When Should You Hold Out for a Better Candidate?

Finding the best candidate to fill your open position can pose a major challenge. Your inbox may be crammed with promising resumes, but finding that candidate who is just right may continue to elude you. As you determine whether or not to hold out for a better prospect to come along, look inward: at your current methods. Then you can make improvements that will help ensure you make the right choice, the first time around.

Confront your assumptions.

Past experience does not necessarily indicate future performance. Don’t focus too narrowly on a candidate’s education and experience. Though they may appear to lack your total desired qualifications, they may offer tons of raw talent that just needs to be tapped. They may need extra training, but once they’re up to speed, they will become a rock star.

Look past branding and pedigree. It’s natural to be attracted to “branded” candidates; for example, those with Ivy League degrees or who currently work for industry-leading firms. But they may cost more in salary and attention than their “generic” counterparts. Look past the labels, at the substance. A great way to do this is by asking creative interview questions. You may find out that not every candidate turns out as advertised.

Involve team members.

As you head into the hiring process, take a 360-degree approach. Have your candidate meet not only with their potential future boss, but also with those who may become their counterparts, peers and/or direct reports. If more than one team member has concerns when you meet to debrief, you probably need to keep your options open.

Create a wish list of the qualities and qualifications you want. Have everyone on the hiring team articulate exactly what would get them excited about the new hire. This creates a sense of accountability. Then, if you find out there’s not enough in common between your dream hire and the candidate being considered, you’ll feel more comfortable holding out for a better fit.

Fit the personality to the job.

Get to know your candidate as a person, not just a skill set. Take a behavioral approach to interviewing, and drill down until you reach that “a-ha” moment where personality, potential, and cultural fit all align.

Judge soft, as well as hard skills. Listen actively to candidates and get an accurate gauge of their strengths in communications, teamwork, and emotional intelligence.
Check social media profiles. Go beyond LinkedIn to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms. How a person behaves on social media is a good barometer of the type of person they are. Remember, if you hire them, they’ll be representing you as well.

The recruitment experts at PrideStaff can put their years of experience and market intelligence to work for you as you develop and implement your strategic hiring process. To learn more, contact us today.

Tips for Getting Hired Long Distance

Making a geographic move to enhance your career shouldn’t be a hassle. While any job search is stressful, the right position in the right town can be an exciting and rewarding new path in life.

Here are some strategies and tips for your long-distance job hunt:

Develop a relocation strategy.

The average job search takes anywhere from three months to a year. Develop your relocation planning strategy with this time frame in mind.

Decide on a time frame for your own move. Then, determine whether you can make one or two scouting trips to your new city. Ideally, the first trip is exploratory, so you can investigate housing and get a first-hand look at the area. The second is for interviews and finalizing details.

Research your new city.

Once you have targeted a specific geographic area where you want to live and work, use Internet sites and other available resources to learn as much as you can about it. The bottom line: Be sure it suits you before you make a move.

Make sure you’ll be able to handle the cost of living.
Decide whether you’ll be comfortable with the regional climate and cultural offerings.

Gauge the opportunities in your new town.

Find out who the major employers are and which ones are currently hiring. Resources you can use include:

Geographic-specific job sites.
Local libraries, telephone directories and chambers of commerce.
Local college websites. They usually focus on their surrounding areas, as many of their graduates tend to seek work there.

Make a list of employers you want to target and identify key people to contact. A list of approximately 20 is a good start.

Don’t disregard the want ads. Although only about 5 percent of job seekers find positions there, they remain a viable tool when you are relocating. You can check them out online at classified ad listing sites.
Read the paper. Learn about regional employment trends by turning to the business section of the local newspaper in your targeted city. If there is a business journal, add that to your research toolbox. Learn about current hiring trends and any new businesses opening or relocating there.

Brainstorm ways to network.

Networking is still the best way to land a job. Contact all your connections and let them know of your plans.

Think of ways to network with people at your target companies. Professional associations are a leading venue for this purpose. Join them and access their membership directories.
Now is the time to use all your LinkedIn connections. This means second- and third-level contacts, as well as those in your inner circle.

Consider temping.

If the planned date for your move is looming and you don’t have a full-time job lined up, consider temping. It’s a great way to get your foot in the door.

At PrideStaff Fresno, every candidate’s job search is an adventure. We love to help you find great opportunities, both temporary and regular. We’re committed to help you advance your career, whether it’s in your local market or somewhere new. Contact us today to learn more.

Have a Fun Company Culture – Not a Waste of Time

Happy employees are productive employees. And when a business is at its maximum level of productivity, its competitive edge is sharp. So, it’s well worth your investment to build and nourish your company culture.

While every organizational culture is unique, a common denominator critical to success is having a safe, satisfying work environment that is fun – yet by no means equates to wasting anyone’s time on the job.

A culture that facilitates employee happiness means improved recruitment, lower turnover and overall enhanced performance. You can get there by:

Recognizing Milestones and Achievements

Making your employees feel appreciated goes a long way toward creating a positive company culture. Celebrating milestones and honoring wins builds morale by encouraging both the honoree and those around them. It sends a compelling message that important events are noticed and acknowledged.

Make recognition personal. Whatever award you give, be sure it is meaningful to the individual receiving it. Google, one of the world’s most popular places to work, awarded a star employee with a week off for his birthday, because his young daughter wrote the company a letter and requested it.
Celebrate birthdays and work anniversaries. These are meaningful milestones. Gather the gang together for a round of applause, an appropriate gift and words of congratulations.

Getting Out of the Office – Together

Give your team a break and get away from your worksite as a group. People will come back with increased focus and productivity.

Take a field trip or have a party. It can be as simple as leaving an hour early and going to a local sporting event. Host a picnic in a local park or simply plan a happy hour once a month. December calendars are chock full, so why not plan a “beat the blahs” party for a date in January or February?
Volunteer together. This not only enables employees to better get acquainted outside of work, it also serves your community. The latter, by the way, is a leading draw for top talent. Both current employees and prospects feel positive about a company that is a good corporate neighbor.

Making Social Media Social

Of course, you use social media to boost your business. Be sure to also use it to foster your positive culture.

Engage both clients and employees. Keep conversations alive with topics that are both business-related and fun. Allow team members time to use their personal accounts to promote your products, services and/or job openings. Periodically, interject content that keeps them engaged and fosters their interpersonal relationships. For example, one employer used company social media to ask, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?” Employees chimed in during their spare time and had a great time, which in turn led to higher on-the-job satisfaction.

Are you looking for more ideas to build your company culture in 2016? The workforce development experts at PrideStaff Fresno can help. Turn to us as you develop your industry-leading strategies for recruitment, retention and talent management. To learn more, contact us today.

Another Year Behind Us: Preparing for Success in 2016

Fast away the old year passes … and with the fourth quarter rapidly winding down, you need to be ready for whatever hiring challenges come your way in 2016. For many HR pros, this means vowing – once again – that their time in the new year will be spent less on putting out staffing fires, and more on proactive planning and building for the future.

What can you do differently to actually realize your annual HR goals this time around?

Hire Proactively

Make it your New Year’s resolution to avoid reactive hiring. This is what happens when your business has a sudden customer challenge or wave of unexpected, business-critical vacancies, and you find yourself scrambling to staff up with the first warm bodies available. Does it sound painfully familiar?

Hire in the direction of your company’s future. Anticipate potential business issues and the related effects on your workforce. Implement a plan to build your bench strength and stay ahead of the hiring curve.
Put the right people in the right roles. This helps ensure that your company will function better and can put its focus on what matters most: being productive and profitable. Hire at least six months out at a time, with the goal of staffing for where you want to go, instead of backtracking and fixing where you’ve been.

Hire Stronger

Hiring great talent starts long before you need to bring them on board. For success in 2016, that means deepening and strengthening your talent pool now.

Have a plan. Your workforce plan should be in place three to four months ahead, addressing 80 percent of your hiring needs for the following quarter. If not, you won’t have enough good people when you need to start interviewing.
Build performance profiles. Top candidates – active or passive – want to know what they will be doing before they’ll even discuss the possibility of a job change. Create strong performance profiles before even opening a job requisition.
Maximize your quality of hire. Predict QOH before making an offer. This requires that jobs are clearly defined as a series of performance objectives, and a candidate has done comparable and exceptional work in a similar business environment.
Every job should represent a non-monetary increase. The basis for any career move needs to be the sum of the increase in job stretch, job growth and job satisfaction. If this equates to at least 30 percent, compensation will be less important and success and retention rates will be significantly higher.

What better time than now to partner with a specialized staffing firm as you pave the way for successful sourcing, recruitment, retention and staff development in 2016? Read our related posts or contact the PrideStaff Fresno team to learn more about how we can help you make this happen.

Developing a Handbook for Wearable Technology at Work

We’ve entered another new era in technology – and this time, you can wear it.

Maybe it’s a pair of Google glasses that feature a computer with a small LED display. It is voice activated, and users can scroll through menus to take photos, shoot videos, upload files, search the web, check email, and more.

Or maybe it’s a baseball cap equipped with sensors to detect driver awareness. This device alerts your long-distance truckers when they approach a state of “micro sleep,” in order to prevent fatigue-related accidents.

The list goes on. Various studies estimate that within five years, the wearable technology business could mushroom into a $42 billion industry.

What do you need to know as you begin educating your workforce in this up-and-coming area?

The Pros and Cons

Wearable technology has blurred the lines a bit between the human body and technology. Consider this: At Epicenter, a think tank known as Stockholm’s House of Innovation, about 20 percent of the 250 employees have had near-field communication (NFC) chips implanted under the skin in their hands, thus eliminating the need for key fobs or electronic entry cards.

As the wearable technology sector develops, employers will be able to acquire more and more information about their employees. Then the debate becomes: Who really owns this intangible property known as “life data?v”

The promise of data-driven efficiency to monitor employee activity and improve productivity can be alluring, but it may come at a cost: your employees’ privacy. As noted by the University of London’s Charles Brauer, “It started with Big Data discussions around gathering business insights and not having the human accounted for in that data puzzle. Wearable tech makes the workforce visible in that.”
A key trend is companies using wearable devices to track employee health. Employers distribute fitness monitors to keep tabs on employees’ activity levels, as part of corporate wellness programs. This data can then be tied to health insurance or other incentive programs to reduce costs. In 2013, approximately 2,000 companies worldwide offered their workers fitness trackers. In 2014, this number skyrocketed to 10,000. It is anticipated that, by the end of 2016, most companies with more than 500 employees will offer fitness trackers.
While wearable technology can bring significant benefits, it also comes with challenges. As devices gather increasing volumes of personal and biometric data, gadgets don’t always have rigorous encryption or other protections to safeguard privacy. This could leave companies exposed to data leaks or threats. It also may create oppressive work environments, if wearable tech is perceived as a surveillance tool versus something to enhance productivity or performance.

There will always be questions about the use of wearable technology at work as it applies to your business and your staff. For the latest market intelligence and resources to address these issues, consider partnering with PrideStaff Fresno. We can work with you to build and develop an industry-leading workforce that is ready to take technical challenges head on. Read our related posts or contact us today to learn more.

Following Career Mentors Online

Online networking is an excellent way to connect with and follow people who can advise you and help advance your career. If you are clear and concise about what you want, and become an active participant who shares in the conversational give and take, your online network will be the springboard to lifelong mentoring relationships.

Leverage LinkedIn

LinkedIn remains the premier global social platform for making and developing business relationships. Connect to your mentor on LinkedIn, as a stepping stone to a face-to-face meeting.

If your mentor is in another city or state, see if you can meet at an upcoming conference or event. Or, set up a Google Hangout or Skype conversation. Take ample time to prepare and to know exactly what you want from the meeting. This way, you’ll make a strong first impression.

Tweet Effectively

Although many people use Twitter as a broadcast medium, it works best for your career when you utilize it conversationally.

Capture someone’s attention by mentioning their handle in your tweet. A mention is an update that contains “@username” somewhere in a tweet. Reply to your desired contact or take it a step further by directly tweeting at the person to initiate a conversation. Start small, with something like, “Excellent presentation. Thanks for sharing,” before you make a specific request.
Use hashtags. Clicking on a hashtag will show you all the other tweets marked with that word or phrase. You can save your search to follow topics of interest over time. This is useful because many business leaders have created relevant hashtags for their communities to follow. Twitter chats also use hashtags to record or supplement their events’ activities. You can join a conversation by using the same hashtag — and discover new people, information and contacts, as well.

Join Facebook or LinkedIn Groups

Facebook and LinkedIn groups differ from pages, as they are more about conversations and community. They often are closed or invitation only – but not always, so be sure to familiarize yourself with their privacy settings before you post.

You often find more intimate and honest conversations in Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Typically, participants are willing and eager to help fellow group members.

Utilize Meetup.com

Research meetups in your geographic area. Reach out to the organizers using the “contact” button on the group’s home page. They are likely to be well connected and can introduce you to appropriate people. Be sure to follow up by attending an event and solidifying relationships in person.

Finding and building relationships with your career mentors is a key step in your overall job search strategy. For additional tips and resources on fine-tuning your process for success, read our related posts or contact the specialized recruiters at PrideStaff Fresno today.

Wait … Who Would Hire You? The Importance of Self-Assessment

Self-assessment should be at the core of your job search strategy as you sell yourself to prospective employers. This means not only evaluating yourself, but also taking an objective look at how others see you.

Of course, you likely already know what you want to do and the direction you want to take. But, this is your career – it’s not something you want to treat lightly. Finding happiness and true fulfillment begins with knowing yourself.

How to Self-Assess

Effective self-assessment is a process that helps you succeed in networking, applying for jobs, interviewing, and when the time comes, negotiating your desired compensation package. Be prepared to pitch who you are, what you know and have experienced, and the contributions you can make. This means:

Accurately and concisely describing your skills, abilities, interests and passions.
Comfortably discussing the reasons you’re the best person for a job. (Hint: You have to believe them yourself before you can sell them to others!)
Knowing, for your own sake, if you really want a position.

Be sure you know your values – the things most important to you, such as work/life balance and the right cultural alignment. This means having a firm grasp on your personality, which reflects your behavioral style. Choosing a career where your personality can soar will reward your effort for time spent self-analyzing – and set you on the path to growth and success within your new organization.

Prioritize your values in order of their importance to you. Do they provide a good fit within the culture of the hiring company?

How Do Others See You?

Now that you’ve defined who should hire you, based on your self-assessment, take a good look at who would hire you, based on what a potential employer could learn about you if they conducted a search. Because they will.

Google yourself. More than 80 percent of employers Google candidates to review their reputations. If they find anything that reflects negatively on you, you probably won’t make the interview short list. If necessary, practice defensive Googling to prevent any damaging results from appearing in a search of your name. Google values freshness, so keep adding new information to make positive features show up.
Optimize your social media presence. When an employer Googles you, they’ll find – among other things – your LinkedIn and Google + profiles and your Twitter bio. Assume that they also will check your Facebook account and other platforms. Spend one or two hours a week keeping your online reputation clean. Think of this as personal branding. The greater your online visibility, the better your reputation and the more likely it is that your resume will make it to the “interview” pile, versus the trash.

Who would hire you? And who should? If you need help defining your career direction, consider partnering with a professional recruiter from PrideStaff Fresno. At no cost to you, we can set you on the path to success. For more information, read our related posts or contact us today.

The Modern Resume: Creating a Professional LinkedIn Page

LinkedIn has a unique distinction among social media platforms. Its purpose is professional networking, not socializing or making personal connections – though this can be an added benefit.

When a hiring manager looks at your LinkedIn page, give them the impression that it’s on point and on purpose – and that you truly care about the direction your career path is taking you.

Use the following tips to optimize your professional LinkedIn image.

Display a professional photo and headline.

You are seven-times more likely to have your profile viewed if you have a professional photo on LinkedIn. And your headline is what LinkedIn tells visitors about you, no matter where you are on the site.

Your photo should portray you at your professional best. This means no children, no pets, no spouses, and no casual vacation shots. Use a well-composed headshot.
If you have no LinkedIn photo, the assumption is that something is wrong. It’s like a house on the market: If you can’t see it, how could you possibly consider buying it? Plus, a missing photo can lead to missing connections. If you leave a networking event with a handful of business cards, it’s much easier to connect online if you know what a person looks like.
Your headline is the title that defines you. This is how you will appear in searches. Make sure it’s accurate, specific, and professionally defines you.

“Sell” yourself through your summary.

Your LinkedIn summary is an online version of the “objective” section on your resume – only better. Since you’re writing online, you have the luxury of more space.

Filling out your summary can give you an edge on the competition. Write it in the first person to give it more energy and personality.

Keep your status up-to-date.

Every few days, put something fresh in your LinkedIn Status to show that you’re active and engaged. Whether you share industry news or a link to a relevant article, this space is great for building connections.

The people you’re updating in your network are valuable. If you have a great following, this is part of the assets you bring to the table.

List your entire work history.

Unlike your resume, where you’re trying to target one or two pages toward a specific position, you should list your entire work history on LinkedIn.

You never know what criteria may drive a hiring decision. Maybe a recruiter went through the same fast-food training program you did, and wants you for the customer service skills they know you learned.
Include volunteer work. Emphasize important tasks completed and skills acquired.

Customize your connection messages.

Avoid using the standard request when establishing connections. Your goal is to build relationships that will leverage into career opportunities, so tailor your message to the specific recipient.

People who use LinkedIn correctly want to be connected to individuals who make them look good. Employers appreciate your connections and may even hire you because you know the right people and can make things happen.

For the best results from your online presence and other facets of your job search strategy, consider partnering with a specialized recruiter from PrideStaff. Read our related posts or contact us today for more information.

When Should You Hold Out for a Better Candidate?

Confront your assumptions.

Involve team members.

Fit the personality to the job.

Tips for Getting Hired Long Distance

Develop a relocation strategy.

Research your new city.

Gauge the opportunities in your new town.

Brainstorm ways to network.

Consider temping.

Have a Fun Company Culture – Not a Waste of Time

Recognizing Milestones and Achievements

Getting Out of the Office – Together

Making Social Media Social

Another Year Behind Us: Preparing for Success in 2016

Hire Proactively

Hire Stronger

Top 3 Job Seeker Posts of 2015

Interview Negotiation Strategies

Read the article here

Will Your Career Path Keep You Happy?

Read the article here

How to Rebound from an Interview Mistake

Read the article here

Top 3 HR Posts of 2015

Avoid Micromanagement

Read the article here

The Importance of Onboarding

Read the article here

Best Practices for Office Efficiency

Read the article here

Developing a Handbook for Wearable Technology at Work

The Pros and Cons

Following Career Mentors Online

Leverage LinkedIn

Tweet Effectively

Join Facebook or LinkedIn Groups

Utilize Meetup.com

Wait … Who Would Hire You? The Importance of Self-Assessment

How to Self-Assess

How Do Others See You?

The Modern Resume: Creating a Professional LinkedIn Page

Display a professional photo and headline.

“Sell” yourself through your summary.

Keep your status up-to-date.

List your entire work history.

Customize your connection messages.