The Final Piece to the Quality Hire Puzzle

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Your company’s hiring managers are working tirelessly to write accurate job descriptions. You’ve made interview checklists and performed background checks, but somehow several new team members are just not working out. And, it’s costing your company big. So, what went wrong? What can you do? First, let’s examine what exactly these bad hires can do.

Bad hires can wreak havoc

HR.com, the largest social network and online community of HR executives shares some eye-opening information about who you are really hiring. For instance, did you know that 53 percent of all job applications contain inaccurate information and that 34 percent of all application forms contain outright lies about experience, education, and ability to perform essential functions on the job? It’s activity like this that can really do some damage to your bottom line.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the average cost of a bad hiring decision can equal 30 percent of a person’s first-year potential earnings. So, for example, one bad hire with an annual income of $50,000 could equal a possible $15,000 company loss. Don’t you work too hard to have your company take a hit like that?

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About the Author

Greg MoranUtilizing more than a decade of human capital management, sales and leadership experience, Greg Moran is Founder and CEO of Chequed.com. Chequed.com is redefining the way companies hire with a singular goal… No Bad Hires. Ever. Their Predictive Talent Selection™ platform helps leading brands worldwide make hiring more efficient and data driven through cloud-based, automated, predictive reference checking. In partnership with the University at Albany, Chequed.com works with organizations to implement best practices in talent selection, which are scientifically proven to reduce cost per hire, increase quality of hire and improve organizational productivity. For more information, visit www.Chequed.com.

Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 10 – Assessment Calendars

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StrategyDriven SBusiness Performance Assessment Program Best Practice ArticleContinuous performance improvement requires focus on both near-term operational priorities and long-term strategic capabilities and initiatives. In order to be optimally effective, performance assessments must be performed in a timely manner such that the subsequent recommended improvement activities can be implemented and effective prior to key operational events. Furthermore, the right organizational resources – particularly personnel – must be available to successfully conduct any assessment. By using self-assessment planning calendars, program coordinators gain the prerequisite insight to schedule assessments and resources far enough in advance to achieve these two imperatives.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

A different kind of thanks. Yours.

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As the commercialism of Thanksgiving fades into the commercialism of Christmas (or whatever name you’re allowed to call it these days), several thoughts have occurred to me that will impact you as a person, you as a salesperson, and your business.

People try so hard to express good cheer in the holiday season they often miss the mark. “Don’t eat too much turkey!” or “Don’t drink too much eggnog!” is your way of saying, I have nothing new to say.

My bet is your ‘thank you’ is somewhat like your mission statement. It’s there, but it’s relatively meaningless, and no one can recite it. (Most employees, even executives, can’t recite their own mission statement, even under penalty of death.)

HARD QUESTIONS:

  • Why is this the only season we give thanks?
  • How sincere is your message, really?
  • Why do you find it necessary to thank your customers at the same time everyone else is thanking their customers?
  • If you’re thanking people, what are you offering besides words to show them you value and care about them?
  • Why do you have a shiny card with a printed message and foil stamped company signature – and NOTHING personal?

HERE’S AN IDEA: Why not start by thanking yourself? Thank yourself for your success, your good fortune, your health, your family, your library, your attitude, your fun times, your friends, and all the cool things you do that make you a happy person.

If you’re having trouble thanking yourself, that may be an indicator that things aren’t going as well as they could be. In that situation, any thanks you give to others will be perceived somewhere between ‘less than whole’ and ‘totally insincere.’

I don’t think you can become sincerely thankful to others until you have become fully thankful TO yourself and FOR yourself. And once you realize who YOU are, your message of thanks will become much more real, and passionate, to others.

NEWS REALITY: The good news is this is the holiday season. The bad news is it’s so full of retail shopping incentives, mobs of people, and ‘today only deals’ that the festivity of Thanksgiving is somewhat lost in the shuffle.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday – or wait, is it Cyber Tuesday, or Small Business Saturday, or Throwback Thursday? Whatever it is, it’s a strategy for advertising and promoting. And I’m okay with it, totally okay with the free enterprise system, I just think the hype of it has become more dominant than the giving of thanks and the meaning of the season.

Call me old-fashioned, or call me traditional, but I don’t think you can call me ‘wrong.’ I want our economy to be strong, but not at the expense of celebration, family time, and personal time to thank yourself for who you have become, and who you are becoming.

TRY THIS: Sit around your dinner table this Thanksgiving and have each person at the table make a statement as to what they are grateful for and who they are grateful to. Then have them say one thing about themselves that they are thankful for.

This simple action will create a sense of reality around your table that will be both revealing and educational. It also wipes away all the superficial undertones often associated with family holidays.

Why not ask people to recall their best Thanksgiving ever, or the person they miss the most, or the most important thing they’ve learned as a family member – and to be thankful for them or that.

BACK TO YOU: Sit down and make a list of your best qualities. Your personal assets, not your money or your property. The assets you possess that you believe have created the person you are. Your humor, your friendliness, your helpfulness, your approachability, your trustworthiness, your honesty, your ethics, and maybe even your morality. (Tough list, eh?)

And as you head deeper into this holiday season, perhaps next year’s intentions and focus (not goals and resolutions) will be more about building personal assets and building capabilities you can be thankful for and grateful for.

For those of you wondering, “where’s the sales tip?” Wake up, and smell the leftovers! I’m trying to help you sell you on yourself.

Once you make that sale, once you become the best you can be for yourself, then it’s easy to become the best you can be for others, and present yourself in a way that others will buy.

It’s the holidays baby, go out and thank yourself!

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

The Myth of Virality and What Marketers Can Learn From Justin Bieber

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The current social strategy of many Marketing and Ad Agencies goes something like: “It doesn’t matter if the content is good, as long as we get a celebrity to tweet it, the thing will go viral!”

The prevailing consensus is that if a Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber tweets your content out to their followers, the inherent size of their audience will cause a viral loop, exploding the campaign into the news feeds and inboxes of everyone and their grandmother.

This fallacy is perpetuated by the ‘hip,’ ‘disruptive’ agencies as they focus on buzz words like ‘share-ability’ and ‘social’ (read in a loathing, sarcastic voice while I make air quotes). If a campaign has a presence on every social network in the known universe, with custom widgets that all connect to each other, then its success is just a matter of turning a key and watching the crowd swarm. Right?

Wrong.

This strategy is not only absurdly lazy, but is ineffective, irresponsible, and even a little offensive to the intelligence of your desired audience. And yet, campaign after campaign saturates the Internet, towing along promises of fame, virality and ubiquity.

Any producer or agency that has had an Internet hit will tell you that content?s value, not “share-ability,” is the most important key to virality.

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About the Author

Christiano Covino is the CEO and Founder of Mischievious Studios, a digital entertainment studio based in Hollywood, California. Mischievious Studios works to blur the line between advertising and entertainment by creating entertaining online commercial content and engaging brand-sponsored entertainment (Branded WebSeries, Films, Sponsorships). Mischievious Studios also produces and programs content for MischiefTube their YouTube channel that receives over 30 million views annually. When not creating a splash online, Mischievious Studios develops and produces feature films. Passionate about innovation, Christiano helps Mischievious Studios stay on the cutting edge and develop new opportunities in the fast-changing entertainment landscape.

6 Silent Productivity and Profitability Pitfalls, part 4 of 7

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Silent Killer #3: Bureaucratic Styles

To most people, bureaucracy is a bad word, synonymous with ‘red tape’ and wasted time. Yet, despite the negative connotations, most companies still operate bureaucratically – insisting employees work inside of increasingly complex structures with processes and procedures designed to standardize or control everything. While this might have been the most efficient way to train assembly line workers during the Industrial Era, human capital is now the greatest resource for most companies. In other words, we’re paying people to think, to innovate, and to collaborate with others to produce the best possible results. You can’t achieve this level of performance if you attempt to dictate their every move with rigid policies and procedures.

The fall of many of our great companies – including GM, Chrysler, AT&T, DEC, and a host of others – is a testimony to bureaucratic blindness. Unfortunately, contemporary management theory offers no alternatives to this style of organizing work and designing organizational structures. Current hierarchically oriented systems – no matter how lean and ‘matrixed’ – are relics of the bygone era of WWII industrialization and manufacturing.

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About the Author

Chris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential ProjectChris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential Project, is the author of The Power to Transform: Passion, Power, and Purpose in Daily Life (Rodale), which teaches the strategies corporate, military, and sports leaders have used to positively transform themselves and their organizations in a way readers can adept to their own lives and professions. He may be reached at www.humanpotentialproject.com.