Bearing Fruit Consulting

Another Letter From Fred Hockett - Recruiting Leader Serving in Iraq

As regular readers of this blog know, we have been sharing the story and letters of Fred Hockett.  Fred is a recruiting leader from Michigan who was called to active duty in January and is currently serving in Iraq.  I have talked previously about Fred and I admire his leadership, recruiting knowledge, courage and commitment to his country.  He is a great guy and I want to continue to share his story with our readers.

Before I share Fred's latest letter, written on June 17th, I want to point out that at the end of his recent communication he indicates he is open to answering any questions (that he can without jeopardizing himself, his men/women or the mission) that you might have.  If you have any questions send them to me via email at mhomula@bearingfruitconsulting.com and I will be sure to pass them along to Fred and we will post your question and his answer in a future post. 

Also, if you want to follow Fred via his own blog there is a lot more information and detail there.  The blog was primarily set up for his family and friends to keep up with him, his activities and just generally know what is going on.  It is a great blog and I encourage you to check it out. 

Without further ado, here is Fred's latest letter!

I'm sorry about the delay in writing you.  We've been moving at a pretty rapid pace here, and as you can imagine I've been doing everything to just keep in contact with family.  It's surprising how quickly time passes.  I'm almost at 4 months in theater.  Things are still very challenging, but rewarding.  The easiest task is made very difficult due to proximity to logistics.  Needless to say we don't have a Home Depot to go to when we can to do a room renovation.  I find myself working on that type of thing most often, coordinating logistics.  It's a great deal of fun.

As you are probably reading in the paper things are quieting down.  The Iraqi military and police have undertaken several operations in the area to quell the violence and they are doing a pretty good job.  Our teams are out working with them on a regular basis and we have people coordinating with the Ministries all the time. We all continue to see progress every day... most of it is the tangible, physical progress: Construction projects, new roads, graduating police officers, etc.  It's the other, less tangible, results that are even more encouraging: the coaching and mentoring going on, people "getting it" after working very hard to understand our methods, Iraqis taking the lead on operations.  These are the critical bricks in our path home. 

I'm very excited about my vacation in August.  My dad, brother and I will be heading out for a guys weekend.  I'm also attending the wedding of a friend in Kalamazoo and visiting other friends in Chicago.  After I return here, I'm down to 4 months left and I return to states in January.  Crazy how time flies. 

I'll close for now, but if you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them.  My job is a lot of different things, but nothing really exciting enough to write about.  It would be boring if there wasn't so much of it. :)  Have a great day and I look forward to visiting while I'm at home.

Your friend,

Fred

What If Karl Marx Were The Director of Recruiting?

My partner in crime at Fistful of Talent, Tim Tolan, had an excellent post yesterday entitled Looking For Talent?  Always Look Outside Your Company.  It is part of a point/counter point discussion between Tim and the mighty Kris Dunn for a Workforce Management series.  I have many thoughts on this topic so I decided to share some of them with you here. 

I am going to come right out and say it.  I think organizations with documented process or policy that require them to look at and/or hire internal talent absent a side by side comparison with external talent are practicing a form of talent management/recruiting communism.  Let me explain.

When I was the Director of Talent Acquisition at Quicken Loans we had a saying within the organization that went something like "What got us where we are will not get us where we want to go."  The point is that what you have done and the work you have done up until this point will not necessarily breed success in the future.  Great organizations need to constantly evolve and get better.  Rarely can this type of performance improvement evolution happen without an influx of talent from outside the walls of the organization.  Constant promotion from within is a form of corporate "inbreeding" that is dangerous and often leads to innovation stagnation, acceptance of norms, inefficiency and general acceptance of mediocre performance. 

More after the jump!

Letters From A Recruiting Leader Serving In Iraq

Today I wanted to introduce you to a very special and gifted talent acquisition leader who I am proud to know and now call friend.  His name is Fred Hockett and I wanted to share his story with readers of this blog as well as launch a new series of posts that are all about him.  Fred's story is, in my opinion, so important that I am creating his own category on this blog called Fred Hockett.  As I think you will agree after reading this, he deserves it. 

So who is Fred and why is he so special that he warrants his own series of posts, you ask?  Well, Fred is a recruiting leader who learned late in January that he was being called back to active duty and would be deploying to Iraq to serve his country.  Now if I know anything about Fred and the kind of citizen, soldier and leader he is then he will likely take issue with my comments about how special he is for serving us and his country.  You see, as a West Point graduate his sense of duty is inextricably linked to who he is.  General Douglas MacArthur, in address to the Corps of Cadets at West Point on May 12, 1962, stated this more poignantly then I ever could:

Duty-Honor-Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, and what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Fred and I became acquainted as I was working on a search for a client to identify a director of talent acquisition.  It turns out we shared some common interests, ideas and thoughts as it relates to talent acquisition, coaching and leadership.  It wasn't long until we figured out that our shared experience at West Point might have been a reason for how quickly our relationship developed and how well we identified with one another.  Fred was an excellent match for our client and the opportunity but in the midst of helping him with this career move he was called back to active duty.

Fred headed off to Fort Benning in late January to await orders and prepare for a possible deployment in Iraq and we continued to stay in touch.  I wanted to keep in touch with Fred for many reasons but most importantly to support him with friendship and communication as he likely faced deployment to a war zone.  He was sacrificing for me, for all of us, and the least I could do is offer to be a friend and another connection to "home".  It then dawned on me, what if I could somehow serve Fred by sharing his story?  Better yet, what if I could help him to communicate his experiences in the Army and in Iraq with the talent acquisition community at large?  I spoke with Fred about this, he cleared it with his superiors and here we are - sharing Fred Hockett's story with the talent acquisition community.

Going forward Fred will write to me about what he is experiencing, what he is seeing and what work he is doing (within reason and without jeopardizing his role and security of course) and I will pass that along to you right here.  I will try to do very little editing of his material so everyone can get a real sense of what he is experiencing.  If you have any specific questions for Fred just email them to me (link over there on the right) and I will attempt to get them answered for you. 

Thanks for your service Fred.  Thanks for answering the call to duty and for defending the freedom and liberty we all hold so dear.  Thanks for helping to make the world safer for our children and grandchildren.  Thanks, most importantly, for your personal sacrifice; for putting yourself in harms way so we do not have to.

That said, here is Fred's first email to me dated back on March 7, 2008.   

Leader as Executioner

Now that title ought to get some attention.  It's certainly not what you might think on the surface.  Though some employees in companies all over this country might have personal experience that causes them to view their leader and company leadership as executioners of the sort that pull the switch, give the command to fire or push the button for the lethal injection to begin that is not what we are talking about today.

Jim Stroup, author of Managing Leadership, had a great post recently called The Executioner.  I am not going to insult your intelligence by citing it back to you verbatim here.  You can read and digest it for yourself by clicking on the link.  Just a few quick thoughts on Jim's post before you head over there to read it.

First, he clearly states at the front end of the piece one of the most glaring issues with leadership and executive leadership today - accountability.

How To Hire Great Recruiters - Part 2

In Part 1 of How To Hire Great Recruiters we laid out some framework around why hiring great recruiting talent is so important and began to share the 8 behavioral competencies Bearing Fruit Consulting finds necessary to succeed as a recruiter today.  Recruiting leaders and companies need to do a better job of identifying, recruiting, interviewing and selecting recruiting talent in order to succeed in such a challenging talent economy.  In Part 1 we identified Interaction as a key behavioral competency for great recruiters. 

Identifying the competency model that is linked to superior performance is the first step to achieving greatness in your recruiting team followed by designing and executing a scored behavioral interview based on the competency model.  One of the finest books on this topic, in my humble opinion is Competence At Work: Models For Superior Performance by Dr. Lyle M. Spencer, Jr. and Signe M. Spencer.  A premier work in this space I can not recommend it highly enough.  I also have to thank and recognize Chris Hallier, one of the high performing recruiters and key thought leaders from the award winning FirstMerit Talent Acquisition team I led, for introducing me to this book some 8 years ago or so.  Chris is a phenomenal HR and recruiting talent and if he is not in your network he should be. 

Let's take a look at the second of the eight competencies. 

How To Fail

Michael Wade on Execupundit.com offers up a list of 21 Ways to Fail.  It is a simple post but incredibly insightful.  There is little doubt that this is the guide on how to fail and, unfortunately, much of the list will likely resonate with many leaders and business professionals. 

Each of the 21 ways to fail are great but number two on the list resonated with me - "Regard yourself as a victim".  I was immediately transported back to my time at West Point.  It might even have been a flashback.  During Cadet Basic Training, Beast Barracks as it is affectionately known, a new Cadet is allowed only four acceptable responses.  They are:

1. Yes Sir.
2. No Sir.
3. No excuse Sir.
4. Sir, I do not understand.

That is it!  It is unacceptable to respond with anything other than one of these four choices.

How To Hire Great Recruiters

Hiring great recruiters is a challenge every company faces today.  This is the first in a series of posts on how to hire great recruiters.  I have written on this subject on ERE in the past but I believe it merits revisiting.  Over the course of 8 or so posts I will introduce the 8 behavioral competencies I have found best predict after hire performance of great recruiters.  In a talent economy that has become increasingly demanding, hiring for the right recruiting behaviors and then equipping recruiters with the best skill training available must be a priority of any recruiting leader and company.  Recruiter training should not only include how to source, one aspect of the recruiting life cycle that seems to get the most attention, but also how to actually execute great recruiting (often overlooked in most training curriculum). 

Anyone who has participated in one of our many recruiter training programs, seen me speak or been on one of the recruiting teams I have led is well aware of my feelings about technology in the recruiting space.  Essentially I believe that all the technology, job boards, social media, blogs and recruiting software in the world will never replace or generate the kind of results a great recruiter can deliver.  If there is a war for talent, which I believe there is, then the next great weapon is the well trained, skilled and artful recruiter.

Director of Talent Acquisition Search

If you or someone you know is an exceptional leader who is looking for a new recruiting leadership challenge you owe it to yourself to check out a search for a Director of Talent Acquisition that we are working on for one of our clients.

They are a wonderful organization who is really making a difference in the world of education.  The recruiting engine is relatively new and needs a leader first and a recruiting innovator second.  If you know of anyone please feel free to email us or give us a call at 517-579-8948.