April Fool’s went by this year uneventful for me, no practical jokes and no annoying pranks. At least so I thought. I have a group of guys that I lead in a bible study on Monday nights. Since it is Spring break this week, we talked about moving our usual meeting day and time. After several emails and conversations everyone agreed that we would keep it our normal time. I showed up, as usual, about 15 minutes early to shoot the breeze with some of the guys. Our 7pm meeting time came and went and no one showed up. I thought out of my 8 guys that at least half… Read More
Continue ReadingHiring Tips
Ok, earlier today I posted on mistakes made by candidates in the interview. Now it is time to look at mistakes made by hiring managers in the interview. From CareerBuilder.com’s article Five Common Hiring Blunders and How to Avoid Them: Experience is important, but life experience is sometimes better Yes, you want to make sure your candidate has relevant experience in the field, but don’t place all your eggs in that one basket. Some candidates lack the desired amount of relevant experience, but they make up for it with their life experience. Military experience, studying or working overseas, volunteering a year of their life to saving the whales, or taking… Read More
Continue ReadingTop 10 Most Annoying Buzzwords
In an effort to stay on top of the hippest trends, I give you this: The top 10 most annoying buzzwords or phrases in the creative industry today: * Outside the box* Synergy* The big idea* ROI* Paradigm shift* Strategy* Integrated solution* CRM* Customer-centric* Voice of the consumer From ManageSmarter.com’s Office Lingo: Buzzwords That Are Losing Their Buzz. The bolded entries are ones I have used in the past 7 days. I will make the proper adjustments to my lexicon, but “ROI” is too important to abandon.
Continue ReadingInterview Tips
We attempt to keep track of the interview tips that are offered all over the web to candidates to assist them in their job search. Some tips seem clever, others seem robotic. This StarTribune.com article – Ten Things Not To Do In An Interview – provides a general, helpful list of interview faux pas. For instance: 3. Don’t speak badly about previous employers or co-workers. Make sure you’ve practiced an honest answer but one that doesn’t show that you’re angry with the previous employer or circumstance. Very true and yet I have encountered many candidates who cannot resist the urge to denigrate previous managers. I worked for my share of… Read More
Continue ReadingWant A Better Answer? Ask A Better Question
The title of this post is a statement often offered by my father. The statement can be slightly aggravating in certain situations, but there is much truth in it. Who? What? Where? When? How? and Why? When phone screening or interviewing salespeople, one of those 5 words should be the lead-in to your question. Yes, I crossed out “Why” for a specific reason that we will get to shortly. We have covered this technique before but it is immeasurably important when screening sales candidates. Do not ask questions that leave you “boxed” in a corner. Those questions tend to have a structure that leads with a verb and always elicits… Read More
Continue ReadingA Brief History Of Email
We’ve discussed no email Fridays here before and now this morning I kick up this CareerJournal.com article regarding the use of other communication channels. Instant messaging is popular here at Select Metrix and does work well as a companion tool to email. In case you didn’t know the history of email: Electronic mail was invented in 1971, but wasn’t widely adopted by businesses until the late 1980s, with the arrival of Lotus Notes and other programs. Since then, its use in the corporate world has exploded: Research firm Radicati Group Inc. estimates the average corporate email user sent and received about 171 messages a day last year, a number expected to… Read More
Continue ReadingSmall Company Incentive Programs
Good article here from Selling Power’s Incentives newsletter – Big Motivation at Small Companies. The topic is how to run effective incentive campaigns when you aren’t a Fortune 500 company. Still, as a recent article in Incentive Magazine points out, smaller companies do enjoy a few incentives-related benefits compared with their larger counterparts. For one, with most of the company€™s employees occupying the same workspace, communicating with the entire team at the same time poses few logistical problems. Also, this sort of intimacy means that whoever is planning the rewards will likely have a better idea what specific prizes will motivate the targeted participants. Plus, as the article points out,… Read More
Continue ReadingWhy Gen Y Job Hops
Steve Rothberg over at collegerecruiter.com provides one of the clearest posts I have read regarding Gen Y and their job-hopping ways. This is Steve’s area of expertise and this post lays it out in simple terms. An excerpt (emphasis mine): Gen X’ers like me who attended college two decades ago received our education for far less money than Gen Y’ers are paying. I paid $3,500 for tuition my last year in school. If the cost of that tuition were to double every seven years, that means that today’s student in that same program would pay $28,000. That’s disgusting. I graduated with about $20,000 in student loan debt. A Gen Y’er… Read More
Continue ReadingWall Street Turnover
If you think you are experiencing hiring difficulties, be happy you are not on Wall Street: Fresh off some of the richest bonuses ever handed out, investment bankers and traders, especially those who deal with leveraged debt, are in high demand. In some cases, bidding has driven newly hired employees into the arms of a rival in mere weeks. That statement seemed like hyperbole until later in the article: Securities-industry employment rose to 804,000 at the end of 2006 after a third consecutive year of increases. The employment figure is just 4% shy of the all-time high set in 2000, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Biggest Hiring Challenge
No surprise here: Finding qualified people to work as sales representatives is the biggest hiring challenge for global employers for the second year in a row, an annual talent shortage survey reported Thursday. Sales reps top the list of hard-to-fill jobs in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and in five other countries… The CNN/Money article goes into detail about CEO’s focus on growth and the lack of salespeople available to power that initiative. We are experiencing it first hand as our sourcing times have been extended. In fact, we are making adjustments today to pour more resources into our sourcing channels. Strong sales candidates require extra work to locate… Read More
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