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Referrals – The Emperor’s New Hiring Practice

Referrals – The Emperor’s New Hiring Practice It’s easy to get excited about referrals if you’re a recruiter: You get candidates pre-screened by current employees, you pay only a little more in hiring costs, you get new hires in place faster who stay in the job longer, and you boost your employer brand.  What’s not to love? Love referrals all you want, but don’t put your hiring budget where your heart is.  Here’s why… Referrals aren’t the best choice for business, despite the claims of advocates such as Dr. John Sullivan.  Behind all the hype is a limited sourcing method that gives only minimally better results than traditional methods – and costs more. Here’s four reasons why referrals are the Emperor’s New Hiring Practice: Referrals don’t deliver high quality hires – Everyone wants high quality hires – top performers who stay with the company.  But fewer than half of all new hires get rated “good” or above six months in, and 46% fail to last even 18 months in their new job.  Are referrals better?  There are a lot of claims and individual company anecdotes but very few reliable numbers to back them up.  The only study so far to [...]

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3 Reasons to Turn Down the Job at Google

You’d have to be a crazy person to turn down a job offer from Google… Right?

As a kid, I had my dream job all figured out. I wanted to rule the world, wear non-matching sneakers, eat ice cream and take play breaks whenever I wanted. Truth be told, I’d still jump at that job. And there is one place it could happen: The Googleplex. Google’s not only one of the most dynamic, most successful and most innovative companies in the world, it’s an incredibly fun place to work.

So why would anyone say no to that shiny, sparkly Google offer?

Ditching the investor’s pet candidate

“I’ve got someone for your team,” the investor said. “She’s smart, capable, enthusiastic and she’s looking to help build a business.”

I made all the right noises. The candidate’s background sounded great and – crucially – she was willing to take a big pay cut in return for the opportunity to be in at the start of a startup. Plus hiring a potential investor’s golden girl couldn’t hurt.

Or could it?

What’s Gen Y’s game?

People have always played games at work – tic-tac-toe, solitaire, let’s-bitch-about-the-boss – but nobody thought work should be a game until Gen Y turned up with their Xboxes and demanded that work be fun.

Employers have gotten the message. Badgeville, a startup that helps companies use online games to attract customers, secured $12 million in funding. Arcade shooting games have been reinvented as training simulations for semiconductor factories. Microsoft offered users Ribbon Hero 2 to help them learn the Windows operating system. Even the British government got in on the act with a multiplayer game called Idea Street that captures employee innovations in government departments. Gartner Group estimated last year that more than 70% of the world’s largest 2,000 companies would have at least one gamified application by 2015.

Is gamification working?

Assessing the job: the hidden part of selection

We hear a lot about assessing candidates, but nobody mentions the other side of selection: assessing the job.

It’s strange we miss this step, because it’s obvious different jobs make different demands. We can all think of a star performer in one role who bombed in another, and different contexts can have a huge impact: Someone who was a star buyer at Ralph Lauren is going to face very different challenges at Walmart. Finding the best candidate is not just about ranking absolute levels of potential: it’s about matching candidates to the specific demands of a specific job.

Jobs are people too

“I hate my job.”

“I love my job.”

“I am just getting to know my job.”

“I am tired of my job.”

Right now you could probably voice one (or more, simultaneously?) of these emotional judgments about your current job – if you are lucky enough to have a current job. If you don’t have a current job, you certainly have emotional judgments about that, too.

Psychometric profiling: All about Eve (and Adam)

The words “psychometric profiling” might scare the heck out of most people. Psycho is a bad start to anything, and isn’t profiling what they do to serial killers?

Well, maybe, but let’s stay calm. At Matchpoint Careers, we use psychometrics and we create profiles and nobody’s going crazy here.

Actually, “psychometric profiling” just names the process of gaining an understanding of what people are like at work: how they behave, what kind of environments enable them to thrive and what skills and capabilities they bring to their jobs.

Profiling lets us match people and jobs, by looking at the factors that genuinely predict on-the-job performance. These factors are three

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