Talent Function

If you took a quick scan of your performance levels in all aspects of your life, how would you stack up? Are you operating at 100 percent of what you’re capable of?

When we ask professionals this question, we rarely hear answers over 50 percent. As a modern recruiter, the demands you face are only increasing: budget cuts, growing workloads and a more competitive market for great talent. You want to get a strategic advantage, but daily demands force you to be reactive. Are you bringing the kind of positive energy and enthusiasm that makes a difference in creating great relationships with your clients and candidates? What if the breakthrough in your performance could actually be realized by better managing your energy?

That’s exactly what Jim Loerh and Tony Schwartz propose in their book, “The Power of Full Engagement.” The basic premise is that managing energy – not time – is the key to high performance. Drawing from decades of working with top athletes and applying those principles to what the authors refer to as “corporate athletes,” they offer tools and ideas to help us function at our highest levels. If you know that you’re less than fully engaged in and out of the office, you’d do well to read “The Power of Full Engagement.” Following is a brief look at some of the big ideas it covers.

It is most important to manage energy.

It doesn’t matter how much time you have if the quality of energy you bring to those hours is poor. Visualize two scenarios: a conversation with a candidate where you feel negative and low energy, then imagine that same conversation but you feel positive and are high energy. Which will achieve the best result?

All hours are not created equal.

We often schedule our days assuming that all hours have the same potential, but Loerh and Schwartz point out that the body not only has a circadian rhythm (24-hour cycles of activity and rest) but it also has ultradian rhythms (90-minute cycles of high to low energy). There are a variety of systems out there but at their core it’s as simple as using a timer to make sure you take breaks for rest in between bursts of high activity.

Take time between points.

In their studies, Loerh and Schwartz noticed top tennis athletes take maximum advantage of the lulls between moments of activity, actually lowering their heart rate in between sets and preventing fatigue towards the end of the match. If your day resembles a tennis match – and whose doesn’t – with constant back and forth with short rests in between, you can take advantage of the time in between calls, meetings and projects to recharge.

Engage in positive rituals.

A positive ritual is something that is baked into our everyday experience and takes very little conscious effort to execute. Think of brushing your teeth. This activity has tremendous health rewards and most of us don’t think twice about doing it. It’s easy to turn the fundamental daily activities that make the biggest difference in our performance into positive daily rituals. This works with not only things like brushing teeth and exercise but also with things like maintaining your talent pipeline

Drink more water.

Nothing could be more basic and have a greater impact on our energy than being properly hydrated, and yet most of us are chronically dehydrated. Inadequate hydration also compromises concentration and coordination, and a muscle dehydrated by as little as three percent can lose ten percent of its strength and eight percent of its speed. Based on growing studies, Loerh and Schwartz recommend drinking 64 ounces of water at intervals throughout the day to gain performance benefits.

It’s also worth noting that these practices should be pointed: always be engaged or purposefully resting. We all know what it feels like to half work. You don’t get much done and you’re exhausted at the end of the day. Sadly, this practice is more common among today’s workforce. If you want to be a top performer in your industry, begin mastering your energy. Imagine the impact you could have if you had even a small increase in drive and performance.

The success and productivity of any organization rests heavily on the personal productivity of its employees, and so, we happily dedicate this post to “getting things done.” While there is and will never be a productivity silver bullet – we are, after all, a vast collection of individuals whose frames of reference span decades, geography, technology and cultures – there are ways to assess how effective your organizational and time management strategies are and in effect how well they provide clarity.

When refining your time management strategies, consider what factors motivate most: Are you deadline-driven? Are you visual? Do you like checking items off your To Do list? What behaviors best jog your memory?

Whether go-to methods involve pen and paper, E-mail, calendars, tasks, software, or some combination of the above; and whether you separate personal from professional or live a one life, one calendar philosophy, it’s important to assess and refine your processes, to secure both your sanity and the confidence others have in your work. But, how do you know if your personal productivity system needs refining?

• Projects are consistently late, incomplete or ineffective. When work doesn’t meet standards and requirements as determined by you and your supervisors, explore alternate organizational methods. Ask others whose work you admire what systems they have in place. While those systems may not work well for you, exploring options and understanding varying models may help you find the right solution.
• You don’t trust your system. While worst case scenario is that others notice errors in your work, another cause for concern is that you do. If you regularly create backup systems or often beat yourself up about low priority tasks you’re not getting to, you don’t trust the mechanisms you have in place to keep you on track.
• You feel overwhelmed. Your system should relax you and provide the experience of control. While some degree of stress in a challenging position is expected and can be healthy, if you feel overwhelmed daily, examine ways to organize tasks in an actionable form. Realistically outline what projects can be completed in your preferred timeline, allowing for some flexibility. And focus: while some laud the ability to multi-task, many studies have emerged on how it can negatively impact productivity.
• You spend too much time on the wrong tasks. If you’re spending hours a day documenting and tracking your activities rather than completing them, or are heavily entrenched in administrative tasks, there might be a better way. Consider which systems and processes you can consolidate and automate, and what tasks add value to the projects that are of highest priority to your organization.
• It feels forced. Don’t feel guilty abandoning time management systems that no longer suit your needs. You don’t have to keep a digital day-to-day calendar because you formerly used a paper-based journal. While some project management tools may be required of you in the workplace, you can supplement with solutions that are custom-built by you and that suit your skills and needs.

The world of talent acquisition software has been busy building and buying software suites. From a business valuation perspective, it makes good boardroom sense: the more you have to sell, the greater the chances of growing your revenue and you avoid being boxed out by other full-suite talent management providers. But this carnival of consolidation is not without a downside. The pace of innovation in previously discrete domains has slowed. To avoid losing the best-of-breed edge, vendors will need to refocus thinking inside the box.

The first step toward real innovation is to consider the recruiting process as a sales process. Many vendors now label this component as Candidate Relationship Management (CRM).

While the intent is there, most recruiting systems are applicant tracking systems that process candidates at scale. They’re designed principally to code candidates for regulatory reports. They screen and process, they do not help us sell, or reflect to what degree a candidate is interested in the company.

But, what if the hiring team could be guided in interviews and communications by emotional candidate statuses? What if they had the level of insight needed to build a solid candidate sales strategy? What if reporting offered intelligence on which team members have the highest close ratios or the average dollar increase between your first and final offers? And what if this sales-centric approach was radiated to be candidate-centric?

With the current systems in place, most candidates are privy to limited information via a company’s job portal. They have access to job listing information, company background and benefits highlights. They can apply for positions, and perhaps have insight to the status of that application. But, if we tap traditional best-of-breed innovation, we can do better than that.

Portals should be smart, and provide the information that’s relevant to each candidate. Why not provide candidates with department background information, or allow them to ask specific questions about the positions for which they’re applying? What if the candidate was presented with experience surveys? A new world of important data could be gathered, and in turn, help make employers more attractive to job seekers.

There is a rich vein of innovation waiting to be mined. To help foster inspiration and bring invention to the recruiting industry, begin by turning the competition dial up to 11 and maintain balance by turning the sales execution dial up as well. And, while you expend effort integrating talent acquisition and management solutions large scale, don’t forget to think inside the box to inspire innovation and provide the best possible solutions.

The Candidate Experience Awards (C&E Awards) are designed to recognize the candidate experience offered by companies through the entire recruitment cycle. The scope of the award covers the experience of prospects you are keeping warm as well as the active job seeker. To learn more, or to submit a company for considerations please visit www.thecandidateexperienceawards.org.

As an executive coach and owner of a talent acquisition consultancy, I have a unique dual perspective on the job search. I help clients through career transitions and also see the under-belly of large recruiting organizations. On an individual level, finding a job is an emotional sport. It is inherently confronting. Read more »

Before I get started, let’s get it out of the way. I love Apple. Their products truly inspire me. I live in Northern California, and I root for companies in Northern California. So, label me biased. Now that this is out of the way, I want to share why I believe the iPad will become THE device for recruiters over the next five years.

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by Elaine Orler

Last week, one of my friends was sharing their frustrating chronicle of applying for a job at a local retail establishment. As you can imagine, all of my friends come to me with such tales. My wonderful friend has a Master’s degree and 37 years of work experience. She is a retired principal who wants to get out in the community. She went to apply online to a said establishment, and, well, let’s just say that the online application experience was… less than welcoming. She recalled, “It was an online equivalent to visit to the DMV. I gave up after thirty minutes.” I laughed, sighed and then shook my head in disgust. A great candidate to any organization, and it’s over before it even started. Read more »

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Webinar
This week I had the honor and privilege of delivering a webinar for SHRM focusing on how to ‘recruit like the big guys’ for small to mid-size companies. You’re welcome to download the presentation here, or if you are a SHRM member, register and listen to the audio recording anytime. With over 600 attendees on the webinar, the majority of the audience questions focused on three main topics: Read more »

It’s been two weeks since I finished the Corpus Operis conference in a small town called, Casekow, which is a 90-minute train ride east from Berlin.  The first inaugural conference was a consideration of the best future for a global workforce. The conference included a colorful array of academics, government development professionals, practitioners, and consultants – all mixing minds at the Wartin Castle. It was perhaps the most interesting and innovative conference formats that I have ever experienced.  My distilled reflections: Read more »