Client Interview: How Veterinary Clinics are Hiring for Attitude

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

We recently spoke to certified Hiring for Attitude professional Elise Lacher of Strategic Veterinary Consulting, Inc. to catch up on how she’s using her Hiring For Attitude certification to help support her work with business owners and practice managers at veterinary clinics.

Q: Hi Elise, thanks for making the time to chat. You’ve been on the road for 6 weeks. How has Hiring for Attitude played into your schedule?

Elise: I just came from a workshop that was built around building systems for small business owners to increase profitability. One hot topic was whether you should hire for attitude or aptitude. As I listened to the discourse I found it  interesting that even with all the smart people in the room, most people were strongly siding with one position or another. I finally said, “Why not hire for both?” And then, of course, went on to explain that while skills are important, even the greatest skills set in the world is not going to result in a successful hire if the person has the wrong attitude for the company culture.

Q: How is Hiring for Attitude helping your clients?

Elise: Right now there are a lot of veterinarians looking for positions. Two or three years ago it took six months to a year to fill an open position, but today there’s an overload of unsolicited applications being sent. And many of my clients, whether they’re the business owner or the practice manager, really struggle to find the right person for the job; someone that really fits the culture of the practice. Being able to tell my clients, “These are your Brown Shorts” (the key attitudes that define an organization’s culture) and then to help them build a hiring process around those Brown Shorts, including how the job ad gets written, has worked miracles. My clients get the Great Fit people they need and it makes my time more efficient.

Q: What’s the feedback like when you tell a client, “These are your Brown Shorts”?

Elise: A lot of veterinary business owners and practice managers have never stopped to consider what makes their practice unique; different from all the other practices out there. For many of my clients, this is the first time they’re able to say, “These are the attitudinal hallmarks that define my high and low performers.”

Q: Rewriting job ads that recruit for attitude is a really fun and effective part of the Hiring for Attitude process. What have been your experiences with Brown Shorts job ads?

Elise: The Brown Shorts ads work exceptionally well. For one thing, too many practices use the same language in their hiring ads. You see over and over the same things written like: “practice quality medicine” or “deliver great customer service.”  It’s the same exact thing the practice down the road is saying. But when we work the Brown Shorts into the ad, when we tell people what it really looks like inside that clinic, then that really makes a difference.

For example, some clinics are very high volume. Great customer service in this environment looks very different than great customer service in a high touch, low-volume clinic. Both clinics want to hire people who give great customer service, but they need to know what that really means. For too many of them, they’ve attended some lecture where they heard, “Great customer service means you look the customer in the eye and chit chat with them about their kids and get them comfortable.” But you don’t want that kind of customer service in a high-volume clinic where you want to get customers into the exam room fast but without making them feel rushed or slighted. You can’t just recruit for “great customer service” and expect to find the right candidates. You have to recruit for what you are really looking for. And that comes down to attitude.

That’s why the Brown Shorts job ads make a difference.  It’s a critical part of putting the whole Hiring for Attitude system together. You can’t just write: “High quality medicine practice looking for experienced technician that loves animals.”  If you’re on the receiving end of that ad, you’re going to get overloaded with applications, and most of them won’t even be from people seeking tech jobs.  You’ll also get a few hundred applications from associates or receptionists.  And no one has time for that.  You want to quickly narrow it down to the Great Fit candidates who have the right attitudes and the right skills.  And that’s exactly what Brown Shorts jobs ads let you do.

If your team or organization struggles to find candidates you feel confident hiring and promoting or if too many of your recent hires just don’t seem to be working out, Hiring for Attitude Training and Certification is for you. Call 1-800-814-7859 or email info@leadershipiq.com today.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

View the original article here

Hiring for Attitude Named One of “10 Best Strategy Books to Beat the Competition”

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Howard Lewinter, writing for Small Business Trends, puts Hiring for Attitude first 

I had a great time last summer talking about Hiring for Attitude with Howard Lewinter on his BlogTalkRadio show, Talk Business with Howard. I also learned that Howard is a guy who reads a lot of books. So I’m especially honored that Hiring for Attitude leads the pack on his recently released list of ”10 Best Strategy Books to Beat the Competition” that shows readers how to survive and profit in today’s competitive business environment.

As Howard says in his review of the book, “Don’t think for a minute that because the unemployment rate remains high in the United States it’s easy to find the right employees. It isn’t.”  When Leadership IQ asked executives from over 1000 companies how successful they were in sourcing the best talent from executive, professional, technical and unskilled categories, the overall response was dismal.  In all four categories, fewer than 10% of the companies said they are doing an excellent job at sourcing the best talent, while 65% said they’re doing an average or below average job.

But as bad as the unemployment news is, there is hiring taking place out there. And the message just keeps getting stronger that the criteria that companies are looking for in new hires is changing. It’s all about attitude.

Mark Murphy is Founder & CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated research and consulting firm that delivers employee engagement and leadership development to the world’s most successful organizations and their leaders.

Mark leads one of the world’s largest leadership and goal-setting studies, and his work has appeared in such publications as the Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Post. Mark has also been a featured guest on programs including CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark’s training and surveys have yielded remarkable results for organizations such as Harvard Business School, Aflac, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Merck, MD Anderson Cancer Center, FirstEnergy, Volkswagen and Johns Hopkins.

Mark’s best-selling books are backed by rigorous research and offer leaders clear and actionable solutions. His most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, was featured in Fast Company, The Wall St Journal, and chosen as a top business book by CNBC. Some of his other titles include the international bestseller, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, and HARD Goals: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

As a former turnaround specialist, Mark’s work has revolutionized how we view the link between leadership and bottom-line results. He was awarded the prestigious Healthcare Financial Management Association’s “Helen Yerger Award for Best Research” for being the first person to discover the link between layoff strategies and patient mortality rates. For his work in saving financially-distressed hospitals, he was a three-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare Award,” joining a list of 300 luminaries including Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. Some of his other groundbreaking research studies include “Are SMART Goals Dumb?,” “Why CEO's Get Fired,” “Why New Hires Fail” and “Don’t Expect Layoff Survivors to Be Grateful.”

View the original article here

What to Look For When Hiring a Content Writer

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Anyone can call themselves a content writer. There’s no degree in content writing, and the skills involved in content writing don’t necessarily require an English degree or advanced education. To be a content writer, you need to:

Write Quickly.Write Well.Research Well.Have Common Sense.

Those are essentially the four skills of content writing, and while a degree in English or some type of advanced marketing studies can be helpful, they do not indicate the ability to write quickly, craft articles on a variety of topics to which the writer is likely to have little experience, or display the inappropriately named and rare skill of “common” sense.

This is a problem, because it means that Billy Joe Schmo may be a better content writer than Dr. Dave Skilled, Ph.D, but their qualifications may indicate the opposite. It also means that a company of 500 may be worse at developing content than an unkempt high school dropout living in a basement. The lack of qualifications also means that someone that found flipping burgers was too intellectually demanding can claim themselves to be a content writer, and those searching for a quality writer have no way of differentiating them from a writer with talent.

Tips to Find a Content Writer

All of these issues make finding the right content writer a fairly complex task, and one that involves a little bit of trial and error. Consider the following tips and strategies to ensure that you’re hiring someone legitimately skilled at writing interesting and valuable content.

The best place to start is by checking out their sample articles or portfolio. It’s where you’ll get at least an idea of what the company or writer considers “Quality Writing” because no good business is going to showcase their worst work. If the quality of the sample articles is acceptable, you can move forward, but still consider a fair degree of skepticism since there’s no guarantee the company or the writer you’ll have wrote the sample articles.

Check Formatting – Including Website Formatting

One interesting way to judge content writers is how they format their articles. Quality content writers understand how to format their articles for the web. They’ll use bullet points, subheadings, shorter paragraphs, decent spacing – their writing will be pleasing to the eye, regardless of the type of content they’re writing about. Formatting is something web writers learn with experience, so quality formatting will imply some degree of knowledge of web content.

It may cost a small investment, but most companies offer single article purchases. Purchase one. The investment is small, there is no commitment, and you’ll be able to get an idea if the writer is someone you want to continue working with. Remember that writing is also subjective – two great writers may develop the same type of content, and you may find one is much “better” than the other according to how it matches your vision. It doesn’t mean the other writer is bad, but it may indicate that you prefer the style of another writer.

Great writers should be able to write content with a minimal degree of research and while relying very little on the work of others. Copyscape (www.copyscape.com) is the best way to ensure that the content hasn’t been stolen, but you’ll want to test for more than that. You want to make sure that the writer didn’t just steal all of the ideas from one single piece of content either. Do a Google search for a keyword or two, and see if the first one or two pieces of content are nearly identical in style to the one developed for your website.

Note that research is common. A great writer may not know how to write an article without a Google search of related topics, and this practice is both common and accepted. But their content still shouldn’t read like they rewrote someone else’s content directly. It needs to read as though they were an expert – as though they wrote it from scratch – even if you know with certainty that they didn’t. Searching Google for similar content and reading it yourself can be of tremendous benefit.

Finally, when in doubt, talk to someone within the company on the phone. How someone speaks is indicative of the quality of writing they’ll provide. Those that can’t argue in favor of their work, or whose English skills appear to be lacking are far less likely to provide high quality content.

Start Small – Go Big

Ideally, the best thing to do is start with a small project and move up from there. A small, 1 to 5 article project shouldn’t put too big a dent in your wallet, and you’ll get an opportunity to judge the speed and quality of the writer(s). If you like the content, you can move forward with a larger quantity. If you don’t, you end the working relationship, and try to find something else to do with the work the poor quality writers completed.

It’s unfortunate that “content writer” can be thrown around with so little regard, but it’s the nature of a subjective business – most poor quality content writers genuinely believe their work is of the highest quality, and in some cases a high quality writer may be judged as writing poorly by someone that has a different view of what “good writing means.”

But don’t forget that you’re under no obligation to use any content writer beyond an initial article, and you can ask content writers as much as you want about what they provide before making a purchase. Ask questions, view samples, do some online research, and start with a small trial project, and while you may have to go through a bad writer or two, you’ll ultimately find the quality content writer you’re looking for.

Bio – Micah Abraham is co-owner and lead content writer at Great Leap Studios, a New York based content writing company. Learn more about content writing at www.greatleapstudios.com.

what to look for when hiring a contentwhat to look for in a website content writinganyone can be a content writerwhat to look for in a content writer

View the original article here

What to Look For When Hiring a Content Writer

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

View the original article here