Recruiting Animal

Democracy

From: Guardian.co.uk - Nick Cohen - Tony Blair's Moral Decline, May 27, 2012

In 2007, John Humphrys of the BBC interviewed Blair about the oppression in Iran.

Blair: "There is global struggle in which we need a policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice…"

Humphrys: "Our idea of democracy?"

Blair: "I didn't know that there was another idea of democracy…"

Humphrys: "If I may say so, that's naive…"

Blair: "The one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you can get rid of your government if you don't like them."

Humphrys: "The Iranians elected their own government and we're now telling them…"

Blair: "Hold on, John, something like 60% of the candidates were excluded."

I do not pick on Humphrys because he was an exceptionally wicked man, but because his approach was so depressingly commonplace. Iranians and other lesser breeds could not expect the rights we enjoyed, and it was "naive to think otherwise".

Blair replied in admirably plain language. His commitment to democracy and human rights was absolute.

Moreover, it was universal: if free elections are good enough for Britain, they are good enough for Iran and no weasel words about theocrats having their "own" version of democracy can be allowed to pass uncontested.

 

She Dreamed Herself To Death

From: Toronto woman dies on Mount Everest - Josh Tapper - Toronto Star - May 22, 2012 (edited)

Shriya Shah-Klorfine dreamed of scaling the world’s tallest peak. On Saturday, she unfurled Canada’s flag at the summit of Mt Everest.

A few hours later she died from exhaustion.

She was remembered by friends for her perseverance and relentless work ethic. Her training regimen included daily 19-kilometre runs carrying a 20- kilogram pack.

“She never let her dream be lost,” said friend Bikram Lamba. “She transferred the dream into reality.”

About 150 climbers attempted to reach the summit over the weekend.

“With the traffic jam, climbers had a longer wait for their chance to go up the trail and spent too much time at a higher altitude. Many of them are believed to be carrying a limited amount of oxygen, not anticipating the extra time spent.”

80% of Everest deaths occur in the final stretch because of its low oxygen level.

Bruce Klorfine said: “My wife was someone who lived life to its fullest, with irrepressible energy and vitality."

In 2011, she participated in a five-day hunger strike to protest skyrocketing auto insurance premiums. She collapsed after four days but returned to the strike after her release from hospital.

For the last two years, she squeezed in seven hours of training each day before running her business in the late evening.

She also mortgaged her home to cover climbing costs.

Priya Ahuja, a close friend, said nothing could hold her back.

“She would say: Life, you’ve just got one, just try to live it. ”

Of course, some might say: Life, you've just got one. Don't throw it away.

They Liked To Sing

From: Gary James' Interview With Helen Shapiro

Q - What did you think of The Beatles when you first saw them? Did you think "this is the future of Rock 'n' Roll"?

A - Well, they were fairly un-disciplined in the very early days, which was nice. I enjoyed them. I'm a big fan.

I would stand at the side of the stage and watch every performance. I really loved them. It was interesting to see them kind of polish up their act during the run of the tour. They learned to be a bit more professional in terms of presentation without losing that raw stuff that they had, which was great and which everybody enjoyed.

We had a lot of fun together on the road. We would sing on the bus, everybody on the tour. We would all sing like Beach Boys songs and a lot of the early Tamla / Motown stuff, which they knew before any of us did because Brian Epstein used to import stuff from the States to his record shop in Liverpool. So, we used to do all that. We just got on really well.

 

Cora Mae on Cold Calls

The other day I saw a posting by Greg Savage on Recruitingblogs.com. It was called: The Golden Rule of Cold Calls. Don't.

That prompted me to post a transcript of my interview with James Bowmer on Recruitingblogs.com. It's called Hot Tips From A Cold Call Machine.

Ironically, both of these guys are CEO's of successful recruiting firms and both of them are Australian. There is one difference though: Greg's article got a number of approving comments and Jimmy's got none - until Cora Mae Lengeman came along.

Cora is a very successful solo headhunter. Her comments (slightly edited) are below:

From: Recruitingblogs.com, Cora Mae Lengeman, May 18, 2012

You simply have to pick up the telephone and make the calls, knowing that each no is getting you closer to a yes.

Cold calls for finding new clients are fun. I love sorting the companies that will be my sourcing companies and the companies that may become my clients.

I don't do it as often now but the exercise is a good one to get you back into the excitement of recruiting.  It keeps the edge (and fun) in the recruiting process.

Yeah, it's interesting that when you write about someone that is successful doing something that most recruiters don’t like or want to do that it gets no comments. 

They are probably embarrassed to admit someone can be successful doing it because that means they could also if they stepped out of their comfort zone.  Scary!!

Work safe = not as much success

 

How an adult acts

From: How To Grow Up, Pam Weintraub, Psychology Today, May 1, 2012

Being an adult means:

- standing on your own two feet

- pursuing your own goals

- soothing your own bad feelings without the help of another person

- not caving in to pressure to conform from people who are important to you

Women Are Built For Sorrow

From: Psychology Today, Why Do the Wrong Men Feel So Right? - Vinita Mehta, May 16, 2012 (edited)

There are 2 kinds of men.

1. The Nice Guy: he's warm, faithful and reliable.

Less handsome, less charismatic and less dominant.

2. The Sexy Guy: better-looking and flashy.

He's Machiavellian. He exploits others. He's self-centred.

Which man do women prefer?

Near ovulation, hormones make the bad boy hard to resist.

Women dig the deep voice; symmetrical, masculine face; competitiveness and social dominance.

Why? It means he's got good genes. And she wants them for her kids.

So, nature blinds her to the high cost involved in mating with a man who is likely to desert his children.

She believes that with her as the wife, this guy will be a good dad.

So, what if she's a recruiter or a hiring manager and the bad boy comes looking for a job?

The Sexes Are Fated For Battle

If manly men are not the marrying kind and women are programmed to favour them, they are bound to quarrel.

And if women settle for the less manly guy they are bound to find him bland -- and be dissatisfied.

 

Read about the experiments used to demonstrate this here.

How to make an enemy a friend

Not Like This

From: American's Nastiest Blood Feud - Gary Wills, NYRB

It began with their very first recorded meeting, in 1953. Lyndon Johnson came into the Senate cafeteria for his customary breakfast there. He was trailing his entourage, radiating his power as minority leader.

He passed the table of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was sitting near the entrance with three or four staffers, including a newcomer to his team, twenty-seven-year-old Robert Kennedy, who had just got this job through the influence of his father, a McCarthy supporter.

Johnson knew about that arrangement, as he did all the things that went on in “his” Senate. Johnson had mocked Joe Kennedy all over town and despised Joe McCarthy as a loose cannon in the Senate. He also did not think much of the newly elected senator John Kennedy, whom he would soon be calling a sickly absentee from the Senate and “not a man’s man.”

Yet McCarthy, with his coarse affability, leaped to his feet when Johnson approached, greeted him as “Leader,” and shook his hand. His aides followed suit, all but one, who remained seated, with an expression of distaste. Bobby knew what Johnson had been saying about his father and his boss, and he always bristled at slights directed at his own revered family. He refused to get up, or even to look at Johnson.

Johnson, whose own history of humiliations Caro has traced in earlier volumes, was just as quick to sense contempt, and determined to crush it if he could. He was a bully and a sadist, and he took the earliest opportunity to force Kennedy to submit to the dreaded handshake.

He went right up to him, towering over him (he always put his height to use) and crowded at him with a half-extended hand. Finally, in the embarrassment of a growing silence, Kennedy rose and, with averted eyes, shook Johnson’s hand. Johnson felt he had made this lowly staffer crawl. It would prove to be a costly victory.

 

Heroes Are Thrill-Seekers

From: All Hands On Deck: How Can We Make More Heroes - Erin Anderssen - Globe and Mail - Jan 16 2012 (edited)

Heroes are born risk-takers and thrill-seekers. They have adventurous personalities.

They are more likely to go mountain-climbing on vacation than lounge around the pool.

Often, their parents modelled compassion and altruism; that's why they say they acted instinctively as if they had no other choice. That reflexive behaviour is run by the brainwashing of childhood.

In 2008, when terrorists attacked a hotel in Bombay many employees risked their lives and died trying to keep the guests safe.

Why? The hotel didn't hire the people with the highest marks. It hired people who showed the most optimism when confronted by adversity and had the most respect for others.

Rohit Deshpandé is an ethics professor at the Harvard. He sez people can be trained to be heroes. But the training has to start early.

Phil Zimbardo, the reciprocity guy from Stanford says 20% of people are heroes.

To program heroism into children, parents and teachers have to brainwash them to believe that they have the power to change a situation.

They also have to teach kids how to build up social influence among their peers because many acts of heroism require people working together.

Zimmy has students go to school with a big spot drawn on their foreheads, so that they experience peer pressure to wipe it off during the day.

"A hero is a positive deviant,” he says. “How do you resist that pressure?”

Why is a hero a deviant? Because she'll do what other people won't. For instance, a whistle-blower, according to Zimbardo, is a hero.

When the Costa Concordia cruise ship went down people fought over life jackets; men pushed their way ahead of children and the elderly; and people tried to launch the lifeboats before they were full.

However, crew member, Manrico Giampedroni, 57 years old, went looking for trapped passengers until he fell in the in the dark and broke his leg.

When he was rescued 36 hours later, his mother told reporters, “If they had told me he was dead, I would have died too.”

 

Vidal Sassoon

From: Forward.com - May 9, 2012 - Ben Ivry and Wikipedia

Vidal Sassoon was famous in the 1960s for creating a short, angular hairstyle that was a recreation of the classic bob.

He had a tough childhood.

At age 5, he was sent to an orphanage in London, after his father, a womanizer, abandoned his mother.

Seven years later, his mother remarried and he was able to rejoin his family.

At 14, he was apprenticed to a wigmaker.

"This Dickensian beginning instilled a fierce fighting spirit in him, as well as a sense of commercial realities."

Although passionate about architecture, he resigned himself to shampooing the hair of the wigmaker's clients as his only realistic career option.

After the news of the Holocaust reached London he went to Palestine to join the predecessor to the Israeli army.

Returning to London, he trained under Raymond Bessone, in his salon in Mayfair. "He really taught me how to cut hair.... I'd never have achieved what I have without him."

Sassoon opened his first salon in 1954 in London.

Comment: I doubt that the Dickensian childhood was the source of Sassoon's fighting spirit. It might have brought him face to face with practical realities at an early age but I suspect that the fighting spirit was inborn.

Also, noteworthy, is his acknowledgement of the importance of good training.

Note: A good story often seems better than the truth. Dickensian childhood brings to mind the world of Oliver Twist. Yet, an article on Tablet.com describes a visit by Sassoon to the Portuguese Synagogue that housed the orphanage. He said that he enjoyed it there.  

By his own account, Sassoon’s years at the orphanage were happy ones. (Sassoon, unlike his younger brother Ivor, was never bitter toward [his mother] Betty, with whom he remained close.)

Mystical Job Hunting

RT @animal: When the job hunter is ready the job offer will come < Have seen so many times. #hfchat

— Anne Messenger (@AnneMessenger) May 4, 2012

So True RT @AnneMessenger: RT @animal: When the job hunter is ready the job offer will come < Have seen so many times. #hfchat

— interviewing.com (@interviewingcom) May 4, 2012

@animal I'm stealing that for my mantra, thanks!

— Sharon Clews (@redspringsmedia) May 4, 2012

@ITtechExec - He who knows does not ask and he who asks does cannot know

— Recruiting Animal (@animal) May 4, 2012