How to Make a Bad Hire – There is a lot of talk about how to make effective staffing policies and train people to make the best hires. Recruiters and hiring managers want to do the right thing but sometimes the wrong thing just happens and it can be a very expensive proposition when it does…Many of the reasons for this are obvious when viewed from the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. [Four characteristics that guarantee a bad hire]
A Pocketful of Invisible Nose Magnets – I should be ashamed of myself. My kids actually believed that I had a pocketful of invisible nose magnets. Every time, without fail, when I would put my hand into my pocket and then extend my hand with the thumb and two fingers together, the dog would run over and sniff my finger. It was as if his nose was drawn by some invisible force to my hand. In fact, that invisible force was the conditioning that he remembered from giving him doggie treats from my pocket on so many occasions. [See how this is analogous to hiring]
Job Seeker Crap Filters – It is hard being a job seeker in today’s economy. With all of the technological advantages we have today one would assume that nobody could get lost. We should be able to turn on some sort of cyber-jobs-GPS, plug in our destination and watch our career unfold on a high-resolution flat-screen display. However, the exact opposite is true. There is so much information available online it can be difficult to wade through it all. To make matters worse, there is so much misinformation that every job seeker has to develop a keen sense of what is real and what is not. [Going online requires crap detection]