Is recruiting in a down economy challenging?  I think so.  I have a number of requisitions I am recruiting for and you would think there would be thousands of people applying for each requisition.  Well, it just isn’t so.  The positions I am recruiting for are quite vast, from customer service, to research and development, engineering and sales managers. Even in this economy candidates are finding opportunities, regardless of where they live.  Plus, candidates are taking jobs based upon their needs, and it they have been out of work for a long time; they will take the first reasonable offer.  Your hiring managers may be busy with upgrades in their office or facility and traveling; they may not have the time for the interviews.  It is our responsibility to help keep them informed on the ever changing workforce challenges and how they will be affected.

Here are a few things you can do to make the process run a little bit more smoothly.

• First, ask your hiring managers about their travel schedule, after all it is summer and people are traveling for both business and vacations.  You should inform the hiring managers what you are ...

On twitter today a brief conversation ensued about best practices versus best principles.  I’ve gone off on this before ( I think Dilbert sums it up nicely), and my tweet today captures my belief:

“please, *not* best practices; abstract best principles and recontextualize!”

However, I want to go further.

Several times recently I’ve had people ask for research that justifies a particular position. And at a micro-level, that makes sense.  But there’s little ‘micro’ about the types of problems we solve.  So I hear it at a larger level: “why should we make learning more scenario-based”, or “what is the empirical evidence about social learning in the organization”.  And the problem is, you can’t really answer the question the way they think you should be able to. On principle (heh).

The problem is, most empirical research tends to be done around very small situations: these 3 classrooms were trialed in this state or province.  In many cases, there just hasn’t been the specific studies that are close enough to make a reasonable inference. And it’s hard to coordinate large studies that are really generalizable for pragmatic reasons that include logistics ...

Thanks to  Ewan McIntosh for pointing me to this video which crystalised something that I have been thinking- and talking – about for a while.  Watch the video and then come back .

Now that is the way to get work done. It shows people coming together when they can/want to and have something to offer at that point. Nobody is sitting around either waiting for their turn (endlessly waiting) or just because they have been told to be there and they are not getting a turn at all.

Some people believe that you can’t get anything done if you don’t have meetings with agendas and action points. Others will be able to show  – like the IDEO guys – that indeed you can. And the quality of what is being done will be at least as good – if not better.

The Edinburgh Coaching Hub recently held an unconference – a meeting with a purpose but with no agenda. The participants generated some discussion ahead of the event from which themes arose and those themes formed the basis of further discussion and development on the night. Everyone in the room contributed  what and when they wanted to. This resulted in a huge surge in energy and a high level of  ...

We may think we should adopt best practices, but to be really effective and innovative we need to practice to be best.

First, we have to do the hard thinking  about how to do things better. Jay Deragon talks about how important it is to think about what we do and not just emulate others:

Social Doo Doo’s are those that practice and copy, what others do expecting to get the same or better results. Social Doo Doo’s are a dime a dozen and the market seems to think hiring the Doo Doo’s will help their business do something different. Doing something different and getting more than you’ve gotten in the past  requires you to know how to think which isn’t what others are doing.

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

Another example of advancing practice in a field is provided in The New Yorker’s The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are? In this article, a doctor explains how radically new thinking saved the life of a fire fighter but his mates ...

“OK, so having seen first-hand the value destroying, anti-collaborative behaviour that short term financial incentives drive, we’re gonna do it all over again. With a twist. We’ll let these sweet bonus carrots dangle a little further away. That way folks will have to focus even harder on the carrot, and from there I put it to you a stronger focus on the value destroying behaviour necessary to bag the carrot will emerge. Not happy? Furious more like!

“The case to ban ...