From the outstanding resume file – a resume I received yesterday for a Project Manager position: Personal Attributes I am highly enthusiastic, hard working, opinionated and motivated to work under my own initiative or as part of a team. 1. I have extensive practical experience of fault-finding… Which explains why his team wants him to work on his own initiative. In all fairness, the candidate goes on to finish item #1 with: …and problem solving systematically. Certainly a lot easier to do once you’ve established blame. There’s a sentence later in the letter that suggests English isn’t a strong suit – My team were involved in maintenance, repairing and servicing… Read More
Continue ReadingOnline Job Movement
The online job posting statistics provide a look at general hiring trends…I think. My question is always in regards to which online boards are being tracked. We are seeing a marked migration away from the big boards to the still-developing niche boards. That migration may be skewing the data from this Inc.com article – I’m not certain. Nonetheless, the year-over-year tracking of the big boards is still noteworthy (emphasis mine): The number of online job postings last month declined 16.4 percent from a year ago, the Conference Board reported Friday. In total, there were 2,591,500 new jobs posted online in April, with healthcare and management accounting for more than 450,000.… Read More
Continue ReadingSWAT Teams
I haven’t heard this term before, but I absolutely love it. From the Wall Street Journal’s How Stay-at-Home Moms Are Filling an Executive Niche: The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss. What a fantastic idea. The differentiation: Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course.… Read More
Continue Reading“You Can’t Grow If You Aren’t Selling”
Isn’t that the truth? Entrepreneur.com has an excellent archived article (from 2002) titled Hire and Hire that discusses hiring salespeople during a recession (no, we’re not in a recession). The point is valid – economic downturns are the best time to upgrade and/or expand your sales team. Pick the right talent, and your new salesperson will pay for himself or herself many times over. After all, Buckley points out, because your ability to make sales is the “engine that drives growth,” salespeople are “pay-for-themselves-type expenditures.” That “pick the right talent” piece is not so easy, but it is the keystone of the approach. Run a hiring process and make sure… Read More
Continue Reading3 Sales Hiring Inhibitors
Even bad salespeople can appear to be strong in a face-to-face interview situation. This reason is why sales recruiting is truly different than any other form of recruiting. Reviewing resumes and assuming abilities is is a fool’s errand. Yet, there are certain aspects of general recruiting that can that hinder effective sales recruiting. The Resumes. Yes, resumes. I have sat through far too many discussions where hiring managers or recruiters attempted to divine incredible insight from a sheet of paper. Granted, you can probably eliminate the retail salespeople from your B2B Sales manager process. Sales is still a people-oriented profession so overanalyzing a document is not the most effective technique… Read More
Continue ReadingTop 3 In-Demand Positions
From RecruitingTrends.com (my emphasis): Manpower Inc. releases the results of its third annual talent shortage survey, revealing that 31% of employers globally are finding it increasingly more difficult to fill jobs. The top three candidates most in-demand are skilled manual trades, sales representatives and technicians (technical workers in the areas of production/operations, engineering and maintenance). What would it be if they put a qualifier on finding the right salesperson? I keep saying this – a strong salesperson is always in demand no matter what the economy is doing.
Continue ReadingExecutive Hiring A Challenging Priority
From the Herman Trend Alert newsletter (sorry, no link): The economic slowdown here in the United States is not having the expected effect on the demand for qualified executive talent. ExecuNet’s “2008 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report” finds that increasing demand, along with a shortage of qualified talent and sustained economic growth overseas, are driving better than expected job growth at the executive level.(http://www.execunet.com/marketreport) The sectors with the highest demand are High Tech, Healthcare, Business Services, Pharmaceuticals/Biotech, and Energy/Utilities. The factors credited with the continuing demand for executive talent are an aging workforce and global economic growth, despite the looming threat of recession. The report also finds, in spite of… Read More
Continue ReadingMore Wacky Lists
CareerBuilder.com offers up another list with “wacky” in the title. For web purposes, wacky is a euphemism for link bait, but I’ll bite. The list is comprised of the most unusual excuses provided by employees for being late. While rowing across the river to work, I got lost in the fog. Someone stole all my daffodils. I had to go audition for American Idol. My ex-husband stole my car so I couldn’t drive to work. My route to work was shut down by a Presidential motorcade. I wasn’t thinking and accidentally went to my old job. I was indicted for securities fraud this morning. The line was too long… Read More
Continue ReadingTelecommuting Is Old School, Nomadism Is New School
The modern workplace is shifting towards a more ad hoc approach vs. a scheduled interaction according this The Economist’s excellent article Labour movement. This article defines nomadism in the current work world: Today’s work nomadism descends from, but otherwise bears little resemblance to, the older model of “telecommuting”, says Mr Ware. That earlier concept became popular in the 1990s thanks to cheap but stationary telecommunications technologies—the landline phone, the fax and dial-up internet. Because it still tied workers to a place—the home office—telecommuting implicitly had people “cocooning at home five days a week”, he says. But people do not want that: instead, they want to mingle with others and to… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Urgency Of Hiring
BusinessWeek.com has a terrific article about executive recruiting that applies to more than just executive positions. Sales hiring mirrors the same issues from the article. The pull quote: Not surprisingly, corporate bosses usually want to play a role in interviewing and assessing top candidates’ experience, qualifications, and fit with senior leadership. The problem arises when those leaders just don’t commit to the executive recruiting process. Often they fail to appreciate its urgency, the fact that candidates may be weighing other offers, or that candidate interviewing can be a process that’s unpredictable, and one that isn’t completely in their control. Even the hiring of a top-notch executive recruiter can’t guarantee there… Read More
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