Ten Steps for HR to Earn That Seat at the Table
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: August 10, 2007
- Category: Business Matters
- Tags: Recruiting by Numbers
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Numbers: Friday, August 10th, 2007
- Understand your organization’s business and financials.
- Spend time in each HR staff meeting educating the team about company matters.
- Measure and publish total workforce return on investment—not merely HR metrics.
- Be a business partner, not a police officer.
- Push the responsibility of policy administration ownership on line management.
- Increase the organization’s intangibles—things that “can’t be dropped on your foot”
- Develop and prepare all the resources of the organization to perform at their highest level by auditing and creating organizational capabilities.
- Find new ways to get transactional tasks done to free up HR to work on more strategic, value-adding activities.
- Build and cultivate relationships; take someone to lunch. “Get out from under your desk” and let managers know what’s going on in HR
- Keep abreast of developments in your professional area of expertise by reading professional books and articles, attending seminars and taking classes.
Kathy Gurchiek, HR News
8 Steps on Leadership by Example
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: July 30, 2007
- Category: Business Matters
- Tags: Leadership Training, Management, Recruiting by Numbers
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Numbers: Monday, July 30th, 2007
- Model the behavior you want to see from others.
- If you make a rule or design a process, follow it, until you decide to change it.
- Act as if you are part of the team, not always the head of it.
Help people achieve the goals that are important to them, as well as the goals that are important to you. - Do what you say you’re going to do.
- Build commitment to your organization’s big goal.
- Use every possible communication tool to build commitment and support for the big goal, your organization’s values and the culture you want to create.
- Hold strategic conversations with people so people are clear about expectations and direction.
- Ask senior managers to police themselves.
Susan M. Heathfield, How to Walk Your Talk
Unlocking Leadership Potential: Give and Take
- Author: Gil Keough
- Posted: July 2, 2007
- Category: Employee Retention, Business Matters
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 0
Editor’s note: This article — The Qualities of A Successful Leader/Manager — was originally published as a comment to Eric Jackson’s post, Building Smart Leadership. In Part 1, On Humility and Other Leadership Qualities, Gil discussed Humility and Concern for those who serve under you. In his conclusion Gil discusses communication and contribution.
Qualities: Communication and Contribution
Peter Drucker said: “He who focuses on methods and on exercising downward authority is a subordinate. He who focuses on contribution and on taking responsibility for results is in the strictest sense of the term ‘top management’.”
Leadership is essentially the ability to influence and contribute to others. That ability comes from communicating in such a way that people can see how valuable they are and put themselves on a path to realize their potential. When the core emotional needs of individuals aren’t being met, employees can’t offer their best efforts.
A good manager must be able to see in others what they don’t see in themselves and then bring them to a place where they can begin to develop those abilities. As a leader you must contribute to the development of your team members. The only way to do that is by clearly understanding what their needs and wants are. How do you find that out? By communicating with them and working with them to help them accomplish their goals.
Signal to Noise Ratio
- Author: Shally Steckerl
- Posted: June 26, 2007
- Category: Business Matters
- Tags: Industry
- Comments: 1
What started in 2004 as a risky move when a few of us stuck our necks out to vulnerably make public our thoughts in an open forum, has in a quick staccato grown to a cacophony. In the ancient history of our profession, around the turn of the century, there were only a few voices, but they were clear as a crystal bell.
These voices broadcast ideas through unidirectional vehicles like newsletters, both in print and online, as well as static websites that required considerable skill to publish. Comparatively a rank amateur in 1996, I was lucky to be a barely discernible junior voice among the ranks of big influencers who started revealing secrets online about our industry as early as a year before my meager beginnings in this industry.
Some of those ancient leading voices have grown very strong while others are returning after a long hiatus. But who cares about that? After all, it’s a forgotten time and things have changed.
Well, the truth is I care. Lately I have been having increasingly more disturbing conversations with my peers, mentors, apprentices, customers and business partners, about the growth of the signal-to-noise ratio. With the maturing of the “click here to post” blog technology, not only has the amount of new voices increased but also their volume is rising as is the diversity of opinions they represent.
Signal-to-noise is the ratio of information to interference in the medium. In other words, when the ratio grows it gets increasingly harder to tell the useful information from the background noise. While I strongly believe our industry will benefit from numerous conversations among people of widely varied opinions, trying to listen to all of them will shortly be impossible. Good voices are being drowned out by noise and feedback loops. So, I’m doing something about it.
On Humility and Other Leadership Qualities
- Author: Gil Keough
- Posted: June 19, 2007
- Category: Employee Retention, Business Matters
- Tags: Employee Retention, Leadership Training, Management
- Comments: 1
Editor’s note: This was originally published as a comment to Eric Jackson’s post, Building Smart Leadership. Here is Part 1 of Gil’s commentary titled The Qualities of a Successful Leader/Manager.
What is a leader, but one who knows how to follow the leadings of those he or she serves. Who is a wise person, but one who is aware of how little they know, and how valuable the knowledge and experiences of others are when considering decisions.
Quality: Humility
Henry Ford was by far one of the most successful businessmen of his era. As testament to that fact, his legacy lives on through the automobile company that still bears his name. And yet, by his own admission, Henry was not the smartest man among his contemporaries. Knowing this about himself did not deter him from pursuing success and becoming a great leader within his industry. He overcame the challenge of his own limitations by surrounding himself with the most intelligent people he could find.
That is one of the qualities of a successful manager or leader; the ability to recognize the experience and abilities of others, and humility enough to admit that one does not know everything. This is an especially challenging mindset for those who hold “papers,” like degrees or diplomas from institutions who have convinced the recipients that they know how to think, and reason, and make decisions within their field. A degree is beneficial, but it still does not indicate that a person knows everything, nor that he possesses management skills. All a person knows is what they know.
We are each the repository of an immense amount of knowledge and experiences that are filtered by our own perspective. It would be foolish to believe that a person who does not have a degree isn’t as intelligent or as capable as a person that does. Two words…Bill Gates.
TGIF
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: June 15, 2007
- Category: News and Events, Recruiting, Business Matters
- Tags: Center of Excellence, Performance Management, STREAMline Training, Training
- Comments: 0
Let’s play a game. Which of the following is the odd man out?
Engineering Manager, VP of Administration, Hiring Manager or Production Supervisor; CFO, Plant Manager or Director of Nursing?
If you picked “Hiring Manager,” good job! No, not because in most instances the term “hiring manager” suggests a task and not a function but because hiring managers – in most cases at least – are not measured or held accountable for recruiting outcomes in the same way as a recruiter is. Of course, there are exceptions. There always are.
I’ve said before, recruiting is not an easy job even though great recruiters make it look that way. Assuming the recruiters “most obvious” job has been flawlessly executed we could expect that the sourcing and screening and selling of the job have resulted in a good stable of well-qualified, interested and engaged candidates for the hiring managers to play their own game of odd man out.
Here’s the reality. Unfortunately, very few hiring managers know much about selection or what it takes to interview a candidate and assess how good a job the recruiter has done in producing candidates. Most hiring managers do not understand how to asses a candidate against critical success factors like organizational fit, competency levels and potential, personal motivations and so on.
The problem with interview training for hiring managers is that whatever they learn they forget just as quickly. What they don’t forget they don’t apply. Yes, yes, there are exceptions but those simply prove the rule! Better yet, recruiter training that addresses these things and enables them to properly manage hiring managers and the selection process is likely to produce much better long-term results.
On Tuesday, June 26th we will be sharing some new approaches to dealing with this reality and sharing some techniques for actually changing it. Our STREAMline Recruiter Training Boot Camp and program primer will be held at the Marriott Perimeter Center, Atlanta, GA nd I would like to invite you to join me there.
Will you?
How to Build a Candidate Profile the “Easy” Way
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: June 12, 2007
- Category: News and Events, Recruiting, Business Matters
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 2
Recruiting is not an easy job. Anyone who tells you it is either hasn’t been a recruiter before or is trying to recruit entry level recruiters.
That is not to say that that there aren’t some fantastic recruiters who are flawless in their execution because there are. There are a lot of fantastic recruiters and I think that is part of the problem.
Consider this: If the better a recruiter becomes the easier recruiting looks, could it be that when people say “recruiting is easy” what they really mean I want to work with good recruiters only? I know it could be a stretch but how many people do you know that want to work with a “bad” recruiter or a recruiter that makes it all look like such a grind?
Managing perceptions is just one element of being able to establish a solid recruiting practice. Realistically managing the expectation of hiring managers and clients is another. If you think those things are hard – either for yourself, your team and/or your organization – then how would you feel if you could make those things look easy? How would you like to discover the possibilities of being “fantastic?”
The Decline of Shipwrecks and Email Distractions
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: June 11, 2007
- Category: Business Matters, Blogging
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 0
With a close enough reading, anyone who has followed my 12-month career as a blogger will know where I am coming from as a marketer and where RCI now hopes to go with what’s been learned, starting here on Bells & Whistles and continuing to develop on our website.
Along the way I have had the support and trust of a faithful sponsor, CEO Mike Moore. Mike has given me a lot of latitude to explore this thing and research all the possibilities for achieving a broad range of marketing and other objectives. Really, Mike has entrusted me to leave the dock with a few boats and some gutsy buccaneers to head off in an anticlockwise direction. I know he expects me to bring some bounty back, as do I.
I have also been lucky to have had guidance from some other exceptional talents who are likewise seminal figures in our industry. One of those people is John Sumser.
In recent weeks and in his posts that talk about content, identity, authenticity, transparency, marketing-spin, markets-as-conversations and what-have-you John paints a seascape where he has long stood as a beacon of sorts.
For those who read his daily column John’s opinionated posts fill in the details of a thing bit-by-bit like a painting-by-numbers. For those who have read John for years his body of work in retrospect resembles broad brush strokes that cover the whole canvas, not the painstaking post-by-post dabs of color — red for technology, yellow for recruiting, blue for business — but a full spectrum that covers everything from branding to job boards and acquisitions to busts. Hue, tint, color. Energized, it’s the stuff that light is made from. Focused it is projected like a lighthouse beam.
Whether for hapless seafarers in recruiting or the seasoned scrimshaw scratchers of HR, John’s posts can help one find shelter from the swells and storms of an industry itself constantly weathering enormous and rapid change. For those who do not understand how lighthouses work — when the real tempests blow — captains and crew get smashed on the rocks and curse John Sumser’s name. I know. I’ve been in a wreck or two and cursed him rather loudly myself.
I’m Recruiting Crazy Russian Climbers
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: May 30, 2007
- Category: Recruiting, Business Matters
- Tags: Center of Excellence, People and Players, Performance Staffing, RCI, Recruiting 2.0, STREAMline Training
- Comments: 2
Guess what, we’re recruiting!
Parkour represents more than physical agility. It is a metaphor for problem solving, determination and recruiting excellence!
If you can get through the first couple of minutes of this video you’ll see some feats of amazing ingenuity too.
These runners represent the indomitable human spirit that can rise from the ruins of urban blight to conquer the limitations of an unforgiving landscape and “self.”
They also represent the exceptional recruiters who intuitively overcome every obstacle, recruiters who realize that the insurmountable difficulties and problems that invariably arise with a linear process or in a psychic prison can be overcome with a disciplined approach to developing new approaches and an awareness of new dimensions.
I really want to connect with a few exceptional recruiters who not only understand about the “art of displacement” but have this passion for the job built into their sinews.
Do you know any “runners” who fit the bill? Are you a runner?
Send me an email if like.
Oh, yeah, I’m looking for salespeople too.
USA TODAY Remains Top-Selling Newspaper in the United States
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: May 14, 2007
- Category: Recruitment Communications, Business Matters
- Tags: Media, Print Media, USA TODAY
- Comments: 1
There have been a number of reports recently that have piqued my interest. As it relates to recruitment advertising and old-media in particular:
It goes without saying that Rupert Murdoch’s recent overtures to buy the Dow Jones & Company for around $5 billion will come as no surprise to those who have watched the Digger’s decades-long strategic expansionism, picking up some interesting morsels along the way.
In this case one suspects that the object of Rupert Murdoch’s desires is the Wall Street Journal. This would be consistent with his strong sense for chum in the water — see the Wall Street Journal’s circulation numbers below — and his taste for gaffing the occasional trophy.
Also of note, Microsoft has bought a 4 percent slither of CareerBuilder for an undisclosed price which includes, no doubt, unlimited job postings. This leaves Gannett who publish USA TODAY — one of RCI’s recruitment media partners — with a little over 40 percent of the CareerBuilder pie the rest owned by Tribune and McClatchy. Under the radar, the more newsworthy item I think is that Microsoft’s MSN and CareerBuilder said they have also extended their partnership for job board distribution. This makes CareerBuilder the exclusive job board supplier for MSN Careers in the U.S. with CareerBuilder paying MSN up to $443 million over the next seven years, based on the traffic MSN delivers.
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