There is no more valuable recruit than a “Purple Squirrel.” In fact, a single Purple Squirrel recruit may be more impactful than all of your other hires combined during a single year. If you’re not familiar with the term, a Purple Squirrel is the moniker that denotes an extremely rare …
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Powerful Recruiting Approaches for Startup Firms
Recruiting is important at any firm, but it is super critical at startup firms. This is because when you have thousands of employees, you can still get by after hiring a few turkeys. At a startup, however, you are so lean that every hire must count and a single bad …
Read More »Your Customers: A Near-perfect Recruiting Target
They are the perfect recruiting target because these prospects are currently employed (i.e. passives); they are diverse; it costs almost nothing to get a recruiting message in front of them and best of all; and they already know and like your company and its products. These perfect candidates are your …
Read More »The 14 Components of an Agile Talent Management Strategy
In business, it is becoming more apparent every day that a large-size company is less of an advantage than speed and agility. There are new stories every month about how smaller firms like Facebook, Zynga, Instagram, and Zappos dominate over larger firms in their same space. The same shift in critical …
Read More »The Death of the Cubicle — and the Killers Are Collaboration and Innovation
You might think of your desk or cubicle as simply a place to do work, but forward-looking executives have found that the physical workspace has a profound impact on increasing not just productivity but also innovation. Silicon Valley didn’t invent the cubicle, but it certainly made it an integral part …
Read More »Recruiting on Pinterest, Instagram, and Dribbble to Build Your Innovation Brand
When most recruiters learn about a potential new media channel like Pinterest or Instagram, their initial reaction is often to discount them as a low-volume source. Many recruiters shortsightedly fail to see their value, no matter how many desirable prospects “hang out” on them, simply because the new source is …
Read More »10 Compelling Numbers That Reveal the Power of Employee Referrals
I strive to be the world’s most prominent advocate of employee referrals simply because there is no more powerful tool in recruiting. Well-designed referral programs not only identify top prospects that are not in a job-search mode but they also require employees to assess candidates for skills and fit and …
Read More »An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page — Action Steps to Avoid or Turn Around a “Great to Good” Slide (Part 2 of 2)
Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I’ve pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world. Google is a large company now, but …
Read More »An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page — Avoid the “Great to Good” Downward Spiral (Part 1 of 2)
There are fewer sad things to observe than a once-great firm sliding into mediocrity. You might not be accustomed to hearing the word “sad” and “business” in the same sentence, but I really do find it sad when great startup firms lose their energy and eventually become lumbering giants. If …
Read More »What’s Wrong With HR Metrics? Pretty Much Everything!
If your goal is to improve the quality of your people management decisions and be metric driven, you need to assess your current metric approach using the following 20 faults as assessment factors.
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