Human Resources | Life Back West

February 13, 2012June 3, 2019

The Trouble with Recruiters

There is trouble in recruiter-land.

Talk to any in-house recruiter and they know it. Talk to any job candidate and they suspect it.

Heck, as someone who has run small, medium, and large size talent acquisition operations I even know it.

You probably do too.

So what’s going on?

Back in the pre-online application days, circa 1996, internal recruiters working for employers customarily carried (preface: at least the good employers who knew to balance workload with quality) 10-15 job requisitions – openings they were trying to fill – at any one time.… Read the rest

January 13, 2012June 3, 2019

The Hiring Game: One More Secret

Turns out just when I thought I knew many of the tricks of the trade in the world of executive search consultants (also known as headhunters), one more tip crossed my radar.

While meeting this week about a very interesting corporate global role with a San Francisco firm (more on the opportunity in an upcoming post), I got to also shoot the quick breeze (time is, in this business, money if you’ve got a full slate of searches) with a couple of senior consultants about a headhunter’s life.… Read the rest

November 30, 2011June 3, 2019

Your Career: Nix the Polite Departure Lie in Favor of Courage?

: Dorothy and Toto Meet the Cowardly Lion

When you’re whacking somebody, stepping down to get out, or getting fired yourself, what passes for organizational “truth” makes most “goodbyes” meaningless.

Isn’t time for more transparency, and more courage?

“Left the firm to pursue personal interests” is the “doing nothing” act in departures. It’s hardly ever true, and frankly everyone knows it.… Read the rest

September 28, 2011May 17, 2019

[Baseball Anyone?] The Rhythm of Winners

Sports are an imperfect analogue.

But like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, analogues and metaphors provide representations that if properly understood can give us insight to the real world – not simply shadows on the cave wall.

So what does this have to do with the most American (as in the United States and Canada – not the rest of the countries in the Americas) of sports, baseball?… Read the rest

September 8, 2011May 17, 2019

Is Guten Tag Simply the Langage of Respect?

The Roche takeover of South San Francisco-based Genentech two years ago provided a field day for all sorts of commentary.

From the revisionist account of the Genentech takeover to Roche’s shifting stance on how they’d “preserve headcount and culture” at Genentech, the acquisition has provided rich fodder.

The report that key execs from Genentech such as Pat Yang [disclosure: Pat’s organization was a client] moving to Basel were required to learn to speak German because it was the language in which business was conducted (note: German is spoken in the Basel area of Switzerland) was – how to put it – was akin to the cherry on top of the sundae; the perfect topping to a trail of miscues.… Read the rest

August 22, 2011May 17, 2019

Why Will You Hire an Outsider rather than an Internal Candidate?

Who knew that hiring realities and a trip to my home state of Oregon would intersect.

But they did.

You know the deal. You’ve got a candidate or two from inside the firm to consider and candidates from outside that are in the vetting / interview hopper for the job.

You end up – surprise surprise – hiring the outsider. Only later do you come across the statistic from the Center for Creative Leadership that approximately 66% of senior execs hired from the outside fail within 18 months and that the overall failure rate for external hires within 3 years is 40%.… Read the rest