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    Blog Posts by Jonathan Poston

    • Tending the Talent: Think Perennially

      By Jonathan Poston | Profit Minded – Wed, May 29, 2013 5:30 PM EDT

      Growing Talent

      Spring is here, and people everywhere are starting gardens. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Besides getting dirty hands, aching backs, and a sunburn, there are some serious decisions to make; one being whether to buy ready-to-plant starters, guaranteed to perform, or to take your chances with great grandma’s forgotten “heirloom” attic seeds, which may turn out great, or force a gardener, mid-summer, to ferry veggies from the grocery for the rest of the season. It’s the same choice businesses make when they hire talent: Sprout it from seed or drop in ready-to-bear-fruit starters? Here are a few garden tips from a “head” hunter’s perspective.

      Seeds

      It’s easy to get lost in a reverie, envisioning your business’s culture fermenting organically, seeded by fresh, hungry graduates primed to change the world. They are cheap, will work hard, and this game plan helps the economy--how much better can it be? Remember great grandma’s seeds - the ones that haven’t been tested - their “fruiting” ratio

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    • Putting Play to Work

      By Jonathan Poston | Profit Minded – Fri, Apr 19, 2013 11:02 AM EDT

      Play at Work

      Historically, playing at work was no different than being caught on hidden video picking your nose on the job all day. No one in their right mind would want management to see them doing anything remotely enjoyable. For the Facebook Me Generation this workplace attitude must feel like very industrial, Hard Times thinking, which may not be irrational when repetitive motion, production line models are the driving force of an economy. But, even then, it seems only natural that people will walk under the yoke for only so long - even now, there are stories about China-based workers turning down good manufacturing jobs for more pleasant, stress-free office work.

      Further along that work attitude evolution timeline, a solid slice of the U.S. workforce keeps stepping further from a grueling 9-5 day of punching the clock, and instead is pursuing more of an intentional, life-work balance, in tune with the mantra of, “work smart, not hard.” So, it’s easy to see how a workplace environment today

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    • Fishing Talent from a Million Online Pools

      By Jonathan Poston | Profit Minded – Tue, Mar 12, 2013 7:08 PM EDT

      Fishing for new employees

      Before the age of the internet, employers had it pretty easy when it came to recruiting talent. Little and big catches swam readily through print classifieds to get a chomp at those tasty starter and dream jobs. Today, with newspapers fighting extinction, that one enormous reliable sea of talent has exploded into millions of micro-pools spanning across the planet. Now, with a kaleidoscope of puddles that must be monitored for movement, what small business has the time to spend all their resources trolling them all for talent? Here are five strategies many employers deploy to gig fresh catches.

      Twitter for recruiting

      An ocean of tweets (live and archived) are search friendly for any employer armed with a neat list of keywords (i.e. C++, Ruby on Rails, developer, etc.). For those posting jobs on Twitter using such keywords, they are conveniently searchable via search engines.

      Internal recruiting

      Many small business employers have been successful at developing talent from within. Hire

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    • Three Big Rules for Burning a Solid Brand

      By Jonathan Poston | Profit Minded – Thu, Nov 1, 2012 5:48 PM EDT


      By Jonathan Poston

      If business "branding" were as simple as its namesake might lead us to believe, then it would just be a matter of heating up the iron and swiftly searing it deeply into the hides of the jumpy target market. Effectively branding businesses involves tagging targets who, unlike their four-legged friends, have already been lashed with hundreds of hot pokers from more established ten-gallon hat ranchers. But, with a steady hand, and a solid grasp of effective technique, there's still room among the herds for new firebrands to make their mark.

      Here are three rules to follow before heating up the branding irons.

      1) Brand names aren't everything, but there are caveats to keep in mind when choosing one. Some marketing firms, perhaps the ones that like to charge 10-20k to conjure out of thin air a slick new name for their clients, will say a name can make or break a business. While partially true, it's not everything. But here's the part that is important: Select a name that

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