Say you’ve been informed of your status as the leading candidate or you’ve received an official offer of employment. Your courtship as a potential candidate for the headhunter’s client has indeed been a journey.

Finishing this journey depends on trust and faith. You have to trust the headhunter can communicate with the client and reinforce why you are the best candidate for this job. You have to have faith in the headhunter’s ability to fulfill your expectations about compensation and other benefits—and to negotiate in earnest. And yes, you have to have faith you are up to a new assignment.

If you haven’t already, you will probably be asked to provide references who can confirm your fitness for the job. Make sure the references you provide know you well and will say good things about your work experience, professionalism, and capacity to tackle a new senior-management role.

Pitfalls of the Counteroffer

If you’re in line to become a C-level officer, don’t be surprised if the hiring company wants to run a background check and perhaps even asks you to get a medical exam. Given the investment the company is contemplating, these are reasonable requests. You should also brace yourself for what could appear to be a too-good-to-turn-down counteroffer from your current employer, with a fatter salary and a loftier title. But it rarely makes sense to forsake a promising new position under such circumstances.

Accepting a counteroffer, after all, will only buy you and your employer a little extra time to attempt to find common ground about how you can live up to your true potential. Your current employer may also wrongly perceive that you’re motivated purely by financial gain, which could change the way it treats you in the future. And should you accept a counteroffer, you can kiss goodbye the relationship you’ve developed with the headhunter who has taken you this far in the process.

Beware of Family Ties

Much in the same way the headhunter must orchestrate mutual commitment between you and the client hiring organization, you must inform and manage communications with those closest to you about your potential transition. If you’ve told the headhunter and the client you’re willing to relocate, you should really mean it. If you have a trailing spouse, partner, and children, you owe it to those currently pursuing your candidacy for this new leadership role to make sure those family members are on board with the change and are willing to disrupt life as they know it.

More than a few executive headhunters have seen their otherwise flawlessly orchestrated search assignments go by the boards because the candidate never fully won the support of loved ones for relocation during the recruitment process.

It’s this potential search-busting dynamic that leads many consultants to simply steer clear of any high-performing executives with a child who is a junior in high school. To the list of relocation nonstarters one might increasingly consider adding an executive’s inability to sell the family’s home for something near what they paid for it (in which case the executive’s net worth could take a real beating if the new employer doesn’t cover the loss) or a family’s commitment to serve as caretakers for aging (perhaps also ailing) parents or other relatives.

Creating a Win-Win Scenario

As the executive search approaches a successful conclusion, you should plan to be in close and almost constant communication as the headhunter negotiates and otherwise advises the client about the true market value of someone with your credentials.

Often, these discussions lead to the hiring organization agreeing to pay you more than it had anticipated when it first launched the search. That may be because someone of your caliber was deemed unattainable at the outset or because the hiring organization has received advice from a compensation consultant.

You can trust the headhunter to go to bat for you and, in the interest of closing the search to the client’s satisfaction, try to create a win-win scenario. After all, he wants to work for the company again, and if your new role requires you to recruit new external talent, the headhunter might also view you as a future client.

Onboarding Feedback

As you prepare to sign an offer of employment, you should press the headhunter and your new employer to include a provision for performance feedback, or what is often referred to as “onboarding” feedback. You will want the employer to commit to gathering feedback from key stakeholders about your performance 90 to 120 days after you start the new job. Such feedback is intended to reveal how your entry into your new employer organization has been perceived, how peers, boss, and subordinates would rate your performance to date, and whether you truly mesh with the organization’s culture and internal politics.

That kind of environmental intelligence is critical. It can help you course-correct if need be. Otherwise, it should make you confident others believe you’re firing on all cylinders.

After you start work, you can expect tan occasional call from the headhunter to make sure things are going well and to see how you feel about the new job. Take these calls and maintain your relationship with the headhunter. Staying on the headhunters’ radar—and continuing to build your own professional network, for that matter—is one of the best ways to position yourself for the career and lifestyle you want.

Source: Business Week

Joseph Daniel McCool is a writer, speaker and advisor on executive recruiting and corporate management succession best practices. He is the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, which has been recognized as “one of the 30 best business books of 2008″ by Soundview Executive Book Summaries.

Employers are being especially prudent when selecting a new employee. The costs incurred hiring a new employee and uncertainty in the future of our economy slows the hiring process. Job openings go on hold or hiring managers wait for the perfect candidate that can make an immediate impact.

Candidates face a marketplace where one job opening can lead to hundreds of resumes submitted.  It results in the company looking for any reason to knock a candidate out of the process. Improper experience, gaps in employment history, extended unemployment, salary expectations and grammatical errors are just a few reasons for an employer to stop the interview process dead in its tracks.

Managing these challenges can be difficult. As a candidate, your time away from work should be used wisely.

• Make yourself more marketable and valuable by developing your skills through further education.
• In addition, build your networking skills by attending functions, utilizing Linkedin, contacting old managers and talking to recruiters within your career niche.
• As an Employer, utilize job sites that are in your specific market category, increase your budget for current employee referrals and utilize a professional agency that understands the employment marketplace and your category.

We have edited the video to show only the relevant piece.

Job Seeker Jimmy

One candidate I spoke with was recently laid off from his company due to the financial downturn.  His first inclination was to put his resume on a major job board.   When I asked him about the results he was less than pleased.  “Between calls from financial service companies and 100% commission jobs, I can’t decipher the difference between what jobs are worth it and which ones are just scams.  It’s a little overwhelming.”

You may ask how can a job board overwhelm you?   Well, when you have your cell phone number on your resume, you’ll be receiving calls morning, noon and night from all types of companies.   I’m finding, as a recruiter, a more effective way to reach candidates during the day is by making one call explaining in detail the purpose my call and what I have to offer.  I then follow up with an email containing my contact info.  If you’re overwhelmed with the amount of phone calls you receive, maybe utilizing only your email address may be an option for you.  Sometimes emails are easier to filter through.

Manager Matt

I also found hiring managers are also having issues with the job boards.  A current client of mine, we’ll call him Matt, is utilizing the job boards in his search for a marketing candidate.  He recently posted an ad on both Careerbuilder and Monster. I asked him about the results:

Matt:”I can’t believe the amount of resumes I’m receiving! I mean, literally, dozens every hour!”

Me: “So that’s a good thing, right?”

Matt: “It would be a good thing if I had the time to go through these resumes! Or if even half of them were qualified!!”

Me: (smiling) “Well that’s why you should leave that up to me.”

He laughed, but all marketing efforts aside here, this is a problem that many hiring managers face.  The unemployment rate is sky high and everyone is applying to positions, whether they’re qualified or not!  The question is how much time do managers have in a day to sort through dozens, maybe hundreds of resumes per day? How much time is it taking away from what they should be focusing on?  In sales, time is money.

Recruiter Maggie

I can’t say I’ve used the job board much lately.  Everyone has access to the boards and quite frankly, I feel like they’ve lost their glitz and glamor. Great commercials, but not so much value anymore.  Not to employers, or job seekers.

Times have changed, and I believe job boards are a resource for information, not a suitable means of finding a new job or employee.  It’s just not that easy.   The old adage holds true for job seekers “Finding a job is a full time job”.   Try networking, finding a niche recruiter, checking with your alma maters career services.  Anything that will separate you from the multitude of resumes companies are receiving.

In reality, we shouldn’t have to offer any guarantee.  When we decide to recruit on a position the only thing we are guaranteeing is that we will find the most qualified candidate based on the needs of that client.  We do the upfront work in prospecting and finding the best fit, but we can’t guarantee retention.   After all, we are talking about human beings here.

I had a sales manager tell me last week that another recruiter offered him a ridiculously low fee and a year long guarantee.  A YEAR LONG guarantee, for a sales person?  Interesting.  Why would they offer such a long guarantee?

“Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of s#%*!”

A hilarious movie scene, but more importantly a fantastic lesson!  I’m sure there are all kinds of companies and independent recruiters working out of their basements who offer low fees and guarantees.  But, a year from now when you’re asking for that refund or replacement will those agencies or recruiters still be there to honor that guarantee?  Lowering fees and extending guarantees does not fit a successful recruiting business model.  If you’re able to get a firm to abide by those terms ask yourself why are they willing to do that?

The difference here is value.  CreativeSourcing and other great staffing firms, wouldn’t be in business if there wasn’t a value behind our fees and guarantees.  We guarantee we will find the right candidate based on clients needs.  We guarantee we will be there during every step of the recruiting process.   We guarantee we will save our client’s time in the recruiting process.  That is the value and responsibility we take seriously.  As a Hiring Manger, responsibility has to be taken in making the right hire.

It reminds me of playing college basketball. Sometimes it took a losing first half and a reaming from our coach to make adjustments and attack our competition in the second half.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, regardless of your occupation, it’s time to hit the locker room and re-group. Bottom line, what was working before IS NOT working now. We can’t continue to do the same things in a different economy and making adjustments to our work patterns is vital to our continued successes.

Compete

Our staff at CreativeSourcing recently attended a sales training session hosted by Scott Love, expert in business human behavior and game theory. Love uses his expertise to teach managers and sales people all over the world how to win in the game of business.

In relation to my last post, he spoke about exploiting our advantages and values and being BETTER than our competitors. Love says he believes we only have to be 1% better than our competitors. He compares it to a racehorse. “The difference between the one and two horse may only be an inch, but its a million dollar difference in pay”

It makes sense. Our competition, whatever that may be, is what stands between you and the win. By being 1% better from now on, could mean the difference between how many WINS we have this year.

Believe

Love says that 50% of our success comes from our thoughts. The other 50% is a combination of strategy, work habits and tactics. At CreativeSourcing, we use the term PMA, or positive mental attitude.

There are many theories behind how our thoughts influence our outcomes. Some are more extreme than others, but for the most part the central theme is the same.

I’m not saying run out and purchase a motivational cassette tape to play on the way to work. I’m the first one to admit its hard to stay positive when you continue to get hit, but its part of the game. If you’re in the game, you have to believe it will get better.

Magic Johnson Enterprises was founded in 1987 and is basically a portfolio of different companies. Interestingly enough one of them is a staffing company, “Magic Workforce Solutions”. In the article Johnson discusses his successes in many arenas and the many challenges along the way.

At one point in the article Johnson quotes, “When selling a service or product, find your competitive advantages and exploit them.”

I thought about how that can apply to what I do in placing sales people and it just hit me! We are in a tough economy right now. God knows you don’t need to read this blog to know that. So, how can this apply to you?

Well for one, if you’re looking for job right now, GET IN LINE. The competition is that much tougher and bottom line, there’s probably someone out there who is just as good or better. If you think your resume looks great, check it again. Interview skills a little rusty? Well you better get some WD40 because the interview stakes have raised and employers aren’t going to hire unless they’re blown away.

Finding a job is a full time job. Its work, time, preparation and a competition in itself. A tough economy isn’t necessarily a time to panic but its certainly a time to step it up and put a little “magic touch” into your job search:

• Check the WEB! Google yourself, because ALL employers will do their homework on you.
• FACEBOOK and MYSPACE-even if you think your profile is private, ITS NOT so be aware of how you come across in your college keg party pics!
• If you have resume that is scented or has your picture on it, DISPOSE immediately.
• BRAG BOOK-interviews are the one place you can boast so gather all your awards, achievements and other accomplishments and bring them with you to interviews
• Utilize your network-stay in touch with old colleagues, employers, clients, etc. You never know who might be able to point you in the right direction.
• And obviously use a talented recruiter who specializes in your industry!

Let us know if we can help you “add a little magic” to your job search.

Maggie Hughes

Senior Sales Recruiter

Welcome readers… CreativeSourcing is very excited to announce the launch of our new staffing blog, Around the Watercooler.

This blog will be a variety of opinion, stories, news, quotes and other information written by the staff at CreativeSourcing. The content will hopefully be informative, helpful and maybe even entertaining!!

We encourage you to peruse, comment at will and of course tell anyone you know who might be interested in viewing!

CreativeSourcing, Inc. has grown in size and revenue since its inception in 1996. During these years the company has never had an unprofitable quarter. We are scheduled for growth and have plans to add new divisions in the years to follow. These goals will be reached by following our strong commitment to the company philosophy.

Our professional recruitment staff brings a great deal of experience and integrity in the staffing of sales jobs, marketing jobs, and manufacturing, supply chain, materials management jobs. Our recruiting staff has built our business by partnering with clients to locate the right candidate for the right job opening, whether it’s Chicago sales jobs or Nationwide manufacturing jobs. Our clients reflect our core value system: honesty, integrity and getting the job done right the first time. We have completed hundreds of successful job searches in the Chicago and Chicagoland areas, nationally and even internationally, for candidates looking to find the most suitable job and for companies hiring the right person.

• How do you handle pressure? Do you like or dislike these situations?
• The sign of a good employee is the ability to take the initiative. Can you describe situations like this about yourself?
• What’s the worst of more embarrassing aspect of your business career? How would you have done things differently now with 20/20 hindsight?
• How have you grown or changed over the past few years?
• What do you consider your most significant strengths?
• What do you consider your most significant weaknesses?
• Deadlines, frustrations, difficult people, and silly rules can make a job difficult. How do you handle these types of situations?
• One of our biggest problems is… what has been your experience with this? How would you deal with it?
• How has your technical ability been important in accomplishing Results?
• How would you handle a situation with tight deadlines, low employee morale, and inadequate resources?
• Are you satisfied with your career to date? What would you change if you could?
• What are your career goals? Where do you see yourself five years from now? Ten years?
• Why should we hire you for this position? What kind of contribution would you make?

• What opportunities are associated with this position?
• What characteristics – personal and technical – must an individual possess to be successful in this position? In your opinion, what specific aspects of my background make me right or wrong for this position?
• What support is available to help me fulfill my position here? What are the people and financial resources available for this position?
• Who will be my superior and what are his or her strengths and weaknesses?
• Are their any projects in motion for which I will inherit responsibility? What are their history and status?
• How is the finance (accounting/technology/sales/marketing/ etc.) function viewed by management? How important a role does it play in the management of the company?
• What are the goals of this company and department? How does this position relate to the rest of the organization, and how important is it to the company’s objectives?
• Could you describe the general corporate policies and goals, or “mission”, and how does this position affect this objective?
• How would you describe your personal management style? Is this consistent with the corporate approach?
• What criteria will be used to evaluate my performance?
• What can you tell me about my peers in this position?
• Why did my predecessor leave this position?
• Why did you come to work here, and why do you stay?