Why Some Hate HR

In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing, and developing that talent should be one of the most important tasks in a corporation. So why does human resources do such a bad job -- and how can we fix it?

Well, here's a rockin' party: a gathering of several hundred midlevel human-resources executives in Las Vegas. (Yo, Wayne Newton! How's the 401(k)?) They are here, ensconced for two days at faux-glam Caesars Palace, to confer on "strategic HR leadership," a conceit that sounds, to the lay observer, at once frightening and self-contradictory. If not plain laughable.

Because let's face it: After close to 20 years of hopeful rhetoric about becoming "strategic partners" with a "seat at the table" where the business decisions that matter are made, most human-resources professionals aren't nearly there. They have no seat, and the table is locked inside a conference room to which they have no key. HR people are, for most practical purposes, neither strategic nor leaders.

I don't care for Las Vegas. And if it's not clear already, I don't like HR, either, which is why I'm here. The human-resources trade long ago proved itself, at best, a necessary evil -- and at worst, a dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change. HR is the corporate function with the greatest potential -- the key driver, in theory, of business performance -- and also the one that most consistently underdelivers. And I am here to find out why.

Why are annual performance appraisals so time-consuming -- and so routinely useless? Why is HR so often a henchman for the chief financial officer, finding ever-more ingenious ways to cut benefits and hack at payroll? Why do its communications -- when we can understand them at all -- so often flout reality? Why are so many people processes duplicative and wasteful, creating a forest of paperwork for every minor transaction? And why does HR insist on sameness as a proxy for equity?

It's no wonder that we hate HR. In a 2005 survey by consultancy Hay Group, just 40% of employees commended their companies for retaining high-quality workers. Just 41% agreed that performance evaluations were fair. Only 58% rated their job training as favorable. Most said they had few opportunities for advancement -- and that they didn't know, in any case, what was required to move up. Most telling, only about half of workers below the manager level believed their companies took a genuine interest in their well-being.

None of this is explained immediately in Vegas. These HR folks, from employers across the nation, are neither evil courtiers nor thoughtless automatons. They are mostly smart, engaging people who seem genuinely interested in doing their jobs better. They speak convincingly about employee development and cultural transformation. And, over drinks, they spin some pretty funny yarns of employee weirdness. (Like the one about the guy who threatened to sue his wife's company for "enabling" her affair with a coworker. Then there was the mentally disabled worker and the hooker -- well, no, never mind. . . .)

But then the facade cracks. It happens at an afternoon presentation called "From Technicians to Consultants: How to Transform Your HR Staff into Strategic Business Partners." The speaker, Julie Muckler, is senior vice president of human resources at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. She is an enthusiastic woman with a broad smile and 20 years of experience at companies such as Johnson & Johnson and General Tire. She has degrees in consumer economics and human resources and organizational development.

And I have no idea what she's talking about. There is mention of "internal action learning" and "being more planful in my approach." PowerPoint slides outline Wells Fargo Home Mortgage's initiatives in performance management, organization design, and horizontal-solutions teams. Muckler describes leveraging internal resources and involving external resources -- and she leaves her audience dazed. That evening, even the human-resources pros confide they didn't understand much of it, either.

This, friends, is the trouble with HR. In a knowledge economy, companies that have the best talent win. We all know that. Human resources execs should be making the most of our, well, human resources -- finding the best hires, nurturing the stars, fostering a productive work environment -- just as IT runs the computers and finance minds the capital. HR should be joined to business strategy at the hip.

Instead, most HR organizations have ghettoized themselves literally to the brink of obsolescence. They are competent at the administrivia of pay, benefits, and retirement, but companies increasingly are farming those functions out to contractors who can handle such routine tasks at lower expense. What's left is the more important strategic role of raising the reputational and intellectual capital of the company -- but HR is, it turns out, uniquely unsuited for that.

Here's why.

1. HR people aren't the sharpest tacks in the box. We'll be blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding career in business, your first instinct is not to join the human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation's top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school: "The best and the brightest don't go into HR."

Who does? Intelligent people, sometimes -- but not businesspeople. "HR doesn't tend to hire a lot of independent thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses," says Garold L. Markle, a longtime human-resources executive at Exxon and Shell Offshore who now runs his own consultancy. Some are exiles from the corporate mainstream: They've fared poorly in meatier roles -- but not poorly enough to be fired. For them, and for their employers, HR represents a relatively low-risk parking spot.

Others enter the field by choice and with the best of intentions, but for the wrong reasons. They like working with people, and they want to be helpful -- noble motives that thoroughly tick off some HR thinkers. "When people have come to me and said, 'I want to work with people,' I say, 'Good, go be a social worker,' " says Arnold Kanarick, who has headed human resources at the Limited and, until recently, at Bear Stearns. "HR isn't about being a do-gooder. It's about how do you get the best and brightest people and raise the value of the firm."

The really scary news is that the gulf between capabilities and job requirements appears to be widening. As business and legal demands on the function intensify, staffers' educational qualifications haven't kept pace. In fact, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a considerably smaller proportion of HR professionals today have some education beyond a bachelor's degree than in 1990.

And here's one more slice of telling SHRM data: When HR professionals were asked about the worth of various academic courses toward a "successful career in HR," 83% said that classes in interpersonal communications skills had "extremely high value." Employment law and business ethics followed, at 71% and 66%, respectively. Where was change management? At 35%. Strategic management? 32%. Finance? Um, that was just 2%.

The truth? Most human-resources managers aren't particularly interested in, or equipped for, doing business. And in a business, that's sort of a problem. As guardians of a company's talent, HR has to understand how people serve corporate objectives. Instead, "business acumen is the single biggest factor that HR professionals in the U.S. lack today," says Anthony J. Rucci, executive vice president at Cardinal Health Inc., a big health-care supply distributor.

Rucci is consistently mentioned by academics, consultants, and other HR leaders as an executive who actually does know business. At Baxter International, he ran both HR and corporate strategy. Before that, at Sears, he led a study of results at 800 stores over five years to assess the connection between employee commitment, customer loyalty, and profitability.

As far as Rucci is concerned, there are three questions that any decent HR person in the world should be able to answer. First, who is your company's core customer? "Have you talked to one lately? Do you know what challenges they face?" Second, who is the competition? "What do they do well and not well?" And most important, who are we? "What is a realistic assessment of what we do well and not so well vis a vis the customer and the competition?"

Does your HR pro know the answers?

2. HR pursues efficiency in lieu of value. Why? Because it's easier -- and easier to measure. Dave Ulrich, a professor at the University of Michigan, recalls meeting with the chairman and top HR people from a big bank. "The training person said that 80% of employees have done at least 40 hours in classes. The chairman said, 'Congratulations.' I said, 'You're talking about the activities you're doing. The question is, What are you delivering?' "

That sort of stuff drives Ulrich nuts. Over 20 years, he has become the HR trade's best-known guru (see "The Once and Future Consultant," page 48) and a leading proponent of the push to take on more-strategic roles within corporations. But human-resources managers, he acknowledges, typically undermine that effort by investing more importance in activities than in outcomes. "You're only effective if you add value," Ulrich says. "That means you're not measured by what you do but by what you deliver." By that, he refers not just to the value delivered to employees and line managers, but the benefits that accrue to investors and customers, as well.

So here's a true story: A talented young marketing exec accepts a job offer with Time Warner out of business school. She interviews for openings in several departments -- then is told by HR that only one is interested in her. In fact, she learns later, they all had been. She had been railroaded into the job, under the supervision of a widely reviled manager, because no one inside the company would take it.

You make the call: Did HR do its job? On the one hand, it filled the empty slot. "It did what was organizationally expedient," says the woman now. "Getting someone who wouldn't kick and scream about this role probably made sense to them. But I just felt angry." She left Time Warner after just a year. (A Time Warner spokesperson declined to comment on the incident.)

Part of the problem is that Time Warner's metrics likely will never catch the real cost of its HR department's action. Human resources can readily provide the number of people it hired, the percentage of performance evaluations completed, and the extent to which employees are satisfied or not with their benefits. But only rarely does it link any of those metrics to business performance.

John W. Boudreau, a professor at the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations, likens the failing to shortcomings of the finance function before DuPont figured out how to calculate return on investment in 1912. In HR, he says, "we don't have anywhere near that kind of logical sophistication in the way of people or talent. So the decisions that get made about that resource are far less sophisticated, reliable, and consistent."

Cardinal Health's Rucci is trying to fix that. Cardinal regularly asks its employees 12 questions designed to measure engagement. Among them: Do they understand the company's strategy? Do they see the connection between that and their jobs? Are they proud to tell people where they work? Rucci correlates the results to those of a survey of 2,000 customers, as well as monthly sales data and brand-awareness scores.

"So I don't know if our HR processes are having an impact" per se, Rucci says. "But I know absolutely that employee-engagement scores have an impact on our business," accounting for between 1% and 10% of earnings, depending on the business and the employee's role. "Cardinal may not anytime soon get invited by the Conference Board to explain our world-class best practices in any area of HR -- and I couldn't care less. The real question is, Is the business effective and successful?"

3. HR isn't working for you. Want to know why you go through that asinine performance appraisal every year, really? Markle, who admits to having administered countless numbers of them over the years, is pleased to confirm your suspicions. Companies, he says "are doing it to protect themselves against their own employees," he says. "They put a piece of paper between you and employees, so if you ever have a confrontation, you can go to the file and say, 'Here, I've documented this problem.' "

There's a good reason for this defensive stance, of course. In the last two generations, government has created an immense thicket of labor regulations. Equal Employment Opportunity; Fair Labor Standards; Occupational Safety and Health; Family and Medical Leave; and the ever-popular ERISA. These are complex, serious issues requiring technical expertise, and HR has to apply reasonable caution.

But "it's easy to get sucked down into that," says Mark Royal, a senior consultant with Hay Group. "There's a tension created by HR's role as protector of corporate assets -- making sure it doesn't run afoul of the rules. That puts you in the position of saying no a lot, of playing the bad cop. You have to step out of that, see the broad possibilities, and take a more open-minded approach. You need to understand where the exceptions to broad policies can be made."

Typically, HR people can't, or won't. Instead, they pursue standardization and uniformity in the face of a workforce that is heterogeneous and complex. A manager at a large capital leasing company complains that corporate HR is trying to eliminate most vice-president titles there -- even though veeps are a dime a dozen in the finance industry. Why? Because in the company's commercial business, vice president is a rank reserved for the top officers. In its drive for bureaucratic "fairness," HR is actually threatening the reputation, and so the effectiveness, of the company's finance professionals.

The urge for one-size-fits-all, says one professor who studies the field, "is partly about compliance, but mostly because it's just easier." Bureaucrats everywhere abhor exceptions -- not just because they open up the company to charges of bias but because they require more than rote solutions. They're time-consuming and expensive to manage. Make one exception, HR fears, and the floodgates will open.

There's a contradiction here, of course: Making exceptions should be exactly what human resources does, all the time -- not because it's nice for employees, but because it drives the business. Employers keep their best people by acknowledging and rewarding their distinctive performance, not by treating them the same as everyone else. "If I'm running a business, I can tell you who's really helping to drive the business forward," says Dennis Ackley, an employee communication consultant. "HR should have the same view. We should send the message that we value our high-performing employees and we're focused on rewarding and retaining them."

Instead, human-resources departments benchmark salaries, function by function and job by job, against industry standards, keeping pay -- even that of the stars -- within a narrow band determined by competitors. They bounce performance appraisals back to managers who rate their employees too highly, unwilling to acknowledge accomplishments that would merit much more than the 4% company-wide increase.

Human resources, in other words, forfeits long-term value for short-term cost efficiency. A simple test: Who does your company's vice president of human resources report to? If it's the CFO -- and chances are good it is -- then HR is headed in the wrong direction. "That's a model that cannot work," says one top HR exec who has been there. "A financial person is concerned with taking money out of the organization. HR should be concerned with putting investments in."

4. The corner office doesn't get HR (and vice versa). I'm at another rockin' party: a few dozen midlevel human-resources managers at a hotel restaurant in Mahwah, New Jersey. It is not glam in any way. (I've got to get a better travel agent.) But it is telling, in a hopeful way. Hunter Douglas, a $2.1 billion manufacturer of window coverings, has brought its HR staff here from across the United States to celebrate their accomplishments.

The company's top brass is on hand. Marvin B. Hopkins, president and CEO of North American operations, lays on the praise: "I feel fantastic about your achievements," he says. "Our business is about people. Hiring, training, and empathizing with employees is extremely important. When someone is fired or leaves, we've failed in some way. People have to feel they have a place at the company, a sense of ownership."

So, yeah, it's corporate-speak in a drab exurban office park. But you know what? The human-resources managers from Tupelo and Dallas are totally pumped up. They've been flown into headquarters, they've had their picture taken with the boss, and they're seeing Mamma Mia on Broadway that afternoon on the company's dime.

Can your HR department say it has the ear of top management? Probably not. "Sometimes," says Ulrich, "line managers just have this legacy of HR in their minds, and they can't get rid of it. I felt really badly for one HR guy. The chairman wanted someone to plan company picnics and manage the union, and every time this guy tried to be strategic, he got shot down."

Say what? Execs don't think HR matters? What about all that happy talk about employees being their most important asset? Well, that turns out to have been a small misunderstanding. In the 1990s, a group of British academics examined the relationship between what companies (among them, the UK units of Hewlett-Packard and Citibank) said about their human assets and how they actually behaved. The results were, perhaps, inevitable.

In their rhetoric, human-resources organizations embraced the language of a "soft" approach, speaking of training, development, and commitment. But "the underlying principle was invariably restricted to the improvements of bottom-line performance," the authors wrote in the resulting book, Strategic Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press, 1999). "Even if the rhetoric of HRM is soft, the reality is almost always 'hard,' with the interests of the organization prevailing over those of the individual."

In the best of worlds, says London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, one of the study's authors, "the reality should be some combination of hard and soft." That's what's going on at Hunter Douglas. Human resources can address the needs of employees because it has proven its business mettle -- and vice versa. Betty Lou Smith, the company's vice president of corporate HR, began investigating the connection between employee turnover and product quality. Divisions with the highest turnover rates, she found, were also those with damaged-goods rates of 5% or higher. And extraordinarily, 70% of employees were leaving the company within six months of being hired.

Smith's staffers learned that new employees were leaving for a variety of reasons: They didn't feel respected, they didn't have input in decisions, but mostly, they felt a lack of connection when they were first hired. "We gave them a 10-minute orientation, then they were out on the floor," Smith says. She addressed the weakness by creating a mentoring program that matched new hires with experienced workers. The latter were suspicious at first, but eventually, the mentor positions (with spiffy shirts and caps) came to be seen as prestigious. The six-month turnover rate dropped dramatically, to 16%. Attendance and productivity -- and the damaged-goods rate -- improved.

"We don't wait to hear from top management," Smith says. "You can't just sit in the corner and look at benefits. We have to know what the issues in our business are. HR has to step up and assume responsibility, not wait for management to knock on our door."

But most HR people do.

Hunter Douglas gives us a glimmer of hope -- of the possibility that HR can be done right. And surely, even within ineffective human-resources organizations, there are great individual HR managers -- trustworthy, caring people with their ears to the ground, who are sensitive to cultural nuance yet also understand the business and how people fit in. Professionals who move voluntarily into HR from line positions can prove especially adroit, bringing a profit-and-loss sensibility and strong management skills.

At Yahoo, Libby Sartain, chief people officer, is building a group that may prove to be the truly effective human-resources department that employees and executives imagine. In this, Sartain enjoys two advantages. First, she arrived with a reputation as a creative maverick, won in her 13 years running HR at Southwest Airlines. And second, she had license from the top to do whatever it took to create a world-class organization.

Sartain doesn't just have a "seat at the table" at Yahoo; she actually helped build the table, instituting a weekly operations meeting that she coordinates with COO Dan Rosensweig. Talent is always at the top of the agenda -- and at the end of each meeting, the executive team mulls individual development decisions on key staffers.

That meeting, Sartain says, "sends a strong message to everyone at Yahoo that we can't do anything without HR." It also signals to HR staffers that they're responsible for more than shuffling papers and getting in the way. "We view human resources as the caretaker of the largest investment of the company," Sartain says. "If you're not nurturing that investment and watching it grow, you're not doing your job."

Yahoo, say some experts and peers at other organizations, is among a few companies -- among them Cardinal Health, Procter & Gamble, Pitney Bowes, Goldman Sachs, and General Electric -- that truly are bringing human resources into the realm of business strategy. But they are indeed the few. USC professor Edward E. Lawler III says that last year HR professionals reported spending 23% of their time "being a strategic business partner" -- no more than they reported in 1995. And line managers, he found, said HR is far less involved in strategy than HR thinks it is. "Despite great huffing and puffing about strategy," Lawler says, "there's still a long way to go." (Indeed. When I asked one midlevel HR person exactly how she was involved in business strategy for her division, she excitedly described organizing a monthly lunch for her vice president with employees.)

What's driving the strategy disconnect? London Business School's Gratton spends a lot of time training human-resources professionals to create more impact. She sees two problems: Many HR people, she says, bring strong technical expertise to the party but no "point of view about the future and how organizations are going to change." And second, "it's very difficult to align HR strategy to business strategy, because business strategy changes very fast, and it's hard to fiddle around with a compensation strategy or benefits to keep up." More than simply understanding strategy, Gratton says, truly effective executives "need to be operating out of a set of principles and personal values." And few actually do.

In the meantime, economic natural selection is, in a way, taking care of the problem for us. Some 94% of large employers surveyed this year by Hewitt Associates reported they were outsourcing at least one human-resources activity. By 2008, according to the survey, many plan to expand outsourcing to include activities such as learning and development, payroll, recruiting, health and welfare, and global mobility.

Which is to say, they will farm out pretty much everything HR does. The happy rhetoric from the HR world says this is all for the best: Outsourcing the administrative minutiae, after all, would allow human-resources professionals to focus on more important stuff that's central to the business. You know, being strategic partners.

The problem, if you're an HR person, is this: The tasks companies are outsourcing -- the administrivia -- tend to be what you're good at. And what's left isn't exactly your strong suit. Human resources is crippled by what Jay Jamrog, executive director of the Human Resource Institute, calls "educated incapacity: You're smart, and you know the way you're working today isn't going to hold 10 years from now. But you can't move to that level. You're stuck."

That's where human resources is today. Stuck. "This is a unique organization in the company," says USC's Boudreau. "It discovers things about the business through the lens of people and talent. That's an opportunity for competitive advantage." In most companies, that opportunity is utterly wasted.


Source: Keith H. Hammonds - Deputy Editor, Fast Company

Recruiter, Clone Thyself: Do Twice as Much in Half the Time

Have you ever found yourself at the end of a day, week, or month and wonder where the time went? Seriously. One moment you were at the beginning. The next moment . . .its as if Scottie beamed you up to CBD (close of business day). You review all that you did in the preceding hours and realize you could not have worked any harder. If you did, you would be dead. (Seriously. Your co-workers arriving the next morning at work would discover you sitting bolt upright in your chair, head tilted back, and mouth agape - as if your last words were not words, alas, but a silent scream.)

I don't know about you, but I've got 371 emails in the inbox I'd cleaned out less than 24 hours ago. It's like I've got randy rabbits in there making baby email bunnies. I've got 4 phones to my name, each one with voicemails demanding my attention. Throughout the day, luminaries and clients all want a piece of me. (The economy is actually working for us as employers seek better value in the search firms they retain.) And then there's the social networking, the blogging, the speaking engagements, the video and photo shoots, not to mention the fact that I head my own firm as CEO with all the requisite fiscal and leadership responsibilities that come with it.

So what's a recruiter to do? What's anyone in talent acquisition to do to meet the growing demands of our 24/7 world when you have so much you want to achieve and so little time in which to do it. I have two words for you.

Clone thyself.

Big, fat companies have been cloning themselves for years. They call it outsourcing. If the outsourcing extends beyond the boundaries of these United States, it is called off-shoring. But for individuals, I am referring to a personal assistant, in this case a virtual one. Celebrities have enjoyed the benefits of personal assistants for years. They can serve as your own personal concierge, taking care of whatever business needs tending to that can be delegated. It takes some planning and management, but as Edward Savio (The author of the book 'Cloning Yourself for Fun and Profit') points out, the rewards can be enormous. It's a way to drive your performance to new heights by getting twice as much done as you did before. You get around to doing stuff you should have been doing that wasn't because you didn't have the time. You get time for work/life balance. And because you are making oh so much more money, you get to give back and pay it forward.

Of course, The Good Search (Executive search firm of the author) is positioned to serve as a natural extension to internal search teams. In essence, we help recruiters clone themselves whenever their bandwidth is maxed out or whenever their time is better spent managing relationships with hiring managers and ushering top candidates through to offer. Clients retain us for a single executive search engagement a month at a time or to deliver candidates across a range of openings. . .we keep it easy, flexible, and affordable. And that's the approach you want in your virtual assistant.

Typically, the corporate solution for an overworked executive is to provide an executive assistant. But, honestly I believe virtual assistants offer greater flexibility. You can task them with personal as well as professional responsibilities. You can have them work overnight while you're asleep so that the task is complete by the start of your business day. You can have them manage a team of helpers . . . The increases you see in your productivity and income should more than offset the cost. In fact, I know some top executives who use a virtual assistant in addition to the executive assistant they have at work. Moreover, one keeps his personal assistant a secret -- better to keep 'em guessing on what his secret is to accomplishing so much more than everyone else. ("Does George ever sleep?")

So the next time your "To Do" list is longer at the end of your day than at the beginning, simply clone yourself. You and your newfound you will be glad you did.

Source: Krista Bradford - CEO, The Good Search - at www.kristabradford.com

Manpower Survey Offers Promise For Hiring

Amid a period of sobering unemployment and a tough job market, any positive report on future prospects for earning a paycheck comes as a welcome change of pace.

Manpower Inc., one of the nation’s largest employment agencies, has provided that change of pace, if only for the first part of next year.

Manpower’s most recent quarterly job outlook, for the nation and the area, indicates employers are more willing to hire workers from January through March compared to the same period at the start of 2009. Employers for the United States as a whole and in the Greensboro-High Point metropolitan area anticipate a moderate increase in their hiring plans for first quarter, Manpower reports.

Of the more than 28,000 U.S. employers surveyed, 12 percent anticipate an increase in staff levels in the first quarter.

It’s the first positive outlook after three consecutive quarterly surveys where more U.S. employers planned to cut rather than bolster staff, said Mary Ann Laskey, spokeswoman for Milwaukee-based Manpower.

In the Greensboro-High Point area, 14 percent of companies surveyed intend to hire more employees, while 9 percent expect to reduce payrolls, Manpower reports. The remaining local employers either aren’t certain or plan to maintain current staff levels.

“(Local) employers are significantly more optimistic about hiring activity as compared to one year ago, when 10 percent of companies surveyed planned to increase staff levels and 17 percent expected to cut payrolls,” Manpower reports.

The possibly gradual shift in the local job market is reflected in activity at the High Point office of the N.C. Employment Security Commission. The office on Wednesday hosted an employment agency, Around The Clock Staffing, that was seeking applicants for industrial maintenance, assembly and production positions.

Job orders are up from this time last year, while the number of people seeking unemployment assistance through the High Point ESC has lessened somewhat, said Assistant Manager Charles Diggs.

“It’s definitely better. We’re posting new job orders every day. At this time a year ago, we’d go a whole week and post one or two job orders,” Diggs said. “This morning (Wednesday), we got three or four new job orders in. It’s starting to move in the right direction.”

Source: Paul Johnson, High Point Enterprise - Thurs Dec. 10, 09 at msnbc.msn.com

10 Behavioral-Based Interview Questions

That Must Be Answered

Opinion-based interviewing questions have been fading away since behavioral-based interview questions burst on the scene back in 1996. Even though some old school questions are important to be aware of, they have been replaced by behavioral-based questioning strategies. Here are a few of the most popular opinion-based questions:

“What are your strengths?”
“What are your weaknesses?”
“Why should I hire you?”
“How will you benefit our company?”
“What would your former manager say about you?”
“Tell me about yourself.”

Today, most organizations have implemented some type of behavioral-based questions to better understand the candidate’s capabilities and past performance. Two primary reasons that behavioral-based interviewing techniques have become the accepted practice are past behaviors are an accurate indicator of future behaviors, and all answers can be verified through a reference check. You must prepare your answers well in advance of the on-site interview, and even the initial telephone interview, in order to stand out from your competition. Your answers will take more time than the questions above, however, simply use the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format, and practice each response so you are well-prepared when the interview arrives.

Here are ten behavioral-based questions. Have an answer for each prior to your next interview:

1. “Describe for me your greatest accomplishment up to this point in your career. When was it? What did you do? What was the outcome?”

2.“Tell me about a time when you didn’t accomplish the original objective. When was it? What was your role? What was the result?”

3. “Describe the most prominent mistake you have made during your career. What did you do? What were the results? What did you learn from it? Have you ever repeated that same mistake?”

4. “Walk me through the last time you worked in a team and didn’t get along with one of its members. When did this take place? What did you do? What could you have done differently? What was the outcome?”

5. “Tell me about the toughest decision you have had to make in the past three months. What made this decision so tough? What information did you consider when deciding? How did you reach your decision? How did it turn out?”

6. “Take me back to the last project that you were involved with that required extra effort on your part. When was it? What adjustments did you have to make to meet these demands? What was the outcome?”

7. “Describe the last important task you delegated. What instructions did you give? How did you check on the progress of the assignment? Was the outcome satisfactory? Why or why not?”

8. “Describe a recent situation that best illustrates your style in leading others to accomplish a task. When did this occur? What was the situation? How did you motivate the team? Who was the hardest team member to get on your side? How did you do it?”

9. “Tell me about the most recent goal that you achieved. When was it? What was the goal? How did you set up an action plan to achieve that goal? What was the result?”

10. “Tell me about a recent customer complaint that you handled. When did this take place? What was the complaint? How did you learn about it? What did you do? How did it turn out?”

By mastering behavioral-based interview questions, you position yourself at the top of the selection pool. Remember, the more recent your examples, the more weight they carry in the mind of the Hiring Manager. Also, answering a behavioral-based question is much more time consuming than other types of questions so the more preparation time you put in, the better you will be able to handle the behavioral-based questions without lengthy delays or uncomfortable pauses.

Source: Mark Krajnik, Vice President, RCS Corporation on his blog at www.recruiterearth.com

Building a STRONG Client Relationship

I’ve often heard recruiters comment that their main responsibility is to provide a service by sourcing and hiring candidates. I find that although sourcing and hiring is certainly at the heart of what I do, I believe that the keystone of my role as a recruiter is to continually build and refine my client relationships.

In doing so, the sourcing and hiring comes secondary and without fail.

Additionally, I prefer using the term “providing a solution” vs. “providing a service.” We are ambassadors of our respective companies, who in turn provide a solution to our clients.

The solution is quality talent through a quality recruitment process. Below are several core objectives I use in building and maintaining my client relationships. I’m hopeful that in some way they can assist you as you strive to build strong, cohesive, thriving, and lasting client relations.

Know Your Product

What is your product? Your client is your product!

Far too often recruiters are ill-prepared when it comes to understanding their client.

What is their culture like? What services do they provide? What is their benefits package? What separates them from their competitors? What is the actual job description and requirements of the role? Where do they stand in the market? What makes them successful? It’s imperative to your success to know your client’s landscape inside and out.

Listen to Your Client

One vital key in building any relationship is knowing how to be a good listener. As a provider of solutions (talent solutions), we are considered subject matter experts (SMEs) in our field.

If we’re not careful, we have the probability to come across with a know-it-all mentality. What our clients need is the SME coupled with outstanding listening skills. We may think we know what our client wants, but if we’re closed off to truly listening to their needs and advising appropriately, we’re destined to fail at every step. We also short-change ourselves in being closed-off to a new idea and/or way of doing business. The old adage “less talking and more listening” is certainly apropos here.

Pick Up the Phone

Email is a wonderful tool. However, whenever possible, pick up the phone and speak one-on-one with your client.

Most clients welcome hearing a human voice on the other end, especially when you’re working on their behalf toward a hiring goal. Having a continuous dialogue in email can sometimes take the personal touch out of building a strong, lasting relationship with your client. Additionally, by speaking one-on-one with your client, you can avoid the back-and-forth of marathon emails as well as gauge your clients’ mood, reaction, and receive timely feedback, and if you’re really fortunate…a little well-earned praise!

Offer Timely Feedback and Updates

Provide timely updates on candidate status and projected time-frames. Based on your client’s preference hold weekly or bi-weekly status meetings. Provide immediate feedback on candidates when their status changes. Keep everyone involved in the process and in the loop, and always thank them for their time and support.

Build Credibility By Delivering Quality Results

Let’s face it; our clients want the biggest bang for their buck. Who doesn’t? Our objective is to provide top-notch candidates via a world class recruitment process. If we provide anything less, we don’t deserve to the opportunity to work for them. Stay focused on your objectives and don’t just work hard, work smart.

Don’t Promise Things You Can’t Deliver

I’ve seen former bosses, out of eagerness to land the deal, promise a service they couldn’t deliver only to have it drastically backfire when they couldn’t. Promising a service you truly can’t deliver, only to initially impress the client, will only diminish your credibility in the long run. Be honest about what you can deliver and when. You’ll be surprised at how far genuine honestly will get you.

Remember Whose House You’re In

Always remember you’re a guest in your client’s environment. When you’re a guest at someone’s home, you’re mindful of the rules, gracious, and respectful of your hosts. The same applies in your client environment. Be on time, if not early. Don’t rush out the door at 5:00. Show the client you care and are available by staying after hours from time to time. Let them know they can reach you after hours via cell phone (and remember to keep it on). Follow the dress code and dress one step above if you can. Maintain a tidy, proficient workspace. Always uphold yourself to a high degree of professionalism, dignity, and integrity. Even when you don’t agree with your client, always be mindful that you’re in their house and it’s their hard-earned monies that actually pay your mortgage.

Attitude, Attitude, Attitude

I’ve seen some of the best recruiters walked out the door due to bad attitudes. When we walk through the doors of clients’ offices, we leave our personal lives outside and put our game face on. Again, we are here to provide a solution, not be the problem. Stay positive and professional at all times.

In the event you feel you just can’t take it, step outside for a breather. Call your boss for a pep talk. I can’t tell you how beneficial this has been to me. I’ve done this a few times myself with my leadership and advisors. By doing so, I’ve remained professional, kept the integrity of my company, and myself, intact. Then I can get back to work and stay focused, even if I was gritting my teeth underneath a fake smile.Always take it outside the walls of the client, even if they’ve truly wronged you. Our leadership team is first-rate, fair, and will aide you in whatever way necessary to rectify the situation. A positive attitude will always yield a positive outcome.

Stay Abreast of Industry Trends and Speak Their Language

By staying in tune with industry trends, both from a recruitment perspective and your client’s, you add tremendous value to your process, can provide valuable insight, and establish that you’re truly dialed in. It also provides you the aptitude to speak your client’s language and will garner you more credibility.

At the end of the day, our clients ask themselves one question: How successful were we in growing our business today?

I challenge each of you to ask yourselves that question as well: How successful was I in helping my client grow their businesses today?

When we grow our clients’ business, we in turn grow our own businesses.

When you daily challenge yourself with this question, I guarantee that you’ll be a superstar at building client relationships.


Source: LoriAnn Bayer at www.fordyceletter.com

Treat your job search as a full-time job!

When you find yourself becoming discouraged, remember that when you are depressed and down on yourself it shows and it could impact your interview. Think of your job search for what it is… you are marketing your skills and yourself as a product for prospective employers to lease. That’s right, an employer leases your time and talent! Make yourself as marketable as possible, showcasing your talents. An employer must feel that if they do not hire you they will be losing out.

If you fear rejection think about it this way.. In sales it can take 10 “no’s” to get a “yes”. You might get the yes the first or tenth time you ask for the sale, you can’t predict. Each “no” you get brings you closer to the “yes”! To be effective, you need to be steadfast and approach each potential customer with the same confidence and presentation - because that could be your sale. If you waiver, become doubtful, skip a step or lack thoroughness you could jeopardize the sale.

A job search is no different!

The key to a successful job search is to remain steadfast and remain consistent in your approach.

♦Treat each opportunity as if it will be a a “yes” and know that each “no” will only bring you closer to your new employment.

♦Present yourself to each employment opportunity as if it were the only opportunity. It will keep you sharp and make you work hard to win it.

♦Prepare for each opportunity by researching each company you apply to then target your resume for that particular job. It’s time consuming but it will stand out from the mass template submissions employers receive. Invest the same time and energy in your resume as you would if you were on the job and being paid to create an important presentation or report.

♦If you have anything less than a professional sounding email address create a new account such as firstname.lastname@host.com. Whimsical, cutesy, goth, TMI, sexual in nature, etc., type email addresses are simply inappropriate. After all, at least in my inbox the first thing I see, my first impression of a candidate, is their email address.

The key is to maintain a consistent professional image from A to Z

♦Keep a spreadsheet for (or jot in a notebook) the positions you have applied to. Include the company, contact, phone number, email address and date submitted.

♦Follow up with a call or email a few days later to ask if you are being considered a candidate. If the answer is no, ask for feedback on why. Don’t be afraid to ask - It will help you understand employer and industry needs and help you refine and target your search to match your skills. Thank the Recruiter for taking the time to provide you with valuable feedback and ask to be considered in the future for positions that match your qualifications. If a Recruiter has been particularly helpful it can’t hurt to follow up with a brief thank you email or note.

♦Start answering your phone in a professional way. “Hello, this is Sam” is a good greeting. Answering with “Yeah, who is this?” is less than impressive to a potential employer.

♦When a potential employer calls understand that is the first step in the interview process. That call is a phone screen. Put a mental “suit” on and conduct yourself professionally as if you were in a face-to-face interview.

♦If you are invited to interview in person ensure you arrive 10 minutes early. If you are not familiar with the location do a dry run. The day of the interview is not the day to get lost. Use that 10 minutes to psych yourself up for the interview and envision the job offer.

♦Dress, speak and act like the position you aspire to. One step up from the position you are interviewing for is a good guideline. Put on your best clothing and grammar (without gum in your mouth, of course), hold your head high and pretend you are the leading role in a movie. Be self-conscious of your posture and body language. Try really hard to have good eye contact.

♦Listen carefully to the interviewer’s instructions and questions. Focus and answer appropriately. Don’t deviate from the questions and do not offer up personal information. Remember it is a job interview and keep your comments to your skills, abilities and talents in regard to the position you are interviewing for. Arrive prepared to discuss examples of your performance, teamwork and people skills at prior places of employment.

♦Let the interviewer know you have done your research. Ask questions to show you are interested and engaged. If you don’t know what to ask some possibilities are about the number of employees and/or locations, what is a typical day like for a person in the position, examples of employee recognition, etc.

♦Thank the interviewer and offer a handshake. If you are still interested in the company at the end of the interview tell the interviewer. Something like, “I am very interested in this position, more so now after the interview and meeting you”. Ask for a business card and send a follow-up thank you email as soon as possible.

Source: karlaporter.com