[The Hiring Hunt] What’s The One Sure Quality Employers Want?

A recent post for would-be Chief Financial Officers on this site gives a great overview of what sort of attributes financial types who aspire to be CFOs should have.

But what about the rest of us non-CFO types? What’s the one sure thing employers want from employees and candidates?

First a caveat – the “take this with a grain of salt” advice: if you ask 100 career coaches you’ll get 100 different answers about THE skill to have.… Read the rest

[Dept. of Bad Advice] Your Brand is Not – Repeat Not – Your Elevator Pitch

I could blame my grumpy reaction to this last set of rainy days in San Francisco, but I won’t. Instead I’ll attribute to the type of “nice graphics first, let’s think about what it means later” approach that pops up every once and a while. And a case of bad career advice.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers is running something called Personal Brand Week. Their web page has a cute set of five name tags, conveniently corresponding to the five days of a traditional workweek and arranged in ascending order, foundations first.Read the rest

[Reading Tea Leaves] Candidate Job Fair Suggests Job Market Uptick

As someone who worked with a quantitative asset management firm – Barclays Global Investors –  I know the value of seeing data in terms of broad patterns. But as someone who has worked extensively with the research and development side of biotech, I’ve also learned to note signs and signals by the ones and twos. This is the latter.

BioSpace.com, the country’s leading news and jobs/career web portal for biotech / pharma is hosting a job fair on March 9th, 2010 in South San Francisco from 2-7 PM.… Read the rest

[CFO Job Hunters Version] What Do Employers Really Want?

One mystery for more senior job hunters is the  question of “What do employers really want?” in terms of backgrounds, skill sets and experience.

Thanks to one executive search person you can get one good answer – particularly if you’re looking fill a Chief Financial Officer role.

Karen Quint of Spencer Stuart addressed the San Francisco chapter of Financial Executives International,  the preeminent association for CFOs and other senior finance executives last month.Read the rest

[Tips for Leaders] How to Face Your Critics AND Give – and Get – Great Feedback

John Baldoni recently blogged on the best way to handle  your critics, using President Obama’s recent session with Republican Congress members as an example. Baldoni’s post at the Harvard Business Review – How to Face Your Critics –  suggests the following steps:

  • Show up.
  • Be cool.
  • Acknowledge your shortcomings.
  • Criticize gently.
  • Smile frequently.
  • Leave them asking for more.

Beyond facing your critics, a key foundational pillar for you to be a good manager and an even better leader is your ability to give and get great feedback.Read the rest

Can You Trust the Recruiter?

The voice at the other end of the voicemail sounded sincere and the message they left earlier about the possible job sounds great. But is too good to be true just that: too good to be true?

And can you trust the recruiter who left the message?

The short answer is “maybe”. And here’s more.

I spend my work life coaching people and teams to up their performance game, and one of ways to enhance performance is to improve the ability anticipate what’s coming down the pike.Read the rest