by Beth | Jan 30, 2025 | Employee Hiring
Every year when January hits, I get inundated with emails from people who are hiring. They are overwhelmed with applications, and they MUST start interviewing candidates. In a bit of a panic, they email me this question:
“What questions to you ask potential employees, Beth?”
As if somehow a magical list of questions will solve all of the hiring issues that you have ever had.
In order to come up with questions that work for you, you have to know what you are looking for in a candidate. “But Beth, I just want a good person to come work for me!”
No, you want a good “employee”, not a good person. There is a difference. A good person may not be the best fit for the job. A good employee is a great fit for the job AND a good person.
Now we are getting somewhere.
Here is the first step to a fabulous interview process: sit down with your team in front of a white board and ask yourself this question: if I could have the absolute BEST person for this job, who would they be? After you write your list of the Ideal person, type it up, add your company logo, and print the list on actual paper. Then, take that list and hang it up in your office, in your house, in your bathroom, and place one in your car.
The single most important part of the interview process is the mindset of the Hiring Manager, and the mindset must be clear: in order to get the employee you want for the job, you have to be able to picture how that person will be in the role and describe that person’s demeanor.
This mindset is the vision for your hiring process, and without that vision, you are wasting your time with your hiring process.
POWER THOUGHT: When hiring, don’t start with questions. Start with the vision.
by Beth | Jan 16, 2025 | Attitude, Employee Hiring, Leadership, Selecting Good Candidates
You have two recent graduate candidates:
Candidate A) has a degree in right industry. She worked her way through college, has volunteer experience, a 3.93 GPA from an Ivy League university, and has 1 minor typo on her resume that would not have been caught by spell check.
Candidate B). has a degree in the right industry, she worked her way through college, has volunteer experience, her GPA is in the toilet, and she almost flunked out of a “lesser” college twice. She has no typos on her resume.
Who do you hire?
Really this is a trick question, because you can’t make a hiring decision based on what I just told you. You need to “interview” them both first. And, as it turns out, both women were hired and are stellar employees. Does this surprise you?
Candidate B has ADHD, and school was really hard for her. She clawed her way through college one day at a time. She had professors who worked with her and advocated for her, and she passed with not so flying colors. She is one of the all-time favorites at her job.
Here is the bottom line: you can’t tell a good candidate by reading their resume. NO ONE can. A resume is a “Marketing” piece by the candidate, full of exaggerations and sometimes outright lies. They are designed to get through AI, applicant tracking systems and websites. They are NOT designed to help you choose who is the right fit for your role and who isn’t. The only way that you can tell who is qualified and who isn’t is to conduct an interview with that person.
So, how do you read a resume? Use it for information on how to contact a candidate and then call them for an interview. That’s it.
POWER THOGUHT: How do you read a resume? With an open mind and a solid interview process.
by Beth | Nov 12, 2024 | Employee Hiring
A few weeks ago, I was invited to my friend Kaylyn’s house for dinner. She had just been able to move back into her house after a flood, and she wanted to show me her new kitchen/eating area.
I sat down on her new barstool at her new counter with a glass of great wine gleefully eating outstanding homemade guacamole and chips. She was on the other side of the counter cooking and drinking a glass of fine wine. She was talking about all the drama around this kitchen renovation, how hard it was, all the moving around, the Airbnb, and how she now LOVES to cook in her kitchen, when suddenly she said, “And I have a double oven. I am not sure why I got a double oven, but I am using it!”
I said nothing as my mouth was happily enjoying the fabulous food, but my first thought was, “I know why you have a double oven. Your four grown children are going to start bringing home significant others, which soon turns into marriage and grandchildren. In the blink of an eye, you will be regularly making meals for 10 plus people.”
By getting a double oven, Kaylyn was preparing for her future.
It’s the same process expanding your business. You have to build some of the infrastructure BEFORE you have an increase in sales, otherwise, you expand too fast and end up with a lot of disgruntled customers. We call this re-investing in our companies. It is taking a leap of faith that “if you build it, they will come”. To be clear, there is fear and uncertainty baked into expanding before you have the sales, but without expansion, you can’t grow.
Kind of like the double oven… if you want to have a big boom in your entertaining at your home, you must prepare for it by having more equipment, more dishes, more room, etc. So, get ready for this next wave of success by buying the double oven and hiring and training your new people.
Success has never tasted so sweet.
POWER THOUGHT: Buy the double oven. Hire your next person. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.
by Beth | Oct 16, 2024 | Employee Hiring
In case you aren’t familiar with the term “Ghosting”, let me educate you. “Ghosting” is when you cut off communication with someone for no apparent reason. You go on a date with someone, you have fun, and then you NEVER hear from them again. Or, in the hiring world, you have an interview with a company, it goes really well, and again, you NEVER hear from them again. EVER.
We are seeing record numbers of candidates who are ghosting us for interviews. We call them, talk to them on the phone, invite them to interview for a job they applied for, and they don’t show up for the interview. We are seeing this with all levels of hires, even the C-suite roles.
Spooky.
I stumbled upon this article talking about ghost jobs. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-role-you-re-applying-for-might-be-a-ghost-job-here-s-what-that-means-and-how-to-avoid-them/ar-AA1rEo1s?ocid=BingNewsSerp
A ghost job is an ad for a position that doesn’t exist. It has either already been filled, or the ad was posted to satisfy requirements of some sort. For example, a position was filled internally, but the company was required by law to post it externally. So, when applicants send in a resume, they are applying for a job that doesn’t exist or that has already been filled. And the numbers of these ghost ads are scary: 3 in 10 job ads are “ghost” jobs.
How do applicants know if your job ad is a trick or a treat? Here are some tips:
- List your company name, website and address
- Have a dedicated person to talk to candidates
- List the real salary range
- Give your candidates a deadline as to when they will hear back from you, no matter the outcome, and meet that deadline.
- Show some grace to candidates. They are navigating a job search in very uncertain times.
In summary, if you want the best of the best to apply for your positions, you must evaluate your recruiting strategy from start to finish. And if you need help, I am standing by…with chocolate.
POWER THOUGHT: Is your position a trick or a treat?
by Beth | Sep 4, 2024 | Selecting Good Candidates
I have been conducting this impromptu, unofficial survey of how people like their margaritas. The answers have been so vast and have sparked some interesting debates! For example: 1) alcohol or non-alcohol 2) salt or no salt 3) lime or no lime 4) lime or strawberry (Is strawberry even a margarita?? one purist questioned) 5) frozen, on -the-rocks 6) mix or coin style.
If that isn’t enough, what are your tequila choices? White, gold, reposado, or anejo. What are your mix choices? Pre-mix? Just lime juice? How about orange flavor? Triple sec? Gran Gala? Grand Marnier? Any other secret ingredients? Quite literally, the combinations are endless.
As the consumer, you CAN leave the choices to someone else, and just order the house margarita… you may like it, or you may not. Or you can spend time, energy and money trying to figure out what you like and create your own special recipe.
Just. Like. Hiring.
You can take any ole resume that comes along with very mixed results. Or, you can spend the time, energy and effort to figure out what you want before you hire someone. This exercise is called the Ideal List, and it is the first step in the A-list Interviews Hiring Process. What type of person are you searching for? What attributes do you want? What values must this person have in order to fit in with your company culture? What skill sets will make them successful?
If you are okay with taking big chances, pull a resume out of the pile and hire them. But if you are like most business-people I know, you need to find the right person the first time. That means, you have to do the work before you hire someone. You deserve an employee that is unique to you and your business.
And for your information, I am not a huge margarita fan. I like Anejo tequila with no lime, no salt, at room temperature. Ole!
POWER THOUGHT: Don’t take big risks with your hires. Or your margaritas.
by Beth | Jun 5, 2024 | Employee Hiring
When I bought my house three years ago, I decided that I wanted some new dishes to complement my regular white ones. I actually walked into Williams Sonoma and bought 8 blue dinner plates and 8 blue salad plates to go with my blue kitchen. I also bought 8 blue linen napkins to round out the place setting. I was in total bliss.
Every year at Christmas, I host my Vistage group for our Christmas meeting. I have one red and green table and one blue and silver table to accommodate about 16 people. I pulled out my trusty blue linen napkins and alas! I could only find 7.
I looked EVERYWHERE for that missing blue napkin. I thank my lucky stars that one person in our Vistage group couldn’t attend the meeting, so I only needed 7 blue napkins.
But still.
This spring, I cleaned every closet, every cabinet, every crevice, crook and cranny of my house, and I couldn’t find that damn thing anywhere. Finally, I started looking at the Williams Sonoma website to buy 8 more napkins, but my OCD kicked in when I realized I would still be short one napkin.
SIGH.
Then, one night, I was going to Boulder to have dinner with my good friends, Lisa and Michael. It was a hot night so I put on a sundress. I turned around to walk out of the bathroom, and there on the floor in the middle of the bathroom was the blue napkin.
WHAT??? My only guess is that thanks to good ole static cling, it was stuck to my dress.
This exact situation happens in hiring all the time. You search and search. You interview. You lament. You worry. You cling to hope. Until one day, your amazing employee drops in your lap. And then, you are so happy that you forget all the other horror.
You are so happy that you hired a great employee, and I am so happy that I have an even number of napkins. YAY!
POWER THOUGHT: Your napkin/employee isn’t lost. It just hasn’t dropped into your lap yet. Keep searching.
