7 Key Tips for Hiring the Best Sales Candidates
Hiring managers know that finding great salespeople is a huge challenge. Top sales candidates are certainly out there — but tracking them down is far easier said than done. Still, it's quite possible to staff your sales team with the best of the best. Just follow these seven tips: 1. Write an Attractive Job Ad One of the main ways to attract talented sales candidates is to craft an...
Read More
Applicant Rights: What Candidates Should Know About Employer Credit Checks
Background and credit checks are scary parts of the job application process. Even if you have no reason to fear what an employer might find, it's unsettling to have someone comb through your personal information. As a candidate, however, you should know you're not completely at the mercy of the employer in this situation. You have rights, and failure to respect those rights can land...
Read More
Challenging Assumptions: A Practical Guide to Innovation
I want to talk a little bit about Marvin Pipkin. When the World War I veteran returned to civilian life and joined General Electric (GE) in 1919, he was assigned the task of creating a lightbulb that was frosted on the inside. Unbeknownst to Pipkin, this assignment was a joke, a prank played on GE's new hires. Interior frosting was widely considered impossible. Pipkin, however, set...
Read More
Own Your Natural Talents: How to Identify and Embrace Your Strengths
We all have natural talents and abilities, but it can be hard to recognize and articulate just what they are. Instead, most people tend to focus on their weaknesses. That may be a natural compulsion, but wouldn't it make more sense to lean into your strengths instead of constantly get hung up on your weaknesses? Imagine you're sitting in a parent-teacher conference and the teacher tells...
Read More
Why No One Wants to Apply to Your Jobs — and What You Can Do About It
Imagine this: You have just posted a job ad for an exciting opportunity at a great company. You are confident it will attract more than enough candidates in the job market to fill your pipeline. So, you sit back and wait for the applications to roll in. But they never do. Your ad attracts barely a trickle of interested job seekers. As the days turn into weeks, your client starts...
Read More
Why Employers Cannot Afford to Ignore Workplace Rumors About Employee Relationships
Recent media coverage of the #MeToo movement has brought a heightened awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. As a result, employers may be more vulnerable to claims of sexual harassment by both their employees and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). According to an October 2018 press release from the EEOC, charges filed with the EEOC alleging sexual harassment...
Read More
Communication Style: The Most Important Job Qualification You're Ignoring
Personality and skill set are important in a new hire, but an even more a crucial factor in finding the right person may be communication style. It may not seem obvious, but the way an employee communicates can often be the most essential part of the position they fill. When trying to decide on the right candidate, it can be very helpful to match their communication style to the...
Read More
Mastering Mergers and Acquisitions: 4 Ways to Maintain Company Culture During Periods of Change
Merger and acquisition (MA) activity has developed an unfortunate reputation in the world of business. With all the moving parts involved in this complex process, it can feel more like a cycle of chaos and confusion than a time of growth and opportunity. Change can be a terrifyingly tricky phenomenon, especially in business. Proper maintenance of company culture and employee morale...
Read More
Fighting Organizational Complexity: 3 Steps to Simplify and Focus Your Work
Organizational complexity is strangling innovation, productivity, and engagement. Witnessed in the webs of matrixed structures and RACI maps, this complexity is fogging people's focus, keeping us from spending our time and energy on top strategic priorities. Instead, we get sucked into low-value, reactive busy work. We, individually, are the victims of complexity, but we are also...
Read More
The Hot Job Market Won't Last Forever
I cannot stress this enough: Today, the job market is excellent. It's the strongest we've seen in 50 years! There are more open jobs than people looking for them, and the unemployment rate has been sitting consistently under 4 percent. Despite all this, I keep running into a phenomenon that boggles my mind: Every day, I hear from people who hate their jobs but aren't ready to find new...
Read More
Are You Sure Your Management Skills Are Effective?
Whether you are new to managing or have been at it for years, it's worth periodically taking some time to reflect on whether your management skills are effective. Of course, that raises a serious question: How do you judge effectiveness in this instance? Relying on your results isn't quite enough. Management skills aren't just about results, but about the entire process. You may get the...
Read More
5 Red Flags of a Toxic Company Culture
Some workplaces are toxic because of a few bad eggs — a micromanaging superior, an overdramatic troublemaker, an overbearing manager, and so on. Others, however, are simply rotten to their core. They're not great places to work, and you'll quickly regret accepting the job offer. If you're in the market for a new job, you should be scrutinizing more than just compensation and benefits...
Read More
3 Reasons to Adopt Text-Based Recruiting Today
More businesses are hanging up on phone interviews and starting conversations with candidates via text message instead. From Silicon Valley tech businesses recruiting engineers to Midwest construction companies in need of welders, a wide variety of organizations are seeing better results when they trade phone screens for text message interviews. The switch to text-based recruiting may...
Read More
Get to Know Your Employees With This Purpose-Generating Tool
With every new hire, you hope that it will be a good match — and a lasting one. One way to ensure that happens is to get to know your employees as whole people. In my work for AARP, I helped create an innovative tool that allows your workforce to develop individualized purpose statements. These weren't simplistic statements like "My purpose is to be happy." Rather, we relied on the...
Read More
Stay-at-Home Moms: Here's How to Ease Back Into Your Career
Taking some time off from your career to raise your family can be extremely rewarding. Many stay-at-home moms and dads say they wouldn't have it any other way. Still, coming back to your career after several years away — maybe as your child goes off to school — can be challenging if you're unprepared. Wherever you are in the parenting journey, it is important to think about how you can...
Read More
It's Not How You Recruit, It's How You Onboard: 6 Ways Your Employee Experience Needs to Change
Nearly half of employers say it is taking them longer to fill jobs today than at any other period in the post-industrial era, and 60 percent of employers directly attribute this fact to a tough hiring environment, according to a 2018 survey by Harris Poll, SilkRoad Technology, and CareerBuilder. In a competitive market — where 51 percent of employees continue to apply to positions...
Read More
4 Ways AI Makes Recruiting More Human
It seems like we simply cannot stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI). AI has dominated the headlines over the last few years, and it has slowly become inescapable even in our personal lives. Gartner predicts 85 percent of all customer service interactions will involve chatbots by 2020. What's more, the research firm has even boldly forecasted that the average person will...
Read More
Evaluating Recruiting Technologies: 10 Features to Consider Before You Buy
People are the absolute bedrock of success at any company, and recruiting is an essential component of building that foundation. To make sure your company is finding the best talent, you need to be using the best tools. Nobody wants to lag behind the times. Given the rapid pace of technological innovation in the talent acquisition industry, it's a good idea to reevaluate the technologies...
Read More
Companies Suffering From Post-Recession Trauma Are Repelling All the Best Candidates
In the contemporary process of hiring and job searching, I've recently noticed a total lack of balance. I've also observed that a majority of companies are greatly dissatisfied with the quality of their candidates, yet they seem totally unaware of how their own behavior directly drives their dissatisfaction. Interviewing resume writer and thought leader Virginia Franco helped me...
Read More
How Your ATS Can Help — or Hurt — Your Recruitment Marketing
When most people talk about their "recruitment software ecosystems," they basically just mean their applicant tracking systems (ATSs). In the best situations, the ATS is just the beginning, and it is integrated with further layers of smart technology to make the recruiter's life easier. Often, however, that ecosystem is just a black box that magically spits out resumes based on a hiring...
Read More
5 Steps to Keeping Your Job Search Toolkit Up to Date
If you're on the hunt for a new position, you know how important your job search toolkit is to your success. The key components of your toolkit include updated documents (resume, cover letters, etc.), a polished online profile, and an extensive professional network. These pieces work together to give you the best shot at landing your next role. However, you shouldn't wait until you're...
Read More
5 Things CEOs Should Do During a Business Model Transformation
All businesses, even the most stalwart enterprises, operate in a sea of constant change. Lately, many firms have found themselves navigating complete business transformations. Whether brought on by digital disruption, economic shifts, mergers and consolidations, workforce upheaval, or other factors, business model transformations can be very choppy. So a The key is transforming the...
Read More
Underqualified? You May Want to Apply Anyway
Most people have had the experience of coming across a job they really want but are unqualified for. This is especially common when you are searching for your first job out of college or making a big career change. Think back to a time this happened to you: You read the ad and loved what you saw — but then you realized you didn't meet all of the requirements. Did that stop you from...
Read More
Anyone Can Find Good Employees — Why Hire a Recruiter?
Would you extract your own teeth with a garden tool? Would you legally represent yourself at a trial? Would you operate on your dog because you learned how to dissect a frog in biology 15 years ago and, hey, Fido will probably be just fine? If you answered yes to any of these questions and are not a qualified dentist, lawyer, or vet, then you, my friend, have delusions of grandeur and I am...
Read More
Three Futures, One Question: How Will HR Rise to the Challenge?
It's almost a cliché at this point, but it bears repeating: We live at a time of incredible, unstoppable disruption. New technologies and new economic, political, and social realities are combining to transform the way we live — and the role businesses play in our lives. People around the world now trust businesses more than they trust their governments, according to "Reimagining Human...
Read More
How to Get Inspired in Your Job Search When You're Out of Work
I was speaking with a business friend of mine, a CFO who had been out of work for several months due to a company reorganization. He was looking for advice on how to approach a job opportunity. It was a position in which he could hit the ground running and save the company a considerable amount of money. After the first interview with the COO, my friend was advised he would be brought...
Read More
How to Address 4 Major Corporate Training Mistakes
Even when you think your learning management system (LMS) is doing what it should, your LMS metrics can indicate unsatisfactory trends. The most obvious case is getting subpar user feedback, which is fairly common. In one survey, only 39 percent of respondents were highly satisfied with their LMSs' feature sets. Other signals may include low training completion rates, low frequency of...
Read More
If You Want to Get Hired Faster, Look for Ways to Be Different
As a recruiter, I've spoken with hundreds of job seekers. Along the way, I've noticed a pattern: Most people want to do what everyone else is doing. They don't want to stick their necks out, take big risks, or do anything "crazy." Here's the problem with this line of thought: Many companies get hundreds of applicants per job, and only about 10-20 of them will even get a phone screen. If...
Read More
7 Quick and Easy Resume Hacks You Need to Know
In an ideal world, we'd all have hours on end at our disposal to learn how to write a resume and tailor it to each position we apply for. In reality, nobody has that kind of time, so we have to strike a balance between working efficiently and creating attention-grabbing job application materials. Sometimes, the best option is to make use of simple solutions to get the job done as well as we...
Read More
3 Keys to Developing Daily Disciplines
Article by Todd Duncan Time is your greatest resource. If you struggle with managing it, you likely have not yet harnessed the power of daily disciplines. As the biblical book of Proverbs says, "He who neglects discipline despises himself." The most powerful decision you will ever make for your productivity is the choice to build rhythm and routine around doing what matters most. When...
Read More
Digital Optimism: How AI Will Put the 'Human' Back Into 'Human Resources' in 2019
In the war for talent, the field of human resources is the front line for innovation. To beat the competition and hire top-tier candidates, HR departments must leverage the right technology to get things done fast, while still retaining the human touch that is critical to recruiting and retention success. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, digital platforms...
Read More
10 Moments When a Career Coach Can Help
Over the years, career coaches have grown in popularity. Once seen as a luxury only top executives could afford, they are now thoroughly mainstream. The shifting perception of career coaches may have something to do with the increasing complexity of the workplace. Professionals are switching jobs more frequently, and companies are searching for ways to empower and retain their top...
Read More
Candidate Submission Response Time: The Roadkill of ATSs
Ask almost any recruiter what the most frustrating part of their job is, and they will likely tell you it is waiting for the hiring authority to get back to them with a decision on a candidate submission. As applicant tracking systems (ATSs), job boards, and other software solutions have automated more and more of the submission process, the greatest casualty has been the direct connection...
Read More
Here Are the Most Satisfying Jobs in America
The prevailing wisdom is that today's job seekers value work with a purpose over high pay. In fact, one study even found that most people would accept a 32 percent pay cut if it meant their work would be more meaningful. But as it turns out, "high pay or high satisfaction" is a false dichotomy. That's according to Glassdoor's new report on the 20 most satisfying jobs in America. Using...
Read More
Pro Tips to Encourage More Efficient Hiring Team Communication
In order for your company to attract top talent, everyone in the hiring process must work together through strong, open lines of communication. Without solid collaboration, the recruitment process is simply bound to fail. Below are some pro tips to help you bridge communication gaps on your hiring team and build a stronger, more efficient recruiting process: 1. Prioritize...
Read More
Volunteer PTO Is the New Raise
"Kindness is contagious." "You get more than you give." These age-old sayings are particularly appropriate today, given that more than 60 million Americans take time to volunteer at least once a year. Like most activities in which one has a personal interest, volunteering has historically taken place outside of work hours. However, that paradigm is starting to change, partially in...
Read More
4 Things Your Resume Can't Do
A great resume can further your career. The stronger it is, the more interviews you'll land. An excellent resume can even get you headhunted! However, no matter how good your resume is, it can't do all of the heavy lifting in the job search process. While it can make a fantastic first impression and provide employers with a detailed account of your career history, here are four things...
Read More
4 Tips for Your Small Business Job Interview
Believe it or not, small businesses accounted for two-thirds of all net new jobs in the US last year, according to data from the Small Business Administration. Working at a small business can provide numerous benefits, from the chance to take on a wider scope of projects to the opportunity to establish closer relationships with clients and vendors. If that sounds exciting, there is...
Read More
This Stakeholder Management Scorecard Can Help You Make the Best Hires
Securing talent is always a challenge, but for me, hiring for a startup is the most difficult type of hiring. You can explain to candidates until you're blue in the face that uncertainty is simply part of the game when your company is doing something brand new, but the reality of startup life still comes as a surprise to many once they've been hired. Startups, either by design or due to...
Read More
On the Verge of Another Recession, You Need to Recruit Passive Talent
It has been just about a decade since the Great Recession, but the repercussions are still palpable for many. Those who lost significant portions of their savings or were laid off are rightfully worried about history repeating itself, and as a result, they aren't willing to take the same kinds of risks they once did. Those fears may be justified: A great number of people are currently...
Read More
Who's Afraid of the On-Demand Workforce?
As the on-demand workforce balloons in size, it is changing the way organizations staff their companies and get critical tasks done. While there is much to be excited about — unparalleled flexibility, increased agility, lowered costs — the on-demand workforce can also induce a little anxiety in business leaders and HR pros, as any disruptive force naturally would. To get to the heart...
Read More
The Foundations of Executive Coaching: What to Expect for a Positive Coaching Experience
Executive coaching is unique among the various forms of developmental intervention employed in business in that it involves a highly customized methodology which, when successfully applied, can be transformational. It is also an intensive method that necessitates involving an outside professional, which is something that both the coach and you, the coachee, must understand for the process to...
Read More
As Retirement Dreams Drift Further Away, It May Be Time to Help Your Older Employees Decelerate
For years, a predicted wave of baby boomer retirements has been expected to destabilize the labor market. So far, that exodus has yet to come to fruition. Data from the Department of Labor shows that adults older than 55 made up nearly half of all the employment gains in 2018. That figure is especially impressive when you consider that baby boomers constituted only a quarter of the...
Read More
The 3 Keys to Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent in a Tight Labor Market
This year, Amazon will begin hiring for the first of 25,000 new jobs it is bringing to northern Virginia. This is a big win for the local economy, but this influx of open jobs in the midst of the tightest labor market in decades means DC-area companies will need to be more competitive than ever to recruit and retain top talent. An important rule in business is that if you want to sell a...
Read More
5 Things to Know Before You Make a Career Change
A successful career transition takes planning. You'll need to prove to an employer you have transferable skills that will help you be effective in a new role outside your previous career path. You'll also need to communicate why a career transition makes sense for you. If you're planning to make a transition soon or are in the middle of one now, here are a few things to keep in...
Read More
12 Ways to Customize Your Resume and Cover Letter
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Today's Question: What is the most important thing for applicants to customize in their cover letters or resumes? The answers below are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization of the world's most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members...
Read More
4 Ways Your Startup Can Compete in the Talent Big Leagues
Your startup is working on a breakthrough product that will make the world a better place — but heaven will have to wait, because you just can't seem to hire and retain the quality employees you need to bring your solution to market. I know this problem well, specifically when it comes to attracting developers. Competition for this segment of the talent market is fierce, and every...
Read More
The 6 Skills Your Workforce Needs to Weather Digital Transformation
Bleeding-edge digital tech like big data, artificial intelligence, automation, virtual reality, and augmented reality is transforming the workplace at a dizzying pace. Every day, it seems we hear news of some high-profile, labor-intensive process finally being streamlined — or even replaced completely — through slick automated systems. New technologies are opening the doors to new...
Read More
