listserv to be distributed to all staff regarding when their shift was available and whatever reasons they were looking to get it filled. One day as I was about to leave at 5:30, I get an e-mail that says:

To: listserv
From: “Matt”
Subject: Shift available

Thursday 3/31
5:00pm — 9:00pm
Building C

Reason: I have a big lab I have to do. Copious BJ’s to the person who takes this shift.

I froze. I re-read. I froze again. I heard footsteps coming towards my office. A quicker pace than usual. In walks my boss, Director of the department. He says the four words I didn’t want to hear at 5:30: “Take care of it.” Guh. I call Matt and tell him to come to the office right now. I call my IT guy to have him come in. In between that time, I get e-mails from three people on my staff that can’t believe the e-mail. One of them is going to file a complaint with the Human Rights Department. The IT guy comes in first so I have him sit with me to fire Matt.

Whenever Matt comes in, he is completely unapologetic. Whenever I tell him he is going to get fired, he gets defiant and starts asking me to cite what policies he has broken. I told him we work for a university that has a zero tolerance policy on sexually harassing words. This isn’t one of those things I could overlook, it is something that we had to take care of right now.

After he leaves, I tell the IT guy to take care of his e-mail access. He says he will do it. He doesn’t. And guess what happens?

Matt sent an e-mail out about 45 minutes after our conversation. Whenever I received it, I was thinking that it was just sent to me. It wouldn’t be the first time, no doubt about it. Then I read the message and I noticed the “To:” field said it was sent to the listserv. I again was shocked to what I saw. A diatribe by Matt regarding how “the man” (not making this up) had brought him down and that our corporate culture was an enemy of human rights. It was laughable stuff, especially in sharp contrast to the note he had sent out not two hours earlier (not to mention the fact that we worked for a university). What floored me was that the e-mail was even accepted. I called the IT guy at home and did what I knew how to do best. I asked a question:

“So did you turn off Matt’s access?”

“Of course I did. Why?”

“Have you checked your e-mail?”

“No.” click click click “Oh crap!”

“Way to go, now will you turn it off?”

“Yes.”

So ended my optimism when it came to people leaving an organization. Thanks to Matt (and some new experiences) I now take much greater precautions and expect the worst of every single termination I am a part of. Most of them go well but I don’t bet on it any more.

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Work Tip: Don’t Offer Copious BJs Over E-mail to the Person Taking Your Shift


It’s not a joke, it’s one of the first HR problems I had to deal with as a manager.

I was working as a manager in a student-run computer lab of a major university. We worked closely with a mixed group of classified employees and student staff. Since there were shifts between students and things always came up, we had an automated way of students requesting for people to take their shifts.

We basically had them send out a request to the listserv to be distributed to all staff regarding when their shift was available and whatever reasons they were looking to get it filled. One day as I was about to leave at 5:30, I get an e-mail that says:

To: listserv
From: “Matt”
Subject: Shift available

Thursday 3/31
5:00pm — 9:00pm
Building C

Reason: I have a big lab I have to do. Copious BJs to the person who takes this shift.

I froze. I re-read. I froze again.

Guh.

I call Matt and tell him to come to the office right now. I call my IT guy and the other managers to have them come in. In between that time, I get e-mails from three people on my staff that can’t believe what they read. One of them is going to file a complaint with the Human Rights Department.

Thank God I don’t work for a university anymore.

Whenever Matt comes in, he is completely unapologetic. Whenever I tell him he is going to get fired, he gets defiant and starts asking me to cite what policies he has broken. I told him we work for a university that has a zero tolerance policy on sexually harassing words. This isn’t one of those things I could overlook, it’s something that we had to take care of right now.

After he leaves, I tell our IT lead to kill his account but he was going to go home first and do it later that night. That’s when I realized the advantages of having all the ducks in a row and pulling the cord before it goes down.

Matt sent an e-mail out about 45 minutes after our conversation. Whenever I received it, I was thinking that it was just sent to me. It wouldn’t be the first time, no doubt about it.

Then I read the message and I noticed the “To:” field said it was sent to the listserv. I again was shocked to what I saw. A diatribe by Matt regarding how “the man” (not making this up) had brought him down and that our corporate culture was an enemy of human rights.

It was laughable stuff, especially in sharp contrast to the note he had sent out not two hours earlier (not to mention the fact that we worked for a university). What floored me was that the e-mail was even sent. I called the IT guy at home and did what I knew how to do best. I asked a question:

“So did you turn off Matt’s access?”

“Of course I did. Why?”

“Have you checked your e-mail?”

“No.” click click click “Oh crap!”

“Way to go, now will you turn it off?”

“Yes.”

So ended my optimism when it came to people leaving an organization.

Thanks to Matt (and some new experiences) I now take much greater precautions and expect the worst of every single termination I am a part of. Most of them go well but I don’t bet on it any more.

Originally published at lancehaun.com on June 12, 2006.

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Mis-management part 476

I don’t like picking on one particular group of people and it feels like I have been picking strictly on employees and candidates. That is unfair because, as everyone knows, management is to be blamed as the root cause of most problems. When I say “most,” I mean closer to 75–85% of the problems in the workplace could be fixed by better management. The great management thinkers of the 20th century agree with me and thinkers in the 21st century are on the bandwagon too.

So what’s the problem with management? It is usually a question of numbers. Either there are too many or too few. I worked for a company that had a ratio of one manager for every one and a half reports. That is silly and luckily, that company was forced to restructure their business and stop the insanity. In many startups, I see the complete opposite problem where you have one manager for every 20 reports. Any cost savings met by having that few managers is lost significantly through productivity losses.

The point being: supervising one person is about as stupid as supervising 20 and both of those situations will sink your business. So what is your optimal number you should be aiming for?

Studies show managers should have three to eight employees directly reporting to them. The more complicated their tasks, the less amount of employees that should be reporting directly. So if you are managing managers, you should be closer to three than eight and if you are managing entry level sales associates or retail clerks, that number should be closer to eight than three. This formula allows for the efficiency of being able to manage multiple people but the ability to micro-manage when necessary.