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JoDee 00:02
As soon as I made this move into HR, our HR director said, “You should get certified.”

Susan 00:08
It was just a lot of… Why would you go work in an area that is, you know, slow and procedure-oriented and not fun or creative? I persevered. I said, “I think it will be. It’s what I want to do.” And I am so glad I didn’t take that early advice.

Susan 00:26
Welcome to The JoyPowered® Workspace Podcast, where we help HR and business leaders embrace joy in the workplace. I’m Susan White, owner of Susan Tinder White Consulting, an HR consulting practice. Joining me is my co-host and dear friend JoDee Curtis, owner of Purple Ink and Powered by Purple Ink, a professional network that I’m part of.

Susan 00:47
JoDee and I get dozens of ideas every month from listeners suggesting topics they would like to hear on this podcast. One that has come up a number of times is what advice do we have for people starting out their careers in HR. We’ve interviewed a lot of business leaders and HR executives over the years, but we really haven’t dedicated time to talk you through how someone new to our profession might want to get up to speed as quickly and effectively as possible. Today is the day. JoDee, you and I are going to share our perspectives gained from starting our careers in HR, from the HR people we deal with as consultants to a wide range of organizations, and from our teaching HR professionals across the US – and sometimes when we’re lucky, across the globe. We’ve been blessed to work with seasoned HR staff and newly minted HR staff, some who are moving into HR from other disciplines, and some who come right out of school into their first job, which just happens to be in HR.

JoDee 01:45
I do think that’s something sort of unique or different about HR is the number of people who didn’t take or major in HR, right? Or… so a lot of these don’t even have an HR degree. They might have graduated in organizational development, maybe, or maybe they… we have people on our team who were English majors and communication majors and psychology majors. So. So different from, like, I went to school to be an accountant and I came out and I got a job as an accountant. Right? So, not that I didn’t have a lot of early transition and figuring out what that meant, but it just was very different from my… a lot of my experience with HR professionals now who did something else.

Susan 02:40
I agree. There’s a lot of HR people who don’t even have degrees, that they, you know, whatever it was they got into, they became really good at it, and then they decided to jump into HR. So I think that the… the background that people have can be wildly varied. So JoDee, why don’t you remind our listeners when and how you moved into HR?

JoDee 03:00
Yes. So I… if you’re a listener, you might have heard this a few times, but I graduated from college in 1985 and worked as an auditor for a CPA firm until 1994. But throughout those nine years, I had the opportunity to raise my hand and say, “hey, I want to do some of our college recruiting,” and, “hey, I would like to do training on this topic for other people.” And so I didn’t officially make the switch to HR – and actually, I still had some internal accounting responsibilities at that time, too. But I really, you know, when I look back in my mind, I was preparing myself for a world in HR, even though I didn’t know it was happening.

Susan 03:56
Wow, I love that. And my journey was a little different in that I went to college to get a job that I could provide for my family and have benefits. That was just my sole focus. And when I got there, I thought, you know, business… the business school seemed like the best place to go to try to earn lots of money and security. So when I got into business, I looked around and I saw all the different types of majors, accounting and production and finance, and I thought they were all boring. But the one that looked interesting to me was HR, which at the time was called personnel and industrial relations. Every HR elective I could take, I just loved. I thought, this is so interesting. Yes, it’s business, but it’s about people. So I graduated from school hoping, dreaming, wishing that I would, you know, be able to get a job in HR. There were very few – in 1980 – companies looking for people with HR degrees. So I ended up going into banking, which I also grew to love, but I worked in our branch banking world, really, management training in the branches until an opening occurred in HR for a campus recruiter. I posted for that job, never looked back, and then had the great blessing and opportunity to move through lots of areas of HR. My husband says I was born to do HR and I’m probably going to be die… I’ll probably die doing HR because here I am, you know, 40 plus years later, still doing it and loving it.

JoDee 05:18
Yeah. Now, Susan, what was your major?

Susan 05:21
It was business management with an area of concentration in personnel and industrial relations.

JoDee 05:28
Technically, mine is also in business administration with a concentration in accounting.

Susan 05:36
Oh, I didn’t realize that. Yeah, very good. And you went to the University of Evansville?

JoDee 05:41
Yep.

Susan 05:41
Yeah. And I went to Indiana University. Go Hoosiers. JoDee, what advice was given to you when you made that switch into HR?

JoDee 05:51
Well, the very first thing was the HR director of the whole firm – so I worked… The firm was divided up into different regions, which was a few offices working together, and as soon as I made this move into HR, our HR director said, “You should get certified.” That was really important for me, because, essentially, to some people, I was in accounting one day and I was in HR the next. And so I felt like I needed that credibility, whereas they might be like, “well, you don’t know any more about HR than I do.” And I thought that was such great advice for me just to gain some of that credibility with the certification.

Susan 06:48
Oh, yeah, that was great advice. I can remember when I was moving from the branch administration world into HR, the heads of the branch system and the head of the retail part of the organization both took me aside and said, “What are you doing? Why would you go into a staff job when you’re in a line job and you’re moving up?” And it was just a lot of… Why would you go work in an area that is, you know, slow and procedure-oriented and not fun or creative? I persevered. I said, “I think it will be. It’s what I want to do.” And I am so glad I didn’t take that early advice. I find HR anything but slow or procedural-driven. Yes, we have process and yes, we have rules. But we can… we have to be the most creative problem-solvers, because the issues that we try to solve for involve humans. So yeah, I find it exciting every day.

JoDee 07:39
You know, Susan, I don’t know if you or any of our listeners know who Johnny Taylor is, but he – Well, I know you know.

Susan 07:49
Yeah, he’s the CEO of SHRM.

JoDee 07:51
Right. What I meant to say is, I don’t know if you’ve heard him tell this story. But he is the CEO of our association, which is Society of Human Resource Management, and he was an attorney by trade and worked in the legal field and then went to work for a company as inside counsel. And then he says he called his grandma one day and said, “Hey, I’m starting a new job. I’m going to be the VP of HR at this company.” And she said, “Oh, Johnny, I’m so sorry.”

Susan 08:31
Oh, no, Grandma.

JoDee 08:32
Grandma thought that was such a step down for him to go from legal to HR. So it is not always viewed as a positive thing.

Susan 08:44
No. And I think you have to decide this is what you want to do. Right?

JoDee 08:47
Yeah.

Susan 08:48
So JoDee, how about a mentor? As you were starting out in HR, did you have a mentor, someone you could go to, to really find out the ins and outs of HR?

JoDee 08:57
So I had two very powerful mentors – I mean, powerful to me, in my role – and one of them was an accountant at the firm I worked with right out of school, and he just… from the first day I started, I felt like he took me under his wing a bit and helped me maneuver the accounting world. But then when I moved into HR, he became the managing partner of our region, so he continued to be my mentor in a new role as well. But then I also mentioned the firm-wide HR director who had recommended that I get certified. He was a great mentor for me as well and got me involved in a lot of firm-wide projects so that I wasn’t just doing the day-to-day at our region, but really involved at a firm-wide role in different projects and performance management and compensation benchmarking and those types of things. So… and by the way, both Joe and Tom are today still my mentors.

Susan 10:15
Ah, I love that. You know, I… I had several mentors that were my bosses at various times that I feel like I just learned so much from them about HR. I don’t know if they’ll ever hear this podcast episode or not, but I just want to shout out – Richard Bonds, he was my first direct manager in human resources. He was the person who I had… actually hired me as a summer staffer years earlier for the bank. And he was just one of the classiest individuals and still is one of the classiest individuals I know. But he knew so much about HR, and he brought such a level of professionalism to it. And I know that I would not be where I am today if I had not had him as my first HR leader. Another manager I had that I just learned a whole different set of things from was Dave Brody, and Dave’s still a terrific friend of mine today. Dave had a way of looking at HR. He, at the time that I worked for him first, managed, like, all of our operational areas’ HR. And the whole set of types of human situations I came in contact with was very different under Dave, but he was… really thought about things with a real business sense. He thought about efficiencies, he thought about how we and HR could really help drive results in the business. It was… it was just great learning from him. And then the third one I’ll mention, somebody you know, because she’s been a guest on our podcast, was Anne Leyden. And Anne was just an amazing… She still is a brilliant person. She’s one of the smartest people I know. And she came into HR always, I think, a little reluctantly. It wasn’t her life’s dream when she was asked to also run HR, but she just brought a sense of how do you really build credibility across the organization. And I think I learned a lot from her about being a really good consultant. So I could go on and on, because I think I can learn from anybody. But those three were real mentors to me, and I still just enjoy all three of them a lot.

JoDee 10:21
That’s awesome. And really interesting that both of us can still to this day… I mean, for me, that was 30 years ago, when I met those guys – actually more than 30 years ago. More than 30. And how we still maintain relationships with them. Like, I haven’t worked with either one of them for the last 23 years. But still…

Susan 12:47
Had such an impact on your life. So I think I would say to any listener that is really starting your career in HR, I would first look to your boss, I would look to your colleagues to figure out how can I just learn from them and think about them as mentors and ask them to be mentors for you. It’s always nice when a mentor has nothing to do with your chain of command and there’s somebody from the outside who can… you can have as a thought partner. But sometimes when you’re starting out in HR, you just don’t know a lot of other HR people, except the ones that you work with every day. So don’t dismiss the people you work with every day. But also take a look, maybe there are people you meet through a SHRM networking event or maybe you and another company joined forces to do something, is there somebody there that would be open to letting you learn from them?

JoDee 13:34
Susan, another thing about my two mentors that I always valued so much, is that the two of them had very different styles, just opposite ends of the spectrum, really. And one of them was, you know, very much a visionary and big picture person and the other one was fabulous at the details and the steps in the processes. So I felt like I was learning from both of them about the same thing with two different perspectives on it or… or just personal styles. And so I felt like I was able to take the best of… what I thought was the best of the best from each of them.

Susan 14:19
What a gift that was. Oh my gosh. Nice to have two different styles. So namely.com gives six tips for climbing the HR ladder that I thought would be good for us to talk through for those early career HR professionals to consider.

JoDee 14:36
The first one is to be proactive. I know for me, when I… when I said earlier that although I was an accountant auditor for nine years, I was starting my journey into HR without even really knowing it. But when I was about two or three years working at the firm and I just went to the person who led our recruiting and said, “Hey, I would love to be… help with college recruiting.” And he said, “Okay.”

Susan 15:11
“I’m not gonna turn down any help.”

JoDee 15:15
So years later, some people asked me, like, how did you end up getting so involved in recruiting? And I said, I just asked him. A few years later, we were moving to a new software system, or I don’t know, some… some kind of new process. and they were looking for people who could do train the trainers. And I said, “I’d like to do that.” And they said, “Okay,” and I started doing it, you know, so that’s where I got my training skills from, or started my training skills. So sometimes you just gotta ask.

Susan 15:53
I think that is a great piece of advice. They always need volunteers, there’s always volunteers for things that maybe you don’t necessarily want to do. Raise your hand, be present, let people see you get in there and do the things that other people don’t want to do. People will remember you. You’re going to be expanding your network, which is always going to help you in HR. So terrific advice. Number two Namely mentions is learn the full scope of HR. And I think that’s a great piece of advice. Because usually, in today’s world, when someone comes into HR, they have a pretty prescribed role. Maybe they’re going to come in as a recruiter, or they’re going to come in as a comp analyst, or they’re coming in, an employee relations representative or an HRBP. And don’t let yourself be limited by the title, right? Yes, you need to come in and learn your job. But be curious and figure out… if you’re doing employee relations work, what are recruiters doing? How can you help recruiters by maybe information that you learn that you pick up? What can you learn from your colleagues? It’s really thinking about the full function, cradle to grave, of what kind of HR processes and services do we offer, and make sure that you are learning those other areas. I can think of times where I’ve encouraged people to see if you can go shadow somebody in another part of the organization for a day. Or if they’re doing a special, like, weekend recruiting event, as you say, volunteer to go help be a receptionist or do something. You’re gonna learn things about other functions in HR that’s going to make you more valuable in your current role, and I think makes you attractive for future opportunities.

JoDee 17:33
Absolutely. And those are great examples. I would say my mind sort of ended up totally opposite of that, although I’m sure I know that both of us shared some experiences on both sides. But I did…. So, I told you the first thing I did was to get certified. Right? And then I… when I got that one, then I was eligible to apply for another one. And I attended lots of conferences, heard lots of speakers, got involved in our association locally and then statewide and even nationally, to some extent, as well, too. So I was, you know, from a technical standpoint, I was learning a lot along the way. I was actually nine years into my HR career… so, finished my nine years in accounting and I was nine years into my career before I really knew anything about benefits. It’d just not been an area that I knew anything about. I didn’t know anything about negotiating with brokers. I didn’t know anything about health insurance. I mean, and that was… everything I learned about benefits was taught to me by our benefits broker. I was learning as I was going.

Susan 19:05
As you were saying that, I was thinking, I’m sure that I was in HR 25 years before I learned anything about incentive compensation. I never had the need to… the roles that I were in had nothing to do with comp plans other than I was a comp analyst, but I didn’t do anything with IC plans and deferred comp, executive comp. I was probably 25 years into it before I ever had to learn that. And I think about if I had done that earlier, maybe that would have opened up different career paths for me. So learning across the HR spectrum, I think, is so smart.

JoDee 19:38
Agree.

Susan 19:39
So number three is, as JoDee has already told us, Namely says consider certifications. And she… she was really proactive about doing this early on. I think the world in the… gosh, the last, you know, 30 plus years of my career, the opportunity to get certified has just grown and grown and grown and certainly there’s HRCI certification to be a professional HR person. There’s SHRM certification. There are specialty credentials that SHRM offers in the areas of talent acquisition, leading workplace investigations, HR departments of one, and more. There are other organizations out there that certify you in different types of areas of expertise. I think it makes sense for you, as you are building out your career, maybe not day one, but maybe year one to start thinking about… What professional accreditation can I get? Because, as you mentioned earlier, JoDee, the colleagues that you have in the firm, they want to know that you’re a subject matter expert. And I believe that HR people through all the experiences they have, they’re gonna gain it. But having some credentials, maybe you don’t have a degree in HR, maybe your master’s isn’t in it. But if you’ve got your practical experience plus a certification, I think that causes other areas to listen to you more intently, and maybe believe even more what you say.

JoDee 20:59
Yeah, 100%. Another tip that namely.com shared was to spend time outside the HR bubble. Susan, how did you do that? How did you spend time outside the HR bubble?

Susan 21:16
Yeah, I think I was really lucky in that I… because I was in a bank where I worked HR for many, many years, I’d started in operations when I was working summers. So I really did understand at least one operational area. And then I’d worked in our branches for two plus years, and that was really helpful to understand the retail part of the bank. And so when I went into HR, I had some more credibility with operations, with branch banking, which also helped me with commercial banking, because I had done commercial loans there. With mortgage, I had done mortgage loans. So I had enough, at least I could talk the talk with clients when we’d go deep on a topic for a number of areas of the organization. But I think what I could have done better over the successive decades is making sure I was spending time continuing to understand the nuances of the various business lines. Certainly now as a consultant, when I work with a business, the first thing I want to do is understand their business. Because for me to be able to consult about what they ought to do on the people front, I can understand what the mission, vision, values is of the company, I need to understand what the challenges are they’re having with the constraints they are… that they’re having to make me a really a better HR person. So now I think I’m much better at it as a consultant than I was when I was in… I got… you get kind of comfortable inside a company that you think, okay, I understand this business, and then you focus all your energy on HR and people. You should never get comfortable. My advice is continually understand, because businesses change over time, really, pretty rapidly sometimes.

JoDee 22:47
Right. Well, and I, of course, I was in the CPA firm world for 21 years and of course, I had grown up there, so I knew the industry very well. But when I started my own business, and you know, as an auditor, we worked with clients in lots of… in different industries, too, on the accounting side, not the HR. But once I started my business, I became more active in… a couple of… I was on a board for a nonprofit, and I was their sort of go-to HR person when they had issues or needed help, and now I’m also on the board of a credit union. So I feel like I’ve learned so much more about credit unions and… or just financial institutions. So you know, so many ways to do that, right, from volunteering to shadowing to just focusing on learning more about the business.

Susan 23:49
Oh, that’s great advice. Number five on their list was utilize free resources. You’re starting out in your career, you should be tapping into any and every resource that’s out there. Certainly, if you happen to belong to, like, SHRM, you’ve got shrm.org, which is such a go-to early in your career. They have a wealth of information and templates and benchmarking information that just really will help you out. But there’s also, gosh, there’s HR morning, there’s so many HR blogs out there. There’s webinars that you can take for free, podcasts you can listen to to really get yourself educated, newsletters, LinkedIn groups. Joining a HR LinkedIn group is smart, gives you a forum where you can ask questions, information, you know, gets shared. Think about where you can go. I’m a big proponent, as I’m helping a company write job descriptions or to figure out how to structure something, I’ll go out to the Department of Labor’s ONet online to really take a look at what jobs are out there, what they’re paying, what part of the country they’re… this particular career might be growing. I’ll go out to The Bureau of Labor Statistics to understand what’s happening on the job statistics front, like how many jobs have been added, what unemployment is. I’m just a big Googler. How about you, JoDee?

JoDee 25:12
I do the same. I do… my number one recommendation, of course, which I’m preaching to the choir right now, but of course, it would be to listen to the JoyPowered® Podcast, right. And you, you mentioned being a member of SHRM, I just think there are so many people, including myself for a long time, who didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to reach out to the HR Knowledge Center, which is set up just for people to ask questions to right of any anything about HR you can get started with and sometimes they know the answer. Sometimes they send you articles, they’ll send you a podcast, a web link, whatever it might be.

Susan 26:02
Yes, that is a great resource. And then the final Namely recommendation is highlight relevant skills. I’m a strong believer in there’s no anonymous giving. So it’s important that you be an advocate for yourself. Yes, you’re starting out in your career, but you’re contributing each day every day. And it’s… you know, I love being humble. I think that’s smart. But don’t let people take you for granted, you know, and when you contribute something, make sure your boss knows what you’ve done. Make sure that you highlight it.

JoDee 26:34
Amen. I believe all of that as well. What mistakes do you think you made early in your HR career that you could recommend that our listeners avoid?

Susan 26:48
I think I made an awful lot of mistakes. I think I still make some mistakes. I think that when I started out in HR, I was so excited to get to practice HR that I’d think I knew more than I really did. I think that I wasn’t great at really being an active listener, because I wanted to prove that I knew a lot. And I’m sure that there was times that I was probably way off base. If I’d listened better, I probably would have offered up better solutions or taken better, you know, smarter actions. I think that I also took myself too seriously. Sometimes I was so concerned with delivering, you know, projects on time, and so concerned with wrapping things up and getting things done quickly. And I just think that if I maybe had taken a breath and enjoyed the ride a little bit more, or had a little more sense of humor, that it would have been more fun for me and the people I worked with. And then I think the other thing that really hits home for me is that I think I’m… I definitely… I’ve always been good at execution. I… I think tactically, just very naturally I am going to get things done. If there’s a goal, I’m going to meet it. But I don’t think that I was very good at thinking strategically and taking a breath and think about the why I was doing what I was doing. Connecting dots, thinking ahead about, you know, if I… if I do X, Y, and Z, what does that mean big picture and what… is what I’m working on really the best, highest use of our time? I just think I should have lifted my head earlier and thought about the big picture, and it took me a long time to kind of learn that.

JoDee 28:28
Well, I of course made many mistakes, probably many more than you did, Susan. Two of them, I think, when I look back now, really stick out to me. One is that I took my role in HR – and remember my first role in HR, I was at the office level in charge of two offices, and then three. And I felt like if there was an HR project, whether it was my idea or not, that I needed to do it, and I needed to do it from the beginning and the end. It never dawned on me to get more people involved, to do surveys, to ask people questions about what… you know, I would hear something at the conference and come back and say, oh my gosh, we’ve got to do this, and I would implement it, and then people would say, like, you know, that seems nice, but what… what was wrong with the way we did it before? And I was like, oh. Well, I think this is way better. But you know, I just never got other people involved. I felt like I had to do it all myself. And then secondly, especially early on in my career, if someone came to me with an employee relations issue… you know, let’s say they came to me and said, “Oh, Jim is being mean to me,” right? “He’s my supervisor and I don’t get along with him.” And I would want to jump up and go to Jim and fix him, you know.

Susan 30:08
I think that’s very natural early in.

JoDee 30:10
Yes. And so two things I was doing wrong, and that really… number one is I tried to fix Jim immediately. But number two is I never even asked Jim about it. Just assumed what the other person told me was the truth, where in many times, it was probably just their perspective for what was happening.

Susan 30:36
Okay, that rings true for me, too. I want to fix the problem, kill the problem without getting two sides of it. Yeah, great, great learning. Thank you for sharing that. So we’re going to ask a JoyPowered® question to each of us, because that’s what we love to do when we interview people. JoDee, what is it about working in HR all these years later that still gives you joy?

JoDee 30:55
Well, we’ve talked before about our strengths, and my number one strength is Maximizer, which is about bringing out the best of people and/or processes. And so whatever the issue or the project might be, it was making it better. And I love that still today, one of my favorite pieces of HR that I do now is training. And I feel like every time I’m training, I’m helping individuals – trying to help them, at least – be better than what they were. And if you have a group of those people all together it’s making the organization better as a whole. So I like to make things better.

Susan 31:45
I love that. Well, my number one strength is Woo – Winning Others Over. And I think it does come into play with the profession of HR. I find people fascinating. I think they’re… each one of them is a mystery. I love to figure out what makes them tick. This job just never gets boring, because there’s people involved. So it just brings me joy every day, uncovering the mystery behind the individual, behind what they did at work, behind what the organization needs. It’s just fun.

JoDee 32:16
Love it.

Susan 32:17
A couple of our episodes you may want to check out related to the topic of building your career in HR. The first one is “Career Paths in HR.” It launched in July of 2022. And the second one is “Becoming a Chief Human Resources Officer,” that launched in April of 2022. In these two other podcasts, we interviewed a number of successful HR leaders who all had different journeys in the HR profession and may give you more ideas about things you may want to consider as you continue to build out your career in HR. We wish you the very best career.

JoDee 32:50
You know, Susan, both of those episodes are two of our best episodes. We had the most people listen to one or both of those.

Susan 33:01
That is great. Well, hope that our listeners… if you haven’t listened to them yet, take a listen. If you listened to it before, listen to it again.

JoDee 33:08
Susan, we have a listener question today. The listener says “I’m an HR manager and I’m having a lot of job candidates ghost me. What should I do about this?”

Susan 33:22
Ah, gosh, for… I’m sure everybody listening knows what ghosting is, but just in case you haven’t heard it, “ghosting.” meaning when they stop replying to you or go MIA at some point during the recruiting process. It is so frustrating, especially when you feel like you’ve really invested time in a candidate and then they aren’t taking your calls anymore, or they’re not responding to your texts. There’s always some things you can’t control. Right? I think the best offense is just a really strong offense. The more high touch and genuinely warm and frequent communication that you have with those individuals through personal updating of… of the individual throughout the process using texting or even if you use a chatbot or other automation… The more human touches you have with a candidate, we know the more likely they are to respond to you and the less likelihood of being ghosted. Monster says that the number one reason employers are ghosted is because the candidate felt that HR or the hiring manager involved was rude to them – I can’t imagine it was HR people, so I’m gonna blame that at HR man… or at the hiring managers’ feet – which they said happened about 31% of the time. The number two reason according to Monster is the job candidates say it’s because it’s taking too long for the employers to get back to them, and that accounts for 29% of the ghosting that’s happening. For the steps in your process that you know are several days or longer, I would really think about communicating realistic expectations to the candidate, that maybe I’d say, I know that we’ve had this conversation today, I thought it was a great conversation, I need to get with managers who I know that are very demanding schedules, it may be six or seven days before I’m back to you. Give them that realistic job preview, because if you – or that realistic job timing expectation, because if you don’t, after two weeks and they haven’t heard from you, they very well may go on to that next job – or even sooner.

JoDee 35:23
I agree. You know, I think ghosting has probably been around for a very long time, but we… we gave it a name a couple of years ago, right?

Susan 35:34
Yes.

JoDee 35:35
Ghosting… So I don’t know if it’s more popular or we just have a better name for it. But I do think that many candidates have been ghosted by recruiters or…

Susan 35:49
In the past. Yes.

JoDee 35:51
…hiring managers, when they just didn’t choose that candidate or didn’t want to move on the line, they just quit responding to them as well, too. So I think we’re… we’re getting some payback there.

Susan 36:05
Oh, dear.

JoDee 36:06
…replying to so many of those people before, but…

Susan 36:10
Nah, I think you may be right. I think it’s wise to get multiple contact methods from candidates as early in the process as you can so you can be communicating frequently. And in worst case, as you may need to track them down multiple ways to get a response. So I would try to get multiple avenues of communication, frequently do human touch or get your chatbot sending out messages or your ATS sending out status messages, because you want that candidate not to grow frustrated and leave and leave the process.

JoDee 36:42
Right. Absolutely.

Susan 36:44
It’s time for in the news. A March 25, 2023 Wall Street Journal article by Gwyn Guilford discussed a US Labor Department report released that shows 72.5% of business establishments report that their employees teleworked rarely or not at all in 2022, compared to just 60 – or 60.1% who stated this in 2021. This is close to the pre-pandemic, before March 2020, 76.7% of businesses that said telework in their firms occurred rarely or not at all. It really surprised me that 72% of businesses are saying that it rarely happens in their workplace now in 2023.

JoDee 37:29
Yeah.

Susan 37:30
Maybe it shouldn’t. A Robert Half survey reported that 92% of managers prefer their teams work on site. And site benefits such as having training, mentoring, culture building, which they value, even when the work doesn’t need to be performed on site. 92% of managers are saying that, JoDee.

JoDee 37:51
I’m surprised. I think, because, you know, my organization, we’ve worked remotely for a long time, mostly because we didn’t have an office.

Susan 38:04
But yeah, and it worked. It worked so effectively. Statistics tell us that the numbers of… the number of offices operating with hybrid flexibility is decreasing.

JoDee 38:13
I do think that’s right. I’ve heard that more and more.

Susan 38:17
Have you?

JoDee 38:17
Yeah.

Susan 38:18
That’s what the statistics tell us. Employers who say their entire workforce is fully remote is just 11% of all organizations, according to the Labor Department, which is higher than two years ago, which was at 10.3%, but not by much. I really believe many employees crave flexibility and deciding when and where they will work, and employers who can figure out how to deliver on that different – on that will differentiate themselves as employers of choice, because you still are pretty unique, JoDee.

JoDee 38:50
Right. I think even if employees don’t use it that… that much, you know, maybe they like an eight to five schedule, and they like to be consistent, but just knowing that they could be flexible, if they…

Susan 39:03
Yes.

JoDee 39:04
…makes a big difference to people.

Susan 39:07
I totally agree.

JoDee 39:09
Well, please tune in next time and make it a JoyPowered® day.

Susan 39:14
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JoDee 39:51
You can learn more about JoyPowered® at getjoypowered.com. Check out The JoyPowered® Shop, where you can order our books, journals, and other items that power our joy, at getjoypowered.com/shop. We’re @JoyPowered on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter and you can email us at joypowered@gmail.com.

Susan 40:19
We hope you tune in next time, make it a JoyPowered® day.