Talent Alley

It’s true. We tend to value extroverted, type-A personalities. But that’s business, right?  It’s a cruel world where the loud and agressive move to the head of the pack, and leadership and team work win out over solitude because it’s better than business. Well, according to Susan Cain, that’s an incorrect assumption that is actually [...]

Read the full story

Mark Suster is writing about Startups in his blog post  Hire Fast/Fire Fast, but how does it apply to everyone else?  Let’s just focus on the hiring part here.  Here’s his take: I don’t think that recruiting is any different than any other decision process in a company. You’re never really going to know how [...]

Read the full story

The British newspaper The Telegraph recently printed an article detailing the unintentionally hilarious results from a CareerBuilder survey soliciting employers for their worst resume experiences. The details were entertaining, including candidates who: listed “God” as a reference (though without any phone number) sent a 24 page resume to detail a five year career included a [...]

Read the full story

While dining this week with the CEO and owner of a nationally recognized SEO firm and the CIO of a large Cleveland institution, the topic turned to business and the current challenges facing both organizations. Not surprisingly, both declared that their single biggest challenge was finding and hiring talent. Finding and hiring bodies to occupy [...]

Read the full story

The scariest part of the job hunt for many job seekers is the moment after they actually receive an offer. They’ve just focused months of effort refining their resume, expanding their professional network and honing their interview skills, and suddenly discover that their job seeking skills are no longer relevant. Now they need to excel at [...]

Read the full story

A lot of large companies are coming to the realization that in order to grow and thrive, they need to develop and pursue internal innovation capabilities. However, they also frequently recognize that they don’t have the internal talent needed to foster a culture of innovation. Organizations are hidebound by organizational memory that stifles innovation and continually pursues [...]

Read the full story

It’s getting tougher and tougher to make your resume stand out on a recruiter’s or hiring manager’s desk. Most resumes adopt similar formats, and virtually all are created in Microsoft Word, using its default fonts, so making your resume stand apart requires some creativity. Since your job search is really just a personal marketing exercise, [...]

Read the full story

I’ve received a number of questions and comments about my previous post in the Toughest Interview Questions series: Why Should I Hire You? that suggest that some more detail and explanation is in order. The reason the question is so difficult for job seekers, and so revealing for employers, is that it requires the candidate [...]

Read the full story

I’ve collected a number of articles and interviews with some of the country’s most innovative and successful executives to discern exactly how they attract highly talented and energized employees to their organizations that continually fuel their success. There was a lot of overlap and similarity between these successful hiring execs that centered around several consitent [...]

Read the full story

In Episode 9 of our real-life, real-time job search experiment with Cleveland sales executive Tim Krenn, we prepare for an interview with the CEO of a potential employer. Tim’s success in developing his personal branding characteristics and his distinctive personal branding statement (I’m the guy who can build the relationships with the people you most [...]

Read the full story