Advocating for the Overqualified: Tips for HR Managers on Combatting Age Bias in the Workplace
As companies focus on building diverse and inclusive work environments, one often overlooked area is diversity of age. Many companies struggle with effectively recruiting, developing, and retaining employees across generations. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Unfounded assumptions about age and ability continue to drive age discrimination in the workplace."...
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Why You Should Think Like a Salesperson When Hunting for a New Job
The art of sales and the art of securing a job aren't all that different. Both center on your ability to hold a meaningful, mutually beneficial conversation. Both also have reputations for one-sidedness. Salespeople and hiring managers are often seen as prize-grabbing characters trying to get what they want while offering little in return. That couldn't be further from the truth: Both...
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8 Best Practices for Stronger Skip-Level Meetings
Defined as meetings between an organizational leader and a lower-level employee who does not report directly to that leader, skip-level meetings give executives the opportunity to get to know the people in their companies better. As such, these meetings are particularly helpful in resolving organizational issues, increasing engagement, and gaining new perspectives and insights. Like any...
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4 Quick Fixes to Improve Your Quality of Hire
When it comes to the success of your organization, nothing is more important than talent. A business lives and dies by the quality of its hires. If you're struggling to hire the caliber of candidate you'd like to have in your organization, you're facing a serious problem. What can you do to bring in the top-tier candidates you want and deserve? It all comes down to your hiring process. A...
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Confessions of a Corporate Talent Acquisition Leader: Should I Stay or Should I RPO?
It's one of the hottest topics in corporate right now: Do we build an internal recruiting team or outsource it? The answer is not a simple yes or no. It really depends. Many factors contribute to recruitment. Some organizations assess the cost of recruitment through the utilization of recruitment agency outfits and decide to build out a recruitment function. Others may have different...
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Are You at Risk of Making a Bad Hiring Decision?
According to the US Department of Labor, making a bad hire can cost you — 30 percent of the employee's salary, to be specific, although that number can easily climb depending on position, seniority, and industry. This is an astonishing price that can have a massive impact on businesses of all sizes, yet many companies are still at risk of making bad hiring decisions. In part, that's...
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Do You Have the Language You Need to Describe Your Company Culture?
Could you accurately and succinctly describe your company culture right now? If you asked a sampling of random employees the same question, would you get consistent answers? For many organizations, the answer to these questions is no. Organizational culture is often vaguely defined and poorly communicated. Even if your company has a great culture, you may not know how to articulate that...
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A Successful Merger Requires a Universal Understanding of Shared Values
Mergers and acquisitions too often start on the wrong foot because your workers, uncertain of how changes will affect them, are in self-protection mode, prone to seeing what's missing. This attitude will lead to making circumstances and/or people "wrong." The disease of wrong will turn your merger into a them-against-us proposition that drains productivity and replaces it with the political...
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New Research Highlights Generational Divides — and Overlaps — in Attracting, Retaining, and Engaging Employees
A decade ago, unemployment spiked to 10 percent, its highest level since 1983. Today, it's below 4 percent. This is by and large great news, but it does mean employers need to work harder to attract and retain talent. However, the tight labor market is just one challenge facing business leaders, HR professionals, and recruiters. These individuals must also contend with the fact that...
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5 Key Things New Recruiters Should Know
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Today's Question: What is one thing new recruiters should know to better position themselves for success? The answers below are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization of the world's most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members...
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Your Recruiters Don't Know Their Why
Recruiters can, and should, provide a great experience for the candidate. But very often, recruiters' attitudes don't match the organizations they represent. I've met plenty of recruiters with little to no interest in enhancing their emotional intelligence (EQ). In short, they don't know why they are doing their jobs. They've lost their way in terms of how their identity relates to the work...
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Make Your Side Hustle Worth Every Minute With These 5 Principles
From driving for a rideshare company or tutoring online to reselling items on eCommerce sites or working at a local coffee shop, there are plenty of side hustles to earn extra money in the gig economy. However, all these side hustles take energy, focus, and time away from other things, such as leisure or time with loved ones. You may be hustling to grow your savings, to get out of debt, or...
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Stand Out to Top Talent With These Social Recruiting Best Practices
With the US unemployment rate hovering around 3.7 percent, recruiters today are tasked with the challenge of sourcing talent in a highly competitive, candidate-driven market. To successfully source and attract candidates in this difficult environment, recruiters must make the most of the resources available to them. Social media is one of those resources. According to a SHRM survey, 84...
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How Quantum Mechanics Can Help You Turn Job Hopping Employees Into an Asset
Many executives might view the job-hopping reputation of millennials as a cause for frustration. When they look at the issue, these executives mainly see the high costs of employee turnover. But there is another side of the coin: Millennials are more savvy than past generations when it comes to seeking job opportunities that they find rewarding. Executives of best-in-class companies...
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Sales Reps Say These 3 Benefits Trump Salary
Money, money, money! It's on every top sales rep's mind, right? While money is an important factor for sales reps — their hard work directly determines their paycheck's size — it isn't necessarily the most important factor they consider when weighing job opportunities. As a result, making salary the only focus of your recruitment pitches could leave you with a dried up talent...
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How to Make Your Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Really Count
Diversity and inclusion (DI) needs to be a top priority for businesses today. Aside from the moral imperative to create more equitable and progressive workplaces, diverse companies, simply put, make more money: Companies with more diverse management teams have 19 percent higher revenue, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group. But let's be real. Despite the best...
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Without an Effective Onboarding Process, Even the Best Hires Are Doomed to Fail
Finding top talent is vital to an organization's growth, but even the best hires can go south without an effective onboarding process in place. Without quality onboarding, companies set themselves up for a whole host of problems, including lower retention rates, lower engagement, a weaker company culture, lower performance, increased costs, and decreased revenue. On the flip side, a...
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Confront Microaggressions at Work Before They Destroy Employee Morale
You would be forgiven for thinking of microaggressions as a relatively new concept, but the term was first coined in the 1970s by Harvard professor Chester M. Pierce, and the topic has been the subject of more than 5,000 academic studies over the past decade alone. Despite all the research, a great deal of confusion still surrounds the concept of microaggressions, and the topic certainly...
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The 3 Keys to a Successful, Sustainable Career in IT
The current mantra is, "Everyone should learn to code." The problem is most people interpret that to mean "Everyone should become a programmer." Like many professions, programming takes a certain combination of talent and skills that not everyone possesses. For example, when I (Cal) was younger, I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar. My parents bought me one, and I started to take...
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5 Ways to Thoroughly Vet Candidates Without Being Too Stringent
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Today's Question: What is the best way to weed out unqualified candidates without being so stringent that you lose out on talented people who don't check every box? The answers below are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization of the world's...
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Be Yourself: 5 Principles for Creating a Company Culture Around Your Organization's Unique Values
Today, company culture is a major factor in attracting and retaining the right employees. To differentiate themselves in the eyes of workers, many companies are investing heavily in efforts to create engaging work environments. For inspiration, employers often look to companies like Netflix, Google, and Zappos, all of which have reputations as exciting, highly desirable work...
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What Makes Mergers and Acquisitions Fail? Culture.
Some of the most intriguing stories in business media are about mergers and acquisitions (MAs). Unlike your average corporate news story, reports of MAs — like telenovelas — exude a sense of drama. Who will be in charge? Will they live happily ever after? Who will leave, and who will remain? There's no shortage of material to cover, either. By September of last year, MA...
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Coping With the Stress of a Job Search When You're Newly Sober
Looking for a job can be stressful for anyone. For those who may be fresh out of rehab for drug and alcohol addictions, the same stresses that every job seeker faces can be amplified by still other stressors unique to early recovery from substance abuse. For example, financial concerns about not being able to pay the bills and provide for one's family are common among job seekers. For...
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Stop Sabotaging Yourself: 13 Things to Stop Doing If You Want to Be More Productive
Consider an average eight-hour workday. How much of that time do you actually spend working? If you're like the average person, it's probably less than three hours a day. Yes, you read that right: The average office worker spends less than three hours in an eight-hour shift doing anything productive. For the most part, they're fighting distractions, combing through inboxes, and chatting...
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Contractors Are People Too: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Using Freelancers
Your contractors may not be employees, but if you don't treat them well, your company could suffer long-term consequences. You treat your vendors and full-time workers with respect, so why not include freelancers in that treatment? Moreover, you should consider the power freelancers have to help (or harm) your reputation. Great freelancers frequently talk to their professional circles...
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Don't Be That Employer: 4 Steps to Better Employer Branding
Eventually, every startup reaches a pivotal point in the life of the business when it becomes imperative to ask: "Should we grow, or should we scale back?" If you decide to scale back and keep doing it the way you've been doing it, more power to you. It is commendable to want to keep your business as manageable as possible on your terms. But if you decide to grow your business, you...
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Looking to Join a Recruiting Firm? Ask These 6 Questions First
Recruiting is a rewarding and profitable career choice, and joining the right recruiting firm can bring you a lifetime of opportunities and success. On the other hand, working for the wrong recruiting firm can quickly derail your career and severely damage your earning potential. If you're on the hunt for a new recruiting firm to join, you have to carefully research your options to ensure...
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Overcoming HR's Engagement Barrier: A Simple Formula for Effective Internal Communication
Every day in HR departments, failures of communication and engagement stymie our best efforts to be the conscience of the organization. The benefits, programs, and support we strive to offer fall on deaf ears or never reach their intended audiences. We can capture this dilemma with a formula from the Six Sigma world: Quality x Acceptance = Effectiveness (Q x A = E) "Quality" refers to...
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Don't Lose the Offer: How to Manage Multiple Executive Job Offers Without Burning Bridges
Getting the chance to consider multiple high-quality opportunities is the Holy Grail for a candidate in an executive job search. While figuring out how to manage multiple offers is a great problem to have, it is nonetheless a problem in the employment market. Candidates may feel great stress as they try to settle on the best job at the right salary among competing professional...
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Get Your Job Ads to Rank on Google With These SEO Tactics
When employers post job ads, they have high hopes they will attract qualified applicants. However, that does not always happen. Often, unqualified job seekers will apply without even understanding the role. There are even instances, although rare, where the employer doesn't receive a single application at all. Finding the right candidates in the job market isn't just a matter of asking...
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The Interview Starts With the Job Ad: Best Practices for a Truly Effective Interview Process
Roughly 46 percent of new hires fail within their first 18 months on the job. It's not always because you hired in the job market someone who couldn't do the job. Often, it's because you hired someone who wasn't the right fit. How can you determine whether your candidate is a good match for the role beyond a simple hard-skills match? Reexamine your interview process. Interviewing...
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To Make Good Hiring Decisions, Let Your Instincts Guide You
Once your business is no longer operating as a solo endeavor, having the right people in place matters more than almost anything else. Which position will you hire for first? Why? How will you find the right person? I've always believed in hiring people who have the right skills. They may or may not have held the same position, but the people you hire need to have a reputation for...
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14 Things You Should Never Say to an Interviewer
Who among us hasn't had the experience: You walk into an interview for a job you really want, sit down in a chair, and immediately start saying things you regret. So much hinges on what you say in the job interview — and unfortunately, it's all to easy to let that pressure get to you. No matter how calm, cool, and collected you might be the rest of the time, job interviews are uniquely...
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Financial Services Companies: Here's Where to Find the Talent You Need
New site selection research from my firm, The Boyd Company, Inc., has identified the top 20 cities for the financial services industry when it comes to expanding and hiring. Key qualifying factors in the survey include the availability of skill sets in banking and financial services, the ability to locally recruit graduating finance majors, comparative office operating costs, and a new...
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Engagement Worth Reading About: 3 Behavioral Design Principles for a More Motivated, Productive Workforce
It feels like half the stories on workplace trends lately have been about some form of employee engagement: "Create an Enjoyable Work Culture." "Giving Employees the Meaning They Need." "A Guide to Engaging and Motivating and Making Everyone Happy, Productive, Rich, and Not Checking Facebook All Day." There are a lot of interesting ideas out there, but I'm struck by how many of these...
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5 Reasons Why You Should Start Hiring People Who Are Better Than You
The hiring process can be a humbling one if you're looking to build a strong, trustworthy team. Business leaders and owners are often tasked with vetting and onboarding new leadership team members, but workplace competitiveness can often complicate the process. While a healthy company culture generally prioritizes the work of the team over any one individual, a certain level of competition...
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So You Made a Mistake at Work. Here's How to Fix It.
We all make mistakes. It's inevitable. But owning up to a blunder at work isn't always easy. "I think it's hard because to admit that you're wrong is not something that's comfortable for most people, especially in a situation like work where the stakes can be really high," says workplace expert Alexandra Levit, author of They Don't Teach Corporate in College. "Your first instinct is to...
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5 Lessons Recruiters Can Learn From College Football
There's something about the sound of a stadium full of fans cheering on their teams, the band playing in the background, that makes college football so exciting. As the season kicks off, that means fall is right around the corner, Saturdays are dedicated to watching games, and you have new hope for your favorite team to beat its opponents. As a fan, I am particularly fascinated by how the...
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Multiple Internships Give Job Seekers the Edge — Here's Why That Matters to Candidates, Recruiters, and Employers:
At a variety of conferences and meetings of career centers over the past few years, colleges and universities have expressed their plans to invest in new internship programs and increase the sizes of the programs they offer. At higher education institutions across the country, students are being encouraged to pursue internships to build experience, develop professional networks, and access...
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Retaining Younger Workers: What Can Millennials Tell Us About Lowering Gen. Z Turnover?
Millennials are three times more likely to leave their jobs than workers of previous generations, and as Generation Z begins to enter the workforce, many talent leaders are wondering if they will continue their predecessors' penchant for job hopping. It may be helpful, then, to examine the factors that have influenced millennial behavior and discern what they might tell us about how to...
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Is Text-Based Recruiting Taking the 'Human' out of 'Human Resources'?
A good first impression at a job interview used to consist of a polite smile, a firm handshake, and stylish business dress. Today, your first impression may be based solely on how well you reply to a recruiter's incoming text message. My advice? Go easy on the emojis. In a bid to save time, a new wave of recruiters are choosing to make initial contact with candidates by SMS text instead...
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Negative Feedback Loop: What to Do When You Are Criticized at Work
We all like to be praised, but when it comes to improving performance and progressing in your career, negative feedback may actually matter more. According to research conducted by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman of leadership development firm Zenger/Folkman, 92 percent of people agree that appropriately delivered negative feedback effectively improves performance. On a similar note, a...
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Employee Turnover: Can It Be a Good Thing?
First, a few caveats before you get too upset or excited about that title: There is never an excuse for ignoring the broader employee voice, especially when it is speaking about organizational challenges. There's never an excuse for mistreating employees. How employees feel at work matters to both your bottom line and to each individual life your organization employs. Turnover...
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In an Age of Ethical Business Dilemmas, Women Leaders Should Be in Higher Demand
As women, we're told to lean in, to be direct, to do our best, to ask for what we want, to establish strong networks, to depend on solid mentors — and then what? We'll rule the world, apparently. But let's face it: That's not happening. We're doing our best and yet, percentage-wise, very few of us are in the upper echelons of leadership. Less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies are...
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Is the 4-Day Workweek Really Feasible?
Moving to a four-day workweek sounds like a nice idea, but does it make business sense? There's little doubt that employees would enjoy better work/life balance, which could help reduce stress levels. Meanwhile, businesses could benefit from the increased productivity four-day workweeks may drive. But are these benefits enough to make up for losing a full day's work every week? Then...
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Leadership in a Digital World: 5 Tips on Managing Borderless Teams
Managing teams across time zones and languages is a complex feat, but now that 70 percent of workers around the world work remotely at least once a week, this mode of operating is quickly becoming the new normal. There are pros and cons to this development. Employing remote workers allows organizations to hire the best talent no matter where it happens to be located geographically. In...
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5 Simple Ways to Give Employee Morale and Job Satisfaction a Boost
We all know that high morale and job satisfaction drive excellent employee performance. What is more of a mystery is how to create a company culture that promotes the levels of morale and satisfaction that lead to high performance. The answer turns out to be simpler than you might think. If you follow these five tips, you should see improvements in morale, job satisfaction, and — by...
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11 Ways to Keep Overtime Costs Down
When it comes to the cost of doing business, labor takes the cake. Every business owner knows salaries are one of the most significant expenses on the spreadsheet, but each employee is worth more than a regular paycheck when you factor in insurance, hazard pay, health benefits, retirement, and more. Adding unnecessary overtime to the mix only pushes labor costs higher, and that bump...
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