Lonely, I'm So Lonely, I Have Nobody to Talk to at Work
There are a lot of things people don't tell you about leaving the nine-to-five grind to go into business for yourself. While being your own boss certainly has its advantages, you may find that you miss personal interactions with your coworkers. Whether you're freelancing or just worry about getting to close to your small staff, self-employment can be lonely work. 'Freelancing' Also Means...
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In Cybersecurity, Diverse Talent Is Key to Innovation
Following the Equifax breach, it should be abundantly clear that cybersecurity is now a concern for everyone – companies of all sizes and all industries, as well as individuals. The question is not whether your information is exposed, but what cybercriminals will do with it. Over the last few years, we have seen cybercrime shift more to targeting individuals, either for their private assets...
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Hiring Millennials 101
In an ever-changing world where technological advancement has become commonplace, organizations all around the world will depend on their ability to hire and attract talent. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are dominating the lucrative job market. In fact, Amazon is planning to employ roughly 50,000 people to work at their new massive headquarters. It's no secret that many...
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How to Avoid 'Pinball Syndrome'
Do you ever reach the end of the day and feel as though nothing of real value has been accomplished? When you don't avoid "Pinball Syndrome," you may find yourself struggling with the following: - You don't realize where you have ended up until it's too late. - You are so busy fighting fires, you spend no time preventing them. - You never beat the pinball game, and often end up feeling...
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To Win at Holiday Recruiting, Provide a Better Candidate Experience
This holiday season, Amazon will hire more than 120,000 temporary workers. Target is eyeing 100,000, UPS wants 95,000, and Macy's needs 80,000. The staffing industry counts on this hiring surge every year. The question is, how will you win that business? Why will candidates choose to work with you rather than your competitors? Recruiters win or lose holiday business based on the quality...
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To Recruit and Retain the Best Talent, Bring Work Closer to Home
Companies across the country face the same challenge: recruiting and retaining employees who possess the skills and talents their organizations need to succeed. While this is indeed an old problem, it has a new twist: Today, there are fewer skilled workers available, and the values of many of these workers differ from those of previous generations. When we at MannKind Corporation considered...
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6 Steps to a Professional Reinvention
If necessity is the mother of invention, misery might be the mother of reinvention. When you're not happy at work, that unhappiness can cloud not only your 9-5 workday, but also your evenings and weekends. Financial responsibilities may make it difficult to up and quit your job, but that doesn't mean you have to stay in an unsatisfying career. Follow these six steps below to reinvent...
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5 Recruitment Advertising Fails We Can All Learn From
Every job search comes with some hiccups. While you may be responsible for a few of those hiccups, others may be entirely the employer's fault. For example, have you ever read a job description and immediately thought to yourself, "What the heck did I just read? What are they looking for?" Let's take a look at five recruitment advertising fails we can all learn from – especially all the...
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5 Ways You Are Sabotaging Your Hiring Efforts
"People are not your most important asset. The right people are." – Jim Collins Whom you hire is the most important decision you make for your business. Throngs of entrepreneurs and CEOs attribute the success or failure of their businesses to the people within those businesses, including giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There is a reason why sayings like "Always hire people smarter...
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Connecting With Millennial Talent Isn't as Complicated as You're Making It
Despite what you may have heard, millennials aren't so different from previous generations. Sure, they have a strong tendency to put their foot down when they don't like something about their employer's business practices, but is that really so bad? Baby boomers will age out of the workforce over the next decade, while Generation X-ers will take on more executive roles. In order to keep...
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5 Ways to Communicate With Confidence
Communicating with confidence is the difference between telling your boss that you need the day off and asking if it would be possible to take the day off. While you shouldn't act self-righteous or disrespect your superiors, it is important to take charge and act on what you need. It can be a hard to communicate with confidence, especially if you aren't used to actively telling people how...
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6 Ways to Create a Better Candidate Experience
Why do some staffing firms struggle while others keep their candidate pipelines consistently filled with qualified talent? The answer lies in the candidate experience. Fostering a positive candidate experience is critical, as it translates to a positive working relationship and an improved reputation. If you want to improve the candidate experience, you need to assess every aspect of...
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The Future of the Independent Workforce Is the Future of Your Business
It has become quite common for businesses today to use independent workers to plug talent holes or scale up projects. Online talent marketplaces and staffing agencies make it easier than ever for businesses and freelancers to connect. Being a self-employed contract worker no longer carries the stigma it once did and is generally accepted as a reasonable career path. Nearly 6 in 10...
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Job Seekers: Pay Attention to Your Punctuation
Your words are incredibly powerful business tools that you use each and every day. This is especially true during your job search, what with all the interviews, cover letters, and resumes. It should come as no surprise that the punctuation surrounding your words in written communication is just as important as the words themselves. Even small things can have a big impact – like using the...
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Be Smart Enough to Ask the 'Stupid' Questions
A few days ago, I was sitting across from a top executive at a leading fashion retailer. He was lamenting the fact that the CEO always came back to the executive team during or right after the holidays with a three-page email about the company's direction and greater purpose. It wasn't that this exec didn't want to address those issues. Rather, he felt continually thwarted in his efforts...
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Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here Today to Say Goodbye to the Annual Performance Review
I've brought you all together today to pay our respects to our long-time friend and colleague, the annual performance review. Some of you may not even remember that prior to the annual review's arrival on the scene, employees had no chance to give feedback, and the concept of engaging employees hadn't even been invented yet. The annual performance review changed all that, and we shall ever be...
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Fair Pay, Flexibility, and Growth Opportunities Drive Engagement in 2017
The results of office snack delivery service Snacknation's latest State of Workplace Culture report aren't terribly surprising, but they're valuable nonetheless. Armed with concrete data on what drives engagement, HR pros can make stronger cases for smart engagement programs to their executive teams. Anyone who has been paying attention to workplace engagement trends in recent years has...
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Why You Should Build Your Core Values into Your Performance Management Process
The performance management process often gets a bad rap. In fact, only 55 percent of employees feel performance appraisals are effective. But it doesn't have to be this way. Performance management can be so much more than filling out paperwork and awkwardly chatting with employees once a year. By centering your performance management process around your company's core values, you can...
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Leaders, Do You Have a 'Traffic' Problem?
Recently, I came across a popular unattributed quote floating around online (in a meme, of course). It states, "You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic." It's a powerful comment on the tendency of people to remove themselves from blame in bad situations – and there's a business lesson to pull from this idea, too. Leaders, if something in your organization isn't working – whether...
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4 Steps to Better Brainstorming
At its best, brainstorming is an energizing conversation in which team members pool their unique strengths to generate exciting new ideas and solve complex challenges. All too often, however, these meetings result in frustration – lots of notes on flip charts, but no clear solutions to the challenges at hand. There are many reasons why a brainstorming might miss the mark. Fuzzy goals...
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Face Your Fear: How One Entrepreneur Learned to Scare the Pants Off Her Customers
Most people carve a jack-o'-lantern or hang a sheet-clad ghost from a tree around Halloween, but we all have that one neighbor who loves the spooky holiday so much they go way over the top. Melissa Carbone, founder of Ten Thirty One Productions (TTO) and the mastermind behind the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride, is that neighbor. "The hayride started out very organically as I got deeper into the...
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5 Tips for Hiring Seasonal Employees
As we usher in the fall, our thoughts turn to the upcoming holiday season and all the demands it brings along. Are you prepared for all of these challenges – including the need to recruit and onboard seasonal workers to help manage increased business? In many industries, seasonal supply and demand trends mean it's neither cost-effective nor practical to maintain a consistent payroll...
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4 Tips for Really Unplugging on Vacation
Article by Mark Royal These days, when work is just a phone call, email, or text away, "unwinding" and "unplugging" are no longer synonymous with "vacation." Technology, which makes connectivity possible in all but the most remote places, is only part of the problem. Thanks to globalization, vacations in one part of the world are treated as business as usual in others. Executives'...
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Is Your Workplace Leader a Psychopath?
When you hear the word "psychopath," what comes to mind? It probably involves images of terrifying murderers, horror movie villains, and the worst criminals who populate our prisons – all perfectly fitting for the Halloween spirit, right? In reality, psychopaths account for roughly 1 percent of the population, and being a psychopath isn't necessarily an indication that a person will...
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To Combat Veteran Underemployment, Let's Make the Transition Into the Civilian Workforce Smoother
Unemployment rates for veterans have been falling in recent years, declining from a high of close to 9 percent in 2010 to roughly 4 percent today. However, as the Military Times reports, many veterans still struggle with underemployment, especially those who belong to the post-9/11 generation of veterans. There are many factors contributing to the high number of underemployed...
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To Diversify Your Workplace, Diversify Your Job Posts
Diverse workers bring different viewpoints, ideas, and talents to the workforce, which drives innovation and breaks down cultural barriers between workers. The most gender diverse companies are 15 percent more likely to outperform the least gender diverse companies, according to McKinsey Company. For ethnically diverse companies, that number is 35 percent. While the benefits of...
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Nailing the Interview Process, Part 7: Sending Thank-You Notes
Some job seekers believe the interview is over once they've shaken the interviewer's hand and left the room. "That went well," they think. "Now, it's time to wait for the decision." Perhaps it did go well, but perhaps one or two other candidates also had stellar interviews. Perhaps those other candidates followed up on their interviews with thoughtful thank-you notes. So when is the...
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6 Online Talent Sources You Probably Aren't Leveraging (But Should)
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question on jobs data you'd like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter QA! Today's Question: Job boards, LinkedIn, maybe Facebook, maybe Twitter – chances are when you search for talent online, you're...
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The Recruiter's Guide to Content Marketing
Recruiters, how often have you heard one of these lines: "Sorry, but I'm really not interested." "No interest. Please refrain from contacting me in the future." "DO NOT CONTACT ME AGAIN." Even in the best of times, recruiters will deal with rejection from clients and candidates alike. No matter how well you craft that pitch or write that email, you're going to hear the sucker-punch of...
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Why You Should Hire Your Superconsumers
When I was a senior partner at a consulting firm, hiring was a huge deal regardless of whether it was an entry-level analyst position or the lateral hire of a partner from another consulting firm. Given that we had no real assets beyond people, hiring was more like an acquisition in terms of both positive impact and negative consequences. Over my two decades in consulting, it became clear...
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LinkedIn's 'Recruiter Dad' Is the Recruiting Parody You Didn't Know You Needed
Corporate recruiting: not a particularly funny business, is it? Sure, I could turn this into a meditation on the seriousness of recruiting or why "people are our most valuable asset," but I mean it quite literally: When was the last time you heard a recruiting joke that actually made you laugh? When was the last time you heard a recruiting joke at all? I've got good news for you,...
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I'm Interviewing With a Startup. What Should I Wear?
With casual dress codes becoming more common, especially among startups, many job seekers are wondering just what they should wear to their interviews. Luckily, the matter isn't as confusing as it may seem. Just follow a few simple steps: Look Up the Company Online Companies like Glassdoor allow employees to rate and comment on their employers, giving you an inside look at the company...
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Talent Insights: Taking a Look at LinkedIn's Latest HR Tool
On October 4th in Nashville, LinkedIn unveiled its latest human resources product offering: LinkedIn Talent Insights. While the product is aimed at talent professionals, it will most likely impact how you, the job seeker, experience the hiring process. Talent Insights aims to help HR departments and hiring managers better understand employment trends. It allows users to pull data about...
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During Your Meetings, Who Becomes the Smartest Person in the Room?
"I don't trust you, and I certainly don't value your opinion!" Is this a message you'd communicate to a vital team member upon whom you rely to make your organization succeed? Of course not, and neither would I. At least, that's what I thought until our COO, Jim, came storming into my office one day, red in the face. He pounded his fist on my desk. "Why do you always do that to...
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Get Pumped: 20 Ways to Boost Your Energy at Work
Uh-oh. Here it comes. The dreaded post-lunch crash. You're not going to get anything done for the rest of the day, are you? Of course you are! The one who stalled out regularly, who couldn't recover once your energy was gone for the day – that was the old you. The new you, on the other hand, knows exactly what to do when you feel yourself running out of steam. That's because the new...
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Having Trouble Converting Candidates to Hires? Here's What You Should Do:
Some of you reading this may remember when the primary way to get applicants was to place an ad in the local papers. If you were lucky, that would drive five or ten applications, including, hopefully, one legitimately qualified candidate. Skip forward a couple decades to now. Open positions are posted on dozens of job sites and may receive tens of thousands of views. Unfortunately, the...
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4 Mistake-Proof Ways to Set Your Hiring Team Up For Success
According to ManpowerGroup's 2016-2017 Talent Shortage Survey, 40 percent of employers globally are having difficulty filling positions. This is the biggest reported talent shortage since 2007. Many obstacles outside of a hiring team's control can impact the recruiting process, so it's crucial that hiring teams have the best of the best when it comes to resources within their...
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Guiding Staff to the Optimal 'Unconscious Competence' Performance Stage
Disengaged employees can negatively impact numerous company performance metrics, from customer satisfaction and growth rates to customer perceptions of the company. For many organizations, customer care and service centers pose the biggest engagement challenges. Front-line workers don't get the feedback they need to stay engaged, which can lead to low job satisfaction and high turnover...
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The Recruiting Reel: How to Empower Candidates During the Hiring Process
Every company needs a strong hiring process – but "strong" doesn't mean "rigid." If your hiring process is too prescriptive, candidates may feel boxed in. They won't be able to provide you with authentic representations of who they are and how they fit the role and culture. As a result, you're likely to miss out on top talent. On this episode of The Recruiting Reel, exaqueo CEO and...
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For Better Professional Social Media, Learn From Taylor Swift
Gary Vaynerchuk wisely said, "When I hear people debate the ROI of social media, it reminds me why so many businesses fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They're playing the sprint. They're not worried about lifetime value and retention. They're worried about short-term goals." I am continually surprised by the marginal competency most people have with using social media to...
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4 Ways to Get Job-Hopping Employees to Settle Down
Employees don't stay in one place for as long as they used to. While numerous factors contribute to the increasing popularity of job hopping, there are a few things business owners can do to boost morale and keep retention rates high: 1. Stop Categorizing Employees in Generational Groups Businesses must understand that being born in an arbitrary block of dates does not define a...
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12 Empowering Lessons About Failure
Article by YEC Building the confidence necessary to take failure in stride isn't easy, and it certainly doesn't happen overnight. You have to put in the time and effort to establish a daily practice of confidence-building actions. Take these lessons learned from entrepreneurs who have faced numerous failures as your starting point: 1. Failure Isn't Forever There's no way to talk...
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5 Toxic Elements That May Be Destroying Your Company Culture
A carefully developed company culture can do wonders when it comes to improving employee productivity and performance. It can also impact employees' day-to-day happiness while significantly reducing levels of absenteeism. On the flip side, neglecting your culture can allow toxic elements to fester. This, in turn, can have a serious negative impact on your employees, your company's...
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The 5 Skills of Highly Valuable and Highly Productive Employees
It's no surprise managers rate their top performers as their most valuable employees. VitalSmarts' latest research sought to measure just how much more valuable top performers are and exactly what it is they do that makes them so valuable. Our study of more than 1,500 employees found that top performers aren't just a little bit more valuable. Rather, both managers and peers say top...
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Dealing With Difficult Coworkers Can Help Improve Your Performance at Work
If your job is stressing you out, there's a pretty good chance your coworkers are to blame. As many as 60-80 percent of workplace difficulties may be caused by strained relationships, according to a new infographic from online personal lenders NetCredit. While you can't force your coworkers to be less difficult, there are a few steps you can take to at least relieve the tension. Below,...
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Disability Employment Awareness Month: Make the Most of 'Ticket to Work'
Do you suffer from a disability? Do you wish you could rediscover purpose and direction in life by going back to work? You're not alone. Every October during Disability Employment Awareness Month, organizations across the country take time to educate the public about the challenges facing so many people with disabilities who are trying to find their place in the workforce. We know...
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Beyond Code: Why Today's Engineers Need Strong Soft Skills
Software engineers are a hot commodity today, and nearly every company needs them. In fact, software engineering is one of the top 10 most in-demand jobs in 2017, according to a report from CareerCast. Along with this current demand for engineers, there is also a growing demand for engineers to have new skill sets, particularly when it comes to soft skills. Gone are the days when...
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6 Big Mistakes Recruiters Often Make
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you'd like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter QA! Today's Question: What are some common mistakes you've seen recruiters make – or have even made yourself – when trying to attract top...
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