Hiring Managers

New Year’s Resolutions

If you are making your New Year’s Resolutions here are a few things you might want to consider as a Hiring Manager or an Employee.

Hiring Managers:

– Outline your hiring needs for the entire year, along with a plan for attracting and landing any key people. If you were hiring in 2017 you know this already, but be prepared to find it quite difficult to find highly skilled candidates. Your competitors are searching for those same people and the unemployment rate for many groups is zero or negative.

– Check your company’s web image. The first place a candidate will go to research your company is of course your website, but after that they are increasingly looking at Glassdoor, Indeed, and similar sites. You may not have much control over the content that you find, but at least you’ll know where you are starting from in selling your company to a candidate that you want to attract.

– Consider what you might be able to offer the millennial candidates that you probably most want to attract and hire. They tend to value things like flexible work schedules, interesting work, and the ability to relate to colleagues. Coming at them with ‘old school’ perks like titles, number of direct reports, and bonus potential won’t work as well.

Employees:

– Consider asking for a raise if your salary increases have lagged the past few years. Many companies tightened up on raises coming out of the recession, and have been reluctant to open the pocketbook given they’ve only seen modest revenue gains. But we are in a booming economy now, and a candidate-driven environment. You just might need to be your own advocate. Do a little research to see where you are at relative to your industry peers, and justify what you ask for rationally and professionally.

– Update your resume in case you get fired for asking for a raise. Just kidding – that won’t happen, but you should update your resume, especially if you’ve been with your company for a while and are NOT actively looking. Over time, your accomplishments tend to fade away, and updating the resume once a year is a good way to refresh your own memory and document the contributions you have made to the organization.

– Update your Linkedin profile. When you update your resume, you have all the information you need to spruce up your on-line business card, which is Linkedin. This will help people find you for any number of reasons; high school and college reunions, community groups, professional organizations, and so on. And it’s the number one way that a company or recruiter might initially see your background.