How Google hires.

Excellent points made in this article describing how Google hires. The title is, "Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college graduates." These approaches dovetail well with Paul Tough's book, "How Children Succeed." Here's an excerpt:

Google looks for the ability to step back and embrace other people’s ideas when they’re better. “It’s ‘intellectual humility.’ Without humility, you are unable to learn,” Bock says. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure.”

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Think Like a Headhunter, Maximize Your Odds & Stand Out.

I am a recruiter, or if you prefer, a headhunter. As I joke on my Linkedin profile, I don't get too wrapped up in titles. I find and deliver specific talent to companies. In essence, I sell people to other people to pay my mortgage. While I make an important distinction between finding people jobs and finding talent for companies (disclosure: the companies pay my fees), I think a recruiter's unique perspective can inform and assist folks looking for new opportunities. When people ask me what I do for work, I joke that I gamble for a living, but it is closer to the truth to say I constantly search for ways to maximize the odds of my own success, and so should every job seeker. Searches I take on are often contingency searches, which means I only get paid when I present the winning candidate and the company successfully hires them,so I am careful where I spend my time. This is one of the first things I want to share with folks looking for a job: The person you contact matters, the way you make contact matters, and your presentation matters. Lots of layoffs are taking place, and the first reaction is often panic, fear, and gloom. One might feel like wallpapering every available surface with a resume and cover letter, but honestly that isn't going to help.

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