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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“We are the difference and we make the difference”
Why the HeadHunter?
As a human resource company, the Headhunter issuing the ratings provides transparency, credibility, and technical expertise. In this way, all stakeholders can have confidence that the results are based on verifiable data and without political interference.
The HeadHunter Group is a premium human resources service provider to corporate and individual clients in North America and Europe. Its 150 human resources experts and specialists serve clients in its Huston, Texas headquarters as well as in Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia.
Its main avenues of service are headhunting, recruitment, staff leasing, training, market research, and salary surveys.
Living out its commitment to workforce and workplace diversity, dignity, and fair employment for all, the Group also operates the LGBTIQ Employment Equality Index in all Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
It has subsidiaries including Karriera, an online job posting site, and has founded a corporate foundation, Rini Albania Foundation. It is currently implementing a job training and placement USAID- founded project, People First, in Albania.
When you have a business, competition is inevitable. It doesn’t matter whether you think your product is new and revolutionary. Someone else is going to copy it and they will try to be better than you.
So what do you do? First, don’t be lenient. The last thing you want is to get left behind while your competitors are enjoying the sales from customers that could have been yours.
Now that it is 2020, you should be setting goals that will set a great tone for the decade. A way to do that is by getting ahead of your competitors. Here are five ways that you can do that.
It should be obvious by now that in order to beat the competition, you need to know them more. Find out where the strengths and weaknesses are. They could be missing areas that only you are seeing.
For example, if they’re doing social media marketing getting as much of their content in as many eyes on social media users as possible, you can find another opportunity they may be missing. Maybe do email marketing campaigns for a personalized touch or account based marketing campaigns where you have a more targeted audience. Doing this lets you.
Have you been eyeing a tech tool but are too afraid to try it? Now is the time to do so. There has never been a better time to be a marketer where you have access to millions of innovative tools that could make your job easier. The best part is that you can find lots of information online about a specific tool. Check whether it meets your needs and only make the jump once you’ve gathered enough positive reviews.
In an age where everything is automated and you could just get passed on to an answering machine, you want to put a personal touch to your customer service. Sure, you can always hire an AI chatbot to talk to your customers, but in other communication channels, you want your customers to know they’re talking to a human. This can be in the form of asking feedback through a personal email or sending them a handwritten thank you note for their generous purchase. By improving your customer service, you keep your customers happy and gain a better reputation.
Get more sales this year by emphasizing your product’s value. Look at your current marketing strategy and check to see making sure this principle is being applied in all aspects. Is it on your website, your blog, social media, email newsletters?
Of course, you don’t need to bombard your customers with reasons why they should buy your products. You can do it in more subtle ways such as providing helpful content related to your product, making transactions easier, providing different payment options. Your customers may not directly see it but once they associate that positive experience with your brand, they’ll be more likely to come back and stick with you.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of perfection. You want to have a good start so you spend hours and hours overthinking whether your project is ready. The truth is, it will never be unless you say so. You just have to get it done, do your best along the way, and move on to the next project.
This will be one of the most valuable things you can do this year. Don’t get stuck ruminating whether something will work or not. Do your research, do the task, and hope for the best. If you make a mistake, don’t fret. It’s not really a mistake because you learn something that allows you to make smarter decisions in the future.
Looking forward into 2020 we will see a major shift in how HR policies reflect their changing workforce with the unique skills and disparate requirements they each bring to the table.
Here are top four trends for HR teams and leaders in 2020:
Research indicates that the biggest skill gaps in an increasingly automated business environment are behavioral and not technical. Years of telling workers to improve their digital skills have created a vacuum of empathetic managers and caring colleagues. More than 45% of chief HR officers say college graduates entering the workforce already have the digital skills they need. And over the next year and beyond, companies will be looking to address the growing gaps in “soft skills” such as influencing, negotiating and creative problem-solving that are essential when fostering greater collaboration between teams.
Training for managers will begin to focus not on what they do, but how they do it. Are they cultivating a culture that helps employees feel supported in their work and invested in its outcomes? Do they regularly communicate with their staff about their expectations and provide actionable feedback on performance? It’s managers’ acquisition of these skills, and their subsequent ability to look frequently (and holistically) at employee performance, that will make them truly effective leaders…and help them to develop the next generation of corporate leadership.
When it comes to developing their skills and careers, today’s employees expect and demand more from their employers than ever before. Feedback once a year simply isn’t enough for younger workers who will increasingly push for more frequent and more comprehensive feedback on their performance because they view their employment as an investment in their own future—and you should see it the same way.
Engaged employees are high-performing employees, so HR will need to help companies create a culture of corporate performance that motivates employees to take ownership of their work and meet clear, mutually agreed upon goals that can be reviewed and measured regularly. And rather than the usual top-down approach, HR will also have to help companies learn to be receptive to feedback from their employees, who may have strong thoughts on why their goals are (or are not) being met. Recruiting, hiring, and training staff is costly and time-consuming, so making future-focused changes like these in your performance management approach can significantly impact whether and how long employees stay at an organization.
Diversity drives innovation, and next year’s workforce will be very diverse indeed. As I mentioned above, this means five generations of adults may work in the same company, and HR policies and practices will have to adapt to fit all of their unique communication styles and approaches to their work.
Diversity of age is an asset to an organization, not a hindrance. While many companies are vying to capture younger customers and employees, there’s a lot to be said for bringing older employees on board. But age isn’t the only element of diversity that HR will need to embrace in 2020. We’re also looking at an increasingly racially diverse workforce, one with more visibility for LGBTQ people, and in which college-educated women will continue to enter the workforce in larger numbers than their male peers.
I see the thing that will require the biggest shift in corporate culture and HR policy is a diversity of location and schedule. In 2020, you’ll see more and more workers who wish to have the option to work remotely or on a flexible schedule at least part-time. This is something that’s good overall for employee morale and productivity, but challenging in more established corporate environments.
The US job growth rate began to slow in 2019 and I predict this slow-down will continue. Though this sounds scary, there is an opportunity here for employers: fewer open jobs means your employees are less likely to seek employment elsewhere. Employers should take advantage of this opportunity to develop the skills and talents of their workforce, ensuring lasting competitive advantage in a crowded and competitive market.
Diversity drives innovation. And diversity across generations can be as powerful as diversity of background. But mediating between different perspectives is a challenge—one which has the potential to reward or divide us.
There’s no way around it, the era in which we’re born influences our outlook on work and life, and ultimately our behaviors. Specifically, politics, economics, technology, societal norms, and cultural references all impact how we interact, communicate and operate. Companies aren’t immune to the broader shifts and strains society goes through. In fact, they reflect them. Today, there are five distinct generations of people in the workforce, which presents HR professionals with unique challenges.
Each of these generations are expected to seamlessly work together, despite having vastly different styles, levels of formality, and communication styles. They come from The Traditionalist Generation, born between World War One and World War Two, known to respect authority and formality and the Baby Boomer Generation, born in the late 40s-60s who have a reputation for questioning authority. Gen X also called the slacker generation work alongside Millennials, who are known for their tech-savvy and achievement orientation. Finally, we’ve seen the arrival of Gen Z, digital natives born from 1997 onwards and the newest cohort to join the workforce.
On the surface, it appears that a lot separates these populations. But the generation we’re born into is just one prism through which we view the world. Our values, tastes, and life experiences, also have an impact on how we operate. And workplaces would do well to remember that when trying to navigate generational differences. Companies that want to create harmony across generations would do well to start with focusing on similarities. As soon as you’ve defined the elements that your employees have in common, use them in internal communications and team-building exercises. Managers should also pay especially close attention to these shared factors when motivating employees to tackle a new challenge.
Every workplace is different, but there are challenges (and solutions to them) that we all share:
We’re all dealing with the relentless pace of business. Regardless of whether you were born into the digital age or grew up writing letters, the onslaught of deadlines brought on by the fast pace of business is a challenge for everyone. So the solution is a new lens to performance management! Companies moving toward a Continuous Performance Management process have been found to help all employees operate at their best, no matter what their generation. This approach includes frequent, lightweight conversations throughout the year that focus on goal setting, goal achievement, feedback and course correction, and career development. All of these activities improve employee engagement across the generations.
The way we work has changed for all of us, meaning that teams expand or contract to meet today’s pace of business. The workplace is less hierarchical than ever, as barriers have been broken down to accommodate work teams that are needed quickly and temporarily. So, how do we effectively motivate this complex workforce? By giving employees a sense that you trust them. You do this by setting clear objectives with employees and giving them the autonomy to get the work done. Managers today are learning that setting the goals clearly and relying on employees to create the solution or figure out the “how” to attain the goal is key!
Employers are struggling when it comes to motivating their workers, with recent Gallup data finding that 67% of U.S. employees are disengaged at work and 51% are actively looking for a new job. That research from Gallup focused on Millenials and Gen Z workers, who report that they’re looking for the following from their jobs:
That last point is critical. And while Gallups’ research focused on the younger generations, you can be sure that ALL employees want to do a great job and feel successful, no matter the generation. Frequent opportunities to give feedback are key to helping employees stay engaged, aligned and motivated regardless of age or role. We’ve all grown accustomed to constant communication both in and out of work, and annual reviews are so infrequent and plagued with issues like recency bias that their impact on employee engagement, motivation and development is minimal. Instead, focus on giving regular feedback that is positive and constructive to the recipient; this will ensure they derive value from the feedback, rather than experiencing anxiety from the process
