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Straight Talk for the Recruiting Profession


Articles tagged 'goals'

The Business of Recruiting, Weigh In!

Are You Proud of Your 2010?

by on Jan. 6, 2011


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As a recruiting professional, I get a little tired of reading the same article at the end each year. You know:

“Think back. Did you hit your targets? Did you work as hard as you could? Did you get all your paperwork done? Did you get a gold star from the person one rung up the greasy corporate ladder from you? Can you work harder next year?”

All reasonable questions – IF you went into this business in order to make a stack of money. Of course, it’s good practice for the January performance assessment season, but seriously, only useful if you are totally focused on your career as a means to an end.

Now, I’m not a ‘leftie’ or ‘anti-money’ – I just don’t find it inspiring; so I can’t be bothered comparing my performance to the “ideal” performance to make maximum dollars. It also makes the assumption that only hard work leads to success, when there’s a lot more to succeeding than just the hours put in. (I dare you to tell your boss that)

I like to think that we’re all in this industry to help people.

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Editor's Corner

The Best of Fordyce: New Year’s Resolutions for Recruiters

by on Dec. 31, 2010


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  1. I will do whatever is necessary to make the Year 2011 the best year of my career. I will divest myself of those activities that will not promote this objective.
  2. I promise to appreciate that, while my efforts will primarily affect my personal income, I am a part of a bigger picture and will do what I can to help my colleagues and my employer as well.
  3. I will approach every day optimistically, expecting that my activities will produce positive results rather than believing they won’t.
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Editor's Corner

The Best of Fordyce: New Year’s Resolutions for Managers

by on Dec. 31, 2010


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Editor’s note: Going back through some of the Fordyce Letter archives, I discovered Paul Hawkinson’s resolutions for managers for the year 2004. As you will read, these resolutions are timeless and certainly apply today as much as they did seven years ago. I proudly share them with you today as part of the Best of Fordyce – may they inspire you to make 2011 your best year yet!

  1. I will do more for my productive consultants and less for those who are just taking up space
  2. I pledge to set optimistic, but realistic, goals for my firm and my consultants.
  3. I promise to stop listening to economic doom and gloomers and other assorted naysayers.
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Business, TFL archives, The Business of Recruiting

525,600 minutes…

by on Dec. 30, 2010


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The former off-Broadway musical, Rent, opens by posing this question: ”525,600 minutes…how do you measure a year?” As 2010 draws to a close, I have some questions for you. Have you invested your past 525,600 minutes the way you had planned as you watched the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in 2009? One year ago, what were you envisioning for your future? Did you plan to be more healthy and happy…to have better and richer relationships…to have a more successful business and greater financial independence? How’d you do?

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Business

The Coming Year

by on Dec. 16, 2010


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Relative novices in our industry who have only been through a few cycles of recession and recovery are quite likely to misinterpret the probable scenario for the year that lies before us. Yet for those with greater depth of experience and observation, predictability is far more clear. “The years”, as Emerson wrote, “teach things that the days never know”.

It is worth examining briefly the reasons why errors may be made, as acknowledgment of these traps will serve to help avoid an expensive mistake.

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Business, The Business of Recruiting

Recruiting Lessons I Learned Managing a Political Campaign

by on Nov. 2, 2010


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Editor’s note: today is Election Day in the US. Make sure to go to the polls today and let your voice be heard!

One of the advantages of building a recruiting firm that can manage itself is that it allows me to “step away” for a few days here and there to pursue other interests. For the past few months I devoted about 75% of my time to managing a political campaign for someone running for US Congress in a tightly contested primary. One of my clients asked me recently what parallels I can share from running a successful recruiting firm and running a successful political campaign.

I shared the answers and thought it would be a great topic for an article. I am not going to share the name of the candidate or their party affiliation because how one manages a campaign in a primary would vary little depending on the party.

By implementing the strategies I will share below, my candidate won her primary election and was the ONLY candidate not endorsed by her party to win in the primaries in our state out of nine contested races. These strategies will help you “win” in building your office, hiring and training recruiters, getting clients, recruiting candidates, etc. 

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The Business of Recruiting

How to Manage the Roller Coaster Ride of Executive Search

by on Oct. 6, 2010


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I love riding roller coasters. I always have, for as long as I can remember.  When I was too short for the really scary rides, I’d put a double layer of socks in my shoes to be just a bit taller, and hopefully my head would hit the measuring bar and I would be allowed to ride. It didn’t help at all that I was a short kid. I’m sure you have similar memories, if you are also a roller coaster fan. As I grew older, and ever after I became a parent, my love for roller coasters has not diminished. I don’t mind waiting in line, and I want to ride as many different coasters across the country that I can get to.

To me, executive search is much like riding a roller coaster. There are ups and downs, and the best rides have the biggest ups and downs. There are scary turns, moments where the ride is very shaky and rickety and downright fearful. Then, there are moments when it’s nothing but a blast. At the top of the long ride up the first hill, you can see all around. Then, sometimes, you go diving deep into a black tunnel, twisting and turning and flying fast into the unknown. A whip and a jerk and up and out of the tunnel, back into daylight you go. As the coaster makes the final turn, the bumps slow down, the speed diminishes, and the car comes to a smooth stop at the place it all began. Your heart is pumping, head a little dizzy, and ears are ringing from all the screaming. Once you get out of the cart, if the line’s not too long, you run back through the waiting area to ride it again.

While executive search is like riding a roller coaster, there are many things that can be done to minimize the ups and downs.

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RPO

RPO 2010 – Part 2: An Inflection Point…What’s Next?

by on Oct. 1, 2010


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Part 1 of this article ended with the following position;

“So I think that 2011 will look a lot like 1999, when RPO firms were called “project recruitment” or “staff augmentation” firms. We seem have come full circle. In the end, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Stay tuned for part 2 of this series….”

Into 2011 – RPO

The above stated, I would offer that we will in fact look more like 1999, but I think that is a very good thing, and here are some reasons why on both (the 1999 and the good):

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Entrepreneurship, The Business of Recruiting

How to Set Goals and Stick to Them!

by on Sep. 7, 2010


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If you are like me, when you hear about “goal setting,” you may want to fall asleep. It’s pretty hard to get excited about a subject like this. I can relate, as I spent most of my previous career without specific goals and had no interest in setting them. A paycheck every two weeks, performance reviews and regular raises and promotions, an office and a desk and telephone and a boss….who needed to set goals in that environment? That all changed when I decided to make the leap from my corporate career (I call it my 20 years in the cubicle) to entrepreneurship.

This was in the summer of 2007. I felt the rush of freedom that came with being my own boss, but I also sensed a need to add some structure to my life and my daily activities. With this motivation, I connected with a life coach, Dr. Tom Hill. Dr. Hill encouraged me to start establishing and writing down my goals. I subsequently read several books on goal setting and found a common theme. It became clear to me, with tons of evidence, that people who set specific goals and write them down are dramatically more likely to achieve their goals and be high performers.

Since this time, for the past three years I have been an avid written goal setter.  I re-write my goals every morning on a 3×5 inch index card and carry it in my pocket. I’m convinced that my success as a recruiter (Sanford Rose Associates – Brighton) has partially been a result of this new discipline. Another element of living a successful life, I believe, is to intentionally work towards life balance. For me, learning, growing and being in balance are the earmarks of true success.

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RPO

RPO 2010 – Part 1: An Inflection Point…What’s Next?

by on Aug. 10, 2010


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RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing). Seems fairly easy to make an educated guess as to what this really means, but think again.

I myself own an “RPO” firm (or so I thought). I have attended several national and international RPO professional symposiums over the last five years. Typically these gatherings include RPO firm executives, as well as industry gurus, and more times than not, one of the breakout sessions at these meetings revolves around a panel of experts discussing what their definition of RPO really is.

Interestingly enough, and coincidentally, each individual always seems to have a slightly different take on what “RPO” really means. They are a group of peers, all in leadership positions within the “RPO” business, yet their definition and perspective of what this actually means and what services should be and are delivered under this type of model vary widely.

RPO EARLY ROOTS

Contrary to the opinion of some, RPO did not just appear as a business model out of thin air over the last five years. The RPO model’s precursor really started in the early to mid 1990’s. The semantics of those days did not include the RPO vernacular, but was described as “Project Staffing”, or “Staff Augmentation”, or even “Stampede Recruiting”. Many firms were created in the “RPO” style in the 1990’s based on the need of Technology companies to grow exponentially on a “real time basis”. Technology companies at that time, and still today, often need to “reactively” hire very large numbers of people to fulfill the demand of a newly produced technology product or service (i.e. think Google or Apple). It was, and is, extremely important to get new technology products to market as quickly as possible, and to do that, you needed increasingly large numbers of developers, sales staff and marketing staff. Because of the large increase in headcount in those areas, it became vital to hire large numbers of infrastructure roles to support the larger organization (i.e. HR, Finance, Procurement, etc.)

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