|
Costs of
a Bad Hire
Calculator Turnover is
expensive, but it can be hard to put a pricetag on
it. Not any more.
This calculator from HR
World can help you estimate the costs your
company incurs for making a bad
hire. |
|
Raise
your Retention Rate with "Stay Interviews" instead
of "Exit Interviews"
Instead
of conducting exit interviews with employees when
they leave, why not ask longer-tenured
employees why they stay?
One
small business experimented with conducting a
series of face-to-face informal "stay" interviews
with employees who had been with the company for
three years or longer, excluding senior
leadership. They were asked such questions as: Why
did you come to work here? Why have you stayed?
What would make you leave? What are your
nonnegotiable issues? What about your managers?
What would you change or improve? The stay
interviews generated useful feedback and
identified areas where the business could make
changes to raise the retention rate.
Read the full article.
Even
Google Has Retention
Problems
Just
a few years ago, Google was seen as an exciting
start-up. But now it's viewed in Silicon
Valley as
a slow-moving, bureaucratic incumbent. Inside the
company some of its best engineers are chafing
under the growing bureaucracy and are leaving to
start or work at smaller, nimbler companies. 
We
are seeing more articles about
departures of key players like Lars Rasmussen, who
helped create Google Maps before he left for
Facebook. (At least 142 of Facebook's
employees came from Google).
This
month, Google gave every employee a raise of 10%
or more and Google is taking other aggressive
steps to retain employees, particularly those with
start-up ambitions. Google has given several
engineers who said they were leaving to start new
companies the chance to start them within Google.
They work independently and can recruit other
engineers and use Google's resources, like its
code base and servers.
|
Let's Stay Connected between
Newsletters ...
Did you miss our last
newsletter? You can read it here.
|
Here
are just a few of the searches we have
completed
since
the last newsletter:
Development
Officer
Director of Project
Management
Membership Director
Policy Research
Assistant
Program Manager
View our
(there
are lots more on the way)
Now,
how
can we help you prepare for January
hiring?
Call
Bob (at 301-570-6780)
or
just reply to this
e-mail. | |
Here
are our the top articles from our blog
this month ...
Early January is the Best Time to
Recruit
 The first 3 weeks of
January are the absolute best time of the year
to be recruiting, but if you don't prepare your
recruiting strategy right now, in early
December, you'll miss out. Read why.
Did you budget for
turnover?
Turnover
in 2011 is going to be huge. Read why. Did you plan
for it in your budget?
3 Year Retention Rate - the Acid Test
of a Search Firm
We've
placed well over 200 people in the past few
years. But the acid test of our
performance is not how quickly our
placements started work, but rather
how effective they were over the
long term. Did they stick around long
enough to make a meaningful, long term
impact?
So
how did we do on that measure? After one
year, 91% of our placements are thriving,
and after 3 years, 84% are still
successfully delivering results for our
clients. See our annual retention report.
| |
The
Boss as "Human Shield"
Stanford
University Professor Robert Sutton recently
published Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the
Best ... and Learn from the
Worst. A
theme that runs through the book is that
great
bosses work
doggedly to "stay in tune" with how their
followers (and superiors, peers, and customers)
react to what they say and do.
 The September 2010
Harvard Business Review excerpted a
chapter of the book dealing with the boss as
"human shield." The best
bosses, says Sutton, are committed to letting
their workers work. They take pride in being
human shields, absorbing or deflecting heat from
inside and outside the company.
Learn the best ways to protect your
staff... |
Job
Satisfaction vs. a Big Paycheck
 How do you resolve the
tradeoff between a fulfilling job and a fat
paycheck? In a new study from
Princeton
University,
there is a magic number when it comes to
income and
happiness:
a household income of $75,000 per year.
Beyond that, money "does
nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness or
stress," the study concludes.
"Many
people want to make a lot of money, but the
benefits of having a high income are ambiguous,"
said Professor Kahneman, one of the authors of
the study who is also a Nobel Laureate in
economics. When you are wealthy you can buy more
pleasures, but research suggests
that wealthier people "seem to be less able to
savor the small things in life."
|
|
The Power of Snap
Judgements
We've
always heard about the importance of first
impressions. Research bears this
out. Within less than a
second, using facial features, people make
spontaneous judgments about the traits of
others, writes psychologist Amy Cuddy in a
fascinating article in Harvard Magazine
-- "The Psyche on
Automatic".
 Warmth and competence,
she finds, are the two critical variables. They
account for about 80 percent of our overall
evaluations of people (i.e., Do you feel good or
bad about this person?), and shape our emotions
and behaviors toward them. Her warmth/competence
analysis illuminates why we hire Kurt instead of
Kyra, how venture capitalists decide where
to make investments, and may lluminate how
some people rise to the top.
Cuddy
also studies nonverbal behavior like the
postures of dominance and power. She wanted to
know which nonverbal behaviors indicate warmth
and competence. Appropriate self-disclosure, use
of humor, and natural smiles all signal
warmth. So do behaviors
called "immediacy
cues", like leaning toward
someone and communicating on the same physical
plane.
To
find out how your body
stance affects people's perceptions of you,
read the full article.
|
|
What People Really
Want
 Never underestimate the
power of trust. People have different names for
it. Soldiers refer to "the bond." Children call
it "unconditional love." But
what is it really? It's someone you can trust to
"cover your six."
Fighter
pilots use the metaphor of sitting on the middle
of a clock face to indicate the relative
location of other aircraft. In other words, an
enemy could be at 12
o'clock
(straight ahead), at 3
o'clock (perpendicular
to your path, on the right), etc.
Your 6 o'clock is what's directly behind
you, the most dangerous enemy location. Your
backside.
Trusting
others to "cover your six" is the essence
of parenthood, team sports, military service,
and great relationships in business. Trust is
what people really want, writes Dan Collins in
his blog A Simple Guy,"but
it's more rare than diamonds. Once a person
trusts you and has confidence in you -- whether
it is your customer, your employer, your friends
or your family -- you have given them the
greatest gift. You have provided something that
cannot be priced, commoditized or
duplicated."
Be
someone on whom people can depend and trust.
It's what they really
want. |
|
What Work Will Look Like
in 2020
 Control freaks, consider
yourself warned. In a new
study, Gartner, Inc. predicts the nature of work
will witness 10 key changes in the coming
decade. Work will be characterized by increased
volatility and hyper-connectedness. By 2015, 40%
or more of an organization's work will be
non-routine, up from 25% in 2010. People will
"swarm" more often and work solo
less.
Swarming
is a work style characterized by a flurry of
collective activity by anyone able to add value.
Gartner identifies two phenomena within the
collective activity:
- Teaming
(instead of solo performances) will be more
valued and rewarded.
- Swarming
is a new form of teaming. Teams have
historically consisted of people who have worked
together before and who know each other
reasonably well, often working in the same
organization. Swarms are agile and form quickly,
attacking a problem or opportunity and then
quickly dissipating.
Here's a list of what work will look
like in
2020. |
|
The Four Ways to
Kill a Good
Idea
 Do you have a good idea
you want to get approved?
Beware: your
naysayers have four tried and true methods
to kill off your good ideas.
But you can get past them if you know
what to look for. In a new
book, Harvard Business School Professor John
Kotter shows how the 4 strategies work: fear
mongering, delay, confusion and
ridicule.
Don't
despair. Just
remember the Ghandi
quote: "First
they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then
they fight you, then you win."
|
|
Office Gift
Guide
 It's gift-giving season
again, and time to choose the right gifts to
help solidify professional relationships that
matter. Here, from Businessweek.com, is a guide to help you find the perfect
present for a client, a cubemate, an
assistant, and the
boss.
| |
|
| |
