Workforce Insights

Hiring Manager Training & Coaching

Jack Welch speaks, writes and leads from the philosophy that companies need to hire people that can clearly execute on their vision or they simply won’t get where they trying to go.

Hiring Managers Aren’t Trained to Hire Right, Yet They’re Held Accountable for Results

Just like any other business skill or core competency, the ability to effectively identify and select the right candidate and to develop them into a true difference maker is learned over time. Your vice presidents, directors, and managers run your business every day. Much more infrequently, they have to make a hiring decision. It’s therefore quite natural that most hiring authorities simply haven’t had the practice needed to excel at targeted selection. So what happens? Gut decisions are made. It’s like buying a car for the paint job, the slick tires and the curb appeal, without a clear understanding of what’s truly under the hood. Then you go to work with your new hire and realize that his personality and talent for communication just can’t make up for his inability to be effective on the job.

KeenHire Helps You Change That

Employee Development

Employee development and training means we invests in our people and help you to do the same.

We provide a systematic and integrated approach to employee development and training, delivered though 1-1 coaching, in-person seminars, or convenient teleconferences. By making career and personal development relevant, timely and social, we help you redefine your approach to employee development and help you to identify your emerging leaders.

Executive Assessment

As a leading decision maker at your company, it’s almost certain that you need to be sure your executive staff is corporately aligned and motivated for success. Because this type of psychometric data is almost never laid out in front of you, we’re here to show you that it can be. Take this sample executive assessment and a member of our team will guide you through how it works in solidifying and scaling your leadership team for the future.

 

Benchmarking & Role Analysis

KeenHire offers Key Contributor and Mission Critical

Benchmarking and Role Analysis Consulting

Benchmarking and Role Analysis are the key steps most often missed when a company starts a search for their next hire. The problem is that most companies are in such a hurry to hire or fill an empty seat that they do not take the time to do the job right from the beginning.  It is essential to establish the job expectations and who the candidate needs to be in order to meet or exceed these expectations. When you begin with the end in mind, you do a better job of hiring, on boarding and retaining the right people. Benchmarking and role analysis helps clarify what “Right” looks like and what it means to “Win” in the role.

Performance Management

Within an organization, making certain each role is producing at or above expectations can be extremely time-consuming and frustrating, especially for new managers. We have developed a systematic process for putting the right people in the right jobs, improving overall performance and reducing management inefficiencies. Our philosophy on performance management is this:  hire right, clearly communicate the expectations, train where training is needed, establish accountability check-ins and then get out of the way. Our performance management consultants are experts in the distinctions that will yield the top performance from your people. Our consultants are trained to identify performance gaps and challenges, and to implement systematic performance management tools, methodologies and training programs that elevate your people’s ability to drive and sustain performance.

365 Days of Gratitude - Post 13 - Landmark Education

Tonight I assisted at Landmark Education's Advanced course evening session. I was there to stand for SELP registration and to register people into the completion course of the curriculum for living.

I first attended the Landmark Forum on a recommendation from Bruce Hodes, a well respected and provocative company performance coach. It was 1996. Before the Landmark Forum I was living a single dimensional life. After the Landmark Forum I saw many more avenues for living, working, mothering, relating, loving and contributing. My world opened up and so did my creativity and my ability to vision a future outside of my peripheral vision.

After the Forum my awakened curiosity moved me to learn everything I could about my industry and about all the factors that would change it. It was almost a decade later that that the KeenHire concept was born.

Whether self development comes in the package of Landmark Education or DePaul University for me taking on my own leadership, being driven for excellence and staying curious has put me in a position to invent and invest in a dream and play the game of making it into a reality.

I'm grateful Bruce Hodes that you invited me to do the Forum.

365 Days of Gratitude - Post 6 - Sophia

I am totally grateful for my granddaughter Sophia!!!

She is a gift from God. My intention is to Skype with her once per week minimum in 2013.

She makes me laugh. She challenges my patience. She goes running and biking with me and she's always cheerful about both even in 100 degree heat.

Sophia Danielle Detmer. I love You!

365 Days of Gratitude - Post 1 - Thank You Tom for My 1st Management Training

My first day of Gratitude 2013 goes to Tom Schaff for turning me on to the fundamental principles for living life on purpose.  One of my goals for 2013 is to create a Gratitude Journal and post daily. Today, as I embark on this year long gratitude journey, I remember first the people I am grateful for. There are so many who have contributed to my leadership growth and development, some came in my life for a reason, some for a season, some my whole a career and some my whole life. There are many to acknowledge. In just the process of doing a mental inventory of who has made a difference in my personal and professional career development, I count 50 people and more than 200 gratitude entries.  (just off the top of my mind).  There certainly will be no shortage of content for these gratitude entries and that is why I am so excited to see where this project for acknowledgement and gratitude takes us. 

As I look at my process of goal setting in general, I think back to Tom Schaff and his Exponentia Growth Systems' Presidents Club in Schaumburg, Ill, the first real management training program I had attended. I think back then there were 20 or so of us in the Sales Management training class and weekly we shared stories and learned lessons of how to be hiring managers and how to scale our sales organizations. In Tom's classroom we learned about our strengths and barriers to growing our sales businesses. Given Toms veracious appetite for knowledge we were always reading new books, and often had the opportunity to meet with new philosophies and even at times Authors.  During that time period Tom turned me on to Jack Canfield, you know the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy. Tom gifted me the book "Success Principles" and today as I look back on my 2012 completion and my 2013 Goal setting process it is Tom's face I see and Tom who I am ever so grateful to for inviting me to kick up my life through reading a book. After I read the book, Tom shared about his experience at Jack's Breakthrough to Success week long course and through his sharing, I too registered for the course.  It was in this course that I learned to really evaluate how my life was turning out. It was there I learned the art of setting intentions and goals. It was through that course that I learned to create annual completions lists of the 100 things I accomplished in that year and to set a new top 100 things I want to do in the new year. It was there that I learned to hone in on the 9 environments in my life and create the "ideal" in each one.  It was in Jack Canfield's BTS course that I learned to set my future vision for my life.  And yes, it was there, in that course, in the sweltering heat, at the beginning of August, in Phoenix  that I learned to set my annual goals from the future state and make them specific and measurable. The reality is, most likely, I have learned these things before, however in this course I created mastery in goal setting for myself and for my business.  As I look back, it was this course that altered the course of my future.  I am grateful for you Tom, and the mentoring that you provided for me as a young staffing firm business owner and as a head of sales.  You believed in me and my ability to change the course of my future and for that I am eternally grateful.

Magi

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Gratitude Can Change Your Life

Talent Strategy or Competition? How to make all your people feel like they’ve been promoted

I recently read an article for employees about how to position themselves for a promotion.  In a corporate culture where the path to the goods is getting on top, getting that promotion is the key to nirvana.  The next step up the corporate ladder means more money, more respect, more job satisfaction, and perhaps a sense of job security, if anyone has that these days!  What if all those things could occur for everyone who works for your business? 

You can reference the entire article here.  For our purposes, I’ll give you the tip for getting that promotion, followed by deeper look at how you can optimize your employee engagement strategy.

1.  Know your job.  The advice for promotion seekers is to do a good job with the one they have.  This is easy to do if the job is a good fit.  Your job as a manager is to hire right in the first place.  Keenhire’s Conscious Hiring process ensures precious time and resources are not used placing a square peg in a round hole.
2. Volunteer.  People who want to be made use of make themselves useful.  Your job is to have a great talent strategy so that the gifts and talents in your talent pool are contributing.  This is how everybody wins!  You get the best results, and your people get to do what they’re good at. 
3. Create your own position.  When people are stepping into a need, new job descriptions get created.  Your job is to develop your people so they can step into the new opportunities that your company’s growth will provide.  A comprehensive employee development strategy is a must.
4. Let your boss know.  Your job is not to wait for an employee to tell you they are interested in contributing.  Make sure your employees know that you know who they are, and are paying attention.  This is a key component to employee engagement, which I discussed in last week’s blog. 
5. Get more education.  Your job is to add value to your workplace by providing ongoing training and development within your organization that helps people do what they do even better.
6. Don’t create drama.  It is difficult for your employees to create drama if you have crafted your company culture to reflect the ideals that everyone wants to participate in.  Company culture starts from the top down, and congruence throughout the organization will make drama a waste of time for all concerned.  Keenhire’s organizational assessment tools will help you understand what’s going on at every level of your organization.
7. Network.  The promotion seeker networks.  The productive organization encourages collaboration.  Cooperation rather than competition is something that you can create, if you’ve hired right, provided a dynamic, creative, high performance company culture, and set up an ongoing employee development strategy. 

Today’s economic climate requires that people at every level of your business are engaged and happy.  A promotion is a great thing, and you can ensure that everyone who works for you is happy without one.  To make sure you're creating the company culture you want, talk to a Keenhire consultant today at 888-533-6447.

 

Written by Elizabeth Danu

 

Behavioral Interviewing is Changing the Game- Are You Ready To Make The Switch?

We’ve all been there, sitting in the waiting room, palms sweating trying to memorize the “right answers” while we are desperately scanning our resume, looking for the right thing to say (like we don’t know where we have worked and what we have done). Interviews can be just as terrifying as public speaking, except you don’t know what’s coming!  You want to be prepared, but so does the interviewer. They want to get to know you and figure out if you’re the right person for this role and their company. This is why most companies have added a step and shifted from relying primarily on traditional style interviewing to utilizing behavioral to validate that the person actually operates in a manner congruent with their corporate values and mission.  Companies are learning the hard way that a resume only states what the person has done, and that 75% of those resumes are inflated. As the competition for business and talent continues to grow sharp business leaders are upgrading their hiring process and positioning themselves to hire the best and say, thank you for sharing to the rest.

What is behavioral interviewing anyway?

Behavioral Interviewing is a way to find out how and why people do things rather than what happened. What’s the point of knowing where someone worked if you can’t know what he or she did and the step they took to get there? Often times when we tell stories there is a lot of “we”, in behavioral interviewing the interviewer wants to know what YOU did, how you contributed and the behavior traits you posses that made you act a certain way. It is all about open-ended questions that force you to draw on events and stories that have happened in your life. The difference between "What is one of your weakness"? and "tell me about a time you failed at something and what did you learn?" might not seem like much, but it forces you to give a different kind of answer. These types of questions give employers a better sense of the kind of person you are and what type of role you might fit into in their company. Behavioral Interviewing is how companies attracted and select A players, and leverage their companies hiring power!

Don’t know how? KeenHire can teach you with our Behavioral Interviewing Training!

In our program you get a fundamental understanding and appreciation for why most bad hiring decisions are made in the first ten minutes of the interview.
Learn to understand the importance of identifying key performance indicators for each role; delve into all facets of the hiring and selection process, narrowing in on understanding and being able to identify motivations, ways of being, ways of thinking, and modes of interacting.

You walk away with a prowess for knowing what to ask and how to interpret the answer. Catch and redirect yourself in the midst of being "sold" in the interview and focus on the content of the validated answer.

"To fly as fast as thought, to be anywhere there is, you must first begin by knowing that you have already arrived."
                                                                    - Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

By: Emily Eastman