Screening Candidates: Finding the Right One for the Job

Gone are the days when you could ask a few simple questions about work experiences, review a resume, maybe call one or two references, and hire a person. These days, recruiters need to find out more about a candidate before even granting them an interview. Finding out as much as you can about the position and the candidates before an interview, developing a sound interviewing strategy, and using testing and simulation methods will help you find the right candidates.

Research Open Positions

As soon as a position in your company becomes available, you should begin conducting research. This includes asking hiring managers, department heads, administration, and others what is expected of those who fill the position. Understanding the tasks, responsibilities, hours candidates will need to devote to their work, if they will be interacting with clients and customers, and if they will be responsible for other employees will give you a better idea of which types of people are suited for the position.

 

This will also give you enough information to prepare a pre-interview questionnaire, self-assessment tests, and whether to conduct a pay-at-risk assessment.

Materials you will need when conducting research include:

• Past new hire evaluations
• Hiring manager feedback
• Past job descriptions
• List of job tasks
• Salary range
• Day-to-day tasks/monthly tasks/periodic tasks
• Impression of the last employee who held the position
• Why last employee left

Many times interviews will not tell you everything you need to know about a candidate. You will need to have a good idea of the position you are trying to fill in order to find the right candidates for the job, not the other way around.

 

Choosing the Candidates

Choosing from a pile of candidate resumes and trying to narrow them down can be a daunting task. While it has to be done, there are ways to do this that will actually help later on during the face-to-face interview process. Ways to narrow down candidates include:

• Pre-interview questionnaire
• Self-assessment questionnaire
• Skills testing
• Phone interview
• Samples of past work (reports, proposals, marketing materials, etc.)

Using what you have learned about the position and the type of person hiring managers are looking for, you will be able to narrow your scope and find candidates that meet some or all of the requirements before interviewing them.

 

When testing candidates on skills and technical ability, you may want to have the top performers in your company take the same tests. You will be able to judge candidate success much better when you have company standards to compare them to.

 

There are ethical and legal guidelines for creating skills testing and pre-interview questionnaires, so be sure to follow them. Many companies have their own set of questions that are appropriate for candidate testing.

 

Preparing for an interview

After narrowing down candidates, you will need to schedule interviews. When preparing for the interview, you should:

 

Create verbal simulations – These are scenarios that ask candidates how to solve a work-related problem, forecast where changes need to be made, or how to handle employee issues.

 

Job content simulations – These are similar to verbal simulations except you will be presenting a scenario that directly affects the quality of the candidates work or job function. Learning more about how a candidate can solve these problems or work around them is a good indication of how they handle stress, employee issues, and how they use critical thinking and problem solving skills.

 

Ask for ideas – Many companies want to hire people who are not only good at their jobs, but who are also innovative. Asking candidates for their ideas about an issue that affects the department they would be working in or one that affects the company in general. These problems do not have to be too specific, but should highlight issues that relate to the industry in general or specific procedures that are used by many companies.

Review sample work – If you asked for samples from candidates, review them to see if they are good enough. Check with hiring managers to see if the work reflects the type of person they want working in their department. Ask specific questions during the interview to gain more insight.

Interviews should be given to those who have shown exemplary results on tests, self-assessments, and work samples. It is easier to pick a candidate who will be successful at your company when you are picking from a handful of successful candidates.

 

The Challenges of Conducting an Interview

By rethinking the purpose and functionality of the interview process, you will be able to use it as one tool in many instead of the only measuring tool. Interviews should be granted only when you know enough about a candidate. This will lead to fewer surprises during the interview and will make hiring decisions much easier.

 

As you begin to change the way you evaluate potential employees, you should notice that making a decision based on a resume and a few questions will not yield the best candidates. Seeing beyond the resume and getting to know more about the candidate and what they bring to a position will allow you to take a second look at those who may not have the experience of other candidates, but who possess the drive, passion, attention to detail, and the skills needed to perform well.

 

When using other tools that include questionnaires, simulations, and asking questions that are more problem solving in nature, rather than matter-of-fact, you will be able to see whether a candidate really has what it takes fill the position.

 

Interviews should be the last indicator in your search for new employees. If you have done your research, gotten back everything you asked for from the candidate, and reviewed samples of their work, you will most likely have made your decision before you conduct a face-to-face interview.

 

Conclusion

Enhancing your candidate evaluation tools and using them before scheduling an interview will help your company in the long run. If you are able to make hiring decisions with more confidence, retention rates will go up, employees will be happier in their positions, and your company will become more sought after by those entering the workforce or who want to change jobs.

Keeping interviews last on your list of tools to use when trying to fill a position may also help candidates. Some candidates do not interview well. They may get nervous or come across as arrogant or aggressive. Scheduling an interview first may give you the wrong impression of what candidates are capable of. Choosing the best of the best will help alleviate this problem.

 

Testing is another way to hold on to potential employees for other positions that may come up later on. If a candidate is not right for the current position, they may be a perfect match for another. Keeping testing information on record and adding candidates to your employee database is a great way to build connections.

 

After hiring employees using this method of evaluation and selection, ask specific questions about the hiring process in their new hire evaluation. This feedback can be very effective in tailoring your process and may spark new ideas for improving or enhancing the process.

 

By: Dakotta Alex

10 Tips to Improve the Quality of Your Networking

By John Rossheim, Monster Senior Contributing Writer

In this age of metrics, it’s tempting for job hunters to seek solace in the sheer numbers of their effort: 200 job postings answered, 300 resumes mailed, 400 business cards collected for the purposes of professional networking.

But if you think about how these brute-force employment campaigns affect the professional on the other side of the desk -- the HR recruiter, the networking contact in a powerful position -- it quickly becomes apparent that the rack-up-the-numbers networker is on the wrong track. That’s because these days employers are looking to select a very few outstanding professionals from a tidal wave of good people who just want a job.

So in the end, the quality-oriented networker, the thoughtful individual who always tries to give better than he gets, should have the advantage. Here are 10 points to keep in mind as you emphasize quality over quantity in your professional networking.

1. Quantity Is a Turnoff

If you hand out business cards like you’re dealing poker, most folks will fold. “People don’t want to do business with a card thruster,” says Shel Horowitz, a marketing consultant in Hadley, Massachusetts. In fact, speed networking probably does not yield the best return on your investment of time. “Quantity networkers are forgettable individuals,” says Benjamin Akande, dean of Webster University’s George Herbert Walker School of Business & Technology. “If a guy is just looking for his next consulting contract, I don’t want to know him.”

2. Don’t Work the Room

Don’t kid yourself: If you’re always on the lookout for the next professional hookup, people will take offense. “When people spend 50 percent of the time looking over my shoulder, I don’t feel warm and fuzzy,” says Sally Haver, a senior vice president at The Ayers Group, an HR consultancy in New York City.

3. Take Time to Make a Real Connection

When you and a new acquaintance seem attuned, take time to explore how you might help each other out. “A lot of people figure that coming back from a networking opportunity with just one contact makes it a failure,” Horowitz says. “But my hour with one good contact makes it a success.”

4. Make Your Case for Building a Relationship
Recognize that if you’re between jobs, you probably have more discretionary time than most of your valuable networking contacts do. “People are overrun with requests,” Haver says. “Unless there’s a compelling reason for someone to meet with you, they won’t make the time.” So work hard to make yourself useful.

5. Exchange Stories
Don’t forget that you are more than the professional objective at the top of your resume. “Networking is about telling your story, describing your human competitive advantage -- what you do that nobody else can do,” Akande says. And ask a new contact to tell you her story. “At the start of a professional relationship, I ask questions to get unique pieces of information about the person,” Haver says.

6. Respond to Others’ Challenges

There’s no better way to establish a business networking relationship than to contribute to the solution of your new contact’s pressing problem. “If someone states a challenge that they’re facing, respond -- no later than the next morning -- with something of value that addresses their issue,” says John Felkins, president of Accelerant Consulting Group , an organizational development consultancy in Bartlett, Tennessee.

7. Set Yourself Up for the Next Contact

If you intuit that a new contact will have lasting value, start building a bridge to your next exchange before you say your first good-bye. “I ask people what they’re working on right now, which gives me a segue to another contact,” says Akande. “I make notes so that the next time I can say, ‘You mentioned in our last conversation…’”

8. Make Yourself Useful, Again and Again
“If you consistently position yourself as a resource to others -- fellow college alums, former colleagues -- it will make you more valuable to your contacts, and, in turn, their contacts, as time goes by,” says Amanda Guisbond, an account executive in the Boston office of PR agency Shift Communications.

9. Don’t Forget Social Media
Social media are powerful tools for professional networking when used judiciously. But spam is distasteful no matter what the social medium du jour. So be selective, and use virtual contacts to supplement, not supplant, face-to-face meetings. As Horowitz puts it: “Social networking is deeply reinforced by an in-person connection.”

10. Mind These Three Watchwords for Quality

Looking for a slogan to sum up quality networking? Try Haver’s: Selectivity, discretion, mindfulness.

Why Women Need a Sponsor for Career Development

By Margot Carmichael Lester, Monster Contributing Writer

Think you’re all set because you get great career guidance from a mentor? Think again. A Catalyst survey found that women who have mentors are less likely to be promoted than women with sponsors. That’s because sponsors help you identify and take advantage of career opportunities.

After reviewing several data sets and interviewing high-potential men and women, researchers found that men are more likely to have sponsors -- mentors who advise and advocate, using their sway to help protégés land high-level assignments and positions. Because women typically don’t have mentors, they don’t advance as far or as fast.

“Everyone’s heard of the importance of having a mentor who gives advice and how to develop, but a sponsor helps you get ahead,” says Christine Silva, director of research at Catalyst and the study’s co-author. “He or she is someone who’s senior in your organization who will advocate on your behalf for development and promotion opportunities.”

Strategic Partnership

Sponsorship is more strategic, less developmental than mentoring, according to Steve Langerud, director of professional opportunities at DePauw University. “The role of sponsor is to ask what you can do for an employer, not what can be done to develop you as a person and/or professional,” he says. “The focus is on creating, demonstrating and leveraging work product that can be used to position you for advancement either internally or externally.”

By helping you find projects or job openings that will help you advance, sponsors take a more active role in your career development. They advocate for you, assist you in gaining visibility in your company and industry, and fight to help you rise through the ranks.

“My sponsor kept her ear to the ground for better job openings, and she really pushed my [participation] in education and volunteer activities that both directly and indirectly benefited me professionally,” says Carolyn Evans, a PR professional in Chapin, South Carolina. “When my professional growth at my first job had peaked, she suggested I volunteer for a nonprofit, knowing they would be adding positions in the new year. I ended up landing a job with that organization, which led to my next job, too.”

Business Intelligence
So how do you identify a professional who can help get you to where you want to go? Look for a senior-level person who has “the power and position to open doors for you,” Silva says. This person can be in your company, an influential member in your field or industry, or even a professor.

Los Angeles-based Ingrid Vanderveldt found her first sponsor, George Kozmetsky, while getting her MBA at the University of Texas in Austin. Kozmetsky was the school’s dean and well-connected in the technology world as the former CEO of Teledyne. (In fact, he mentored Michael Dell). With an interest in technology, Vanderveldt sought him out. “He taught me the ropes,” says Vanderveldt, managing partner of Ingrid Vanderveldt LLC, a parent company for several entrepreneurial ventures. “And he introduced me to Admiral [Bobby Ray] Inman and convinced him to invest the first $50,000 I ever raised. Those two made my deal go.”

Joint Venture

Once you’ve identified a sponsor, you then have to show him why it’s worth his while to go to bat for you.

“You need to be excellent at your job and have the necessary skills and experience under your belt,” Silva says. This is why you may still want a mentor to provide the business coaching you need to build the correct competencies.

Some ways to get noticed include:

• Asking your mentor to introduce you to key decision makers.
• Joining professional networks.
• Expressing interest in mentoring and leadership development programs.
• Requesting to be put on high-profile projects or high-visibility teams.
• Using your existing network to get introductions to top-level people.
• Attending industry and corporate events that draw high-level influencers.
• Volunteering for charitable or community activities that provide an opportunity to work alongside potential sponsors.

When you find the right person, ask for a meeting. “Take 30 minutes or take them to lunch and tell them you really admire their work and vision,” Evans suggests. “Then ask if they would be willing to work with you on your career growth.” And if they decline? Don’t take it personally. Ask for advice as well as suggestions for other potential sponsors. Also ask to keep the person in your professional network.

Once you’ve got a sponsor, remember it’s a two-way street. “Know how you can act in service to them,” Vanderveldt says. “And if you don’t know, ask.”

Of course, the best payoff for your sponsor is to see you achieve your goals. “Sure, sponsors know of great jobs that pay a ton or projects that will get you noticed,” Evans says. “But they’re more than a personal job-posting board. They want you to succeed.”

Does your job have you on emotional life support?

Considering the rocky state of the economy right now, you may count yourself lucky just to have a job, never mind giving a second thought to how happy you are there. However, don't be so quick to dismiss your feelings about your job; companies know that happier employees are more innovative and loyal. If your job meets your emotional needs, you're a much bigger asset to the company than you may have thought.

Mark Ingwer, business psychologist and author of "Empathetic Marketing," identifies five core emotional needs that every company and employee should know about in order to be more successful and motivated. Check your professional pulse with these five emotional needs, and find out if you're thriving in your work environment or if you belong on life support.

Belonging
A sense of belonging is indispensable if your company encourages innovation and creativity. Being comfortable around your co-workers and boss establishes an open environment that will be more receptive when you pitch new ideas. "Businesses that cater to and help us meet the need to belong will uncover previously unexplored opportunities," Ingwer says. Are your co-workers a little standoffish? Talk to your boss about ideas that can bring the group together. An office book chat or a community volunteering day can open up your co-workers and get people talking.

Control
Are you being handed more responsibilities and projects to head as time goes on? Being given more control is a clear sign of how your company measures your worth and is an easy way for you to gauge your place there. Asking for more responsibility or taking the lead on a project also shows how confident you are at your workplace. Ingwer notes, "We only spend energy on controlling outcomes proportional to our belief that we can succeed." If you've been avoiding your to-do list or have shied away from speaking up, now's the time to start taking more control of your career and of your place at your company.

Growth
How challenged do you feel at your job? Being able to grow in a job or company is a major factor in the evolution of your career. "It's important to note that we grow most fully when our enlightenment leads to competency, which is extraordinary knowledge in a given area or subject. In one's career, those who learn more about their niche will get ahead of those who do not," Ingwer says. Look for opportunities to expand your knowledge about your industry, and continue to challenge yourself. When you reach a point where every day seems like a repeat, see if there's a chance to move up. Make an appointment to speak with your manager about taking on more responsibilities, and ask if your position can grow to include more leadership possibilities or if there's a higher opening within the company for which you can be considered. If the conversation is a dead end, it may be time to consider looking for a more challenging position elsewhere.

Recognition
Are you getting the credit you deserve? Do your co-workers and boss know that you were the one who submitted that great idea? Ingwer notes, "Recognition is paramount any time the need to motivate groups, and individuals within groups, is central to accomplishing organizational goals." If others are looking to you as a leader and professional role model, your reputation is working in your favor for advancing your career. Still going unnoticed for your hard work? Start getting more involved both in public and private ways at work. Speak up more at group meetings, email others your ideas and ask for input, and stay on track with your projects to start getting noticed.

Self-expression
If you're fortunate enough to work in a field you care about, you're already experiencing positive self-expression. "For many people, the most satisfying vehicle for expression is often the work of one's career," Ingwer says. But if you're in a job you couldn't care less about, your need for self-expression may leave you wanting more. Look for ways to get your interests involved at work. Love messing around with computers? Ask for technology training. Passionate about sports and fitness? Start a company kickball team or organize a company entry in the next marathon. Your self-expression and initiative will make you a stronger figure in the company and get you noticed for the right reasons.

Susan Ricker is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz. She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues.

Measuring An Employee's Worth? Consider Influence

The performance review of the future will include services like Salesforce.com's Chatter and its Influencers feature, which measures how much weight you carry among your peers.

Today, your performance review is based on things like sales numbers or number of goals met. Tomorrow, though, it could be based on something that until now has remained ephemeral: organizational influence.

Salesforce.com's Chatter system released a new feature this spring called Influencer. It purports to measure how influential you are within your company, by tabulating, for example, how your fellow workers respond to the items you post to your corporate social network.

It's still a work in progress, senior director of Chatter product marketing Dave King tells Fast Company. But already companies are using it to help them run more smoothly.

King says he's heard from CIOs, for example, that, when they have a new system to roll out, they'll look up who the most influential people are in various departments and bring them in for a briefing ahead of time, in the hopes they'll be able to evangelize the system to their peers.

At Salesforce.com itself, CEO Marc Benioff has invited the company's top 20 influencers on Chatter to the retreat he hosts offsite for the company's top executives. "Some were 22- or 23-year-old engineers," King says, "and we put them on stage for a couple minutes each to talk about innovation and what we as a company should be doing."

Chatter, which was launched two years ago, is not the only company working on a metric for influence within organizations. Yammer and National Field, other enterprise social networking tools, are also taking a stab at the problem.

The most progressive organizations have always realized that the informal connections employees make with others and the amount of knowledge and expertise they share outside of prescribed work responsibilities contributes mightily to the bottom line. But until now, they haven't had an empirical way of measuring that activity.

Salesforce.com won't disclose exactly how the Influencer algorithm works. It's more than just tabulating number of posts, though. In fact, workers could actually be penalized for sheer volume, if colleagues don't consider their content useful. "We don't want people being noisy," Chatter general manager Kendall Collins tells Fast Company.

Instead, the algorithm looks at things like how many Likes a post gets or how often it's re-shared. "It surveys all the activities you're involved in and weighs them differently," King says.

He adds that managers wanting to evaluate worker influence will probably want to combine the machine-generated score with the output of an explicit recognition system, like Salesforce.com's newly acquired Rypple, which allows employees to give each other badges for great work.

When you add a system like Rypple, King says, "you get a complete picture--not only what's derived [from activity on the system] but also what's declared by peers and managers."
[Image: Top: Flickr user Snugg LePup]
E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter.
BY E.B. Boyd | 07-05-2012

How long before we should convert temp staff to employee status?

Q. Is there a law (or advisable benchmark) regarding how long we can hire temporary staff before they must be either hired on a permanent basis or released?

A. There is no time frame that is set in stone. The risk of keeping a temporary worker on for an extended period of time arises if you classify the worker as an independent contractor. In that circumstance, you want to make sure that the worker is truly an independent contractor rather than an employee, which depends on a variety of factors.

If the individual performs services for you over a long period of time (rather than for a discrete project), that may be one factor suggesting that the worker is more like an employee than an independent contractor.

Business Management Daily

7 Rules of Now

— Adapted from Business at the Speed of Now, John M. Bernard, Wiley.

Some rules of leadership are timeless, but some simply don’t cut it anymore.
Here are the 7 Rules of Now:

1. Listen closely to your customers and employees.
2. Keep the organization’s goals uppermost in your mind.
3. Measure performance—your own, your team’s and that of others.
4. Make data-driven decisions.
5. Don’t hide the truth. Hidden problems fester.
6. Figure out how to say yes.
7. Fear nothing.

Why aren't companies hiring?

The U.S. economy’s paltry addition of 69,000 jobs in May has intensified the political finger-pointing, but the truth is that no one really knows for sure why the economy is growing yet too few jobs are being created, said Sageworks CEO Brian Hamilton.

“The jobs report is disappointing because, at this stage of the recovery, the economy should be generating more jobs,” said Hamilton, who is also co-founder of the financial information company. The sluggish job growth is a paradox, he said, “because privately held companies, which actually produce the vast majority of new jobs, are performing quite well.”

Indeed, Sageworks’ data shows privately held companies’ sales have increased by an average of 8.08 percent in 2012, on the heels of 8.25 percent sales growth in 2011. Net profit margins, meanwhile, have increased to an average of 6.84 percent so far this year, compared with 5.87 percent during 2011.
Through its cooperative data model, Sageworks collects financial statements for private companies from accounting firms, banks and credit unions, and aggregates the data at an approximate rate of 1,000 statements a day. Net profit margin has been adjusted to exclude taxes and include owner compensation in excess of their market-rate salaries — adjustments commonly made to private-company financials in order to provide a more accurate picture of the companies’ operational performance.

The federal government said Friday that U.S. unemployment edged up to 8.2 percent in May from 8.1 percent in April, sending Wall Street stocks skidding and inflaming worries about a global economic slowdown. Stocks faltered again Monday as the debate over what’s keeping job growth slow continued.

Hamilton has said that business owners remain nervous about where the economy’s been, where it is now, and where it’s going in coming quarters. A recent Sageworks survey of accountants, bankers and others who work closely with private companies found that about 32 percent of these professionals believe their clients aren’t hiring because they are concerned about the economy in general. Another 22 percent of those surveyed said private companies have become more risk averse because of lingering anxiety from the last recession.

In addition, technology and other productivity improvements have helped boost per-employee sales and profits in recent years, which could reduce the urgency for some companies to hire. In the Sageworks survey, 23 percent of respondents said their clients’ efficiency has reduced the need to hire additional people.

Recent Sageworks data has also shown that later customer payments and slower moving inventory have combined to tie up private companies’ cash 16 percent longer than just three years ago. That’s money companies don’t have in the bank to hire new people or buy equipment.

Other data sources have blamed the lingering employment woes on a gap in the skills needed and those available, geographical constraints tied to the still-difficult housing market and the increase in the number of people dropping out of the workforce, a trend that is tied to an aging population.

Sageworks, a financial information company, collects and analyzes data on the performance of privately held companies and provides financial forecasting software.

Written by: Mary Ellen Biery

Why Boards Need More Women

Diversity on boards is critical to sustaining performance. Broadening the composition of the board increases the size of the candidate pool and, more importantly, helps expand perspectives at the top. While most CEOs recognize the importance of appointing directors of different ages and with different kinds of educational backgrounds and functional expertise, they tend to underestimate the benefits of gender diversity.

Two days ago, the Italian government had to pass a law requiring listed and state-owned companies to ensure that by 2015, one-third of their board members would be women. Only 6% of directors in Italy are currently women — one of the lowest rates on the continent — compared to 14% in the European Union and 16% in the U.S.

There are several benefits to appointing more women on boards. When Fortune-500 companies were ranked by the number of women directors on their boards, those in the highest quartile in 2009 reported a 42% greater return on sales and a 53% higher return on equity than the rest, according to a recent study conducted by Lois Joy, Nancy Carter, Harvey M. Wagner, and Sriram Narayanan.
Experts believe that companies with women directors deal more effectively with risk. Not only do they better address the concerns of customers, employees, shareholders, and the local community, but also, they tend to focus on long-term priorities. Women directors are likely to be more in tune with women's needs than men, which helps develop successful products and services. After all, women drive 70% of purchase decisions by consumers in the European Union and 80% of them in the United States.
Research by Catalyst — a not-for-profit that seeks to expand opportunities for women — shows a strong link between the presence of women on boards and corporate reputations. Female directors serve as role models, and therefore, improve female employees' performance and boost companies' images. Several rating agencies and investment funds, such as CalPERS and PAX World, use the extent of gender diversity as one of their investment criteria.

Yet, in Europe, barring a few exceptions such as Norway, women lack representation on boards. Research by the Cranfield School of Management shows that the percentage of women in FTSE 100 companies has risen slowly from 6.9% to 12.5% over the last decade. The percentage of women directors seems to be correlated with geography, with the Scandinavian nations having over 20+% women among board members; the U.K., Ireland, and Netherlands being in the low teens (10% to 12.5%); Germany, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium in the high single digits (7.5% to 9.7%); and the Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Italy, and Greece reporting low single digit (2% to 6.5%) representation, according to a recent study by Egon Zehnder's Laurence Monnery.

In Turkey, where I live, the participation rates of women in the workforce are among the lowest in Europe, indicating major barriers to entry into the work force. However, there's neither discrimination in terms of pay nor a glass ceiling that prevents women from getting to the top. Turkey has the second-highest percentage of female CEOs (12%) among the OECD countries as well as Brazil, China, and Russia. In fact, 22.2% of board members in the country are women. This includes the members of Turkey's business families, but even in the case of independent women directors, the country ranks among the top in Europe. Two women CEOs have led the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association in just the last five years, and the heads of several Turkish business groups, such as Sabanci, Dogan, and Kale, are all women.

Studies show that the presence of at least three women is necessary to change boardroom dynamics. In fact, an analysis of FTSE-listed boards found that operational performance and share prices were both higher in the case of companies where women made up over 20% of board members than those with lower female representation.

A new Turkish initiative seeks to increase the numbers of women directors by getting 40 business people to coach 40 next-generation women leaders in the skills of board membership. That's an example other countries may well wish to follow, especially since the European Commission is soon likely to introduce quotas for women directors in every member country.

by Yilmaz Arguden
Harvard Business Review

1 Thing Every New Hire Should Get On Their First Day

The first day at a new job. Excited but nervous. Shoot, why didn’t I wear a tie? They said business casual but my boss is wearing a tie. Oh geez, that woman again, I just met her and I forgot her name already. Should I go to the cafeteria to eat lunch by myself—should I wait for someone to ask me? It’s 5:00 and I have nothing to do…should I leave? Everyone else is still here. Let me check the news on Internet again…

It is being reported on several techie websites that when employees arrive for their first day at Apple, they are given the inspirational note shown below.

I love the concept of giving every new hire a letter on their first day for the following reasons:

1)      First days are tough. You haven’t made “work friends” yet so you feel alone, you don’t know the company culture or jargon yet so you feel confused, and you are quite literally lost (“Where’s the coffee and bathroom?”). A warm letter can make you feel welcome.

2)      First impressions count. A good orientation program helps, but a warm note shows that the company cares enough about you to think ahead to your arrival.

3)      Cultural immersion should start early. First days—first weeks—often are periods of lighter workloads. It’s the perfect time for new hires to “work” on understanding the company culture and values.

Having said that, there are two things wrong with Apple’s approach (note: so far, Apple has neither confirmed nor denied whether this letter is authentic) .  First, it’s paternalistic. Slipping in, “The kind of work…you’d sacrifice a weekend for” sounds like they are setting the weekend hours expectation up front. If you’ve hired the right person, she’ll know that sometimes extra hours are required to get the job done. She’ll already have a work-life blend mindset. She won’t need to be reminded of that, and bringing it up on day one sets a bad, paternalistic tone.

Second, it’s impersonal. The signature line has a pre-printed logo and “Welcome to Apple” statement. Not very warm. It would mean much more if the letter was actually signed by the CEO, or by the person’s manager, or even better, by every person in the department (talk about peer pressure!).
Welcoming each newbie on their first day with a note is a great idea. To make it effective, make it personal and focused on organizational values.

Kevin Kruse, Contributor
Serial Entrepreneur, Author Employee Engagement 2.0
Forbes.com

Navigating the Recruiting Maze

For a lot of hiring managers and small business leaders, hiring remains the most crucial pain point. If you magically get the right people, stuff just gets executed. However, we never make the perfect hiring decisions all the time. Sometimes we are in a hurry to fill the role, and the options available seem more attractive than the list of skills and qualities we carefully created.

Of course, every manager has a different outlook – some of us “hire fast, learn fast and fail fast,” whereas some of us passively look at many resumes and only make an addition to the team when it feels right. I’ve made my fair share of errors and would like to share an example that might help when you are at the next crossroads and in a hurry.

I was looking for an online marketing person and started furiously going through LinkedIn for profiles that had keywords of certain skills that were required. After I found a few profiles, I cold wrote to a particular prospect and heard back from her. She shared her detailed resume with me and it looked like a dream. After I explained the role to her, she seemed positive that it was her domain and she joined the next day.

Over the next few weeks, she worked very hard and made a difference to our efforts. Her skills were matching with many peripheral tasks, except for the core role she was hired for. And the mistake was entirely mine. I made a few notes to myself:

Never Absorb The Resume Or The LinkedIn Profile On Face Value

Get evidence of past work or go through some testing or sample review. For engineers, this can be writing a piece of code during the interview.  For content writers it would be writing a sample piece.

Understand The Cost Of Hurrying

You can fill a role quickly but if the person is not taking your load off instantly, then chances are they are increasing the load. The relevant experience can contribute to your workload, but if a person needs to be taught everything from scratch – you will be taking time out of your job to show them the way. Depending on how fast your small business is growing, this can be challenging.

References Are Not Always Helpful

When you ask someone for a reference, of course they are going to give you a positive one. Skip this step. Especially if you are a small business without corporate guidelines.  Go with your gut and use logic.

Lots Of Trial Projects

If you can, take people on short-term projects to help you with different parts of your business. As a small business, you have to depend on freelancers and consultants for certain roles anyway. Make sure you have a good pipeline of folks helping you as freelancers. As your business grows, you will have the opportunity to offer full-time roles to these folks, and you will know them extremely well by then.

There is no perfect hire and there are no perfect hiring tips or guidelines. We can simply learn from our own mistakes and hopefully from mistakes of others.

By Raj Sheth
May 16, 2012
In Employment Trends
Maze Photo via Shutterstock

5 Reasons Why Traditional Employment Is in Trouble

According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession.
This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.

In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. Many felt unappreciated and disrespected — a word I hear a lot now and never used to hear at all.

And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening.

I think we are seeing the early signs that the attitudes and expectations of the emerging and experienced workforce are changing faster than many thought likely and that traditional firms may find it harder and harder to employ the best people.
I among others have been predicting that the age of the entrepreneur is dawning — a time when more and more people are confident and optimistic about working for themselves, offering their services for a fee to someone who needs their skills. Many of the ones I speak with are convinced that this is a better way to feel fulfilled and be prosperous than the daily grind of going to work for an employer.

The success of crowdsourcing sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and other sites where anyone can offer their services for bid such as elancer or freelancer say a lot about what is happening. It has become relatively easy to offer products for sale on sites such as eBay or Craig’s List or to find a match between your skills and the needs of someone else.

But many corporations and recruiters are in denial. They will not agree that a significant number of people feel this way but at the same time they will not deny that it is hard to find, attract, close, and retain the skilled talent they need. And as Baby Boomers start to retire and move out of the active job market the gap will grow.
It does not take a crystal ball to see the signs of change.

Expectations Have Changed

People expect work to be engaging, interesting, and fulfilling. Younger people even feel it should be fun. The organizations that offer project-type work, work that poses a challenge, or work that fulfills humanitarian needs, are not having much trouble finding good people. Gen Y, those in their 20s, have been the pioneers in changing attitudes and in showing that individuals can find work that is fulfilling and earns money — often by working independently or by joining a very small firm or startup.

Choice, Not Control
People want to be empowered to make decisions, to be free from bureaucracy and administrivia. They know they have a lot to contribute and are frustrated when seemingly meaningless rules and procedures are put into place with no consultation or discussion.

Firms like Brazil’s Semco are run as democracies, and employees have the power to decide almost everything. For the past few decades this, along with Gore-Tex in the U.S., have been storybook examples of how organizations may look as we move into this century. The hallmarks for success include participation in decision-making, freedom over schedules and work assignments, and fair, transparent, and equitable pay based on contribution.

A Focus on Employment Branding

But, in lieu of making these painful changes to structure and existing practice, firms are instead focused on using the power of advertising and image-shaping to enhance or create an employment brand in the hope of attracting people.

Most employment branding efforts use Madison Avenue-style tactics to raise interest in a company. The campaigns are expensive and require immense effort, but there may be a period of time when more good people are attracted to a firm. The downside is that once hired they may quickly move on if the hype is not reflected in practice.

Semco, on the other hand, has no trouble attracting great people primarily through referral, word-of-mouth, and by the quality of the products and services they offer. Historically, very few firms have had to resort to expensive branding campaigns to attract the people they needed. Talented people with the right skills sought out the firms. This is why the employment market has always been skewed toward the employer who has been able to set salaries, offer the benefits it wanted to offer, and carve out jobs with minimal regard to the candidate’s or employee’s needs or desires.

Firms such as Lincoln Electric, Gore-Tex, IBM, and recently Facebook have little need to do overt employment branding because their employees do the recruiting for them.

More Interest in the Candidate Experience

Also, almost in acknowledgement that they have not done a good job in providing a candidate with a positive experience — with good customer service — when they apply for a job, there is now more emphasis and interest in improving that experience.

Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads has long been an advocate for improving the candidate experience and has tirelessly worked to get firms to make substantial changes in how they deal with a candidate. Recently he has created the the Candidate Experience Awards to further enhance this effort.

But it is unfortunate that he has to do this. It is simply another sign that the tide has turned away from traditional employers to the smaller firms that do care about the candidates and do listen to them and offer decent service.

More Effort and Money Being Placed on Becoming Listed as “The Best Place to Work”

Many firms spend thousands of dollars in fees and salaries to compete for a Best Place to Work award. Many have full-time employees dedicated to this effort for a significant time period while also ramping up employment branding activities.

Again, this is only viable because there is not enough natural interest in these firms to attract good people.

As traditional organizations try to fit round pegs into square holes, the smaller startups and enlightened larger firms are finding it easier to hire good people.

Good people are attracted to places that are in alignment with their needs, attitudes, and intellect, and those places are increasingly organizations that are flexible, fun, empowering, respectful, transparent, and flat. But the dinosaurs didn’t evolve successfully and I doubt that larger firms will either.

by Kevin Wheeler

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it's not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., "If it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I'll work out for 30 minutes before work.") Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won't improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you'd honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don't. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur ("If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.") It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that's the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don't tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it's important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don't put yourself in harm's way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

 9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.

If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don't need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It's never what you are, but what you do.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist, and author of the new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). She is also an expert blogger on motivation and leadership for Fast Company and Psychology Today. Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson
http://blogs.hbr.org/

How Do You Identify The Perfect Staffing Specialist? How Do You Measure Success?

The perfect candidate for your client’s temporary job is sitting in right in front of you. You know this. But how do you prove it? And how do you prove it to your clients?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. For decades, Human Resources departments have used established metrics to measure their own performance. So it’s somewhat surprising to me that so many staffing firms – even the larger ones with multiple locations – aren’t doing the same thing.

It’s surprising because a good system for self-measurement can be doubly useful for staffing and recruiting. You can use it to make your own staffing firm more efficient. Plus, you can get a much clearer idea of who the perfect temp candidates are.

But it’s only somewhat surprising because the most commonly-used metrics are not foolproof. Here’s a quick look at some of them:

 ■Time-to-Hire. This is a good metric to show clients who typically want positions filled RIGHT NOW. However it’s dangerous, because it encourages you to fill a position fast – as opposed to filling it with the best resource. That can cost your client a lot of money in training and quality assurance, and ultimately cost you both the resource and the client.
 ■Retention/Turnover. How long are your placements staying with their employers? These are good metrics, as they can shed a lot of light on costs associated with recruiting, hiring and training. You can use them to prove, for example, that a client is better off leaving the position open for an extra month rather than hiring too fast.
 ■Cost-Per-Hire. This compiles all of the expenses related to hiring, including advertising, sourcing, technology, drug testing and many more. In fact, a taskforce led by the Society for Human Resource Management operating under the auspices of the American National Standards Institute is developing a universal CPH standard which is currently up for second review. It does not, however, measure any expenses after the hire.
 ■Performance. Many organizations use a general survey-style method for measuring the “quality” of an employee, such as a performance rating based on a scale of one to five. The problem here is that what people say and what they do are often very different. An evaluator who’s in the mood to award a “5” one day might be more inclined to award a “3” the next, and even then there’s often no clear action to be taken on the results.

Perhaps a more practical approach, for yourself and for your recruits, is to focus on KPIs (key performance indicators).

KPIs are related to your specific business. They should always be tied to your business goals, actionable, consistent and trackable.

For example, let’s use common staffing KPIs tracked by the American Staffing Association. These might be:
 ■Resumes received
 ■Sendouts per employee
 ■Number of placements
 ■Hours billed per employee
 ■Length of service by recruit
 ■Gross margin per salesperson

For determining the perfect temp candidate, it’s great to know your client’s KPIs. Your client might measure success by:
 ■Hours per employee
 ■Total production by employee
 ■Employee absences
 ■Total business cost per employee
 ■Total cost per project/initiative

This is important: once you’ve got the right KPIs down you can combine them into what tells you the most, at a glance, about how your recruits are performing and how you are performing for your client.

It’s important because none of your KPIs will tell the complete story. An employee who is absent the most may not be the least productive. A low number of sendouts might mean you’re slacking off; it could also mean that you’re consistently getting it right the first time. You need to combine them to get a full picture.

But here’s the most important part. It will no doubt get me in trouble with HR mavens and other math-oriented professionals.

People are not numbers. No matter how hard we try, they never will be.

None of these metrics help you measure the perfect temp candidate that’s sitting in front of you right now. So it’s vitally important to balance the knowledge you’ve come up with through hard numbers and your unmeasurable instincts. Because if you bring in good people in the first place, many of the reactive measurements later on will take care of themselves.

In a recent New York Times article, author Robin Black said: “I have to stop worrying about numbers. I have to reclaim the ambiguous part of my own intelligence.” There has to be a subjective “gut” feel to what you’re doing, too. Nobody has ever come up with a formula to quantify creativity or drive or persona (see point #6 here). Sometimes you just know.

That’s your job.

And if you’re doing it well, you’re probably dealing with numbers – matching the client’s KPIs to the candidates’ qualifications.

At the same time you’re operating in ambiguity, looking for specific strengths and identifying weaknesses in your recruits that will allow both the recruit and the client to grow. You’re making an informed judgment call.

www.staffingtalk.com

Working with Recruiters

Working with recruiters is the next best thing to working with hiring managers. Recruitment professionals know their clients and they pride themselves on knowing their candidates in the hopes of making the right connections. In order to make this happen there are a few things you need to know:

TELL THEM EVERYTHING:
When building a relationship with a recruiter, this is no time to be shy. Recruiters need to know everything there is to know about you and what you are looking for in your career, i.e. salary, perks, specific employers, etc. Building an effective relationship with a professional recruiter starts with trust and honesty, so be forthcoming with your requests.

FIND OUT EVERYTHING:
Relationships are a two way street. When working with a professional recruiter you need to know as much about them as it relates to their capabilities and ability to help you secure employment. Do a thorough background check on the recruiter and/or the company. Review all the social networking sites where the recruiter does business and if they do not recruit via these new mediums, be aware; it might mean that they are not keeping up with workforce trends and new recruiting practices.

COMMUNICATE OFTEN:
Unfortunately securing a recruitment professional does not mean you will secure employment immediately. There can be a lot of waiting involved. Sitting still and waiting for the phone to ring is not an option for you. You are part of the communication equation and you must take an active role in all aspects of your career.
Approach your job hunt like you already have a job. If you see something online, hear about it on a website, see it on the news – contact your recruitment professional and collaborate with them on a game plan. Good recruiters are savvy and well connected, like real estate agents. They tend to know where all the hot properties are. However, they can not be everywhere, so the more hands they can have working in your favor the better.

BE REALISTIC:
Understand that you are not the recruiters’ only client. Schedule standing meetings no matter how short; just get them on the calendar. Recruiters understand your urgency however they have other clients asking for the same things. Work with your recruitment professional to set realistic goals that are effective and actionable.

http://www.recruiter.com/

The War for Talent Is Returning; Don’t Get Caught Unprepared

Here is a heads-up alert for you: be prepared because not only will the infamous “War For Talent” be returning to impact your firm, but it is already underway in its full intensity here in the Silicon Valley. Begin planning for this next round of talent wars, because once the intense competition begins, there simply won’t be time to catch up with, no less get ahead of your talent competition. If you’re not familiar with the “war for talent” phenomena, it involves a prolonged period of intense competition where top applicants are both scarce and arrogant, employees leave by the droves, firms regularly raid each other for talent, and bidding for top talent is commonplace.

If you have global contacts, you already know that not just in the Silicon Valley, but also in Australia, as well as parts of Canada, India, and China are already involved in the latest round of the “War for Talent.” Entire industries like social media, gaming, and oil/minerals are currently involved in a war for talent, as are top-rated firms like Facebook, Google, Apple, Zynga, and most startups in social media, mobile phones, medicine, and technology. Here in the Silicon Valley, talent competition has already returned to near 1999 levels. For example, recently a recruiting firm sent 150 cookie baskets directly to key employees at Zynga, the social game developer. They didn’t send them to their home, but directly into the office where they could provide the maximum impact by creating a buzz and letting every employee learn that outside firms wanted them. Winning a war requires bold action not conservatism.

Examples of How Boldness Is Required in a War for Talent  

Here are a few of many examples on how firms have stretched the limits of talent management in order to remain competitive.

• Match this referral bonus - DNAnexus, a Silicon Valley sequence storage and analysis firm, offered a $20,000 referral bonus for successful referrals for the relatively common job of software engineer.  They also threw in a full genome sequence for the employee as an added bonus.
• Low tech drive-by recruiting – Zspacer, a cloud security firm, drove a van with a “we are hiring” banner continually around the building of its “target” competitor, Blue Coat, in order to entice the competitor’s employees into leaving.
• Turn a job into a game – most people like playing games and competing, so turning a cashier’s mundane job into a competitive game with a score (gamification) can make it more fun. While at the same time, an employee can know how well they are doing as an individual and compare to others.  This new “personal leaderboard” process at retailer Target has been reported to have resulted in increased cashier efficiency, lowered checkout times, and increased employee morale.
• The death of the cubicle - rather than employees having offices, the Silicon Valley has been the home of the cubicle. But once firms like Google and Facebook found that cubicles reduce interaction and collaboration between employees (both of which are required for innovation), they took steps to eliminate them and replaced them with an open space arrangement for the team. Google goes even a step further and now offers “standing desks” (like a counter where the employee stands instead of sits), which dramatically increases the number of interactions, while also being healthy for employees.
• Free beer for life – the Silicon Valley startup Hipster offered new hires $10,000, a lifetime supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon, “authentic” skinny jeans, striped bowties, and a pair of Buddy Holly glasses. A little weird, but innovators like weird.
• Interview live from anywhere – most interviews take forever to schedule because they require travel to your site.  This new iphone app from HireVue allows candidates to interview from anywhere at anytime, using their mobile phone or iPad.  Now almost every candidate and manager can find time for an interview. 

Why Should I Be Concerned About This War for Talent?

An analogy between police weapons and military weapons might help you understand why a war for talent requires completely different tools and preparation. Consider the work environment of a policeman. It is a difficult and sometimes a dangerous job but the tools and strategies required to do the job are relatively basic (i.e. equivalent to normal recruiting, retention, and talent management). However, when you’re facing a real war, a policeman would be outgunned. Instead, soldiers with sophisticated equipment and strategies would be required. The tools that they would need in order to win the battle would have to be two or three times more sophisticated than those of a policeman.

The same is true when you’re in a war for talent. You need to overhaul everything and develop completely different and much more powerful talent management tools, strategies, and approaches. You may even need a completely different team of talent management professionals. To make matters more difficult in this current round of the war for talent, the recent growth of social media and the mobile platform now requires the creation of talent management tools that have never existed before. This upcoming “war” will be even more ferocious than the last because of the recent litigation and government actions to eliminate informal “no-poaching” agreements between firms. Firms that in the past have been your “friends” will now be encouraged to raid your employees continually.

Action Steps to Take to Get on a “War Footing”

Now is the appropriate time to begin preparing for this next war for talent. In order to be prepared, you will definitely need to revise your talent management strategy and you will certainly need more than a handful of new tools. The battle will require sophisticated recruiting, powerful onboarding, superior retention, predictive metrics, exciting training, and a leadership development program that can replace lost leaders rapidly. You will also need to develop a competitive analysis function to stay ahead of your competitors and a market research function in order to better understand the changing expectations of your target talent. You may even need new talent management leaders who are agile, who learn fast, and who know how to operate under “wartime conditions.”  It requires a different breed and many on your staff may not be ready for it.

There Won’t Be Much Advance Warning Before This Power Shifts to Employees and Applicants

Obviously you won’t receive a formal announcement, so unfortunately, by the time you realize that you’re actually involved in a war for talent, it may be too late. You simply won’t have time in the midst of the battle to renew your strategy, your staff, and your talent management approaches. Things that you have taken for granted over recent years like a high applicant flow, complacent candidates, and low turnover may completely turnaround in a few months. Workers who have recently demanded security will shift their expectations to include challenge, innovation, development opportunities, and an opportunity for wealth through stock options. And unless you have good metrics, you won’t realize until months afterward that the changes have occurred.

But it Seems Calm Now Where I Work!

If you work in nowhere, smaller town, USA, for example, you might think that this author is crazy because the high unemployment rates where you are means that candidates are still begging for jobs in your town. But you should also be aware that if you had been a talent manager in the mineral-rich areas of Montana, Alberta Canada, or Western Australia, you too at one time had little difficulty finding skilled labor. That is until all of a sudden, you experienced a dramatic shift in the competition for labor. You may not see the war for talent appearing at your doorstep for a longer period of time if your firm trains its own workers or if you hire mostly hourly workers with basic skills. However, if any part of your operation requires technologists, mathematicians, scientists, or experts in monetization or social media, you’ll soon find that your current approaches to talent management will become ineffective. And as unemployment rates continue to drop and the housing/mortgage crisis subsides, finding top talent will become difficult everywhere.

What Are the Foundation Causes of a War for Talent?

A war for talent is a relatively recent phenomenon because in the past, finding and applying for jobs was a slow paper- and mail-driven process. But now that almost anyone can be found on the Internet and interested people can find and apply for dozens of jobs within an hour, fighting over talent has become common. These “war conditions” occur when there is continuous rapid change in the marketplace due to intense competition. And as a result, employee skills need to be updated continually. In this situation, the shortage is not the number of people available (there may be many) but the number who have the required advanced skill sets. So, a war for talent is a skills shortage not a people shortage. For example, today if you need advanced skills in technology, oil and minerals, medical research, and social media you are likely to find plenty of labor available (due to high unemployment rates) but finding people with the right skills, in the right location with right performance levels for these critical jobs may be a continuous battle.

Final Thoughts

Many of the professionals who currently work in talent management were not in the field when the original war for talent occurred during 1999 and 2000. To those and others that may have forgotten what it was like, remember that even though talent management received a great deal of attention and boatloads of money, it was not a good time.  If you weren’t prepared, days were long and hectic and even with unlimited resources, it was a struggle to hire and retain even mediocre workers. If you don’t think the war for talent can be stressful and even ugly, connect with someone on your network who worked at Cisco, HP, or Intel during the late 90s or today at Zynga, Facebook, or Twitter.

Like it or not, the war for talent is returning and it is already at ferocious levels in the Silicon Valley and in other high-growth areas around the world. These tremendous differentials in talent demand between different business units and regions may even force large global firms to adopt a dual talent management strategy — one where you simultaneously manage for both slow and fast growth at the same time. So if you skip over this warning, please remember later on that you read it here, when there was still time to prepare.

by Dr. John Sullivan

4 Ways to Better Manage Gen-Y

By now the lower ranks of the proverbial corporate ladder have been completely taken over by Generation-Y, a group of people roughly between the ages of 18 and 29 years. Much has been made about the unique characteristics that define this generation, from their constant need to be connected, to their rather conservative perspective on the market. Just like the generations before them, there is also well-documented tension between Gen-Y and their older counterparts. Gen-Y is often perceived by some as being lazy, having a sense of entitlement and lacking in social skills. Regardless of your position, the simple fact is that soon this generation will assume the responsibility of middle-upper management, and their performance will largely determine the success of our economy in the next few decades.

According to Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, Gen-Y will make up approximately 75% of the global workforce by 2025! So there is incentive to better understand and prepare young professionals for the next steps in their career (As well as incentive to maximize their productivity in the workplace today!). With that said, here are four ways that you can be a better manager to your Generation-Y employees.

1. Make them feel like they have an impact on your business

Gen-Y wants to be a part of something, and they don’t want to wait 10 years until they are able to do it. Now certainly, this doesn’t mean that every entry-level employee should be given control of the budget or allowed to make strategic decisions for the company. However, there are small things that you can do as a manager that will go a long way in both developing them as leaders and maximizing their productivity. Give them the autonomy to make basic decisions on non-critical components of a project. Create an environment where they are comfortable with and encouraged to share their thoughts and opinions. Even if those opinions aren’t acted on, the sense that their contribution is valued will make them more productive for your company.

2. Build loyalty in smaller doses

Let’s face it, corporate loyalty is almost something that can be taught in a high school history class. Gone are the days of pension programs and employees beginning and ending a career at the same company. Gen-Y workers simply aren’t motivated by traditional means such as higher salary (Of course they are motivated by money, but there are other factors that are considered by them, such as growth opportunity, freedom of social media access and job security). Many companies have unrealistic expectations about corporate loyalty, where the employee is expected to associate with the brand name first and their co-workers second. Gen-Y employees are far more loyal to their immediate co-workers and superiors than to the brand they serve. As a manager even of a small group, create a culture of teamwork, recognition and growth, and you will find your employees far more satisfied, and much less likely to jump ship.

3. Set a clear success path for employees to grow within the company

This one goes hand in hand with building loyalty. Gen-Y employees do not feel loyal to corporations, because they don’t believe that corporations are loyal to them. They came of age during one of the worst economic time periods in our nation’s history, and they have seen their parents and other adult role models let go from companies that they had been ‘loyal’ to for a number of years. In their minds, that loyalty isn’t reciprocated, and their experience in a down economy has taught them to look out for themselves. To this end, members of Gen-Y change their first jobs after just over 2 years! Still, despite Gen-Y’s pessimism, many would prefer to stay with their organizations and grow. They leave because they feel like they have no other choice. So when onboarding Gen-Y new-hires, work with them to determine their career goals, and develop a pathway for them to reach those goals. Designate specific milestones and metrics that will help them to move their way up the ladder and not feel as though they have to leave in order to advance their careers.

4. Embrace their way of doing things

Gen-Y is inherently different from Gen-X and the Baby Boomers. They are a results-driven group, and don’t enjoy the confines of a 9-5 work day. That may draw criticism, but they are ready and willing to work nights and weekends to get their work done. They may be connected to the Internet and social media almost too much, which may lead to distraction at the work place, but it also has given them an unmatched network of information, and they are able to conduct research at light speed when compared to prior generations. Clearly, there is a balance, but by harnessing the characteristics of Gen-Y, you will give them a sense of purpose and value while at the same time improving your business’ success.

Dan Schawbel is the Founder of Millennial Branding, a Gen-Y research and management consulting firm. He is the author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.

Photo credit: inBlubs.com

7 Ways to Identify the Perfect Candidate

Your business will rise and fall on the quality of your employees.

Yet, the hiring process can make it difficult to find the right person for the job. If you’re not sure what look for, you can wind up with a candidate that seems perfect but, in reality, can’t do the job well.

You can go with your gut, but your gut has a much greater margin of error than the facts.
Here are seven tips to help you separate the gold from the dross:

Start by truly understanding the job. Know what experience, knowledge, and skills are essential to the position. This includes both “hard” requirements like a bachelor’s degree in economics or a CDL license, but it also includes harder-to-measure requirements such as professionalism and the ability to interact with vendors or clients.

Eliminate candidates that don’t meet the job’s hard requirements first. There’s a good chance that the ambitious genius who dropped out of business school after two years could indeed bring your company to the top of your industry. There’s also a chance that he’s not particularly motivated and will try to get by doing as little as possible. It’s an employer’s market right now, so you have the luxury of filtering out applicants that don’t meet the job’s basic requirements.

Take a closer look at those candidates who provide consistent results. A candidate that claims to have “developed a project tracking system that improved the company’s time to production by 20%” is a better potential candidate than the one who claims to have “worked in project management.” You want candidates that have provided consistent results. Perhaps moreover, you want candidates who are results-aware, and will do what they can to help your company experience results, too.

Narrow the field to a dozen applicants, and then pass them around to others in your organization. If you have time, get input from other managers about those candidates’ resumes. Pull your team together and go through the resumes one at a time. You’ll be surprised just how many warning flags you may have missed that your team or that other managers might be able to identify. This process should reduce your stack by another 50% or so.

Develop a truly useful interview process. The interview process favors candidates who have the ability to sell themselves. You need to find ways to also award candidates who may do a stellar job, but who don’t have the tongue for self-promotion. One way to do this is by working through sample scenarios.

Discuss an actual problem faced in your department recently, and ask the candidate how they would address the problem. You’re not looking for line-by-line solutions; rather, you’re looking for fluency in your field and you’re looking for an effective problem-solving approach from the candidate.
Consider a multi-level and multi-stage interview. You need to get a feel for how the candidate will function as a part of your team, so you need to give them the opportunity to meet the team. This also lets you have an opportunity to get feedback from the team as to the candidate’s appropriateness. And, while your boss may not have many dealings with the candidate on a day-to-day basis, getting his impression of the candidate can help.

Be diligent about references and background checks. There’s only so much you can get from a reference. Many former employers will be hesitant to say more than whether or not the individual was actually employed there. In some cases, you might ask the candidate to provide letters of reference. Background checks serve an equally important purpose. In some industries, the background check may be an absolute necessity for compliance reasons, too.

The recruiting and subsequent interview processes aren’t perfect. There will be times when a candidate looks and feels right, but in the end they just don’t perform. When that happens, you need to be ready to let them go and start from scratch.

By following these principles, however, you’ll reduce the chance of that happening.
Written by Dominick Frasso
www.staffingtalk.com

Why Recruiting Looks Easy

There is an absolutely wonderful children’s book called 20 Heartbeats about a painter who paints a horse for a very wealthy man. I hate to ruin it for you, but I have to say what happens.

The rich man pays this famous painter to paint his favorite horse. But years go by and the painter won’t finish the painting. The rich man finally shows up at the painter’s house and demands the painting. The painter obligingly whips out a piece of parchment, dashes off a horse in black ink with his brush, and then hands the painting to the rich man. All this takes less than the time of 20 heartbeats.

The rich man is, of course, aghast. He storms after the painter to demand his money back. However, as he walks after the painter, he sees what has been taking so long.

All along the walls are hundreds and hundreds of painted horses. The painter wasn’t procrastinating, he was practicing. The rich man then finally takes a look at the painting that he purchased so long ago, now in his hands. It’s a perfect horse, a horse so real that he whistles to it.

As every art form takes discipline and practice to look easy, every kind of work takes years of diligence to perfect. Recruiting is no different, but few professions look so simple. It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper, right? You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves, “Yeah, I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.

The end product of recruiting, for one thing, is someone’s else’s work – it is someone else’s talent, ability to interview, and everything else they have that gets them hired that is the end product of the recruiter’s process. It’s hard to pinpoint the recruiter’s exact role in this pseudo-science. Did they identify the talent? Spot them? Find them? Assess them? Understand the job? The culture? Have the right database? The right connections? The right insight into the department or hiring manager psychology? Did they make a lot of calls or know some secret strings to search for in Google? It’s hard to say what it is exactly that the recruiter does and so it’s easy to discount the recruiter’s role entirely.

However, we might be looking at it wrong. A recruiter’s value can’t be found within the process of a single hire. It can’t be found in that space that sometimes spans twenty heartbeats between talking to a manager about a job to the identification of a possible talent.

You have to look at everything that comes before that identification to see the value of a good recruiter. A great recruiter creates the conditions for that magic luck to strike. They don’t talk to a lot of different people. They talk to everyone. They don’t want to know their clients or their company’s competitors. They want to know everything that’s happening at every company in their area. It’s a massive amount of work that requires constant rejection, failure, stress, and is compounded by the minutiae of job offers and the uncertainty of human emotion.

That’s why very few succeed at recruiting. It’s not like there is anything special about that one placement. There is nothing about identifying a candidate and getting them a job offer that requires any particular kind of magic, or even a college degree for that matter. Unlike a beautiful painting, anyone or any recruiter can luck out and make a placement or two. But the background required for long-term recruiting success is much different. It involves the deep study of companies, products, markets, assessment, and professions coupled with a kind of brute force stamina to doggedly pursue the talents of other people. This is the process that forges the recruiter’s talent. This talent, when functioning at its best, is impossible to find.

Article from Recruiter.com