When you do find someone great, it’s amazing, and makes incredible things possible. Finding good people (and then managing / delegating properly) is one of the main characteristics of any successful business. Finding good people to work with or for you is well known to be difficult.
It’s interesting how completely different the two sides of the process are (hiring vs looking for work). By this I mean, for example, how different a resume looks when you’re looking at it from the point of view of the employee or the employer.
Here are several points which I’ve found useful to remember:
- Taking the first step is a frequent barrier to entry. Writing good job ads, reading applications and interviewing is an incredible amount of work, however natural procrastination can inflate this to a point of absolute inertia.
- Structure is good. While this is generic in that it applies to most tasks, outlining the general process, and listing the parts involved makes it clear that the first step can be less than several hours of work, and the whole process then takes on its own momentum.
- It’s very important to not waste time. You don’t need to read all the way through every crappy resume. If the first two sentences make it clear that the applicant can’t write, pay attention to details, would annoy you or your clients and so on, then your job is to move immediately to the next one.
- You’ve got to look at applications in batches. If you can’t stand messages sitting in your mailbox as they arrive, move them to a ‘pending processing’ folder.
Resume tips. This assumes you’re actually trying to get the job, obviously:
coming soon!