By Bob Van Rossum

This seems like such a basic part of the job search process, however I am finding more candidates confused about this today than I have seen in during the 12 years I have be in recruiting. 

Ultimately you need to send a thank you note to everyone you have interviewed with.  In today’s world the preferred method for such communication is e-mail. 

Each letter to needs to be personalized to the recipient and can be used to highlight a point you made in the interview that you believe was important.  Please notice I said to highlight a point, not to create an entirely new line of thought.  This is not the time for I forgot telling them all the things you forgot to bring up during the interviews. 

Be humble and grateful, yet confident in your ability to exceed their expectations.  Ultimately people want to work with people who are excited about working with them and for the company.  Please address in your why you are excited about being part of the team. 

Timing is also important, if you send the note from your smartphone when you get to the car, you are stalking.  Best time is that evening when you are done with you work day.  If you wait too long it will be hard to convince them you are really excited about the role and company. 

Also check out:

Win-Win Salary Negotiation

How to Prepare for an Interview

Career Success Triangle

Our Current Jobs

Each new job sounds good when you start, but how can you tell that offer you are about to accept is really going to move your career forward?

At its core, each career transition has three components and if you are an “A” player you want to make sure all three are positive, in order for the move itself to be considered successful.

Ultimately there are no guarantees and things will change after you start or their will be facts that impact your transition that you do not have at the time you must make a decision.

The best place to start is to make sure these three items are in alignment with your ultimate career goals.

1. Role – Is the role a step forward in your career?  Is it either a step-up in responsibility with a like size organization or a lateral move to a larger company?  Additionally does it move you forward on your path to your long-term career goal?
2. Manager – Are you about to go to work for someone you respect?  Most importantly, someone you can learn from?  Someone you will enjoy working with everyday for the next three – five years?
3. Company – Are you about to go work for a great company?  Is it growing?  Is it in an industry that will grow?  Are you passionate about what the company does?  Do you see yourself as someone who fits well into the culture?  Do they have a defined culture?  Can you grow your career without having to leave the organization?

Ultimately on you can decide what is going to be the best career move for you.  How much you are moving away from pain or towards gain? How each step you take puts you on the path to your ultimate career goal.

Also see:  How to Interview

By Bob Van Rossum

For longer than I have been in the business, candidates have tried to adjust momentum in their favor by creating deadlines for the company doing the hiring.  This is done by making up another offer and telling the recruiter you have an offer when in reality you do not.

Ultimately I have rarely seen this work out well for the candidate and most of the time it backfires.  Companies have a hiring process that they go through because it has proven successful for them in the past.  Asking them to shorten (disrupt) this process makes them uneasy, there is no good reason to do this unless it is absolutely necessary.

After the deadline has passed, it is amazing how often this other offer did not materialize and they are still interested in my client.  Unfortunately the candidate with the faux offer has now lost tremendous credibility.

What we recommend is transparency.  If you really have a competing offer, or are expecting one, share everything you know about it with the recruiter.  Then we can manage our client accordingly and if you are truly very talented it is likely we can get them to make a decision more quickly than they wanted to.  However there is risk they will not adjust the timing of the deal, risk you have no reason to absorb if you are not forced to do so.

By Bob Van Rossum

There is a lot of bad data out there on how to prepare for an interview, much of which is actually counterproductive to the process.  Please DO NOT go out on Google, search for sample interview questions about behavioral interviews or any other type of interview process and waste your time writing out and memorizing answers to these questions.  The result is likely to be disaster, first you have no idea what type of questions the interviewer will ask. Even if you hear from someone who has interviewed there before that Company X uses behavioral interview techniques, you do not really know if they do or just the person they interviewed with did.  Additionally, no matter what methodology a company uses there are always multiple high ranking employees who can’t be bothered to learn the process and therefore interview the same way they always have.   So now your friend told you to prepare for behavioral based questions and you spend hours doing so and you go in and the very first interviewer asks none of the questions you have painstakingly memorized questions for, first you get a little nervous, second your confidence goes downhill and next you are fumbling for answers to even the most basic questions.  You just lost the opportunity to work for this company.  Worse is you go in and they ask you exactly the questions you are expecting and you answer them all based on the memorization game you played with yourself.  You leave the interview feeling great and you never hear from that company again.  You have been rejected and they never even bothered to call and let you know, let alone let you know why.  In this case the reason you were rejected was your answers sounded rehearsed and therefore fake.  Best case scenario is you lacked credibility, worst case scenario they just flat out did not believe you.   When you interview you are competing and when you compete with others of similar skills and background, it is individual most prepared who will win.  How are you separating yourself from the competition?

Check out:

How to Prepare for an Interview

The Phone Interview

MarketPro – is the leading marketing staffing and marketing recruitment firm utilizing top marketers to find you top marketing talent.

By Bob Van Rossum 

We all know that a top performer is ten times more productive than an average performer and they only earn about ten percent more.  The bottom line impact of having an “A” player on your team is enormous.  Ultimately, Corporate America is interesting in the fact that due to pay grades and internal equity, rock stars get paid about the same as the kid in the high school band.  No one needs to be reminded of the cold, hard truth that your job rides on the quality of the talent you are surrounded by. That in mind, who do you want to go to battle with everyday?  Bono or the pimply faced kid playing the trombone? 

As organizations have reduced headcount overall and eliminated the fat they have become laser focused on cost in ways that are counterproductive.  You cut the bottom ten percent of your workforce because expenses were out of line with revenues.  Now it is time to make some strategic investments in talent and your process for doing so is to hope you find an “A” player who fell into another corporation’s bottom ten percent?  If so, you are asking for an underperforming professional and to have to do the search over again in twelve to eighteen months.  It is true that there are some very talented people in today’s job market.  However they are clearly the exception rather than the rule.  If you look at the placements our firm has made over the past 18 months, 84% of the candidates we have presented to our clients have been in a position or employed at the time we submitted them for consideration.  These passive candidates resulted in 93% of our placements.  Interesting that at a time when unemployment is around 9%, our clients are overwhelmingly convinced the best talent is not out looking.  When compared side-by-side, you are able to see their simply is no comparison.   

Today it is more important than ever to have quality people in your organization.  Simple math really, you have fewer people doing more work.  With an increased importance being placed on marketing, nowhere is this more important than in the group responsible for differentiating you from your competitors.  Peter Drucker says, “All business in marketing and innovation, everything else is just an expense.”

Business is harder than ever, we are still in a recession and not sure what the new “normal” is.  Globalization puts constant pricing pressure on companies who do not have that level of competition built into their cultures.  If you hope to compete and win, it is vital that you have the best possible people on in your organization.  Yet the strategy many executives carry to their HR organization is DO NOT spend any money on search fees.  Even worse, they tie the bonus of the HR executive to how little they spend on search fees.  How about we tie the bonus of the HR executive to the quality of hire?  If you send your hiring manager enough average candidates, sooner or later they will find a bad excuse to hire one of them to the detriment of your bottom line.   

I believe that eighty percent of organizations have quality people working in HR and recruiting.  Problem is based on who they are, they cannot effectively research, target, contact and most importantly convince passive candidates to join your team.  RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) companies have not improved upon this they have just shifted an identical process to outside your company.  You get prettier reports, but not better talent.  The only tried and true method for attracting the best passive candidates to your team is to call an executive search firm.  Most importantly pick one who is at the top of their specialty.  The best search firms know they cannot be all things to all people and can move exponentially faster when they niche focused.     

Not everyone in the executive search business is an “A” player their respective niche.  The best ones hire people with domain expertise in the area of specialty and train them to be top recruiting professionals.  For example, you cannot recruit a top marketing professional if you have never worked in a marketing role.  Globally, the recession will end soon enough.  Your company’s ability to come out of its own doldrums and grow again is 100% dependent on the quality of your team.  Are you surrounded by rock stars motivated to do great things or kids from the high school band just looking to get by?  The deck is stacked against you if you are looking to hire another organization’s castoffs.

By Bob Van Rossum 

Having an agency (ad, pr, digital, etc.) is great if they are truly presenting you with something unique.  If you are doing tremendous mass advertising and your agency has incredible creative then you are in the right place.  Unfortunately getting an ROI from your agency partner is becoming increasingly difficult and certain pieces of the relationship structure work against it.  The distance between you and your agency presents challenges with communication and speed of execution.  Truthfully only 20 percent of organizations using an agency really need one.  The remaining 80 percent of companies gain a competitive advantage utilizing top talent on a contract basis to insource your agency. 

Top Reasons to Insource your Ad Agency:

1. 35% – 40% Cost Savings:  Why pay your agencies rent in addition to your company’s rent?  Looking at an agency’s overhead and markups, it’s easy to see how you can insource and push money to the bottom line. Or use this to your advantage to do more marketing and increase your top line. 
2. Higher Quality Marketing:  When you hire an agency, you are really hiring one or two people and paying for others you were unable to select, but have a real impact on the work.  As part of our insourcing model, you select exactly who you want for each role.  This provides greater depth and breadth of experience resulting in better work.  If you have someone who is no longer able to provide the level of work you require due to changing needs, you are able to immediately bring in someone new who can.    
3. Confidence:  The CMO who insources their marketing shows tremendous confidence in themselves.  What you are saying to the others on the Senior Management Team is you do not need to lean on your agency like a crutch.  You having confidence in yourself in turn is rewarded by the organizations increased confidence in you.  A natural byproduct of providing additional ROI.
4. Flexibility:  All areas of business are going through massive change that is simply magnified in marketing.  Utilizing on-demand marketing talent provides you the flexibility to turn on a dime.  Giving you the freedom to bring in new resources as your marketing mix changes, your business grows or needs to cut costs or a new area of expertise is required.  It is significantly easier to change out one or two team members as your needs change than to switch agencies and get the new agency up to speed.  In the end you are buying an opportunity to get the work done and saying good-bye to a fixed monthly retainer. 
5. Knowledge:    Imagine a marketing department and agency relationship with zero knowledge gaps.  Completely possible when you insource the agency, retaining the right to bring in the knowledge you need for only the time it is required.  From top creative talent to digital strategy to execution, you can have all the talent you need inside your four walls without the commitment to them as employees. 
6. Velocity:  What a treat to walk down the hall and talk to your Creative Director.  Opening up communication and encouraging collaboration between what has traditionally been your agency and what is your internal staff decreases the time it takes to get great work done.  The inhouse agency will hit the mark the first time more often. 
7. Better Communication:  In addition to increased velocity, having the MarketPro team at your location increases their ability to interact with your team and gives them access to knowledge about your company that it is impossible for someone at another location to have.  This increases the quality of the work, speeds up execution all while saving you about 40%. 

By ALYSE KNORR 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you can’t Tweet, you might get beat — in the job hunt, that is.

http://www.ajc.com/business/social-media-skills-become-crucial-for-job-hunters-102247.html

By Bob Van Rossum 

In Part One we discussed from a basic perspective why it is so difficult for a CMO to drive success.  Now we need to go farther into the challenges all CMO’s and those who hire them face.  Some suggest that the average CMO tenure is closer to 24 or 28 months, in reality they are measuring too small a universe of companies.  CMO tenure is a problem that only gets worse as company size decreases.  Smaller organizations need marketing now more than ever, however they tend to have less of an ability to measure the ROI their marketing programs bring.  As a result they tend to jump from one program to the next with no strategic marketing plan.    

The CMO Dilemma:  CMO’s face a common dilemma, do you focus on long-term innovation and maybe miss short-term goals or do you focus on the next ninety days and ultimately get passed by more aggressive competition?  One thing is for sure, organizations with the best financial results have CMO’s who have been around a while and have a real seat at the table in the C-Suite. 

How to recruit a new CMO:  The biggest challenge in finding a new CMO is not all CMO jobs are similar.  Unlike the CIO or CFO role, the CMO job actually can have more differences than similarities.  We have identified 5 distinctly different CMO gigs, which means depending on who you hire if you are not aware of what type of marketing organization your company has your chance of success is 20%.  Ultimately, not only do you need to identify what type of marketing organization you have, you need to recognize what kind of talent you have reporting to your CMO. The functional expertise of your existing marketing team will also change the type of expertise you need the CMO to have.  Bringing in a new CMO is a huge opportunity, not just to bring in better talent, but to re-define what marketing needs to do for your company.  Last thing in the world you want to do is bring in a new CMO and ask them to continue with the status quo that led to last person to leave in the first place.  

One of our competitors has published a whitepaper on The Successful CMO.  Ultimately the whitepaper leads companies down a path that will set the new CMO up to fail.  In part of the whitepaper, they outline a CMO’s range of responsibilities and the reality is no one has a career with enough breadth of experience for them to come close to checking all those boxes.   You get to be a senior marketer by being an expert in one area first and becoming a generalist later.  This means there are one or two things you do extremely well, a bunch of things you are good at and a few things you have never seen before.  Question is does your expertise as a marketer line up with the type of marketing organization you are walking into?  If not, even the brightest mind will fail as the CMO gig does not offer on-the-job training. 

Ultimately if you are inviting someone into the C-Suite, make it a big gig and hire someone who can exceed all expectations.  If you only want advertising and marketing communications, then an SVP of Marketing will suffice.  You will get passed by your competitors who truly understand the CMO is becoming more valuable everyday and the value they provide includes understanding consumer (or business) demand, product development, achieving top line growth and delivering on margin goals. 

www.marketproinc.com

By Bob Van Rossum

Interesting times we are living in, looks like many people are being lulled into a false sense of insecurity.  A belief they can wait until the market turns before they need to take action.  The market is creating a situation where good business people are pretending they do not know how to run their business because they are unable to grasp what to do next.  While others are seeing it clearly and using this as an opportunity to hire the best marketing talent and they are doing so with alarming speed.   We lost a top executive level marketing candidate today as our client has been slow to make a commitment, the second such top candidate we have lost on this search alone. 

But this search is not unique, our clients who are succeeding are the ones moving fast and our clients who are acting like a deer in the headlights, well they are slowing down their search as I will only let them hire an “A” player.  The myth is that there are a lot of talented people in the marketplace.  Reality is there are very talented people looking for a job, but the other reality is companies by and large did not cut their top people, they cut the bottom ten percent.  So you have a dynamic where the marketplace has lots of unemployed people and around 10% – 15% are worth hiring.  For the placements we have made in the last six months, over 82% of candidates hired had a job at the time we found them a new one.  In my decade as a recruiter, I have never seen a better time to add talented marketers to your team and never has it been harder to separate “A” level talent from everybody else.  Our business is growing as companies are realizing the need for an experienced marketing professional to recruit and screen marketing talent, as those looking for a job have become talented at interviewing. 

The most important aspect of what is going on in the market is the work and results being driven by these new marketers.  Our clients have seen themselves leapfrogging their competition with regards to brand awareness and revenue.     

http://www.marketproinc.com

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This program was developed by Pax Gabriel, a leading executive search firm based in Atlanta, GA. We have placed over 1,500 individuals and managed over 6,000 interview processes over the past decade. Our valuable experience has led to knowing what is most successful in the interviewing process and what needs to be avoided at all costs.

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