How to Lose a Perfect Hire - Your Career Intel

How to Lose a Perfect Hire - Your Career IntelWhen it comes to hiring top talent, is your company its own worst enemy?Knowing when to commit to a candidate and make a job offer can be a complex decision. With a limited talent pool, companies are unlikely to find a candidate who checks every must-have skill or experience. Yet the desire to find this perfect candidate persists, prolonging the recruitment process. Compounding this desire is a legitimate concern about making the wrong hire. SHRM estimates the cost of a bad hire to be $240,000. Understandably, no one wants to be responsible for a mistake of that magnitude. The result decision maker paralysis and a reluctance to commit to any candidate.This hesitation to commit may seem harmless, but in a competitive talent market, theres no room for delay. Great talent wont wait around for your company. Postponing a decision even by a few weeks can mean missing out on top hires. Small changes to your interview process can strategically ac celerate the decision-making timeline without compromising candidate quality. Heres where to departureTimeThe challenge For some companies, the hiring process is an exercise in hurry up and wait. They rush to collect resumes and then wait a month or longer to schedule an interview. Part of the reason for this delay is the inability to reach internal consensus over which skills are indeed required for the job, and consequently, which candidates should be interviewed.The opportunity Rather than rushing to start recruitment only to hit pause, I recommend the opposite approach take your time upfront and wait until all stakeholders are aligned to the same objectives. Determine which skills are genuinely required and which are nice to have. This is where a recruiter with a broad view of the candidate market can help. I provide supplementary market knowledge through the lens of an objective outsider. Aligning to hiring priorities in advance ensures a timely response to resume submission an d candidate interviews.CommunicationThe challenge Transparency and consistency are paramount. When you tell a candidate youll be following up in three days but weeks pass with no information, youre sending a message that your company does not value the candidates time and is not excited about hiring them. Ive seen businesses ignore a candidate for a month and then act surprised when the candidate turns down their job offer.The solution If you really need that extra week before making a decision, let candidates know that your timeline has changed. Candidates who are kept in the loop are mora comfortable with an extended decision-making process. Theyre less likely to feel slighted and will be more receptive to an offer when it comes, ensuring theyre engaged from day one.ReputationThe challenge Your companys reputation its employer brand can have a significant impact on recruitment success. When you have a strong employer brand, top talent is more likely to be interested in your comp any from day one. The interview process can either reinforce or undermine your employer branding efforts which message is yours sending?The solution I want every candidate even those who dont receive an offer to walk away from the interview process saying, That was a great company and Id absolutely work for them in the future. Throughout the interview process, answer these key questions Why is your company an exciting place to work? How will your company help this candidate grow their career? When candidates walk away excited about your company, theyll share this excitement with their network and give your employer brand a positive boost that will make future recruitment easier.If you can find someone who has the right skills and experience, and who fits with your company culture and team, dont hesitate. When you align expectations in advance, communicate with transparency and clarity, and build a strong employer brand, youll be positioned to say yes to the right candidate.What i s your biggest obstacle to hiring transformative talent?

Is Office Jargon Hurting Your Performance

Is Office Jargon Hurting Your Performance Sometimes, office jargon can feel like its another language. Words like value-add, paradigm shift, and datafication have so much and so little meaning at the same time its no wonder that Arianna Huffington and Sheryl Sandberghave talked openly about banning certain phrases from the workplace altogether.Nobody is a fan of office speak, but for many individuals its an important way to connect with your coworkers. Using office jargon is a good way to show that youre on the same page as your team, but if youre not careful using colloquialisms that stem out of sports and military terms can hurt your professional identity instead of help it.So should you actually be using office jargon? Here are a few of the ways your language of choice might be negatively affecting you1.It can make you seem unprofessional.Killing your goals, targeting clients, trying to be bleeding edge do any of those terms sound like they come from somebody youd enjoy working w ith? Its important to have goals and plans on how to reach them, but jargon frequently masks real meaning. Overusing it makes it seem like you havent thought clearly about your direction and is a sign of poor leadership.2.It can be exclusionary.Using phrases that arent related to work to describe work can leave teammates out of the conversation. Nobody means to cause confusion, but using football terms to describe your companys annual plan implies that its important to have knowledge of football to do ones job well. And unless you work at the National Football League, chances are it doesnt.It would be great to get rid of all those military and sports references, columnist Jena McGregor wrote for The Washington Post. Not even because they create a machismo workplace, but because people simply stop listening to managers who use such awful clichs. Good leaders communicate their needs and expectations clearly in a way that all employees understand, and good team members should do so as well.3.It puts you between a rock and a hard place.Research has shown time and time again that society has different expectations for how men and women should communicate and that they are rewarded differently as a result. Typically, women are not praised for asserting their dominance or for utilizing aggressive tactics to achieve their goals. An office that relies on work speak puts women in a tough situation use the jargon and risk being seen as aggressive, or ignore it and risk being left out of the office culture. These kinds of situations can be avoided, but for women at work its a commonplace and incredibly unfair struggle.4.Youre confusing your message.Imagine you get two emails from two senior executives. The first email asks you for a position update on a spreadsheet thats due Friday. The second asks you when youll be able to touch base offline about your deliverable due by close of play. If you think that the first email is a lot clearer than the second, youre not alone. The latter is a perfect example about how jargon can hurt more than help.Many office terms dont have specific definitions. By using office jargon, youre creating the appearance that youre either unable to express your message clearly or youre indifferent to whether your message gets muddled in its delivery. Taking the extra time to re-read an email or walkthrough what you want to say on a phone call is a great way to make sure your message is specific and concise.5.Its distractingThe energy youre spending worrying about what phrases do and dont mean could be spent in a variety of other, much more productive ways. Encouraging the use of simpler language in lieu of office jargon will go a long way in furthering productivity and a more inclusive workplace for all.