The IQ PARTNERS Blog

It’s easy for business leaders to get caught up in day-to-day business needs and forget that leading and developing their team is just as important as that quarterly report that’s due next week. Your top employees are getting calls from your competition, so it’s important to give them a reason to stay. How? By hiring the right people, being available to them, and committing to their development. Use these 8 employee engagement and retention strategies to develop and retain your top talent.

In a text message world, our collective outlook on email has become increasingly casual. But this can have real implications in a professional setting, in terms of the practical dissemination of information, productivity, and perception. To help you simplify your life in 2015, here are 4 quick and easy reminders to help you write (and receive) more professional emails.

In these 5 popular posts from 2014, IQ PARTNERS headhunters touch on hot industry topics from 2014 with tips and information for job seekers and talent seekers alike.

The first day on a new job can be tough for new employees, but it doesn’t have to be. Onboarding is the process of integrating a new hire into the company and helping them acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. There is certainly a range in terms of how and how well companies onboard. Most of us have had experiences on both ends of the spectrum at some point in our careers… so we know that effective onboarding makes a world of difference, both in productivity and feeling “at home”, engaged, competent, and committed.

Preparation breeds success which is why finding employees who fit perfectly with a company’s goals and culture is the largest contributor to a company’s long term success. In this blog I will outline the top questions headhunters should be asking to find the best fit candidate for the job.

We are thrilled to be included for more than 10 years in Marketing Magazine’s annual Salary Benchmarks publication. Salary Benchmarks coverOn newsstands now, the article breaks down who’s making what in the marketing industry and why. It includes data and salary ranges for 89 key positions, with first-hand accounts and data from 21 high-profile industry-specific recruitment professionals, including IQ PARTNERS’ own Bruce Powell, Randy Quarin, Mark Rouse, and Maurizio Calconi. According to the article, “the result is a comprehensive snapshot of the modern marketing job landscape”.

Key 10 in my blog series, Hire Wisdom: The 12 Keys to Successful Hiring, is Perform Reference Checks. When I started writing this blog post, all I kept thinking was…“How can I get people to care about reference checks?” That’s because conducting reference checks have become one of the least meaningful parts of the hiring process. People have started to think of them as a final box to check, a task to “get out of the way” when the candidate has all but signed on the dotted line… but they’re wrong! Thinking of reference checks this way is a missed opportunity. Remember, a bad hire is costly, both in time and money – the cost of attrition is one to three times an employee’s salary!

As a headhunter, you recognize them almost as soon as you meet them. That rock star candidate who will stand out from the rest and be much more likely to be offered the job. Why? Because the top notch candidates, the ones with passion as well as prowess, share a number of common characteristics.

It just makes sense that the best talent in the marketplace want to work with the best companies… and they are never short on offers. This is, of course, because top performing groups of talent are really what drive positive business growth, and continue the cycle of attracting the best people, which leads to ongoing success in business.
As a company in a competitive market you want to make sure top candidates are drawn to you as a destination employer. How?