In response to an excellent article in Financial Times (Nov. 16, 2015) by Andrew Hill, I posted this and was pleased to receive 'editor's pick' notice.  Here is a link to the article, which I have previously posted on LinkedIn and elsewhere:…

I like to publish small snippets periodically, because it's fun to write and think, and I like to share my thoughts with others.  However, it's another matter altogether when I see someone with a year of experience in recruiting, after previously being a hairdresser, passing off a classic article on "Counteroffers" on LinkedIn as his own work.  

3000+ views is a lot of attention for a recruiter to grab, but it would certainly have been much more ethical to do his own work, wouldn't…

Recently, a new scientific discovery was made, which was that a fluorescent sea-turtle of the Hawksbill variety was discovered in Papua, New Guinea. I haven't been to Papua, yet, but it is on my 'bucket list'.



Apparently, scientists had never previously conceived the idea of a fluorescent sea-turtle, although various corals, sponges and other…

Since the 'invention' of fire, there have been times when History was clearly diverted from a previous course by intervening events and the influences of people.  In this instance, I offer an example wherein an otherwise "free agent" has become ensnared in his own web of deception, by becoming a parrot of my own recruiting pitch to Time-travelers.  Apparently, he wants "out" of this Universe, entirely.  I can understand, to some degree.…

Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk both think that Robots and Artificial Intelligences might eventually try to take over the world and destroy life as we know it, in a "Terminator" kind of doomsday scenario.  

I think people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are frightfully clever people, but I would like to point out where humans retain an advantage over…

I sometimes receive email from people who appear to have mental illness, asking the question: “Why would I use a spammer like you as a recruiter?”  Although this is clearly a loaded question, based on the false presumption of email contact by recruiters being ‘spam’, it does deserve an answer and provokes thought.

Firstly, you can call anything you want whatever you want to, up to a point.  Shakespeare wrote “A rose by any…

http://carlcheo.com/startcoding?utm_content=buffer4052d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=update

I've gotten three calls in the past two days from people with very thick Indian accents claiming that I have been indicted for tax fraud and that it is a "non-bailable charge" which will result in me being jailed if I do not pay quickly. This is a prevalent scam these days, which the IRS has warned the public about.

Apart from the fact that I my Dad works with the IRS, (he has a special license to practice tax accounting defense in front of the IRS that most accountants don't have), I…

Some of you might have some great answers, too. It's an interesting question!

http://www.quora.com/How-does-one-go-about-becoming-a-headhunter/answer/Nicholas-Meyler-1

No prior experience in Human Resources is required. Probably it is a negative, even, to some people. HR People and Headhunters are different breeds, like cats and dogs (which sometimes get along very…

Really?  "Purple Squirrel"?

Is that the best you can come up with to describe an 'unfindable' candidate?

I remember seeing red squirrels for the first time in 1976, in the Vienna Graveyard, while I made my pilgrimage to the tombs of Beethoven, Schoenberg, the Strausses, Schubert, and other great Viennese super-composers.  "Rock-stars", if you will, to reinvent another overused phrase.

I had never seen red squirrels, before, so I was pretty amazed with them, as there were…

Silicon-Valley superstar/rockstar/billionaire Vinod Khosla (his brother is a professor at Stanford, I believe) has provided an infusion of Venture Capital to an interesting and very different career-oriented website called Pymetrics www.pymetrics.com; which actually provides some very interesting interactive tests to evaluate skills, traits, talents, etc.

I learned that I have a high degree of skepticism, am very undeterred by my own mistakes,…

Some newbie, "wannabe" (i.e. 'nutcase') decided to weigh in on one of my posts (now deleted and blocked) with the sage comment: "Recruiters are no big deal.  They are just middlemen."  Bright comment to leave on a blog site populated by 50,000 recruiters, right?

I thought about this a while, and came up with a rebuttal of sorts: 

"Please excuse me for being a middleman while I sell you down-river, to someone important, then..."

The very word "entrepreneur" is at…

One of the fairly persistent complaints I have heard from non-recruiters about what recruiters do is "You only match buzzwords and keywords. Even a monkey can do that.  You are a talentless fool who could only make a living being a parasite off of gainfully employed people."

Of course, this is a complete fallacy, which we all know.  Firstly, as someone who actually studied Boolean Logic as a Philosophy major at Princeton University (which was the World's highest-rated academic…

Owing to some very sloppy programming, by a rather amateurish Ruby coder, I was able to exploit a vulnerability in www.recruiterspam.com and determine the number of actual email addresses that received claimed 'spam' sent by recruiters. As far as I can tell, the number is 460, although possibly it is as low as 57 people using multiple "spam-trap" addresses, which is an illegal and deceptive practice recently ruled by the Courts to be…

I'm trying to understand the principles of "Information Asymmetry and Salary Negotiation".  Has anyone read any new research on this topic which can prove one way or another whether the 'first person to name a number' loses?  I don't believe that entirely, although in some situations I do.  My client was upset that I told a candidate the top of the salary range, although the candidate was $100K per year above the salary range, but still interested in the job, even after I tried to…

I think Executive Search is a field of study with somewhat contradictory parts to it -- for instance, that there is an emphasis on thoroughness, diligence, exhaustiveness, finding ALL possible solutions, etc.; but, there is also a high emphasis on intuitionistic processes, like deciding which candidate to call, guessing who might be most interested, anticipating what objections a client might have to a specific candidate, etc.

So, I see it as both an Art and a Science.  Nonetheless,…

My friend, a candidate I placed 15 years ago at MicroOptical Corporation (the company Google bought the "Google Glass" patents from) is a former Everest climber, who wrote the book on the search for Mallory and Irvine (first team to summit Everest in 1924, but died on the descent).

He has a client who has developed a search engine that is much better than Google or Bing (much more specific, no extraneous results, searches text perfectly to find results, understands text rather than…

"To a 'T'"…

Here is an excellent article I co-wrote, primarily as a researcher and provider of facts, and editor, with Jack Thornton (a splendid technical writer).

Imbued with a few of my favorite key phrases (i.e. "bleeding edge", etc.) this article does attempt to encompass, and indeed manages to capture, the complexities of Technical Search (not only in Mechanical Engineering, but in multiple other fields, as well).

In my experience, the goal of a Search is almost always to identify…