Category: Recruiting & Talent

Should you prepare for your employer to outgrow you?

February 24, 2021

This is a conundrum. You are early in your career in the tech industry and you love working for a small start-up. You enjoy the pace, the energy, and the innovation. Every day you feel you are making an impact. The company is laser focused on growth and success and the culture is all about ...

How senior executives make decisions?

January 5, 2021

I recently was in the loop of an email thread that went something like this. A junior level candidate was referred to a senior executive as a possible hire for their team. The senior executive inquired with their management team as to candidate fit and positive feedback was provided so introductions were done. The recruiting ...

Are you climbing a career ladder? Or using the staircase?

November 23, 2020

After you read this title, you may be asking, what’s the difference? Many people talk about “climbing the corporate ladder”, getting promoted from an individual contributor to a Manager, then Director, then Vice President, and onwards into the executive ranks. Many think about their career as a ladder, each step moving you higher vertically. Unfortunately, ...

Getting a job when you are in your 50’s, and what you need to do about it when you are in your 30’s

July 1, 2020

This story reoccurs about every other month. Someone whom I worked with 20, 25, 30 or 35 years ago but I haven’t talked to for ten plus years reaches out to me. Typically, they are now in their mid to late fifties and occasionally in their sixties; have had a very successful career; made big ...

Managing the Attrition Bubble during the COVID Downturn

April 9, 2020

If you are not managing your “Attrition Bubble” now, expect it to impact your ability to grow once a recovery starts. If you don’t know what an Attrition Bubble is, read on… In every business, there is a natural employee attrition of departing people that takes place every year. Generally, attrition is measured in two ...

Managing Performance

June 10, 2019

About a decade ago, the Toronto based company Rypple (acquired by Salesforce in 2012) popped onto the tech scene and made a lot of noise with their very loud marketing strategy that claimed Employee Performance Management systems are broken. Their argument was that current performance management systems and processes as practiced in most companies don’t ...

Diversity and work-life balance

June 2, 2019

Most companies aspire and strive to become a high-performance company and believe high-performance leaders are needed to drive a high-performance culture, but what does that mean? Growing up through my career during the eighties, nineties and into the new millennium, it was commonly accepted that for someone to become a senior leader, it meant long ...

When hiring, do you do your own reference checks? You should!

July 17, 2018

I continually meet with leaders who have hired an employee, only to terminate them within months of recruiting them. When I ask why, they reveal that they were surprised by a behaviour or absence of a critical skill set that didn’t surface during the interview process. When I ask whether they personally did reference checks, ...

Bad Candidate Experiences: How companies are losing the Talent War

June 3, 2018

A few months ago, I met with a former intern who had impressed me in the past. He had since graduated and become a successful junior software sales person. After a couple of years in his first sales role, he had decided to leave his current employer and find a more challenging sales position. I ...

Terminating an employee

I appreciate all the positive feedback that I received on my post Seven Lessons for New Leaders, so I thought I would stick with the theme for a new article. One of the most daunting tasks for a new manager is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is it filled with emotion, this decision ...