<p><b>Callie sits down with Claire Petrie at SHRM's 2018 Leadership Development Forum (LDF) to discuss building credibility as a young professional.</b> Along the way, they dig in on failing royally, acting like "a deer in the headlights" and mutually beneficial partnerships like mentoring. Listen in for tips on how to build your own credibility and put failure in perspective.</p>
Callie sits down with Claire Petrie at SHRM's 2018 Leadership Development Forum (LDF) to discuss building credibility as a young professional. Along the way, they dig in on failing royally, acting like "a deer in the headlights" and mutually beneficial partnerships like mentoring. Listen in for tips on how to build your own credibility and put failure in perspective.
Callie Zipple:
Welcome back to Honest HR. I am your host, Callie Zipple. For those of you that don't know, we are actually in person for the first time, doing a recording from SHRMS Leadership Development Forum, or known as LDF. I'm extremely excited to have this opportunity. Typically, I am in my jammies and on the phone, recording from home, and I'm excited to be with my guest here today in person at LDF. So today I have Claire with me and I'm going to let her do her own intro as well as give you guys some information about her background and why she's here and maybe a little bit about what she's gotten so far out of LDF, and then we'll jump into our topic, which I'll introduce here in a moment. So Claire, take it away.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah, absolutely. This is awesome to be here in person, Callie. So yeah, my name's Claire Petrie. I'm the talent acquisition manager for Remedy Staffing located in Buffalo, New York. I've been in the HR field for about six years, so I'm on that interesting cusp where I'm a young professional moving out of it, so it's a cool place to be. So I've gotten really active with SHRM over the past couple years, live tweeting through some events, Twitter chats, things like that, and that's how we got connected. So I'm glad to be here today.
Callie Zipple:
Yeah, I'm excited. And as I mentioned, this is a first occurrence for us, and so we're taking an opportunity to actually do, what we're calling, a double feature. So we're going to be doing two topics today, and so our first one, and hopefully we'll be dropping the two topics as separate episodes. So for those of you listening in on the podcast this week, the topic you're going to hear us talk about is, building credibility as a YP.
So, that's the first thing we're going to talk about today here at LDF, and I'm just going to jump right into it. The first question we're going to talk about is about how we enter the workforce. So almost everyone enters with some level of uncertainty, which leads us to be less assertive or less confident in our abilities, and so how can we prepare for our first job so that we're ready to have tough conversations and be comfortable being curious and asking questions right out of the gate?
Claire Petrie:
Yeah. I love this question. I'm going to take it two different ways. So to answer the initial question for starters, in terms of preparing, before you get to your first job, I recommend starting the networking, obviously through your local SHRM chapter or other means as soon as you can, job shadow or intern during school, things like that, that personally helped me before getting into my job, but the other things I wanted to touch on were more so when I was starting in my first professional HR job, and I have to mention that I just wrote a post for the SHRM blog on this called, Imposter Syndrome and Confidence for HR Young Professionals, because it definitely happened to me and I wanted to share my experience to other folks who might have been feeling the same way.
Callie Zipple:
Awesome. SHRM blog. What's the title again?
Claire Petrie:
It's called, Imposter Syndrome and Confidence for HR Young Professionals.
Callie Zipple:
Cool. Thanks. Keep going.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to touch on the second way I wanted to answer this was, the advantage of starting off in your career in that HR assistant or coordinator position in order to build that assertiveness and confidence. So I talked to a lot of HRM professionals, that want to come out of college right into that HR manager role, for some that might be fine, I know for me, I needed to build that assertiveness and confidence still.
So I was lucky enough to start my career in an assistant type of role, got to observe and support a great team of talent acquisition specialists before moving into the specialist role myself. So it helped me to have role models, experience the uncomfortable situations live with my team because it's always so different than what you might have read in your textbook at school. So this helped me start gaining that credibility with hiring managers, they respected that I moved through the ranks once I did get to move up into that more challenging position. So I started off working with hiring managers more behind the scenes on interview scheduling, background checks, things along those lines and then moved into the specialist role where I got to advise them more on the recruitment process, sourcing strategy, presenting candidates and things along those lines.
So there definitely were some tough conversations when a hiring manager had a list of their 15 must-haves, wanted someone to hit the ground running, air quotes, my favorite phrase in recruitment and so on, but through watching my colleagues style and implementing my own, I was able to present my case and opinion more confidently. So for me, I'm glad I started off and moved up that way.
Callie Zipple:
It's so funny that you say that, and I think you said a couple of things that resonated with me, the first one is that you knew when you started that you were not confident and that you were not assertive and you owned it, and you knew that was something that you had to build on. So I think that's something that we can all identify with. The other thing that you mentioned too, which I think is important, is finding somebody or somehow to build that credibility, and so if you can find a mentor within your organization to take you along and learn from them and teach you and who's comfortable teaching you by the way, because sometimes we want to learn from somebody, but they're not equipped to teach us or they're not willing to teach us or they don't have the time to teach us. So finding somebody that you're able to learn from and who's willing to teach you, I think is so important.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah, I would totally agree.
Callie Zipple:
Cool. So a lot of times, and you didn't touch on this at all in your answer except to say that you knew starting where you were, you needed to build up some credibility and some experience, and so I want to talk about failures. We've heard it a lot here at LDF about how we need to lean into our failures and learn from our failures and own our failures. So how can we as young professionals or really anybody at any stage in their career, be comfortable trying new things while also being comfortable with the idea of failure.
Claire Petrie:
So I totally agree that we learn most from our failures, and I was going to talk about having a mentor.
Callie Zipple:
Yeah.
Claire Petrie:
[inaudible 00:06:04] this part of my answer. So I was like, "you already touched on this", but I know personally I was more comfortable trying new things when I had support from my manager, so I'm sure a lot of people feel this way, but when I didn't have my managers support, sometimes you have to explain why you felt it was a good move, let them know that you're going to try it, and of course, telling your manager you're going to try something, goes over better when it's not a huge decision that's going to cost the company a lot of money.
So I started off small, suggesting, implementing a hands on portion of the interview or attending career fairs for new sources we haven't been to before, things along those lines. So I think building up a few small wins can help when you want to try that new bigger thing that's more expensive and has a higher probability of not working out. So when I had an idea that did go well, I made sure to talk to my supervisor about it and put something together which helped me build momentum, but I think, as a young professional, you have to be open to the possibility of failure, it's not expected we know everything, so if we do our best and own when something doesn't work out, it's easy to move ahead and try again, and I have plenty of examples if we want to get into that too.
Callie Zipple:
I think we all do. I don't know a single person in my life who has not royally failed and I'm talking big time failed at some point in their life, and I think one of the things that we can learn from our failures is this idea of grit, and I think we've mentioned this on previous episodes and I'm remembering correctly, it was Katie who mentioned how her key to success was learning from her failures and the way that we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, not only helps us build our own grit and helps us learn from those, but it also defines us within our organization, when other people see us fail and come back from it, we're almost automatically building that credibility, because we're not hiding, we're not slinking away, we're saying, "listen, I know I failed, I know that was crappy, but this is how I'm going to improve on it, and this is how I'm going to do better in the future."
So I think that's just something that we can all own, admit that we have the vulnerability, admit that we've had the failure and turn that into some level of success.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah. And we heard about this in one of our keynotes this morning at LDF. Definitely how once you move through different failures, your confidence can go up along the way from what you've learned, and I tweeted out something from that session too, I don't know if it was something she said or something that just resonated with me, other people move on from our failures way quicker than we move on from them ourselves. So the length of time that we spend and think about our failures is exponentially larger than what other people are thinking about those failures. I mean, they're going to forget it tomorrow, we're going to remember it for weeks or months or years. So realizing that, and understanding that nobody else really cares, most people care less about you than you do, and that goes to failures as well, I think.
Callie Zipple:
Yeah. I agree. That's a great way to think about it when you really put it in perspective.
Claire Petrie:
Right.
Callie Zipple:
So let's shift back to our YPs a little bit and we have to do a better job of approaching conversations in a different way. So let's talk about, we've all failed, we just went over that as a topic, and sometimes when we come into conversations after that failure, we're heated up, we're upset, we're bummed that it happened and that it's falling on us. So can you tell us about a time when maybe you were walking into a conversation like that, that you knew wasn't going to go great, and what happened and how you overcame that?
Claire Petrie:
Yeah. So the one that comes to mind, I think I actually went into it thinking it was going to go great, and I just wasn't prepared enough, maybe I was a little too naive, but when I first moved from that support role to the talent acquisition specialist, I had sat in with some of my colleagues on their intake meetings, debrief meetings, so I was like, when I finally got to do my first one, I went into it and I'm like "guns are blazing. This is going to be great. I know exactly how this is going to work." So when my first meeting came, I thought I was going to be completely in control, and obviously every hiring manager was different, so some trust us, some have been through the process before, some haven't, some need more facts.
So I honestly thought it was going to be easy, and that hiring manager blasted me, looking for regional market trends, relocation costs, compensation, statistics, things like that, I definitely wasn't ready, so I felt really embarrassed coming out of it, for sure. I was able to hold it together enough to validate their questions and I'll get back to you by X, Y, Z timeframe to answer that, but leaving it, I felt horrible, and I was like, "I should have been more prepared in the situation."
Callie Zipple:
I have a very similar experience of that, I handled it much worse than you did though. I was asked questions that I was not prepared for and I tried to BS my way through it, and it took me so long to rebuild that credibility, because I got called on it, I got called on my stuff, and they said, "really? Because I'm not sure that's the answer that you should be providing. This is what I think the answer should be."
And it was like, "oh, you know what? That sounds better than what I said." And now I'm standing in front of you looking less credible than I did when I walked into the meeting. So if I have any advice to our listeners it's, do what Claire did and say, "I hear your question, I will look into it", and don't try and BS or pull facts out of the air like I did, because it makes you look dumb and it absolutely makes you lose credibility in the workplace.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah. I mean, I definitely looked like a deer in headlights, so it still was pretty bad, but yeah, I agree. At least try to end it on a positive note and keep that relationship strong.
Callie Zipple:
So let's spin it now to a positive example. So tell us about a time when you used a different approach to that situation or conversation and it was more successful than what we just discussed.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah. And I think that's another theme of our conference too. I feel like I've heard from some speaker about preparation. So some of your business operations folks that you're a business partner too, might have some questions and some might have different ones, but I learned after that to just prepare everything for every single meeting, which at first took obviously a lot of time and sometimes I wanted to shortcut it, but in the end, even if questions didn't get asked, I was more confident throughout the whole meeting. So, after that bad interaction with that hiring manager feeling like I didn't know anything, I definitely spent more time to prepare, be a better and knowledgeable talent acquisition partner, and I also spent more time looking at and understanding the data they were asking for, which was a great professional development exercise for myself, asking for all those market trends and compensation data, I really needed to spend time understanding that so I could explain it to them, so it ended up being a good learning exercise.
And I have a very different experience about approaching something to build credibility in the workplace, and I'll tell a story about when I was at my manufacturing role, I was an HR generalist, I think we had, at our peak season, 300 employees on a few different shifts, and I built credibility by actually going out on the floor and learning to weld, and I learned some other tasks to, we were a education based furniture company, and so we had tables and desks and chairs and things that we made and a lot of those components were metal, so we had a rather large welding team and I was talking to one of the shift leads about somebody they were trying to bring on, and they were telling me about how difficult it was to learn a certain type of weld or something.
And I think in a manufacturing environment, it's okay to joke with people, so I'm just saying that as a caveat, but I sort of said, "how hard can it be?" And he was like, "let's put some time on your calendar and let's actually try and learn to weld", and I think I burnt through, I would say, five good pieces of metal before I actually had a very crappy looking weld that didn't have a burn through, and the first few, I was like, "this is really hard, we actually do need to hire people with that experience", because I was coming at it and saying, "well, can't we train for that? Can't we hire somebody who has different competencies and train welding."
And frankly, a lot of welding you need to have experience with in order to be successful at it, and when it's furniture, I mean, it needs to look good too. So it's not about speed, it's not about that, it's about actually having it be fast and look good. So, that was another thing that I learned while I was out there, I had this crappy weld and I was super proud of it, and then I put it next to somebody else's really good weld and it was a little bit embarrassing, but I share this story, because it certainly helped me build credibility with a bunch of guys that were looking at a young professional and saying, "what does she have to add to the conversation?" And so, that's just an example of how I built credibility in a way that maybe others wouldn't have used as an approach.
Callie Zipple:
Yeah. It's great that you weren't afraid to be like, "yep, I'll try this and just jump in."
Claire Petrie:
Oh, I was totally scared. I mean I had to have gloves and it was fire. That's another thing which you should know about welding is that it involves fire, but I didn't realize how much it involved fire in my hands, next to my face. So it was just a very cool and different experience in the workplace.
Callie Zipple:
Cool. So let's move on. We've got one more question that I want to talk about on this topic, and it really resonates with me and I think it's a really important concept for our listeners to understand, and it's about mutually beneficial relationships. So it's one thing to have a relationship where you're getting something out of it, so I'm thinking specifically about mentorships, if you have a mentor and you're learning from that individual, that benefits you, but how can we turn that into an instance where maybe you're also teaching your mentor a new social media platform, that would be, in my opinion, a mutually beneficial relationship.
So, how can we create relationships with people in our organizations that are mutually challenging or mutually beneficial? And again, what I mean by that is, how can we make people comfortable with us reaching out to, and using them while they're also comfortable reaching out to and using us? If that makes sense.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah, I think so. So the way I think of it is, obviously the hiring managers that I work with, so whether you're an HR business partner, talent acquisition business partner, I always take the approach that, the person I'm working with in the business is the expert in their field, and I show how I'm the partner to them.
So I've worked most of my career in manufacturing as well, but on the recruiting side. So the people I work with in support are very technical. So before going ahead with sharing my opinions or telling them how I want to handle the search, I always ask really good questions and listen. So I show that the insights I bring to the table are thoughtful based on what works best for them and their department, and then they feel more comfortable giving me feedback and suggestions as well. So I think, setting expectations is a big part of it too, at least for me, of how the process is going to work, what we can expect from each other, based on what our skills are, timelines, things like that to make the process the best it can be for our business and for our candidates so we both understand what's important to each other and where we might need to ask the tough questions to make it best for both sides.
So people can sense, in my opinion, when you're being genuine, when you really want to help. So when I push back, still challenging, but they know I'm coming from a good place, I guess.
Callie Zipple:
And I think the first question I asked or the first topic that we started with was being curious, and so when we first start in our career, being curious to me means asking those questions, learning from some things and being comfortable with asking the tough questions and putting other people on the spot, but we need to find a way to build credibility in a sense that, when we ask questions, people hear them. Sometimes when we're early on in our career or when we're young professionals, we ask questions and people answer it in such a way that's operational or tactical or those sorts of things, but sometimes we're asking questions to better understand strategy or process or those sorts of things.
So we need to, as young professionals, find a way to ask those tough questions in a good enough way that others see us as, as you said, a partner. So we are mutually challenging each other. I'm challenging you with good questions and good challenges to what you're currently working on, and you feel comfortable sharing with me your feedback and that I am at a place where I'm challenging you and feeling good about that relationship.
Claire Petrie:
Yeah, I think you're right. Some of the situations that come to my mind most about this were when my partners in the business had those light bulb moments where I would ask a really thoughtful question and they were not expecting it from me, but it really showed that I was prepared and did my research, so that was huge for me.
Callie Zipple:
And this idea of partnership. I think that's so important for us to really get home to our listeners. It's all about the two way communication and not necessarily just asking the questions, you have to be open to the feedback that you get as well. So this idea of partnership really means that you're adding something, but you're also getting something in return. So I think that's just a really important thing for us to remind our listeners, when you're a partner you're not only giving something to the person you're a partner to, but you're also expecting something in return, so I think that's important to share. So those are all the questions I have for you and that we've discussed already. So is there anything you want to leave our listeners with around this topic of building credibility?
Claire Petrie:
Yeah, I think just to summarize it, definitely prepare, do your research, I love what you said about being a partner because it's easy in HR, I think sometimes when we have the ways that we like to do things with our processes and procedures, but once you have that person out in the business or that hiring manager that comes back at you with a little bit of a different perspective, you have to flex either your communication style or the program that you have might not be the best fit for them. So, really by starting off with being prepared, asking the good questions, building the relationship, in some sense before you might move into that tougher, more challenging role is really helpful.
Callie Zipple:
And I think my takeaway, and I know you're not supposed to prescribe takeaways on other people, but my takeaway from this conversation and frankly, things that I've heard already at LDF is all about failure.
My co-workers will tell me that I am afraid of failure and frankly that's true, I know that, and that's something that I have to own, but really taking home the, "nobody else cares about your failures" idea, I think, is going to be a pivotal change for me. I spend way too much time on my failures, much more time, far more time than other people spend on my failures, and I think that's just the biggest takeaway that I have from both this conversation and the presentations I've already heard at LDF. So I want to thank you for your time, and I know you're sticking around for the double feature that I mentioned earlier, and if you're interested in what that topic will be, please come back next week for another episode of Honest HR with Claire, but Claire, for the individuals listening today, will you share with us your contact information and Twitter handle for individuals that want to continue the conversation around building credibility?
Claire Petrie:
Absolutely. I finally just put the finishing touches on my website, so it's just clairepetriehr.com and right on the homepage, just how to connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, the blog, all that kind of stuff, but Twitter is _strclaire, and that's why I put it on the website, because it's a little bit funky.
Callie Zipple:
Do you mind spelling your last name for us and your website?
Claire Petrie:
Yes. It's Claire, C-L-A-I-R-E, Petrie, P-E-T-R-I-E hr.com. clairepetriehr.com.
Callie Zipple:
Awesome. Well, thanks again. If you want to connect with me, feel free to find me on LinkedIn, I'm also on Twitter and Instagram at SHRMCallieZ. For those that have not yet subscribe to updates on our website, it's shrm.org/honesthr. We release episode information on there for those who have subscribed, and I invite you to do that and follow us on iTunes, Buzzsprout, wherever really you get your podcasts, and I just want to thank you for coming out for this episode and we'll see you next time on Honest HR.