Dear Recruiting Professional,

2012 is off to a great start!  In my first “address” of the year, my first order of duty is to get the word out that the National Association is changing.  Some of you are aware of the changes that have already begun.  But, please allow me to explain.

We have new leadership.  With that new leadership comes fresh ideas.  What I am talking about is simply EDUCATION, REPRESENTATION AND ASSISTANCE.  We are here to educate you.  We are here to represent you and we are here to assist you.  It’s that simple.

You will begin to see programs that you can be a part of – that will definitely help your businesses and your individual recruiters and employees.  One great example is the improved delivery of our certification program.  Credentialing participants will now have the opportunity to view a “Learning Session” recorded from a Certification Immersion Class (CIC).  As most of you know, this is a certification prep class.  We have informally dubbed this program the “E-CIC,” as it is a self-paced course allowing you to view the class at your own speed.  Participants in this original CIC class in the past have experienced a pass/fail rate of 10 points higher than if they study on their own.  Members will have the ability to view this class at no cost.

This is only the beginning of what the NAPS is doing to help get you educated.  Our Annual Conference is our “flagship” of education.  Our conference is always packed with the best speakers in the country, making this event something you can count on, year after year.  This year is no exception with over 175 already registered.  Do not hesitate to visit www.recruitinglife.com for learn more about this fantastic event.

From all this education comes Professional Success.  These following facts contribute to our Professional Success:

• Recruiters with the Certified Professional Consultants “CPC” and/or Certified Temporary Services “CTS” designations outperform and earn more money than non-certificants.
• Recruiters that continue Professional Education by attending the NAPS Annual Conference outperform and earn more money than non-participants.
• Recruiters that participate in their Professional Associations (NAPS) outperform & earn more money than non-participants.
• Recruiters that educate their Candidates and Clients through giving back through Professional Service outperform and earn more money than those non-participants.

It’s all about making yourself better and better at what you do – through continuing education.  Not only do you feel better about it, but your customers (your clients and your candidates) can see that growth and experience in you as well.

Thank you in advance for taking time to make a difference!  I look forward to seeing you in San Antonio at the NAPS- September 2012 Conference.

Sincerely,

Robert Krzak, Chairman of the Board, NAPS

5 Ways to Spot a Bad Boss In An Interview

Stephanie Taylor Christensen, Contributor Forbes.com

A boss can literally, make or break your career. Here are five ways to spot the bad ones before they become yours.

A great boss can make you feel engaged and empowered at work, will keep you out of unnecessary office politics, and can identify and grow your strengths. But a bad boss can make the most impressive job on paper (and salary) quickly unbearable. Not only will a bad boss make you dislike at least 80% of your week, your relationships might suffer, too. A recent study conducted at Baylor University found that stress and tension caused by an abusive boss “affects the marital relationship and subsequently, the employee’s entire family.” Supervisor abuse isn’t always as blatant as a screaming temper tantrum; it can include taking personal anger out on you for no reason, dismissing your ideas in a meeting, or simply, being rude and critical of your work, while offering no constructive ways to improve it.  Whatever the exhibition of bad boss behavior, your work and personal life will suffer. Merideth Ferguson, PH.D., co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at Baylor explains that “it may be that as supervisor abuse heightens tension in the relationship, the employee is less motivated or able to engage in positive interactions with the partner and other family members.”

There are many ways to try and combat the effects of a bad boss, including confronting him or her directly to work towards a productive solution, suggesting that you report to another supervisor, or soliciting the help of human resources.  But none of those tactics gurantee improvement, and quite often, they’ll lead to more stress. The best solution is to spot a bad boss—before they become yours! Here are five ways to tell whether your interviewer is a future bad boss.

1. Pronoun usage. Performance consultant John Brubaker says that the top verbal tell a boss can gives is in pronoun choice and the context it is used. If your interviewer uses the term “you” in communicating negative information ( such as, “you will deal with a lot of ambiguity”), don’t expect the boss to be a mentor.  If the boss chooses the word “I” to describe the department’s success—that’s a red flag.  If the interviewer says “we” in regards to a particular challenge the team or company faced, it may indicate that he or she deflects responsibility and places blame.

2. Concern with your hobbies. There is a fine line between genuine relationship building, and fishing for information, so use your discretion on this one. If you have an overall good impression of the potential boss it may be that he or she is truly interested in the fact that you are heavily involved in charity work, and is simply getting to know you. On the other hand, the interviewer may be trying to determine whether you have too many commitments outside of work. The interviewer can’t legally ask if you are married, or have kids, so digging into your personal life can be a clever way to understand just how available you are.

3. They’re distracted. The era of email, BlackBerrys and smartphones have made it “okay” for people to develop disrespectful communication habits in the name of work. Particularly in a frenzied workplace, reading email while a person is speaking, multi-tasking on conference calls and checking the message behind that blinking BlackBerry mid-conversation has become the norm of business communications. But, regardless of his or her role in the company, the interviewer should be striving to make a good impression—which includes shutting down tech tools to give you undivided attention. If your interviewer is glancing at emails while you’re speaking, taking phone calls, or late to the interview, don’t expect a boss who will make time for you.

4. They can’t give you a straight answer. Caren Goldberg, Ph.D. is an HR professor at the Kogod School of Business at American University. She says a key “tell” is vague answers to your questions. Listen for pauses, awkwardness, or overly-generic responses when you inquire what happened to the person who held the position you are interviewing for, and/or what has created the need to hire. (For example, if you are told the person was a “bad fit,” it may indicate that the workplace doesn’t spend much time on employee-development, and blames them when things don’t work out).

You should also question turnover rates, how long people stay in given roles, and what their career path has been. All of these answers can indicate not only if the boss is one people want to work for, but whether pay is competitive, and employees are given a career growth plan.

5. They’ve got a record. Ask the potential boss how long he or she has been at the company, in the role, and where he or she worked before coming to it to get a feel for his or management style, and whether it’s what you respond to.  For example, bosses making a switch from a large corporation to a small company may lead with formality. On the other hand, entrepreneurs tend to be passionately involved in business, which can be a help or a hindrance, depending on your workstyle.

Goldberg also recommends searching the site eBossWatch, where you read reviews that former employees have given to a boss. If you’re serious about the position, she also suggests reaching to the former employee whose spot you are interviewing for, and asking for their take on the workplace. (LinkedIn makes this task easy to do). The former employee’s recount may not necessarily reflect your potential experience, but it can help you to determine whether his or her description of the job and company “jibes” with what the potential boss said.

“Unemployment discrimination” and the jobless
By: Elaine Quijano (CBS News)

Of the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, 6 million have been jobless for more than 6 months.

CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reports that many job seekers say being unemployed is being held against them.

Delores Barnes always goes job hunting armed with her dossier of documents, including her birth certificate.

Two years ago, she was laid off from her supervisor job with New York’s Children’s Services. Ever since, Barnes has been looking for work to support her and her nine-year-old daughter, Savianna “I can’t give up. I’m on a mission. I have a daughter, and she’s like, I have to be strong for her. I have to show her that you just don’t give up,” Barnes says.

Yet no amount of persistence can overcome the simple fact that some employers don’t want to hire the unemployed. In job posting after job posting, companies require that applicants “must be currently employed.”

“They have that perception that they are the dead weight, therefore they want the strong people who are currently employed,” says Robert Krzak, president of Gecko Hospitality.

Krzak says some companies won’t even consider unemployed job candidates.
“If there is a candidate out there who has been out there in the job market for six months or even a year or more than a year, a lot of companies are very suspect of that, because why aren’t they working?” Krzak says.

“It’s discriminatory and the fact that just because you don’t have a job you can’t compete for a job,” says Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. DeLauro is sponsoring a bill aimed at stopping the practice.

“These are competent people. They have lost their job through no fault of their own,

Why shouldn’t they have an opportunity?” DeLauro says.
Barnes says the practice doesn’t make sense, hiring people who have jobs when so many don’t.

Barnes is now training to be a computer technician, and says she’ll keep pounding the pavement, even though with some companies she can’t even get her foot in the door.

One Trait that Makes a Great CEO-and Place to Work

What makes a great CEO? That question came to mind recently when I read the news that Chief Executive magazine had named Alan Mulally of Ford Motor Company its 2011 CEO of the Year. It’s easy to understand why Mulally was chosen. After all, he presided over one of the more remarkable corporate turnarounds in recent memory.

But a look at the magazine’s criteria gives some insight into what makes a great CEO truly great. Some of the criteria was typical: the honoree had to show evidence of looking ahead, driving value, focusing on people, fostering corporate citizenship and sustaining business results.

But one factor was unusual: the winner had to maintain a “stable, consistent ‘moral landscape.’”

Moral landscape?

Tom Saporito, CEO of RHR International, who helped develop the selection criteria, defined moral landscape as “courage, integrity, reputation and having a coherent and high purpose” embedded in the corporate culture, due in part to the CEO’s example.

From day one on the job in September 2006 when Mulally took the reins of a faltering Ford, he has pushed hard to drive purpose throughout the company. It was no easy feat; other CEOs had tried and failed, but Mulally made it clear through the development of One Ford that the company had to become leaner and more focused on developing products that were uniquely Ford.

Mulally himself preaches this but, and stuck his neck out on the line for, notably by taking out a $20 billion-plus line of credit to ensure the transformation. This line ensured that Ford would not need to take advantage of federal bailout funds, nor would it have to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying its creditors. Something that its Detroit competitors GM and Chrysler both did. I would call Ford’s behavior in this instance highly moral.

There is another side to sense of purpose that Mulally talks about extensively: you create greater levels of buy-in when people know what you stand for and are committed to doing. Ford’s pride of purpose took a beating in the early part of the decade when it suffered year after year of losses. But now that it’s firmly in the black and has paid all but $3 billion of the $23 billion it borrowed, the pride is back. Not because the books are balanced but because Ford is making and selling products that consumers in North America, Europe and South America want and will pay a premium for.

The drive for purpose emanates from the leadership team, but as I have discovered in research conducted for a forthcoming book, employees are hungry for it.  Purpose, as supported by my research, drives clarity because it enables people to see the big picture. Even better they see themselves painting part of that picture.

Savvy leaders trade on this quest for purpose as a means of giving the organization sharper focus. When people know what it expected of them, they can deliver more readily. And if they believe in the purpose they feel part of something greater than themselves.

The coda to RHR’s description of “moral landscape” is a leader who puts “the interest of the organization above personal gain.” That’s a foundation of servant leadership; leaders do what the organization needs doing. Easy to do when times are good, but hard when times are tough.

But it is this orientation toward others that drives organizational purpose. Employees want to follow their leader; they believe in what he or she stands for. If they sense the leadership team is only out for self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement the underpinning of purpose erodes.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who works for a living. They know instinctively if the boss has their back or they have the boss. If there is mutual support, people are engaged. If something is missing, no amount of preaching about purpose will do anything. Leaders need to walk the talk.

How to Hire Great Employees (Not Great Applicants)

By Mel Kleiman

The Problem with Behavioral Interviewing

Just as typewriters and record players have given way to desktop computers and handheld media players, outmoded employee selection systems need to be reinvented to take advantage of our new understanding of how to select employees in the 21st century.

Although behavioral interviewing was initially developed by industrial psychologists back in the 1970s, it is still in widespread use today. Predictably, during these past 30 years, everyone looking for a job has learned to expect interviewers to ask them about their past behaviors.

Just as we all learned what our teachers wanted to hear from us in school, prospective employees learned to deliver the answers interviewers want to hear. Ask, “Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult customer,” and all but the dullest applicant immediately understands that customer service is paramount and will respond to the question accordingly.

Every job applicant with a basic understanding of the interview process now knows that the most critical interview questions will concern past behaviors. The reason so many unsatisfactory new hire decisions are made is due to the fatal flaw in this system – specific past behaviors during specific past events are all but impossible to document or verify.

The continued reliance on the validity of behavioral questions has led to too many hiring decisions based more on the applicant’s presentation skills rather than on the person’s ability to perform on the job.

Great Employees vs. Great Applicants

Start hiring great employees (instead of great applicants) by shifting the focus from past behaviors to verifiable experiences and achievements. Begin by using an interview built upon the following five, essential questions. (To gain a sense of their effectiveness, as you read each one, ask yourself how you would respond if you were the applicant.)

Essential Question #1: “Tell me what you learned from your very first paying job.”

This is the first question interviewers should ask because our earliest learning experiences set the patterns and expectations for later experiences. (Hiring Hint: The story makes a lot more sense when you hear it from the beginning. Follow this up by asking them to talk briefly about each successive job and what was learned at each.)

Essential Question #2: “Which work achievements or accomplishments to-date are you most proud of?”

The achievements we value most reveal both our strongest character traits and our strongest desires. Identifying these speaks volumes about the kind of employee the applicant can become. (Hiring Hint: The number of achievements or accomplishments is not as important as the motivations that drove it.)

Essential Question #3: “On a scale from zero to ten, how would you rate yourself as a (job title) and why?”

Because we seldom see ourselves as others see do, the specific number is not as important as the fact that you will be able to verify if the applicant’s number is higher, lower, or the same as perceived by the applicants former managers or supervisors when you check references. (Hiring Hint: Would you rather have an employee who undervalues or overvalues their contributions reporting to you?)

Essential Question #4: “When we contact your former manager to verify your employment, what will he or she tell me about your last performance review?”

The answer will tell you a great deal about the applicant’s actual on-the-job performance, ability to take direction, and efforts to improve. (Hiring Hint: Phrased this way, this question will elicit the truth from 99% of applicants. For further verification, if you decide to extend a job offer, then ask for a copy of that review.)

Essential Question #5: “What would you like to ask me about the job or our company?”

The answers to this one reveal the applicant’s concerns and motivators or simply point out basic job information (benefits, hours, policies) that have not yet been communicated. (Hiring Hint: Follow this up by allowing the applicant one or two more questions for even more insight.)

Between Questions #3 and #4, ask all the other questions you’ve developed that help determine if the candidate is a good fit for the job, the department, and the company. After the interview, verify what you learned with this achievement-based interviewing technique through evidence-based selection criteria: thorough reference and background checks.

The further you can move your interviews away from outdated behavioral techniques and toward achievement- and evidence-based selection, the quicker your hiring effectiveness will improve. Like that great philosopher of our time Dilbert said: “Eighty-percent of a manager’s job is hiring the right people. The other 20 percent is leaving them alone so they can do what you hired them for.”

What Gen Y Job Hunters Need to Know

It’s old wisdom: surround yourself with people better than yourself. But how? How do you know that the people you’re putting around you are actually better, and not just richer/smarter/better looking?

Now that you know I can do this, here’s my methodology so you can do this, too:

• Let go of judgment. The first step in recognizing talent is recognizing talent! You can only do this if you are able to put aside your own issues and prejudices and see others for who they are. ie, if you’re starving, any chef is a 4 star chef. You’ve got to be able to compensate for your own “schtick” when assessing others.
• Let go of ignorance. Sifting through the self-promoters to get to what’s real requires that you have some education about the world around you.
• Let go of jealousy. If you’re jealous of what they’ve got, you’ll feel it, they’ll feel it, and badness will be inevitable.
• Let go of need. Needing others is only fractionally better than being jealous of them. Needing people leads you to make demands. Which amps up the awkward and ends painfully.
• Let go of labels. Strong people don’t need anyone to define a relationship with labels because they’re able to figure it out on their own. Trying to label a relationship can scare a strong person off. (Not comfortable with ambiguity? Keep that to yourself.)
• Let go of doubt. Great people want people around them who are even better then themselves. If you don’t believe you belong, you don’t belong.
• Let go of control. Great people will do things you don’t understand and can’t explain. Insisting on living in a world you fully understand will keep you from experiencing people who can open you up to new and bigger ideas. Great people approach their worlds with innocence, wonder, and curiosity.
• Let go of you. Help the people around you shine brighter. The strong ones’ll keep you around and start feeding your gift back to you. (The weak ones will show their true colors by trying to take advantage or assuming malintent on your part—easy to deal with once you’re prepared for it.)
• Let go of work/life distinctions. When the relationship comes first, it’s sometimes difficult to know if it’s going to grow into friendship, business, or both. Especially with great people who jump from idea to idea with ease, and make no distinction between a project that makes money and one done for fun. Be profersonal.
• Let go of self-esteem. The thing about surrounding yourself with awesome is, you are always being challenged. It’s with love and support, but they’re challenges nonetheless, and you must win, without help, without cheating, without rationalizing. And when you don’t win, you must bounce back quickly and confidently because you don’t want to fail twice in a row.
• Let go of ego. You love that local band? Accept that you’re just one small part of their success, and help them get big anyway. Make it your goal to enjoy next year’s conversation with that girl who claims she “discovered” the band on the radio “last month.”
• Let go of negative. Awesome people fix things or laugh about them. They see no third option.
• Let go of safe. Surrounding yourself with extraordinary people guarantees one thing: change. Scary, risky, life-altering change. No-more-comfort-zone change. For instance, if I were the worlds’ best matchmaker and we were hanging out, I could find you your true love. When I did, would you be ready? Great people requires us to abandon the safe harbor of our routines.

Did you get it yet? Greatness happens when you let go. It’s the ultimate “stone soup;” you bring only your true self and all the other ingredients you think you need actually are provided by others when the time comes. It takes an incredible amount of self-confidence and faith to play this game—but I never did say it was easy.

That’s my recipe. I hope you can make it work for you!

As former outplacement counselors, we created these questions for our clients to practice in advance of their interviewing candidates as part of their interview preparation. These questions should be asked and answered both positively and in job-related terms. This is the first rule of a solid interview process. Try asking yourself some of these interview questions and see how your answers would resonate with you! That will provide you some context to better hiring.

1. Tell me about yourself.

2. Why do you want to work here?

3. What are your strengths?

4. What are your weaknesses?

5. What do you know about us?

6. Why should I hire you?

7. Why did you (or why do you want to) leave your current employer?

8. If you could turn back time and live your life over, what would you do differently?

9. Describe the ideal work environment for you.

10. Tell me about the worst boss you ever had.

11. If you could change one thing about your last (current) job, what would it be?

12. How do you think your coworkers would describe you, both good and bad?

13. How do you think your bosses would describe you, both good and bad?

14. In prior performance reviews, what were your opportunities for improvement?

15. What are your greatest accomplishments so far?

16. Describe yourself in three words.

17. Are you interested in managing or leading others? Why or why not?

18. How do you define success?

19. Besides money, what do you value or need most if you are to have job satisfaction?

20. Have you ever been fired (laid off, outplaced, etc.)? Explain the circumstances.

21. If you gave your last boss a performance review, what would he or she need to change?

22. Do you prefer to work alone or with others? Why?

23. Describe a difficult situation or task that you had to deal with, and how you did so.

24. How do you feel about travel or relocation?

25. Is there anything that would physically or mentally prevent you from performing this job?

26. What other organizations are you pursuing, or are pursuing you?

27. Do you consider yourself to be creative? If so, give some examples.

28. How would you describe your personality?

29. How much are you expecting to earn in this job?

30. How do you feel about incentives, which are heavily tied to performance?

31. How do you feel about psychological tests?

32. How do you feel about drug tests?

33. What are your goals for five years and ten years out?

34. Do you prefer a job with clearly defined tasks, or one that is more self-directed?

35. Do you prefer to work for a man or a woman? Why?

36. How do you feel about working in a diverse workplace (with minorities, for example)?

37. If you could change three things about yourself, what would they be?

38. Do you consider yourself to be a traditionalist? Why or why not?

39. What motivates you?

40. Do you think that people are basically lazy and need to be pushed to perform?

41. Have you ever had to fire someone? Explain why and how you did it.

42. If you could be in your own business, what business would it be?

43. Do you consider yourself to be more of a people person or a taskmaster?

44. What qualities do you think are necessary to be a leader?

45. How long do you anticipate being in this job, or with our organization?

46. Do you believe that success depends more on what you know than on whom you know?

47. How do you perform under stress?

48. Do you keep current in your field? How?

49.  Do you have any role models? If so, who are they, and why are they role models?

50. What more would you like to know about the job, or about this organization?

Excerpted from The Everything HR Kit: A Complete Guide to Attracting, Retaining, and Motivating High-Performance Employees by John Putzier and David Baker. Copyright ^© 2010 John Putzier and David Baker. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

I have been working on some great searches the past few weeks, and have come across an interesting pattern.

The companies I work with do not want resumes from candidates that are on career boards and job sites. That is such a different expectation from what most of you understand. They want to see and hear about great industry leaders that are not on these job sites. They want to have me present fresh and intriguing candidates.  Candidates they and their competitors have not seen.

Every employer has access to these sites. It has been heard that some employers are regularly viewing these sites not so much for new talent, but to see who on their current team may be “out looking for a job”.  Be very careful!

Another interesting phenomenon as of late is that if candidates are on an employer’s site posting for jobs, and they want to delete that online profile, they cannot in some cases. So, once you apply, you are in their tracking system indefinitely. What does that matter you say, well just this week I had some great candidates I wanted to take before a client for some great positions, but because they had already applied into the company’s database, they could not be presented. Could they still be reviewed by that client and hired, sure. But, your resume is in a huge and burgeoning system with thousands of other candidates. You are just a name and number. It will be very hard for you to get noticed, it at all.

However, if you use our services [never a fee to you], you will have a Gecko professional be your advocate in front of these companies. We take your resume right to the decision maker. These decision makers are taking our candidates and our word that these candidates are high quality industry leaders. We at Gecko have done our homework, and present you in a great light. We get through all the “noise” and to the top.

Give it a try, take you resume offline, stop applying to every little opening you see, and send us your resume today. You will not regret it.

Kevin Kalstad — Gecko Hospitality

“Don’t burn a bridge” and “Finish strong”

We have all heard the term “Don’t burn a bride”. Now more than ever, this term is vitally important as you are considering a job change.

With potentially hundreds of candidates vying for the same job opening, the job will most likely get offered to someone who has not “burned a bridge”.

Over the past few months I have heard different ways that people have “burned bridges”. These are real-life and current examples.

• A manager sent his boss a text message he was quitting without notice.
• A manager left a note that he was quitting on the desk in the mangers office with his keys, and quit.
• A manager took a hard-line stand and made comments about Senior Managers after several hourly team members were let go by those Senior Managers.
• And of course, the no call, no show. This is where someone just abandons their job, but never showing up to work for their shift.

Now each of these people have told me reasons for why they left their companies the way they did, but is anything that bad that you need to leave your employer this way? [Note: Of course there are ethical, and legal matters that may lead you to leave abruptly, even then, you can involve your HR department or senior level leaders in your company to get protected if the matter is that serious or harmful.]

Do you really want to be tainted with the reputation of leaving an employer this way? Do you really understand what you are about to do, and set into motion by leaving like this?

So, how do you avoid “burning a bride”? How do you protect your priceless reputation and career during a job change?

Here are a few things that should help, and help you “finish strong”.

1.       Before you even consider leaving, understand your options and count the cost of leaving.

2.       If you do decide to get a new job, start by getting a great recruiter [Like Gecko Hospitality] working for you, and representing you. We have the best job orders, and we have the direct connections to the decision-makers to your new potential employer[s].

3.       Once you get a recruiter retained, let us do the work for you. Concentrate on your job. We know how busy you are, and you need to ensure you are focused to your current job and your current employer.

4.       When we get an offer for you, and a new job lined up, you need to give you employer a written letter of resignation. You should give this to your direct report [boss] in person, and talk about it. Be prepared for potential high emotions, and being talked out of leaving. What is important is that you have taken the time to write you resignation; you are prepared to intelligently talk about it, and believe in it.

5.       Once your notice has been given, and accepted, agree upon a last date of your employment. Be flexible and helpful if your current employer needs a few more days than you gave. We will work with your new employer to coordinate your start date. Do not be worried that your new employer will be mad or upset if you need a few more days to finish strong with your current employer. Most likely your actions and desire to take care of your current company will speak volumes about your character, and who you are.

6.       As you wind down your final days, stay focused to caring for your guests, your team, and your owner’s interests.

How can this all be summed up?

Two words, “Finish Strong”!

Very few employers will remember your first day, but they always remember your last day.

I will say it again, “Finish Strong”!

Kevin Kalstad — Gecko Hopitality