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Recruiting Excellent Job Candidates
An independent recruiter, recruiting agency or executive search firm is charged with tracking down excellent potential candidates for available job positions. Despite the fact that there are innumerable people seeking positions of employment in the 21st century, it often seems to a typical recruiting agency that qualified men and women are few and far between.Here are six easy tips that recruiting services, staffing firms, or executive search firms should keep in mind when on the hunt for outstanding potential job candidates in the 21st century.These tips are equally applicable to companies undertaking their own search without the help of recruiting agency services. Indeed, the headaches associated with finding qualified personnel is magnified for a company undertaking its own recruitment efforts.1. Post an Ad on an Industry-specific Job Board. Oftentimes, a recruiter will take a scattershot approach to finding candidates that are worthy of consideration for an available position. They broadcast far and wide the fact that a certain position is open and available, in big city newspapers and on major Internet job boards.If a recruiting agency were more thoughtful about its recruitment efforts, it would realize the benefits of positing an announcement of an available position on an industry-specific Internet job board. By posting in a selective and admittedly limited manner, recruiters and staffing firms would be reaching out precisely to the pool of people most likely to be qualified for an open position.One excellent tool for finding industry-specific job boards can be accessed at the Online Recruiters Job Board Directory.2. Use Recruiters that Specialize in a Given Field. As with advertis

ou increase your odds of making a poor decision.

Each position should have a job description. We mentioned the importance of job descriptions earlier, from a cash flow component, a small business should make sure that most if not all of the positions it is hiring for include a positive bottom line component. What do I mean? I mean you should be able to link the duties laid out in the job description back to either an increase in Revenue or a decrease in expenses. Either way, each and every position should positively impact your overall bottom line. If you stick to this rule, you are putting yourself in a good cash flow position. So before you hire your next employee, run this acid test, ask the question, is this person going to positively impact the bottom line. If yes

How To Answer Questions At Interviews
Getting The Job Of Your Dreams – Interview QuestionsEmployer: “Why would you like to work for us?”Candidate: “I will like to work for your company because it will give me the opportunity to further develop my skills and attain my career ambitions.”Now let us break down the answer to the question above.“I will like to work for your company” – It s about you! “It will give me the opportunity to” – It’s still about you! “Develop my skills and attain my career ambitions” – Once again, it’s about you!What about the employer?What’s in it for them?Don’t just listen to what is being said, listen to what they mean by what they are saying.It’s obvious what your answer means: You just want the job to fulfil your personal goals.Employers are not a charity club. This is not why they recruit people. They have their own needs, requirements and desires.This is what the question above actually mean:Employer: “What do you have to bring to the table that will help our business grow and why do you want to help us achieve this?“How does your interest, needs, desires and goals help meet our own interest, desires, needs and goals”Consider this: Husband: “ I will like to buy you that blender because I love the smoothies my mother makes.Wife: “ I can’t believe how selfish you are!”Husband: “ What now! It’s a gift for you not for me you stupid blob. How does that make me selfish?”Do you now see why most women complain all the time about their husbands?You see, everyone cares first about their own needs and in most cases would rather have them met before thinking of meeting yours; especially if you are a total stranger.For example:If you’ve ever had a severe toothache, then you will know that unless you are Jesus C

Is your business still sitting on the runway? We call a business that can fly a Flourishing Business. If you follow the Flourishing Business Methodology you can get your business to really take off. There are tried and true methods for creating a successful business. These include structured sales and marketing, efficient employees, loyal customers, focusing your business plan, systematic processes, positive cash flow and cultivating value in your marketplace.

Using the following Flourishing Methods will allow you to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of your growth. By making smart decisions and avoiding potential pitfalls you can enjoy the personal and professional rewards that should come with entrepreneurship. Here are 9 quick tips for every business owner who aspires to be on the path to flourishing.

1. Learn the difference between sales and marketing and how to make each Flourish Many people think they understand sales and marketing but very few actually do. Marketing is a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering market value to clients and for managing customer relationships in ways that best benefit the organization. Selling is the act of persuading or influencing a customer to buy (actually exchange something of value for) a product or service. However, marketing activities should support the sales efforts. Actually, marketing should be the most significant force in stimulating sales.

Marketing attracts people and gets them to listen, sales closes the deal. For complex sales these are two very different functions. Even if you are selling soap or chewing gum or any low involvement product (products which are frequently bought with a minimum of thought and effort because they are not of vital concern nor do they have any great impact on the consumer's lifestyle) you still need to understand how to sell and how to market your product or service. If your desire is to grow your business, you need to bring on the best people you can find to join you in both of these areas.

Sales and marketing are not just common sense; the finer subtleties many times can be counterintuitive. So don’t try and just wing it, learn from and leverage experts who really know what they are doing. Sales and marketing should be distinctive activities, expertise in one does not necessarily mean expertise in the other, but they need to be cohesively linked to each other and to the overall corporate strategy. They also need to be the two areas of your business that you are getting the biggest ROI from investing in. If you are not, you need to learn how to do it better, because mediocre sales and marketing efforts are a recipe for failure.

2. Find good employees by intelligently hiring them Too many people wait until they are desperate to hire before they start looking. They force themselves into a bad position of hiring the first person they can find who has a pulse and seems like they are capable of a reasonable job. By being desperate, they take themselves out of the power position. When you lose power you lose choice and when you lose your power for choice, you increase your odds of making a poor decision.

Cross Cultural Blunders
At our company we often get many emails from visitors to our sites saying how much they enjoy examples of cross cultural blunders. We are constantly asked for more. Bowing to pressure we have therefore complied some more examples of how cultural ignorance can and does lead to negative (and much of the time humorous) consequences.The following cultural blunders are therefore presented to our visitors and we would again like to stress that such examples of ‘culture gone wrong’ are presented in order illustrate to people how crucial cultural awareness is in international business today.Managers at one American company were startled when they discovered that the brand name of the cooking oil they were marketing in a Latin American country translated into Spanish as "Jackass Oil."American Motors tried to market its new car, the Matador, based on the image of courage and strength. However, in Puerto Rico the name means "killer" and was not popular on the hazardous roads in the country.A sales manager in Hong Kong tried to control employee's promptness at work. He insisted they come to work on time instead of 15 minutes late. They complied, but then left exactly on time instead of working into the evening as they previously had done. Much work was left unfinished until the manager relented and they returned to their usual time schedule.A US telephone company tried to market its products and services to Latinos by showing a commercial in which a Latino wife tells her husband to call a friend, telling her they would be late for dinner. The commercial bombed since Latino women do not order their husbands around and their use of time would not require a call about lateness.A cologne for men pictured a pastoral scene with a man and his dog. It failed in Islamic countries dogs are considered unclean.<

o aspires to be on the path to flourishing.

There Is A Strong Parallel Between Physical And Fiscal Health
There is a strong parallel between corporations and medical science. Companies fall sick just as people do. Contrary to the common view, a company is not an inanimate object. Rather, it is a community of people, a living organism and an entity with its own distinctive personality and attitudes. Therefore, without proper care, a company, which has a life of its own, will perish. Rather than understanding businesses by using some mechanical or industrial models, it is useful to understand them from the perspective of ecology of organisms. Like all organisms, the companies exist primarily for their own survival and improvement as well as fulfill their full potential. Similarly, as human beings, we exist to survive and thrive.At the antenatal stage, just as in the case of the impregnation of the human embryo, a company is incorporated through a concept wherein the founder explores or brainstorms the initial idea. In the case of the person, the foetus will be nurtured through antenatal care till birth. For the company it is conceptualized from a feasibility report on its commercial viability followed by incubation and culminating in its start up. The company may have been born out of a merger or acquisition, the social marriage for corporations. At birth, the start up company is a baby. Some babies are stillborn and aborted due to various congenital defects. Similarly, some start-up companies are aborted due to lack of funds or breakup in the partnerships.A healthy person is like a profitable company, full of vitality and energy, whereas a patient is akin to a troubled company plagued by problems. The trouble is often financial in nature. When the company is sick, it needs a corporate doctor for healing or turnaround. In many cases, the sick company requires fresh injection of funds

different functions. Even if you are selling soap or chewing gum or any low involvement product (products which are frequently bought with a minimum of thought and effort because they are not of vital concern nor do they have any great impact on the consumer's lifestyle) you still need to understand how to sell and how to market your product or service. If your desire is to grow your business, you need to bring on the best people you can find to join you in both of these areas.

Employee Disengagement - The Lights Are On But Nobody's Home
The world of business is changing dramatically. There was a time in corporate America when employees were closely connected with their employers – when they had a sense of corporate loyalty. This is seldom true today. The reason? The old psychological contract between employer and employee has been broken.There were reasons for breaking the psychological contract - heavy competition, cost pressures, having to do more with less - all of these have impacted most corporate cultures resulting in staff reductions, and higher demands on remaining staff with little or no recognition of their efforts. The result is that employees are ready to leave on short notice for what they perceive to be better opportunities. And the most likely to leave are those who are contributing the most to the business.Some employers brashly say they will simply replace these employees – there are many available candidates out there who could do the job better. This attitude is one of the main factors driving these employees to leave. And employers making such statements may not realize that they cause employees to leave mentally long before they leave physically – these employees simply disengage.What is the cost to the business of employee disengagement? One way it can be measured is in declining productivity. People can be working longer hours but accomplishing less because they are no longer committed to results. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.So what can employers do? Fire them all? They could, but what would happen to the business as a result? What would be the cost of replacing them? There’s a more effective way of addressing the problem. Employers can hold up the mirror and take a good look. The person in the mirror is responsible for breaking the psychological contract. The good news is that he/she al

expertise in the other, but they need to be cohesively linked to each other and to the overall corporate strategy. They also need to be the two areas of your business that you are getting the biggest ROI from investing in. If you are not, you need to learn how to do it better, because mediocre sales and marketing efforts are a recipe for failure.

Internet Mystery Shopping – How Should You Choose a Mystery Shopping Agency?
There are of course, many mystery shopping agencies that will sell you their bells and whistles approach, whereby ‘experienced’ researchers will descend on a business and collect information relating to products and services.If we consider the cost base on this factor alone, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it is out of reach for most ‘new’ and ‘growing’ companies. However, without some kind of customer feedback mechanism profitable growth can be limited by bad service and poor customer perception.Today, so much money is spent on sales and marketing, but the importance of the customers’ perception can easily become forgotten. Bad customer perception is like having the taps open in a sink with no plug. Then there's the unrelenting 'sales push. 'Sales/telesales people targeted with more and more conversions, high advertising budgets with little evaluation of their effectiveness. All of these things cost businesses’ money.What if customer satisfaction could be measured almost immediately after the sale? Most businesses record lost sales, but they don’t have an effective way of measuring lost incremental sales.Spending money on a structured approach, with all the associated costs and resource doesn’t seem like a very ‘lean’ way of operating in this day and age. Customer feedback simply can’t be measured effectively when very high transaction volumes are made over a short space of time. Things can get missed, customers are unhappy and sales are lost. It can be difficult to actually measure the impact on the bottom line.It is very clear that keeping close to your customers and allowing the ones that want to ‘feedback’ to your business can do so in a timely and efficient manner is absolute key to any business that wants to be the best in its class. Getting the right feedback from customers cou

ou increase your odds of making a poor decision.

Using an assessment test for proficiency, aptitude and work style and psychological profile are also great ways to insulate yourself from the perils of making hiring decisions based on intuition. While I’m a big fan of intuition when it comes to making business decisions, using intuition to make hiring decisions is often not a good idea. Because of our natural social biases and the way that we judge people subconsciously without even realizing why we like or dislike someone, it is unwise to simply use instincts when making hiring decisions. There are many great resources available for profiling employees’ natural abilities and assessing their potential to gel with a certain team environment or succeed at a certain role. When you think of all the time you spend in training a new employee, investing time and resources into them and getting them to perform at their best, it is a terrible waste of time and money to make poor hiring decisions. Sure we all make one from time to time, but the more of this you can eliminate the faster you will be able to grow. You can save yourself a ton of time by getting some interview coaching from an expert, using an assessment tool that is best suited for your company, and the critical factors for success for a position, and by developing a strong corporate culture that will attract and bring out the strengths of the right people and repel the wrong ones.

3. Remember your customers are the whole reason your business exists and treat them accordingly Do you know the lifetime value of your customers? Cost loyalty is one of the least paid attention to metrics, yet one of the most critical for long term business success. New sales get all the attention from a metrics perspective because everyone thinks of new business as the glamorous side, Sales gets the best people, the best expense accounts, and they are the big prize winners at the annual company meetings. Retention of existing customers, is not as sexy, but just as if not more important. Look at how much you are spending to acquire new customers and ask yourself if some of that money would be better spent keeping your existing customers happy. Many penny pinchers may worry “what is the cost of good service?” I say, more importantly, what is the cost of bad service?

Get customer feedback. Don’t run from it, encourage both positive and negative feedback. You are in business to fulfill your customers’ needs, you need to know if you are doing that, before they stop coming. Most customers won’t take the time to complain, nobody really likes to, that is why you have to create an open environment where your customers can share their feedback, in whatever way is comfortable to and easy for them.

4. Pick a focus and stick with it Some business owners have no strategy and some have too many, both of these scenarios is problematic. You need to have 1 very clear direction that you are moving in. And everyone in your organization needs to be clearly focused on this goal and see how

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This article is for the overwhelmed buisness man or women trying to relieve stress by fitting exercise into their already busy schedule.

When people hear the term merchandising, many think of window displays or perhaps the mass proliferation of Disney memorabilia. However, merchandising is a much broader concept, encompassing everything a company does to package and present its products or services.

Teamwork demands that all departments provide service to the internal customer who is on the front line serving the external customer. That means you are responsible for serving other team members and they are responsible for serving you.

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