Month: February 2020

When it comes to your job search, we want to make sure there’s nothing scary about it at all! There are five things that jobs seekers often do that can scare away potential employers:

Resurrecting an outdated resume

Most people search for a new job only every few years, or sometimes decades can pass before we are on the hunt again! When the time comes to send out applications, we delve into the deepest darkest crypt in our computer and resurrect an old, outdated resume. Hiring trends change and resume formatting preferences evolve; take the time to reinvent your resume so that it’ll catch the eye of today’s hiring managers.

Mysteriously showing up late to an interview

Being late to an interview is a red flag, but being late with zero explanation or forewarning is worse. There are many unexpected circumstances that can result in someone being late, but it’s courteous to ring ahead to let your interviewer know and explain the delay.

Answering questions like a zombie

Employers are looking for enthusiasm and interest from potential new hires, so providing lifeless responses won’t leave a good impression on the interviewer. Avoid generic answers and instead provide tailored answers that show you’ve researched and prepared for the interview.

Having a frightening online presence

Drunken selfies, offensive language, controversial status updates—we’ve seen it all online and it’ll have employers running for the hills! Before you start your job search, make sure you clean up your online presence. Check and recheck your privacy settings, delete anything questionable and ensure only your professional online presence can be found.

Being a ghost after the interview

Make sure you don’t completely disappear after your interview . It’s important to follow up with the interviewer less than 24 hours after the interview to thank them for the opportunity and reiterate your interest in the role. An email is the most common way to get your message across and let’s the interviewer know you genuinely care.

Recruiters and hiring managers typically spend less than a minute on the first read of a resume, so you need to make a great impression right away. In addition to the other resume tips, here are some mistakes you should make sure to avoid:

Weird or Small Fonts

Choose a professional and easy-to-read font (Arial, Helvetica, Calibri, Times New Roman) and stick to it throughout your resume. Avoid whimsical, unprofessional or hard-to-read fonts (Comic Sans, Papyrus, Brush Script). Use one font size for headers and another for the body, ensuring both are large enough to be legible.

Superfluously Creative

Although it’s important to ensure your resume stands out, you should not do so by getting overly creative with graphics and colours. Unless you are applying for a creative job like graphic design, you should keep the layout simple and avoid unnecessary embellishments.

A Little Spillage

If your resume mostly fits on one page, with just a few lines spilling onto a second, clean it up with smart editing and formatting to make it fit nicely on a single page. If your resume is two pages, avoid splitting paragraphs or bulleted lists between the two pages—play with formatting to keep sections together.

Storytelling Your Whole Career

Your resume should give a brief overview of your career as it pertains to the job you’re applying for. The entire history of your work experience is not necessary to share with potential employers. If you are applying to be a Controller at a publicly traded company, then your Sandwich Artist experience from 15 years ago probably isn’t relevant. Focus on work and education that is relevant to the job posting, especially your most recent experiences.

Missing Keywords

Recruiters and employers search for resumes with keywords. When writing a resume, it’s important to think about which keywords or phrases they’re looking for to ensure you get noticed. Look at the job posting for cues and mirror the language (for example, if the job posting indicates they’re looking for strong project management skills and that’s within your skillset, make sure it’s stated in your resume!).

Outdated Resume

Failing to update your resume with each submission will make you look obsolete. Make sure your work history and skills are current, again taking cues from the job posting about the skills they are looking for. Use present tense when talking about a current role (i.e. ‘analyze user data’) and past tense (i.e. ‘analyzed user data’) when talking about a past role.

When you write your resume, you should always list your strongest and hardest hitting statements first. Since most readers simply scan over the document, you should place the strongest statements, duties, or accomplishments at the beginning of each section of your resume. If you fail to do so, your reader may never get to your best work in a section because you have it buried beneath mundane tasks.

Those of us in the recruitment business hear it all too often – there is not enough talent to go around. With national unemployment at a 51-year low, finding qualified candidates is one of company executives’ biggest issues of the day. 

In fact, a recent survey revealed that recruitment would be a significant hurdle in 2020. Among this group, 51 percent said they are “extremely challenged” in finding quality candidates – more than double (22 percent) who said the same thing just two years ago.

In a tight labor market, companies also may be paying more than they could – or should – for recruitment. 

Of course, social media and mining employee referrals can help defray the cost of finding candidates. But there is another strategy that is effective, efficient and economical. It’s called recruitment research.

Recruitment research defined

Simply, recruitment research is precisely and successfully targeting the people that are the best match for a company’s open positions. Equal parts detective and skilled salesperson, recruitment research is a flexible, multistep methodology that begins with learning our clients’ business and ends with a list of interested, qualified candidates. 

Strategy is at the core of the process and it is followed by digging in to uncover hidden talent. That means reaching beyond job boards to find the right people and then piquing potential candidates’ interest in what could be a career move that is beneficial for them and their new employer. The goal is to serve up the most qualified candidates for interviews, but also give clients comprehensive market data, including other candidate names, background details and contact information, that could be useful for future searches.

The building blocks

There are key steps in the recruitment research process. The foundation is an in-depth situation assessment to understand the culture and personality of the hiring company, along with the job’s requirements, responsibilities and specific skill set needed.  

Using a comprehensive intake form, the recruitment team collects data about its clients’ recruiting targets, geographic preferences, salary and compensation levels, communication expectations and industry-specific vernacular. 

That leads to development of sourcing strategy to find candidates who would be the best fit for the job. For example, a client may need a product manager, but there may be 15 types of product managers;  may or may not want to target competitors; or may be in a new industry and not know who the players are, or even what they want in a new position. 

Next comes name generation. Armed with information from the client briefing, the recruiter can identify candidates whose backgrounds, education and experiences dovetail with their needs. This is accomplished using a variety of methods — from cold-calling and Internet tools to probing professional organizations, trade shows and chambers of commerce — to find people who are looking for new careers – and some who may not be looking at all.

List in hand, it is now time to contact and pre-qualify candidates as part of the recruitment candidate vetting. Because getting people to return calls may be difficult, it is important to create sizzle around why potential hires should consider the opportunity. In addition to courting the candidate, this is the time to ask some all-important questions, including if they are interested in relocating to a particular area, if they have the right educational and experience requirements and if they have a genuine interest in the job the client is trying to fill.

We may search as many as 100 candidates for one position and then present the top three to five most qualified and fully screened candidates for interviews. These candidates are typically seen within 15 days of the start of the search. 

That’s important, given that recruitment research takes a different approach to finding top talent, using a model based on billable hours, much like a CPA or an attorney. Clients choose from a menu of services that can result in a cost savings of up to 50 percent per project compared with traditional recruitment practices. 

Elton Ilirjani, the CEO of the Headhunter, gave an interview this friday for “ORA 7” Morning Show on “Klan Kosova” TV channel. The talented youth of Kosovo was the main topic of the conversation. Ilirjani discussed their employment problems, and gave great advices to them. He also shared some HR projects of The Headhunter, that will give great employment opportunities to people in Kosovo.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW BELOW

Sytë 7 – Elton Ilirjani, Head Hunting në kërkim të punëtorëve të rinj

Sytë 7 – Elton Ilirjani, Head Hunting në kërkim të punëtorëve të rinj

Gepostet von Ora Shtate nê Klan Kosova am Freitag, 21. Februar 2020

There was a time when business leaders resorted to working with headhunters only for the seemingly impossible job searches. Today, companies are changing their perception when it comes to executive search firms with the numbers indicating this trend strengthening over the next decade.

The Evolution of Corporate Talent Acquisition

As business and hiring practices continue to evolve, the plight of the headhunter looks to be one of longevity, and business owners may find themselves increasingly reliant on them to fuel their company with fresh talent.

While the value of personnel is better understood and appreciated than ever before, the availability of talent seems more scarce by the minute, and company leaders are finding it harder than ever to find top talent using traditional methods, so they are turning an eye towards headhunting firms.

Traditionally, internal recruitment teams have filled the vast majority of roles for a company, yet the increasing complexity of today’s job descriptions are proving to be more difficult for corporate recruiters to manage than in years past. Nowadays, there are too many roles at most large companies for a handful of corporate recruiters to adequately recruit for. This is especially true for upper-level positions – that may not need to be filled frequently, and a corporate recruiter may not have experienced this type of job search.

For a company to have the breadth and range an executive search firm possesses, they would need to employ an entire search firm internally – fully equipped with the tools, licenses, and operational processes necessary to find the right talent. Recruitment firms with specialized teams of recruiters are far more likely to have the experience to find and, more importantly, qualify candidates for specialized roles.

The Headhunting Advantage

Based on the survey responses of nearly 4,000 corporate talent acquisition leaders, 61 percent say their team will stay the same or decrease in size in 2017. One reason for this is companies are still warming up to the idea of using search firms for positions that are not commonly filled. While an organization with a large sales team may have no trouble filling average sales roles, the internal recruitment team may struggle to find a director of compensation with the right experience. Not being exposed to the wide range of compensation talent like a headhunter, the internal team is likely to look for individuals with the same job title, and underestimate the importance of the type of experience, varied exposure to both specific and broad-based areas of compensation, and the importance of finding an individual who has worked with a similar company. In the medical field, there are general practitioners and then there are specialists — the headhunter is the specialist.

The ability to reach out passive job seekers

Passive job seekers are professionals who are not actively looking for a new job but may be open to new opportunities. Eighty-five percent of professionals in 2017 are open to new opportunities. With recent developments like LinkedIn’s “Open Candidate” tool that allows professionals to indicate they are open to conversations with recruiters, the ability to recruit from a company’s competitor is easier than ever for a recruiter. While headhunting firms excel at this, corporate recruiters have limited resources. It takes a much more proactive approach to attract this level of talent than the average active job seeker.

Avoiding hiring mistakes

Poor hiring decisions can cripple a company’s growth. Because hiring mistakes are more cost producing to an organization than previously thought, companies are extending their hiring process longer and taking more precautions to guard against making poor personnel choices. This, however, can be a double-edged sword as time-to-hire increases and jobs stay unfilled longer.

While companies are willing to put more effort into finding the right candidate, they still need to fill the jobs in a relatively similar time frame. This is where the speed and efficiency of an executive search firm is attractive to business leaders. The lack of bureaucracy and a focused approach, typically lead to faster time-to-fill and quality candidates.

Finding your Talent

If you identify with any of the information above, it may be time to reach out to a headhunting or executive search firm. Look for the firms that specialize in your industry. The detailed approach recruiters within those companies will take is necessary to you finding the correct talent to fill an open position.

It’s ok to be a bit overwhelmed if this is your first time navigating the world of working with a headhunting firm. We can walk you through it. Just shoot us a note and we’ll get in touch with you to help you get started.

The right talent is out there – and it’s our job to find it.

Unemployment in Kosovo, bad policies in Albania and Kosovo and treatment of LGBT+ community, are some of the topics that the CEO of The Headhunter Elton ILIRJANI discussed on the studio of morning show “Gjesi” of T7 tv channel. ILIRJANI also shared his experience, in every word giving a strong message that everyone should live the life the way they feel, without being judged for who they are. He also shared some HR projects of The Headhunter, projects that will give great employment opportunities to the great youth of Kosovo.

Businesses are facing a dilemma when it comes to goals: according to Gallup, employee productivity increases by 56 percent when managers are involved in helping their reports align their goals with the needs of the organization. Despite this, only 44 percent of those employees felt they could connect their goals to those of the organization’s goals. This means that somewhere, there’s an alarming disconnect.

For organizations to remain agile and meet their strategic objectives, their entire workforce must be able to understand the impact their work has on the business as a whole. Feeling that their goals are meaningful and understanding how they tie back to the ‘Big Picture’ is a top driver of motivation for employees, and this alignment is essential for keeping your workforce focused and maximizing profits for your company.

With that in mind, here are three ways business leaders can help employees map their individual goals back to the organization’s goals and ensure your workforce stays focused on the priorities that move the needle.

Nurture a Sense of Purpose

When employees are able to link their individual goals to those of the organization, they are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged. This nurtures a sense of purpose in the workplace, as it allows employees to link their work to the bigger picture. Doing so unifies and engages managers, employees and the entire organization and can make a significant a significant positive impact your bottom line. In a survey of 1,500 global C-Suite executives, research from DDI found that those companies who clearly define and then act on a sense of purpose outperformed the financial markets by 42%.. 

Nurturing this sense of purpose within the workplace makes employees feel that they are an integral part of the company’s mission and goals. But it is also critical that business leaders in turn connect to the work and goals of each employee. One major step that leaders can take is to make the business’ goals transparent, enabling individuals and teams to align their objectives with the company’s overall direction. This increased visibility into the organization’s top-level goals gives employees more clarity and confidence in knowing how their work contributes to the company’s success. 

Gallup’s study also shows that today’s workers are most interested in opportunities to learn and grow, and crave managers who care about them as individuals. Managers can help nurture purpose by acting as coaches and collaborating on goal setting with the individual’s personal career goals in mind, in addition to the company’s. 

Get Employees Involved in Goal Setting 

When setting goals at the employee level, a good manager should establish expectations upfront and give employees a voice in the process.  

Gallup found that employees whose managers involve them in goal setting are 3.6 times more likely to be engaged. Managers should collaborate with employees to define performance expectations based on that individual’s abilities, aspirations, and developmental needs. An effective way to do this is to set FAST goals, (Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, and Transparent). Frequent conversations around goals help ensure the individual understands the impact and value of their work and how it aligns with the organization. Encouraging employees to set ambitious goals is critical to their and the company’s success. It’s tempting to play it safe, but employees who set and pursue ambitious goals significantly outperform those with less challenging objectives. Ambitious goal setting ensures employees will feel more fulfilled in the workplace, and benefits the business at large.  

Create a Culture of Continuous Feedback 

Nurturing a sense of purpose in the workplace and involving employees in goal setting creates a “Culture of Performance” that ensures your business’ objectives are met and contributes to long-term competitive advantage. But this can all crumble when feedback comes infrequently. 

Unfortunately, only 17 percent of U.S. employees strongly agree their company has open communication, which leaves employees unclear about how their individual work is making a difference to the company’s mission. One way to boost performance, ensure goals are aligned, and remind employees their work is meaningful to the business’ overall strategy is to implement a Continuous Performance Management process.  

Lightweight, frequent conversations between employees and their managers motivates employees and ensures that they have a clearer understanding of what is expected of them. It also makes it simpler for managers to regularly assess how the overall business goals are is aligning to individual goals and performance, especially as the goals of the larger organization evolve over time.  

Establishing a culture of ongoing feedback helps motivate employees to achieve their goals and push themselves to meet new challenges. It also fosters trust among relationships across the organization, improving transparency and communication and giving managers at all levels a chance to remedy unforeseen issues before it’s too late. 

The CEO of the Headhunter, Elton ILIRJANI, is visiting Kosovo where he is getting lots of attention about his activity and business. Tuesday morning he was a special guest on the Morning Show of Public Television of Kosovo, “Good Morning Kosovo”. During this interview, ILIRJANI gave some details on the opportunities for Kosovo’s youth experts to get easily hired. 

Resumes should tell the story about the candidate’s relevant experience and skillset about the position. Here we will cover five things on a resume that should be reconsidered, to increase an applicant’s chances for employment.

Complete Mailing Address

In the past, it was common to see resumes where the candidate would put their full mailing address near the top of the document. If the candidate is relocating and does not have a local address, the elimination of any address information on the resume is advised. If the job is nearby, adding the city and state is sufficient. At this early stage of the hiring process, the street address is not necessary.

Hobbies

Applicants will sometimes add a section entitled “Hobbies” on their resumes. While employers consider personality during the process, including personal hobbies on a resume is not helpful to the interviewer.

This type of personal information is not what recruiters are necessarily interested in. If your hobbies are not related to the skills or experience the company is looking for in a recruit, they should be left off of the resume.

Irrelevant Work History

Many applicants make the mistake of thinking that a resume should be an exhaustive list of their previous work experience. The truth is, previous jobs that are not pertinent to the position that is being pursued is not necessary.

If a candidate worked in the fast-food industry in their teens, and they are in their thirties looking for an office position, that restaurant job will not help secure a spot. This is also true for jobs that are held for short periods during college. The job history should tell a story that illustrates the ability of the candidate to fulfill the needs of the company successfully.

Style and Font

As we mentioned earlier, the ATS will filter out candidates that don’t fit the criteria set by the employer. These systems will also reject resumes that are formatted in a way that is confusing to the software. This is why the structure and format of the resume are so important. To be on the safe side, the layout should be in a clean, traditional resume format.

When it comes to the font used in the resume, fancy fonts should be avoided. Your resume font says a lot about your character. The readability of the font is the primary factor to keep in mind. This also means that the size of the font should be approximately 12 points for the body and heading should be between 14 to 16 points.

Past Salary Disclosure

Supplying current or past salary information is not a good idea. By including information that shows lower wages in the past, this may lead to getting a lower starting wage for the position being sought. Some candidates will inflate the past wages earned on their resumes. This strategy will likely backfire, and the candidate will be caught and terminated. Overall, keeping past salary information off of the resume is the best policy.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, the competition in the job market is exceptionally high. Your resume is the key to securing employment. It is just as important to leave out unnecessary details as it is to include the important ones. Keep your resume as direct and informative as possible, while avoiding the elements mentioned here