One hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds. That’s the winning time for Sunday’s London Marathon winner, Sebastian Sawe, who did something no human had ever done before: run a marathon in an official race in under two hours. In case you were wondering, that is an average pace of 4:33 per mile or 13.16 miles per hour. (For comparison, in 1862, a runner named George Farran set the world record for the mile by running at 4:33.)

The post Two Men Broke a Barrier No Human Had Ever Broken. Neither Did It Alone. appeared first on Improve Your HR.

No eating hair

No climbing on the table

Everyone goes potty before we leave the house

The post Why The Rules Exist appeared first on Improve Your HR.

If you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t compete with the big companies, things are shifting.

The post Deloitte Is Cutting Perks. Your Small Business Just Got More Competitive appeared first on Improve Your HR.

A job interview is a conversation between two liars. 

It’s a fairly common phrase, and we can all chuckle at it because, of course, the candidate overstates qualifications while the hiring manager understates the amount of work to be done. But it’s more than just a little bragging that is the problem. It’s that candidates describe what they think they can do, and hiring managers describe what they think they need. Both are wrong, and the stats show it.

A recent McKinsey study found that one in five new hires in Europe leave the company before their probationary period passes. 

That means there was a mismatch somewhere. 

One of the hardest parts of hiring is writing the job description, and it’s often done by a recruiter using AI to take the notes from the hiring manager and put it into the company’s standard format.

The result is this type of mismatch. A situation where both the candidate and the hiring manager think they are a match, and when the new hire starts, everyone realizes this just isn’t working out. 

It’s not just that you’re hiring the wrong people; you’re interviewing the wrong people.

The system filters on proxies (resumes, credentials) instead of capability, so the wrong people enter the funnel. This results in what we think of as talent shortages. It’s not that the talent doesn’t exist; it’s that you can’t find the talent needle in the applicant haystack.

Alex Rashkovan, CEO of Atalef.ai explains:

“Most companies don’t have a tech talent shortage. They have a skills measurement and role-matching gap. Skills-based validation replaces CV assumptions with real data about what candidates can do and how they fit the role. At Atalef.ai, that’s exactly what we built DeepMatch for, our skills-validation and matching engine that compares candidates against role requirements. It gives hiring managers a defensible, skills-based reason for every shortlist decision.”

Instead of looking at skills, recruiters look at resumes. And for most jobs, the day-to-day tasks don’t involve resume writing, so resumes come in three categories: 

• Written by an (expensive) professional resume writer who will make the resume sound great, but that reflects the paid writer’s talents more than the candidate’s
• Written by AI tools to optimize for keywords in a poorly written job description
• Terrible

There are people out there who can fill your vacant position, but they won’t make it past the screeners (human or AI) because their resumes don’t match what you’re looking for. Maybe they don’t have the right degree, didn’t work for the right company, or use clunky language to describe their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

The better way to fill technical roles is with skills matching, rather than keyword matching. When skills tests are available, you can even get candidates who wouldn’t meet the “on paper” qualifications but go ahead and take and pass the test with flying colors.

Knowing what people can actually do, rather than what they talk about doing, is the difference between a good new hire and a new hire who will struggle in the position. 

The problem isn’t that candidates are lying or that hiring managers are unrealistic. It’s that both sides are working with incomplete signals. If you can create a skill evaluation that really works, you’ll find your talent shortage shrinking and your early-stage retention increasing. While hiring managers and candidates may still lean toward exaggerations, a solid test gets you to the truth.

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While scrolling through X, I saw a video that made my HR blood boil. The scene is a young woman speaking with her boss through a computer screen. The boss tells her to turn on her camera. She objects, he pushes. She counters.

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“You should know that they need gym shoes in third grade.”

This was an actual line my son’s teacher said to me (albeit in German).

Please understand that from Kindergarten (two years’ worth) through second grade, gym shoes were forbidden, and they needed “Stoppersocken” (those socks with rubber on the bottom).

I asked her how I could have known that there was a change in grade three when there had been no list sent home. She replied, “Because academics start in grade three, and so we are serious about gym.”

I still didn’t see the logic, but she acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world to her.

And it was obvious to her. But I’d never had a third grader in the Swiss school system before. There was no way for me to know without someone telling me. And most of the other parents knew as well–because they were Swiss and knew that grade three was a big academic change and that it related to gym shoes. So the teacher looked around and thought, “20 kids in the class and 18 knew to bring gym shoes. These two mothers are idiots.” No, we were just foreigners who weren’t raised in that system.

So often we do this to our employees. We make up rules in our heads, and then we just expect people to know them and punish them for not knowing.

We say, “Oh, we don’t need a dress code, we just tell people to ‘dress for your day.'” Or “Don’t sexually harass people,” but we don’t lay out what the boundaries are.

Just because it’s in your head and very clear to you and the executive team doesn’t mean it will be clear to everyone.

Say what you mean. And follow that up with meaning what you say. It’s a kindness for everyone to have clear understanding of expectations.

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What’s better than free New York Mets tickets? New York Mets tickets that cost $10.

The post The Problem With Free: What the Mets—and Hiring Managers—Got Wrong appeared first on Improve Your HR.

“There is no ‘P’ in hamster.” This is not a controversial statement. Any dictionary will agree with it. Any pet store will too. But Carol Blymire overheard a conversation between a young employee with her boss, and this came up.

The post This Helicopter Mom Raised a Daughter Incapable of Normal Business Behavior. A Warning appeared first on Improve Your HR.

Billionaire Bill Ackman fired an employee, who is threatening to sue. He wrote 2,400 words on X asking for opinions.

To keep reading, click here: Bill Ackman Posted 2,400 Words About a $2 Million Lawsuit. Here’s the Real Lesson

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Katyayani Shukla posted this on Twitter. Now she is in India, and I don’t know anything about Indian employment law, and generally write from a US (and sometimes European) perspective, but this is a question that comes up often. Why are employees expected to give two weeks’ (or more) notice, and employers can kick you to the curb via an early morning email?

It’s a good question. It seems incredibly unfair. One of my least favorite things is when an employee offers a notice period, and the employer terminates the person immediately. I find that to be absolutely immoral.

I once had a manager call me, enraged because an employee had told him on a Friday afternoon that today was his last day, handed over his laptop and badge, and left. The manager raged, “How could he be so unprofessional?”

I asked a simple question: What did you do the last time an employee gave two weeks’ notice?

The manager replied, “Well, he was going to a competitor, so I terminated him immediately.”

I still don’t think the manager understood that these were the clear consequences of his previous actions.

There is a rationale for terminating someone without prior notice. Now, if you’re terminating for cause or poor performance, the employee should be well aware that this is coming.

If you’re conducting a layoff, then the reason for not notice is practical. Terminated employees tend not to be happy to work. At best, they come to work angry and feeling betrayed. At worst, they sabotage things. The employees who were not terminated are unsure how to interact with their coworker.

It’s very difficult. In fact, so difficult and unpleasant that in the case of things like a company shut down or merger, where you need to keep a transition team who know they will be terminated, you have to offer large stay bonuses to keep them working.

What I recommend:

–Employees who offer a notice period and you don’t want them to work it: Terminate them immediately and provide them with pay through the end of the (reasonable) notice period.

–Terminate for cause/performance: The employee should know it’s coming and that they could have fixed it and chose not to, so just let them go.

–Termination as a position elimination: Immediate termination with severance and benefits continuation.

It’s better all around if disgruntled employees can move on, but do pay them, at a minimum, the amount you would ask from them for a notice period.

Position eliminations are sometimes necessary. Don’t be a jerk about it. Pay out a reasonable notice period and offer severance.

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