The Practical Guide to Hiring Employees

Hiring new employees is among the biggest problems businesses face. From micro businesses to large enterprises, finding and closing top talent is a major challenge that we're all eager to overcome. Hiring Employees With Qualified Talent Having led over a thousand interviews, I’ve faced challenges with almost every role I looked for in IT. Software engineers — needless to say, companies are competing for top talent in engineering, not the other way around. Resources are scarce and companies keep growing, therefore demand is through the roof. As an extra challenge, top engineers often switch to management/training, open their own companies,… Continue Reading

Leadership Development: How to Promote and Grow Your Management Team

According to several independent studies, 80% of leadership positions have no formal training at all. If you run a mid-sized business and promote your management team internally (as the majority of the organizations out there), you likely fall into the majority of the businesses that grow organically. Management, along with leadership, is often taught “on the job”—without an MBA degree or background in economics to help you move forward. Leadership training can help people. Your staff will become more aware of their weaknesses and strengths. Communication skills—along with other critical soft skills for leaders—are improved by learning to clearly express… Continue Reading

7 Useful Tactics To Establish A Solid Team

Every business owner or manager dreams of having the perfect team. But since there isn’t such a thing, settle for the next best — a team you’ve created and carefully trained. So, how do you establish a solid team? Hiring the best people does not necessarily and automatically equate to having the best team. Like cogs in a well-oiled machine, you don’t need to find the perfect employees, just the ones that can fit in perfectly into your team. More importantly, after hiring the ones you wanted, you need to have the ability to keep them. Here are practical  tips… Continue Reading

6 Traits Of A Great Manager And Top Tips To Develop Them

There are good managers. And then, there are great ones. According to The Predictive Index, nearly 30% of employees believe their managers fail at team-building skills, and a portion of them suck at handling feedback, delegation, and time management. While some best practices to obtain qualities of a good manager are inherited over the years (starting with the way families raise their children), the evolution of management builds on top of "hard skills" in the corresponding business segment, interpersonal communication, mastering psychology techniques for handling conflicts, and getting to know each team and the business objectives separately. It's an iterative… Continue Reading

6 KPIs Your Hire Needs to Hit to Pass the Probation Period

Regardless of whether you enforce a probationary period or not, you need to ensure that your new hire has completed the onboarding process successfully and fits the organizational culture. Even the best recruiters out there can't gauge employment efficiency during the interview cycle. And several studies, including a recent survey by Checkster Research, show that 78% of applicants misrepresent themselves. While we continuously refine and improve our recruitment process, certain metrics can't be deducted over the course of an interview or two. Speed of execution, working in a team environment, and attention to detail are some of the common denominators… Continue Reading

5 Business Process Challenges For Project Managers

Management and ownership are different. But are these truly incompatible? Successful business owners and entrepreneurs have simply struggled for a continuous period of time, juggling with anything and everything from legal and accounting through sales and marketing, IT, operations, recruitment, branding, management, negotiations, to name A FEW. This isn't necessarily a great thing if the vast majority of your time goes into dreadful stuff. I always cringe when I need to handle accounting or legal cases for over an hour! Experienced managers, however, are paramount to the future (and the growth cycles) of an organization. Yet, these are rare to… Continue Reading

7 Reasons Why It is Difficult to Manage New Projects (Or Inherit an Old One)

What makes projects so difficult to manage? As a project manager, you need to assess the culture, your role, your team, how problems escalate, what your responsibilities are and how to tackle edge cases (delays, problematic team members, running out of budget, handling scope creep, disagreeing with a client, etc.) And within the right environment, everyone follows the company mission statement and the core principles of the organization. This will turn your decision-making process into a quantifiable, well-oiled machine, which should facilitate the team and get the work done. Project management is, in theory, the activity of ensuring a project’s… Continue Reading

Strategies In Managing A Software Development Team

Prior to launching my own web development agencies over 10 years ago, I’ve jumped between the role of a senior developer and a manager multiple times – including leading and managing a software development team role. My first stunt in management was back in 2007. We were building a Java-based distributed software for a telecom group operating in multiple countries. I spent a year and a half with the company as a developer before joining the project along with our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and a couple of other developers. The CTO and I spent several months working closely together… Continue Reading

Developing Discipline: 8 Integral Traits and Tips for Practical Application

This is the guide to developing discipline, including both the essentials and the tactics to make it a habit either personally or professionally.  How to Be More Disciplined The semantics around how to become disciplined have been fairly controversial especially when we account for the fact that disciplining team members is using the same verb. The truth is that discipline is merely sticking to an established process, following protocols, and adhering to requirements.  And even the most easy-going startups, or the companies with fun Google-like playgrounds, still require a certain amount of discipline because every business goes through ups and… Continue Reading

11 Aspects to Focus On to Boost Recruitment Marketing

Why do companies invest so much time and resources in recruitment marketing? Gone are the days when companies could easily go cherry-picking among hundreds of applicants. Sure, CVs are flying in all the time, but they are predominantly interns or juniors looking for a job in a different industry or field of work. Top brands invest significantly in recruitment marketing. What is Recruitment Marketing?  If you're running a business, then you know how hard recruitment is. If, for whatever reason, you are unfamiliar with recruitment marketing, this is basically the type of marketing that is bringing applicants closer to closing… Continue Reading