Liz Ryan

Don't Give It All Away at the Interview This diagram shows why you never, ever want to give away a concrete solution to a hiring manager's pain in a job interview. If they've already tried your idea and didn't like it, you'll be stuck saying, "It's…

Every problem companies experience with their employees springs from the same root cause: there is too little trust in the environment. There is too much fear. Too little trust and too much fear in a workplace has a name: it's called a toxic work…

We are getting smarter as a species and realizing that leadership is completely different from command-and-control supervision. Supervision is expensive, but leadership is very cheap. When trust flows in an organization, you don't have to spy on your…

Dear Liz, I have to tell you about my incredible job interview with the VP of Culture at a company I worked with for several years. I work for myself, and this company was a consulting client of mine beginning in 2011. During the time I partnered…

I was shocked as a young HR person to learn that in the USA, an employer can fire an employee for no reason at all. "Since employees can leave a job at any time, therefore employers should be able to say 'See ya!' to individual employees at any time,…

One thing we learn in life is that some of our most important lessons come to us slowly. We don't get every big "Aha!" all at once in a flash of insight. Sometimes the learning drips in slowly, instead. That's what happened with me with respect to…

It is painful to watch a function devolve. I have watched the HR function that I entered as a peppy punk rocker in 1984 devolve into a pile of steaming, talent-repelling bureaucratic nonsense. Not every company's HR function has turned to dust in…

Sometimes I wonder what CEOs think happens to people who leave their company in disgust. Where do they think those employees go? They go straight into the arms of your competitors. They work for your competitor and they call their friends at your…

I have sympathy and compassion for every living creature but my patience is wearing thin with the plaint "It's so hard to find good employees"! It isn't hard. There are tremendous people everywhere. We make recruiting ten times harder than it needs…

What do CEOs and their HR chiefs talk about? With luck, they talk about everything -- about hiring, and the state of the organization, and upcoming events. I hope they talk about who's getting promoted and who's leaving and what's new and how the…

I went to speak to a group of people in transition. We talked a lot about the non-transactional side of job search or career change -- the personal, introspective part of the process. One woman in the audience said "The very last thing I expected,…

Outsourcing has been all the rage for 15 years, at least. There’s a name for the industry that sprang up to take over the tasks corporations don’t want to pay for in-house: Business Process Outsourcing, or BPO. There are lots of situations where it…