5 Easy Ways to Design Great Interview Questions

Recently, a small business owner shared her concerns about hiring great employees. She needed to hire the right people soon or she would have to close her business. That statement is painful to hear because hiring great people is possible with a few simple tweaks to your hiring process. One of those tweaks is asking[…]

5 Artful Tips for Hiring Great Employees

Hiring great employees is both an art and a science. You need to understand a little of the science to create the art. For example, painters must understand colors, textures, light, and darkness (the science) to bring the images in their mind (the art) to life. When you are hiring great employees, most of us[…]

4 Surprise Ingredients for Hiring Your Ideal Team

4 Surprise Ingredients for Hiring Your Ideal Team

This week, I was the featured guest author over on the eWomen Network blog discussing hiring your ideal team. The other night I was wide-awake at 2:00 a.m. and was leafing through a cooking magazine. A few pages in, I found a mouthwatering picture of a pie. I immediately felt hungry and ready to make a[…]

Can You Spot Your Candidate's Easter Eggs?

Avoid a Costly Hiring Mistake: 3 Helpful Ways to Find a Candidate’s Hidden Easter Eggs

Easter is over for another year and with it those colorful Easter eggs that are so much fun to decorate and hide. However, Easter eggs also have another meaning. They can be a secret feature or hidden message. Movies, video games, or software often have this kind of Easter egg. Small businesses can make a[…]

How to Overcome Your Hiring Complaints

How to Overcome Your Hiring Complaints

One of the most frequent hiring complaints I hear in a gathering of business people is “It’s too hard to find and keep good people.” When asked why, responses typically include: there are no qualified candidates available, larger companies take the best applicants, or, the most frequent excuse, no one has a strong work ethic anymore.[…]

How to Check References to Help You Hire Better People

Small Business Hiring Tips: How to Check References to Hire Better People

Congratulations! You found a great candidate who has the skills you need and appears to be a good fit for your team. You’re ready to check references and make an employment offer. That’s an exciting feeling. And yet, it’s also a bit scary. Why? Because you’ve been fooled in the past. Maybe your perfect candidate[…]

7 of My Behind the Scenes Recruiting Tools You'll Love

7 of My Behind the Scenes Recruiting Tools You’ll Love

There are so many great sourcing and recruiting tools out there, yet we tend to forget about some of the easiest and free tools available. Most of us get stuck in our comfortable, old ways and complain about how long everything takes. The problem with this is other organizations are using recruiting tools that make them[…]

Solve Your Hiring Puzzle

Surprisingly Simple Secrets to Solving your Hiring Puzzle

Life is filled with puzzles and solving them can be both exciting and challenging. To relax, I do traditional puzzles where you put together a picture with a few hundred tiny pieces. However, there are other kinds of puzzles, and they are everywhere when you stop to think about it. Have you ever tried to[…]

10 insanely fun and creative search techniques

10 Insanely Easy and Fun Search Techniques

Hiring great employees is hard work. Even in the best of times, hiring isn’t easy. You can no longer rely on posting a job and having plenty of qualified candidates come to you. Finding these great employees requires strategic planning, creativity, and some fun search techniques. Fun? Yes, hiring can be an enjoyable process. Here[…]

Irresistibly Easy Ways to Learn the Truth About Your Candidates

Irresistibly Easy Ways to Learn the Truth About Your Candidates

I recently stumbled on a NY Times article about the uselessness of the job interview. The article described a situation where an interview panel hired a candidate based on their misperceptions rather than the truth. While I disagree with the reporter’s views and the relevance of the research cited to job interviews, I agree that[…]