I love this story I read the other day.

A young man, gazing out a train window, exclaims at every new sight with glee:

“The sky is blue!”

“The trees are whizzing by!”

“I see a bird!”

The man’s father looks on proudly. Meanwhile, a couple sitting nearby cannot help express confusion tinged with pity. “Have you taken him to the doctor?” they ask the old man.

“Why yes,” he explains. “We are just coming from the hospital, where they cured my son’s blindness. He is seeing for the first time.”

Moral is, you just never know what someone’s story is. First impressions can be quite wrong.

On the other hand, as an Executive Recruiter in the business of connecting employers to candidates, I know how very important first impressions often are. So while I urge interviewers to look beyond first impressions, I also coax my candidates into making the best first impressions possible.

AI and HR — two abbreviations that don’t necessarily seem to go well together.

As we forge into the next decade, there’s a lot of buzz around how Artificial Intelligence and automation will impact the job market. In my role as Recruiter, I field a fair amount of questions about AI’s impact on jobs.

The short answer is that many jobs will be replaced or changed by automation, sure. But most HR and intelligence experts agree that for every job lost to AI, a new one will crop up around managing and working with data.

Felicia Tan, General Manager, Human Resources, Fuji Xerox Malaysia, is focused on Talent Acquisition in the tech space, so quite familiar with the topic of AI in HR.

Tan sees certain human-only traits becoming increasingly critical in the age of AI: curiosity, imagination, empathy, creativity, intuition, emotional intelligence. For individuals with the goal of staying relevant and competitive, honing and cultivating these skills will be increasingly important.

Quote ” As technology automates routine tasks, human intelligence becomes more important in the digital economy”.

One thing is for sure: it’s going to be a wild ride.

You thought you’d identified the perfect candidate — then she turned down the job. What happened?

Statistically speaking, she may have had a bad experience during the hiring process that you weren’t even aware of. According to PwC, nearly half of job seekers have turned down an offer for this reason.

Katie Burke, chief people officer for HubSpot, outlines four ways to ensure you’re offering the best “customer experience” to your candidates:

1. Do a good job of setting expectations by clearly defining what will happen at each stage of the hiring process.

2. Communicate early and often. Candidates’ number-one complaint is lack of timely response from prospective employers.

3. Use automation — but don’t lose human interaction.

4. Lead with empathy. It helps build trust and rapport right off the bat.

If you’d like more tips and techniques for offering a good customer experience to candidates during the hiring process, that’s in my wheelhouse as Executive Recruiter at Newcastle Associates.

It’s a New Year and a new opportunity to think about your personal brand. If you were a brand, what would your logo look like?

Would it be a classic Times New Roman font? Cartoon Sans? An animated emoji?

One thing great candidates do well is that they understand their own personal brand. They know what makes them unique, what defines them in the eyes of potential employers and how they come across on social media as well as in person.

Having a personal brand means that you tell a story with your professional history. You can build a narrative with your job experience and show future employers how everything you’ve done until now led to this point.

It means you know your purpose and where you can have impact, and you’re able to articulate it well, even under pressure.

If your goal this year is to get a new job, start with your brand. And if you need some help defining it, give me a call at Newcastle Associates and we’ll work on your story together.

Ready to make a change in your career? Turns out, there’s a science to this.

It’s called the Stages of Change Model, and it outlines the six steps people go through to make a dramatic change:
1. Precontemplation
2. Contemplation
3. Determination
4. Action
5. Maintenance
6. Termination

The first stage, Precontemplation, is a particularly interesting one. It’s when we very first realize we have a problem (company/boss, compensation, culture, etc.) We aren’t yet ready to do anything about it, but that nagging little voice in the back of our head whisper-shouts THIS IS NOT WORKING.

Getting from stage 1 to stage 2 is the trickiest part of the whole equation. It takes a lot of motivation, and that’s the one thing you probably don’t have.

Typically, that shift only happens when stage 1 becomes intolerable. Or when the benefits of change finally outweigh the risks of staying the same.

Once you enter stage 2 — Contemplation — you have a trajectory. While this stage may take deep advantage of your procrastination skills, change at this point is nearly inevitable.

If you’re stuck in Precontemplation in your current position, what’s it going to take to bump you to the next level? (And if you want to talk to a Recruiter about this, I’m all ears!)