Blog Posts

The Top 10 Mistakes Made by New Hires: An Onboarding Checklist on what NOT to do

onboarding checklist

We know that starting a new job can be a bit overwhelming and mistakes can be made, especially in the first month when new hires are still getting the lay of the land. And whether or not it’s fair, judgements are made about new employees—often very quickly. So, if you’re new to your role or you know someone who is, here is an onboarding checklist of 10 mistakes to avoid.   1. Not showing up early enough Arriving late for work sends an immediate negative message and warning sign to your manager and coworkers, but showing up right on time ...

7 Telltale Signs You Hired the Wrong Employee

Hired the Wrong Employee

According to a 2016 survey by CareerBuilder, more than half of American companies said a bad hiring decision had negatively impacted their business this year. Many company leaders cited associated challenges such as lost revenue, poor productivity, lower employee morale, and strained client relations. Furthermore, 27 percent said a single bad hire had cost them over $50,000.1 Needless to say, this is not only a critical mistake to building a world-class culture of employee engagement, but it also adversely affects revenue and profitability outcomes in a serious way. So here are the 7 most glaring signs that you hired ...

8 Tips for Awesome Onboarding

onboarding

I was recently honored to conduct a SHRM webinar sponsored by Jellyvision called The 8 Tips for Awesome Onboarding. With 5,000 registrants, it was one of the most well attended webinars in SHRM history. I was also excited to learn that attendee feedback ranked high enough to place us in the top 5% of all webinars. Thanks to everyone who logged in to watch! If you missed it, you can watch the archive here. (If you don’t have a SHRM membership, you can sign up for free.) I thought I would share with you and your team some of ...

What Employee Engagement Means to Recruiters & The Staffing Industry

Recruitment

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent with recruiters and staffing firms each year by companies trying to attract top talent to empty positions. The obvious hope on the companies’ part is that the recruiters will find the perfect person for the position and that the new hire remains fully engaged in the years to come. A natural question posed by the people holding the purse strings for recruiting is: Are we getting our money’s worth? I was invited to do a keynote presentation at the 25th Annual Staffing Industry Analysts Executive Forum later this month to answer that exact ...

Hiring Right – Fine Tuning Your Recruiting Efforts to Avoid Mis-Hires

Recruiting and Hiring

The report card on hiring in North America is pretty poor and indicates that too many organizations are simply filling positions with “bodies,” as opposed to applying meticulous screening to avoid hiring the wrong people in the first place. As revealed in my New York Times Best Seller, Building a Magnetic Culture, 59% of all new hires are gone before the one-year tenure mark. As a result, these organizations encounter the significant costs of re-recruiting and re-hiring. All best-in-class organizations (defined as top 10% on employee engagement) have detailed processes for hiring and vetting candidates that applied detailed scrutiny. Simply ...

Fuel50 Guest Post: The Three Truths of Agile Recruitment

Fuel50 Logo

The silver bullet, the magic cure, the rock star employee who will magically solve your business woes. Myths, all myths, and dangerous ones at that, that easily gain traction when the blind start leading the blind through the murky waters of talent acquisition and management! The three truths of agile recruitment: #1 Any employee is only as good as the environment in which they must operate (and the opportunities they are given). #2 It’s a question of alignment; the right career experience, for the right person at the right time. #3 It’s very possible to turn an A player into ...

The Non-Negotiable List – 20 Red Flags For Interviews

non-negotiable list

If you ever interview job candidates, you need a Non-Negotiable List. This list is used during the interview process to help identify “warning signs” that candidates aren’t a good fit for the organization or position. When a candidate shows one of these warning signs, he or she is no longer considered as a potential hire. We used a Non-Negotiable List quite effectively at my old company, curbing our turnover by over 90% in one year. The genesis of the list were the many occasions where on the heels of a new employee not working out (fired or resigned), one of ...

The Best Interview Questions for Virtual Jobs

Interview Questions

Finding good employees can be difficult. The challenge becomes even greater when hiring for a virtual role. When you don’t see employees every day, you have to trust they are working hard even though they’re unsupervised. As promised in my last blog, I’d like to share some of the best interview questions to help you effectively vet through the sea of job candidates and hire people with the greatest propensity to thrive and succeed in remote positions. More specifically, the interview questions that relate to the Four Characteristics for the Best Virtual Workers, as described in my last blog. General ...

FUN: The Missing Driver of Employee Engagement and Recruiting

GlobeSherpa Logo

One of the central messages in my recent keynote presentations focuses on what is consistently missing from most companies’ solutions for building world-class engagement and attracting fantastic new talent: FUN. This woeful absence and missed opportunity is beginning to get noticed and corrected by more and more organizations. Hence, the major rise of gamification in the workplace, and the widespread incorporation of modern perks (e.g., Ping-Pong tables and beer carts) into the employment value proposition. While these types of “fun” benefits used to be limited to tech start-ups, companies in all industries are following suit. Why? Because it’s ...