over 53% of people lie on their resumes!

The resume. Fact or Fiction?

Here are the top 3 ways to discover if the person you are considering to hire is a resume liar.

These 3 ways are part of the process we use in recruiting.

Let’s go through a few of the steps we use.

EQ Testing & Assessment

Stress management, assertiveness skills, empathy, and political/social acumen are critical success factors that have a direct impact on the bottom line. These can be assessed in an Emotional Intelligence (EQ in the workplace) test profile. We use an online profile that was selected for measuring many competencies including integrity & trust. This same profile showcases how good someone is at promoting themselves & performing in an interview.

We conduct these EQ profiles on Candidates just before the first face to face interview with the Client. Each profile suggests that for a certain position, the Candidate can be low risk, medium risk or high risk. Although its not the sole factor in making a hiring decision, we don’t present high risk Candidates to our Clients.

• testing confirms the Candidate’s motivation, attitude & compliance
• testing identifies individuals who put their own needs ahead of the company’s interests
• testing helps match the Candidate EQ to the competencies required for the specific job
• testing determines if the individual will be great in the interview (but perhaps not great in the job)

Reference Checks

Maybe you don’t have access or training for EQ testing and assessment.

If you are trying to collect resumes and do the hiring yourself, DON’T MISS THIS STEP and don’t accept excuses from the job applicant for not delivering contact info. for references. “out of town”, “can’t get the telephone number”, “no longer at the company” – are these excuses?

You can discover a resume liar by doing a thorough reference check. We conduct scheduled & structured 20-30 minute telephone interviews.

• we schedule formal structured reference interviews
• we only use work references where the job Candidate directly worked for & reported to the reference OR the reference reported directly to the Candidate
• no friends
• no family
• no co-workers
• we use the results of the EQ profile to focus on issues or concerns
• we verify the data provided; income, duration, responsibilities, results, capabilities, licenses, competencies

The Face to Face Interview

Some people are great in interviews. This doesn’t mean they will be good at their work.

They promote themselves well, and can show interest and excitement during an interview – but they could turn out to be duds at the job.

Integrity and trust are critical in every job. Do you want to hire a liar?

The face to face interview is an opportunity to get past first impressions, and dig into the facts about their past performance. Hopefully you are looking at a good functional-style resume which focuses on “What I Can Do For You” not absolutely everything I have done.

Its interview time. You have a resume in front of you, and sitting across from you is your job Candidate – What do you do to Spot a Resume Liar?

The face to face interview is a chance to match up the requirements for peak performance with specific questions that will verify competency, experience… essentially check out all the “claims” of a good resume. Ask the questions & make notes (you will need them for the reference checks)

• read the resume in advance
• be prepared with questions about anything you want related to the job and job performance
• ask specific questions about “claims” on and off the resume, collect more information; income, commissions, bonuses, title, responsibilities, scope of work, duration, gaps in work (it is not unusual to find obvious “mistakes”)
• ask questions and drill on experience & competency

How do you reduce the risks of being self-employed, on commission, or starting a business?

In part 1 we linked to the XL Wealth approach to help identify your success profile.

In part 2, we touched on the difference between self-employment, running a business, and the relative security of being a successful salesperson (and being a revenue & profit generator) vs. having a job and being a cost center.

In this 3rd part we share zenPeak’s risk reduction for self-employment, running a business, and working in a commissioned job.

For self-employed persons needing peak performing assistants or staff, and for businesses needing peak performers in every role, our NO RISK recruitment process and pricing is guaranteed to deliver. We even have special pricing for recruiting commissioned salespersons that are NO RISK to you.

What if starting or owning a business is impractical, and/or your skills are not suited to being self-employed?

Consider the security, and high income enjoyed by successful commissioned salespeople. This week alone we have 3 sales roles, in our client companies, where the top performers (all women by the way) earned $175,000 – online ad listings, $ 160,000 – telecom sales, and $180,000 – mortgage sales, respectively;  each of them can walk into any competitor and get a sales position instantly. That’s security!

zenPeak  has a number of these sales position opportunities that we call “certified”. What does this mean? The bottom line is that we carefully select the positions and companies we recruit for to make sure they offer the potential for high income earnings.

1. The Hiring Company is strong and has been in business for at least 10 years.
2. The Hiring Company has marketing programs in place to support sales and the sales force to grow the business.
3. The Hiring Company has training and support programs in place to assist new hires.
4. The Hiring Company is local and operates out of permanent professional facilities

Dreier used investors’ money to subsidize the money-losing firm, to pay off some of the victims of the scam and to buy luxuries for himself, including a 121- foot yacht, vacation homes in the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island and a $39 million contemporary-art collection. The judge said he was surprised that Dreier’s letter showed an “understanding” of his crimes. Letters that victims wrote to the judge depicted Dreier as “arrogant, condescending and cruel” – Bloomberg

If he had taken the zeroriskHR profile, I wonder what his scores would have been on empathy towards others and adherence to rules.

We know that statistically, a good fit to a benchmark score, will contribute to peak performance.

According to the Financial Post of May 20 2009, under the new compensation plan, investment bankers at ScotiaCapital will win in the long run if all stakeholders, including the bank and its shareholders, also win in the long run.

The Financial Post outlines the details, and asserts that there may be a rush for the exits if other Bay St. firm don’t head down the same path as ScotiaCapital.

While the world’s big financial institutions cope with stress tests (the Federal Reserve Stress Test guide is here) zenPeak has another thought…

Why not test staff for how they respond to stress with a comprehensive Emotional Intelligence profile from zenPeak?

It’s a proven methodology to discover the EQ and get some awareness on how someone will perform in their job. Take a look at the core competencies that bring peak performance on Bay St.!

We are well down a slippery slope of  panic solutions that are just throwing taxpayer money at what appears to be ways to instill confidence, loosen inter-bank credit etc. Nothing seems to be working as fast as needed, and it appears that everyone is running for the hills.  Obama is only human and in spite of the best of intentions has a formidable task just to fill his cabinet posts.

Today,  Bank of America hit new lows – down over 90% in a year! I was in a waiting room a few years ago at Bank of Montreal and was reading about the history of VISA. What I took away from my quick read was that Bank of America (originally Bank of Italy) operated by Amadeo Giannini, emerged as a San Francisco institution when the owner recovered the bank’s hard assets out of the earthquake damaged building in a vegetable push cart, and then went down to Fisherman’s Wharf and set up a table in the open air, and began extending credit and resuming operations to help the city recover from the earthquake. The Company later went on to be a founder of the Visa card (BankAmericard).

Wouldn’t it be a shame if BAC is nationalized by the US Government as suggested by Sen. Chris Dodd – Bloomberg

Somewhere out there is another Amadeo Giannini, a man who can be trusted to get things moving without the government bailout, maybe running a small regional bank that in 25 years could be the world’s largest!

I’m not sure these were the boots Warren was wearing (they are gorgeous huh?) when he got busted at the border, but  “Court documents alleged they defrauded investors and mortgage companies of $100 million since 2006. The fraudulent deals involved 500 homes and condominiums in California, Florida, Nevada, Illinois, Colorado and Arizona”   ——-

News today that Venezuela seized Stanford Bank , reminded me that Allen Stanford is missing after allegedly scheming 8 Billion out of  50,000 customers. Huffington Post reports that Stanford’s damage could match the Madoff ponzi scandal, and lists the “most shocking” allegations…

1. Stanford posted identical returns two years in a row, in 1995 and 1996, indicating the fraud has been going on for at least 13 years.
2. Stanford and CFO James Davis have “wholly failed” to cooperate with the SEC investigation.
3. There was no army of analysts combing through Stanford’s multi-billion-dollar portfolio. Rather, the only research conducted on companies in which he was investing came from Stanford himself, and CFO James Davis.
4. Stanford told at least one client that the SEC was freezing CDs, a blatant impossibility.
5. Stanford lost money from the Madoff ponzi scheme, “despite the bank’s public assurances to the contrary.” One analyst puts the loss at $400,000.
6. Despite repeated calls from the SEC to Stanford’s Antigua-based accounting firm, the accountants never answered their phones.
7. And as if the SEC couldn’t put it any clearer, Stanford’s public statements about its investments “are false.”

Bloomberg reports that Michael Zarich, a senior investment officer with Antigua- based Stanford International Bank, in a sworn deposition, described how “Stanford told investors the program had positive returns for periods in which clients actually lost money. The firm claimed a return of 18.04 percent in 2000 when actual investors lost as much as 7.5 percent, according to the complaint. In 2008 client pitch books, Stanford presented hypothetical data under the heading “Historical Performance” alongside the audited 2005 through 2008 figures, the complaint said.”

- Frank Abrams is the founder of  zenPeak Inc.,  helping companies find and retain peak performers.

Apparently, he was involved in stealing commissions, but at this stage, maybe the kindest thing to do, until the facts emerge, is to say his life was unraveling. His wife had recently filed for divorce, and his father had just passed away.

Someone accustomed to $1,000 suits, private planes, fancy cars and club memberships, can often have a hard time when it all comes “crashing down”. Victims of the Madoff scandal have killed themselves out of despair.

How a person deals with these challenges and choices in the workplace is best understood with EQ testing and assessment, based on the science of axiology.

Luckily, Schrenker wasn’t hurt when he parachuted out, and no one on the ground was nearby when his plane landed in a swamp.

If a person, like Mr. Schrenker is alleged to be, had been EQ tested and assessed using the zerorisk system, prior to being hired, I believe they would have been identified as a poor fit for a position of trust, with a potential for theft and embezzlement.

- Frank Abrams is the founder of zenPeak Inc. , helping companies find and retain peak performers for high-trust and high-integrity positions.

Lying in public

He has admitted to falsifying the financial records of SATYAM a leading Indian publicly traded company.  Ramalinga Raju, is not a slumdog millionaire but a man who took his family’s agricultural roots, and grew them into a successful conglomerate, most notably as a computer services offshore outsourcing powerhouse. Now Raju and his company are in the outsource outhouse. Ramalinga Raju was an Indian hero and has delivered The Mea Culpa – “what I did and why” to the Board of Directors.

- Frank Abrams is the founder of the zenPeak Inc. , helping companies find and retain peak performers.

As a commodity broker myself in days past, I can tell you I never met a fellow broker or trader who liked the term “hedge fund”. Originally the thinking was to create funds to balance other asset classes held by rich folks, hence the term, but the reality is they are speculation funds. And in this case speculation, greed and perhaps fraud have made the front pages, but at the bottom of the page. This news is overshadowed today by the auto bailout bill not being passed by the US Senate, but it is very very big news for Wall St. since the Madoff funds investors were the smart guys of Wall St. and total losses may be from 17 $billion up to 50 $billion.

Supposedly turned in to the authorities by his sons, if it is true this would be the largest ponzi scheme in history, and like all of them the unraveling starts when people demand their money back, and fresh funds coming in are not available to service the prior “investors”. Hedge fund redemptions, forced selling and trading losses don’t help matters.

Bloomberg reports that “Jim Voss who runs due diligence firm Aksia LLC, said he spent several months probing Madoff’s firm on behalf of clients, only to recommend against investing in it.

Among the red flags, Vos said: Madoff’s auditor, Friehling & Horowitz, operated from a 13-by-18-foot office in Rockland County, New York. Vos had an investigator stake out the office. A call to the New City, New York, office of Friehling & Horowitz after business hours wasn’t returned.

“I’m shocked by how investors turned a blind eye to returns that were too good to be true, constant steady small positive monthly returns,” Vos said. “When something is too good to be true, it probably is.”

- for information on insuring peak performance in high-risk and high-trust roles please contact me.

Everyone is an expert; they arrive at their broker with shopping bags full of cash to put into stocks because “the market is going up” and they don’t want to miss out. Or they heard a tip on a company. Or they heard about a new IPO. Forget valuations… “it’s different this time”.

They abandon their regular occupations and interests,  and become full-time traders or investors. Whether it is 1927 or 2007, no difference.

Silly behavior permeates up as well. Trading desks, “hedge” funds, seek out new angles and products that extend the momentum, or offer a quick hit on riches. Some do make out like bandits but the higher you are, the harder the fall. THESE ARE PEOPLE IN HIGH-RISK AND HIGH-TRUST POSITIONS. Some will usually go to jail when the party ends.

The 2008 collapse has been brutal and frightening and costly. Usually bear markets are quick and painful, but this is more. Too many failed banks, brokerages and insurance companies. Not just earnings hits, but failures. Also have you noticed that people who were infallible don’t know what to do? George Bush doesn’t know, Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke don’t know, Henry Paulson doesn’t know, Congress doesn’t know. Not exactly a confidence builder.

We are looking at a structural reset, and that takes longer. The capital markets environment needs time to shake out every last ounce of irrational exuberance, over-confidence and amateur participant. But beyond that, time is needed to remove uncertainty and allow planning and confidence in predictable business performance; specifically predictable earnings. Market participants need to reform and rebuild.

Time is needed to look around the rooms at banks or brokerages or insurance companies and know whether the men or women will protect your company or put it at risk.

so, Are we at a market bottom?

I doubt it. Here’s why?

(1) You can try and gauge when the moment is, that investors can buy a share with confidence in future earnings.  Look for new measures of earnings predictability to be talked about. The markets need confidence in earnings projections. – not there yet.

(2) You you can also look at the folks with the shopping bags. They are not the smart money. Until they curse the words “stocks” and mutual funds and are determined to only buy a bank deposit in the future.  Look for online trading companies to shut down – not there yet.

(3) Until the terminology and marketing of equities takes on a new form we won’t be there because nobody believes the “feel good”, “we’re smart”, “trust us”  blather in advertising. Look for personality-based companies and promotions. Would I trust Jim Cramer more than an actor in good wardrobe? – hell yes. Would I trust CEOs of companies that emerge from this mess unscathed? – oh ya.  – not there yet.

(4) Finally banks, brokers and insurance companies, in fact every co. in the financial services business needs to clean house, and describe how they are doing it, and make a policy of it. They need to assess and test every person in a HIGH-RISK AND HIGH-TRUST role, and make sure they are occupationally and psychologically suited to their job.