Career Tools

With the increasing globalization of business, cut-throat competitiveness, and corporate downsizing, it is imperative that organizations hire more versatile people and retrain and develop employees already on board. This indispensable guide shows companies how to do just that, focusing on the many applications of Richard Fear's proven step-by-step method for assessing an applicant's work history, education, social adjustment, and motivation.

Great companies don?t just depend on strategies?they depend on people. The more great people on your team, the more successful your organization will be. But that?s easier said than done. Statistically, half of all employment decisions result in a mishire: The wrong person winds up in the wrong job. But companies that have followed Bradford Smart?s advice in Topgrading have boosted their successful hiring rate to 90 percent or better, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage. Now Smart has fully revised his 1999 management classic to reintroduce the topgrading concept, which works for companies large and small in any industry. The author spells out his practical approach to finding and managing A-level talent?as well as coaching B players to turn them into A players. He provides intriguing case studies drawn from more than four thousand in-depth interviews.

irtual Teams That Work offers a much-needed, comprehensive guidebook for business leaders and managers who want to create the organizational conditions that will help virtual teams thrive. Each chapter in this important book focuses on best practices and includes case studies and illustrative examples from a wide variety of companies, including British Petroleum, Lucent Technologies, Ramtech, SoftCo, and Whirlpool Corporation. These real-life examples demonstrate how the principles identified in the book play out within virtual teams. Virtual Teams That Work shows how organizations can put in place the structure to help team members who speak different languages and have different cultural values develop effective ways of communicating when there is little opportunity for the members to meet face-to-face. The authors also reveal how organizations can implement performance management and reward systems that will motivate team members to cooperate across multiple boundaries. And they offer the information to determine which technologies best fit a variety of virtual-team tasks and the level of information technology support needed.

This book is literally crammed with every recruitment suggestion and recommendation the author has developed in her 20-plus years in the field. She shows how to design the best assignments for volunteers as the initial step to finding the most qualified people. She continues by addressing organizational image, where to look for volunteers, why people volunteer (or do not), what "diversity" means to an organization, and the impact of trends in volunteering today. There is a complete chapter on membership development for all-volunteer organizations. This book also contains an appendix on how to use the Internet and other cyberspace opportunities for volunteer recruitment.

There are 40,000 job boards and career portals on the Internet, and this Guide helps you make smart choices among some of the best. Edited by Peter Weddle, whom the American Staffing Association called "the Zagat of the online employment industry," it lists 350 of the top employment sites on the Internet and provides the detailed information you need to evaluate them effectively and select the right sites for your career objective.

The members of professional, technical and trade associations are some of the best candidates available in the job market. It?s no surprise, therefore, that a growing number of these organizations are adding job boards, resume databases and other recruiting resources to their Web-sites. The challenge for recruiters is to find which of the associations offer these services and where they are located on the Internet. WEDDLE?s Guide to Association Web Sites solves that problem. Compiled in conjunction with the Association for Internet Recruiting, it lists over 1,800 professional, technical and trade associations and indicates what kinds of recruiting services (i.e., job board, resume database, listserv or discussion forum) they provide. Anyone can find the low hanging fruit on the Internet; what sets the best recruiters apart is their ability to find the candidates with rare skills and those who are superior performers. This book will ensure that you reach this talent where they hang out online: at the Web-sites of their associations and societies. It?s a one-of-a-kind reference for corporate and staffing firm recruiters and executive search consultants.

If your workplace sometimes feels like a battlefield and your colleagues sometimes seem like aliens, you are not alone. Today there are four distinct generations of employees glaring at one another from across the conference table, and the potential for conflict and confusion has never been greater. In When Generations Collide generational experts Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman shed much-needed light on how to bridge generational gaps at work by understanding the differences that drive generations apart. Traditionalist employees with their "heads down, onward and upward" attitude live out a work ethic that was shaped during the dark days of the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the eighty million Baby Boomers are at a crossroads, trying to balance their overwhelming need to succeed with their desire to slow down and enjoy the fruits of their labor. They alternate between admiration and abhorrence for the chutzpah demonstrated by Generation Xers, who, in addition to feeling as if they have to prove themselves constantly, are chafing under the image of being overly ambitious, disrespectful, and irreverent. Nipping at everyone's heels are the new kids on the block, the Millennials -- with their unique mix of savvy and social conscience, they promise to change yet again the landscape of the workplace. Whether you're a manager, an employee, an entrepreneur, or a skilled professional, you'll derive hands-on, take-home business benefits from understanding this vital form of diversity affecting today's high-performance workplace. Using a wry and practical approach to bottom-line business issues and drawing upon interviews, experiences, and the findings from their national survey, Lancaster and Stillman give you in-depth insights into each generation. With their help, you'll have the tools you need to recruit, retain, motivate, and manage each generation more effectively. And you'll recognize that while -collisions are inevitable, ultimately it's how we manage them that counts.

Bold new ideas that help managers get the work done in the age of flexible staffing. Cradle-to-grave job security went out the window with 1980s corporate downsizing. A new generation has been hired fully prepared to fend for themselves in the free-agent marketplace. Woe be to their managers, as talented people come and go like professional baseball players. It's a war out there, a war for talent, and the managers and companies who win will become the most agile, productive competitors in the global marketplace. Management expert Bruce Tulgan, highly sought-after consultant on staffing issues and author of Managing Generation X, the classic study of Generation X in the workplace, offers his six principles of staffing in today's work environment. This book will change fundamentally the way managers think about building a team of talented workers.

If you're challenged to find and keep good people, you'll want to read this book. Worker shortages! Demanding employees! The necessity to do more with fewer resources! What can you do to attract, optimize and, especially, hold onto the good people you need to get the job done? With chapters written by some of the most-respected consultants and authors in human resources, Workforce Stability tells you what works, what doesn't and why. The answers you're looking for to build stability in your employee population are in Workforce Stability. Whether you are challenged by recruiting, selection, orientation, or retention, you'll read about innovative, proven strategies and tactics that you can put to work right away. And the best part is that many of these time-tested ideas are low- or no-cost, so they won't hurt your budget.

Targeted especially at managers, human resource professionals, customer service and sales representatives, and others whose personal interactions determine their success, Working PeopleSmart offers six core strategies for maximizing interpersonal relationships. Here are practical solutions to tough, real-life dilemmas: getting along with a difficult colleague; firing an employee; speaking up rather than suffering in silence; being open to resistance; and getting a team to work effectively together. "Nuggets of wisdom" for each scenario enable readers to envision an appropriate PeopleSmart response.

Not taking the time to hire the best employees undermines an organization s performance and opens the door for competitors to recruit the outstanding performers who were overlooked. Managers and recruiters are engaged in a "quest for talent" a search for the right person with the right skills and temperament for a specific position with a specific organization at a specific point in time. Zero Defect Hiring presents a systematic, reproducible, and proven methodology for hiring. This short and to-the-point book guides managers through all the necessary steps to successfully hiring the "right" person, including: planning, profiling, advertising, assessing resumes, interviewing, legal and ethical guidelines for hiring, selling the company to the candidate and the candidate to the company, references, red flags to watch for, and much more.