My new book, Success for Hire (ASTD Press) features employee recruitment and retention practices that a lot of people think they know but in reality, don’t put into practice.  One of those practices is effective in-person interviewing, which can ensure that you hire the right candidate the first time around.  The next time you speak ...

I frequently get asked about whether or not I recommend companies participate in job fairs to find qualified candidates.  But open houses are often a more effective means of initiating face-to-face contact with a large number of potential recruits.  In an open house, you invite candidates to an event at your organization’s offices or a ...

It’s interesting.  You always hear about supermoms trying to do it all, but what about superdads?  Here’s what Stephanie Armour at USA Today has to say about this issue: Todd Scott, 32, has two children under age 5.  Each workday, he leaves his job at Himmelrich Public Relations in Baltimore at 5 p.m. to be with his family, and ...

This week on Adventures in Capitalism, Chris Yeh talks about how he recently worked with a team of entrepreneurs who had done a phenomenal job of building a product that their customers loved, but couldn’t figure how to sell it to big companies for the life of them.  In no time at all, Chris rattled off the marketing and promotional plan that ...

Now that I’m a manager, I’ve found that it’s partly up to me to ensure that my reports have good work/life balance. I’ve seen other supervisors ignore this issue, expecting that work should be the only thing that matters to employees, and the department is a revolving door.  Here are some of the methods I’ve used or seen used ...

The customer’s always right.  This is the mantra that customer service representatives have to repeat to themselves every day – if they want to keep their jobs.  But what happens when you come into contact with a particularly angry customer, who is determined to give you a piece of her mind?  When I was writing They Don’t Teach ...

Lately, I’ve been speaking at a lot of colleges regarding the challenges new graduates can expect to face in the workplace, and how they can conduct themselves professionally and diplomatically in order to ensure their success.  A lot of my tips are things that I wish someone had told me when I was still in school, before I got my first job ...

[ImageAttachment] A topic that’s been coming up a lot in my discussions with twenty and thirty-something employees is empowerment.  Today’s younger workers want to come into a job and have the autonomy to take hold of projects and run with them self-sufficiently.  However, their baby boomer managers, more often than not, hold them back ...

[ImageAttachment] Chris Brogan at the Lifehack blog had an interesting perspective on what your boss wants – and doesn’t want – from you this year.  Some of his ideas: Your Boss Wants… You to “get it” quickly, develop a plan quickly, and then take action You to clear all the smaller roadblocks yourself, exercising creativity without ...