“Listen more, ask more questions, and try to engage others more, but know that even then, you may never have everybody 100% where you want them to be. When you’re working with people, you’re working with the strangest commodity on the planet.” – Jon Thurmond, Regional Human Resources Manager at Team Fishel and Podcast Host and Producer of the #HRSocialHour Half Hour, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Jon Thurmond, Host and Producer of the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast and Regional Human Resources Manager at Team Fishel. Jon took on his first HR role in October 1999 as a Recruiter with CBS Personnel. He then moved to an Accounting and Finance Recruiter position with Acsys. In May 2001 Jon began working as a Human Resources Generalist and Recruiter for CORESTAFF Services. He joined the team at Dominion Virginia Power as a Senior Recruiter in June 2005 before taking on subsequent roles there as a Supervisor for Staffing Talent Acquisition and Labor Relations Consultant.
In October 2013, Jon became an Instructor for Career Prospectors, later taking on a role as a Recruiting Consultant for Titan Group LLC alongside this. He transitioned to his current role within Team Fishel in December 2014, starting his work on the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast alongside this in January 2018.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
Before I started on the HR path, I was a public school music teacher teaching band and choir. However, I quickly figured out that that career path wasn’t for me. I got out and went to a temporary agency intending to apply for temp work, but when I explained some of the relationships I’d built up while teaching to the recruiter, they told me I’d be good at their job.
Within a few weeks, I was working for the temporary agency itself, placing people in entry-level clerical and manufacturing jobs. Recruiting seemed to be a great fit for me right away—my manager once told me they’d never seen anyone pick up ATS systems so quickly, but to me, working out the role played by each of the components and how they interacted was just like reading a musical score. I also found that I loved learning about jobs. Meeting a range of different companies, seeing how they operated, and getting to work with their management teams made my own job interesting.
Eventually, I moved from Kentucky to Virginia to get married and started recruiting for a mid-tier accounting and finance company—until one particular client I was placing candidates for told me that she was going on maternity leave and not coming back, so I needed to apply for her job as an on-site manager for a staffing business who worked within a local electric utility company. I did a lot of generalist HR work in that role, and it was my first real taste of a dedicated HR function.
After four years, the electric utility company itself approached me to interview with them and hired me as a corporate recruiter. I was in that job for a year and a half before a leadership opportunity came up, then I ended up taking on a Supervisor role to teach others how to recruit. I had a team of 18 people filling about 2000 jobs a year, and we reduced time to fill by four days even with a 65% increase in staffing. After two years, I got burned out and decided to move on.
I was approached to work with labour unions within the same company, which led to a whole new career, and I spent five years working with unions in the New England market. That was a very eye-opening experience, but after five years, I had effectively worked myself out of a job. We negotiated contracts to sell the plants I worked with, and then there was no need for me.
As a result of that Labor Relations job, I was able to bring together all the experience I had gained to really understand all the pieces and parts of the HR function. I would never trade that opportunity for anything, because it taught me so much more about HR than I had known while recruiting. Even though I was dealing with union leads rather than individual employees, I found that the issues they were facing and the need to build relationships was the same, so I learned a lot about how to handle interpersonal things better.
Once I had left that job and taken some time off to spend with my wife and sons, I took a six-month recruiting contract. I went in and streamlined job postings, started social media recruiting via Twitter and LinkedIn, and did a lot of government compliance, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do in the long run.
After that contract ended, I found my current job with Team Fishel, and now I get to do a little bit of everything. I recruit, I train, I work on investigations when we have issues, and I get to piece together what I call the ‘People puzzle’. It’s been quite an interesting adventure, and I love that although I’ve been in this world for 20 years, I’m always learning something new and the work we do only continues to grow.
My co-host Wendy Dailey and I started the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast in February 2018 as an outgrowth of the #HRSocialHour Twitter chat that we started in September 2017 following the ‘Not at SHRM’ chat we held for the 2017 SHRM Conference in New Orleans. Almost 60 people from nine countries showed up to commiserate the fact that we weren’t at the conference, and talking to them really resonated with me.
I told Wendy that I wanted to keep hosting chats, and we created a chat that we’ve been running on the second and fourth Sundays of every month at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time for three years now. We’ve had representation from around the world, and we average 45 to 50 people per chat discussing all kinds of HR topics. The idea is just to get connected and learn more about the challenges people are facing around the world. Although things can be different from a legal perspective, a lot of the fundamental issues we face are problems we all deal with and can help each other get through.
Having connections is incredibly critical in HR, and I’ve been fortunate enough to build a global community. We’ve done 133 numbered shows in the two-and-a-half years we’ve been running the podcast, and in every one, I’ve learned something that I’ve then been able to then go back to my day job and utilise. Making connections, going to events, and talking to vendors are key to expanding your HR knowledge.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
There are a lot of great employees within organisations. Those individuals aren’t necessarily great leaders, but if they perform well at what they do, they can quite often be automatically handed the reins to lead without wanting to. The fact that we promote based on talent rather than aptitude in a lot of cases is a problem, because some employees in leadership positions may be less effective due to the fact they lack the skills or adequate training to lead. In my case, I was driven to develop those skills because I knew I liked teaching people and I had great leadership willing to help me become the best leader I could be, but not everyone has that. For that reason, I continue to mentor and shepherd my peers when they don’t have as much experience, so I’m leading in my own way.
In terms of recruitment, I think we need to tell candidates about the realities of the teams and organisations they’re potentially going to be working with in the interest of finding the right fit. We should do all we can to accommodate people, but it’s important to remember that you can’t always be everything to everyone, and it’s better to be honest.
The other big thing for me is that we’re experiencing the smallest talent pool we’ve seen in years, so we need to be focused on re-skilling and upskilling our people. There was a period of time where my previous organisation didn’t train anyone because the business was stable and the pay and benefits were good, so people typically stayed until they retired. That’s not the case anymore, and as a result, the industry has a lack of skilled employees because we haven’t invested into training them early enough in their careers.
Because we’ve been reliant on older people who are now retiring to do skilled work, a number of organisations are facing a dearth of developed skillsets on top of a lack of people available to fill roles. We need to continue to train people, as well as find different ways of doing that to attract new talent. Changes in the way we think and do things continue to challenge the way we train and re-skill people, as well as build relationships.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
My first piece of advice might sound silly, but the first band director I ever worked for told me to invest in a comfortable pair of shoes because I was going to be on my feet eight hours a day. I’ve carried that advice with me, and now I wear a nice pair of work boots; not just for comfort, but because if I’m out in the field, I don’t want to be seen as the corporate HR guy that wears a suit and tie instead of jeans and work boots like everyone else.
The other thing I’ve learned over the years is that not everybody comes to work for the same reason you do. Particularly if you’re going into leadership, it’s really important to consider how you’re going to work with people who are wired differently than you are. Everyone around you has different perspectives, so you need to make sure that you understand them and their motivations in order to work out how to challenge them to be the best they can at their job. Listen more, ask more questions, and try to engage others more, but know that even then, you may never have everybody 100% where you want them to be. When you’re working with people, you’re working with the strangest commodity on the planet.
Jon has been working as Team Fishel’s Mid Atlantic Regional Human Resources Manager since December 2014, and provides leadership of employee performance management and employee relations strategies, as well as leading recruiting efforts for the Mid-Atlantic area and moderating the company’s social media based job pages.
In addition, Jon has co-hosted and produced the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast since January 2018, in which he comes together with a global community of talented HR professionals to talk about the power of connecting, giving back, and building your network.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.