LinkedIn Live Lunch Hour with Michael Goldberg: Episode 8 with VP, Human Resources, Seth McColley

Thanks for having me, Michael.

This is my first LinkedIn Live broadcast. You know, I've done blogs and all kinds of things, but this is my first time on LinkedIn Live, so thank you for having me.

Right, the first time you've had to have someone go mobile on you.

Sure, sure. So I'm the vice president of human resources at Kirby Smith. Kirby Smith is a heavy equipment dealer who is based in Oklahoma City. We've got 12 locations across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, the largest Komatsu dealer in the nation. So the stuff that we sell, rent, and service is what I call the big toys. These are the big cranes, excavators, dozers, and wheel loaders. This is not the stuff that, you know, if you need to dig a small ditch in your backyard over the weekend. This is the big equipment that a lot of subcontractors and general contractors and DOTs are leasing and purchasing for big projects. We've been in business since 1983, family owned and operated. And so I'm live in Dallas, but my office is in Oklahoma City, so I spend a lot of my time up there. Today I'm at our Dallas branch and I don't have a dedicated office and it is filled up today, so I didn't have a private space, so I'm here in my truck today. And in terms of me, I've been with Kirby Smith — this Friday will be my one-year anniversary.

So I'm excited, I've been here for one year. It's been a wild ride. It's been great. The word I'd like to think that comes to my mind when I think about what I'm doing, what I'm trying to do, is transformation. So really kind of just think about HR transformation. How do we love a lot — that's the term I use internally with organizations — like we've got a lot of great processes in place, a lot of good tools in place, but how do we take it to the next level? We have 575 employees today, continuing to grow. We're going to continue to grow. And so a lot of things that I'm focused on are how do we scale for that growth, and that includes from a recruiting standpoint, from an HR standpoint, from an engagement standpoint. What are the tools that we're using today? What are some of the new tools that we could be using tomorrow to just get better?

Yeah, great question. So about half of our organization are what we call internally service technicians, but the outside world they would be diesel mechanics. These are hourly diesel mechanics that are out there turning wrenches in our shop, out in the field, servicing the pieces of equipment that we have. So again, probably half — we've got about 230, 235 technicians in our workforce. And that workforce, as a lot of people may know but you may not, skilled labor workforce today in the country is tough to find. It's tough to find really good people and it's tough to hang on to really good people. So recruiting and retention is certainly one of the primary focuses for me, has been since I got here. But this year specifically, I'm partnering with some folks internally to create a technician recruiting and retention plan that's going to help us find ways to attract and recruit that talent, but also how to keep that talent that we have.

It's the old Affiliated Computer Services building.

Wow.

Yeah, right. We do have some people on the operations side that help with reaching out to veteran groups. We have some partnerships with some of our trade schools like TSTC down in Waco and OSU-IT in Oklahoma. We'll do career fairs and things like that. But in terms of banging the phones and doing phone interviews and phone screens and digging into our ATS and actively going out and headhunting — that doesn't exist today.

That's right.

Correct. Yeah. We do have kind of a handful of partnerships with some industry headhunters and search firms that we use that have got those relationships. We've obviously, like I mentioned, we've got these feeder programs at TSTC and OSU-IT that can help us bring in interns or kind of on-the-job training where they'll sign up for a two-year stint with us. They'll work for us for seven weeks in the shop and then go back to school for seven weeks, and so on. We do have an employee referral program that I wish was more active, to be honest with you. I'd love to pay our people all day long for bringing in good talent.

Yeah, those are good questions. That's kind of some of the stuff that keeps me up at night. I don't know why we're not pulsing that out more. Some of it I think is just awareness. We just got to keep it top of mind. So I'm doing some things internally to help with that. We did kind of a rebrand of it in the middle of last year, made sure we had flyers sent out to all the locations, blasted that on email. We are starting an employee newsletter that's going to be coming out here in the next few weeks. So we're going to do a quarterly newsletter, so that'll be another platform to highlight successes and to remind people, like, hey, we've got this program, you can earn some money. So I think it's just one of those deals. When people don't hear it, when they don't see it, it's not top of mind. So we just got to keep the word out there. The key is just awareness.

Yeah, figure out — if people aren't referring, then is there something going on internally that we need to address and figure out if there's a reason for that, there's a driver for that. Yeah, good point, absolutely.

You know, it's good questions. It's maybe hard to answer that because a lot of our positions are evergreen, so they're always going to be out there, right? So we're always going to be posting for these service technicians or mechanics at a lot of our locations. I'd say, generally speaking, we typically have about 20 openings. But again, keep in mind we've got a lot of these openings — like if you were to go to the website, you'd see a service technician opening for every one of our locations pretty much. But then we have parts people, we have rental people, we've got a couple sales positions and other things. Probably 15 to 20 on average. And that is the turnover side, right? So this is traditionally a very high turnover position. In 2019, our turnover just for the technician position alone was 30 percent. So that doesn't help matters. And some of that — I'm a big believer that there's such a thing as good turnover, and sometimes you need to turn some of those people over. But when you're losing the really good ones that have been there for a long time, you really got to look at what's going on there. But what we see too often, in my opinion, is people that live within — literally within six weeks they'll come on and then something happens and within six weeks they're gone.

That's some of the analysis that we're doing now. We're really digging in to some of that data to understand what's driving that. Is it happening at specific locations? Is it happening all the way down to specific managers? So we are doing some things — not to totally shift gears, but it is kind of related. One of the initiatives that we had and that we're doing right now is — safety also rolls up to me. So I've got HR and safety, and I partnered with my safety director to create a manager training. We hadn't really done something like this before. We have created a one-and-a-half-day course where we bring managers from the business into Oklahoma City for a day and a half, and we'll spend half the time focused on safety and half the time focused on HR. The whole idea there is that if we can build the capability of our managers and make them better managers and better leaders of people, then my hypothesis is that's going to help the retention. Because I'm a big believer in the idea that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. And I think if we can improve our managers and build their capabilities, that's going to help shut the back door, so to speak, on the retention front. So over the course of this year, the plan was to get at least 50 percent of our managers through this training course.

No, we built it from scratch.

Yeah, literally me and my safety director. We put together the content. I facilitate the HR piece of it, he facilitates the safety piece of it. We're going old school. We put in a couple videos sprinkled throughout it, but we just bring them in, sit them down, and the first session we had a few weeks ago went fantastic. Next week I'll be in Oklahoma City doing our second session. The plan is to do this every month.

They can see both of us.

Managers, no opportunity. And again, this market here is tough. I mean, these are — I don't want to paint too broad of a brushstroke here, but a lot of times, very similar to like the hospitality space or other kind of high turnover or retail environments, a lot of times people will leave for small things, right? Fifty cents more an hour, a dollar more an hour, things that most folks wouldn't. But in certain places — like for example, Odessa is a very tough place for us. I don't know if you've ever been out there. It's like the Wild West out there. You've got the oil fields out there. I think dons starts off with like eighteen dollars an hour.

It's tough out there. And so when you've got all these other competing businesses trying to bring talent in, it makes it hard to find real good people and keep real good people. But here's the other thing, this is kind of my hot sports opinion on why people leave. HR tradition — a lot of people say, well, what does the exit interview tell you? In reality, we have not been doing exit interviews for quite some time. Nobody's fault, there's no real reason for that. But I'm not a big believer in exit interviews. I'll just put that out there. I think if they're done properly, if they're done timely, if they're done the right way, I think you can get good information from exit interviews. By and large, I don't know that that happens a lot. I think a lot of times what you hear from employees is they'll tell you what they think you want to hear as opposed to the truth. I'm really more interested in stay interviews or retention interviews. In fact, I'm going to be speaking at the Oklahoma State HR conference, OKHR, in April. My topic is going to be all about stay interviews and the case for stay interviews. And again, not to totally ditch or bag on exit interviews — I think if they're done the right way you can get great data — but I think the problem is a lot of times they're not done the right way. And I think the ideal model is doing both, right? So finding some way to get data from employees when they're leaving, but also during the course of employment, getting feedback and information from employees through retention or stay interviews.

And it's true. Here's the fact: you're not going to change somebody's mind to stay. They're already checked out. Sorry, we're about to have loud barking if my dogs hear the mailman.

Yeah, well, I'm fascinated by this topic. So again, I think exit interviews by and large are very reactive. So somebody's already told us, hey, I want to break up with you, and here we are on the back end going, hey, what can I do, why are you leaving? I mean, that's not to make light of it, but it's kind of like a bad relationship that goes south. Hey, it's not me, it's you, let's stay friends, all that kind of stuff. So I don't know how often we're really getting the truth. Because so many times — and I don't want to oversimplify this — but so many times the exit interview is with the HR person and it's on the last day. And so if I'm leaving the organization, I'm sitting there thinking, okay wait a minute, this meeting with HR is the only thing standing between me and happy hour. I really don't want to go out on a bad note. I really don't want to throw anybody under the bus. I don't want to burn any bridges. I don't know, it may not be totally great where I'm at, what if I want to come back? So when I'm asked all these questions about why you're leaving, am I really going to be honest? Am I really going to tell them the truth or am I going to pencil whip it? Yeah, it's great, just a better opportunity, better meal, better money, because I might want to come back. So I just don't know that we get the real deal.

That's fascinating. I would be fascinated to see the difference between Johnny takes this exit interview two weeks before the last day and then three months later. I'd love to look at the difference there, right? So it's like, okay, are they — three months later they're like, okay, I'm happy where I'm at, let me tell you what's really happening. The intention could be to try to lure them back, could be good, it could be — hey, we want to really find out what the real deal is. It could be a re-attraction strategy, right? So a lot of times people leave and they think the grass is going to be greener and maybe it's not. So maybe three months down the road they're like, man, I really thought this was going to be great and this is not what I thought it was going to be. And if there's an opportunity to come back, I'd love to. So maybe it's an opportunity. I don't know, I've never seen that before and I thought that was fascinating.

No, no. I'm working with my general service manager right now. We're putting together a proposal, plan in place for technician recruiting and retention, and this is a vendor that we've looked at and we're throwing this into the mix as a possible solution. So we've done the demo, we've explored them, but we're not using them today. But I'm fascinated by the concept.

As long as leadership and the managers and everybody is following up and acting on them. Yeah. Another good question. I will — I had one more thought I want to add about exit interviews before we break off of that. I was going to talk about counteroffers. I was just going to say, like you said, by the time you get to the exit interview, it's kind of too late, right? The train's already left the station. And I can tell you in my 23 years of doing HR, I've seen like probably less than a handful of counteroffers actually go well. Usually counteroffers are a band-aid. It's a quick fix, but very seldom have I seen them actually last very long. The real issue is going to come right back up, and while an increase in pay or a chunk of money might help fix it for a little while, the real issue typically is still there. So I'll bounce off of that and go to engagement surveys.

We don't have that in place today, but interestingly enough — it's kind of related, but the same vendor, the same tool that I was talking about that does the pre- and post-exit surveys, they also do kind of stay interviews and they do kind of check-ins. And when somebody gets hired — but the other thing they have is a chat bot that employees interact with, to do these surveys and these interviews. But they also have this anonymous bot that's out there where employees have concerns, they can honestly do them. So that could be a feedback mechanism, but it also could act as an anonymous 24/7 employee hotline. So that's another feature of this tool that intrigues me, knowing that we've got a tool out there that could collect feedback 24/7. If employees have an employee relations issue that they want to anonymously bring to our attention, or just feedback and maybe they don't want to put their name to it — that could be a receptacle for that.

Yeah, I think they're good. I think it's kind of my views on exit interviews — they're only as good as what you do with the data. So like exit interviews, I mean if you're doing exit interviews and your HR person is making notes and all this stuff and then, okay, thank you for your time, enjoy your happy hour, good luck with your life — and they take all these notes and put them in a file folder and it goes into their desk and it just sits there, it's worthless. Same with engagement. If you go out, you do all this effort to get people engaged and take the survey, and the leadership team gets all this feedback like, wow, this is really interesting stuff, okay let's move on — like if there's no action. If the leadership team is not committed to taking action — and there's a difference between taking action and feeling the need to address every single concern. Obviously you can't address them all, you can't say yes to everything. But I think you've got to find the things that you can number one change, but also address. Say, hey, thank you for your feedback on, you know, we really appreciate the feedback around filling up the water fountains with Coca-Cola instead of water. Really interesting, we'd love to do that, but here's why it's not going to work, you know. But you've got to find a way to address the feedback that was given, even if you're not going to do something with it. At the very least, acknowledge it, address it. Ideally say, hey, we're not able to do that, here's why, it doesn't fit in with our business plan, our business model, long-term strategy, whatever it may be. But the key is taking action on the things that you can take action on. Finding out what's actionable, how do we action plan, and ideally finding ways to involve employees or create task forces and get employees involved and being part of the solution.

Yeah, so for me it comes down to — and this is whether you're talking about recruiting, whether you're talking about HR — for me, it's being an effective business partner. What I mean by that is, I've always held the position that the most effective HR partners actually spend time in the business. They understand the business. They can speak the language of the business. I think where a lot of HR — and when I say HR, I'm including recruiting in this — I think where a lot of HR people get it wrong is they've kind of got blinders on. They're really good with the HR stuff and they can talk HR speak all day long, and I go to this firm conference, I do this, but they're not talking the language of the business. So a perfect example of this — when I came on board at Kirby Smith, I had one ask. I said, hey, what I want to do, I want to spend the first 60 days — part of my onboarding — I don't want to do any HR. I know you're hiring me to do HR, you've got a team doing HR, they're going to keep doing it. I said, I don't want to do any HR. I want to be in the business learning the business. And they agreed to that. So for the first 60 days, I really had no HR responsibilities. My sole purpose in life was to spend time in the field, learn the business. So that was getting out to all the branches, I took overhead crane safety training, I went out on ride-alongs with salespeople, I was involved, I toured the shops, I was spending time understanding the business — what are the pain points, how do we make money, how do we lose money, what makes us profitable, who are our customers. And essentially, what I boil it down to is you've got to develop street cred. If you don't have street cred with your business partners, with your operations leaders, there's always going to be this us-versus-them and this division. And I think they're always going to see HR as a necessary evil and, you guys aren't getting it done for me, and so I'm going to have to go find an outside partner or a third-party headhunter to get it done. So I think the more that we recruiters and HR can be involved in the business, understanding the business, speaking the language of the business, that's where we're going to make real headway. That's my opinion.

So thank you — Larry said you were great to work with on the UT project.

Sure, I can. The short answer is, today we don't, because they're not happening today. But in the past — and this is maybe part of the problem and why they weren't as effective — the exit interview that we had been using prior to my arrival was, of course, it was four or five pages and it was hard copy. And to me, that's too much. That's probably a reason why it wasn't very effective. So ideally, again, there's a lot of schools of thought out there around when do you catch people. And I remember being — I mean, I remember years ago when I was working for AT&T Wireless in Seattle, and I was the HR person for the HR organization. This was like 2001, it's almost 20 years ago. I remember having this very conversation, and we were trying to figure out what's the best way to get exit interview data. Do we send them something in the mail that they can send back to us? Do we do it over the phone? Do we do it — this is obviously before Skype and Zoom and all that. But we're still struggling with: is it hard copy, is it a phone interview, is it in person? We're still trying to figure out what's going to capture the best, when are we really going to get the meat of the matter. And I don't know that there is a silver bullet, but in my mind, when I look at this one vendor, this one tool, finding a way to capture that electronically, digitally, is to me the best, most effective way to do it. We're a mobile society now, and finding ways to capture people via text or online or some URL that they can take a quick survey, I think is going to be the best.

Yeah, I did some prior to this. I mean I saw recruiting — yes, just prior to coming here, I spent two and a half years with McCarthy Building Companies, and I was the talent acquisition manager for them for the Texas region. Done recruiting kind of all throughout my HR career.

Well, we are actually in the process right now, as we speak, of implementing a new applicant tracking system. So there are some features within the new system that we don't have today that are going to be great. So some of those things include a pre-screen survey that we're going to be doing that we don't do today, that's going to help kind of weed out the applicants that come in. We're going to be including a built-in tool for skill surveys that is done through the ATS to get reference checks. So the traditional — give me three names, numbers — and we have to go chase them down. It's kind of the onus is on the candidate to provide that information. And again, sends out through a URL, which I like, the data that way. So there's some things with the applicant tracking system that I think are going to help.

We're moving to Hireology.

I wouldn't say specialized, but they certainly have a lot of clients that are in our space. My CFO and I were introduced to them about a year ago when we went to the AED conference in Chicago, which is the Association of Equipment Dealers, and that's how we were introduced to them. So several of their big customers are friendly competitors of ours. I did a lot of exploring and a lot of conversations with my peer groups to kind of find how they worked. And so I think they do a lot of automotive dealerships, they do have some heavy equipment dealers like ourselves. So I wouldn't say it's a specialty, but they certainly get us and they understand our business.

I think I'm just curious to know, how did you — what prompted you to get this started? Because I think this is a relatively new endeavor for you, and I love it. I love what you're doing. But what was the tipping point for you?

That's right.

Yep, I'm ready.

The Godfather, hands down.

A smooth sea never yielded a skilled sailor.

Oh boy, that's a tough one. It's probably neck and neck between barbecue and beef fajitas. With the Morro — I have to go with beef fajitas.

Pecan Lodge. Pecan Lodge is good. And there's some other folks that are kind of coming on the block here. Dallas is starting to get some pretty good competition with Austin.

Franklin Barbecue is the best in Austin. Franklin, have you ever tried Kerlin Barbecue? They only serve on like Fridays.

Wow. Yeah, I'll extend this beyond Kirby Smith, I guess. I just want to continue to elevate the profession. And I think that, again, I think there's a lot of misperceptions out there about what HR is and the value that HR brings. And so I think the more that we can do things like this and be social and get the word out and share kind of our thoughts and opinions about how we're leveling up and elevating the HR profession, I think just helps us. It helps us build credibility with our operation partners and with all the people who we work with, and just business in general.