The HR Tech Revolution: A Deep Dive with Tim Sackett

Speaker 1: 0:03

This is the Rebel HR Podcast, the podcast about all things innovation in the people's space. I'm Kyle Rode. Let's start the show. All right, welcome back. Hr Rebels Really excited for the conversation today. We are going to have a fun one. Here with us we have Tim Sackett. He is the CEO of HRU Tech, recognized as an influencer and creator of one of the top 10 global HR influencers. We're going to be talking about all sorts of different things today. Tim, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. We're really excited to have you here. Before I hit record, I had mentioned I've been following you on LinkedIn for a couple years now and just appreciate all the content you put out there. We're really excited to have you on to share some of your work and perspective with our listeners today. Thank, you.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Yeah, I love being on podcasts and talking. I think it reaches a different audience. Again, people are on LinkedIn, people are on the Twitter or can't call it Twitter anymore X, whatever IG. I'm not on Snap. I don't know. At a point you go, come on, where are we at? I'm not on TikTok, but I'm one of the guys that just lurks on TikTok. I don't like do TikToks, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:21

We actually just talked about this with the past guest. I actually have a TikTok page for the podcast, but it's just like snippets of the podcast because it's like I am not doing an HR Rebel dance like show team style or something. It would be just bigger to it.

Speaker 2: 1:37

I get so many people saying, oh my God, you should have one and you should just go out there and you should just rip on the tech space and vendors. I'm like that's not who I am. I would never do that.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Yeah, yeah, that would be interesting, though there are a couple I think there's a couple HR folks out there that they're like the anti-HR HR which is fine.

Speaker 2: 2:01

Yeah, If that's your stick, man do it. This is not me. I love our space too much to rip on people. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:11

At a certain point when you're actually in the trenches and you're a practitioner, you're trying to hire people, retain people and stuff like that. You don't necessarily want to be the person out there being super cranky about the work you're doing. Yeah, oh for sure. Well, really excited again to jump into it here. I want to start off the conversation by talking a little bit about the work that you do as the CEO of HRU Tech and obviously focused on technology, really focused on the HR space. I'm curious to maybe start off with a question about what type of technology in your space right now are you the most excited about coming down the pipeline here for HR?

Speaker 2: 2:56

A lot of what I do is talent acquisition technology and recruiting technology. I'm also like super. I would like performance technology. I think, is one of those things that we haven't really figured out yet, which, again, we can dig into. For me, the one that stands out above everything is a company called Paradoxai right now, which is a high volume hourly hiring technology based on conversational AI. Blah, blah, blah like put people to sleep here, but the reality is it's just a super simple, easy, lightweight thing, if you think about most hourly people when they apply to a job. In fact, there was a giant global manufacturer that I was working with and we started to go through their process.

Speaker 2: 3:40

It was literally 27 screens that an hourly worker had to go through to finish the application. What are you thinking? What you would hope for is to get maybe it would take 90 seconds, three minutes, that's the holy grail. Some people are like, hey, we got it down to seven minutes. Great, it's better than 27 clicks.

Speaker 2: 4:05

The crazy part was they had to people fill out an entire application on the screen. Then an actual physical application came up. Yeah, they had to fill in. They asked for the same stuff. I'm just like what are you? They're like, well, and this is just cloud page art. It was like, well, we need the application. You're like, no, you asked them for the applications, you don't have to have a physical application. It's those forms of the things we do. I love the pair. And that paradox isn't the only one. There's a bunch of the high volume, hourly conversational AI companies out there. They just happen to be the one that created the space and they're probably having the most success. Again, they just are game changing. I was working with a really large enterprise employer and this is just like, I think, what every technology company would want. The guy goes it just works. You know how often we need it and that should just be their tagline it just works.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of those areas. I think AI is really fascinating. I think there's a lot of headlines right now. I've kind of dabbled in the chat GPT Almost like a copywriter. It can give you, if you start with a blank piece of paper, it can give you a directional place to go. It's not perfect, right? So I've got to believe that some of these AI tools and some of these technology tools, they're really about saving time in areas where you can define parameters and have some clear black and white things articulated and then eventually it has to get handed off to some sort of a human to do some of the assessment. Is that what you're seeing in this space? Is that really where you see this scale, at least in the near future?

Speaker 2: 6:07

Yeah, I mean it's a higher level of automation. I think we've been automating in HR and TA forever, right? So I think this is just that next level. Most of this stuff is going to be built into the systems and processes we use. It'll be invisible to us. I do hear, like you know, you'll have someone raise their hand and they go. But, tim, I read this Wall Street Journal article that AI is racist and I'm like, well, you don't understand. Ai can't be racist. Now it can learn your racist behaviors or your biases and then it will reflect those and mirror those back to you. I guess and I always tell people like that was kind of like machine learning 1.0 and we're so far beyond that now that you know we have built-in audits and parameters and bumpers and things to kind of help to make sure that AI isn't being biased or generous or anything like that. I go, I'm way less concerned with my AI being biased than I am with Jim the hiring manager, right, I can't control Jim.

Speaker 2: 7:05

I can control my technology.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Yeah, that's a really great point, I believe me. I've had that dialogue with a number of people as we've talked about this like the risk of being an exclusive club of AI, and I think inherently there's probably some level of bias in it because it is learning from human behavior or human responses and reactions. But that's an interesting tangent to think about it and the fact that it's better than the hiring manager, or at least you have some control over it, right.

Speaker 2: 7:46

And now, yeah, you have the audit, Like I think again, originally, when they turned on machine learning, it was like, let's say, I'm the hiring manager, right. And I'm just like, oh, I just love hiring white dudes. The machine was learning that I like to hire white dudes and so it was giving me more white dudes, right. And so then it was going, hey, the machine's biased. And you're like, well, not really, it's just learning what you want, it's giving you more. I think now you can build in like this is all of AI is a software, right, so you can code in to say, hey, by the way, if your top of funnel you know candidates coming in, let's say, is a 50-50 male-female ratio, we want to ensure that as we go through and screen and assess and all these things, we want to see red flags when that ratio goes upside, down, right or turned sideways or something like that. Right, so you can build in all this stuff and then have real-time metrics. That goes, hey, oh, by the way, it's actually turning, but it's turning when it hits to the interview, right. So again, the real person stepped in and this happened.

Speaker 2: 8:47

I was on a panel a few months ago, One of the guys that was on the panel was an AI professor from Stanford and he might have been 30 years old, right, I mean, this is the kind of these are the AI professors of today. He's super young people and he said raise your hand if you think AI can be biased and most of the room is HR people raise their hand, he goes. Well, let me share something he goes. Anytime you add AI into a process, you reduce bias. Anytime you add human into a process, you increase bias. And it was just that kind of like uh-oh, we've been thinking about this all wrong.

Speaker 1: 9:25

Absolutely. I think it's fascinating where this is gonna go. I do think to that point, you can. One of the benefits of AI is you can measure the output, right. You can measure the input, the output. So if there is a failure in your system somewhere, and it happens to be with the human screening process, you know the infamous well, they're just not a quote. Fit right, you know, and whatever that means, versus you know having an objective, some sort of objective screening methodology, right? That's where it gets really interesting.

Speaker 2: 10:01

I think the hardest part for all of us is gonna be how do we keep this stuff in the middle of the road? Right, we tend to like right ditch, left ditch on a lot of stuff, like you go one way all the way too far, and then you recourse correct and you go the other way. And to me I'm always like, hey, I love part of like the skills conversation. Right now we talk about skills, skills, skills, skills-based hiring, blah, blah, blah. It's so much I just wanna throw up because it's all marketing kind of stuff, but I'm like that's great, right, I understand the premise of why we wanna hire skills, but at the end of the day, we're also hiring humans. Right, we're hiring people that have experiences, that have education, that have you know.

Speaker 2: 10:35

I try to tell people, if I'm General Motors and I need to hire, and we're going from combustion engine to electrical engine and I need to hire a bunch of electrical engineers, of course I want skills, I'm looking for embedded software, blah, blah, blah. Also, if I have two people that the skills are basically the same one worked at Tesla for five years and one didn't probably that experience at Tesla is very valuable. I want that right, and so we can't give up on experience and education and all these things, and that's where I see us like we have so many people now going. Yeah, we don't even care about experience or education, we only hire skills, and I'm like good luck with that.

Speaker 1: 11:14

You know, have fun. I love that. You know the analogy. The right ditch, left ditch, like. Either way, if you end up in the ditch, it's a bad thing, right? Yes?

Speaker 2: 11:24

Yeah. Of course you're right, we're correct.

Speaker 1: 11:28

That's it. Yeah, it's, you know, and I think that's one of the things that's fascinating about you know, about this world, about technology in general, is you know there's so much, you know there's so much advancement, and I actually, you know, I think one of the more interesting things about AI is the fact that AI is actually going to help advance tech that much more, because it helps with programming right, Because it can actually build more tech more efficiently than a human being can, once it figures out what you're trying to build and code and all that. And so you know, I think this could be, this could be the area of AI that's maybe more important than anything else and, quite frankly, if any of us in HR are fighting against this and saying we can't have this, then okay, you know, best of luck to you, but this is like this is going to be here for the rest of your career.

Speaker 1: 12:23

So whether you utilize it or not. It's up to you, but you know it exists.

Speaker 2: 12:28

I think HR pros need to kind of focus not on what AI will take away from HR, from their job or from you know, their daily activities, but what do you do that's uniquely human that AI couldn't take away? Right, what those relationships with candidates, with employees, with all those like kind of you know, there's a lot of stuff that makes us uniquely human that AI can't replace and if you focus there, that's going to be the future of HR, the future of TA, future of all that we do and you know. So it's like this concept of you know becoming a 10X HR pro or 10X recruiter or whatever. How are you leveraging this technology to be that much better of a person you know?

Speaker 1: 13:09

Absolutely. Yeah, I very well said. I couldn't agree more. You know, and I think that the you know, the HR professionals that can identify where humanity needs to be present in the workplace and the culture and their you know everyday lives and where it maybe doesn't, you know there's. You know, especially, like I think, a lot of the like solutions that are, quite frankly I'll call you know, just busy work, right, like it's like you've got like this, you've got these protocols that you follow and the 17 different steps, and by the end of it, you're like why the hell did I do step 14 through 16? You know what I mean. Like this is a complete waste of time. I don't need to do this. It's like the application, you know answer. Why do they have to do an application? Well, because because they're. Because I said so, you know, like that's the honest answer.

Speaker 2: 14:01

Yeah, yeah 27 years ago, our legal team said we had to have a signed application. You're like, okay, I could, I can have the. You know, the computer will fill all that stuff out. When the person comes to sign their paperwork, we'll have them sign it or we'll do an electronic signature. We'll figure it out right, I don't need to have them fit, do it physically. Yeah, yeah, it's one of those. It's one of those crazy things that just kind of doesn't make sense to us anymore.

Speaker 1: 14:25

You know, from that standpoint, yeah, it's funny, it's like the. I remember there was a there's a question on one of the one of the certification tests I had to take. We'll, we'll, we'll keep it nameless, just in case one of them wants to sponsor the podcast and something from the near future, but it was like. It was like you know, why do you have to have it? Like the premise of the question was why do you have to have a signed application with every, with every candidate? Like the assumption in the question was you have to, right, and the question was why do you have to? You know, and this is like in every. You know many HR professionals take these tests. So that's like the honest answer. Right, it's like because we assume that we have to, because we've always been told.

Speaker 2: 15:10

Litter D was like CYA and you're like bing.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Yeah, that's exactly why we.

Speaker 2: 15:14

That's exactly why we?

Speaker 1: 15:15

Because some lawyers somewhere at some point said hey, because you didn't have this, we're going to go through the company and you know, and there are, yeah, some headlines somewhere.

Speaker 2: 15:24

Hey, like how, by the way, I understand like the tactical work of HR and how people get addicted to the tactical work of HR. I, I'm one of those guys who loves I love to mow my yard. People go really like, oh my God, why? And I said because there's so much in our life that you begin in the day and then you just come back the next day or the next week or the next month and it's never completed. But I can go mow my yard at the end and look at the straight lines and it's completed and I'm like I accomplished that. Right, fresh smelled grass, like the whole thing.

Speaker 2: 15:53

People think I'm insane but it's like no, I can start that, I can complete that and it looks amazing and that's tactical work in HR, that's tactical work in recruiting. We get frustrated with, like our HR peers who like love that and I go God, I totally get it. I totally understand why they love it. But if you that's what you think your job's going to be in the future, you're not going to have a job Like it's just going to be gone.

Speaker 1: 16:16

Yeah, I'm not kidding anymore. I totally, by the way, I totally get it, although I don't. I don't do the mowing, because there's a high school kid that likes to do it for me and I'm perfectly happy with it. But I used to work in retail and I used to feel the same way about being a cashier, like there's something beautiful about like through the midst of our day I don't have to go like deal with HR stuff, I can just go like check somebody out at the cash register and it's like, oh, it's like I can start something and I can finish something. It's like, oh, that felt great, that was really nice. I don't have to no.

Speaker 2: 16:48

I mean we discount that, we discount that Right.

Speaker 1: 16:51

It's kind of nice, it's kind of nice, but, but I do think it's. You know that that is where I think the individual that embraces it it's an accelerator, right, Like like this is just the more of that stuff that you systemize and automate, the you know, the more of the other stuff that you can, you can focus on. And I think I actually think, like, so I have a lot of people on my team that are like hyper diligent, like like super high attention to detail. Yeah, they love to start, they love to finish, like they like awesome tacticians.

Speaker 1: 17:25

I actually like I would argue like their job is to go out and make sure everything's just running correctly, Right, Like like it's. It's more of a hey is the system working, as opposed to hey, I actually have to go like check these boxes on this, on this best practice. So I think that skill sets still there, but it's just, it's a different, a little bit of a different version, Right, yeah, so it'll be fascinating to see where we, where we end up. And I think, you know, the other thing that I think is fascinating is the fact that I think this is especially in talent acquisition, just because I think it's it's probably the most advanced, where we're seeing the most advancements probably because there's so much noise in talent acquisition, just because of the labor shortage and all this stuff right now.

Speaker 1: 18:07

like you know, it's squeaky wheel, gets the grease right, but I think it's it's really going to change the face of talent acquisition. And I think, if you look at if you look at talent acquisition, I'm kind of on the macro level you know it's it's it's really being heavily disrupted right now. And so I'm curious because this is kind of this is your wheelhouse, this is where you spend a lot of your space. You know, how do you foresee that disruption, kind of kind of reshaping the talent acquisition industry as a whole?

Speaker 2: 18:36

It's. That's super interesting because I think we take a look at corporate town acquisition versus kind of agency RPO, like all these kind of aspects of how we fill positions. And I was just at a conference last week and in we had so many people talking about like, oh my gosh, like we were in this really kind of downturn in TA, and they were talking about all the tech side of like recruiters losing their job, recruiting leaders. But like you and I both know, like I do, we do a ton of like manufacturing work and if you're on that side of the world you can't find enough people, you. I mean, there's a labor shortage and it's just Tell me about it.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Worse and then demographics continue to play against us for the next foreseeable future, and so it was weird that you're having people. There was always people, like you know, that are in our space. There was like, oh my gosh, it's doom and gloom and I'm looking at them going. That's not the way most of the world feels right now. You guys are in this very you know. They were in this all startup space right where money was free and they're getting hundreds of millions of dollars for an idea, you know, yeah, and then they had to burn through this cash and they were over hiring. I think Twitter, when Elon came in, they had Twitter's TA team had 1200 people in it. That's one TA person for every eight employees.

Speaker 1: 19:51

It is not sustainable right, oh no, that sounds great, by the way, that I would be so nice.

Speaker 2: 19:57

So they like, so they lay off a thousand, and people think, oh my gosh, it's never gonna run, it's never gonna do they're just fine, they're fine, sure, sure, they didn't need 1200 people. I always question, like, what were these people doing? Like, really like they, like, what was your job? Tick tock? Yes, that's probably a lot.

Speaker 2: 20:14

They probably had an entire TA tick tock team, I'm sure you know, burning through cash left, or right so yeah, so Um, but yeah, you know, I do think, like when we take a look at Corporate TA, I think is gonna be the one that's gonna get disrupted the most. And I say this Knowing that there's great corporate TA people out there but we still have, I bet, 90% of the corporate TA world is posting a job and Waiting for somebody to apply. Now again, that's a very broad stroke, and I'm not saying that because I, you know, I'm working on the staffing or agency world, because I've worked on both sides and I've seen it happen and I see it continue to happen with a lot of consulting work I do. And if that's what you do, if you post a job and you wait for somebody to apply, the company does not need you.

Speaker 2: 21:01

The technology will do that 24 7365 better than you, and so we have to get into and say, okay, well, then the future of corporate TA becomes Really going out and saying, hey, in our marketplace, who are, who is the best talent? And then how, what are the relationships we have? So that when a hurry metric comes to us and says, hey, by the way, I need another quality inspector, I need a, whatever that you go. Oh my gosh, I've been talking with Jill over here. I'm in now, engage her and say hey, we're ready, we want you to come in and we know you're a better talent, right? Instead of going well, let's Recreate the wheel and start from ground zero every single time we have an opening like that's just. I don't need that. The AI will do that better than I can you know right, right.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Yeah, that's a great point. I think you know the reality is, especially when you get into like these really critical positions where there be a really specialized skill set, where you Act yes, you actually do need experiences, skills and like education so that you can actually do the work, not just like have a great mindset.

Speaker 2: 22:03

Well, we and we have this. We have this like misnomer that we hire we only hire the best talent. Every CEO that I talked with was go we only hire the best talent. Here's what they actually hire. They actually hire the best talent that's available at the time that the position was filled and that applied to the job, which Actually could be the worst talent available in the market.

Speaker 1: 22:25

But they say we only hire what what they're hiring is they go.

Speaker 2: 22:28

Basically what they're saying is like Tim, we only hire the tallest of the seven dwarfs. Like that's what they're saying. Right, it's like I'm still a hardy to do. Or and that's, I'm not like that's, I'm saying that's a metaphor for not hiring, like they use it the best out, but Like constantly, like I hear that and then I know on their TA side or I know on the HR side what's actually happening and like oh gosh, and but the hears of sad part is most of those CEOs they truly believe that their teams are out there trying to find the best talent. They don't realize that we're just filtering through whatever talent actually applied to our job. Right, we have no correlation to actually being better, you know right.

Speaker 1: 23:06

And that's where I think I do think what's really fascinating and, I think, really interesting In the future is the kind of the cultivated talent networks that are out there, and a lot of times you do see that on a non-corporate team, where you've got people who are actively going after passive candidates and building a kind of a community network. And that's where you can see, like social media, ai, some of these technological platforms that help connect talent with jobs, that are maybe content but open-minded. And that's where, like I've seen, a lot of the success is those like these multi-year relationships where you talk to somebody and you keep that resume and then you're, like, you know, three years later you're like oh, we just did an orgery structure. I talked to this individual three years ago. At the time we didn't have exactly what they were looking for. They want a general manager status.

Speaker 1: 24:03

You know what? Here it is right, here let's get them on the phone, you know, and that's where that's where it matters and, honestly, like I do think that's the exception versus the rule and it all comes down to, like you know, having a tool to do that because, like you know, it's very rare that I actually remember those people Right, like I have. Like I have some sure, yeah, full of resumes of people that are great, but it's like, yeah, what's that person's name again? Oh, I don't remember, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 24:31

No, and in the next 24 months, there's going to be technology on the market where you'll literally speak to your computer. In fact, I just I just demoed one this morning that it was just like hey, I want to do a search and instead of typing it in, you're just basically telling it basically a conversation that you just have with the hiring manager Like hey, we're ABC or this, we need this, blah, blah, blah. And it was like it was taking in all of this and then bam, it would give you back out like a perfect job ad posting based on all of that that you could adjust and change. But it was like it was like oh, wow, so now imagine going oh my gosh, hey, there's. I talked to a female like maybe a couple of years ago. They worked at Tesla, they were an electrical engineer and also, as you're speaking, it's bringing in. You're like, oh, that's the person right there, it's like yeah, that one.

Speaker 1: 25:15

Yeah, great, the one with the cat you know, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, if you got, yeah, I mean like I need that, like it's like, oh, is that one person that was coaching their kids? Yeah, well, team, yeah, and and I have. You know, I am at a point now where, actually, do you use digital notes? I don't. I actually don't have the scribbles on the piece of paper.

Speaker 2: 25:36

So you know, I'm at least kind of there, but yeah, I was like in, like AI, I imagine having a personal assistant, but that personal assistant actually knew every single thing. And then I go and now imagine that personal assistant in every aspect of your life, not just professional but personally. Like you wake up in the morning and the coffee and smells already brewed because they know exact and by the way they had ordered it, you know, and it got delivered Like every. There's that one aspect of your life that this person or this thing Like I say person you know, doesn't know about you, that can help. Like you know, and I even say this on the HR side imagine the employee experience.

Speaker 2: 26:14

Like right now somebody calls in and says, hey, how much PTO do I have? We pull up the HCM. We're like, oh gosh, jim, you have 56 hours. You're like, ok, great, and we mark that as a success. Like, oh my gosh, I got a question. We answered it Like today was a good day, didn't even have to use my AK.

Speaker 2: 26:33

And but now imagine, why does somebody call and ask for a PTO? Well, they could actually want to go on vacation, or maybe they need to use some time to take care of themselves or a loved one, or maybe they're actually looking to cash out because they have another job. Like there's always reasons, right? The AI could start going, hey, by the way, prompt you know, tim, this question. Like oh, are you going on a vacation? Like oh, yeah, I'm going to Florida. And the AI would know Tim has two dogs and, like you know. So now in HR you could go, oh, were you able to find someone to watch your dogs? We can, like we have some services right. Or did you get your hotel and a Marriott? Because we get 20% off corporate discount? Like you could actually like really engage it up that employee experience versus going 56, you have 56 hours 56 thumbs up.

Speaker 1: 27:20

That's it.

Speaker 2: 27:22

Click. You know, thank you. And so, yeah, I mean really, I think you know, as we take a look at potentially, of what that could be, it's only your mind can like, come up with, like the. You know how that ends, you know.

Speaker 1: 27:37

Yeah, that's like, yeah, it's, that would be ideal state. It's the like, the leading indicator of the employee experience. Like, hey, you know, can we like, can we actually give somebody a cultivated, you know, employee experience? Right, like, I mean, we're going through this right now, right, it's the benefits benefits renewal time for the renewal at the beginning of the year, and it's like, well, we've got all these great programs, we're doing all these wonderful things, and the reality is, you know, you can have the best program in the world, but if nobody really knows how to use it, or doesn't get connected to it when they actually need it, or gets, you know, calls the wrong 800 number when they actually need a different one, and it's. And now it's. Now it's a bad experience and you've got no control, right?

Speaker 1: 28:18

If there's a tool that can help out with this, you know it's. It's like why, why wouldn't we use this? Right? If this makes people happier, more engaged and helps the tools that we're like blood, sweat and tears pouring over to get, get everything in this thing correct and accurate and try to make everything you know implemented, well then why wouldn't we use a tool to make sure that people can actually use it correctly, right.

Speaker 2: 28:42

So it's, it's stuff like yeah, I totally, I totally agree, If you have a thousand employees there's, it doesn't matter how many number, whatever number of employees you have, there's going to be a time when you're going to have 500 employees and they're going to have 500 different benefit programs, Because each one is going to specifically tailor to them based on AI, and it's not something we have to actually build. It's going to be built right. I try to tell people imagine, like a job description going up right now maintenance supervisor. Now imagine a candidate coming and but the job description in the moment changes specifically for that candidate. I mean, like that stuff will happen Right, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 29:20

And I think it's. You know, I, there's just so many use cases there. Right, like, like you can generate an interview guide, ask specific questions so that you can get objective responses based upon someone's background and skills. Right, that would take you 10 years to cultivate and figure out, based upon you know, succeeding and failing right as a as a recruiter. And yeah, I think there's, there's just there's. It's going to be fascinating to see where, where this goes. I think the long story short does. You know we've, we've got to be open minded, we've got to be able to embrace it. And yeah, and I strongly believe the organizations that do, they're just going to be more nimble, they're going to move more quickly. You know speed wins in this, in this field, especially in talent acquisition, and so you know, if you can figure out how to, how to stay focused on being more, more nimble, I think it's it's it's going to benefit you and your organization long term.

Speaker 2: 30:13

So, yeah, the number one question I get asked like over the last, like you know, really, since kind of GPT launches, people were asking like how they can get involved or how do they stay in front of it. And I'm always just, like you know, talk to your current, like tech providers, understand what their roadmap looks like. And if they don't have AI in their roadmap and they're kind of acting like they're anti AI, start looking for other vendors. You know, don't sign that next contract. There's going to be a problem right there. You're going to be left behind by your competition.

Speaker 1: 30:43

Yeah, yeah, I, I agree, I think you, yeah, you got to get some forward thinking partners, 100%, yeah, for sure. So, speaking of I, you know we're really like literally just scratching the surface here and and but, but I'm I want to shift here into the rebel HR flash round because I'm fascinated to hear your, your responses, as as someone who's very influential in space. So first question of the rebel HR flash round where does HR need to rebel?

Speaker 2: 31:17

performance. Every time I talk to an executive team, the one thing that they still can't figure out. Well, they would say talent, right, and that's just. You know. I mean, we're all trying to figure that out, and part of that is it's not something that's necessarily a TAHR problem. I mean it is because we've owned that problem, but we have a demographic issue that's bigger in the US, right, so that's kind of just a bigger overall problem that none of us can solve, but we all have to figure out how to solve it. To me, it's performance. It's flat out.

Speaker 2: 31:45

When we talk about return to work and hybrid and remote and all this crap, actually your executives don't care. They do not care. All they care about is the performances there. And when they start talking about return to work, the reason they're talking about it is because performance isn't where they need it to be. And so it's one of those things where it's like hey, if everybody, if the company, was actually performing better year over year, you would never have an executive go.

Speaker 2: 32:10

Hey, I think we need people to come back and sit in a cube, like they would never say that, without knowing and without us giving them any levers to pull, they go back to what they know, which is assets and seeds. I see you there, so you must be working, which we know. That's true, either right. But that's why there's this giant pull back to the office and people think, oh no, it's a commercial real estate thing. That's whatever your company would gladly pay for an empty office building. For a 25% increase year over year, they would have no issue at all of paying for an empty office. This is not a real estate question. This is a flat out performance question. So I think if I'm running an HR for a company, I'm actually calling myself the chief performance officer and I'm owning performance for the entire organization and I'm going to ramp it up to a level where low performers are no longer welcome to work here. It's just the way it's going to be and I'm going to drive high performance.

Speaker 1: 33:09

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's funny. I just had a similar conversation with my CEO, literally last week, and it was you know we're doing all the right things, right. You know? And as a head of HR, you know you've got. You generally have a playbook and you have to determine how best to execute the playbook. But the push was not necessarily to execute the HR playbook right. The push was to execute the organizational playbook. How do we grow? How do we do it profitably? How do we perform? How do we do it through people? Because that's really, at the end of the day, that's what we're here to do, right? So I couldn't agree more. So some anecdotal evidence for you there.

Speaker 2: 33:46

Yeah, no, I love that All right.

Speaker 1: 33:49

Question number two who should we be?

Speaker 2: 33:53

listening to. I get asked this a lot. People want to know who I'm reading because I blog a lot in a space or what podcast I actually I'm like I love. I'm a nerd for data, so I love economists and so, like marginal revolution Tyler Collin, I tend to listen and read everything outside of our space. I do a lot of MarTech, marketing, technologies, type reading. Again, just knowing that in the town acquisition space we tend to trail marketing by about five years, right. So whatever they're doing, right that today, this is probably going to be standard of what we'll be doing in TA five years from now.

Speaker 1: 34:31

Yeah, yeah, it really is the same exact thing, right? It's just you know. Instead of you know selling a product, you're selling your organization to a consumer, ie potential employee, right, yeah, so yeah I can.

Speaker 2: 34:45

I'm going out next week and I'm like speaking at a construction conference and there's actually like a head of HR and their CEO are going to speak like with me, like right after I'm talking, like bigger picture, and then they're going to get in the weeds and actually share their entire process and I go. You know, people actually love to hear that one. It validates what they're either doing or not doing, right. But we tend to act like we're like oh, it's secret sauce, don't share. You know this is competitive, and like we're all basically doing the same stuff. It's just nice to hear how somebody else is doing it. So if you can ever find, you know, people that are willing to share and talk about that, I listen to that stuff too because I think it's, I think it validates you know kind of where we're at.

Speaker 1: 35:23

Yeah, yeah, I call it. You know I kind of call BS on it, because if you want to find any sort of quote, best practice or how somebody's doing something, you know there's this thing called the internet where you can pretty much figure out exactly what everybody's doing. But if everybody had it all figured out, then everybody'd be doing it right. So it's, you know, it's about the application of the knowledge, not necessarily understanding.

Speaker 2: 35:43

It kind of makes me laugh. When I talk to like an HR person that will go oh, we're a best practice organization. I go to me what best practice means is you're doing something that somebody found innovative five years ago and then they did it and did it and did it and it worked, and so now you're doing. So what you're doing is stuff that people did five years ago and you're acting like it's like groundbreaking, like great. Now again, if you're not at best practice, get to best practice. But don't we confuse best practice and innovation, right, innovation is new, that you're testing, and I'm always like, hey, you should constantly be trying stuff and testing stuff for your organization, right, and if it works, great. If it didn't work, it was a test, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna pull back. You know, on that test, you know.

Speaker 1: 36:28

Yeah, yeah, yep, yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think best practice for me is kind of like a red flag, or at least maybe a maybe like an orange flag is kind of like oh okay, so you're like, yeah, so you're doing what you think is best, but you haven't necessarily figured out how to innovate or adapt it so that it works best for the organization. Right Like it's. And I don't get me wrong, there's some things we need to do that like yes, establish norms. Yeah, that doesn't mean that, that doesn't mean that it's the end, all be all right. So I think, yeah, we could?

Speaker 2: 36:57

that's a whole nother podcast if you go on it.

Speaker 1: 37:00

So we have, we are at time. You've been very generous with your time, Tim. I know you're a super busy guy, but and I guarantee you that all these listeners are going to be looking for other ways to learn more and listen and connect. So how can our listeners reach out, connect with you and find out more information and what you're looking at?

Speaker 2: 37:18

Yeah, I've done a pretty good job branding. So Tim Sackett on the Google machine you'll find me. I'm probably the first hundred pages there used to be. Well, I think he's still a lie. There was another Tim Sackett in Minnesota that was a truck driver chaplain and so when I first started like this whole journey of becoming this micro influencer, it was him and I fighting for SEO, and now I think I've totally killed him on the SEO. Nice, it would be awesome if I was like the truck driver chaplain on the weekends and then recruiter guy during the week. But now he's two different guys. But you can just Google and then my site's timsackettcom All of the social things on Tim Sackett.

Speaker 1: 37:55

So Perfect, and we'll have all those links in the show notes, so so check it out. Tim, thank you so much for for spending some time with us and imparting some knowledge and being so generous. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 38:06

Thanks for having me Love talking shop.

Speaker 1: 38:09

All right, that does it for the Rebel HR podcast. Big thank you to our guests. Follow us on Facebook at rebel HR podcast, twitter at rebel HR guy, or see our website at rebel human resourcescom. The views and opinions expressed by rebel HR podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the organizations that we represent. No animals were harmed during the filming of this podcast.