Tag Archives: Talent Acquisition

The dumbest interview questions of 2012

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Written by Anne Fisher

If some of the things you’ve been asked in job interviews lately have struck you as kind of peculiar, cheer up. It’s not you, it’s them.

FORTUNE — “Are you a nerd?” “Can you dance?” “If you were a doughnut, what kind would you be?” When talent management consultants Development Dimensions International quizzed more than 2,000 newly hired employees about strange questions they had fielded in job interviews, the researchers got an earful. Some hiring managers’ queries are not just odd, they’re banned by law. See if you can spot the illegal questions in the following list. (Answers are at the bottom.) Continue reading →

Fatigue Is Your Enemy

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  Written by Tony Schwartz

Two years ago, I began hearing the phrase “It isn’t sustainable” over and over from senior executives. They were talking about the everyday demands at work.

The day of reckoning seems to have arrived. During the past month alone, no less than a half dozen senior executives have told me that fatigue, exhaustion and even burnout are the biggest issues they’re facing both for themselves and among their troops. Continue reading →

Losing the War for Talent: Why Offshore Providers Come Up Short Onshore

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Written by Deborah Kops

Over the last few weeks, I must have had at least 10 calls from outsourcing talent currently looking –or being recruited for new positions–many of them by offshore providers. And that’s not counting the calls from search consultants, desperate to locate that buried diamond of a sales-accounts-or-solutions guy who can be persuaded to jump ship. Continue reading →

Learn to be Charismatic

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by Scott Edinger

What makes a leader inspiring? By far, the most common answer I hear from the thousands of leaders I’ve spoken with on the topic is “charisma.”

And who would argue? When they hear that answer, people typically nod knowingly; we all seem to recognize the power of charisma to motivate. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, recently wrote on this site about its importance.The sociologist Max Weber described it as being endowed with supernatural, superhuman, and exceptional powers. Continue reading →

You Are (Probably) Wrong About You

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written by Heidi Grant Halvorson

If you want to be more successful — at anything — than you are right now, you need to know yourself and your skills. And when you fall short of your goals, you need to know why. This should be no problem; after all, who knows you better than you do?

And yet your own ratings of your personality traits — for instance, how open-minded, conscientious, or impulsive you are — correlate with the impressions of other people (who know you well) at around .40.  In other words, how you see yourself and how other people see you are only very modestly correlated.  Continue reading →