Omigosh.  Almost to the halfway point of this exercise.  We're at the stage of holding our breath for a bit while we see what starts bubbling up from a couple weeks of activity.  (I'm thinking quite a bit.  Just to say it.)

I have to admit that I had to slide through the weekend without lifting a mouse because of volunteering at our church festival Saturday and Sunday.  Today I had an inbox full of e-mails and I was actually pretty excited to find some new candidates to screen and…

No matter what your profession, we all have circumstances that make things a bit awkward.  Look at Justin Bieber and how he’s been dealing with the paparazzi.  And how about those folks in Washington DC right now trying to justify all the spying scandals.  Boy, that’s got make some sleepless nights.

Let me tell a little story that got me thinking about this.  This weekend our 11,000 member church is hosting it’s annual festival complete with live music, mountains of food, rides and…

This is Day 11 of the journey from the point where I started from scratch.  To be quite frank, I'm feeling a little wobbly and brain dead that the best thing I could come up with was a misleading title for this.  I have no profound thoughts.  I look back on this weeks activities and see no, as this guy at MRI used to say at all of the conferences, "nuggets of wisdom".  I look back and see the metrics. 

I mentioned one time before that we're, as headhunters (3rd party recruiters), NOT…

A while back and I won't say when for fear of embarrassment, my CPA handed me the "jump drive".   I sadly took the damn thing with a lot of trepidation. 

See, I'm a product of the '80's and am a complete nut-bag psycho about computers.  What's that mean? 

I'm in that age bracket that was going to school when things, like overnight, went from using a typewriter to using a computer.  Anyone guess what's coming?  See.  These were the old days when Microsoft or whoever didn't…

How many expressions occasionally pop up to sum up the reality life brings us?  Probably one of the most recent is only two words and the second word is "happens". 

So my self-motivated kid finished up her Freshman year and it wasn't without the sting of reality.  So she slid back and forth in Advanced Math from an A down to a B- throughout the year.  Then there was the final which makes up 25% of the total grade.  Let's just say this particular test was more like a cinder block…

I'd like to dedicate this song to Nicky Coffin by Tom Petty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8

Sincerely and respectfully!

- Stephen Nehez, Jr.

Today was, by far, the darkest day of the year.  Before I knew it, the Grim Reaper of Recruiting was standing about 20 feet behind me and decided to cast a demon into my life.  The signals were all there. 

Earlier, half paying attention and knee deep in yesterday’s e-mail candidate applications, I sort of overheard one of the recruiters here say to someone that they’d call back “in a bit”.  I was so intense today that I barely noticed that our little boombox played…

So I'll start this one with a joke:

Today at 3PM, one of my established clients had their VP of Sales write me an e-mail.  He dusted off our fee agreement and changed some words and highlighted the changes in the 3M patented neon yellow highlighter look.  He writes in the body of the e-mail that he's been asked (?) to "take a look" at our (20% BTW - yawn) fee agreement.  He says that if "everything looks ok" then we can keep going on his sales role he's trying to fill. 

The…

Before doing this, I was an engineer back when my face didn't have "laugh lines".  I actually was involved in automotive engineering groups conducting studies on automotive engineered systems.

Needless to say, the byproduct of this was learning the ins-and-outs, good-and-bad within the automotive supply base. 

A few years later after I was zapped by an extraterrestrial gamma ray, I found out I was a Recruiter and soon was filling positions for a very admirable automotive…

I'm not quite as glib and bullet-proof feeling as I was on Friday (Reference the "Day 4" blog posting).

Yea.  The weekend was OK but I kind of feel like I'm planning for a wedding all over again.  Mountains and mountains of preparation all to be shot in a short period of time.

It wasn't that reading a ga-zillion resumes doesn't seem satisfying, my mental burdens was the stuff on the outskirts.  Friday night was a pure blow off.  I decided to run six miles on Saturday morning…

This week's marketing campaign was such a smashing success that my Macbook Pro with retina display will be chugging some electrons this weekend. 

Somehow, someway, we're gonna need to squeeze around 30 or so experienced Program Managers our of DB to present on four new JO's....all pretty close siblings to one another so there should be pretty good synergy.  One of the FOUR NEW CLIENTS I found this week also is seeking an engineering liason with Korean language skills so they can…

Please indulge me while I tell three stories to clarify words I stated a couple weeks ago.

My first real job with a real paycheck was at a McDonald’s in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, when I was 15 years old.   The Manager is one of the most serious people I had encountered by that age.  Before allowing me to work in the kitchen, I was handed a plastic bag and told to go outside and clean the property.  It was mandatory to call it “trash” as we were not allowed to use the word “garbage”. …

Crawled into the office this morning after a five mile morning run that didn't go so hot.  And what was waiting in my voicemail inbox???? 

Answer:  Only a 1 minute 58 second message from the Vice President of Sales at a HUMUNGOUS Tier 1 automotive supplier expressing that his Program Management group is in dire need for NOT ONE, NOT TWO, BUT THREE Program Managers here in Day-twah!  (That's Detroit for outsiders.)

So I waited a couple hours because I'm so busy and gave him a…

Holy Mackerel.  Talk about being rusty. 

My program on Day 1 and 2 has been to tackle all office things first thing and move on to my 30 day reboot-my-desk deal.  I get between 30 and 100 applicants each and every day.  I have to review each resume one-by-one.  It took seven hours on Memorial Day to get through about 240. 

These resumes are coming from all corners of the planet and only roughly 50% of them are remotely relevant to our industry.  Some may find this amazing but I…

And so it goes that sometimes we're our own biggest critic.   I've spent the last four and half years pulling together all of the most robust tools I could find to create "The Avengers" version of a boutique recruiting office. 

We have four busy-body recruiters pounding away on the phones, moving and shaking, making money calls, and always marketing.  I believe our system is unique and we approach everything we do with as must honestly and perseverance we can muster. 

Through a…