The Imperative of a Talent Strategy

We all know the pain points when our talent practices aren’t working: difficulty filling positions, increased staff turnover and burnout, low staff morale, and overarching downgrading of talent over time as top performers seek employers who have their talent practices in order. And there is a plethora of research outlining the financial implications of these challenges. For example, the price of one employee leaving is estimated at 150% times that employee’s annual salary.

And the implications do not stop there. Who achieves an organization’s goals? People. Who implements an organization’s marketing strategy? People. Who raises money to support an organization’s programs and growth? People. So why wouldn’t everyone have same level of rigor around their talent strategy as they do around marketing and fundraising strategies? Especially when the success of achieving an organization’s mission is so obviously dependent on the people employed there.

Here are five steps your organization can take now to build a talent strategy that is aligned with organizational goals and priorities:

1.     Understand what your organization is trying to achieve. This means setting concrete and measurable organization wide goals that the talent strategy can be designed around to support. For example, if your organization is planning on launching a new service or program, the talent team will need to ensure they have talent pools at the ready to fill new openings.

2.     Assess your current bench. Do the people in your organization have the skills and experience required to achieve these goals? Or, are you venturing into a new area that requires bringing new expertise into the organization. Maybe your organization is growing in size and complexity requiring a more sophisticated management skill set. The talent team needs to be aware of these changes on the horizon in order to plan for professional development that will prepare staff for the future and to fill certain gaps with new talent.

3.     Survey your staff. It is critically important to understand staff engagement. Are people fired up and inspired to give it their all everyday or is a lack of engagement and enthusiasm getting in the way of your organization’s success.  

4.     Start leveraging data. Data driven decision-making is the anchor for any effective talent strategy. Without it, your organization will be shooting blind at an unknown target. For example, individual staff performance data should inform every single decision your organization makes about talent:  who gets promoted, where you invest professional development resources, how you embed strategic succession planning to prepare for future organizational evolution. Market data should inform how much individuals are compensated and how. Engagement data should inform priorities for improvement.

5.     Put it all together to inform your talent strategy. Once you know what your organization aspires to achieve, what skill gaps exist in your talent pool, how engaged your staff are, and have concrete data to refer to, your strategy will become clear. Top talent priorities and areas of urgency will rise to the surface.  Now, your job will be to translate these into concrete goals, initiatives, and actions that the organization can take to advance talent practices throughout.

Go…..USA Women’s Soccer Team!

What an amazing game against Japan!  As I watched the USA Women’s Final World Cup game, I wondered how Jill Ellis (head coach) goes about choosing the right players for the team. There are young players and veterans who bring an unique understanding of the game. Offensive and defensive players who have different skills but can only work together to be a powerhouse. There are natural leaders that get the team pumped when they are down but also competitive players that want all the glory themselves. There are thousands of women that have played soccer their whole lives.  How do you find the right 12 players that will work so effectively as a group that they can score a goal in 2 minutes in the biggest platform for women’s soccer?

How important is it to hire the right person for the job? There are so many questions that each organization needs to consider before making a hiring decision. Once you determine the non-negotiables from the questions below, you can create interview questions.

Here are a few key questions I recommend:

1. Is skill set more important than culture fit?  

2. Do you have the right balance of skill sets on the team?  What is needed?

3. Do you need a leader or follower (or both)?

4. Is finding the right person more important than meeting a timeline for the hire?

5. What type of person will be aligned with your organization’s core values?

6. Is it important to hire someone who has the potential to be promoted?  Do you need a seasoned, experienced employee or someone newer in their career who has potential?

When the all the right players are on the team, it is unbelievable what can be accomplished! Scoring 4 goals in 16 minutes in a World Cup Final can be just the beginning!

Recruiting Lessons from the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao Fight

My colleagues and I regularly get called upon to help schools and education organizations find the best candidates to fill key positions in their organizations. We are skilled at combing our extensive nationwide networks and researching prospects in similar roles to identify top candidates. Still, hiring managers sometimes struggle to settle on a final candidate, wanting to hold out for the “unicorn” candidate.

Everybody loves a unicorn. Unicorns are those magical, mystical creatures that have all the most desirable characteristics and traits. The unfortunate truth, though, is that unicorns don’t actually exist. Which might be why some observers of the May 2nd boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao were disappointed.

Hype and anticipation accompanied the weeks and months leading up to the title match in Vegas. Fans and the media excitedly looked for this to be the biggest fight in recent memory, harkening back to the “glory days” of boxers like Ali, Frazier, Foreman, and Sugar Ray. Now that it’s over, fans are complaining that it was boring, lacked excitement, wasn’t worth the hype or the money Pay-Per-View viewers and attendees of the live event paid to see it. They’d hoped to see the kind of dramatic moments in boxing that die hard fans never forget, those magical, mystical moments that get replayed for generations to come.

What they got instead were two accomplished boxers who put in exceptional effort and followed the rules. Arguably, Mayweather was victorious because of his precision, consistency, and tenacity. Nothing about either boxer was spectacular, extraordinary, or exceptional, yet both have excelled in their field and won the adoration of legions of fans as a result of what Mayweather would call “hardwork and dedication”. It’s clear they’ve both been successful.

Aren’t these the qualities we all want in a good employee - someone who can be counted on to deliver consistent and dependable results? Is it actually necessary to hold out for someone with almost supernatural talents and abilities rather than hiring the person we can rely on to do their job well and follow the rules? In other words, what really is the allure of the unicorn candidate who seems to have so many strengths that failure seems impossible? We can all agree that our kids need great people leading their schools and the organizations that support them. Yet maybe it’s time for search teams and hiring managers to prioritize consistent, knowledgeable, and dependable talent over the hunt for the seemingly impossible-to-find unicorn candidates. After all, though some might think Floyd Mayweather’s technique lacks dynamism, it has led him to an almost flawless record and recognition as a stand out in his field. 

Practice Makes Perfect

“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds.”                                                                                                                                                                     - Winston Churchill

My seven year old recently started playing piano. After the first lesson, his teacher gave him a binder and a sheet to record his assignments for each week and how long he practiced. At first, the practicing was a point of friction for us. My son was resistant to play a series of “C’s” in a particular pattern rather than playing around to figure out “Monster” by Eminem, which he had learned in a class at school. For me, having spent most of my childhood and teenage years as a pretty serious musician, I knew that the only way to really excel was to learn technique and music theory (notes and rhythm) but when I tried to nudge him to play, it came off too strong and he bristled. Luckily, after a month or two, he started to be able to play more interesting songs and feel a sense of pride in his progress and I stopped being so concerned he wouldn’t put in the proper effort, so the conflict has resolved itself.

This experience reminded me of the importance of rote practice, something that is not always fun or pleasant but a key to getting better – if not always becoming “perfect” – at most things. I know that in my family we happen to be pretty musical so it comes relatively easily to my son and me. I also know, though, that I would not be half the musician I was at age 18 if I hadn’t put in hours and hours of practice in the preceding years. Similarly, I was also a pretty serious swimmer for a few years and although I did not have any particular talent or skill for it, I was able to be an above average competitor because of all the early morning dives into the pool and evening practices in which I participated. With our kids, my husband and I focus a lot on “growth mindset” and the importance of hard work (our five year old actually used to think our last name was synonymous with “works hard”) but what about for us as grownups?

Something I spend a lot of time doing professionally is interviewing candidates for leadership roles, assessing their ability to meet a particular standard and move forward in a client’s hiring process. Thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hours” theory from Outliers (although I have to admit that my mind automatically goes to the Macklemore song – I mean, who else talks about Gladwell, David Bowie and Kanye in the same phrase?) I am not sure I literally have spent 10,000 hours interviewing people over the past decade, but if not I think I am getting close. Conducting interviews and hiring people is a skill, just like piano playing or swimming. And yet many of us approach hiring as if we are naturally gifted at it, or automatically know what we are looking for and how to assess it in the brief interactions we have with candidates during a selection process.

To me, this feels a bit like Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” statement about pornography – we assume we will just know which candidates are great when we talk with them whether we have taken the time to practice our technique or prep for how to rate candidates' responses in advance. However, unlike Justice Stewart, thousands of hours of interviewing have shown me that our snap judgments are often wrong – even biased in a whole range of troublesome ways - and we usually don’t “know it when we see it” unless we spend time practicing our interviewing techniques and thinking ahead to what we want to get out of each interview before it begins.

When I first started interviewing aspiring principal candidates in my work at New Leaders for New Schools a decade ago, I did not have a clear picture of what I was looking for or how to identify it in an interview process. It was only through conducting rounds of interviews with more experienced colleagues who gave me targeted feedback and rote practice (asking the same questions and listening for the same kinds of responses over and over again) that I became competent in interviewing school leaders. Over the years I have refined my skills, getting better at listening for key pieces of evidence that fit into the competency buckets we are testing and recognizing when a candidate is qualified – and when they are just talking around the answers to my questions, using jargon or saying what they think I want to hear.

One of my favorite kinds of engagements with clients is to support the development of their leader hiring process, facilitating conversations about their priorities for the role, competencies that will lead someone to be successful, and ways of testing candidates’ ability to meet these standards during the selection phase. And then we get to the part where we practice the interviews themselves. It strikes me at these moments how often this is the first time these close colleagues have ever sat together and practiced what they will say to candidates, how they will say it, and what they are looking for in the responses they receive. For me, this is the moment when the magic starts to happen – folks find themselves practicing interview questions and scoring responses relative to a competency framework and they realize together how much more confident they are in their ability to evaluate candidates and make high-quality hiring decisions, feeling better about the whole hiring process in the bargain.

A few weeks ago, my son’s piano teacher asked us to work on a duet to perform at his recital in May. As a result, instead of me calling out to him to practice from the other room, the two of us are sitting down at the piano together almost every night, working through our parts in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” We both get excited when we nail a particular phrase, laugh at ourselves when we mess up, and support each other when we are struggling. My husband likes to come by and just watch us work together on something that used to drive us apart. I can’t guarantee that we will nail every note perfectly when we perform next month, but I do know that our collective practice will set us up for success. And hopefully by modeling my own need to work hard to get something right – and my failures along the way – my seven year old will understand that even grownups need to practice things sometimes to ultimately get them right.

Get Ahead of the Game

If you're a talent professional in the education sector, things are likely a bit slower (read: more manageable) for you right now as all the people you hired for this school year settle into their new roles. Still, I always say that education talent recruitment is like working in retail - to be successful you always have to be at least a season ahead. So now with the season officially turned to fall, a good recruitment strategy for your next hiring season needs to start now. But where does one begin?

Evaluate the previous season
Most schools are data-driven environments these days, and the HR/talent team is no exception. Begin your talent strategy planning by looking at all the important data from the previous season. From where did most of your new hires come? Which events or marketing initiatives were most successful? How successful are your newest hires in their roles? What were the candidate pass-through rates for each phase of the selection process?

Begin with the end in mind
Particularly for anyone working in a growing charter school or network, you'll need to know what new positions are anticipated for the coming year. Is your organization adding a new grade? Are new positions being added as part of the transition to Common Core? Connect with whomever is charged with the academic program to find out what they have in mind. (But keep in mind that it could change!)

The talent shuffle
Take a current faculty and staff list and sit down with your school's leaders to determine who they anticipate will return to their same position next year. Is anyone being promoted to a new role? Who is considering a cross-country move, planning to be a stay-at-home mom, or planning for grad school? Use the fall season to start identifying these potential transitions to help you assess what openings you'll need to fill. You'll start to identify some definite openings and some possible ones.

Survey and Interview staff
Want to know what people like about working at your organization, what made them choose your school over another offer, or what candidates most liked and disliked about the selection process? Just ask your staff. This information will be invaluable in putting together a talent recruitment marketing plan, figuring out where to recruit, and tweaking your selection process. Don't forget to use the opportunity to ask them what educator rockstars they know who might be interested in future openings!

Review your selection process
When I was Chief Talent Officer at DC Prep, I called this "reflection and refinement" in honor of one of our organizational values. Ultimately, you want to be sure the steps you take to select staff in different roles are efficient while also being aligned with your values and expectations of staff. You can get even more bang for your buck if it is well aligned with your performance management system and observation/feedback cycle. Further, it is important to get clear about what you're looking for in staff before you start recruiting them to ensure both processes are aligned.

Review your marketing materials
Have you updated your website, social media sites, and print materials since the last hiring season? Make sure these properly reflect what's happening in your schools and promote your school in the best light. Think about how the sites reflect what you value most in staff. For instance, if you want data-driven and results-oriented staff, include student achievement data and examples of the kinds of results your teachers and leaders have garnered for students. As much as possible, try to show and not just tell the things that make your school great by including videos, pictures, and graphic representations.

Candidate cultivation
Plan ahead, get clear about your hiring needs, and make sure your materials are a good reflection of your organization, but don't wait another minute to cultivate prospective candidates already in your database. Remember that awesome candidate from last season who decided not to move at the last minute? Or that leader you didn't have the right role for last year but think you might next year? Send them an email or give them a call just to check in, include them on your organization's e-newsletter, or invite them to an event at your school. They'll love that you remember them and who knows how circumstances might change for you and them in the next cycle.

Our team just loves coaching and consulting with talent professionals to support these proactive components of talent strategy. Let us know how we can help you get ahead of the game. Talent strategy is all about planning and it takes the talent professionals at your school or organization to lead the way in securing the best talent pool. Don't delay!

Hiring Leaders

The other day, a friend of mine asked me for some advice on how to hire a swim coach for a summer recreational league.  Although I am not an expert swimming coach, as a seasoned educational recruiter this inquiry led me to consider the similarities and differences between hiring for this position and one of the school leader roles I so often work on.  In the end, I decided that while the two roles clearly require a different set of technical skills, they both require strikingly similar leadership abilities.  And what I have found after years of recruiting is that technical proficiency can be much more easily quantified and verified than the more elusive and subjective areas of leadership style and skills. Thus the reason so many clients and partners seek support from a third party talent organization such as ours.

Great candidates possess leader attributes that are universally sought. When I am seeking for the “best fit” candidate for a leadership role, the primary attributes I seek are:

-        Work ethic

-        Integrity

-        Team orientation

-        Positive attitude

Of course, how you evaluate, rate and qualify these attributes is the $64,000 question.  Interviewing multiple candidates can add context in helping managers sort through different individuals.  Also, working with a recruiter who deeply understands the industry and where to find candidates with specific skill sets can add a lot of value to organizations’ attempts to build a viable candidate pool.  Talent managers should always cast a wide net by emailing friends and family who can connect them with others, and internal networks are also a terrific resource to tap as you are narrowing in on a candidate during the reference checking process.

Every position boasts a unique description and set of qualifications, but in my humble opinion a few basic questions should always be asked during an initial interview. Here are some of mine:

1.     Tell me a time when you worked on a project and needed to put more effort into it than you planned?

2.     Give me an example of when you worked with a team, and what was your role?  What was the outcome?

3.     How does your attitude impact others at work?

Remember, Redwood Circle is a great resource to use when looking for education leaders.  Our recruiters are well connected in the industry and are here to help!

Back to School

My sons are back in school after a busy summer.  Mornings at the house are finally quiet again and this got me thinking of all the projects related to this back-to-school season.  It is time to get ahead of the curve on the most important of those tasks. 

Similarly, this is also a good time of the year when many school-based organizations can start to plan out their hiring timelines and projections for the following school year. Teachers and school leaders may start thinking about next career steps as early as November or December and many school recruitment activities really start to pick up at the beginning of the new year. 

 The Fall is a perfect time for organizations to look at potential hiring sources such as:

·       Recruitment events at teacher colleges and/or Schools of Education

·       Networking opportunities in your community to establish new relationships and to build potential partnerships

·       Specific conferences that specialize in areas to fit your organization’s needs (i.e Charter School or technology based conferences)

·       Maintaining connections to key stakeholders and building a referral network.

One of the best resources for hiring key positions is to promote from within.  Does your organization have an emerging leadership program?  The Fall can be a great time to look at succession plans for key positions.  Who are some of the influential individuals in your school or organization and how can you empower them to take on more leadership responsibilities?    

This is a great time to look back at systems and processes to determine what worked well last year.  You can ask key questions such as:  

·       What events gave us a good yield of qualified candidates for our open positions and which did not?

·       What key positions do you expect to open up in the next 9-12 months?  

·       What will be our recruiting and hiring budget for the coming year?

·       Have we prepared financial reserves for positions that need to be filled unexpectedly throughout the year? 

Putting together a recruitment project timeline and listing a calendar of events will help hiring managers to get a bird’s eye view of the upcoming recruitment season, alleviating any last minute scrambling to fill those critical positions.  So, why not get a jump start on the planning process this year?  You will be better prepared to fill those critical positions and before you know it, summer break will be upon us again! 

Conversion – More Than a Religious Experience

If you are like most people, when you see the word “conversion” you think of the process someone goes through when they are shifting money around among their retirement accounts or the experience of changing identity from one set of religious practices to another.  [Spoiler alert: Neither of these are the uses of the word “conversion” that I will be talking about today.]

For recruiters, though, conversion is about that very important – and often neglected – step between the “recruitment” phase of getting a candidate interested in a job and the “selection” phase, where we are assessing their interest, fit, and skills related to the position in question.  In this context, conversion means the work we do to “convert” someone from an interested lead to a real, live, active applicant for the given role.  And in my experience, this is where many of us fall down on the job, losing high-quality people in the process.  It is crucial to have a systematic, persistent recruitment operation, cultivating potential leads and getting them excited about our organization.  But we need to follow that up with encouragement to complete the application process so we have a chance to review their credentials and consider hiring them for our positions. 

As someone who has focused much of my career as a recruiter on finding quality leaders for under-resourced public schools and the organizations that support them, I may put a little more stock that most in the need to work closely with quality candidates to ensure they complete and press “send” on their formal application paperwork.  If I do, however, I come by it honestly.  My clients do not have a wealth of exceptional candidates beating down their doors to take over these highly rewarding but very challenging roles. And I have seen far too often that if we do not continually court and reach out to those who are in demand throughout the recruitment process, someone else will.  When we create cumbersome and opaque application systems, fail to follow up regularly with people to ensure they don’t have any lingering questions, or take for granted that candidates will understand our value proposition without really explaining it to them, high quality leads may decide in the end not to apply at all and try their luck with one of our competitors instead.

So as we start wrapping up our recruitment operations for this year’s education hiring season, don’t forget to evaluate your application systems to make sure that every step you include is vital to collecting the information you need to make great decisions – and not too arduous for candidates to complete.  Take the time to look back over your leads and see if any of those folks you were excited about when you did your initial recruiting calls failed to actually apply to the role(s).  If so, pop them an email or give them a quick call today and see if you can convert them from a lead to an applicant by giving a little more encouragement along the way.

What Can Computers Teach Us About Hiring in Education?

Computers & software can do a lot of complicated things: find you a restaurant, plot out your route, count your steps. They can even grade essays pretty well – and at a low price.

But can they – and should they – screen in or out candidates for your next position?

A recent Planet Money podcast focused on the increasing use of job-screening tests that help big businesses find call center employees and collections agents in ways that go far beyond screening resumes for keywords. The companies that create the tests work with their clients to identify their best (and longest-lasting) employees, isolate the qualities that predict such performance and retention, and then design tests that gauge which applicants have these qualities. Indeed, the podcast noted that the companies using these new online job assessments are finding that they do a better job of predicting employee performance and retention than they had achieved through traditional approaches like reviewing past job experience (through a resume) or asking about applicants’ strengths (through a cover letter or interview).

Why would a faceless computer program out-perform a friendly hiring manager? Planet Money pointed out the blatantly obvious: people are flawed. Angling for a job, employees may be inclined to write cover letters and answer screening tests in ways that are more about what they think the employer wants to hear than what's really true. Meanwhile, people like to work with people like them, so employers tend to look for cues in resumes and interviews that indicate whether candidates are like them – same or similar colleges, relevant volunteer experiences, and so forth – rather than focusing purely on skills or knowledge. And then there's past experience, which we often look to as a proxy for likely success. For Xerox, past experience in call centers was found to have little bearing on success or longevity among its call center employees. Elsewhere, Google has applied this “people analytics” to much of human resources work; the company backwards-mapped the characteristics of its most effective employees and found that its most successful employees don’t necessarily have college degrees, high test scores or strong grade-point averages. Google and other employers are also considering how to measure more intangible qualities like resilience, using not only formal application data and traditional job tests but also social data like LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles and Klout scores.

These new screening tests are designed to overcome these human problems, conducting a more objective screening of potential employees before bringing them in for an interview, and dig into applicants’ traits in unexpected ways: interestingly, the podcast revealed that collections agents’ success correlated with their creativity more so than with their persuasiveness. These tests also use clever approaches to uncover applicants’ true strengths and limitations. For example, rather than outright asking if potential call center employees are good at time management or are self-starters, “forced-choice” questions ask applicants to choose which of two statements best applies to them. This structure minimizes the chances that a candidate will simply pick the "right" answer, and maximizes the likelihood they'll just go with their honest gut feeling.

Could this approach work in education? First, we’d need to figure out which current teachers and administrators are effective – no small task. Then, we would isolate the qualities that distinguish the most successful and long-lasting employees from the rest of the pack, determine how to gauge those qualities upfront, and design valid and reliable tests that accurately measure those qualities. For example, the Haberman Educational Foundation claims its “Star Teacher Pre-Screener” questionnaire predicts 95% of the teachers who will stay and succeed (or fail/leave) based on measuring potential teachers’ beliefs and likely behaviors. Gallup’s TeacherInsight screening tool also promises to surface the best potential teachers, although it’s unclear whether it maps to improved student achievement in teachers’ classrooms. We might also bring in some of the tools and techniques being developed for the corporate world: imagine if employers or teacher training programs used games like those developed by Knack for corporations and medical schools to assess teacher candidates’ classroom management skills or social intelligence before awarding them a degree or credential.

This approach could teach us humans a thing or two – if we're willing to have our biases reprogrammed.

Passion Matters!

Sure you qualify, but are you passionate about the work? Does the mission of the organization or institution resonate with your innermost being? Is your organization hiring talent that champions your mission?

Now, don’t be turned off by the word passion. Hear me out. Get the images of Fabio and trashy romance novels out of your head. Now, think about what is meaningful to you. Think about what you will be proud of accomplishing at the end of the day.  Passion is a vital force driving the education industry but it's not something we openly recruit or hire for. We emphasize skill, background and training (all critical aspects, of course), but there is a lot more to consider.

The scope of work for education professionals and leaders has grown significantly more complex with dramatic shifts that emphasize skills like autonomy, creativity, relationship management and critical thinking to address major, multi-dimensional problems. Because education is changing, so is the work of delivering the systems, resources, and talent needed to educate the next generation of leaders.  So, getting back to your passion. What does this mean for prospective hires and for hiring managers looking to identify new talent?

Alignment of Mission with your Core Values

These are questions I ask myself both when seeking new opportunities and when acting as a hiring manager. I love to ask candidates to reflect on the mission of the organization I represent and explain why it is important. "What resonates with you?" This can sometimes be more important than the skills they bring to the table because someone who believes in their work whole-heartedly will bring a level of passion and engagement that can serve as a pillar of the organization.

As a job seeker, you need to carefully assess how aligned an organization’s mission is with your own. You are looking to establish a long-term partnership that will enable you to grow and develop as a professional, and you should also be looking for an organization that closely aligns with your personal values, as this is what will propel you forward to do what it takes to accomplish your vision.  It’s this alignment that will ignite your creativity and energize you to push forward against the odds. (Cue the midnight oil analogy.)

Yes, you are qualified, but…

This section is primarily for hiring managers, although it's certainly useful for job seekers too. Having the right set of qualifications and relevant background is vital to ensuring the right fit for the role. However, don’t become fixated with fancy qualifications and credentials (I’m speaking with you, Harvard) without considering the whole package. Think about the skills that can be developed and those that are fundamental to the successful performance of a role. The right job description and recruitment campaign can generate a strong pool of potential hires, but what will set the best candidates apart? Here is where your organization’s culture, mission and values come into play. I argue that the candidates who possess strong personal convictions and the vision to think beyond what is needed are the ones who rise to the top – not just during the interview, but well beyond - ensuring strong impact and results. 

Bringing it together, why passion matters

I’ve worked in the education sector for almost 12 years in non-profits, private agencies, and with various school districts. The higher up the rungs I go, the more complex and ambiguous I've found the work becomes. I (and my colleagues) work very hard, we work long hours, and we have to define strategies and find solutions to increasingly complex and multi-faceted problems. The urgency of improving educational outcomes for our neediest students is staggering, no matter where in the country you work.  As a child of immigrant parents, education is fundamentally tied to my core personal values and it is this passion (not necessarily my morning coffee) that fuels me to continue working hard every day. I am devoted to improving educational outcomes for children, and my contribution to this vision is finding excellent educators and leaders to lead schools and classrooms.

Here’s to finding your passion! 

Why Search Consultants Make Business Sense

The Challenge

If people make an organization, why is recruitment often a second tier priority for most organizations?

Most HR leaders including myself will say, “no, no, no – our people are our greatest asset and hiring the best talent is one of the most important priorities in our organization.”

Very often in today’s world of efficiency and productivity, the strategic initiatives that are so important to our organizations are under-resourced while we battle the business priorities of the day. We can easily close out a 10-hour day of managing the tactical priorities that are most pressing “right now”, and fail to dedicate the time and planning required for a successful talent acquisition effort.

As an HR leader I have spent many an evening and weekend screening applications and talking with candidates. These working hours were not ideal for me, the candidates, or my organization; this was simply the only time I could allocate to recruitment and talent acquisition.

Relegating search activities to a lower priority often leads to a less rigorous effort, which in turn can lead to a poor hiring decision. And, if you have been in the business long enough, you understand how costly a poor hiring decision can be to your organization and to you.

Another interesting dynamic we deal with today is what to do with the unqualified candidates who apply to an ad or our website(s). An organization’s brand is increasingly valuable in today’s social media world.

• Do you respond to all applicants?
• Do you personally contact interviewed candidates to respectfully inform them that they didn’t make the cut?

A Solution

Do you have several open positions or just one really tough position to fill?  Don’t know where to start recruiting because it seems like such a daunting task?  There are so many advantages to hiring a search consultant; these individuals make a profession out of hiring the right person for the job.

Here are a few benefits that come along with hiring a third party recruiter:

•    A structured approach
•    Existing & relevant professional networks
•    Access to candidates
•    Objective outsider's perspective
•    Protection from alienating great candidates lacking the experience you seek  
•    Protection from politically sensitive relationships that may be bruised from the  search & selection process
•    The resources to respectfully manage all applicants

Want to learn more?  Feel free to reach out to us at http://www.redwoodcircle.org/contact/ or leave a comment on this page.  Thanks for reading!

- Viviana Pyle, Senior Consultant

She’s Just Not That Into You

Why Hiring and Dating Are More Similar Than You May Think

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure I should say that it is possible some might not think me qualified to write a blog piece that talks about the world of dating.  I met my husband more than 15 years ago and have not dated anyone since, which means my last dating experiences came not only before the days of social media, “meet-ups,” and online dating services, they were also before regular people had cell phones.  If we wanted to meet up with one another, we left messages on each other’s home machines, called the other person during our work day and tried to talk quietly so our co-workers in the next cubicle wouldn’t snicker too much, or (shocking, I know!) made firm plans a day or more in advance.  I doubt many 20-somethings today would even recognize the dating rituals in which we participated. 

So why, you may ask (given my substantial disclaimer upfront) would I presume to speak about how dating and hiring are more similar than one might think?  It is because, although it’s been a while since I have been out on the market for both things, I remember clearly the feelings and thoughts I experienced when I was – and they are almost identical.  “Does he like me?” “Did I make a good impression?”  “I wonder if they will call me this week?”  “How long should I wait before I call them?” “Am I really that interested?  How will I know?”  One of the most important – and most difficult – characteristics of success in either scenario is a clear understanding of your own needs and value proposition and how they match up with the qualities and interests of the other party.

As hiring managers (or in my case, search consultants), it is easy to become seduced by someone’s credentials and qualifications – their Ivy League degrees, deep and relevant experiences, referrals and high recommendations from trusted sources – and forget that the candidate selection process should be a give and take on both sides.  We need to make sure they are passionate about and committed to us as much if not more than we are passionate about and committed to them.  Otherwise, we are like the guy in the movie chasing the ideal catch and losing sight of the really great girl next door who loves us for who we are.  If a potential hire is haggling aggressively about money, taking forever to respond about an offer, or easily swayed to consider another opportunity, it’s probably a good sign that he or she is just not that into you and your time will be better spent finding someone passionate about your mission and committed to working with you for the long term.

Similarly, it is important for organizations to not only put their best foot forward, confident in the value they are offering to employees, but also to be realistic and honest about the challenges new hires will face when and if they come on board.  Deception during the courting phase doesn’t do anyone any favors and can lead both parties down a path of regret, frustration, or hurt.  If a lasting match is to be made, it will be because both sides have been open and honest about their strengths and weaknesses and have decided together that they can work through their differences and form a strong, enduring partnership.  Regardless of how people find one another, it is these kinds of relationships that lead to great things in terms of high levels of loyalty and job satisfaction and – most importantly – long-lasting sector impact.