Recruiting 3.0: Today, It’s All About “Making Meaningful Connections”

This is my tweet (see below) from Thursday afternoon after I got a glimpse of this campaign to find a new CTO.

Not only that, but the person that is eventually chosen can have $10,000 donated to his favorite charity.

“A CTO with heart” does not quite fit into my mind when I think of a CTO. I know numerous Chief Technical Officers, but I would be hard pressed to figure out which one had “heart” in this context.

How Would You Do If You Were Ranked By Your Former Employees?

I saw and interesting article this week about a Glassdoor survey  which shows that the highest rated CEO is Tim Cook of Apple.

His approval rating was a whopping 97 percent. That rating even beat out his former boss, Steve Jobs. And as so many have reported, Jobs was pretty challenging to work for.

That was not what surprised me, though.

I wondered about how we, as leaders and managers, would be rated by our former direct reports. How would we fare?

Staying connected with former colleagues

Transparency: Does Your Company “Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk?”

"I am sorry, but we have already identified someone for that role." The next question was, "how could that be, the job was just posted on the Internet?"

What my friend had just found out is a little dirty secret in some organizations. Sometimes when jobs are posted, and even when they are not, hiring managers already have someone lined up for the opportunity.

What message does that send?

My friend was beside himself; what he found out was that this is the norm within this company. There is not much movement so there is a thirst for advancement, but unless you are in the clique, your thirst will not be quenched

I remember back when I worked for IBM that we always pushed internal advancement in an open and transparent process. We posted open positions internally on Thursday’s. It became such a great initiative that we had everyone checking their computer as soon as they hit their desk on Thursday.

When You Ignore Culture, You Get Employees Resigning in the NY Times

“I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

That is the defining statement from Greg Smith, the now famous departing employee who resigned from Goldman Sachs last week via an article on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

As I read the various commentaries about Smith’s article, it seemed like reading the movie reviews before you see the film. That is, the movie being the actual resignation letter.

I would never get into the cause of this breakup because I have always said, in any situation, there are three sides: My side, your side and the truth. What intrigued me after I read the resignation was his statement about corporate culture.

Everyone Wins When You Help Get Employees Into the Value Zone

One of the things I love about being in HR is that everyone always bring you these rich stories that sometimes causes you to have an “a-ha” moment.

A major retail chain this past week did something that, for a retail company, needs to be lauded. In retail, you have a workforce that is largely made up of hourly employees. They are the people that face the customers each and every day. Good mood or bad mood, they must keep the stiff upper lip and remember that the “customer is always right.”

One of the challenges all retail companies face is the weekly schedule. Trying to place people in slots, or work around challenges in their lives, is an enormous uphill battle both for the manager as well as the employee. I owned a 7-Eleven convenience store for 10 years, so I am very familiar with this weekly challenge. I had 11 people on the payroll, and trust me, it is a challenge.

What Great Leaders Know: It’s About Getting the Right People on the Bus

 I have been to the mountaintop.

This past week, I was in Austin, Texas for TLNT Transform, which was billed as a new type HR conference. While not a presenter, I served as conference chair. This allowed me to not only sit in on all the presentations, but it gave me insight into all the speakers since part of my role was to introduce each speaker and to get some insight into their presentation.

From the moment I entered the doors of HR, I always felt that more could be done within the role that could benefit the organization. I say that based on other roles within the company. Marketing, Finance and IT were all not only structurally defined but had a unique role in their organization’s strategy.

Diversity: It’s Good For Business, the Workplace, and All of Our Lives

It’s OK if the formula does not make sense.

I have watched with amusement these past few weeks the reaction in the sports world to the phenomenon called Jeremy Lin.

Not being much of a sports fan (especially basketball), I had to delve a little deeper than the normal fan. Chinese-American and Harvard-educated does not normally equal star in the NBA — or at least, that would have been the thinking before Lin.

But it goes back to show how we humans have certain mindsets, and how we have all painted our own picture of what utopia would look like.

Do You Know “When” It’s Time to Go? Here Are 8 Tell-Tale Signs

How do you know “when?”

When I went away to college, my father told me that if you are thinking of getting married, college is the perfect place to find a wife. Since he had been right about everything else in life, I took his advice.

Six months in I saw a young lady across campus and I knew then that she was the one. Fast forward, two kids later, and I knew it was the best decision I had ever made.

On one of my previous jobs, employee morale had sunk to such a low point that it was almost unbearable to go to work. My dream job had morphed into an atmosphere that was unrecognizable. In both of these situations, I knew “when.”

Giving Hope For All Those Impacted by the Social Media Onslaught

Last Saturday, I was an invited guest on a panel discussion during Social Media Weekend at Columbia University.

This is their second annual Social Media Weekend hosted by Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs, and a big social media fan. My panel guest were Maggie Mistal, nationally known career coach and former co-worker, along with David Gaspin, Head of Talent Acquisition at the Ladders. The name of our panel was "Social Media and Job Search."

The weekend consisted of workshops, panels and keynotes to help journalists, media professionals and others understand social media. Our current crop of social media tools are talked about constantly and get a lot of press.