I often get asked for some quick and easy advice on ‘how to interview’ by clients or professional connections that do not have a lot of experience with the process. While I do have a system that I use, I should be clear in saying that there is not one perfect approach nor is there a clear industry standard. I believe that the key is to be organized and to put yourself in a position to make useful comparisons so you can come away the information that you need.

Everyone understands that…

If you’ve been in recruiting for the last 10 years or 20 years, the chart below will be real interesting.  You should see a tremendous correlation between the levels of job growth per year and how business was during that period.  The chart is in hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The great take away here is not that job growth is good for business.  We all know that.  But look how big the numbers were in the 90s.  Check out the slow down when the tech bubble burst in…

Whether working for a small, mid-size or large business, you know like everyone else at the office that you need to stand out from the rest and not in a negative manner.



Each and every day you set foot in the office or telecommute from your residence, be it a small business start-up or a company that has been around for some time, how do you go about making sure that the boss notices you?



Having worked for several companies now over a 23-year span, I have always gone into a…

The high cost of client acquisition necessitates that the service side of your business do outstanding work not just in delivery, but in retaining and expanding accounts. When the service team takes the lead in keeping and growing current customers, sales is given the freedom to add more new business at brand new clients. Companies that do this grow faster as they retain their core customers while enjoying an influx of new business at new and existing accounts.

In almost every case…

Some of my customers, who are jobseekers, for the most part think recruiters—internal and third-party alike—are unfair and the reason for their failure to get a job. They think recruiters are only concerned with two things: 1) determining if my customers meet 10 out of 10 requirements and 2) want them to work for peanuts. I know this is not necessarily true, I know that recruiters have a job to do, which is to find what the employer wants. This is how recruiters get paid.

I’ve read…

What’s more important – having a good CV or a good cover letter…? The answer? Both! Cover letters are just as important as CVs because a good cover letter gets your CV through the door and a good CV then goes on to qualify you for an interview!

If you know anything about my background, you’ll know I fell into CV writing, cover letters and so on by accident while working in the media as the assistant editor of a magazine. Back then I had to recruit people (as well as everything else)…

Unless you’ve had your head firmly stuck in the sand over the past three months or so, you would have noticed that everyone is going on about the latest social network that is set to “take the world by storm”. We’re not talking about Facebook, Twitter, and no, not even the still relatively new Google Plus – the latest boy/girl wonder site in question is none other than Pinterest.…

Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about sources of hire, talent matters, social recruiting, job creation & destruction, HR influencers and candidate experience.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular…

In September 2007 Canada reached the lowest employment rate in over the last 35 years at 5.9%.  By mid-year 2009 the national unemployment figure rose to over 8.5%.  To put this in perspective, every percentage point change is approximately 180,000 people who no longer have a position.  Today the national rate is 7.4%, lower than the national average for the last 36 years (8.5%) – and that should encourage us, however it is not because the unemployment rate is actually trending in the wrong…

With psychometric assessment (aka psych testing) steadily establishing itself as one of the most reliable selection weapons in a HR professional’s arsenal, organisations around the country are implementing them as a standard part of their selection process, especially in bulk recruitment exercises like graduate intakes and vacation programs. 

Unfortunately, the growing popularity of psychometric testing has also led to the introduction of some ‘undesirable…

Why do companies continue to waste money on hiring talent over and over again? Isn’t doing something over and over again the definition of insanity? The reason this happens is the same reason so many companies and people still work 9 to 5 in an office at a cube. It’s because that’s the way everyone has done it for so long. Finding talent in the market we all are facing needs to be much more defined and strategic. The employer needs to look at each individual and determine if they are someone…

CEOs & Other Healthcare Executive See Easy Money In Hospital System

In this age of public scrutiny about financial wrongdoings and at a time when Occupy Wall Street sends a strong message to corporations about greed there is a segment of the financial sector that still manages to break the rules day after day, healthcare. In a day and age when a piece of newsworthy material can make it from Beijing, China to Los Angeles, CA in a viral second the headlines are full…

The Information Technology industry added 13,300 jobs in January, bringing the total number of IT jobs in the U.S. to an all-time high of 4.1 million, according to Staffing Industry Analysts.

Citing information from TechServe Alliance's index of IT Jobs, the article states that IT employment is at its highest…

What if I was to tell you I’ve been holding back? No really...  I’ve been keeping secrets from you…

My last 2 blogs covered such ground breaking and thought provoking issues as whether we should wear ties, or carry compendiums in the recruitment workplace.  Some of you saw it for the light hearted entertainment it was supposed to be, whilst others wanted me burned at the stake – or banished to the Victorian equivalent of Siberia (in my estimations that location would be Orbost,…

Traditionally, spring is the time to sweep out the dark corners that were neglected over the winter, open up a window or two, shake out the rugs and perform all of those once-a-year cleaning rituals.

That’s in your physical space.

And with everything feeling so fresh and new, the spring cleaning frenzy may even spill out of your home and into the confines of your…

In this week’s #HRTechChat, we discussed what it meant to provide great customer service in the HR Technology space.  From real world examples of customer service excellence to how to create innovations that provide value to customers, there was a lot of great discussion and sound-bytes on the topic.

The question that inspired this post, however, was a simple…

I’ve talked a lot recently about the benefits of blogging as a part of a social media portfolio.  I am a real fan of blogs and blogging and read a lot of blog posts, especially with the help of the very good Google Reader app. Its a great way to keep up to date with changes in all  sorts of industries, stay in touch with changes and rumours in technology…

Return on Investment (ROI) is that magic phrase that any service provider will coin in an attempt to justify that ‘investing’ in their product or service will result in the impact of a relevant business metric. I say this somewhat sceptically because while most HR service providers do offer tangible ROI, many are a lot harder to justify, and even tougher to extract…