How Can You Help Me to Find the Best Candidate for Our Role

How Can You Help Me to Find the Best Candidate for Our Role I’m often asked by my clients, “How can you help me to find the best candidate for our role”? As a recruiter with more than 20 years experience, I will always tell them that there is only one sure way that I can guarantee to find the best available candidate in the market and that is through the application of executive search or headhunting techniques. Let me explain; there are essentially just 3 ways in which any organisation, large or small can recruit; You can access candidates through a database You can advertise your role in the most appropriate media You can Headhunt, proactively approaching candidates and often referred to as “Search” 1. Database Candidate databases of one form or another are typically maintained by a wide spectrum of recruiters as well as, increasingly these days, by more and more employers and of course there are networking sites such as LinkedIn which provide a useful database albeit one based on self reported data. Databases are at their most useful, in my view, when you might be looking out for the “steady Eddie” type of candidate, low risk/limited potential; the very best candidates will rarely show up on databases and on the odd occasion that they do, they rarely stick around on the books of a recruiter for very long. Ask yourself, ‘How did candidate X or Y happen to show up on the recruiter’s database in the first place?’ What role were they pursuing initially and seemingly, unsuccessfully since they are still looking today, that brought them to the attention of the recruiter in the first instance? Not that this necessarily makes them a bad or less relevant candidate, but do you really want to hire someone else’s second best for your key appointment? So, why then do I personally carry around a database of several thousand names on my iPhone or stored in my cloud, all of them accessible from almost anywhere in the world via a broadband connection? Why you might ask would I choose to do this having regard to what I have said about Databases at the outset? The answer is simple, a database in the right hands provides a useful conduit through which the very best candidates might be identified and accessed through the effective networking of the most relevant contacts within that database. 2. Advertising Despite the inexorable recent rise of social media platforms, recruitment advertising is still one of the more effective tools in the recruiters toolkit. Of course, like almost everything else in life, the internet has in recent years made a significant impact upon recruitment advertising as discussed in my blog; “Recruitment advertising: death by social networking”? Today, rather than paying a lot of money for a ¼ page ad’ in a national Broadsheet newspaper, a short, sharp and sometimes rather pithy call to action delivered via a social networking site may well yield as many prospective candidates as the traditional Broadsheet. The trick is knowing how best to write it and also where best to put it! Advertising is of course a passive medium. If your desired candidate is not even looking for a new job or just happens to miss the particular issue that your beautifully written and hand crafted recruitment advert appears in, then it is all for nought. 3. Headhunting And then we come to Method 3, Headhunting. Properly applied there is no substitute for it. You may be the best networker that ever trod a boardroom floor or even the best recruitment advertising copywriter that ever lived. But, unless you have the skill, knowledge and credibility to first of all identify and then to approach the very best talent in your sector of interest, then even your very Sunday best efforts, delivered with the benefit of a following wind and a very long run-up, could still never guarantee that you will bring your opportunity to the attention of the very best candidate “in the market” rather than those who just happen to be “on the market”. Simply put, that is what the Headhunter will do for you and in an intensively competitive market where points of differentiation between companies are slight, why would you not strive to ensure that you hired the very best? Wasn’t it Napoleon who when not composing the worlds longest palindrome suggested that the only difference between one army and another lay in the calibre of their people? Substitute the word companies for armies and the same still holds true today. So are you going to adopt the passive approach and just wait to see what tasty morsel (candidate) swims by your bait or are you going to strive to recruit the best? The incremental additional cost of hiring a competent headhunter to proactively go out and find your candidate pale into insignificance when put alongside the business advantage to be gained by hiring the very best. Robert Hyde writes the Headhunter2001 blog which  carries advice based upon the experience of an active head-hunter with more than 20 years experience in the UK Executive search market principally serving industrial and technology sectors. Follow Robert on Twitter at  @headhunter2001.  

How to Say No To Your Boss - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

How to Say No To Your Boss - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career You all had times where your boss wants you to take on a new assignment or asks you to do something that is outside of your job description. In this case, you have two options. You will either do whatever your boss says or push back. However, you should be careful when pushing back your boss’s requests. Rather than saying ‘no’, you should be more political and say no to him without using the word ‘no’. Below are some tricks that will help you say no to your boss. 1.  Frame Your Responses Carefully: You are juggling between three different projects, you truly don’t have time for anything else. However, your boss asks you to work on an additional fourth project. In this scenario, instead of saying ‘No, I am too busy to work on this new project.’ You should say ‘I would be happy to work on it but my deadlines for project x and y are coming up this week. I don’t think I have time to look at the new project this week.’ Another approach is asking your boss to help you prioritize the projects. You can say ‘I would be happy to work on it but my deadlines for project x and y are coming up this week. Can you help me prioritize the project list?’ This approach is called a show and don’t tell approach. 2.  Communicate Openly: No one knows how busy you are better than you do and you have to communicate that to your boss from time to time. Always communicate clearly with your boss to avoid any misunderstandings. Also, if your boss asks you to do something that you feel uncomfortable because of your work load or a personal issue or etc., you have to explain it and express your opinions. You can say ‘I don’t really feel comfortable doing this because….’ A simple but clear explanation will be enough for your boss. 3.  Offer an Alternative: If you don’t feel qualified to do a certain task, instead of saying no to your boss, you can offer an alternative such as suggesting someone else who may be interested in working on that new project or who has previous experience in that topic. ‘John is more experienced in this compared to me. I know he has worked on a similar project before.’ You can also ask him to make adjustments such as postponing some of the deadlines to create more time for you to work on all of the projects. Presenting options to your boss shows your interest and willingness to help and that you are not refusing work just because you don’t want to do it.

Personal Brands Create Value - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Personal Brands Create Value - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Effective communication is one of the keys to success, especially for a business looking to enhance its brand image in a society that values information. Relationship experts maintain that only through communication do relationships last. A business looking to stay competitive will maintain beneficial relationships with its potential and prospective clients, and partners. As one looking to establish a strong and approachable personal brand, building and maintaining relationships should be your bread and butter. As much as information abounds regarding effective communication, and people continually emphasizing on its effectiveness, we don’t always get it right. No one does. But by learning the right skills, you can come pretty close to being perfect. For that, we’ll borrow from the Rotary’s 4-Way Test. As a Rotarian, I’ve had the great privilege of seeing this test in action in countless relationships.   In the 4-Way Test, Rotarians take into consideration… “Of the things we think, say or do Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Does it build GOOD WILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned? Consider the 4-Way Test as a set of skills you can learn and practice for the rest of your life [tweet this], and that will help you relate with people in ways you never thought of before. Let’s start with the first step: Is it the TRUTH? During communication, we tend to lie for a host of reasons, but mainly (i) because we don’t want to hurt the person we are talking to by telling the truth, (ii) because the lie serves to put us in a better position than what is actually reality, or (iii) we are afraid of the consequences if we tell the truth. If you’re worried about hurting other people with the truth, practice starting conversations in a safe zone. There are simple ways to start a conversation safely: by asking how a person is faring (How are you today?), making an observation on a situation and building on that (The meeting seems to have taken ages), asking the other person to describe what they see (Did you see what he was carrying?), and describing your own experiences (I’ve never eaten this sandwich before …). Starting conversations in a safe place tends to put the other person in a less defensive state, even when you don’t agree on a situation. People tend to use reason (ii) to elevate their image to others, but only for so long. Lies don’t hold on forever, and at some point people get caught in the lies they’ve built for themselves. A personal brand built on a lie will never truly live up to its potential. Besides, you would rather start off your conversations on the truth and have people accept you for who you are, rather than an embellished story, which carries great risk for your personal brand. Is it FAIR to all concerned? Most of the time, people don’t wake up in the morning with outright intentions of hurting others.   Slow down and see things from other people’s perspectives. Perhaps that colleague you have labelled a control freak in your eyes would probably think of themselves as detail oriented. See the difference in perspectives? When you start viewing situations from other people’s perspective, you use their language, increasing your ability to authentically engage with them. Does it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? To establish a strong personal brand, it’s important to be relatable enough with people and build strong, lasting relationships. You know what works? Pulling people aside and constantly encouraging them, telling them that you see potential in them (as long as you genuinely feel that way), and expressing thanks and gratitude to others. It is only by seeing the good in people that you will start building goodwill that will influence them to see the good within themselves. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned? You are going to bump heads with others at work, in school, and life in general. How you handle those situations says a lot about who you are. Finding even ground where you can both tackle the situation is also a great practice that is beneficial. You make it easier for the other person to open up, and end up having a dialogue on ways you two can help each other. Effective communication take practice and genuine desire. The Rotary’s 4-Way Test is a great way to test the quality of your conversations, and by following the lessons each test provides, you are in a better position to be authentic.