Recruiting in China

After spending weeks -- or months -- diligently looking for the perfect job, the last thing you want is to be forced back onto the job market.

A few wrong steps, however, and you might see a pink slip before a paycheck. If you want to guarantee your spot in the unemployment line, try some of these moves:

1. Don't bother learning what's expected of you.
Sit down with your manager and make sure you understand exactly what your job entails, your deadlines and any relevant department policies. This eliminates ambiguity and ensures you'll know how your performance measures up.

2. Learn to say, "That's not part of my job description," and use it frequently.
Everyone needs to set limits, but doing only the bare minimum sends a clear message that you're just interested in a regular paycheck. Sooner or later, your boss will start looking for someone willing to take more initiative.

3. Go shopping in the supply closet.
While you're at it, run a few errands with the company car and pad your expense report. Stealing from the company is one of the best ways to guarantee your immediate dismissal.

4. Abuse company technology.
Think your boss won't notice that you spend more time instant messaging your friends than you do working? Think again. Most companies monitor all their employees' e-mails and Internet usage -- and that includes what you do with your laptop after hours. Never use your company computer for anything illegal or X-rated.

5. Complain about your job to anyone who will listen.
Whether your pay is too low, the work is drudgery or you think your boss is an idiot, be careful of who hears you complain. If it gets back to your boss, she may just put you out of your misery.

6. Forget teamwork -- look out for No. 1.
No one wants to work with an arrogant employee who steals ideas or an egotistical worker who demeans others. Helping your co-workers doesn't make you a pushover, it makes you smart. Likeable employees move up the company ranks more quickly, and your colleagues will be more likely to help you find leads when you launch your next job search.

7. Bring your personal life to work.
It's inevitable that personal business is going to pop up during work hours. But keep in mind that cubicles don't lend any privacy, so the whole office can hear -- and are distracted by -- you making that appointment with your waxer. Keep personal calls and errands to a minimum during work hours.

8. Consistently work "abbreviated" workdays.
Want to show your boss how little you care about your job or career progress? Regularly come in late and leave early. After all, if you can't be trusted to show up on time, how can your boss trust you with more responsibility?

9. Treat deadlines more like guidelines.
When you procrastinate, everyone suffers. Your missed deadlines reflect poorly on you and your boss, and they delay everyone else on the project, since they can't finish their work until you do yours.

10. Operate the gossip mill.
While you can't avoid office gossip completely, don't get caught spreading it. Think about it: Do you really want hurtful or untrue rumors to be traced back to you? And remember: A few martinis are no excuse for getting loose-lipped.

Marshall Goldsmith is a famous executive coach, who has worked with more than 80 CEO¡¯s in the world¡¯s top corporations. He has a fabulous new book out called What Got You Here Won¡¯t Get You There. Actually, the title is not very descriptive, but the subtitle says it all: 20 workplace habits you need to break. It¡¯s a content-rich, well-written book.

While Goldsmith warns against self-diagnosis, I found the list incredibly helpful (even though I am not and never will be a CEO.) The practical, real world advice he provides for conquering these bad habits is immensely useful. Here¡¯s his list of bad habits:

1.The need to win each time
2.The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion
3.The need to pass judgment on others
4.Needless sarcasm and cutting comments
5.Starting with ¡°no¡±, ¡°But¡±, ¡°However¡±
6.Need to show how smart we are
7.Speaking when angry
8.Negativity: the need to share negative thoughts even when not asked
Withholding Information
9.Failing to Give Proper recognition
10.Claiming credit we don¡¯t deserve
11.Making excuses
12.Clinging to the past
13.Playing favorites
14.Refusing to express regret
15.Not listening
16.Failing to express gratitude
17.Punishing the messenger
18.Passing the buck
19.An excessive need to be ¡°me¡±: exalting our faults as virtues simply because 20.they¡¯re who we are

There's marketing yourself on your r¨¦sum¨¦, and then there's flat-out lying. Many job seekers are crossing the line.

Although just 5 percent of workers actually admit to fibbing on their r¨¦sum¨¦s, 57 percent of hiring managers say they have caught a lie on a candidate's application, according to a CareerBuilder.com survey. Of the hiring managers who caught a lie, 93 percent didn't hire the candidate.

When r¨¦sum¨¦ inconsistencies do surface during background checks, they raise concerns about the candidates' overall ethics. Forty-three percent of hiring managers say they would automatically dismiss a candidate who fibbed on their r¨¦sum¨¦. The rest say it depends on the candidate and situation.

Stretched dates to cover up employment gaps is the most commonly-caught r¨¦sum¨¦ lie, with nearly one-in-five hiring managers saying they have noticed this on a candidate's application. Other top r¨¦sum¨¦ lies include:

Past employers (18 percent)

Academic degrees and institutions (16 percent)

Technical skills and certifications (15 percent)

Accomplishments (8 percent)

Reasons for lying range from the innocuous (not being sure of the exact employment dates) to the more sinister (intentionally being deceitful to get the job). To ensure your r¨¦sum¨¦ is accurate but still portrays you in the best light, heed these tips:

If you don't have much formal experience... Highlight any activities or coursework that could be relevant to the position. Volunteer activities, part-time jobs and class projects can all provide transferable skills and training.

If you didn't quite finish your degree... Do not indicate on your r¨¦sum¨¦ that you graduated. Instead, name the university and list the years in which you attended.

If you were out of work... Don't stretch the employment dates to cover the gap. Instead, keep the dates accurate and address the gap in your cover letter. Be sure to mention any classes you took or volunteer work you performed during this time to keep your skills up-to-date.

If your company uses unfamiliar titles... This is one of the only circumstances in which it's acceptable to change your title to something more recognizable. For example if your title was "primary contact," and you performed the duties of an administrative assistant, you can clarify your title by writing "Primary Contact/Administrative Assistant." Giving yourself a promotion to "office manager," however, crosses the ethical line.

If you're a senior executive looking to add a key member to your marketing staff, but you've never hired marketing people before: buyer beware! Why do I say this? While there are a lot of talented marketing executives out there with an excellent repertoire of skills and experience, there also are marketing people who lack the substance, the training, the skill sets, and the understanding of marketing dynamics in order to really have a positive impact on your business.

What is the profile of an empty marketing suit? Well, typically it's somebody who dresses well, is very polished, speaks nicely, and uses all the latest fancy buzzwords, but who has little/no track record of actual execution or success. This person is great at "wowing" a CEO through the interviewing process, but that's about all they're good at.

What you should be looking for is a marketing executive who's got true substance and capabilities.

What I want to outline here are some of the key hiring criteria when you're looking for a good marketing executive:

• They should have outstanding quantitative training with a strong background in mathematics, which translates into being able to do budgeting, forecasting and tracking.

• They should have proven analytical skills that are used to survey and analyze complex sets of data, do market segmentations, sizing, competitive analysis, etc.

• They should have strong strategic thinking skills and a strong grasp of marketing strategy, as evidenced by previous challenges they have faced and dealt with in their career.

• They should have formal training in strategic marketing planning, product planning, new product development, etc.

• They should understand the modern methods for marketing communications for both awareness building as well as lead generation. In particular, a marketing executive of today needs to have a very strong grasp of Internet marketing since that¡¯s how so much of today¡¯s successful marketing gets done.

• A marketing executive needs to be able to lead. That means they have to have very strong collaborative and influencing skills, that can be brought to bear on setting a direction for an executive team. They also need to know how to instill good marketing discipline.

Today's "best in class" companies are both market and customer driven. The marketing leader needs to be the voice of the customer and the marketplace as it relates to setting strategy on target markets, new product development, gross margins, sales channels, messaging, etc. ¨C the list goes on. Given this level of complexity in skills and experience, making a good hire can be a real challenge for the untrained eye. This is why bringing in a recruiter or executive search firm which specializes in marketing is so important for many firms who lack this expertise in-house.

If you are in the process of looking for a member of your marketing team, make sure that you follow a rigorous process to clearly understand what's under the hood with the people who you are interviewing. If you don't, and you end up with an empty marketing suit, it'll cost you tremendous amounts of money, lost market share, and lost opportunity.

THE city's approval system for granting permanent residence to non-locals who graduate from a Shanghai university is discriminatory and blocks the free flow of the job market, according to one university president.

He Qinhua, president of East China University of Politics and Law and a deputy to the Shanghai People's Congress, has proposed changing the system.

He suggested the city government grant a residence card to every migrant graduate who applies to work in the city and then issue permanent residence permits to the best of those graduates after a trial period.

To control the city's population expansion, non-native university graduates who wish to stay in the city are graded based on the university they attended, academic background, foreign language ability and computer skills, as part of a system that went into place in 2004.

Only those who meet the minimum level, which will be announced by the Shanghai Education Commission every spring, are eligible for a Shanghai residence permit.

About 11,000 migrant graduates obtain a residence permit every year, accounting for 25 percent of non-locals who graduate from city universities.

He said graduates from renowned universities aren't necessarily superior to others. Deliberate government intervention has violated the modern free job market, he said.

If you are a CEO or a sales manager and you're in the process of interviewing top sales talent, you probably have been trained on standard behavioral interviewing techniques which are used to make sure that you are getting to the heart of a candidates past behaviors as to predicting future performance. The other critical component that's probably even more important is to make sure that in your behavioral interviewing process, you're integrating performance based interviewing questions that really get to the heart of whether or not a candidate has the track record of consistent achievement that is an accurate predictor of their ability to achieve their sales goals once they come to work for you.

Performance based interviewing means that you need to integrate a number of specific measurements of metrics into the actual questions that you ask to a sales interviewee. Those include providing a summary of sales achievements by year against their actual quota, and then moving upstream from there to look at their activities in terms of daily and weekly customer visits, call counts proposals delivers, face to face customer visits, percentage time spent at the sea level versus at the front line decision maker level, etc. A good sales candidate should be able to rattle off these types of measures from previous positions.

Performance based interviewing also means that you're going beyond just asking a person how they faced and won in a difficult sales challenge. What it translates to is asking the candidate how they've consistently beat their sales goals. Those are the kind of people that you're looking to hire anyway, and by asking performance based questions, you'll have a much better chance of weeding through a pile of resumes and a pile of potential candidates to get to those true top performers. After all, the true top sales producers, those who are in the top five percent of their class, can outsell the next ten to twenty percent of sales people by a factor of two fold. So why wouldn't you invest in hiring only the best?