KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Maximize Your Effectiveness with the Success Factor

The Premise
You are the sum of the results produce in life. While some like to point to luck being at play when great success is reached. I say luck is what happens when hard work and preparation meet opportunity and inspired action.

This high-energy, collaborative program highlights the drivers and levers that bring long-term personal and business success.

If YOU are really the source of your own success it is powerful to take a look at how that success happens.

The thoughts you have, the beliefs you hold, the actions your take, the people you surround yourself with, what you spend your money on and how you spend your free time is all about your choices; and your choices determine your outcomes. 

Explore and create a vision for yourself and your future that it inspires you to take the actions that lead to success.  Click here to Register NOW

The Program

•    You to the 5th power

•    Engaging Risk

•    Making the Right Choices

•    Being Unstoppable

•    Commitment – Living inside a context for winning

The Takeaways

1. Goal setting tools that turn ideas into action

2. Actionable activities that sharpen your saw

3. Heightened awareness of what stops you and how to cut that off at the pass 

4. Self Management strategies that eliminate time bandits and unworthy distraction

5. Resources to maximize your strengths

The Expert  

At 21, single mother Margaret Graziano had a tough choice to make: to fight for child support or try supporting her family with a straight commission sales job. She chose the latter and never looked back. Graziano began her personnel career as an employment consultant earning a six dollar an hour draw and within 10 years, had opened her own staffing agency. In testament to her business savvy she has established a client base stemming from 80% repeat business, earned more than $5,000,000 in personal “desk production” income, and placed more than 2,000 candidates in direct hire positions with a 98% placement satisfaction rating.

 

Want to Bring a KeenHire Consultant In-house for Training? Call Today! 1-888-533-6447

 

Registration

Virtual Courses consist of 6 weekly 1 hour sessions and begin on Monday evening June 14, August 9, October 4 at 6:00 pst and costs $299.00 per person. Save 30% overall when you register 3 or more participants. Click NOW to Register.

Emerging Leaders Immersion Training

The Premise
If you are new to the responsibility of Managing people, process or systems and your company requires an efficient and effective use of their resources this hands on Management immersion training program is for you.

This high-energy, collaborative program hones in on the fundamentals of managing your team, maximizing your effectiveness and building a high performance team. Click here to register NOW!

The Program
•    Workplace Strengths Awareness
•    Delegating Authority
•    Accountability
•    Personal Productivity
•    Hiring the Right People

•    Motivating and Inspiring your team
•    Performance Management
•    Navigating through your Role as Manager and Key Contributor

 
The Takeaways
1. You gain power and prowess in your ability to lead
2. You walk away embracing your managerial role
3. You learn systematic methods to maximize productivity  

4. You get a process for hiring, on boarding and managing your team
5. You focus on building and strengthening on your and your teams X-Factor

The Expert
Margo coaches business leaders on building strategic minded stakeholder centric organizations. Her expertise in Strategic planning and Organizational effectiveness position her in a senior level Executive advisory role. She has developed proprietary work-flow process, training and tools that enable her customers to implement Conscious-hiring protocols, High performing Recruitment initiatives, Employee Retention and Leadership development.

 

Want to Bring a KeenHire Consultant In-house? Call Today! 1-888-533-6447

 

Registration

Virtual Courses consist of 8 weekly 90 minute sessions and begin on Monday mornings June 14, August 30, October 11 at 9:00 a.m. pst and costs $399.00 per person. Save 30% overall when you register 3 or more participants. Click here NOW to register.

 

follow me on twitter - @keenmargo

 

Call For Women Leaders Working In 'New Age' Biotechnology

SD Forum panel on June 29th - Yahoo Headquarters

Explore new business, career and investment opportunities with revolutionary Biotech solutions that transform health and wellness!

Preventative Health care – “There will come a time when the individual, with the help of technology, social media and self awareness becomes their own primary care provider” quote by a soon to be famous doctor from Minnesota via San Francisco

The SD Forum http://www.sdforum.org/ is putting on an evening event about the future of the biotechnology industry, specifically looking at proactive technology like Epigenetics, Genomics, Brain Stimulated medical device, etc.

We are looking for a moderator, a scientist, and 3 business operators. The session is June 29 and lasts from 7:00-8:30 and is primarily around the business side of the industry: careers, challenges, funding, education, competition, impact. Typically people start to show up at 6:00 for networking and leave by 9. Ideally, we would like females on the panel as this group is for women in technology.

Ultimately, we will utilize the help of the panel to formulate exactly how the evening will roll out. If you think this is a fit for you or you have a recommendation of someone who you think I need to call please forward :).

How cool is this topic!

Thank you so much for your time.

Margo

Hiring, Managing, Engaging and Thriving With Your Virtual Workforce

When you have to do more with less, hiring virtual employees could be the perfect solution, just remember to Choose those virtual team members wisely. When you make the choice to open your doors to the virtual workforce you open yourself and your company to a whole new world of responsibility such as performance management for virtual employees, virtual team building and retaining virtual employees.

Keep in mind certain aspects you take for granted in managing and engaging your in house employees must be addressed, shifted and tweaked when hiring, managing and engaging with the virtual workforce. It is extremely important that you get it right in the beginning as more and more of your workforce will choose the virtual option and more and more companies are offering it.

Virtual team members carry more than just the burden of remembering which time zone they're working in. Business and Hiring Managers need to recognize the different way that virtual team members experience signal and noise. In order for a team with virtual members to work well, some effort needs to be spent up front on team governance and organizing communication processes into a tune with a good beat you can dance to.

 

 I'm thinking about the distractions around virtual team members because I stumbled on a great, if somewhat geeky, article in Information Technology & People that speaks to what my company does.  The gist of it is that co-located teams and virtual teams have different ways of getting to trust and team commitment.  In short, co-located teams develop trust through irregular personal interactions, whereas virtual teams build trust out of regular processes and clearly defined working relationships. 

 

This makes a lot of sense.  If you work side by side with your teammates you get cues all the time from them about how to work together.  In fact, you're receiving peer pressure, process pressure, the persuasion of the team leader and company pressure all at once, all the time.  It’s like listening to a symphony – notes and melody swirling around, but with somebody guiding them in the same direction.  Not much of a surprise then that it's relatively easy to get to a high level of team commitment with all that conducting going on. 

 

But put yourself in the shoes of the virtual team member.  Boy, what fun!  You get all the interaction of your local environment, but what you're tasked with focusing on is something invisible, unfamiliar and that doesn't give much feedback.  It reminds me of a pledge drive: I'm trying to just drive the car and not to hit anything when the music stops and the man asks me to pick up the phone.  We all know how well that works: I turn down the distraction and stay on the road. 

 

What I read in this article is that, in general, it's hard to focus in a noisy environment, and that people are really bad at thinking on their feet when they're under pressure.  I've always thought that it's a good idea to have a protocol to follow in the event of a surprise, so that you don't have to actually think on your feet.  Fortunately, for co-located team s these surprises and the resulting pressure are (usually) infrequent events that occur and get resolved.

 

But in a virtual team, the members are always under pressure. What they need is more like sheet music to guide from beginning to end.  And what the authors are suggesting is that it's that note by note guidance that makes it possible for the team to get its work done at all.  The team’s sheet music helps keep everyone together so they can create a soundtrack, not just background noise.  A pledge drive is easily turned down and ignored, but a good regular four-four beat gets turned up and sung along to.

 

The team leader has to orchestrate those rhythmic processes and clear relationships at the outset when he or she has the best chance of being heard.  That's the time, early on when an awful lot of us would likely be thinking about the schedule, that we should be spending our energy on governance. That’s when we should be setting up the relationships, performance management standards and processes that inform how work actually gets done.  After all, a schedule tells me how long I can wait until my tasks go critical. But what a virtual team needs early on is members zeroing in on their responsibilities and understanding the process for communicating regularly to the team that they're on the beat.

 

It's all about making it easy to do the right thing. The world is full of distractions. The challenge for a virtual team is to systematically make teamwork simple enough and regular enough to cut through the noise. 

 

 

David Kershaw

Founder, eVisioner

http://www.evisioner.com

MetaTeam :: Revolutionizing The Way Teams Work!

 

Call For Executive Recruitment And Talent Management Presenters

HR Executive Forum – Silicon Valley –January 2011

Our intention is to create a transformational Executive Retreat at StillHeart Institute in Woodside California for companies committed to achieving extraordinary results in service delivery, operational excellence and profitability through the power and engagement of their workforce.

Call for Presenters:

I am looking for highly successful Executive Level Recruitment, Corporate Recruiting Leadership and Talent Management Consultants and Practitioners who are at the top of their league, have an extraordinary ability to capture and engage a room and have achieved transformational results in dynamic and challenging environments.

Areas of Expertise

Corporate Transformation Consultant

Systemic Change Agent

Leadership Development

Succession Planning

Organizational Development and Design Specialist

Corporate Recruitment Consultant

Engineering Management Recruitment Consultant

Executive Sales Recruiting Practitioner

Management and Executive Recruiting Consultant

Human Resources Management-Operational Excellence

HR Technology Consultant

Recruitment Technology

Performance Management Consulting

Employee Engagement Consultant

Application Process

Please submit your CV, a video of you speaking to a group as well as the 3 goals you want to accomplish by participating in the HR Executive Forum. mgraziano@keenhire.com.   Deadline for submissions 6.29.10

 

 

2010 Goal Setting and Accountability

It is January 26th, Have you Set your 2010 Goals and Action Plans yet?

Here is a quick overview of the process that Keen Coaching utilizes with our Emerging and Executive Leaders. 

1. List 2009 Successes - Celebrate, pat yourself on the back, kiss the mirror, get a hug, give a hug

2. List 2009 Resentments, In-completions and Disappointments - then say what you need to say, burn them, laugh at them, but get over it.

3. List your 100 Life Goals 

4. Look 5 years old and imagine your life as the masterpiece you want. What are you doing? Where are you living? What is your bank balance? How does it feel? Create Affirmations for each area of life that is important to you, be very descriptive of how life looks, feels and is in the future that you create. 

5. Create a 1-2 page 2010 Plan - Business & Personal Goals in the areas of life that are important to you. For me it is Fitness,Family, Fun, Financial, Love Life, Work - not in that order. Chose what your overarching area of concentration for 2010 is going to be. Chose the Values that you will use to monitor your behavior. Set dates to each goal. Make them measurable.  Add some ZIP and ZAP to the goals. Loose 10 lbs gets old and boring, like washing the toilets. Looking fabulous and sexy in the speedo is a bit more enticing. 

6. Create a monthly habits chart - things you will do that bring out the best in your. Drink lots of water, do Yoga, meditate, Say thank you, etc. Download MonthlyHabitschart

7. Create a monthly score sheet for your goals so you can track your progress.

8. Create a Weekly Activity Tracking Sheet Download WeeklyGoalTracking2010

9.Use a daily 6 Most Inspired Actions worksheet to keep yourself attached to the weekly, monthly and annual goal.

10. Create a HOT, Fun, Inspiring Vision Board  -See  Above..... :)

11. Engage  buddy you can count on to schedule weekly accountability calls with you, have a consequence for blowing the call.

2010 - Your Time To Ascend !

Recruiting: Filling The Talent Pipeline

Filling the Recruiting Pipeline  

Sourcing and Selection are two very different worlds. One puts as many applicants in the pool as possible and the other sorts and selects the best fit for the fulfillment of the positions’ key objectives.  Given there is a War for Talent many companies fear that they can not afford to be highly selective in their recruitment efforts. The reality is while there is a war, there is also a recession which means certain industries are dying and with that is the emergence of talent from hidden sectors. 

If you strategize effectively you will easily attract solid ‘core’ talent from industries that are highly compatible to yours. Yes, you may have to train the candidate to your company, products and services. However if you conduct the hiring process with thoroughness and integrity you hire ONLY the best suitable talent - rather hiring the best suitable experience (which we all know backfires when it’s the wrong ‘fit’). Either way you have to train a newcomer to your firm, so it is your choice whether you want to train and fix bad behaviors or invest in up front industry, product and service training.  

To attract, hire and retain the “right” talent Keep in mind there are now a multitude of cost effective options and alternatives.  If you are choosing to pay a fee, or hire a contract recruiter ensure your recruiter is highly skilled in both search and selection, or consider outsourcing pieces of the processes to firms or people who are highly skilled in a specific area, or make certain that your internal resources have all the tools & training  they need to improve their hiring batting average.

Options for Generating Candidates at the top of the funnel:

A. Hire a Contract Recruiter, a full scale Search Firm or a local Employment Agency

Interviewing & Hiring A Recruitment firm or Professional Recruitment Contractor:
Questions you may want to ask.
1) How many placements have you made in our field/niche/industry/position level?
2) What is your passive candidate strategy? Please outline it.
3) What system are you utilizing to evaluate your candidates strengths, behaviors,and competencies as they compare to our immediate and long term needs for the role?
4) What is your due diligence process? Who pays for that?
5) What is the average tenure of your placements?
6) Will you consider a fee arrangement with a percentage weighted on retention
7) How many customers have you retained for 5+ years?

B. Sourcing Candidates through the Boards & Internet

1) If you using the boards to source candidates – hiring a 3rd party sourcing company might be a prudent option; these companies have armies of people who scour the job boards while we in America are sleeping. The average cost of this service is $1500.00 per search to $2500.00 per month.  Different companies charge based on the deliverable. This emerging industry is rapidly taking their stake in the talent acquisition sector.
           
2) Resume Search Aggregation and Filtering – these are software as a service subscriptions that take your job specifications and pull appropriate resumes from a multitude of job boards. This type of software can save your internal Sourcers or Recruiters hundreds of hours.

3) Posting technology - There is job board and social media posting technology that takes your single job posting and delivers it to hundreds of specialty sites in seconds. Pretty cool!

C. Passive Candidate Acquisition: Social Networking 

1) If you chose this route make sure you are hiring/contracting with a person who has no fear of rejection, is willing and able to make an abundant of outbound calls on a regular basis and who has strong talent in navigating around the internet.

2) Linked in and Face Book are by far two of the most effective ways to find passive talent. 

D. New Fashioned Head hunting

How is your recruiter planning on building the list of who to call? Do they have the resources for list building; will they outsource this function; if so how much will that cost?  There are excellent technology solutions that your recruiters need be using to maximize their efficiency and effectiveness. 

E. Create an EVP and promote the hell out of it

Find out why people work for your company, find out why they stay. Create an Employee Value proposition and promote it on social media, industry sites, internally, to customers, to local colleges and vocational schools, etc. 

F. Pay Referral Bonuses

G. Build Your Internal Recruitment Team to Maximize Your People ROI

Consider implementing B-F with a carefully selected and trained internal recruitment team. The internal team must be evaluated based on hiring metrics, retention, efficiency and value they provide.

The bottom line is make sure you are investing in the right solution for your unique situation.

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

Talent Strategy 2015 -It Starts NOW!

Every time the right person walks out of your door and the wrong person walks in, the cost to your bottom line is immense.  With a rocky economy, emerging global competitors on the rise, three generations in the workforce, Sr. level leaders on the verge of retirement and a future of opportunities knocking at your high potential workforces’ door, it is time to start thinking about how you are going to incorporate the ‘talent mindset’ in your company. The Society of Human Resource Management reports that 6 of the top 10 Workplace Trends are directly related to talent acquisition, selection & retention. The number 1 trend to most likely have a major impact on the workplace is workforce retention, and the most critical HR function effecting business strategy is Staffing/Employment and Recruiting. The above issues are not separate -they are looked at as Talent Management and there is no better time than right now to master the distinctions of Top Grading and Employer of choice.

The KeenHire™ Corporate Talent Strategy Series empowers hiring managers, business leaders and strategic HR partners to leverage the power of their human capital. Given Workforce retention is on everyone’s mind, it is only fair to share that 65% of all retention issues are caused in the selection process.  In this 16 hour program you will learn strategies for choosing your talent wisely, creating an engaged multigenerational workforce, and on-boarding, as well as strategies for effective succession planning, performance management and retention.

Join us for this provocative, insightful and fun program that delves into the corporate strategic talent issues and highlights innovative solutions you can initiate to solve them.

Course Outcomes

We will delve into corporate retention issues, dispel the myths and uncover critical issues that affect your ability to attract and keep good people.

You will learn a strategic approach to assessing your real human capital needs and how to implement the top grading approach to building an organization of high performers.

You will gain hands on experience in uncovering the Real Cost of Employee Turnover and the impact that it has on your company’s ability to achieve its strategic objectives. You will gain competence and capacity to choose your talent wisely.

You will walk away with the power and prowess to create the Talent Mindset within your company.

You will leave the workshop with a myriad array of retention strategies that meet the needs of a multitude of people in your workforce.

Course Overview

Corporate Retention issues
•    Understand the difference between Talent equity and Tenure equity
•    Review the generational parameters and influencers effecting retention

Corporate Assessment
•    Learn the organizational development approach to uncovering your human capital challenges
•    Benchmarking and Top Grading and how it can help you help your company

The Talent Mindset
•    Understand how the change in mindsets is imperative to your ability to attract and retain the right people in the right roles
•    Learn solid retention strategies that you can immediately implement

The Real Cost of Employee Turnover
•    Work through a hands on deep digging exercise and uncover the painful impact of hiring the wrong person or keeping the wrong person in a key role

Empowering your Management team to Choose Wisely
•    Implement hiring process and systems that bring forth only top tier talent

What They’re Saying

“I am pleased to recommend Margaret Graziano as a foremost authority in personnel recruitment, assessment, selection, and retention. I have paid to attend training and certification events with Margaret as the leader, and feel that the value was exceptional. Beyond her incredible knowledge of the aforementioned subjects, she brings a sincere passion to the training, and presents useable information in such a way that it is actually useful in a real-life setting. She cares about the people she works with and truly wants to advance our industry by helping others thrive as “true professionals”. Her training has helped me in my professional development, and the development of my organization. I believe that even if you are a “master” in this business, you can certainly increase your personal productivity and profits from her training, speaking, and the products offered by her company, KeenHire.

Top qualities: Great Results, Personable, Expert

Ed Keil, CPC, CERS, Owner, Reliance Recruiting
hired Margaret as a Consultant/Coach/Trainer in 2006 , and hired Margaret more than once

“Margaret Graziano has proven to be one of the torchbearers of progressive Human Resource/Human Capital initiatives. Her insight to what Corporate America wants and needs in order to help their company grow and prosper is truly leading edge and spot on. She has wowed her contemporaries with her "Keen" insight to the marketplace and has produced products and services which will revolutionize our industry. If anyone has any questions about Margaret's ability, just let me know. There is no one better equipped to assist you with Talent Acquisition and Talent Management issues for your firm. Do yourself a favor and get her involved with identifying and helping you solve these HR issues.” October 21, 2008
Jeff Wilson, CERS, CPC , Managing Partner/Owner , Key Corporate Services, LLC
was with another company when working with Margaret at KeenHire

 

Video testimonials are available

Shifting The People Responsibility To The CFO

For years I have been speaking to HR Professionals and Recruiters about the need to partner with their end users in aiding them in choosing their talent wisely. Now more than ever, a companies ability to attract and retain the RIGHT talent is imperative to their ability to survive and thrive. More and more companies are leaning on the Chief Financial Officer to manage the expense and analyze returns as well as implement profit driven talent management solutions.

In a market that is flooded with candidates, it is all about being able to discern who to hire, and who to take a pass on. 

When you open a job requisition for a “difference maker,” are you completely aware of the impact that this role is expected to make in your company within the first 60, 90, 180 days? When you ask yourself the tough performance questions, what do you hear yourself saying? Are you listening?

What nuggets of information surface when you assess and analyze the reasons why the incumbent failed to achieve results in the role? When on the hunt for that key difference maker in your organization, how aligned are you with where your firm is heading and how your difference maker is expected to help you get there? When you compare your final candidate with other top performers at your company, how does he stack up? Does he complement the company’s already high-performing team, does she fill a competency or talent gap, or is he simply the best candidate you can locate within the tight timeline parameters?

After all, in the war for talent, beggars can’t be choosers, right? Actually, statistics being generated in mass quantity by the Harvard Business Review as well as the major human resources consulting firms indicate that 60% to 85% of the retention problem is caused by defects in the hiring process.   

If these statistics are true, the writing is on the wall that it’s critical for companies to improve their ability to put the right person in the right role the first time.                                                                                                                                                

It is also critical for corporations to view their needs from a global organizational analysis perspective, including role benchmarking, behavioral interviewing and talent assessment.         Even before you facilitate a conversation with other key stakeholders to refresh and realign your big-picture human capital needs, your ability to discern and articulate key behaviors indicative of corporate difference makers immediately positions you as a “good to great” leader.

A difference maker is someone who leaves the company in a better position when his or her time is complete.

A difference maker in many cases shakes things up, brings forth change, takes a tough stand for performance, and is at times not the most popular person on the team.  In today’s competitive business market, difference makers typically directly impact a company’s ability to hit its targets — whether those are sales, effectiveness, innovation, market share, talent management or service.

True difference makers have highly developed competency at leveraging their behaviors and values for the betterment of their company. These people know what motivates them, and they position themselves in roles where they can shine. Often but not always, difference makers are the leaders in their organization, even if they do not have the title.

Difference makers almost always possess core values that position them as winners in their organization’s eyes.   Difference makers tell the truth, they don’t cover up mistakes — they learn from them, and they are completely accountable for what works and what doesn’t. 

They are fundamentally motivated by a strong sense of responsibility, and that impulse governs their desire and willingness to get things done. Additionally, most difference makers have an innate need to achieve personal significance and meaning in their work, and this is something that really has an impact on those around them. Furthermore, most of them make the case that they are never done learning and that mastery, or being excellence focused, is their way to stay ahead of the curve and bring innovative solutions to their company and the marketplace.

Difference makers are proactive and solution oriented; they are the type of people who act and don’t wait to be acted upon, and they don’t shift responsibility and blame others for their or their company’s shortcomings. Difference makers do whatever they must to get the job done, whether that means coming in two hours early or working until the wee hours of the morning. At times they could be accused of being workaholics, yet these people don’t work out of an addiction, but because of a passion and commitment to their mission.

A leader who is also a difference maker is a great coach. She typically demonstrates concern for her employees’ professional development and often gives subordinates opportunities to take on new, stimulating challenges that stretch their abilities and advance their careers. Another leadership competency that difference makers possess is the ability to consider the results of the group as a whole, make changes and improvements where necessary, and increase the level of productivity and performance at all levels of the team. Some difference makers are highly accomplished trendsetters; their innovative ideas, understanding of the marketplace, creativity, and willingness to take risks pave new paths for their company, their products and their services.

Difference makers are typically highly astute in their ability to assess themselves. They know which areas they excel in as well as the areas where they need to delegate to others more competent in that skill set. 

As the war for talent and the economy continue to drive home new corporate challenges and your company is facing the grim reality of a problem called the leadership deficit, there will be a major push to identify, engage and develop difference makers. 

So the question is...what are you going to do about it?