Being Strategic Means Taking Ownership And Being Accountable Almost by definition, strategic people assume responsibility for getting things done and for producing results. For example, CFO’s assume responsibility for financial systems, CIO’s for information and computing systems and the head of retail operations for producing retail sales results.  Individuals in …

Employed Top Performers Require a "Better Job" Unemployed people and semi-anxious people are significantly less picky about applying for open job opportunities, and in some cases apply for any and every job. The job title matters little to them, and no matter how mundane the position description is, they will …

Action Steps That You Can Take To Develop a "Position Marketing Template"   In order to make your descriptions compelling, you need to develop a template that can easily guide position description writers to produce great sales descriptions every time. Here are the steps in that process: Find the current …

People Do Click! It's no secret that Google books most of its revenue from selling advertising that appears at the very top and in the right-hand margin alongside search results. When searches are entered, Google servers look at the key words that are being searched for and then matches those …

It is no secret that many corporate customers of HR solution providers are disgruntled, especially in the applicant tracking market where it has become common to bounce from vendor to vendor every few years despite a lack of significant differentiation in product/service offerings. As vendor-neutral advisors, we're routinely asked to …

In addition, the increased access to the Internet coupled with better hardware and software means that metrics can be calculated almost instantly and reported to almost anyone at minimal costs.  Fields that used to rely on intuition such as marketing, purchasing (now known as supply chain) and manufacturing have made …

Using Existing Contests, Challenges, and Awards Programs The first step is to ask your current top performers in each mission-critical job family what prominent awards and contests already exist in their field. Professional organizations tend to offer the most awards and contests, and could often use sponsors and judges. Focus …

What is a Rolodex Party? Rolodex parties are informal departmental or business unit meetings where top performers are brought into a conference room and are then asked to "download" and share from their personal contacts the names of the very best individuals that they know at other firms. If you …

Most Recruiting Activities Are Not Strategic in Scope Almost everything that an individual recruiter does is intended to resolve an immediate need and is therefore operational or tactical in nature. Because the scope of the outcome is so limited, it is nearly impossible for any single instance to rise to …

Business Impacts of Referral Programs Various academic and internal corporate research has found that employee referral programs can: Produce employees who are more productive on the job. MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Emilio J. Castilla discovered that employees recruited through employee referral programs can have significant performance differentials from …