How do you react when a recruiter calls? Do you clam up, nervous and distrusting? Do you assume your hushed voice and hurriedly push through the call? Or, are you energized and inviting, excited about the potential opportunity to connect with this agent of change?
While some presently employed careerists erect a wall when a recruiter calls, others realize that a recruiter relationship offers potential for a longer-term career partnership and future gains.
Don’t make these errors:
I’ve posted about the top five career regrets but what are the mistakes people make when choosing jobs?
Via Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance:
To shed light on individual behavior during job changes, we conducted a survey of over 400 search consultants from more than 50 industries in mid-2008. The respondents, 67 percent of whom had more than ten years of experience and 70 percent of whom recruited stars at the senior-executive level or higher, were asked to specify the most common mistakes individuals make when contemplating a job change and the reasons for such mistakes. Also, over 500 C-level executives were interviewed from more than 40 countries in late 2008 about their experiences managing their own human capital. Finally, we posed similar questions to the heads of human resources at 15 multinational companies in mid-2009.
In the course of running my own businesses for more than two decades, I’ve done my fair share of hiring. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that one of the most costly, time-consuming blunders a business can make is picking the wrong person for the job.
How costly? The U.S. Department of Labor currently estimates that the average cost of a bad hiring decision can equal 30% of the individual’s first-year potential earnings. That means a single bad hire with an annual income of $50,000 can equal a potential $15,000 loss for the employer.
He’s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood
Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good
—Run DMC, Peter Piper
Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different than engineers and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.
This article initially appeared on TechCrunch.
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing.
“We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra.
I believe it’s flawed.
While I have some sympathy with not investing too heavily in sales people until the product has properly been tested and commercialized in the enterprise environment, in the end it’s a fact that it takes sales people to move product through large organizations. And of course the most successful technology companies: Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com [duh], Oracle, Microsoft all have loads of sales people.
Most CEOs don’t have the time to personally interview every person who joins their company. But they absolutely set the priorities and culture that factor into every single hiring decision, and are intensely involved with top level hires.
Those are some of the most important decisions they can make, so company leaders tend to have strong opinions about the kind of people they want at their company.
If you’re a college senior and you already have a solid offer on the table, then you should know at this point where your expectations lie. If you don’t, that’s a whole other problem. You certainly don’t have to divulge all the details of the components of your other offer, but you need to give the recruiter a clear idea of what your expectations are. Even a range is necessary
For many startups, raising a round of funding is a day of celebration. It’s exhilarating knowing that someone believes enough in your idea to put money behind it. Raising a round, though, doesn’t mean that a startup has “made it” or that the entrepreneurs behind the venture are on their way to tech stardom.
I recently reviewed a resume for a colleague who was trying to define a clearer career strategy. She has terrific experience. And yet, as I looked through it I could see the problem she was concerned about: she had done so many good things in so many different fields it was hard to know what was distinctive about her.
As we talked it became clear the resume was only the symptom of a deeper issue. In an attempt to be useful and adaptable she has said yes to too many good projects and opportunities. She has ended up feeling overworked and underutilized. It is easy to see how people end up in her situation:
Google used to have really embarrassing hiring practices.
It would hardly look at applicants who hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school, MIT, Cal Tech, or Stanford. It also actually used to ask executives and engineers in their mid-30s about their college GPAs. The worst thing Google HR would do was ask applicants insanely difficult “brain teaser” interview questions. Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a former Google software engineer and author of The Google Resume, says the company has finally “banned” most of these awful hiring practices.Copyright 2015 © New Ventures Consulting | All Rights Reserved