Yearly: 2015

A lateral hire is someone hired “from the side”, meaning at the same experience and wage level as their previous job. As most hiring managers and HR professionals know, luring a top candidate away from their current job to one with the same salary and title can require a bit of finesse. Here are my top tips on how to complete a successful lateral hire, starting from the first point of contact, the job posting.

Perhaps you’re late to the interview, you haven’t had a chance to review the candidate’s resume, or you call him “Dan” instead of “Derek”. This is a senior level position, Derek is a seasoned professional and you can tell he’s annoyed.
The best thing you can do is apologize and be upfront. Say something along the lines of, “Please excuse my tardiness, you’ve caught me on a bad day. Would you like to reschedule or are you okay to continue?”

What question do I need to ask a candidate to find out if they’re a good fit for your organization?
Believe it or not it actually stumps the majority of my clients… I usually get “Oh, I don’t know, let me think about that…” And then when they do, whatever they come up with is almost always the key to successfully recruiting on that role.

“I’m working on getting better at presenting to large groups of people by presenting to my team every week. It’s getting easier, but to be honest it’s always been a challenge for me, which is a lot of the reason I went into this field… I was the only sixth grader I knew with a deep passion for Excel spreadsheets.”

Like only Vince Vaughan can, he and Owen Wilson’s character ramble their way through the Google interview question, “You’re shrunken down to the size of nickels and thrown into a blender – what do you do?”

Takeaway: In the face of even the most ridiculous questions, don’t try to ramble your way through it – 90% of the time it will be nonsense. We’ve all been there. Stop, think, and start over.

“I’ve lost four employees to you headhunters in three months. None of them would have left if a headhunter hadn’t lured them away!”

As headhunters, we hear this a lot. The reality is, there just isn’t enough A+ talent to go around, so they will always be in demand… and headhunters will always call.

Recently there’s been a lot written about headhunters and salary. Should you disclose? Should you negotiate directly with the hiring manager? Here’s my best advice on how to be the most successful in talking salary with a headhunter.

For job seekers, having an optimized LinkedIn profile is your best bet to being found for a new opportunity… and even if you’re not job searching, you never know what connections or opportunities are out there. I spend a lot of time looking for candidates on LinkedIn, and I’m sharing the 4 fastest and easiest LinkedIn profile fixes that will help you get found by a headhunter.

Some business leaders believe there is such thing as the “perfect hire” with the perfect qualifications, experience, personality, and culture fit. We call this the quest for the unicorn. This one is mostly false. Unicorn hires are not just incredibly rare, but they can be virtually impossible to attract and move.