Throughout my career as a senior Recruitment Leader and now as an Organizational Talent advisor to a number of companies, I have been fortunate enough to work with a large number of great organizations who gave me the opportunity to partner with them on developing and implementing new practices to enhance their recruitment function and hiring outcomes.  A few years ago a large Canadian organization asked me to come in and partner with them to build an in-house recruitment function for them…

Recently I facilitated a session on “Recruitment Trends and Best Practices” for a large group of senior Recruitment and HR leaders from a large global technology company at their annual HR Leadership offsite in Chicago.  This organization is one of the better ones I have worked with in terms of their focus and investment in talent.  They understand that the acquisition, development and engagement of talent is the number one priority for their HR team.  Their partners in the business look to…

People who know me know how important integrity is to me.   People close to me within my network definitely think I take too hard of a stance on others who have let me down through their actions and subsequent lack of integrity.  I am a very trusting person and want to always be able to take people at their word.  But once a person fails to live up to their word I have a very difficult time looking beyond that experience and continuing our professional or personal relationship.  It's…

I consider myself a strong networker…….meaning I give as much or more back to my network than I ever ask for or receive.

I am often asked to conduct networking 101 sessions for corporate HR and recruitment teams and provide one-on-one coaching to business leaders on the art of networking.  The number one rule I always spend the most time speaking about is to never take advantage of your network and never make it a one-sided relationship.  You can’t be selfish when you venture into the…

One of my biggest complaints about recruiting is the lack of respect given to candidates throughout a recruitment process.  Whether it is from the lack of candidate respect by the behaviour of a poor recruiter or an unengaged hiring leader who fails to realize the importance of good recruiting, or simply from an overall poorly constructed recruiting process of an organization, 99% of the candidates applying to your company are most likely to walk away with a bad taste in their…

How successful is your Employee Referral Program (ERP)?  What percentage of your total number of Top Talent hires come from your program?  How are you driving your Top Talent to refer other Top Talent to your organization?  These are all questions we need to continue to ask ourselves if we want our ERP to continue to provide new Top Talent to our organization. The 3rd question I pose is the most critical – how do we drive Top Talent within our organization to refer and recommend Top Talent…

One of the continuing challenges facing the Recruitment function is moving from the traditional, reactive and primarily transactional focus to a proactive and enhanced recruitment model.

Think about when you sit down with your hiring leaders to scope a new open position and the role details.  When you ask the hiring leaders for a proposed start date for a new hire, how many of them responded with “ASAP” or “yesterday”?  How many of your hiring leaders complain about the time…

One of the most important steps in the recruitment process is the offer stage – yet most companies don’t invest the appropriate amount of training and resources into this critical recruitment phase.  Recruitment is all about the outcome – the hire.

As Recruiters, we need to look at this phase as “closing the candidate” and put the same importance the Sales function puts on “closing the deal”.  An organization can have best-in-class sourcing channels but if they are unable to have…

The number one question HR professionals in Canada ask me everyday is "When will the market heat up for HR talent once again?"

The HR Talent market has been through a roller coaster of demand over the past few years.  Many organizations cut back on resourcing within HR starting in 2008.  Many areas of HR were hit very hard including Talent Development, Talent Management and Recruitment.  Many senior HR roles were eliminated as part of a corporate wide cost cutting exercise.  Many…

In my mind, the engagement level of an organization's Recruiters are a major indicator of how well that organization's Recruitment function performs.  Over the years I have worked with hundreds of Recruiters in countries all over the world and one of the characteristics that always differentiated the performance of the great Recruiters from their Recruitment colleagues was the high levels of passion and engagement they brought every day to their role and their organization.

I remember…