Featured Candidates
Real Estate Attorney
Jeffrey is a well rounded director level real estate and corporate attorney holding substantive experience in both publicly held companies and traditional top drawer law firm settings. See his full resume here.
Employment Attorney
Craig is an experienced employment litigation attorney with diverse experience in government, corporate and firm settings. He is an experienced trainer and brings a wide range of skills to the table.
See his full resume here.
Danielle is a driven and detail oriented veteran paralegal. Well versed in all litigation processes, she loves a fast paced office and has great writing and communication skills.
See her full resume here. |
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Linda is a premium real estate secretary with a great can-do attitude and polished downtown demeanor. She has a very stable job history with one of Denver's finest firms.
See her full resume here.
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Greetings!
It's difficult to believe it is already November! These are most certainly unnerving political and economic times. Law Q has made a long term commitment to the Colorado legal community and we understand the challenges that face our law firm and business clients. Questions loom about how our clients can position themselves for future growth and development, while still accounting for today's economic realities. To help address these questions, Law Q will now offer a 10% discount from its service fee. In this way, we hope to make things a little easier for our clients and allow them every opportunity for future success. For more information, please contact us!
We have included a few articles that will help you face some of the challenges of today and opportunities of tomorrow. The articles in this month's issue discuss techniques to build and maintain a top drawer work force. By recognizing generational differences, maintaining a flexible work structure, and ensuring that the right people join your organization- you will be well on the way to maintaining the stable and attractive work environment that great employees seek.
As always, please check out our featured attorney and legal staff candidates in the upper left hand corner of this newsletter. The resumes of both our featured candidates and our other top candidates can also be viewed on the 'Recruiting' page of our website at www.lawqteam.com. Have a great month and feel free to contact us with any of your recruiting or employment questions.
Truly yours,
R. Christopher Newton
LAW Q, LLC |
Flexible Work Arrangements Equal Loyalty
by Nancy S. Ahlrichs, SPHR , monster.com
With tight hiring budgets and few qualified applicants, the old approach of on-site, full-time and 9-to-5 is falling by the wayside. Many employers around the country are meeting their project deadlines and need for quality by engaging employees in a wide range of nontraditional employment configurations. Some smart employers are also holding on to top talent who would otherwise resign by offering alternative arrangements. Employers who insist on conventional full-time employment are setting themselves up for long fill times and the unnecessary misery of trying to find qualified full-time people.
Keep the Good Ones
When a job opening is created, broaden your usual approach. In addition to seeking a full-time replacement, consider offering exiting employees, ex-employees and job applicants a nontraditional arrangement that meets immediate company and candidate needs. For example, a manager faced with a valued employee's resignation in order to return to school, care for an elderly parent or child, or because of health problems, could offer to reconfigure the job, enabling the employee to continue to work. Here are a few ideas:
Part-time hours (even one day a week).
Job sharing.
On a per project basis.
Telecommuting from home with regular online or in-person meetings.
By continuing a relationship with an excellent employee, the organization is more likely to avoid the hidden costs of turnover, including missed deadlines, quality issues, customer/client problems and even domino effect turnover. You'll likely need to hire a second person to take over the balance of responsibilities, but it is easier to find such candidates today than it was just five or 10 years ago.
Fill in the Gaps
Ex-employees and potential hires may be very interested in other, even more creative ways to be associated with your organization. Right Management Consultants (RMC), an international human resources consulting firm with more than 200 offices worldwide, requires the availability of a small army of trained consultants who are engaged as needed to assist corporate clients undergoing large downsizings. Some individuals use their vacations days to work for RMC.
Whether for sporadic needs or ongoing requirements, many employers cultivate hiring opportunities with:
Ex-employees or others working for noncompeting businesses.
Consultants who are available as needed.
Stay-at-home moms.
Downsized individuals at all levels.
Adult students.
Retired professionals.
These candidates tend to know others with similar work preferences and skills, and can be terrific referral sources. Employers intent on achieving goals within budget and time parameters are using this emerging strategy.
They are also listening to the needs of talented individuals who seek alternative work arrangements by matching them to the work that needs to be accomplished. Employees hired and developed creatively reward employers with loyalty.
*reprinted with permission 2008
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Unique Generation Y Working Styles
Careerbuilder.com
Generation Y, also known as the "Millenials," is the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce today. At almost 80 million strong,Gen Y includes those born between 1980 and 1995. This is a generation whose behavior and worldview is dominated by two factors that pull them in different directions: technology and anxiety.
Technology makes Gen Y a completely unique group. They have been immersed in technology from an early age, and they don't remember what the world was like before cell phones, computers, and the Internet. These devices are as common to them as television similarly was to previous generations, but the impact of new technology on Gen Y is more significant. Theirs is an always-on, always-connected generation, and consequently, the lines between work and private lives are beginning to blur.
They may receive personal text messages and check their Facebook page at work, but they also expect to read work-related email on their iPhone, Blackberry, or Treo during evenings and weekends. While previous generations were linear in their thought processes, separating and organizing their lives according to hierarchies, this generation is always adding and blending connections - or to use the network term, nodes - in their personal, work, and social lives.
The anxiety factor of Gen Y results from traumatic changes and threats that they have witnessed in their young lives. They are becoming adults in a post-9/11 world in which foreign wars have drained confidence in our country's future and leadership. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is roughly where it was 10 years ago, and the current crises in housing, credit, and energy further threaten national prosperity. Environmental and health care concerns also trouble them. Looming financial obligations to Medicare and Social Security will fall on their shoulders, as will the burgeoning national debt.
Students' responses to these pressures and challenges are reflected by their choices in college majors. Serious losses in IT, science, and health care majors are contrasted by a rapidly increasing number of business majors. This represents the pragmatic side of Gen Y, but sizable percentage gains are also seen among majors in visual and performing arts, communications and journalism, and parks and recreation.
Previous generations have observed a close tie between their choice of a college major and their subsequent career, but this generation sees it differently. They don't believe that a college major necessarily links them to a particular career path.
What they do believe in is the power of technology. This is demonstrated through a variety of network effects. One of these involves a sense of belonging developed through online communities and the personal branding that comes with it. Through technology, Gen Y makes connections across borders, gender, race, religion, and color.
Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr allow people to create a personal brand, something that was never possible for previous generations. YouTube's tagline is "Broadcast Yourself," and members create and protect their personal brands in the same way that business marketers create and protect their product brands.
Another network effect involves the instantaneous viral spread of information among Gen Y. Information today moves online like the flu through networks, and opinions are sorted out in the process. Information is quickly sized up and deemed to be good or bad, useful or useless, cool or uncool. True to the survival of the fittest principle, only the best, most useful, and coolest stuff survives the information gauntlet.
A message must be attractive and innovative to the masses to make it through the process.
The wisdom of groups rules the process, as music, politics, gossip, clothing, beliefs all pass through the network and are judged at high speed. A message must be attractive and innovative to the masses to make it through the process.
This process is important because for the first time in history, an information glut exists. For previous generations, information was in short supply. Baby boomers went to libraries and had to read entire books - or at least search the index - to find the information they sought. For Gen Y, information is abundant and comes at them rapidly and relentlessly.
The scarce commodity for this generation, and the most difficult thing for consumers and potential employers to gain from them, is their attention. As masterful as they are at multitasking, they don't have enough time to devote their attention to everything that comes at them with equal force.
Facebook, with over 60 million users, gets a significant amount of Gen Y attention. More than half of Facebook users are in the 18 to 24 age group, according to comScore, Inc. research. As it is also one of the 10 most trafficked Web sites in the United States, it is not a surprise that companies large and small are now taking steps to create a presence on Facebook for recruiting purposes. This is a potentially treacherous move, as intrusive marketing messages do not belong there and will get discarded quickly - as well as earn you a negative reputation.
To build a successful recruiting program on social networking sites like Facebook, you must respect the unwritten rules of Gen Y. This generation expects you to respect their community, and they are not concerned with traditional hierarchies of power and authority. They don't respond to traditional marketing, but instead to authenticity and understanding.
If you want to attract and bring in Gen Y candidates to replace retiring baby boomers, start by structuring jobs for interaction and teamwork, and defining career paths with variety in mind.
Their attention span is short, as they are constantly moving from one idea or trend to the next, and they will not stay with an employer unless the employer provides them with a variety of experiences. Keep them moving. One theory about why IT has lost its charm for college students is that the IT industry actually consists of 150 different jobs practiced in relative isolation.
Gen Y prefers collaboration and teamwork. If you want to attract and bring in Gen Y candidates to replace retiring baby boomers, start by structuring jobs for interaction and teamwork, and defining career paths with variety in mind.
Gen Y is a unique generation. Technology and networking has bred them to be comfortable in a world of speedy global networks where decisions about adopting or discarding ideas are made faster than ever before. On the other hand, coming into adulthood in post-9/11 America has made them needier for community and security than their parents were at their age. Looming social and political crises are a threat to their way of life.
And while they are more comfortable and knowledgeable in the world outside of the United States, that world also appears more dangerous to many, both from a competitive and political point of view. Because of this, Gen Y workers are more demanding. They insist that managers from older generations "get it" - get the technology and the networking and the new paradigms for decision making. On the other hand, they seek comfort in financial stability and clear career paths.
Gen Y, the newest, fastest-growing, and fiercest generation of workers to date, seeks both a dynamic company culture and a stable vision of the future that allows them to focus on work - their definition of it, of course.
*reprinted with permission 2008
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The Key to Hiring and Keeping the Best
by Eric Herrenkohl, monster.com
Of course, you want to attract and keep great people. Here are four steps you can take to recruit the best and keep them:
1. Define What Your New Hire Needs to Do
Take the time to define what you need the person in this job to accomplish. Believe it or not, this critical step is often overlooked. By first defining exactly what you need accomplished and then hiring to those requirements, you may well open your eyes to an ideal candidate you would otherwise not have considered.
A marketing services firm I worked with typically hired salespeople from within its industry. But the company's two top salespeople previously sold in completely unrelated industries. Defining what made these two successful -- their ability to open doors and be hands-on in the delivery of solutions -- was the key to hiring more similar salespeople. Industry experience was helpful, but only when added to these two fundamental skills.
2. Have Candidates Describe Individual
Accomplishments in Detail
Now that you have defined who you are looking for and have begun interviewing, here is a simple but powerful rule that will reduce your hiring mistakes: Focus on understanding the candidate's individual accomplishments. Someone who has accomplished something can describe in great detail how he did it. Ask all candidates to give details in the first person on what they have accomplished in past roles and jobs.
This is not always easy. Many people want to describe things in the plural, saying, "We did this; we did that." This does not necessarily mean they are trying to fool you, but neither does it help you understand what a candidate accomplished personally. Lay the ground rules early, and keep people on track throughout the interview. If someone cannot describe in detail how he accomplished something, the candidate may be overstating his involvement in the accomplishment.
3. Ask Your Top Candidates What They Want
If you are genuinely interested in a job seeker, communicate that interest by taking the time to understand what the candidate is really looking for in his next role. Take the time to ask questions that will help you learn about the person's goals and desires. And then listen carefully to the answers. Ask follow-up questions.
What you learn may help you shape the job description for the people you ultimately hire. You'll also be conveying that you take a genuine interest in these people, and few executives do that during the interview process. As a result, you will stand out in their minds. If your interest is sincere, this is one of the most effective recruiting tools at your disposal.
After college, I had 20 to 30 interviews with different people and companies. By far, the best interview was with an executive of one particular company. He did not aggressively try to sell the company to me or offer me a lot of money. He just asked me what I really wanted out of a job, and then he listened intently to my answers -- something no other interviewer had done. He paraphrased back to me what I had said, and asked, "Do I have it? Is that what you are saying?" I walked out of the interview sky high. I ultimately chose to work for that company.
4. You Are the Key to Getting and Keeping the Best
The best people want opportunities to do the best projects, to work with the best clients, and to develop personally and professionally. These people can always get a job (even in a down economy), but they have a hard time finding an organization (and a boss) that is actively interested in helping them develop and achieve. Simply put, good people want good bosses.
Write down the name of the best boss you ever had. Why did you love working for this person? Chances are, it wasn't his intelligence or technical ability. More likely, confidence was the key. The best bosses believe in themselves and their people, and this translates into a work environment compelling enough to entice a talented person to take a job and stay with it.
*reprinted with permission 2008
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