In a recent impromptu interview with award winning movie writer/director Edward Lyons, a story I hope he will someday allow me to record and promote, something clicked in my brain. My career in talent acquisition in a corporate world is not so different from his. Even though he could have been a great actor or teacher of actors, he has a calling to lead talented people through his craft from the other side of the… Read More »Life and Career Analogs
The debate rages on at conferences, meetings, online media, and in just plain gossip. Why does everyone say they hate spam and then engage in the same practices they deplore? This is especially puzzling when the spaminator is a recruiter who is not only supposed to know better but also needs to woo a target audience, not turn them off. Is it the fault of the individual generating the spam or the people that encourage… Read More »Go Forth and Spam No More
The corruption of our thinking began with learning things that we are unwilling to unlearn. Beginning with inventing the wheel and discovering fire, we eventually came to worship better technological advances. Often we found that automation alone was not the answer, but we failed to understand why. Nobody who is a recruiter today would consider spending time by only placing ads in a newspaper and then watching the daily mail or a fax machine for… Read More »The Pervasive Post and Pray Pathology
Not all interviewing methodologies are broken. If you subscribe to the theory that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!†then you won’t have to worry about change until repeated problems force you to look deeper. The lack of apparent problems by current measuring standards could mean nothing is wrong. Conversely, it could be a sign that we are using the wrong benchmark to measure it. The biggest problem with today’s patchwork methods of interviewing… Read More »Talent Selection – Part 5: The Interviewing Paradigm
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