I have to admit I'm in PARADISE. 

I have my doubts if anyone followed the past 30 days journey into an unknown future when a month ago I decided to dump what I was working on as a recruiter and start from "start". 

For the past four days, I've been tucked away in a little corner of the USA.  There are palm trees, little signs of humanity, gourmet food,…

Any fan of the Sapranos would know that those two words were what we were left with after however many seasons of the show.  And knowing our state of shock as we watched the clock, waiting and hoping for answers, and the damn minute hand kept creeping towards the end of the hour...the director not only tortures us with slicing a chain saw through the Journey song, but then leaves 30 seconds of black screen to stare at.

The magic of the Sapranos really circled around the character…

Sometimes I wish I would wake up and be one of those recruiters with $5,000 suits from Dubai who tool around in their choice of Ferrari to get to the office. 

I've had this client since 2005.  Back then, I cleaned up, threw a suit on, and made my way to their office.  I met their VP of HR at his office and he was half my size.  I remember.  They were in a mode of expansion.  Within a few months, I had a few placements and soon enough he had hired an HR Generalist to take over the…

You simply can't imagine what an experience it is to live in the greater Detroit area.

Oh, man, cue the circus music!  It's our annual "Let's FBI'nd Hoffa!" festival.  This year it's being held at a farm field in the neighboring Oakland county.  The Feds were sneaky once again and it wasn't until some of our brightest scholars in the area noticed the huge piece of earth moving equipment and all…

This Father's Day, I'm officially admitting that I'm a "prude".  While I'm at it, I'll also admit that I'm one of those people who doesn't really "get" most song lyrics and if you heard me sing (God forbid) a favorite song, there's no doubt I slaughter the lyrics.  I'll get to that in a minute...

Got a call yesterday from a guy who's a bartender at a local trendy restaurant that we often go…

Another shot weekend.  I'll be weeding through a ka-zillion resumes over the weekend once again.  Though as a personal highlight I'm looking forward to seeing the Superman movie.  We're cheap so we'll probably hit the matinee.  (Christopher Nolan and comic flicks is a great combo.)

OK so I got the story from one of my clients which is a combination of four companies that merged in the last six months.  They have plants sprinkled throughout the Midwest and guess what... they need…

I was involved with a group of professionals and influencers in the metro Detroit area working together on a mission of hope and renewal for the city of Detroit.  It was a volunteer thing and was fun while it lasted but after a while I had to back away because I simply couldn't dedicate the right amount of time on it.

We had a "speed networking" event among the membership to make super-quick introductions between each other.  There was such a variety of people with really diverse…

I want to draw a parallel and analogy that may confuse some people.  I have a total attitude today and I think I figured out why a lot of people have attitudes about Recruiters (headhunters). 

I hate it here (sometimes).  I live in the most dangerous city on Earth.  Exaggeration?  I think not.  Since I consider myself eternally out of shape, I fired up my jogging program a couple months ago.  I'm up to six miles a day now.  And I live in a city. 

When I chose this place, I…

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…