It’s true, the “War for Talent” is over… the candidates have finally won. This should be no surprise with how the world is changing. Everyone has access to an incredible amount of information on the Internet, our networks are getting bigger and stronger, and we’re communicating more than ever. Just as the customer now holds most of the power in a buying process, candidates are now in the same position in the hiring process. This shouldn’t worry anyone though… this is a good thing! Now that candidates hold the reigns, we as employers can no longer stretch the truth and ‘BS’ our corporate story (not to say everyone was, but luckily the dirty tactic is gone for good).

Why is it good news that candidates have all the information they need when learning about a future employer?

1. It pushes companies to be more transparent

In a world of interview and employee reviews on Glassdoor, Google news with the latest rumors, public company financials posted online, and bigger networks of connected workforces, employers are now in the hot seat to be honest and transparent in every area of their business. No longer can we say, “We have the best technology” we need to show we have the best. No longer can we say, “We have a ping-pong table and we’re the best place to work” we need to go much further, and we cannot say, “Our employees are the happiest here” when they are, in fact, not happy. All things we can no longer turn a shoulder on. This transparency forces employers to build better workplaces that attract, engage, and retain the best talent out there, because if they don’t… they will fail.

2. It pushes brands to go further than “We’re Awesome, We’re Hiring” as a message

You see it every single day that you’re on LinkedIn, browsing a job board, or commuting through the city and see a job ad at the T-station. The “We’re Awesome, We’re Hiring” message. That doesn’t work anymore. You need differentiation. You need to cut the BS jargon out because candidates are seeing right through it. What differentiates you? It’s not free coffee, ping pong, and bean bags. Candidates now are more interested in technology that is proven in the market, teams of incredibly hard-driven professionals working towards a mission, strong leadership teams and the market opportunity in front of the company. Going further I would add that programs such as mentorship, work/life balance, and challenging work are more attractive messages than “We’re Awesome.” Dig deeper and ask yourself, “What do we offer that is on the plane above just ‘being awesome?’”

3. It creates a two-way communication built on trust

With transparency comes trust. Now that employers are opening their practices, policies, and missions up to the public, we are working towards a more trusted relationship. We’re now seeing deeper conversations about who the employer is, and you’ll even notice candidates are sometimes interviewing the employer now! They have the information, so let’s be honest in our answers to their questions about our company.

4. Candidates find better long-term fits, Employers get the right talent

This is probably the greatest part of companies building stronger employer brands. By creating a strong brand around what you’re good at and not trying to be like every other company, you make it easier for the right candidates to find the right employment. By building your employer brand out to your strengths, and showing exactly who you are and what you stand for, you’re able to hire the right candidates who won’t walk in the door and be caught off guard by the way things work. Stronger, more personalized employer brand, played to your strengths leads to a longer tenured workforce. Additionally, with the right fit employee, businesses end up seeing the needle move in terms of the company’s overall success. It’s a win-win.

There are plenty of other reasons why having a transparent, honest, and attractive employer brand leads to company success, but the list is too long. If you want your business to survive in the longer term, or if you’re having trouble retaining employees, maybe it’s time to reassess your employer brand and figure out the types of talent you want and how you really need to present your culture in order to hire them.

Justin Graci is the Brand Marketing Manager at Turbonomic. You can follow him on Twitter here: @JustinGraci.

In the fifth episode of our Career Inspiration podcast, we are really excited to have Mike Hebert - Head of Talent Acquisition at edX - join us!

Hebert has a unique background and some serious credibility being that he graduated with an MIS degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and actually wrote code. He also started his own hardware and software support company before switching over to his current profession in recruiting.  

​In this episode we discuss:

• Hebert's background
• Tips for hiring engineers
• Building out your employment brand
• How to prepare for an interview with edX, and how to land a job there
• Pointers for recruiters on how to be more effective
• The importance of retention as it relates to your overall strategy
• ...and lots more!

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. To make sure you receive future episodes, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Soundcloud. If you enjoyed our show, please consider writing a 5-star review - it will definitely help us get the word out there!

Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz.  Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.

Whether you call it resilience, grit or optimizing for “Option B”, that quality that allows some of us to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever doesn’t have to be elusive.  We all have the ability to rise from the ashes and find the opportunities that exist during the worst of times.  I’m introducing the concept of Plan O...for “Opportunity.”  Specifically those contingency plans we must embrace when our original plan goes off course. They almost always do, so why not explore the possibilities that can come from that?

In her bestselling book Grit, Angela Duckworth wrote about those who embody the elements of perseverance and passion for long-term goals, with a realization that achievement doesn’t always follow a clean, linear path. Resilience is often defined as that quality held by people who find a way to rise from the ashes, never letting a setback or failure drain their resolve. People characterized as having grit or resilience seem to share a number of similar attributes, including a positive attitude, the ability to regulate their emotions, and view their failures as opportunities. Over a century ago, educator Booker T. Washington highlighted resilience with his quote, “I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles overcome while trying to succeed.”  Truth.  

Any time tragedy strikes a family, people tend to comfort parents with the often used adage, “Children are so resilient.” That sentiment probably doesn’t provide ample comfort, but there is something to it.  By learning about resilience from a young age, children are better capable to learn from disappointments, cope with losses and adapt to change. We learn most of these skills by kindergarten, and yet somehow we tend to ditch some them as we get older. Let’s remember back to childhood and see what we can learn.

Make Connections 

One of the first things children learn when they are young is how to make friends and develop empathy. We learned to be a good friend in order to make friends. We were provided support at home to strengthen those relationships and had a safety net for when disappointment eventually strikes. Essentially, we were taught we are never alone; if we have invested in relationships, we will always have a safety net to rely on.

Define a Structure

We often put kids on schedules to aid in establishing a routine, primarily to pacify those who benefit from a little structure. And while this is important in providing those basic elements that will aid as adults (understanding deadlines, organizing priorities, and the like), it’s also important to teach them how to operate when things don’t go according to that structure. For example, when my kids were in middle school, the principal actually requested that if your child forgot their homework, the parent SHOULD NOT immediately drop it off at the school, coming to the rescue. The kids needed to learn how to handle their mistakes, and not having someone bail you out every time is part of that learning. In other words, plan out whatever structure, roadmap or guidelines you want to aid you in organizing your work and life plans. And leave enough buffer room in there for a contingency plan.  

Establish Reflective Time

Kids get timeouts, naptimes, and recess as times to decompress and hit the pause button. Whether you think of it as personal wellness or work-life balance, everyone needs to carve out a bit of time to reflect and gather their thoughts.  When I was going through my divorce years ago, I was forced into an “Option B” situation - clearly, my life was no longer going in the direction I had anticipated. To stay focused, I chose priorities; kids and work. For a period of time, everything else took a distant place on the pecking order, including myself. It took me a while to figure it out, but I ended up transitioning my commute in the morning and evening from work phone calls to quiet, reflective time.  Sometimes I would listen to music, sometimes I’d just have myself a good cry. The point is, it became “me” time, which for that period of time twice a day no one could touch.

Set Reasonable Goals to Help You Accomplish the Audacious Ones 

Whether it’s learning to ride a bike or how to tackle that first book report, we teach children how to break down their big goals into small bite sizes ones. That same notion applies to us as adults. Consider the grand aspiration of promotions. Your Plan A might be “I’d like to be promoted into XX role by the end of the year.” Perhaps you’ve defined the roadmap to accomplish the skills you need to get there, and you make progress. Let’s go with an easy example of weight loss. Perhaps you have committed to an audacious goal of losing twenty-five pounds. You’ve signed up for a weight loss program, and you’ve hit the grocery store to stock up on healthy foods. You’ve set a goal of working out four days a week, and you’ve found a support group to cheer on your progress. And then you have an accident, in which you break your leg, and you are now out of commission and won’t be working out for the next few months. Does that mean your big goal of weight loss is now destroyed? Nope. It just means you need to refocus those goals and find a new way to achieve the master goal.  It obviously won’t be your original plan, but if you are committed, you’ll design a new one. Breaking down that big goal into smaller, reasonable and adaptable ones allows your Plan O to still get you where you want to go.   

This is the Worst Day...so Every Other Day Will Be Better

Death, loss, disappointments.  While some of us have suffered these to a more dramatic extent than others, every human suffers hardships. Each time my children encounter one, we spend time talking about previous times they felt similarly down, and how they were able to move past it and thrive. In the moment when it hits, it can feel like your world is falling apart. And yet, we all have the capability of moving past those difficult times. Of course, people need time to grieve and wallow a bit. However, when it’s time to move forward, putting things in perspective often helps. If that moment when you lost your job, got dumped or didn’t get that promotion you wanted became your absolute low point, it can only go up from there. If your Plan A is now defunct and you are feeling chaotic, pause and reflect.  What opportunities can Plan O provide? Sometimes, being forced into a new situation where you need to change course can offer possibilities you never dreamed of until you were forced to do so. Partner that with a positive outlook that each day will be a little bit better than the last, and you’re well on your way to healthy resilience.

Change or Die

As children, we learn about Darwin and the Theory of Evolution early on.  Simply put, if we don’t evolve, we die out. While having a set path and being able to navigate and feel in control of your Plan A might provide comfort, life just doesn’t always work like that. Finding ways to course correct and edit our plans isn’t just a new skill to develop; it’s critical to our existence. No, I’m not suggesting you’ll perish if you can’t establish a solid Plan O.  I am, however, acknowledging those who do build that resilience muscle is far more likely to evolve into a healthier, adaptable human being.

Resilience, grit and overcoming bumps are part of life’s journey. We all individually elect whether or not to embrace those ebbs and flows.  While intellectually everyone might understand the importance of our well being to develop that skill set, it’s easier said than done. By remembering and employing some of the basics we learned from our childhood, we can overcome just about anything. We just have to take a deep breath, believe in ourselves, and get busy plotting out Plan O.  While Plan A might have been what you were after, you just might find the opportunities your Plan O nets you are even better.

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator.

Our company is lucky to have a unique perspective - gained from engagements with companies that range in size from startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises. Abstractly one can say “business is business”. However, there are many lessons to be learned from companies all along the size spectrum.

Lessons for Large Companies: Stay Nimble

Given the rise in innovation labs among large enterprise leaders (Google has two), it’s clear that fostering entrepreneurial thinking and a ‘start-up/agile’ mentality is attractive to large companies.

Today’s business climate is rife with nimble market disruptors, so larger enterprises strive to innovate faster, make decisions in a more streamlined fashion, and take advantage of new opportunities.  But they must contend with the startups and smaller businesses that often execute all these things well. In large part, this ability to be more nimble is driven by an absence of organizational complexity; smaller companies lack the bureaucracy, management layers, and obstructions that can hinder visibility into problem workarounds. Although they possess fewer resources, they can more easily impel employees to identify and pursue opportunities faster than their larger counterparts.

Smaller companies are inherently closer to the customer and this closeness reduces the time it takes to identify the problem/opportunity and develop a solution. Smaller companies tend to hire ambidextrous, multi-taskers across their organization. In either case, larger companies trying to emulate this structure and approach can adopt one of two strategies.

• They can establish a “lab” type of environment that incubates ideas, exploits new technologies and tests new customer segments to determine idea viability without having to navigate the corporate approval chain. Although tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Apple have been doing this for years, in the past two years, firms like JPMorgan Chase, CVS, and Home Depot have opened labs as well.

• They can invest strategically in smaller firms that can perform this function, and if it makes sense, they can acquire the company in the future. Cisco has successfully implemented this approach for decades.

Lesson for Smaller Companies: Use Enterprise Tools

In the past, companies needed to be of a certain size to leverage enterprise technologies such as CRM, ERP and collaboration platforms. Today platforms like SalesForce, HubSpot, and NetSuite are growing their revenues by catering to the needs of all companies, not simply global enterprises. This focus on the needs and pricing preferences of smaller organizations allows small businesses to acquire the same or similar tools as the big guys.    

The same is true for telecommunications—consider the advent of hosted phone systems and video conferencing. Not that long ago, it was unusual for small companies to use sophisticated phone systems or video conferencing capabilities. But now, powered by cloud-enabled services and platforms, the “everything as a service” model allows smaller companies to buy only what they need. Opportunities presented by cloud-based technologies vs. the older on-premise model that makes you buy both the expensive system and the infrastructure to run it allows most businesses to use enterprise-class tools for modest monthly subscription rates with little or no upfront investment.

The same is true for broader communications/collaboration platforms. The ability to have their teams be geographically distributed and highly productive was traditionally reserved for larger enterprises that could afford the infrastructure. These hosted offerings can be used by one person companies as effectively as 100K employee companies.

Finally, investigate how to harness on-demand infrastructure as you grow. Larger organizations figured out long ago that they can buy the computing power they need from vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered the concept of ‘on demand’ infrastructure.  While startups have figured out that they can operate on the same industrial strength infrastructure as better-heeled larger organizations, smaller companies often lack the human capital to research and understand the myriad sophisticated offerings from Cloud vendors. However, a whole new crop of service providers has sprung up to service this growing market.  

We’ve covered only a few ways that small and large companies can learn from each other. As you move along the growth curve, try to keep the core dynamic of agility and innovation as you scale, but recognize what will need to change as well in order to serve the company well into the future.

Peter Karlson is the Founder and CEO of NeuEon. Follow NeuEon on Twitter: @neueon

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

In the fourth episode of our Career Inspiration podcast, we are really excited to have Jen Paxton - Director of Talent at LevelUp - join us!

Six months ago, LevelUp announced a new $50M round of funding for its rapidly growing mobile payments/loyalty rewards platform.

Paxton has an interesting background; while she has worked at really early stage companies like Logentries & TrueMotion, she has also led talent acquisition at more aggressively-scaling companies. Since joining LevelUp back in May, the company has added another 50 people, and now has over 200 employees.

​In this episode we discuss:

• Paxton's background
• When entrepreneurs should bring in an internal recruiter
• How to qualify an external recruiting firm
• How to build out the talent pipeline (and a company's employment brand) from scratch
• Ways to keep the bar high as a company scales
• How to prepare for an interview with LevelUp, and how to land a job there
• ...and lots more!

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. To make sure you receive future episodes, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Soundcloud. If you enjoyed our show, please consider writing a 5-star review - it will definitely help us get the word out there!

Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz.  Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.

Founded by a 24-year-old Tufts grad in 1999, Bullhorn is a SaaS company that was bootstrapped for seven years, flourished in The Great Recession, and remained founder-led through an 18-year history and its own acquisition. Needless to say, this is not only impressive, but also incredibly uncommon.

Bullhorn Founder and CEO Art Papas got his start at Thomson Financial, where he worked as a software engineer while attending Tufts and learned how to code. Soon after he graduated, he wanted to join a startup, and joined GammaGraphX – a company that was developing web-based digital-imaging & printing software.

GammaGraphX would go bankrupt a year after he started, but the situation had a silver lining for Papas: He was looking to start his own company.

“I got a three-week severance package, which I thought was plenty of time to tide me over while I start my business. That’s 24-year-old logic for you right there,” Papas said. “It gave me the kick I needed to start my own business.”

He would then meet his co-founders, Barry Hinckley and Roger Colvin. Papas met Hinckley – the company’s original President – first, with Colvin coming into the picture slightly later as CFO. Hinckley stayed with Bullhorn until 2010, and Colvin until 2012. “It was a pretty magical founding combo,” Papas says of the trio.

The original vision for the company saw Bullhorn as a freelance marketplace for graphic design talent, but it was an introduction to a staffing firm that led to the pivot. Papas learned that the staffing firm wanted to build a collaborative database for their four offices. They used Lotus Notes, and the only way for the offices to compare these databases with each other was over the phone.

“We decided that the best solution was to build a new web-based system from the ground up. Our staffing firm contact said, ‘If you do that, I’ll pay you $10K a month, and also, you could sell that technology to every staffing firm in the world.”

And with this, Bullhorn was born, with a focus on helping staffing and recruitment firms run their businesses with a suite of CRM and back office products. “We built it brick-by-brick, client-by-client,” Papas said.

They started the same year as Salesforce – 1999 – and were a pioneering company in the SaaS space. Actually, back then, the SaaS acronym didn’t quite exist yet, as the business model was referred to as an ASP (Application Service Provider).

“It was really difficult to convince investors that software was going to move to the cloud. It was tough to convince customers too. ‘You’re going to put my data on the Internet? Are you crazy? Everyone will see it!’ It was a tough sell. Now it’s all in the cloud and people don’t think twice.”

Shortly after the company started, the tech/dot-com bubble burst, making things even harder. Bullhorn had little choice but to build a solid foundation for their company, meaning a product that is solving a critical pain point for staffing firms, customers, and revenue.

“We basically bootstrapped the business from 2001 to 2008, before Highland Capital Partners and General Catalyst invested.”

By that time, they were at $13M in revenue, and even though it was during the 2008 recession, they were turning a profit. The growth capital allowed the company to “hit the gas pedal and catapult ahead” of their competitors that were scaling back to survive the economic meltdown.

Over the next few years, Bullhorn’s business flourished as they grew both organically and through acquisitions. The company also pushed into new markets, like Europe.  

In 2012, Papas received an inbound inquiry from a private equity firm – Vista Equity Partners – about buying the company.

“Vista was really good at running vertical software companies. They told us that they could help us take the business to the next level. It turned out to be a great outcome.”

Papas says that Bullhorn is targeting $150M revenue by the end of next year. He adds that 2018 is going to be big, with a focus on continuing growth internationally, as well as investing heavily into the enterprise market.

Back in September, the company announced the acquisition of Connexys, a competitor for Bullhorn in mainland Europe.

“We have similar core values and the same company colors, so they’re already like Bullhorn Europe. They accelerate our roadmap for European expansion by three years.”

Papas pegs the overall market opportunity for their industry at $2B, so there is still plenty of room for growth. This growth potential caught the interest of another private equity firm – Insight Ventures – which acquired the company from Vista in October.

All in all, the company employs over 650 people globally, and more than 7,000 companies rely on Bullhorn software. Papas has come a long way from where he and Bullhorn started, but the CEO wants to be even better.

“I feel like I need to keep learning so I can become a better leader. The folks who don’t turn the corner – when the company has to bring someone else in – they struggle with leadership, not with vision or delivering on customers and sales. Being a good leader is learned – not something you’re born with.”

Alexander Culafi is a Staff Writer for VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter @culafia. ​

Images provided by Bullhorn.

Employee retention was one of the biggest concerns for companies going into 2017 and continues to be a key area of focus as employers look forward to 2018. Not long ago, Right Management conducted a survey and found that 68% of managers fail to engage their employees’ career development. That’s more than half. That’s an awful lot of employees with underdeveloped careers. One clear strategy to retain talent is to focus on their development through coaching. But what is coaching? Having a manager sit down in a one-to-one and calling it coaching without really understanding the concept can do more harm than good.  

The terms coaching and managing are often used interchangeably, but that doesn’t suppose they mean the same thing. While a manager typically organizes the work and processes to deliver results, a coach drives team performance and helps people get to their next level of effectiveness. Let’s explore both roles a bit deeper.

What is Managing?

Managers are task-oriented and often direct team members to ensure the project is delivered on time and on budget. Managing is particularly beneficial when a crisis occurs or when you need to achieve certain outcomes quickly and efficiently. Being a manager means being the person team members look to for guidance and answers.

What are some specific situations where managing is necessary?

• A crisis that needs to be resolved quickly
• Onboarding and training new team members
• Delegating and assigning tasks
• Meeting deadlines
• Conducting meetings
• Monitoring progress
• Making executive decisions

Managing is metrics driven. It is very much driven by numbers. How are you checking in with your team and tracking progress? What are you really managing towards? What are the desired outcomes? What’s the best way to organize the team or the task? What are all the moving pieces of the project?

What is Coaching?

On the flip side of the same leadership coin is coaching. Where managing is about providing directives, assigning tasks and monitoring progress, coaching involves partnership and exploration. A coach is someone who guides team members to their next level of evolution, thereby creating new leaders within the organization.

Over the past 10 years, the Harvard Business Review has collected responses from roughly half a million individuals who have all echoed what other surveys have found: effective coaching increases employee productivity, engagement, and commitment.

The following chart from hbr.com shows the clear link between a leader’s ability to develop team members and the level of those team members’ engagement and efforts:

It’s the right time to coach when:

• A team member needs career guidance
• Collaboration is necessary to develop new strategies
• You want to develop your team members and help them reach the next level of effectiveness
• You believe the potential is greater than the current performance

Coaching = developing. When you have a team of competent professionals who are already performing at a high level, your goal should be to help develop these self-reliant and confident team members to think independently and execute without waiting for permission. Getting people to their next level is an incremental and holistic process.

Why Both Roles are Necessary

When it comes to fitness, some people focus on aerobic exercises like jogging and biking, while others focus on lifting as much weight as possible. But health experts will tell you, to be optimally healthy, you need to include both aerobic exercise and resistance training in your workout routine.

To have the healthiest team possible, you must manage and coach them. You’ve got to be able to organize the work so that it makes sense for your people, but you’ve got to coach and develop your people and show them you are invested in them as people.

Think of managing as the short game, and coaching as the long game.

The good news is that many managers want to also coach their team. But just because you want to be a coach does not mean you are naturally good at it. You may need to develop this skillset to be able to coach effectively.

Here’s a great evaluation tool to learn your personal style of coaching.

If you’re new to coaching and you don’t know how to identify what a person needs the most help with, simply ask your team members what they feel they need help with. If there is a shared buy-in, it’s going to help them do the necessary work toward growth.

Also, if they say, “I want to develop in this area” and you yourself don’t have that skill or expertise, then it’s up to you to match them up with someone who can help.

Let’s say someone on your team is really struggling with public speaking, but you yourself aren’t the greatest public speaker. As this person’s coach, you can help them create a game plan to reach their goal. Maybe it’s signing them up for Toastmasters. Or maybe you’ll have that team member lead the discussion at the next quarterly meeting.

The bottom line is, coaching takes practice. The more you practice and ask for feedback, and implement that feedback, the more you'll be able to flex your style.

True leaders do whatever needs to be done to propel their teams and their business. If, up until this point, you focused primarily on managing your people, try to collaborate more so you can help people grow and ultimately create new leaders within your organization.

Gabriela McManus is Executive Director at Intelligent.ly. Follow her on Twitter: @GabMcM