Blog [ Original ]

Chart a Course for Success

December 1, 2015 By Marta Goertzen

We have been boaters for 21 years at the same marina in Sandusky OH.

The docks are kind of warped from the impact of many cold winters and not being attended to or upgraded. Goose poop piles up on the docks during the week. The Internet is sketchy at best. No one from the marina catches your lines when you come in. The gas dock helpers don’t know too much. Once each weekend the manager walks across the parking lot. He nods at people. Maybe you get a smile with that nod but not much conversation. He is not engaged with his customers.

What do you think has been the impact on the marina? As you might expect the marina is half empty now. The only reason we stay is because we can’t convince our friends to leave.

We’ve been traveling on our boat a lot lately. Recently we had a completely different experience at Osprey Marina south of Myrtle Beach SC. An experienced dockhand caught our lines, filled the tanks with fuel and pumped out the holding tanks all the while chatting and asking questions, friendly as can be.

Because he asked questions to generate conversation, he opened the possibility of us staying at this marina for 2 weeks. He guided us to our spot on clean, new floating docks.

The clubhouse offers donuts in the morning and the high speed Internet covers even the farthest corner. The manager walks out to check on us every day, brushing leaves and goose poop off the docks. We see him walking around talking to everyone he meets. He seems to know everyone too. The facilities are spotless with clean shiny washers and dryers.

What do you think is the impact on the marina? Osprey Marina is completely full with a widespread regional reputation for great service at good prices. Although they are full, they find some way to make room for transient boaters with some creative accommodations. Boaters stream in and out of there with smiles on their faces. Revenue is up and the facilities are fully utilized.

I think the difference between the two marinas is leadership and the expectations for performance that leaders set on the team.

Next summer we have a decision to make about where we want to dock our boat. Will we choose the marina with the crabby employees and deteriorating conditions? Or will we choose a friendly marina with great facilities?

Customers are making choices every day that directly impact your bottom line. As a leader you can influence your customers’ choices by creating a great customer experience. Start by understanding your business issues:

Understand your customer experience. What do customers think about your service? How do you know? Who are they telling? Steps you can take include:

Reward and recognize repeat customers
Customer feedback surveys
Social media ratings

Understand the impact of your employees on your customers. What do your employees think about your service? How do you know? Who are they telling? Are they a positive representation of you?

Measure employee turnover, especially 1^st year turnover
Social media feedback
Employee attitude surveys

Set expectations from the moment you being recruiting. How do your employees know what you expect? Don’t assume. Plan, execute and communicate. Understand the outcome you seek, the positive things that will happen by having that particular employee on your team

Recruit for the behavior you want to see
Set expectations from the beginning that are consistent from recruiting

Reinforce values. How do your employees know what you expect – tasks and behavior? How do you reinforce expectations? Do you walk the talk? How do you grow your employees so they can thrive in your workplace so they stay and nurture your customer?

Onboarding
Performance reviews
360 feedback
Pulsing
Training
Delegate to give your employees development opportunities to grow

Be a little introspective to honestly evaluate your business. Then call The Interview Doctor. We can help you put together and execute a plan to influence your customers’ choices by creating a great customer experience!

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 26, 2015 By Marta Goertzen

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out and eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

This Thanksgiving is your chance! Say thank you for the opportunity to taste experience to the utmost. Are you open to newer and richer experiences? How can you shed fear and reach out eagerly for something, the next thing.

On behalf of The Interview Doctor, we wish you a life full of exciting opportunities and a glass always half full!

Place Yourself in the Path of Opportunity

November 24, 2015 By Marta Goertzen

A recent blog, Recruiting with LinkedIn is a Puzzlement described five ways hiring managers can use LinkedIn to find candidates who meet their needs:

Have a robust number of connections
Profile should be welcoming and interesting
Even if use LinkedIn recruiter application, have robust connections and a welcoming profile
Build relationships
Look for ways to engage

Candidates can use the exact same techniques to put themselves in front of hiring managers! This is the frustrating and wonderful part of recruiting.

Both hiring managers and candidates want the same thing: to make a great match, the right person for the job so the job gets done well and neither party has to look again. That is everyone’s goal.

Both hiring managers and candidates and have the same tools available to them to make a great match. Both sides can use LinkedIn and other networking tools to put themselves in the path of the person they want to meet.

In that recent blog, Recruiting with LinkedIn is a Puzzlement, we described John and Jane who used their LinkedIn connections to find an applicant pool that was right for their opening. Most of these candidate were passive, not looking for a job. They would not have shown up in an advertisement. Yet their profiles and connections put them in John and Jane’s path.

Here are some tips for candidates to put themselves in the path of the opportunity you want:

Have a robust number of connections. You need a lot of connections to make LinkedIn work for you. You can’t do this with 100, 200 or even 400 connections. Set a goal like I do to increase your LinkedIn connections by a certain percentage each month and year. Then figure out what you have to do to achieve that goal.
Your profile should be welcoming and interesting, reflecting your personal and professional brand. Include a friendly headshot, not just a selfie you took at the big party last weekend. Get a professional photo if you want to be taken seriously. And smile!
Be sure to use the keywords that the hiring manager will use to describe the job you want. In the example in the last blog, John and Jane used keywords well organized, entrepreneurial, administrative experience, pleasant and a whiz with Microsoft Office. If you want that kind of job then your profile should include those words!
Build relationships with your LinkedIn connections. Personalize your messages and include a question or comment that encourages the other person to talk to you. Keep up the conversation in LinkedIn’s email. After a while it will be easy to ask to meet that person and voila a connection is more than a number!
Look for other ways to engage through LinkedIn Groups. Offer interesting articles that might start a conversation or comment on LinkedIn Group conversations to get noticed by people who might be looking for someone like you.
If you submit a resume in response to an advertisement, use LinkedIn to find the hiring manager then reach out to the hiring manager or someone in that company. If you make the connection and start a conversation you may intrigue the hiring manager enough to go to the head of the candidate line. Odds are the hiring manager would never even know you submitted your application.

My advice to candidates is the same as my advice to hiring managers: Stop slapping a resume out there in response to ads. Use the technology available to you to find people who are just waiting to meet you!

Recruiting with LinkedIn is a Puzzlement

November 20, 2015 By Marta Goertzen

As the King said, “It is a puzzlement.” A fellow entrepreneur shared how he added a right hand person as a means of growing his business by leaps and bounds.

I was intrigued by how he grew his business but I was more intrigued by HOW he added a right hand person.

Here is John’s story:

I was really buried in admin work and couldn’t get to the important stuff that makes my business grow. My wife suggested in that subtle way she has that if I continue to be buried I will never get ahead. “You need to delegate those everyday tasks that are keeping you buried.”

She was right. But I was so buried that I couldn’t even put together two minutes to find someone to help. Jane said she would help.

Jane used Advanced Search on LinkedIn to identify the characteristics that she thought I needed: someone who is well organized, entrepreneurial, has administrative experience, is pleasant and a whiz with Microsoft Office living in a 50 mile radius of where we live. She found almost 200 people who fit the bill. She looked at profiles, refining the search until she had about 10 people she liked. She reached out to connect with those folks and started conversations.

After having coffee with a few of these folks she found 3 people who she thought would fit the bill. I met each one and settled on Alma. Within three months Alma had me on my feet again! I can’t believe it. She even started setting my appointments and getting me more speaking engagements. I can’t even remember what life was like without Alma!

Jane would have gotten responses by placing an ad somewhere on a job board. But advertising for jobs these days is no guarantee that the responses will include the right person for the job.

Using LinkedIn, even the basic LinkedIn account like John and Jane, kept Jane in control of the “candidates” she included in her applicant pool. She did not leave to chance that the right person was looking at her ad at the right moment. In fact, Alma was not really looking for a job. She would never have seen the ad and would never have been included in the applicant pool under a traditional search.

Jane and John found the right candidate by using non-traditional methods and reaching out to people in their circle of connections. This doesn’t happen by magic.

Here are some tips to use LinkedIn for recruiting like John and Jane did:

They needed a robust number of connections in order to find almost 200 people who met their criteria. You can’t do this with 100, 200 or even 400 connections. You need a lot of connections to make LinkedIn work for you. Set a monthly goal to increase your LinkedIn connections by a certain percentage then figure out how you can make that happen. I do this every year. This year I’ve already grown my connections 23% with an annual goal of 25%! Setting the goal forces me to figure out how to achieve the goal. Imagine the searches I can do with 2700 first level LinkedIn connections compared to someone with 400 or 500 connections!
Your own profile should be welcoming and interesting, reflecting your personal and professional brand. That way people you reach out to will find you interesting enough to respond to.
Even if you use LinkedIn’s recruiter tool, you should have a significant amount of personal connections (500+) and a nice profile. Otherwise those you reach out to may think you are not up to date with technology and not necessarily someone they want to interact with.
The goal is not the connection. The goal is building a relationship. When you reach out to connect or accept a new connection personalize your message. Include a question or comment that encourages the other person to talk to you. View every connection as a potential link to someone else.
Look for ways to engage. Offer interesting articles that might start a conversation or ask questions that encourage people to connect with you and talk with you. In this way you expand your horizons, using LinkedIn and your connections to learn.

Stop slapping ads out on the job boards and expecting to find the perfect candidate.

Use the technology available to you to find people who are just waiting to meet you. The perfect candidate might be just a click away! NEXT: John and Jane’s story from the candidate’s point of view.

Past Performance Predicts Future Results?

November 17, 2015 By Marta Goertzen

The quarterly investment statements arrived this week. I love that dark reminder at the bottom in tiny print: Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.

I can be confident of my investment choices based on my observations of circumstances, environment, and other factors influencing results. Investment comes down to informed guesses.

It is impossible to predict financial future results with 100% accuracy but it is possible to make informed guesses that move me in the direction I want to go.

We place a great deal of emphasis on past performance in a lot of areas of our lives. In recruiting and job search we are trying to guess which candidate will help us achieve our future goals. Short of throwing a dart, the only evidence we can evaluate to make an informed guess is the candidate’s behavior during the interview and a peek into past performance.

I had two experiences recently from both sides of the job search spectrum seeking to utilize past performance to predict future results.

A client searching for a Social Media Designer called to understand how to ask questions that will help him hire the right person based on past performance.
The other day my daughter Marissa called to prep for interviews in distribution and supply chain for summer internships in her MBA program. She was told to prepare for behavioral interviews.

We start at the same place in each situation: What is the outcome, the positive, wonderful thing that happens because someone is in this job? We can call this the performance expectation or the critical success factor. Think big picture.

What is the performance outcome that happens because we hire a social media expert in a small business? The client thought this through and figured that probably 1) revenue goes up because the market expands, 2) brand recognition grows, and 3) more people are exposed to the product through different mediums.

What is the performance outcome that happens in the distribution and supply chain business interviewing Marissa? Marissa got out a pencil and paper and figured that probably 1) able to anticipate customer needs leading to increased customer satisfaction and increased revenue, 2) upsell between divisions through better coordination, and 3) increase collaboration and proactive market responsiveness.

By understanding the performance expectations, the company can create questions that will see whether the candidate has prior performance that predicts whether he or she can also perform in this job. The candidate can be prepared with stories that demonstrate whether he or she can perform in this job.

It gets down to the stories. Do the stories the candidate tells about his or her prior experiences convince you that he or she can do the job successfully in your company?

We created a little chart to help Marissa prepare for her interview. From the candidate’s perspective, by understanding the performance expectations and company culture Marissa can prepare stories to support her experience.

The same kind of chart works for the client company preparing for interviews. Understanding the performance expectations and company culture, the company can prepare questions to solicit stories about performance experience. For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at Marissa’s job from the company’s point of view.

The stories are the way candidates share their experiences and companies evaluate past performance to see whether that past performance predicts whether that candidate can reasonably deliver on the performance expectations.

In this way we turn behavioral interviewing on its ear by making the behavioral interview fit the performance expectations! Are you interviewing smartly to get at the performance behind the behavior? What are you learning from the 30 Frequently Asked Questions about the ability to perform or fit into your organization?

Chart a Course for Success

We have been boaters for 21 years at the same marina in Sandusky OH.

Be a little introspective to honestly evaluate your business. Then call The Interview Doctor. We can help you put together and execute a plan to influence your customers’ choices by creating a great customer experience!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out and eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

Place Yourself in the Path of Opportunity

A recent blog, Recruiting with LinkedIn is a Puzzlement described five ways hiring managers can use LinkedIn to find candidates who meet their needs:

My advice to candidates is the same as my advice to hiring managers: Stop slapping a resume out there in response to ads. Use the technology available to you to find people who are just waiting to meet you!

Recruiting with LinkedIn is a Puzzlement

As the King said, “It is a puzzlement.” A fellow entrepreneur shared how he added a right hand person as a means of growing his business by leaps and bounds.

Use the technology available to you to find people who are just waiting to meet you. The perfect candidate might be just a click away! NEXT: John and Jane’s story from the candidate’s point of view.

Past Performance Predicts Future Results?

The quarterly investment statements arrived this week. I love that dark reminder at the bottom in tiny print: Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.

Change the way you interview to better predict future results.