Category: Candidates

Nosce te ipsum, especially when interviewing

For those who read this regularly, you may know that when it comes to interviewing and hiring, I’m an advocate of knowing your strengths, not dwelling on what you cannot do. Questioning someone to tease out their weaknesses is often a waste, as a smart interviewer will reverse it to show a weakness as a…
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The CV is alive and well, thank you

Last week was typical-I had 4 people ask for help with their CV. All senior, around 25 years work experience, all very smart and polished. None had done a CV in years, hesitant about where to start, length, format, content, buzzwords to put in or avoid. All had a crie de coeur of ‘Aaarrggh, I…
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LinkedIn does NOT solve all hiring

I’ve recently read more and more articles which state, unequivocally, that LinkedIn and social media will disintermediate the executive search business. Companies will seldom need help from headhunters, or even recruiters. It will go the way of the travel agency, and more organisations now tout their internal recruiting arm as a more cost efficient way…
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Dancing Butterflies and Job Security

A friend called last week, and from his earlier email I could figure out why. The re-org his company started 2 years ago finally hit him. He’s been with them 12 years in senior global roles, 25 years professional experience, sterling academic, work and legal credentials, cross culturally sharp. He called to see if I…
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Pope Benedict’s management lesson..

I don’t follow the papacy very much, but as Benedict’s sudden resignation has been front page news everywhere, I just finished reading a front page in today’s (14 Feb) IHT/NYT, headlining that he had no choice but to step down, calling him a ‘weak manager.’ That piqued my curiosity. Not a weak leader, but a…
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How to get a job–8 pointers

Do not rely on headhunters. This past week alone I had three coffees with people looking for opportunities, all telling me how many headhunters they were in touch with (never asked any of them what that made me..) but told them all to stop it. Headhunters won’t get them a job, it’s [mostly] a waste…
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Send In The Clones??

Many corporates believe that in order to build a high performing team, hire top talent, in turn they’ll attract their own ilk, et voila, problem solved for talent acquisition. The best hire the best, right? Mediocre talent hires even worse talent. That’s the thinking, and has been ingrained in management. This is, of course, nonsense,…
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There is no war for talent–not in Asia, anyhow

The ‘war on talent’ was coined by McKinsey in the late ’90′s, for which they made a simple demographic assumption about talent in the US and Europe. With a low or negative birth rate, there would be less people to take over from the baby boomers, and not enough people to fill the job opening,…
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Hiring? Thoughts on ‘smart’ rather than ‘fit’

When clients decide to make an external hire, they [almost] always state that candidates must have industry experience-to fit in more quickly, to engender credibility, have an easier learning curve, and to ‘hit the ground running.’ Industry knowledge helps, no argument. Indeed, if the job to be filled is mid or low level, technical or…
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