ATD Footer Logo

Sean C. Castrina is a successful entrepreneur and author of 8 Unbreakable Rules for Business Start-Up Success. Learn more at www.newbizcoach.org.

Sean Castrina

Thinking About Starting a Business? 4 Questions to Ask Yourself

In the public sector, the Competitive Service Act of 2015, enacted in March 2016, is meant to streamline the recruiting process by allowing agencies to share information on applicants and potentially fill positions more quickly with the most qualified candidates. But recruitment isn't just about filling positions when they become vacant. Government recruiters need to think ahead. Prepare yourself today to recruit tomorrow by thinking through these steps.Determine Present and Future NeedsThe key is to build your candidate pool before you need it. Waiting for a vacancy to occur creates the reactionary approach that many organizations fall under. Budgetary or personnel number constraints may prevent you from hiring ahead, but you can certainly predict some future areas of need by evaluating the tenure and ages of staff in your organization. How many are nearing retirement age or have 20-plus years with the agency and may be in a position to move on? Consider whether there any incentives coming in the next 18-24 months (such as early retirement bonuses) that may create a mass exodus. As you evaluate the need, you also must look at the multiple generations in the workforce. There are different triggers of success for each identified band of employees. Previous generations may have seen it as perfectly normal, understood, and accepted that young, new employees start at the bottom and work their way up in a very rigid hierarchical structure. That is not always the sentiment of new employees. You must plan accordingly.Identify Available ResourcesJoin professional trade associations and groups that align with your industry and specialized workforce. Create master lists of industry leaders and other potential employees from customers, colleagues, co-workers, and friends. Invest in your employees and pay for their participation and networking in industry groups, conferences, and trade shows. Create a listing of employees' areas of study and any collegiate allegiances (where they graduated from or potentially a family member attends or attended). This can be used for recruitment purposes later.Develop Candidate PoolsStart internally with your existing employees. Build a personalized recruitment section or board for them to learn of openings, and give potential internal candidates an interview. It's a chance for you to know them better and for them to learn more about agency goals and needs. Sometimes, a good fit is found between your needs and theirs.If no internal candidate exists and your search reaches externally, reach out first to passive job seekers. All good recruiters should have a pool of warm candidates they can contact when a vacancy occurs. These are a group of people that you've interacted with and cultivated relationships with over a period of time. The better the cultivation, the more applicants you may have to choose from during your next vacancy announcement. No matter if the new hire is internal or external, always hire for strengths. Don't expect to develop weak areas of performance, habits, and talents. Build on what is great about your new employee in the first place. Establish Criteria for SuccessOrganizations often measure success as a filled job, but recruiting success is so much more than that. Success does include finding the right talent, at the right time, at the right price, but it doesn't end at the fulfillment of a vacancy. It extends well into the new hire's employment. When determining your success, you must answer these questions:  How was the employee onboarding process?Was the new employee assigned a mentor to help with navigating the organization?How soon is the new employee contributing to the overall work?How is the new employee adding value to the culture?Has your new employee made it past the first 90 days, six months, or year? Recruiters also must understand internal relationship building and evaluate the process with the respective hiring managers and other internal constituents. What are more qualitative measures of success for each of these stakeholders? For more advice, check out my article, “Active Recruiting: Casting a Wide Net,” in the June 2016 issue of The Public Manager. You also can listen to the podcast interview with Jon Wolper. We define active recruiting and discuss how recruitment for government agencies differs from recruitment for the private sector.

4 Steps to Active Federal Recruitment

It’s not as intimidating as it sounds. Many organizations are becoming global, which means your L&D team may eventually span multiple countries and time zones. Efficiently managing a global team requires some change management on the part of L&D leadership.
If you are preparing for such a change, this session will provide tips to help you:
• Facilitate efficient global communication and project planning.
• Structure team meetings so they provide maximum value.
• Create follow-the-sun workflows and recurring tasks that ensure team coordination.
• Structure major global training initiatives.
• Organize a training calendar and course catalogs that cater to multiple worldwide audiences.
 

Structured for Success: Organizing a Global Training Team and Program

The winter 2011 issue of The Public Manager kicks off with a 3-article forum on homeless in the U.S. and what government can do to make a difference. Having had first-hand experience on these matters during my long government career - including assignments with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during the early years of the 'war on poverty" and the US Department of Health, Education & Welfare/Health & Human Services (HEW/HHS) - I was interested to learn what 's different in 2012! Well, these articles indicate that today's solutions are largely built around a combination of: 1) sustained, creative intra- and inter-governmental collaboration, 2) vigilant performance measurement (at all levels) and 3) smarter governance.The first article, contributed by U.S Department of Housing & Urban development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan, is "Ending Homelessness in Our Time: Why Smart Government is Key," offers a very promising overview - particularly the "teasers" about actual case illustrations across the country. One would like to learn more about the innovative efforts already showing results in Cleveland, Chicago, NYC, Greater KC, Nashville and the State of Utah and such related apporaches as "HUDstat" and the varied HUD partnerhsips with HHS, the US Departments of Labor (DOL), Education (EDUC) and Veterans Affairs (VA). Are there Web sites where we can learn more about these innovations AND their measurable performance outcomes? I guess for that, we'll have to dig further at HUD's Web site - which I will do and report back in my next post.The second article, Interagency Collaboration Moves the U.S. Closer to Ending Homelessness authored by Barbara Poppe, executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, drills down more deeply into the strategic planning, goals, roadmap building AND numerical measures of success that have gone into these efforts. The key to all these multi-farious investments and undertakings at different levels of government and the private sector is Opening Doors Across America, "the nation's first (integrated) strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness" which has four goals: 1) ending chronic homelessness by 2015; 2) preventing & ending homelessness among veterans by 2015; 3) preveneting & ending homelssness for families, youth & children by 2020; and 4) setting a path to end all types of homelessness.Finally, in the third article, Homes Wiped Away by Natural Disasters, Frances Edwards, former emergency preparedness director for San Jose CA, shares poignant lessons from several natural disaster-devestated communities that demonstrate what kind of mitigation steps can be put in place to reduce the extent of homelessness. Some of these measure include: risk-based zoning, strict building codes, limitations on building in flood zones and along fault lines, further requirements in wild land and urban interface zones, etc. Again, further probing needs to be done to share links to sites that provide readers with more details on the rich case illustrations Ms. Edwards refers to (including the Whittier Narrows earthquake of 1987, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, the Oakland-Berkely Hilss firestorm of 1991 and Hurricane Katrina less than six years ago.Please feel free to share more thoghts and details (including links) on these and related matters. I will do likewise.

Confronting the Challenge of American Homelessness in the 21st Century

Anne Bruce doesn't just speak for a living, she's also a talent manager and an executive coach who helps speakers and authors including celebrities, politicians, sports figures, and well-known business leaders soar to the next level of their career. With a background in broadcast journalism and years of extensive television work, Anne has written for clients and projects in Hollywood and New York. Her clients have appeared on Ellen, Shark Tank, Steve Harvey, Today Show, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper 360, and more. She's also carved a niche in coaching talent to write and deliver popular TEDx and TED Talks.Anne has had the privilege of speaking, writing, and conducting talent projects worldwide for organizations like the American Red Cross, Baylor University Medical Center, Sony Entertainment, Sony International, Saks Fifth Avenue, GEICO, Ben & Jerry's, Accenture, Coca Cola, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, The White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Columbia University School of Business, the Conference Board of Europe, and NASA, where she produced a documentary on the lives of women astronauts.She is the author of dozens of e-books and more than 23 books, which have been translated into more than 36 languages worldwide. Some of Anne's books include Speak for a Living: The Insider's Guide to Building a Speaking Career; Discover True North: A 4-Week Program to Ignite Your Passion and Activate Your Potential; Be Your Own Mentor; How to Motivate Every Employee; The Manager's Guide to Motivating Employees; and Building a High Morale Workplace; and Leaders Start to Finish: A Roadmap for Developing Top Performers (2nd edition). She's also been a featured author for Perfect Phrases for Employee Development Planning, part of McGraw-Hill's Perfect Phrases series. Anne also authored and acted as acquisition editor for the Pocket Tool Kit series. She has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, London Times, San Jose Mercury News, Newsweek, and Inc. magazine, among others.Anne's home base is in the greater Los Angeles area at Channel Islands Beach her favorite place to coach clients and film her popular weekly video blog, #30SecondsAtTheBeach. She has also partnered with her co-author Sardek Love, to launch The Speak for a Living Success Academy, a program for aspiring and accomplished speakers.

Anne Bruce

Trying to get your learners’ attention? You may have the world’s best training program, but that doesn’t mean much if your learners don’t show up for class! Join Katrina Marie Baker for fun, simple ideas that ensure learners are as excited as we are about learning and development.
This 60-minute webcast provides 15 tips that will help you:

Reach learners who are geographically dispersed, incredibly busy, or in need of individualized coaching.
Introduce new learning technology, such as a learning management system, in a way that is engaging and beneficial to your overall training program.
Creatively promote learning and development within your organization.

Use cases, best practices, and humor included free of charge. We look forward to seeing you!
 

Search results for 'Sean Castrina'

Categories

Refine By

Search results for 'Sean Castrina'

Categories

Refine By

Topic

Industry