What does a high performing team look like?  Should I hire a receptionist/front office person?  How do I best mix different generations of employees?  How do I make sure my team members are a good fit for each other?  How should I determine my benefits to attract the best talent?  Below are some ideas that will help guide you:

Should I hire a receptionist/front office person?

Most sales leaders are in charge of growing their sales and taking their business to the next level with Walmart and other key national accounts.  So the question that each individual person has to answer is…how much time are you taking out of your day to do simple tasks that you can pay someone else could do for you?  For instance, if your time is worth $75/hour…should you be doing tasks that someone else can do for $20/hour?  If so, the real question is…can you afford not to hire a receptionist.  If you’re being paid to do high level work, you’re cheating yourself and your investors if you’re not doing the high level work they’re expecting from you.

If you determine you need someone, keep in mind you don’t have to hire a person full time.  There are many very qualified people who would love to work part time.  I’ve had conversations with many female candidates over the years who would love the opportunity to stay engaged in the workforce in a challenging position, work part time and still have time to be a mom.  Unfortunately those positions don’t come around that often.  This could be a win, win.  From your perspective, you can get a really good employee who you don’t have to hire full time.  And you’ll have a very loyal, happy employee who values the opportunity to work and contribute but can also balance other important priorities in their life as well.

How do I best mix different generations of employees?

This is a great question.  For many years I’ve been perplexed by companies who let some of their most tenured employees go.  A mix of Millennials and Baby Boomers allows input into your business from different perspectives.  Chances are good that the Millennial employee is going to bring a technical savvy and awareness of social media that a Baby Boomer won’t.  On the other hand, the Baby Boomer is not afraid to pick the phone and talk, or better yet, meet in person to help build the relationship.  Both perspectives are needed…it’s called diversity.  We hear that term a lot, but don’t necessarily relate that to diversity of ideas and approaches to the business.

How do I make sure my team members are a good fit for each other?

This happens during the interview process.  All the employees who will interact with the prospective new team member need to meet with this person and get everyone’s buy in.  If all the appropriate people are allowed to share their input, they are more apt to try and work things out when things get tough versus not trying as diligently.  Also, by allowing everyone to be part of the interview process, the new employee is getting a real good idea of what he/she is walking into.  The team is also aware of who’s coming on board and feel like they are part of the decision making process and part of the team.

How should I determine my benefits to attract the best talent?

The best approach is to think in terms of a pool of money for your benefits and realize that everyone has different needs and is motivated by different things.  For instance:

One employee may be a single mom and health insurance may be extremely important.

Another may have a spouse who has great benefits and doesn’t need health insurance coverage at all.  Vacation time may be much more important to this person.

The bottom line is, the companies who think outside the box and offer some flexibility on their benefits will be ahead of the pack in attracting and retaining top talent.  Think flexibility and give your employees choices and options and they will be more loyal to you for it.

Sometimes, some of the most important questions you need to answer in an interview, are the questions you will never be asked. These are questions your potential employer is thinking and wanting to know, but won’t directly pose. Here are a couple of those ‘secret’ questions, and how you need to answer them throughout the interview process.

Question: Do I want this person to represent my company and my products to my buyer at one of my biggest customers?  Can I project/see them doing this role?

Whatever you do in front of your buyer, however you conduct yourself, that’s the way you need to present yourself in an interview. Consider the entire interview as a role-play, with the hiring manager already projecting you in the role.  You need to have the same disposition that you are already would have in the job.  For instance, most buyers have a ‘get to the point’ mindset.  Therefore, don’t ramble on in the interview.  Make your point and move on.

Question: In today’s world, many candidates have been downsized/re-orged at some point in their career.  The hiring manager is not going to ask you directly, but they want to know, Was it you/a performance issue? Or was it the company/were you one of many people laid off?

Most hiring managers will not directly broach this topic. To prove the lay off wasn’t on your shoulders, it’s important to share accomplishments and successes in your previous position. Perhaps you were offered a different position with your previous company as they reorged your current position.  If so, that is important information to share…it shows that your current company wanted to keep you, but in order to do so, they had to change the position, location, etc.

The other important detail to share is how many people within the company got reorged?  Was it only you (which is usually a red flag), or were you one of many people.  The more people that were laid off, the more likely that it wasn’t a performance related issue in the eyes of the hiring manager.

These two details can go a long way in helping put the hiring manager at ease and prove to them it wasn’t a performance issue that forced you into a new career.

A new study by researchers from Lehigh University and the University of Missouri found one of the attributes in job seekers most likely to lead to success in their search is an attitude focused on learning.

The study found job seekers who have a “natural disposition to learn from every situation in life” are likely to be more successful in getting their dream job and achieving some of their major career goals.

To conduct the study, the researchers focused in on 120 college seniors who were hunting for jobs. Subjects in the study who were identified as having a strong “learning goal orientation” (LGO) reacted to failures in the job hunt by searching much more intensely, whereas people with low LGO decreased their intensity. Interestingly, the same was true even when the job search was going well.

This indicates that people with high LGO respond and deal with stress better than other people, and are more likely to push forward and learn from their experiences in the job search, both positive and negative.

Fortunately, there are ways job seekers can learn to improve their learning attitude. The researchers behind the study say job seekers should spend some time every day reflecting on their successes and failures and what they have learned from the process rather than getting caught up in the emotional highs and lows.

It’s just one more study that shows that while attitude may not be everything when it comes to the job search, it certainly plays a major role!

When people write their resume, they tend to focus only on the content. And while it’s true that the content is extremely important in convincing potential employers of your competency, the appearance of the resume is just as important.

The reality is most hiring and HR managers don’t have the time to read through every resume they get in great detail, especially if they have numerous openings going on with many applicants for each position. They have to make a judgment call within only a few seconds as to whether they even want to continue looking. The way your resume looks could be the difference between whether you yourself get a closer look or get put into the rejection pile. It’s the paper version of a first impression, and first impressions are incredibly strong.

Consider some of the following questions before you send in your resume to a potential employer:

• At first glance, does your resume look appealing, neat and have a professional appearance?
• Did you use an appropriate margin width for your resume?
• Do you use a consistent, readable font throughout the whole page?
• Do you use bold, italics and underlines to help break up and organize your resume?
• Does the spacing between each section look appropriate?
• Is it easy to quickly scan over your resume and still get the most important information?

Taking all of this into account will help you ensure your resume looks professional and draws the attention of potential employers. It will make for an inviting document that wants the interviewer to get to know you better.

Every month there are millions of people who are looking for new jobs, even if they already have one. About ten percent of all of these job searchers swill switch employers in the next month. However, the majority of these people never report that they were looking for a new job. Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that instead of these workers actively seeking the jobs, the jobs actually found them.

This information came from analyzing job search and employment transition rates over the past 20 years. On average, it’s estimated that about 4.3 percent of people with jobs were actively searching for a new job. Recent college grads, at a rate of 9.6 percent, were more likely to be searching for new jobs while employed compared to people age 45 or older (2.3 percent).

The really interesting statistics, however, are about hiring probability. While research suggests people who search for jobs are more likely to find a new position, employed people who did not search for a new job made up about 25.7 percent of all new hires, compared to 7.4 percent for employed people who were actively searching.  Therefore, 77.6 percent of all employed people who changed employers were not actively looking for a new position. This is because there are so many more people who do not actively search than those who do.

So what does this mean? It would seem that a lot of these people are being attracted to new positions by corporate recruiters, by a friend alerting them to an opening or other similar tactics.  Bottom line is…recruiters are an important ally in helping companies find that hard to find, passive candidate who might not be actively looking on the job boards.

Let’s take a look at another key point from Tim Hoch’s Thought Catalog article “10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be.”

Point number nine is “you can’t/won’t let go.” This is a problem we all have at some point. Perhaps we feel someone wronged us, and we can’t forgive them for it. Maybe we feel shattered because of a failed relationship. Perhaps we have lost something or someone.

However, just like any other challenges we face in our lives, these have the opportunity to be defining moments for us. The way we respond to these moments gives us a chance to grow and better ourselves in new, exciting ways. If we close ourselves off and refuse to let go, we’re never going to move on emotionally and find the happiness we deserve.

While we can never completely forget the struggles we go through, we are able to manage them and learn from them. “Letting go” isn’t about forgetting, anyway — it is about forgiveness.  Forgiving someone is difficult because it goes against our nature.  Simply put…if you don’t choose to forgive, you become enslaved to the very person who you feel hurt you.

Consider what is preventing you from “letting go” of the baggage in your life, and what you can do to turn that around to find joy.

According to numbers published in a Gallup poll, less than a third of all American workers (approximately 31.5 percent) were considered to be “engaged” in their jobs in 2014. While this is the highest level since Gallup first began tracking employee engagement, the amount of employees who qualified as “not engaged” (51 percent) and “actively disengaged” (17.5 percent) still vastly overwhelm those who are engaged.

Gallup’s definition of engaged employees is an employee who is enthusiastic about, involved in and committed to his or her workplace. These numbers are based on interviews conducted by Gallup Daily between January and December 2015. There were 80,837 employees represented in the study.

Perhaps not surprisingly, engagement levels were highest among executives, managers and officers, who were engaged at a 38.4 percent rate. Employees that work in production and manufacturing were at the lowest levels (23 percent).

In terms of generations, Millennials were the least engaged group (28.9 percent) while traditionalists were the most engaged group (42.2 percent), followed by baby boomers (32.7 percent). Millennials are not as likely to be getting positions they desired out of college, and they also respond that they have not had the opportunity to “do what they do best” in their work.

Based on these numbers, one thing is clear: if a company is able to provide workers with a job that they can truly care about and engage with, it has an advantage in terms of attracting and keeping employees over approximately two thirds of the market. Engaged employees are more likely to do great work, so companies should make every effort to increase engagement in their teams.