Blogs

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7 Shocking Truths about Candidate Resumes

By | 2017-06-15T13:07:42+00:00 October 6th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Interviewing|

Did you know that a recent survey of 4000 employers in Singapore revealed that virtually all of them (99%) say they have between 10% to 50% bad hires in their organization? What this means is that if an organisation has 10 employees, it may have between 1 and 5 employees who are not performing to expectations. [...]

Should You Throw Performance Ratings Out the Window?

By | 2017-06-15T13:07:51+00:00 September 29th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Leadership & Management, Performance|

The big boys have done it. Juniper, Adobe, Deloitte, Accenture and Cigna have all done it. And even General Electric (GE) - the one that popularised Performance Ratings - have all thrown Performance Ratings out the window.   So why are all these large organisations ditching performance ratings? The more important question you should be asking [...]

Is Past Performance a Good Predictor of Future Performance?

By | 2017-06-15T13:08:04+00:00 September 15th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Interviewing, Leadership & Management, Performance|

In almost every investment brochure, you will see a disclaimer that says: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results". However most investors (or so they call themselves) completely ignore this disclaimer. Similarly in the world of hiring and recruiting, most hiring managers ignore the fact that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Performance-based [...]

Performance Management: How to Manage an Under-performer

By | 2017-03-16T13:39:02+00:00 September 8th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Leadership & Management, Performance, Team Building|

It’s that time of the year again when performance appraisals are done, budgets are set and strategies are put in place. This is the time of the year when you identify the weakest links in your team and identify the individuals who have not performed up-to-mark and decide what to do with them. However, not all [...]

Being Busy Isn’t the Same as Being Productive

By | 2017-06-15T13:08:24+00:00 September 1st, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Leadership & Management, Performance|

Research has found that people have a natural aversion to idleness: we’ll go out of our way to stay busy, even if we have to invent things to do. But being too busy can be counterproductive. Studies have also shown that we have a bias toward action: when faced with a problem, we prefer to act, [...]

Is friendship a good measure of employee engagement?

By | 2017-06-15T13:09:46+00:00 August 25th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Leadership & Management, Organisation Culture, Performance|

The measure of friendship on employee engagement has been touted by Gallup for the longest time. In their employee engagement surveys, one of the questions employees have to answer is: “Do you have a best friend at work?" The question is: Does the measure of friendship determine the level of employee engagement? The answer I believe [...]

How to Hire Successfully in the 21st Century

By | 2016-02-01T08:17:47+00:00 August 18th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Interviewing, Organisation Culture, Performance, Personality|

In an HBR article titled The Big Idea: 21st-Century Talent Spotting, Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, senior advisor at global executives search firm Egon Zehnder and the author of “It’s Not the How or the What but the Who???, says the first era of talent spotting leaders were done based on their physical abilities. For instance, if you wanted [...]

Do Happy Employees Make Successful Companies?

By | 2017-06-15T13:10:05+00:00 August 4th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Organisation Culture, Team Building|Tags: , , , |

NOTE: This article first appeared on LinkedIn in June 2014. There has been so much focus on Employee Happiness recently. There is even a National Workplace Happiness Survey Information Session coming up soon right here in Singapore to talk about – you guessed it – Workplace Happiness! Not too long ago, I came across a blog [...]

The Downside of Hiring Lower Wage Workers

By | 2016-02-01T08:18:45+00:00 July 21st, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Employee Engagement, Interviewing, Leadership & Management, Performance, Strategy|

I recently came across a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review. In this article, the author reveals that when companies hire lower-wage workers, the productivity of both its current employees who are paid higher wages and the new workers who are paid lower wages, are negatively impacted. This leads to an overall decrease in [...]

Assessing the Dark Side of Your Candidates

By | 2017-06-15T13:10:42+00:00 July 14th, 2015|Categories: Blogs, Interviewing, Strategy|

A recent doctoral study of 3200 candidates by Christian Enger Gimsø at BI Norwegian Business School found that those with narcissistic personality traits tend to ace interviews and get selected for management and leadership positions.   The study found that when organizations set out to recruit new leaders, they typically look for candidates who are dynamic, [...]