11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college.

Maybe it's different in other parts of the USA, but when I look around at high school and college students today, I wonder what on earth is going to happen when they get out into the real world of work. A perfect example is a young high school freshman I know. One of her teachers gave her an assignment and reviewed it before she submitted it for grading. The teacher told her she needed to cite her sources at the end of her report and gave her a URL to learn how to do this. The student went there and immediately complained that she couldn't figure out what the page said. I looked at it with her and pointed out the page covered how to cite sources from newspapers to web sites, magazines to books.

The problem? She had to actually read the whole page to learn how to cite the sources she had used! Maybe it's the Internet age - we are used to instant gratification now. How did we ever wait 3-5 days for a letter from a friend?

A great article on Training Systems, Great Training for Great Employees, lists 11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college from Bill Gates' book "Business @ The Speed of Thought"

RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make 100 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

Read all 11 rules here Retain Young People

11 Challenges Facing Hiring Managers

In a recent article that I saw on Recruit, Inspire & Retain they listed 11 challenges that hiring managers face today.

One of the things listed was not having a formal sourcing strategy in place, so companies end up hiring the best of the bunch - and not THE BEST. Here are the top 3 challenges:

Most companies lack a formal sourcing strategy and end up hiring the best of the bunch rather than THE BEST. Top talent needs to first be found. In a robust economy or tight labor market, many of the best people are working. In other words, they are passive candidates that need to be located.

The wording in typical job descriptions limits the number of qualified people who will apply for the position. Rather than looking at what people are exceptional at, abilities and talents that are instinctive, many companies make their hiring decisions based on what people have learned, acquired and experienced to date. Because the essence of people is not what they have learned, acquired and experienced, hiring based on those limited aspects will bring limited results.

Most companies only list the "necessary" skills, experience and knowledge required without appealing to the real reasons top talent accept new offers.
You can read the full article here:Cool Recruiting Tips

Waking the Sleeping Giant - Passive Candidates Won't be Passive for Long!

I hear so much about active and passive candidates and it used to be true that the best sales rainmakers never had to "look" for a job. We called them passive because they had people chasing after them, begging them to work for them, without ever looking at job ads online or in a newspaper.

Things are changing now though. Just as it isn't common for employees to retire after 20 years at the same company, the Rainmakers are looking for much more in a career than the highest pay - and they are willing to shop around for it quietly.

This article Waking the Sleeping Giant - Passive Candidates Won't be Passive for Long! by Bryan Johanson goes into great detail on how you can attract these Rainmakers. The recruiter can't do it alone - everyone on your hiring team has to work at wooing the best!