Recruiter

Predicting Performance From Personality

New York Times.

- Paul Wolfowitz doesn't seem like a zealot
- he is patient, logical, respectful and soft-spoken
- but he has a missionary's optimism about America's
  ability to build a better world

- has an activist bent
- he sees trouble coming before others do
- doesn't want to stand by while bad things happen
- and thinks about the cost of not acting

- for Colin Powell Vietnam is the prime example of good intentions gone wrong
- Wolfowitz was sympathetic to the war
- later he accepted that it was a case of overreaching

- Wolfy was an architect of the Iraq War.
- could we predict from his activist orientation and optimistic perspective
  the likelihood of over-reaching?

Selling Your Personality

The Lessons of David Axelrod

Axelrod met Obama when the senator was 30 years old... In the 15 years since, Axelrod has worked through Obama’s life story again and again, scouring it for usable political material

- David Axelrod is Obama's campaign manager

- he wants to portray the candidate as having a leader's personality
- so his campaigns don't focus on issues but on the candidate’s life

- a job hunter can do the same in an interview
- she should have clear ideas about how her job is done

- but she can also tell a story about her life and focus on moments
  in her history that define her as the person she wants to be

- while the image you project may be edited, to be convincing
  it has to be based in reality

People Can Surprise You

Source: Wall Street Journal. (edited)

Harry Truman was a small town man whose career had been sponsored by a corrupt political boss. Then he was carelessly elevated to a senior role by Frank Roosevelt. And, yet as the sponsor of the Marshall Plan and the policy of containment, he had done great things.

From this example, Peggy Noonan concludes that:

People can come from nowhere, with modest backgrounds and short résumés, and yet be individuals of real gifts.... that are suddenly revealed.

You have to give people time to show what they have. Because maybe they have magic too.

Immigrants Dislike Preference For Skilled People

TheStar.com warns that:

1. Immigrants with skills do not get a chance to use them in Canada.

When Chakraborti joined her husband, Sailen, in Canada, it took her just two months to parlay a master's degree in philosophy into a job as a bank teller.

"Many immigrant communities are already being discriminated left, right and centre..."

His parents have a university education and worked for Ontario Hydro as clerks...

2. So the government's increased preference for immigrants with job skills discriminates against the unskilled people the country actually needs.

Greeting and Thank You Card Service

Matt Mancino, a construction industry recruiter in Phoenix called to tell me about Send Out Cards.com.

You can create your own thank you or greeting cards online - in your own handwriting, if you choose -- and they print them and snail mail them for you.

Because everything is electronic today, these snail mailed cards stand out and differentiate you from the pack.

Leaders Are Flexible

Reference: George Jonas.

It’s definitely not for nothing that Obama -- who, in theory, stands against everything Powell has stood for, from party affiliation to policy -- responded to the endorsement of Bush’s former secretary of state by saying that he was feeling honoured and humbled.

Presidential? Pragmatic? Practical? Unprincipled?

All of the above, I’d say. The first adjective sounds like a compliment; the last one certainly doesn’t. Yet they’re not incompatible and may even be complementary.

Recruiter, Toronto, Canada

Your Communications Require A Consistent Tone

Reference: Commune Media via One Degree

A large company will usually have strict rules about the presentation of its image. For instance, it will only use specific colours, photos and fonts . The reason? Once these signals become familiar to the viewer, it becomes easy to relate to the firm as a known quantity.

The same restrictions and clear definition are required for any appearance of the company's voice. But this is where firms often err.

When they are trying to reel you in as a customer or an employee, they are very personable and friendly. But once you are sold, they become very task-oriented. You're no longer a pal. The only thing that matters is business.

People don't like that sudden about-face from caring about them to caring exclusively about yourself. It makes you seem untrustworthy and dishonest.

So, if you have a friendly voice in your marketing vehicles, including your recruiting communications (your blog, for instance), you should maintain it in all of your ongoing communications as a basic element of your culture.

Do Interviewers Disagree?

Take a look at the judgements of the third presidential debate.

McCain looked and sounded like a man who is floundering and doesn't know what to do about it.
-- Editorial, The Age (Australia)

In my mind McCain won the last debate by some margin
-- Ron Liddle, TimesOnline (England)

Presumably both writers are well-informed, politically. Liddle, who supports Obama, was a speechwriter for the Labour party in England. And, yet, they disagree.

What could possibly account for it? And does this disagreement reflect something that might happen when a candidate meets a number of stakeholders within the same firm?

Do You Still Need a Resume? Yes

According to Debbie Dib, the resume is losing its role as the primary tool in a job search.

But not really. You might have a blog or a website or a video profile but I'm a headhunter and when I call you about a job, you'd better have a resume.

How else am I going to get a quick overview of what you've done and, based on that, assess what you can do? I have to have something to pass on to my client, too. And to anyone else involved in the search.

And, if I don't have a resume, what am I going to use? A LinkedIn profile? That's just a resume online, nothing more, nothing less. And I love LinkedIn; every recruiter does -- but it's got some strikes against it.

1. It's got the LinkedIn format which includes a lot of junk on the right side of the page.

2. At present, LinkedIn is still foreign to a lot of people. A hiring manager might not recognize it as a resume.

3. Many people who register on LinkedIn don't recognize its potential value, either, so they don't put a lot of details or stable contact information into their profiles.

Multi-Tasking Works Against You

Steve Rubel claims that young people are good multi-taskers.

The Gen Yer's, it seems, do a far better job of coping with massive amounts of information.

It's not uncommon for a lot of folks to be running Meebo with a dozen IM windows going at once, Facebooking, emailing and talking on the phone. And they're productive!

Scientists don't agree.

In 2005, Glenn Wilson (University of London) did a study on multi-tasking for Hewlett-Packard. People "distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ." That's double the impact of marijuana.

René Marois (Vanderbilt University) examined brain scans of people who were forced to respond to several stimuli at once. Task-switching leads to time loss as the brain determines which task to perform.

Source: Toronto Star