Bold and Outrageous HR Practices That May Indicate Your Approach Is Too Conservative

As a result, it’s time for HR leaders to realize that in a battle to attract and retain top talent and innovators, your firm has to act differently with superior talent management approaches if your firm is to develop and maintain a competitive advantage in the talent marketplace. In fact, from an employer branding perspective, your firm needs to do a few unique things in HR if it is to stand out as a great place to work.

As a professor, I am fortunate to have the time to track and give corporate presentations on the array of leading and “bleeding-edge” programs that a handful of firms have had the courage to implement. Almost by definition, bold HR programs are new, controversial, and full of risk, so don’t be surprised when you don’t agree with many of the listed approaches. I suggest that you compare them to your own programs in that functional area in order to see if perhaps your firm is being too conservative and is falling behind the leading edge.

The Top 10 Bold and Outrageous HR and Talent Management Practices

Here are my selections for the top 10 bold approaches that define the current “bleeding-edge” of HR practices.

1. Outrageous benefits – Google recently revealed that it offers amazing death benefits to every U.S. employee. Should any of its U.S. employees die, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive 50% of the employee’s paycheck each year for the next 10 years! With a young employee base, fortunately not many will likely take advantage of this benefit, but it still sends a powerful message that benefits at Google are different.


2. Limited-term employee contracts – even though most managers have the right to fire weak-performing employees, most never get around to it unless the employee does something truly outrageous. In order to force managers to weed out weak performers, the Revel casino and hotel required many of its new hires who interact with customers to sign employee contracts with a limit of four to five years. After their contract expires, employees must formally reapply for their job. Hotel management argues that eliminating the guarantee of a permanent job will pressure employees to remain productive and customer-friendly throughout their employment term. They also believe that top performers won’t be discouraged with the lack of job security because their performance level will continue to make them desirable.


3. Meetups for recruiting — Edelman, the powerhouse PR firm, combines social media and “meet up” events to attract and build relationships with the very best. It uses employee social media contacts to invite candidates to mingle and to build relationships at social events held at popular restaurants. Candidates are offered unique snacks and drinks, while senior executives give a brief presentation. At the events, employees wear name tags with their Twitter handles on them. Attendance has reached as many as 300 and the events have resulted in more than 25 hires.


4. A recruiting TV show – the Chinese are learning how to be bold in recruiting by offering a TV show entitled “Only You” where candidates are interviewed and hired by executives in front of a live TV audience.


5. Outrageous recruiting video — game creator Kixeye put together an outrageous recruiting video that pokes direct fun at its competitors. The video literally mocks the age of EA’s approach to gaming by including the logo “EAARP Games” (A reference to the AARP senior group) and an aging executive with an oxygen breathing tank. They also mock another competitor, Zynga, by transforming its famous dog logo to a logo showing one dog literally humping another. To most, this mocking would definitely be in bad taste, but to candidates in the gaming industry, it may be considered cool and bold.


6. Bold employer branding – Amazon recently placed a letter containing information about its employee educational reimbursement benefits directly on its customer homepage. Although a letter about benefits might startle shoppers, it also sends a message to everyone who interacts with Amazon that employee welfare and development is important. Placing HR and recruiting information in the middle of a firm’s primary homepage is certainly unique.


7. Unlimited vacation policies – a major role of the HR department is to track absenteeism and vacation days. However, foursquare, Netflix, and several startups have begun to offer unlimited amounts of vacation and sick leave. This bold approach treats employees like mature adults who know how to manage how much time to spend away from work. By offering compelling work, tightknit teams, and performance-based pay, the firm offers enough positive incentives to drive employees to work more hours.


8. Outrageous referral practices – the quality-of-hire results provided by employee referrals has encouraged firms to redesign their programs. While many firms discourage nominating friends as referrals, Tata Consultancy Services of India did the opposite. It developed a program that was specifically designed to encourage buddy referrals by making “your friends your colleagues.” Its slogan “what if all your friends worked with you at TCS?” is a powerful one. The pressure to increase employee referrals has become even stronger now that employees can use social media to make more contacts so DNAnexus raised the reward bar by offering a $20,000 referral bonus … plus a free DNA screening for referring a software engineer who was hired.


9. The worst-place-to-work ranking – for years there have been a variety of best-place-to-work rankings, but now the magazine The Consumerist is sponsoring a new “worst place” ranking. It conducted and published a poll asking readers to rank the worst companies in America to work for. Obviously making the list would severely damage your employer brand and recruiting. This year EA beat out B of A with more than 64% of the vote. In addition, the increasingly popular employee feedback site Glassdoor.com now allows contributors to rank a company’s CEO. In one case this year the CEO of Visa received only a 20% rating while the Apple VP received a 97%. Obviously, a bad CEO ranking can now damage your recruiting and employer brand image.


10. Keeping the job a secret – smart firms periodically peruse the job postings of their competitors in order to use the required skill sets to aid in predicting their upcoming products and initiatives. The “inside Apple” blo, reports that some candidates at Apple are being kept in the dark throughout the hiring process about the specific role and job that they are being recruited into. In a company well known for secrecy, the premise for this approach is that the information about what new hires will be working on is valuable and it must be kept from competitors. Obviously this approach can frustrate some candidates and it could even turn them off if they didn’t fully understand the reasons behind it.

Final Thoughts

If you’re going to provide a competitive advantage for your firm in the talent marketplace, you by definition have to do things that are different and that produce superior results to your talent competitors. Even though budgets are tight, now is not the time to be conservative in HR. Most major corporations that I advise need to be much more aggressive in the area of talent management. If you’re going to be a business leader as opposed to a business partner, you have no choice but to lead by going first.

The goal is not to recommend these practices, but instead to more clearly define the leading edge of current practice.

In this part 2, I will highlight 13 additional practices that define the leading and “bleeding edge” of HR. If your goal is to “push the envelope” in talent management, this list can give you an idea of where the average ends and the truly bold practices begin.

Although every firm cannot directly adopt the practices listed here (some are reprehensible), I find during my corporate presentations that merely becoming aware of these bleeding-edge practices can create great energy and a strong desire for individual HR functions to do more and be bolder.

Additional “Bold and Outrageous” HR and Talent Management Practices

Here are my selections for the remaining top recently implemented bold approaches that define the bleeding edge of HR practices.

1. Recruiting on social media with the “10 days of shoes” contest – Marriott is a longtime innovator in employer branding but it has found a novel way to use social media for recruiting. The premise of the shoe giveaway campaign is that applicants should always try to “put their best foot forward.” This message is reinforced by Marriott’s giving away a $100 gift certificate at shoe powerhouse Zappos each day for 10 days. To qualify for the selection, the individual merely had to sign up to become a member of Marriott’s Facebook recruiting page. Using highly desirable prizes to drive individuals to your social media page is a bold addition to the standard Facebook recruiting approach. The uniqueness of the approach ensures that it will receive notice throughout the social media and blogging world.


2. Games become part of the workplace – with so many both young and old hooked on gaming, it only makes sense to integrate games into the workplace. Games have long been used by the military to train, but the giant retailer Target has begun using games to motivate individuals working in mundane jobs. For example cashiers can be scored on each transaction, and individual employee scores can be competitively compared to other cashiers. The end result is both higher quality work and improved morale.


3. One Friday a Month integration – closer collaboration, cooperation, and integration are major goals in any organization. LinkedIn’s “inDay” program provides an opportunity for the firm’s employees to increase their learning and understanding about other areas of the firm. Each unit sets aside one Friday each month and then comes up with its own plan. Integration examples include the EMEA team holding a “speed dating” type event that provided sales reps with an opportunity to learn about the customers, issues, and products of other reps. During “Hackday” prizes were awarded to techies who successfully implemented new ideas or explored emerging technologies.


4. Recruiting on customer receipts – in the retail world, your customers should be considered as potential recruits simply because they know you and like you. Wells Fargo ATMs in San Francisco now print out a customer receipt that includes a “Now hiring” recruiting message. It costs almost nothing but it successfully gets your recruiting message out to every customer that uses an ATM.


5. Contests for attracting passives – contests for attracting and assessing candidates are becoming increasingly popular because they attract highly competitive individuals who are not actively looking for a job. However, the approach offered by Quixey is unique in that it uses a telephone operator to provide the problem to prequalified contestants. All winners are automatically invited to an interview.


6. Remote college recruiting – Nestlé Purina had long relied on multiple campus visits to identify college hires. Noting the growth of social media and Internet, it shifted to a complete “remote college recruiting model” which allows it to target any campus. As a result of the program, the quality and the retention of college hires has increased dramatically and recruiting costs have gone down.


7. Immersing managers in day-to-day reality – this Hilton program requires managers to totally immerse themselves in the day-to-day operations of the hotel one-day each quarter. The goal is to improve communications and operations by improving a managers understanding of the operational employees and the problems encountered by them. By doing the jobs of customer service people, for example, finance employees might increase their understanding of customer issues.


8. Simulations for assessment - simulations are an important technology that allows for problem solving without the costs and danger associated with solving problems in the work environment. KPMG has developed an electronic management simulation that allows them to assess second-round candidates and college prospects on real problems that they will face. In addition to better assessment, it may build its employer brand image as an advanced firm that has embraced technology.


9. “Why do you stay” retention interviews – as the economy turns around and individuals have been stuck in a single job for years, retention issues are bound to increase. It’s important to find out why people leave but traditional exit interviews occur too late to give you a chance to prevent turnover. So Villet International offers an alternative approach called “stay interviews.” By asking current key employees “why do you stay?” and “what might cause you to leave?” in an interview allows the manager to  identify potential retention issues before they get out of hand. By being proactive, managers have time to fix any issues.


10. Forget resumes, watch them work – IGN does not accept resumes because they provide limited information about the capability of an individual. Instead it offers Code Foo, which is apprentice training type program where prospects work at the firm during a six-week-long training and trial period. IGN then hires the very best performers at the end of the training.


11. Drinking on the job – most firms punish drinking on the job but numerous Silicon Valley and San Francisco firms now offer beer and wine to their employees. Rather than having to go out after work to drink and collaborate, they can do it in the workplace. Dropbox has “whiskey Fridays,” and Hipster, a San Francisco-based startup, has offered new hires a lifetime supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. The key to this practice is to hire individuals who know how to act like mature adultswithout the need for rules and regulations.


12. Open-office design improves decision-making speed – many in HR don’t understand the value of rapid decision-making, and they certainly don’t take steps to track or increase decision-making speed.But pharmaceutical giant GSK does, and as a result, it eliminated offices and implemented an open-office design. Not only did it increase collaboration (a precursor to innovation) but by reducing barriers to open discussions, it found that decision-making speed increased by an amazing 45%.


13. Deep dive reference checking — some organizations (including Maryland’s Department of Corrections and the University of North Carolina) have begun to demand that certain applicants provide them with their social media accounts (Facebook and Twitter) and their personal passwords, so that reference checkers can go beyond the protective firewall to find out more about the candidate’s background and postings. Other employers are occasionally demanding applicants give permission to see their W2 IRS tax forms either during the recruiting process or before the final offer is made. These tax documents can be used to verify the accuracy of information provided by an applicant about their previous salary and their employment status. Both of these practices demonstrate the leading edge of reference checking while at the same time raising serious concerns about employer branding, privacy, and legal grounds.

Final Thoughts

If you wonder whether you are being too conservative in your approach to talent management, this article should certainly stimulate your thinking about what is possible and what the outer limits of current practice are. If the talent wars are not yet raging in your industry, now is the ideal time to begin planning for it by developing one or two people-management practices that are bold enough so that both employees and potential recruits will want to talk about and share them. With the growth of social media and worldwide Internet access, stories that can be used to increase the image and visibility of your talent-management practices are essential. And remember that your story and talent management practices certainly can’t be compelling unless they are bold, innovative, or even outrageous.