Deadly Mistakes Job Seekers Make #3

Send resumes or cover letters with typos:

Why it Matters: Typos brand the job searcher as a careless person who didn’t take the time to proof read her resume and cover letter. You can often judge the quality of the candidate’s future work by the quality of the documents that introduce the job searcher. You certainly obtain a sample of the written work you can expect. Many managers use typos as a screen to eliminate candidates from contention – and, wisely so.

Deadly Mistakes Job Seekers Make #2

Fail to follow your directions about how to apply:

Why it Matters: By following your requested application method: email, fax, or mail, the job searcher brands himself as a cooperative person who can and is willing to follow directions. The candidate makes it easy for you to route all applications into an email recruiting folder, as an example. The job searcher is telegraphing that he is willing to stand on his qualifications without the need for games or by-passing your application system. He’s the job searcher you want.

Deadly Mistakes Job Searchers Make

Sometimes the simplest mistakes make all the difference in the potential joining together of an employer and a job searcher. These opportunities to fail occur before the first phone call is ever exchanged. If you’re an employer, these simple, yet serious, job searcher mistakes tell you volumes about the candidate. These deadly mistakes matter. Here are ten things that employers need to watch for as you review job searcher resumes and applications. Beware of job searchers who:

Risks of not moving towards outsourcing, specifically Smart-Sourcing.

In many ways, we only need to look to the U.S. automotive industry to answer that question. In manufacturing, those industries that delayed or simply ignored the move to off shoring paid and continue to pay a heavy price. Change in any industry is painful, especially when the industry is accustomed to premier stature. The only thing more painful, in the long run, is ignoring the change. We need to face the challenge and opportunity of globalization with a retooling of our educational systems and our workforce. For those individuals, organizations and nations who resist the future will be uncompromising in passing judgment on their inability to keep pace.

Technologies part in the Enterprise Process of Smart-sourcing

Smart-Sourcing is a business decision but, like so many business decisions in today's organizations, you cannot separate the business from the underlying technology. Doing so would be like a pilot trying to maneuver a plane without understanding the limits and capabilities of the aircraft. What's most important to keep in mind when considering how technology fits in is to look carefully at the ways in which the organization doing the Smart-Sourcing and the provider of the Smart-Sourcing link their technologies in order to achieve agility and accelerate innovation? It's fairly easy to have someone else perform a process, but not so easy to make sure that process continues to keep pace with every other aspect of your business after it's been outsourced. Smart-Sourcing requires greater synchronization and coordination of processes that may reside with multiple partners. That is primarily a technology challenge.

Smart-sourcing Dependence on Intelligent Knowledge of a Company's Core Competency

Simply put, you cannot smart-source without an explicit and well understood definition of a company’s core competency because you will not have a solid foundation for partnering on what is non-core. It is amazing how often a senior exec at an organization will be stumped by the question of core competency. Far too many people define a core competency as a product or service. Core competencies are rooted much deeper in an organization's culture, brand, and behaviors than any product or service. Understanding your core competency is essential if you are to identify where you should focus your energy and resources. It is also key in accepting those things that detract from, dilute or otherwise compete for your resources.

Once a company understands its core competency, it should proceed in the following manner.
Knowing what you are best at is a start. But then you need to objectively understand the metrics of performance in both your core and non-core areas. In a Smart-Sourcing analysis, you will actually rate your processes on two dimensions: from core to none- core; and then from high performance to low performance. The result will be a set of four categories of process, those that you Optimize, Reengineer, Outsource and Offshore. This is a rigorous process that takes much of the guesswork out of an outsourcing and off shoring decision by making it objective and methodical. As amazing as it may seem, to date most outsourcing and off shoring decisions have involved much more seat-of-the-pants and intuitive decision making than methodology. Smart-Sourcing is about moving the decision from art form to science

The Next Step in Outsourcing Move forward to “Smart-Sourcing” and Containing Innovation

When we raise the specter of work mobility, the first thing that most people think of is outsourcing. Smart-sourcing is not synonymous with outsourcing. Outsourcing is only one part of Smart-sourcing. Outsourcing is meant primarily to reduce costs and transfer the risks of a defined process to a third party.

Approximately 60% of all organizations that undertook an outsourcing initiative did so, initially, for only cost objectives. The term used for this sort of outsourcing is "lift and shift," meaning an existing process is lifted out of its current organization and shifted over to the third party. The third party may achieve economies of scope through shared services, technology or international wage arbitrage, but such a relationship will rarely lead to higher levels of innovation. This innovation deficit in current outsourcing relationships represents a huge opportunity lost. One tends to believe that this is one of the most limiting factors in the acceptance of outsourcing and off shoring.

Organizations need to focus their precious resources on what they do best in order to innovate on their core competencies. But, they also need partners who can continue to innovate on the non-core processes that they outsource.


Smart Sourcing advocates using partners who can help a company to focus on its core, balance risk and opportunity, lower costs, increase innovation across all of its processes and finally, put in place attitudes to optimize all of these factors, socially and politically. Outsourcing and off shoring are essential components of this but only if they pave the way for organizations to free up resources so they can focus on core competencies that lead to greater innovation.

The effects of Globalization on Outsourcing

Factors affecting the current Outsourcing Model

With outsourcing increasingly becoming a way of life in the global economy, the key question for many businesses is how a well managed outsourcing process can translate into business improvement across the board. Suppliers and manufacturers are moving from bringing workers to the work to taking work to where the workers are.

Globalization involves much more than just the popular misconception of cheap labor. There are three trends at play driving global outsourcing
Cost
Education
Mobility.
Everyone understands the process of wage arbitrage through which disparity in global pay can be used to reduce costs of a service or product. Yet this is only the smooth tip of the iceberg.

What we often underestimate is the degree to which secondary and post secondary education has accelerated in providing a skilled base of knowledge workers in other less developed economies. In Japan, for example, less than 1% of the population eligible for university actually attended in 1950. Today that number is greater than 25%. The same sort of shift is occurring today in India and China. This is having a profound impact on the availability of qualified workers for jobs that we would never have considered outsourcing.

The even greater shift is in how easily work can be moved to wherever it makes the most sense. Mobility of work is at least as great a factor in the changing landscape of global trade as the migration of immigrant workers to the new world was in the 19th and 20th centuries. When you combine these three very significant dynamics, it becomes clear that the depth and impact of outsourcing is far more than a passing arrhythmia on the global economic landscape.

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