Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

With the promotion of Amy P and the transition of Kristen D to the Strategic Marketing role, we had a gap in skill set for someone to assist with the creation of Job Descriptions. Adrienne jumped right in and has done an exceptional job of capturing some of the unique nuances of our strategies and has eliminated any of the question marks that we had for who could handle this responsibility.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Clients

We made a significant tactical shift in how we were grading the interviews for the Sales Roles with one of our clients and both Suzie and Lori took ownership for looking back and reviewing/re-grading the interviews that had already been conducted. What made them shine with regards to our Core Values was how they each were so respectful of the budgets of the client and HireBetter and were very efficient and accurate with the entire project.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

With only a little bit of guidance, Gina jumped right in to the Social Media Marketing Initiative and was both great at it and had an incredible attitude (something that, even after a couple of years on the team, we have ll come to expect from her). When asked about her new responsibilities she said, "I love doing this so much that it doesn't even feel like working!"

Core Values Lived: Always Add Value and Trust is Earned

Michelle has done an exceptional job of taking on a client relationships and accepting ownership for the results that our Team produces. The number one trait that Michelle displays with her Client Services role is knowing when to go the extra mile while also understanding when to ask for help. Great work!

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Clients and their Candidates

Kelli has been our TORC champion for about a year now, and what we really value and appreciate about her is her quick actions when we are ready to do reference checks. Case in point - Gus P. The TORC request came out late on a Thursday afternoon. By Friday morning, Kelli had already reached out to Gus with the suggested references based on his CI and had all three reference checks done by COB on Tuesday (a 3 business day turnaround). From her Team Leader, "I love the respect she shows not only to us and our processes but how she stays on top of references to get a response from them as quickly as possible, out of respect for our clients' peace of mind."

Core Values Lived: Always Add Value & Respect for Clients and their Candidates

When a Hiring Manager made a last minute request to get someone through the screening process before on-site interviews commenced, Shawn was up to the challenge. She determined availability of the candidate (which was very limited) and then worked diligently to track down Lori who she knew might have availability. Lori, working outside in her yard and dirty/smelly/sweaty, stepped up to the challenge and conducted the interview just moments later. The best part of it all was Lori's quote after, "It's a good thing that you can't smell or see someone during a phone call..."

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Company

When we made the decision to integrate our phone system a few years ago, it was because the ability to have a hosted PBX and virtual extensions for everyone was a real cool feature. At the time, our costs were $49.99 per month for each phone that we had. This past week, Natalie spent quite a while researching, following-up and negotiating with our phone provider. She was able to get our rates reduced to $19.99 (a 60% reduction) effective immediately. As if saving $350+ per line each year wasn't enough, she also pored over our past bills and found more than $300 in overage charges that she got refunded. Awesome!

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

When she received the call from her Team Leader about limited scheduling, Lisa's immediate reaction was "I want to help in other ways!" Effective this week Lisa is diligently working the phones and doing reach-outs to prospective clients because she feels so strongly that her passion for HireBetter will be easy to articulate during the sales process.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Team

A random phone call by a teammate last week caught Jen by surprise because the call was about creative solutions for some challenges that the person was facing. Jen lived the Core Value of respect by being attentive and making sure that she understood the challenge and the solution but also by validating her teammate through giving her the time to share her thoughts and then explaining her steps for how she would implement the suggestions.

Core Values Lived: Trust is Earned & Balance

While Kacey was out on vacation she completely turned the responsibility for the QS@ mailbox over to her, and didn't check it once. She did an excellent job of following up with interviewers for clarification points and putting the right candidates on the Parking Lot for Hiring Manager presentation.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value

After landing a number of PR opportunities through sheer determination, Gina took it even one step further and went out and bought a book on the specific challenges of PR in today's marketplace.

Core Values Lived: Trust is Earned & Respect for our Company

Upon learning that the requirements for her team were changing significantly, Amy immediately reached out for clarification on how scheduling should get completed and what the goals would be for her team going forward. On top of that, she made a number of great suggestions on how to improve the research process in general and offered to assist in the on-going development and implementation of these ideas.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Company & our Clients

When a client added dozens of interview requests onto our calendar in a very short period of time, Suzie stepped up to the plate, extended her hours to make herself available and conducted up to 4 Comprehensive Interviews EACH DAY in one week.

Core Value Lived: Trust is earned

Last Wednesday was Kacey's last day in the office before a short vacation. When Kacey called her to help on a project, she threw the calendar for auditing to Natalie and told her to handle it. Even with minimal direction she had set all of the audits up and determined who could assist with the scheduling. Kacey remarked upon her return, "It was like a 'Magic Fairy' had visited and left everything perfectly organized for me."

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Company

Erin took the time to drive from New Jersey (into traffic) to New York City to meet Kristen face to face for the first time. While they could have had their conversation be about anything, most of the time at dinner was spent talking about work. What really impressed Kristen was just how much Erin CARED about the company. She came with some fantastic ideas for how to improve the converting process, never complained and used her face to face opportunity to share ways she thought that we could improve HireBetter.

Core Value Lived: Balance in our Lives

As the longest-tenured Sr. Team Member, Kacey has always made herself at all hours of the day. As such, going on vacation was something that she was nervous about. After the Sr. Team stepped up and ensured that Kacey wasn't going to be asked to do anything during her time away, Kacey held up her end of the bargain and really "unplugged" for a few days. Even better, we learned during her absence that her delegation and management of her team has been set up so effectively that everything went off without a hitch while she enjoyed her family.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Team & Balance

Jen took over running our twice weekly Production Meetings as part of her new responsibilities on the Sr. Leadership Team. In her very first opportunity, she led the fastest Production Meeting in company history (11 minutes) and has made the suggestion that we reduce future production meetings from 60 minutes down to 25 so that everything stays sharp and on point.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value & Trust is Earned

Kristen lives a double life - by day a Mom and a Sr. Team Member. At night a world-renowned Foodie Blogger and Influencer to Moms. With the success that she's had building up a powerful audience for her blog and tweeting efforts, Jonathan challenged her to do the same for HireBetter. She's made it a point to reduce her management hours and start to focus more on these efforts and has already started to add huge value to our organization by leading our "Influencer Project" to become one of the strongest name brands in the Human Resources sector.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

Tara has been exceptionally patient over the last couple of weeks in working with both the Sr. Team and some outside consultants and bankers. The reason she's being nominated is because often it's tough to have so many people come at you with questions (and often questioning why) about something that you have ownership of. In Tara's case, she's never been defensive, has been open to making changes to our accounting and reporting structures and has earned trust by doing everything fast and correctly when asked. It's flexibility like this that is a primary reason why we've continued to be successful even through such growth.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value

On Friday afternoon of last week Gina got a call that there were more than 50 new interviews that needed to be scheduled for the coming week. Making it even more difficult, we didn't know about all 50 right away. Gina showed her competence and patience as she was reacting minute by minute. Scheduling is like a really complicated puzzle and she really performed brilliantly!

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

[PEER NOMINATION] I want to nominate Shawn for covering all aspects on the client interview scheduling logistics while I was on vacation. She handled everything perfectly and precisely and I was able to relax and enjoy my vacation with my family, which was definitely opposite of my husband (who got numerous phone calls every day from his office asking for help). Her communication with the clients and candidates was superb. It is so nice to have people in this company you can truly rely on in your absence.

Core Value Lived: Respect: for Candidates & our Company

With the recent change in scope at one of our clients, Crissy really showed that she had a personal level of ownership in the prospective candidates that she had spoken with as well as respect for the reputation of our organization. She's made it a point to individually follow-up with each person that she's formed a relationship with and ensured that they were handed off properly so that our client doesn't lose any momentum.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned & Respect for our Company's Processes

Michelle's blazing a new trail at HireBetter by taking on full responsibility for a client relationship from the start. In addition to being relatively new to the HireBetter Team and still learning our processes that make us so unique, she's had to work with the Sr. Leadership Team to also build out some new and effective ways of doing things. She takes everything in stride and her positive attitude about each and every situation has proven that she's not only the perfect person for this position but also that this kind of thing is really a possibility going forward.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value & Respect for our Clients

Heather, as the Team Leader for our Resume Review and Posting Teams, is always looking for creative ways to communicate better, improve results and reduce costs of her team's efforts to our clients. Recently, she discovered a new way to have a single job posting uploaded to one website and have it distributed to an exponentially larger number of special interest groups at the same time. This made a significant improvement and by discovering this, gives even more runway to our Research and Converting Teams to have the time they need to help our clients confidently make great hiring decisions.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value

During an interview with a prospective employee, Christine was able to obtain a key bit of information that, if not acted upon, could have resulted in our client missing out on a key application deadline for doing work with certain government agencies. Not only was the client thrilled with the nugget of info, when they realized it they immediately put in their application and it could result in hundreds of thousands of new business in just this next year for them. THAT is adding value!

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

The invitation went out last week to everyone in the company to listen in on an actual Topgrading Interview that evening. Suzie and Erin both jumped at the opportunity. Suzie has been nominated for Core Values recognition specifically because she listened in for the entire 3+ hours and then had some incredible observations upon the completion of the phone call. On top of that, she took an active position on becoming cross-trained enough to handle these kinds of interviews herself in the very near future.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Company

It says a lot about your character when you do what you say you're going to. In Adrienne's case, this is especially significant because she's just joined the team. She had a scheduled call with her Team Leader and, even though she was really sick, chose to maximize the downtime in bed to complete her training while also respecting the time that she had already booked on her teammate's calendar.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

As a Team Leader, the a heavy burden for training falls on Amy's shoulders. This is simply part of the job and Amy's really good at it. What's earned her a Core Values nomination is the fact that she's always looking for creative ways to improve the efficacy of that training because there is a lot of material to share and because our processes are so unique to the industry. Just this past week she figured out how she could share her screen with a new team member even though they were on different Operating Systems and its impact was incredible.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Processes

Our strategic planning session was just last Wednesday and we still haven't even finalized all of the specific action items that we need to complete to have a successful Q3 and yet, Jen Globig is nearly completed with #1-A. She's acknowledged the goal of our Migration to Google for email and has taken the challenge on faster than any of us expected. In fact, the entire migration should be completed by this weekend.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

Milli was a "wild card" when she was hired as our Director of Quality because she had absolutely no experience in the world of talent assessment or identification. Rather, with a background in logistics, we were hoping that she could bring an outsider's perspective to help us in evaluating how and why we do everything. Not only has Milli proven that she's capable of doing this in her 5 months with our company, but her contribution to Strategic Planning, Process Improvement and Consistency has been incredible. It seems that each week she's here there are more and more things that she contributes that really demonstrate this particular Core Value. This nomination has been been earned over and over again.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

When a client asked a really obscure yet pertinent question about a candidate who Crissy had interviewed, Crissy was able to go back through her notes and quickly provide very complete information in an objective light that both answered the question and exceeded expectations.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Company

Being a Leader means that sometimes you've got to have tough conversations. Kristen, more than anyone else at HireBetter, has been pushed out of her comfort zone in 2010 and through her willingness to grow and adapt, she's become a great leader. This was especially evident when she had to have a discussion with someone on her team who had a very different communication style from hers. Instead of avoiding the conversation and hoping that it would resolve itself, Kristen met the challenge head-on and, as a direct result, had an incredibly productive discussion that galvanized her relationship with that team member.

Core Values Lived: Trust is Earned & Respect

Jackie took on a unique challenge for a client and was able to uncover some incredibly important and game-changing information. Rather than hide this information and keep her head down, she spoke up and did the tough thing of sharing the news. It was honorable and what made it so incredibly selfless was the fact that by sharing the information it may have cost her and HireBetter a lot of work in the future BUT, without sharing it, we would have done a lot of work without producing results. Jackie proved that she's got a lot of integrity and she's living our Core Values in everything she does.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

When a serious concern was raised by a Hiring Manager, Jen's response wasn't defensive. Rather, she took the concern very seriously, identified what happened to cause the issue to arise and immediately made changes that not only will prevent it from happening again, they actually make the process of scheduling interviews even better.

Core Values Lived: Always Add Value & Respect

Her attitude is resilient and always positive. She's got energy that we'd love to "bottle up". She's always got a sense of humor and always provides a ray of sunshine to her colleagues, manager and the candidates that she's talking with.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value

Stepped up and said she'd love to take on more duties. She identified some areas within the company that she'd like to step up to help with and her organizational skills and attention to detail have been able to positively impact a number of other functions within the company.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

Remained positive throughout the changes within certain documents along with flexible. "She's so smart and she's one of the best things to happen to this company". She meets the commitments that she agrees to and it's fantastic to know that I can always rely on her to deliver.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value

To build redundancy and teamwork, Christine and Lori worked as a pair over the past couple of weeks to learn a new interview style and Christine's skills have expanded so rapidly as a direct result of the comprehensive and team-focused training that she received from Lori.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Clients and their Candidates

Tracy has been trying to schedule an interview for a candidate whose work schedule gives him limited availability. The original interview Tracy scheduled with the candidate was requested to be rescheduled at the last minute. Tracy went above and beyond to ensure the client's senior team would be available to talk with the candidate during his window of availability so the interview could continue and the client process wouldn't be disrupted.

Core Value Lived: Balance

Five new people are starting work at HireBetter in 2 weeks and they are all going through the orientation process at the same time. Jen and Lisa have not skipped a beat on incorporating all of those people into their busy schedules, making sure the new hires are getting their questions answered and our clients are not impacted in any way.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

After being assigned a sketch of what was needed for Interviewer Utilization, she took it and turned it into a report that was aptly described as a "Picasso" that has incredibly powerful for both understanding our current team's capabilities as well as giving us insight into our hiring needs for the remainder of 2010.

Core Values Lived: Trust is Earned & Always Add Value

With a very limited schedule of availability, Tracy and Gina worked together to get 4 of the 5 candidates in for interviews across 3 roles with a client's Sr. Executive. Normally that's part of their regular routine but in this instance, they did it with less than 18 hours of advance notice which made it nearly miraculous.

Core Value Lived: Balance

Her kids finished school this past week and that can really be an insane week. That also happened to be the busiest week in company history for qualifying screens for internal employees. Natalie acknowledged what the priorities were for the company and was able to pull all of the calls off while still maintaining the balance in her life and properly setting boundaries.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned

I've heard it said that 80% of a client's satisfaction is their trust in who they're talking with. That's definitely the case with Kacey and the Hiring Managers that she's working with. Reluctant to take on the added responsibility, she's been able to earn trust time and time again and it's recently resulted in us being asked to take on a much larger role with one of our clients.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

With limited instruction and a lot of homework dumped on their plates, both of them stepped up learn how to conduct some really specific and difficult interviews and then make themselves available in their limited calendars to conduct the interviews during a week when each had a lot going on.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

Tasked with a loosely defined project of finding manufacturing facilities for a very specific industry (not easy because manufacturing locations aren't always public information). Rather than just provide basic information they created an impressive presentation that is user friendly for the client that even included a geo cache of locations so when you mouse over the map the locations pop up with information.

Core Values Lived: Respect for Our Company & Balance.

Responsible for updating roles in "The Brain", she was facing some challenges in receiving the information she needed. Rather than waiting for someone to bring that information to her, she proactively asked questions and offered to share her thoughts on how to improve the process with her Team Leader. Because their busy schedules made it lmost impossible to get them together, Natalie met with Milli while traveling with her family to Sea World.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

Our Converters have adopted a new process that involves them conducting a modified qualifying screen during initial conversations. Crissy's notes have been thorough in providing the level of detail needed for the interviewer to smoothly transition into a Comprehensive Interview without having to backtrack or ask extra questions.

Core Value Lived: Trust is Earned.

Entrusted with a very complex research project, both Katrina and Paula were able to utilize their vast professional skills to exceed expectations by completing the project early and under budget with results that were well beyond what was expected.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

Jen helped Kelley Gu with her email settings in record time. She quickly responded and used her wealth of knowledge as a resource to take care of Kelley's issue in minutes.

Core Value Lived: Always Add Value. Always.

Kelli was able to secure 15 free postings on ExecuNet for free which has served to be incredibly valuable for the upper-level roles that we're working on for clients.

Core Value Lived: Respect for our Clients.

Nona stepped up and took on responsibility for reviewing 150 resumes in one evening for a new role and completed the work efficiently and with perfect accuracy.

Core Values Lived: Balance & Respect.

Heather, as a Team Leader, has been taking part in the twice-weekly production call for a couple of months now. As her role has increased and her daily responsibilities have expanded, she approached her manager and asked if it still made sense for her to be on the call or, because of things like the Brain, she was okay skipping the call and focusing her time on revenue producing, value-generating activities. It was a bold question that took courage and professional tact and Heather pulled it off beautifully.

Core Value Lived: Respect for the Company.

Last week a client's VP of HR was really under pressure to get a couple more candidates to interview for a key position in Florida. Erin jumped in, did an exceptional job under the gun and made sure that we could deliver for the VP when she needed us most.

Core Values Lived: Add Value and Respect.

With the Converting Team spread thin this week, Crissy didn't hesitate to pick up the phone and contact her Team Leader and Manager with an offer to free up her schedule and step in to help. It was both appreciated and resulted in her picking up a second nomination.

Core Values Lived: Trust is Earned and Respect.

Making difficult decisions aren't easy or they would be called "easy decisions". Kristen had to make a number of difficult decisions last week. In doing so, she had to challenge herself as well as answer to me when I asked, "And what did we learn from the situation that we can use in the future?" I'm proud of Kristen because of how she stepped out of her comfort zone and made the tough choices that will make our company stronger and ensure that, long-term, we're building a team and culture that always relies on its Core Values to guide our decisions.