Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Bad Attitudes Don't Sell

Recently we've had a few candidates come in to meet with us with such doom and gloom attitudes. Maybe they are letting down their guard with their old recruiter friends but seriously, bad attitudes don’t sell.

No matter how awful your day, week, year has been, most people prefer their potential employees – leaders of their company -- to have a positive outlook. I’m not saying you can’t gripe every now and then. Life would not be fun without a few sarcastic comments, like the old saying goes, “If you've got something nasty to say come sit by me.” 

But in an interview, please keep the snarky attitude to yourself.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Adding to Your Team

Create an accurate and detailed job description. The number one difficult thing about a search is when the hiring manager has no idea what they want. If you don’t quite know what you need ask around, talk to your employees. They typically know exactly what you need and what you don’t need. Open up those lines of communication.

Think about the intangibles -- the person’s personality. Develop and idea of who would work best on your team. If you have too many introverts who never speak up, maybe you find yourself an extrovert. Make sure you round out your team.

Use your network to find your ideal candidate. Yes, email all your friends and ask who they know. If that doesn’t work then call us. We’ll start using our network.

Conduct an in-depth interview. Make sure you get all your questions answered. Going off the cuff works when you interview all the time (like us) but if you don’t interview often make sure you cover the essentials. Over here we start out new recruiters with an interview cheat sheet. Bring your interview cheat sheet into the interview in case you forget what you need to ask.

Background checks tell all. Make sure you run one on the final candidate. We’ve a had lots of skeletons come out of the closet with a detailed background check.