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HR entrepreneur Mike Coffey, SPHR, SHRM-SCP engages business thought leaders about the strategic, psychological, legal, and practical implications of bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. As an HR consultant, mentor to first-stage businesses through EO’s Accelerator program, and owner of Imperative—Bulletproof Background Screening, Mike is passionate about helping other professionals improve how they recruit, select, and manage their people. Most thirty-minute episodes of Good Morning, HR will be eligible for half a recertification credit for both HRCI and SHRM-certified professionals. Mike is a member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) Fort Worth and active with the Texas Association of Business, the Fort Worth Chamber, and Texas SHRM.
There can be some disparate impact on certain certain, cultural groups and certain racial groups. I mean that's it's still think it's valid, but like I said, DEI programs aren't always doing that well. If you're going to really invest in things like, you know, training for unconscious bias, and and focus on things that would really help undo some of that systemic issue that we have, I think that's more likely a more effective approach than just saying we're gonna start checking boxes and filling quotas when we hire.
Mike Coffey:Good morning, HR. I'm Mike Coffey, president of Imperative, bulletproof background checks with fast and friendly service. And this is the podcast where I talk to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. And welcome to the first HR news episode of 2025. Joining me to look at quite a month in HR related news is Kara Kelley.
Mike Coffey:Kara is founder and CEO of Clinical HR LLC, a human resources advisory firm for dental and medical practices, where she works with practice leaders to develop strategic HR systems that engage their team and strengthen their organizations. Cara is also a committee chair for Austin Sherm. I always wanna give them a shout out and is the immediate past president of the Austin chapter of the National Speakers Association. Welcome back to Good Morning HR, Cara.
Kara Kelley:Thanks, Mike. Always a pleasure to be back here. And yes, I agree. This month is still January for some some reason. Oh, my goodness.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And, there's just I think it's just fasten your seat belts. Let's just the next 6 months is, I think, gonna be a wild ride. Oh, absolutely. So on his first day of office, president Trump signed more than 200 executive orders, many of them affecting federal workforce and DEI efforts and federal agencies.
Mike Coffey:But of immediate interest to private employers, he rescinded the 1965 executive order signed by President Lyndon B Johnson that created the OFCCP and required affirmative action plans related to race and gender for federal contractors. He also prohibited the OFCCP from promoting diversity, holding federal contractors responsible for taking affirmative action, and allowing or encouraging workforce balancing based on protected class and Federal contractors must now certify that they do not operate any DAI programs that violate Federal anti discrimination law. However, the order doesn't affect reporting or affirmative action plans related to veterans or persons with disabilities, which would actually take an act of congress. So that's just a small change. What's your take on this executive order?
Kara Kelley:I mean, we are definitely starting this, term out with a bang. Yeah. I think we have to really look at what what exactly this is saying, that I see a lot of overreaction right now. I've spent a lot of time on social media, LinkedIn, as well as Facebook. I see things even on Instagram from, private employers, who are completely going one direction or another.
Kara Kelley:I've seen people, you know, going ahead and putting their, their claim out there for what they are going to do or not going to do. And I really I feel like some of this is a little bit of an overreaction right now. Not saying that we shouldn't have DEI programs. Not saying that we shouldn't put, you know, diversity for it and make sure that our workplaces are inclusive. But I think that part about illegal DEI programs is something we have to look at very closely.
Kara Kelley:We're not just saying we're striking all DEI programs. We're looking at illegal DEI programs.
Mike Coffey:Which was kind of an issue last year. Right? There were several DEI programs that got challenged in court that said, you know, you can't you know, title 7 still applies. Even with all of this stuff gone, title 7 applies. And you can't say we are we are going to go hire a female of color for this VP job.
Mike Coffey:That's our goal. That's a violation of Title 7 just as much as you said, you know, I'm gonna hire a 6 foot 2, you know, white guy for the role.
Kara Kelley:Oh, absolutely. And I've had, you know, like you mentioned, I work with healthcare practices and so clearly more private sector than public, but even even that, you know, I've had clients, in years past that would say, here's my job description. Let me can you can you review this for me before we post it? And I start reading through it and it looks fine until I get down to the end, and it'll say something like, Hispanics only. And I'm like, woah, woah, hang on a second.
Kara Kelley:We can't have that. Well but I need somebody who speaks Spanish. Yes. And that's a bonafide job qualification. You can put that in there, but let's start with the fact that, first of all, not everybody who's Hispanic speaks Spanish.
Kara Kelley:And second, you can't say that.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And and I think a lot of, you know, and there was a court case that said, yes, obviously, reverse discrimination happens. And and some of these programs put weight on companies to make choices about staffing, and I think affirmative action plans were intended to do that. I mean if we're being honest, but I came into HR a long time ago, and aerospace and then in healthcare, and I can tell you even back then, and this was in the nineties, affirmative action plans are primarily exercises in gerrymandering your numbers so that your actual numbers that you reported to the government, you know, matched what they would expect to see across a general population. Okay.
Mike Coffey:Well, let's divide this class this job class into this group and this group, and let's do this and this, and there's a whole industry that sprung up around this. I mean, software companies that specialize in this, law firms, HR consultants, who that's their livelihood doing that.
Kara Kelley:It's the type of the quotas they have to fill?
Mike Coffey:Right. Yeah. And help them get, you know, you know, manage your data, so that, you know, you look like the community that, you know, really what you're trying to do is avoid those questions from the, you know, from OFCCP with your contracting. I think the 1965 executive order from 65 years ago did good things, but I think we live in a different time. We have title 7.
Mike Coffey:We have state, civil rights laws at every level. We've got them at the city level, municipal levels across the country. Without getting into the politics, this is one of the executive orders that I kind of think is probably time to do, and it was gonna take somebody who's willing to make a bunch of constituencies angry just, you know, without thinking through it, to do it. But I don't really see this being the end of the world for for fairness in the workplace or for, for anybody really except for you know, I've got friends who are gonna be impacted by this because they're HR consultants, and this is a big part of their practice.
Kara Kelley:Sure. And I've I've seen some of those conversations. I've seen conversations from HR professionals who are in support of this, like wholeheartedly because there's so many DEI programs that have been implemented that they're just not done well. There's affirmative action.
Mike Coffey:They don't work. Right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's Harvard Business Review article after Harvard Business Review article saying asking why DEI doesn't work, and the bottom line is you don't change people's hearts and minds.
Mike Coffey:That's what they've focused on by either guilt or shame or compassion or feelings for social justice, and I've had for 3 years now a presentation around DEI that's about mitigating bias in your employment hiring process, building systems that help mitigate people's own biases whether it's class, age, race, what college you went to, any of these things that help you that get in the way of you hiring the very best candidate. And we need to go back to a systematic approach. And when you're just counting noses or in this case, you know, what kind of sex organ somebody has, then you're not really getting to the root of the problem, which is the process because most of your hiring managers don't want to be jerks. They're not they're not neo nazis or they're not, you know, followers of Louis Farrakhan or whatever. They're not actively trying to discriminate against somebody else.
Mike Coffey:They just have their their human and they've got their biases.
Kara Kelley:And that's gonna be my question for private employers is that, you know, if you want to strike your DEI program and and say we're gonna stop doing training on this, okay, well, what are you going to do? If we're trying to say, well, we're in a completely different world and we we really do want this meritocracy. Alright. What program are you gonna put in place that really does hire and and promote and train people based on merit? Are we going to start using software when we're looking at applications that are removing names from from resumes?
Kara Kelley:Are we gonna start removing, college graduation dates, which people can go back to college at any age? So that to me is kind of a here or there if you're really gonna judge based on that. Well, it's probably not a company I wanna work for personally.
Mike Coffey:But but
Kara Kelley:what are you gonna do at that point if if you're saying that we really are truly, you know, 2025, we're an enlightened organization, and we don't need DEI. It just we should shouldn't have any of this. We shouldn't need it. Alright? Show it.
Mike Coffey:Right. And what's the best way to get this job done? What are the skills we really need? And let's let's punch that paper ceiling too. We've still got a lot of jobs out there that require bachelor's degrees.
Mike Coffey:Do we really care that that somebody got a computer science degree 15 years ago? Is it relevant today? Probably not.
Kara Kelley:Probably was it relevant last year with the way
Mike Coffey:that AI Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, before AI. And so how do you, you know, how do I measure the actual competencies that they bring to the table right now?
Mike Coffey:What does experience look like? What can they do for me on day 1? And if we start doing those, then you're going to start attracting candidates who are maybe come from lower socioeconomic values, and I'm much more concerned about class than I am race and sex because I think class is still the area that that most determines, you know, financial classes is, economic classes the the area that most determines what obstacles someone's gonna have throughout their career because those are, you know, you know, when you're requiring degrees and somebody's willing to go into $35,000 in average debt for you the modern college, graduate in the US, Those are those those are really keeping your workforce limited, those kind of requirements.
Kara Kelley:Sure. And, I mean, there can be some disparate impact on certain certain, cultural groups and certain racial groups. I mean, that's it's still think it's valid, but like I said, DEI programs aren't always doing that well. If you're going to really invest in things like, you know, training for unconscious bias and and focus on things that would really help undo some of that systemic issue that we have, I think that's more likely a more effective approach than just saying we're gonna start checking boxes and filling quotas when we hire.
Mike Coffey:Right. And and putting systems in place, like you said, strip out those names, strip out even college names. I'm sorry. I show me the competencies. What can you just because you graduated from UT or MIT still doesn't mean that you're going to be the best engineer in my pool.
Mike Coffey:You know, it could be somebody who went to, you know, the University of Texas at Arlington has a great engineering program. And if that person's aptitude and skills and experience are the best thing for the job, let's not worry about what the school looks like. And so, you know, the thing the other thing that surprised me about this is all my time working in, you know, with employers around employee selection issues and all this, I never realized that executive order 11246, which is the one that was revoked, was just an executive order. They've how in I mean, if this is such a big priority, how in 65 years have we never turned this into an actual law? You know, that that any president along the way could have just signed another order and made it just disappear overnight like president Trump did.
Mike Coffey:It's it's wild to me. And I mean, it goes back to the whole question about why should should we be ruling the government by through executive orders and all of this and maybe Congress should wake up and start doing its job again. But I was just wild that that was just a just an executive order.
Kara Kelley:It is. It's very surprising. And it and it, you know, it is limited at this point to to federal contractors. And so that there again, we have, you know, it's it's something that I think some of us are really gonna overreact to a little bit, but it also be indicative of what we're doing in the future. And so that may be something depending on how the next couple of years goes that could be a challenge at the federal level, for private employers, for some of the the laws that actually are once put in place by Congress, not just executive order.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And to be honest, if they come for title 7, I think they'll find a lot more pushback. I mean, that's, you know, I think, you know, title 7 has has served a really good purpose. It continues to. Now do I always agree with the EEOC's sometimes twisted logic and how they bring lawsuits about it and things like that?
Mike Coffey:Not always. But generally, yeah, we should not be discriminating against people, you know, based on age race age, race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, all the things that we've got laws about. Right?
Kara Kelley:So Basic human decency things?
Mike Coffey:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in in the kind of country we really want to live in. But Title 7 still exists, and that's the thing that we have to keep reminding people.
Kara Kelley:It does. And there's also, like you said, state state wide organizations that have have put laws in place that have gone to expand upon that. And that's one of the things that I talk with my clients about, and you know, all of my clients are going to be private employers at this point. Whether they're corporate or like individual, whether it applies or not, because it only applies for 15 or more employees. And I have a number of smaller clients that I work with that have, you know, 10 or less.
Kara Kelley:But then we also have to look at the state, and as you mentioned, some local, sometimes city, sometimes county, ordinances to see if there's something that is additional that applies. But none of those are things that really we shouldn't be discriminated against any of that anyway. We shouldn't be discriminating against natural hair texture or HIV status or age or or genetic, anything like that.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Kara Kelley:That's just basic human decency things. And so I've I've always, you know, told my clients that these laws are a floor, not a ceiling. You can always do more than is required of you. I say that in regard to mandated sick leaves whenever they, you know, push back. Oh my goodness.
Kara Kelley:I have to give these these employees 40 hours even, you know, even though they haven't been here for a year. Well, yeah, that's not really that much if you look at it at the end of the day. So it's probably not a bad idea to give some people people some paid time off during that 1st year, but we can always do more. And if you wanna be a competitive employer, you're looking at those things on on a regular basis anyway. So I think we can do more when it comes to EEOC and title 7.
Kara Kelley:We're not limited by those ordinances and if they get overturned, if they get stricken down, I I still think we can say that we're just not going to be the company that starts, you know, suddenly discriminating against people because of their membership and what was previously a protected class.
Mike Coffey:And, I mean, it's cutting your nose off despite your face. I mean, the the whole point is to find the best quality talent that you can afford Mhmm. To pay to come work for your company, and you know, why make it harder by putting barriers in place that aren't related to the job.
Kara Kelley:Sure. And we're also in the age of social media. Look at how it's blown up this last week. Just because you can't doesn't mean you should and we don't want to be those employers that started firing pregnant women again. Like
Mike Coffey:Right.
Kara Kelley:Everyone's going to know about that if if that, you know, gets overturned or those protections get overturned and all of a sudden it's something that you can do. Well, we don't want to do that. We're going to we're going to let the entire world know that we're that company at that point. Somebody will will share that information, and you're going to likely have backlash from your customers, from your team, from a number of people. And so even if those protections are returned, I don't know that the impact is gonna be as significant as some people think it would be.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. I I I think you're right. Companies mostly to respond to social justice type pressure and especially social media pressure, spent a lot of money over the last 4 years doing, you know, doing taking these program doing these programs, and most of them were primarily performative. You know, it's, they wanted to look like they were really doing something, and but they didn't know what to do. So you do a ton of training.
Mike Coffey:Well, train the the studies say over and over and over, the training on this stuff doesn't work. Implicit bias training, to the extent it's even scientifically valid, which is, you know, there's a lot of challenges there, doesn't change people's hearts and minds. And so, you know, what you gotta build are systems around how you do these things so that your best candidates are bubbling up to the top regardless of of any of those characteristics that are unrelated to their job.
Kara Kelley:And that's what I love about the speakers that I get to work with, the HR consultants I get to work with. I have a group called HR Consultants Mastermind, and there's about 3,000 either soon to be or want to be HR consultants or ones who are actively doing it, and and many of them do DEI training and speak on DEI. And I feel like the ones that have a program have a way to actually work with the organizations that they're speaking to and that they're training, to really move that needle forward and really make sure that those core values are implemented in the organizations are more likely to be successful going forward than the ones who who just talk about it as as a let's hope we can do better.
Mike Coffey:And let's take a quick break. Good morning HR is brought to you by Imperative, bulletproof background checks with fast and friendly service. If you're an HRCI or SHRM certified professional, this episode of Good Morning HR has been preapproved for 1 half hour of recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information, visit good morning hr.com and click on research credits. Then select episode 185 and enter the keyword ofccp.
Mike Coffey:That's ofccp. And if you're looking for even more recertification credit, check out the webinars page at imperativeinfo.com. And now back to my conversation with Kara Kelley. So on to another topic I thought was really interesting, our mutual friend, Suzanne Lucas, the evil HR lady had an article in inkmagazineorinc.com about JPMorgan, and I saw this crop up on several things, but I thought Suzanne's take was really good. We'll have the link in the show notes, but basically, JPMorgan is one of these companies who said, you know, we're going to return to office, you know, full time or very limited hybrid, but by the end of March everybody's gonna be here.
Mike Coffey:At a point where about half of them were working full time or remote pre full time remote, previously. So they make this announcement, and unsurprisingly, the response from a big group of the employees was not good. You know, you're taking something away from them that we kinda did say when everybody went remote, we did say this is temporary. We're gonna wait and see what happens. We're gonna follow-up.
Mike Coffey:And so they have an internal Slack channel or something like that at JPMorgan where employees can just apparently just say whatever they want to and, and post whatever and and after that's the amazing thing to me is that they still have that kind of system. After they we've seen what happened at Google, at Amazon, at all these big companies where they just let these brief for all chat groups open up or have they ever even looked at x? I mean let's let's be honest. I mean, you know, if you look at your, you know, your average x feed, it's full of, you know, off the cuff, you know, often offensive things. But they had this, and so people started blowing it up and getting angry.
Mike Coffey:And so, JPMorgan just turned off comments on it. And so, why don't you tell me what happens from there?
Kara Kelley:Oh, goodness. I loved that article from Suzanne. And I I agree with her as far as that goes, that that could be a challenge to their National Labor Relations Act rights. That could be just in general, it's not a great idea. I mean, feedback should go both ways.
Kara Kelley:Right? I mean, there should be an opportunity for employees to express, what you know, their displeasure, and I'm sure that they knew that that would be the case, that they
Mike Coffey:Oh, yeah. They had to be ready for that. I mean, it's not like, well, we're gonna do this and our employees are just gonna bring us flowers.
Kara Kelley:No. I mean, there's some people who do enjoy working in the office. They feel they're more productive, but those people were probably part of the 50% or whatever it was that were already working there.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Kara Kelley:Right. I I also think that they have to consider, you know, some of the employees who who may have ADA accommodations, medical disabilities accommodations that are working from home for specific reasons. I hope that they are at least planning on making some allowances from that perspective or are still allowing it at certain times when they're ill, if they still can work, if they have kids that are ill, there's ways or reasons why it might be something that's valid to keep open as an option for some things. But they're within their rights to pull people back to the office, and there have been some studies and some data that suggest that people sometimes do perform better in the office. I mean, you you see a lot of articles that are have come out about people who are, over employed, who are taking second jobs.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Kara Kelley:And getting literally 2 full time salaries, because they're able to get things done so quickly, and that's certainly something worth considering, but I see why some companies are wanting to pull, people back to the office. However, yeah, highly disagree with them shutting off the comments. I do think people need a forum to to discuss those working conditions, and I think they're gonna find it elsewhere if you turn it off internally. Like Suzanne said, very short sighted of them, to to shut that off because now you've got people who are gonna turn to to public forums
Mike Coffey:Mhmm.
Kara Kelley:Where, you know, everybody else is gonna get to see it too, and they can't tell them to stop in most cases because of an LRA.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And that's the thing is I wouldn't have allowed those kind of conversations on an internal Slack or whatever kind of channel anyway. This is this is for use in the company. This is for use to take care of company business. We're not we're not sharing recipes.
Mike Coffey:We're not, you know, talking about vacations, and we're we're we're not gonna use it primarily to talk about working conditions. Now, Even that is challenging under the National Labor Relations Act, and so, you know, you have to be really they have to be really cautious there. But there's no doubt that when people employees are complaining about their working conditions and you take take something away from them that you allow them to do other things on, you know, that are non strictly work related, you're definitely stepping on to the NLRA there. And so I think that's that's the the big problem. Why would you do it?
Mike Coffey:And just from a culture point of view, I get that JPMorgan wants to bring people home, bring them back to office. For many employers and I I still argue that if remote work's not working, that's primarily a manager issue, not an employee issue Because the managers are the ones who hired those people. The managers are the ones who are supposed to be paying attention to their productivity, coaching them, bringing them up to speed, making sure the objectives are met, and and and even remotely creating collaborative environments. And, and I think that can be done in many cases, but if a company decides, especially on the collaboration side, we want people together to do that, then that's their right. Let them do it.
Mike Coffey:But a lot of these other problems that you hear a lot of these return to office people talking about are really management problems, and maybe we need to manage some of these employees out. Maybe there are people who are taking advantage of us. They're doing, oh, that over movement. We've talked about it now. This is the 3rd HR news in a row that this has come up.
Mike Coffey:I've had clients come to me trying to figure out how to how to respond to issues. In effect, next next Wednesday, the day before this episode comes out, so yesterday, as far as your listeners go, I'm doing a presentation at an HR conference on remote worker fraud and one of the big topics is overemployment. So it does happen, but there's a cultural change that's gonna happen when we make these decisions and we have to live with those. But then you just make you muddle the argument when you take away the commenting that was already there or or when you just come when you're when you're seen as a heavy in, you know, to your employees. When your employees feel like they don't have a voice.
Mike Coffey:I mean, you know, if I was gonna do this, I and I'm sure I don't believe for a New York minute that JPMorgan didn't do some sort of surveying of their employees beforehand, that they didn't have all kinds of of conversations around productivity and all the issues, and what the backlash would be from employees. And maybe, you know, maybe this is a way we're seeing a lot of layoffs in in tech and finance and JPMorgan is both of those, so maybe this was a way to say, okay, if we lose 15% of our population because of this, that saves us a round of layoffs. I mean, you know, and that may be well what happened, but I I don't think they went into this without considering those things. I think the only thing they really fumbled was the impact of of taking the, you know, taking something away as far as the ability to communicate with your peers that they'd already extended to them.
Kara Kelley:Yeah. It was very much a, we know you're not going to like this and we don't care kind of move.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes you have to do that. I mean, that's sometimes the boss has to make the decision and this is what it is, but it's kind of insult to injury maybe on a cultural level to, to end then take away their ability to comment. So, you mentioned social media and I think I've mentioned what a hot mess it is, but I am in every HR news now trying to get at least one conversation that we saw on Facebook or Instagram or in this case, Reddit.
Mike Coffey:And, somebody seek seeking a job on one of the subreddits and we'll leave a link, in the story, asked hiring managers of Reddit, how likely are you to give someone a second chance if they seemed nervous during a phone screening and froze up on one question? Then she goes on to explain she had an interview and she felt like she bombed it because she was really nervous and she's wondering what a hiring manager's feedback is, about that. And, so you I'll I'll why don't you what would your response to her be?
Kara Kelley:Well, I didn't actually see the full threat. I saw what her post was. Did she ever say what the question was that she bombed?
Mike Coffey:No. She didn't. It was something, apparently related to the to the role. So it wasn't, you know, you know, you know, if you could be a duck or a cow, which would you want? Is it one of those stupid HR interview questions that I'm always begging clients on to do?
Kara Kelley:Oh my goodness. I've had some of those interview questions way back in the day before I did what I do now. What was it? What what kind of sea animal would you be? Marine animal would
Mike Coffey:you be? Sometimes our our hiring managers are too clever for themselves. I mean, if you think that's gonna really tell you anything.
Kara Kelley:You know, I would honestly say it depends. It depends on what the question was. If it's something that's gonna be really critical to their job or if it's something if it's a prescreen question, I I don't know that I would really completely write somebody off for bombing one question. If it's a whole interview or the whole prescreen call, they seemed really nervous that they couldn't answer anything, or they were just very, very vague in their responses when I'm asking them something direct like what schedule can you work. Right.
Kara Kelley:You know, if they're gonna go back and forth on something like that, I might be a little bit turned off on them as a candidate, but it really depends on the question. Role related, even at that, I think it depends on what the question is. I'd have to know more related to give a solid answer on it.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. My general response is that if somebody's just nervous, that's going to happen. I will not discount someone who's just nervous or awkward unless I'm hiring somebody in sales or somebody who's going to be in PR for the company or the public face of the company, somebody who's in customer service, been able to talk to people and think on their feet Sure. Those are places where this would be this may be really relevant. If I'm hiring an analyst or somebody in accounts payable or somebody who's just, you know, going to do whatever kind you know, an engineer or whatever, and their job doesn't involve thinking quickly on their feet and responding verbally to awkward or unexpected questions or whatever, I'm going to discount that as a hiring manager.
Mike Coffey:That's not a problem for me. I I am not I'm gonna give them grace on that. I'm not hiring people to take interviews. Now if I was hiring somebody who does interviews all day long, you know, then it's a it's a different situation.
Kara Kelley:Sure.
Mike Coffey:And a lot of the respondents on Reddit said, yeah. You're toast, and they're gonna blow you off. And ultimately, she came back and said, I didn't get the job. And so it did happen, but, we don't know that it was because of that question, first of all. But beyond that, I think it's the interviewer's job to make the candidate comfortable.
Mike Coffey:I start all our interviews off giving them the opportunity to ask us questions. Okay. They've already got the full job description before we do the interview. You looked at it. What questions do you have, about it, you know, because no job description is gonna answer all the questions you've got about the job.
Mike Coffey:This anything I can do to give them the opportunity to ask me questions, to put them in the driver's seat. Again, just kind of understand that I want a conversation. I'm not drilling them to try to screw them up, you know. I wanna I wanna see what this person when they're calm, you know, how they're gonna respond to questions where maybe we've built rapport and trust. And I don't want it to be a circumstance where, I'm just in that situation where I'm playing got you or they they feel like it's a self defeating process to answer questions.
Mike Coffey:They have to, you know, be on the defensive the whole time.
Kara Kelley:Sure. And I would have the same response to somebody's asking me, oh, I made a spelling mistake on my cover letter. Unless you're applying for a job as copy editor at a publishing house, I don't know that I would count somebody off for one single mistake. It's riddled with mistakes. Sure.
Kara Kelley:I also think the other thing that it would depend on is the job, the company, how many applicants I've gotten for the role. If you're one of 3 applicants and it's a hard to fill role, I'm certainly not going to discount you over one mistake on the prescreen. If I've got, you know, 350 candidates to sort through, I may be a little bit more inclined to be very nitpicky about, you know, things like that in the very beginning to narrow it down. But there's a myriad of reasons that that she could have not gotten the job. It could have been the salary wasn't in the right range.
Kara Kelley:It could have been something completely different that had nothing to do
Mike Coffey:with you. Other better candidates. I mean, that's the other thing. And and so I'm and I think my advice to her was take your swing. You did it.
Mike Coffey:Learn from this experience. It'll be better next time. Do you know, she was young in her career, so I was like, take as many interviews as you can even for jobs you don't really care about just because it's great practice and you'll get better at it. But, you know, on the flip side there, you know, there are hiring managers who are gonna do these things because they think they've got this unique insight into the human soul and no matter how much training we do, and it goes right back to their bias that we talked about earlier, they're gonna insert their biases. And unless we can build systems and into the process that are gonna, you know, mitigate those biases that we all have, it's going to get in the way on occasion.
Mike Coffey:And so this manager may have lost the best candidate that he had because, you know, maybe he did let think, oh, well, you know, she froze up on that. I mean, I've over the years, I've had managers say, well, she didn't have a firm handshake or she didn't make eye good eye contact during interview. And I'm like, what the heck? I mean, you know, unless unless doing staring contest is a really important part of this job, eye contact is probably not as key for most roles as you think it is.
Kara Kelley:Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I've seen one recently, a question about the new hire was 1 minute late. They're supposed to be there, you know, training starting at 8 o'clock and they were there at 8:0:1. Would what would you do? Would you terminate this person immediately?
Kara Kelley:And I'm like, really? Y'all are complaining about how difficult it is to find people in health care. Are we really gonna go by a 1 minute late? I understand. Yes.
Kara Kelley:It's probably best that this person would have arrived at 10 till, 15 till, but you know, one minute, we're really gonna cut people over 1 minute with the amount that it takes for us to to find candidates and actually hire people, get willing people willing to accept our jobs in certain sectors. I don't think I'd let a minute be the defining factor.
Mike Coffey:And if we're being honest, how often are our trainers ready to start right at 8 o'clock anyway? But if you really want to set that culture expectation and that's really what you are, great. You start the training at 8 o'clock and then they walk in 1 minute after we've started. They understand this is a high accountability organization. We we start meetings on time, they end on time, and we this is how this is what we do and hold them accountable.
Mike Coffey:But again, that almost seems like playing got you, especially when you're talking about salaried employees, you know, 801 for anybody. But but when you're talking about salaried employees and I've, you know, I've had clients over the years who I had one who if you were one minute late to work, you had to buy donuts for the office the next day. And I mean oh, yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Mike Coffey:And but by golly they're all salaried. And and but by golly, if you didn't if you if you left the office right on the minute at on the dot at 5 o'clock, they were looking down their nose to on you as well. So it was just, you know, that's just how some organizations are, and some people thrive in those organizations and others don't. So you've you know you know, that that one that person who's 1 minute late may have dodged a bullet.
Kara Kelley:Absolutely. Well, and this person who didn't get the interview, if it was because of the one question that may not be the company she wants to work for anyway.
Mike Coffey:Exactly. Yeah. There you go. Well, that's all the time we have. Thanks for joining me, Kara.
Kara Kelley:Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me. It's always a pleasure.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. Hopefully, 25 2025 is gonna be a hot, wild ride, but we'll have some fun along the way.
Kara Kelley:You may need to double up on your episodes in 2025.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Coffey:Maybe it may be made to do it twice. Yeah. Well, thanks for joining me, and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you're listening. It helps us reach more listeners.
Mike Coffey:Also, find find our post on Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn, and share it to your network. If you find value here, share it with your friends. They'll love you for it. Rob Upchurch is our technical producer, and you can reach Rob at robmakespods.com. And thank you to Imperative's marketing coordinator, Mary Anne Hernandez, who keeps the trains running on time.
Mike Coffey:And I'm Mike Coffey as always. Don't hesitate to reach out if I can be of service to you personally or professionally. I'll see you next week, and until then, be well, do good, and keep your chin up.