English Columns

As a candidate, negotiating an offer may reveal more about you than anything you do in the recruiting process. Negotiating sends volumes of information to others about who you really are. Think about it for a second. This is where you display—for real, not just “interview talk”—what is important to you and how you approach discussing and resolving difficult issues—just the kind of thing you will have to do with colleagues and clients.

Basic assumption: your interest is in building a career and not on short-term economics. If this is not your interest this is where you can stop reading and get up to pour another cup of coffee before moving on to the want ads.

Conducting a competent, thorough reference is a critical element in making the right hiring decision. The purpose of a reference is to determine a candidate’s likelihood for success in a given position with specific needs, challenges, and a specific corporate culture based upon the candidate’s past accomplishments and demonstrations of behavior and skills. It’s a simple premise: the best way to predict success is to identify success in someone’s background as it relates to your specific need.

Having interviewed senior-level executives and having trained people to interview senior-level executives for more than twenty five years I would make these observations: a) A good interviewer’s style is “organic”, it’s flexible and has the ability to adapt to individual personalities and situations, and b) The best interviewers always have structure as their foundation. This is where the three “gotta-haves” come in (more on those in a minute).

It’s safe to say that one of the key elements of any plan for boosting economic growth is human resource development. Without talented, motivated, and skilled people to execute brilliant business strategies there wouldn’t be much happening in the way of innovation and growth. I applaud Mr. Martin Jahn, former Deputy Prime Minister and now a member of Skoda’s Board of Directors, and others for bringing a focus to human capital here in the Czech Republic as SME’s prepare to more fully seize the opportunities of the future.

In this final installment of thoughts and observations to consider regarding the creation of a culturally relevant Czech version of mentoring we’ll examine both ends of the mentoring spectrum from potential dangers and abuses to what mentoring looks like in its highest and best form.

In a continuation of our look at the creation of a culturally relevant Czech version of mentoring, the first question is, “How do you begin the process of finding a mentor?”

The idea for this column came from a discussion I had over dinner in Prague almost two years ago. My wife and I were new to Prague and anxious to learn about the city, the people and culture of the Czech Republic. We were having dinner with former student dissident leader and successful Czech entrepreneur, Jan Bubeník and his wife, Pavlina Wolfová, a popular talk show host here in Prague.

Full disclosure notice: I’m a fan of coaching and I have been since I was a youngster growing up in the farmland of the central United States when I first heard the unmistakable voice of a man who was later described as the most broadcast man on the planet, Earl Nightingale. He was on something like 500 radio stations with his program Our Changing World. Earl was a human potentialist—he believed we all had something special to contribute and he dedicated his life to helping people find their own special talents and to motivating them to use those talents.

Are you treated like royalty by your current employer? Do you get at least two or three requests a week from people asking you to consider joining a new company offering you the possibility of expanded responsibilities, a brighter future and increased income?

You’re not? You don’t? Then read on.