CareerBuilder.com – Top 10 Recruiting Myths – Busted. I’ll tease you with my 2 favorites: 2) Good questions reduce hiring errors Good questions are essential but are fallible. Many hiring managers think that asking good questions will result in good answers and that’s it. Listening, observing and adjusting the interview is as important as a list of good questions. By noting how the candidate reacts to the questions, and listening intently do the details of the answer, the interviewer can learn much more about the individual and reduce hiring errors. 10) The ‘perfect fit’ employee is out there somewhere All hiring managers would like to think that the ‘perfect fit’… Read More
Continue ReadingBiggest Employee Time Wasters
Salary.com has a great article called Wasted Time At Work Still Costing Companies Billions in 2006. From the opening paragraph: the average worker admits to squandering 1.86 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time Amazing, but it gets better: The biggest distraction for respondents was personal Internet use. 52.0% of the 2,700 people polled cited web surfing as their #1 distraction at work. Socializing with co-workers came in second at 26.3%. Conducting personal business, “spacing out,” running errands, and making personal phone calls were the other popular time-wasting activities in the workplace. I particularly enjoyed the “spacing out” time waster. It came in at 6.6%. The sum… Read More
Continue ReadingWhether to Use the Stick or Carrot
Sales&Marketing Management posts this online article – Iron-Fisted Management – regarding negative motivation. Being a psychology major, I am always drawn to these discussions. From the article: Matt McCann, district sales manager at ACSIA, a Darien, Illinois-based long-term insurance agency, agrees. “I think [negative incentives] are counterproductive. You may see short-term success, but I think it builds resentment,” McCann says. When he’s seen or heard about negative motivation, it’s yielded the same result: short-term profits, but an office inferno. Those who are the objects of punishments “start saying they don’t want to bend over backwards. They wash their hands of the situation, look for other jobs, and try to get… Read More
Continue ReadingCorporate Policies Regarding Blogs
Blogs are popping up at 1 per second according to the latest Sales&Marketing Management email. Here are some interesting facts regarding developing corporate communications (sorry, no link): –Just over a quarter of employers have terminated employees for e-mail misuse. Another 2 percent have dismissed workers for inappropriate IM chat. And nearly 2 percent have fired workers for offensive blog content including posts on employees’ personal, home-based blogs. –While 35 percent of employees use IM at work, only 31 percent of organizations have an IM policy in place, and 13 percent retain IM business records. 50 percent of workplace users are downloading free IM tools from the Internet. –Blogs are booming… Read More
Continue ReadingWhen to Assess Salespeople
The first key is to assess candidates before hiring. We encounter many companies that hire based on their gut feeling about a candidate. I met with a customer last week who has a VP who makes up his mind in a matter of the first 10 minutes of an inperson interview. Some people have strong empathetic abilities and can get a good read on an unknown candidate. But they make mistakes. The President of the company explained to me that although this VP was quite intuitive, he still missed on candidates which ended up costing the company. This meeting brought to my attention the need to explain when to assess… Read More
Continue ReadingMore Aggressive Cover Letters
Its Monday and it seems like we need a bit of levity to ease back in to the work week. Nothing like general resume cover letters to lighten the mood. I actually enjoyed this person’s resume – it was eye-catching in its uniqueness. Then I read this: If your company isn’t willing to offer a job with a BASE salary of at least $30,000 then please do not consider me a candidate. I searched the job market 2 years ago for a brief time before I began running my own business on a full time basis and discovered there are a lot of “Bull Crap” jobs out there (i.e. selling… Read More
Continue ReadingQuestions for the Interviewer
Tory Johnson from abcnews.com has a helpful article titled Turn the Tables in a Job Interview. She discusses what candidates should ask in an interview when the interviewer asks, “What questions do you have?” I’m always perplexed by candidates who simply state “None.” That response is always a red flag. Volumes of information are readily available with the Internet. Today’s candidate should have a general understanding of the hiring company’s business model, markets and corporate structure (privately held, subsidiary, etc.). Due diligence is easily completed with today’s technological tools. Back to the article – this question can and should be asked by every serious candidate: What are the biggest challenges… Read More
Continue ReadingInterviewer Styles
Monster.com has an entertaining article about interviewer styles. We’ve seen this “version” more times than we can count: The Unskilled Interviewer Problem: This is an interviewer who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Maybe the person was “roped into being there,” says Meehl. “Maybe they just don’t know what to do.” In a way, it is you who is teaching them how to be an interviewer, she explains. The article is a quick read and does provide some good pointers to interviewees when trapped in a poor interview.
Continue ReadingMore Anecdotal Encounters
I decided to mark these general resume emails as anecdotes also. I found this one entertaining: I’m looking for work that doesn’t involve customer service. Also work that is relatively healthy in that there are no poisonous gasses or fumes in the workplace … I have had around 30 jobs in the past 10 years. I quit jobs because I either get sick of the people I work with, bored with the job, or a little of both. I took the liberty of shortening the cover letter – it didn’t change the context. You know, we sometimes harpoon websites that ghost write cover letters and resumes. In this instance, investing… Read More
Continue ReadingAnecdote – Work at Home
Friday sourcing anecdote time so let’s go. This one was an email response that I need to give you just a little background information. First, the company we were running this hiring process for had a few open positions on their website. Second, we were in different stages of the hiring process on several positions with several customers. I received this email with “work at home” for a subject: hi ijohna ilooking to work this at home can you call me asap 4561230978cst johna@email.com call me monday at 2;00pmcst I am always baffled by responses like this to employment ads. This guy obviously has some communication issues with email. Yet,… Read More
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