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Tom Bolt

Talent Selection – Part 4: Interviewing Tradeoffs

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Anyone with more than a few minutes of experience working in a corporate staffing office knows that certain things are not negotiable. I once worked at a start-up that was a spinoff from a large corporation with a lot of inherited baggage in the form of policies and procedures from the parent company. We had to change everything that didn’t fit. An example of a non-negotiable item when hiring new employees was vacation time. Many… Read More »Talent Selection – Part 4: Interviewing Tradeoffs

Talent Selection – Part 3: Interviewing Adaptability

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When confronted with issues of flaws in the candidate experience, I have actually heard interviewers speak the words, “I am just following policy.” That is possibly someone looking for a scapegoat to blame for their actions. The psychological term is called “The Nuremberg Defense” which came from the trials of Nazi war criminals for atrocities following WWII, “I was only following orders.” This is sometimes called the Eichmann defense who stated, “I cannot recognize the… Read More »Talent Selection – Part 3: Interviewing Adaptability

Talent Selection – Part 2: Interviewing Reality

Everyone has a theory about interviewing candidates for hire. This applies to everyone involved in conducting interviews and not just people in positions of leadership in HR or recruiting. The two primary ignorance factors that keep us from doing it right are the line managers who dismiss interviewing as something that anybody off the street can do and the HR types who don’t realize that people could have that opinion. If there are no missionaries… Read More »Talent Selection – Part 2: Interviewing Reality

Talent Selection – Part 1: Interviewing Crosscheck

“Flight attendants, prepare for arrival and crosscheck.” I have heard that over the aircraft cabin PA systems for years and thought that it had something to do with counting people. I remember eons ago on school outings teachers would walk down the aisle of the school bus and count heads to make sure the number of heads that got back on the bus was the same number of heads that got off. On a recent… Read More »Talent Selection – Part 1: Interviewing Crosscheck

Off the Grid: Not Necessarily HR – Coded Messages

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We are pretty good at detecting crap messages in TV commercials. “4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident to their patients who chew gum.” That one hasn’t been believable for decades… how do they know? My dentist never asked me if I chewed gum, so maybe he was that one holdout that didn’t recommend sugarless gum or any other kind of gum. Comedians also had a field day pointing out that the word Trident actually… Read More »Off the Grid: Not Necessarily HR – Coded Messages