KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

You Are The Sum Of The 5 People You Spend Your Time With

Sometimes that statement makes me cringe. If that statement is a true one, we all best be very selective with who we chose to call our friend and who we chose to give our time to.

I make friends easily. On planes, on trains, in cars, in bars, in courses, on horses, at lunch, upon a hunch, through my boys, because of my sporting toys..... it seems no matter where I go I come back with new friends. The real question for me to answer is, "How do I feel when I am on my way home from being with these people I am calling friends?".

Do I feel energized, powerful and giddy or am I drained and exhausted? Are my friends and business partners feeding my spirit or sucking the life out of me?  Do they give what they take, or do they just take. 

Do we share values, beliefs and commitments? Or do we share partying and fun over cocktails and gossip?

The naked truth at times hurts. Sometimes even people I have known and loved for a decade need to take a back seat because they are stealing my energy, time and in some cases my spirit. 

One of my new friends and inspirations is a  man named Michael Nila, Michael is the CEO of Guardian Quest. When we met we discussed everything from spiritual matters, leadership, parenting, sex, business and family.  I was sharing with Michael my dilemma of as I get busier and have less time, how selective I need to be with what I do with my time. He says purging is part of life. Sometimes you see people because of the family connection, other times because of a deep bond and a need to be with that person, other times it is to fill in the space or out of obligation.  The key is evaluate, assess, weigh the pros and cons of having certain people in your life.  Sometimes when there are people who I am around out of guilt or fear they limit who else comes into my life and the time I would have to nurture the right relationships is wasted and misused.  WOW, it seems pretty much like the coaching I give to hiring managers and business leaders on choosing their talent wisely.  When the student is ready the teacher appears.

Michael believes that Magic moments are what ties people together and builds foundational bonds. Sharing things that matter, like life training programs, family events, kids sporting games, life losses, charity events, spiritual awakenings and uplifting adventures. He said that the ability to communicate good, bad, happy, sad, real feelings is critical. As he was speaking I kept checking in with myself for how I was interpreting his words. The thought that kept popping up was shared values. Common bonds, common life experiences, aligned beliefs, similar work ethics and missions in life. 

It is a lot like hiring, right?  You are the sum of the 5 people you surround yourself with in business. Are you surrounding yourself with challenging people who will up the ante or are you surrounding yourself with people who are happy just to have a place to call home?

My conversation with Michael was very timely, actually perfect as I plan for 2010.  I chose ideal friendships, and ideal lover, ideal business partners, ideal employees and ideal customers, people of depth, purpose and passion.  People who will call me to be at my best. 

Cha Ching - Ring in the New Year!

Best of Success in 2010

Margo

Who has made a difference for you in 2009?

Stop Jamming A Square Peg Into A Round Hole

As a manager, have you ever had the experience of trying to ‘make’ an employee change, forcing an outcome from an employee to improve their performance or even worse; have you ever attempted to have them work differently by encouraging them to alter their natural work style, values, behaviors, beliefs and personality so they would perform better in their role, or for the betterment of the company?  

As leaders of people, we often have to deal with ourselves to overcome the syndrome of

“I can fix and change people".  As a peak performer in recruitment, for years I found myself placing the best and hiring the rest. As a small business owner, I was hiring 'C' candidates, because they were more affordable and selling myself on the myth that they would be better if someone just helped them and then I expended enormous amounts of my personal effort trying to overcome their ineffectiveness.  My shortsightedness had me saving money on the front end and spending 3 times the savings on the back end. Until I went  through a basic training from Vistage (formerly known as TEC),   I was not present to the profit erosion that these non strategic hiring practices were causing.

Once having my eyes opened, I embarked on a hiring process development journey. I was committed to fixing my problem and I took courses on organizational assessment, behavioral interviewing, top grading, organizational development, personal transformation and executive coaching.  Over the course of a decade I invested $100,000 in mastering 'putting the right people on the bus'.  After much resistance and many breakthroughs, I finally learned the lesson handed down to me from my first mentor.  "People are whole and complete and have everything they need to be successful, as long as you put the right people in the right role." It is your job to Choose Wisely"

There have been many books, articles, lectures and even case studies written on this subject. Companies like General Electric, PepsiCo, Spielberg Productions, DreamWorks, Google, Microsoft, The Limited and more have all publicly stated that a KEY factor to their enormous success was the people they chose to employ in key contributor, mission critical and leadership roles.

The new game in the business of Recruitment Process In-Sourcing

Guardian Quest Leadership Development - Michael Nila, Ondra Berry - Stellar training, stellar people.

7 Easy Steps To Becoming An Employer Of Choice

Step 1 – Establish Your Employee Value Proposition

 

Tie your employment brand with your business strategy. Understand why people want to work for your organization and develop a program that attracts more ideal candidates through your doors.

 

Recommended Reading: Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity, by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez.  

 

 

Step 2 – Establish a 'Cracker Jack' Candidate Sourcing Strategy

 

Do the work to find out where your ideal candidates are right now. Where do they hang out? What do they read? What do they do for fun?

 

Include Social Media tools, this means be a proactive social media presence. Have a credible, passionate, authentic person from your company talk to your ideal audience all the time, whether you are hiring or not. Provide value.  Keep ideal candidates coming back for more, get them on your web site, create reasons for website and social media stickiness.

 

Be a talent scout. Enroll your team into scouting for additional contributors and mission critical players. Reward your people for quality recommendations.

 

Hire the right recruitment talent.  Select your partners as wisely as you select your teammates. There are a ton of ‘recruitment’ alternatives in the marketplace. Choose a partner who is committed to your end game and will do a great job surfacing, selecting and assisting you in on-boarding top tier people for your organization.

 

Step 3- Conduct a Role Analysis – Let the job talk.

Define performance criteria before you start searching. Sit down and work through the KPI’s, Core functions and specific Selection Criteria with the key stakeholders impacted by the success or failure of the hire. Predetermine the “who” in who you need to hire. What values do they honor? What is their work ethic? For that matter, what are their ethics? What are the non-negotiable competencies, behaviors and emotional intelligence levels required in the role?

 

Recommended reading: The Truth About Managing People and Nothing but the Truth. Stephen Robbins.

 

Step 4- Establish a hiring process that holds your hiring team accountable for selecting the best and eliminating the rest.

 

Create a process and choose to stick to it. All to often a great process is defined and then a decision maker meets someone who strikes their fancy yet clearly does not meet the selection metrics required. The decision maker calls the shots, ignores the very process they implemented and pulls the trigger only to discover that a slick talker with a good story has bamboozled them into paying way to much money for way too little in return.

 

Step 5 – Begin amplifying the employment brand during the hiring process.

Silicon Valley Continues to Lead N. American Metros in Strength of Its High-Tech Industry

Silicon Valley Continues to Lead N. American Metros in Strength of Its High-Tech Industry, but Growth in Other Regions Shows Integration Across Continent, Says Milken Institute Study

LOS ANGELES – Silicon Valley, the largest and most influential high-tech center in the world, continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in North America in the breadth and scope of economic activity it creates through technological innovation. But many other metros have built strong and diverse industries that should allow them to prosper when the global economy recovers, according to a new report from the Milken Institute.

“High-tech industries are an important and sustaining anchor for regions to survive the slump and to rebuild their economies around high-wage jobs,” says Ross DeVol, Director of Regional Economics at the Institute and author of the newly released report, North America’s High-Tech Economy: The Geography of Knowledge-Based Industries.

“Every sector has been impacted by the current economic downturn, but high-tech centers will come out on top,” continues DeVol. “In 2003, many said that the era of technology-based economic development was over. However, the industry defied the naysayers and grew rapidly in the following years, proving that regions that promote and sustain the vital inputs to a high-tech sector are best prepared to recover and generate broader stability and growth.”

According to the study, which ranks the top high-tech centers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, most of the top tech metros are well known – like Seattle, Cambridge, Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco. But there are many lesser-known regions that have made tremendous inroads in the past decade to build their technology assets, such as Toronto, Canada; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and even Baja California.

The top-ten rankings for the preeminent high-tech metros in North America:

Silicon Valley leading the way out of the recession!

What Is RPI-Recruitment Process In-Sourcing

Without a doubt, the world is starved for high performing mission critical, key contributor and next level leadership talent. Companies are scrambling to create recruitment  and retention strategies that bring forth and engage this population.

With the well-publicized graying and impending retirement of the aging workforce, the abundance of millennial talent entering the workforce and the emergence of social networking; it is crystal clear that the business world is seriously reevaluating old, stale recruitment and hiring practices and eager to locate new cutting edge strategies for attracting, selecting and retaining the right people to take their companies to the next level.

KeenHire has amalgamated core components of our Organizational Design, Recruitment, Selection, Hiring and Retention programs to deliver a world class Recruitment Process In-Sourcing (RPI) program for Emerging and Expanding companies needing to hire a team of people in a specific time frame and maximize their return on their human capital investment.

Keen joins forces with your existing management team,

What is RPI? Recruitment Process In-Sourcing?