12 Questions with Silicon Valley Recruiter and Tivos Director of Talent Acquisition William Uranga

12 Questions with Silicon Valley Recruiter and Tivo's Director of Talent Acquisition William Uranga 2 William Uranga is TiVo Inc.‘s Director of Talent Acquisition and the founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Recruiting Leadership Forum. 1) How did you get into recruiting/talent acquisition? By recruiting summer interns for a local non-profit. I then moved onto recruiting volunteers (much harder). One day I started a conversation with a complete stranger at a Starbucks who, it turns out, was part of the BridgeGate Group (part of Bay Area recruiting lore) and soon was conducting retain search for HR execs… things rolled from there… 2) What are your favorite recruiting tools? My cop-out answer is the Internet. To be more specific it's the Google Apps. I could run any operation if I had to using them: research (search/rss reader), db (apps), process, documents and communication (gmail/chat). 3) What do you find is different about recruiting in Silicon Valley? Well, I hear from folks elsewhere that we're scrappier. I'm not sure if we lack “polish” or more of a “get it done” attitude. There is a lot of diversity both in industry and in ethnicity which makes it really interesting (in a fun way) in the creation of teams and companies. 4) What are some recent trends in Valley recruiting? A recent survey had Oakland, SF and San Jose as 3 of the top places to find a job. Social media is really growing (beyond Linkedin and Facebook). Whatever innovations are being created be it technology or thought leadership in marketing and customer connection, I think a lot of folks are asking, ‘how can that be used in talent acquisition and talent management?' 5) What are the most annoying practices that job seekers are using in the Valley? Job seekers who mail/fax their resume. After that? Those who apply and say they know about “TiVo” â€" most quickly show they haven't done their homework (psst, use the Internet). Hint: TiVo went way beyond the box 4 years ago. When they don't bother to read up, I feel like I'm on a bad first date â€" and there's not going to be a second. 6) What are the most annoying practices that recruiters are using in the Valley? Well, not just in the Valley, but everywhere â€" most recruiters think only in terms of their discipline: recruiting. It took me a while to get beyond that one-dimensional thinking. Several of my a-ha! moments came as I was talking with client groups, researching what tools and operations would be useful to them (again, the client, not just me in HR). Taking classes in other disciplines, like project management and marketing will make you better at your craft and not just the process of recruiting. 7) With the economic crisis in mind, how do you think Valley recruiting will change over the next 6-12 months? It could be longer â€" so beware of the “experts”! I think there are two camps of thought that are not too unfamiliar to other areas: a) circle the wagons, do our job and maybe they'll keep us longer or we should all be looking for a back up plan or b) this is a great opportunity to redefine what we do, offer more client-relevant solutions, and expand our role (to more quality, more HR). 8) If someone wanted to get started recruiting in the Valley today, how should they go about it? Well degrees and certifications are perhaps a cute start. However the reality is that the current body of world knowledge that a freshmen in college learns will be obsolete by their senior year. So a) you need to be constantly learning, always a student and b) build yourself a cadre of mentors. I have found some in the places where I've worked, some in social media and others by joining (or creating) a helpful association. 9) What would you have done differently in starting your own recruiting career? I probably would have changed my major to business, marketing or finance. I would have liked to have had a mentor (in a career sense) when I left college. 10) Do you do anything differently when recruiting a recruiter? Obtain references from prior client groups, both hiring managers and those placed in it. Listen to how they problem solve. I'll give them a current search we're working on and ask them to source right then and there via a laptop or bring it back (as homework) showing their process, strings and results. Hear from them how their prior companies/agencies are better off for that recruiting having worked there. I just can't hire a recruiter who can only demonstrate their worth by their hires. Yes, the act of recruiting is important, but it's only one dimension of the person that will make my company better. In this age, you have to be self-directed about your learning and on-going education. I ask about how they, as a recruiter, keep up on things in the industry and recruiting. Taking a few classes, joining a mailing list isn't enough. I want someone who is really engaged and is giving back what they have learned/been given. 11) Can you share an unforgettable recruiting horror story? We once interviewed a candidate for the role of CFO who conveyed where he was in his career, “Yeah, I really don't want to work that hard…” Y'gotta be kidding me, right? 12) You created the Recruiting Leadership Forum (RLF). What is it and and what are its goals? It started about a year ago with a peer of mine. We had met for coffee and discussed how frontline recruiters and even senior HR execs had gatherings for their kind to share and learn. Yet there was nothing for those of us who were leading the corporate recruiting function in the Bay Area. It seems to float between the tactical and the very high strategic stuff. So we started a group for us and invited our peers. It's a monthly meeting where we have a peer present a project and we discuss/critique. It's a safe place, nothing is recorded and we say how things really are and share our strategies, tools and opinions. RLF has a minimal online presence for this obvious reason (see not everything in the Silicon Valley has to be tech-based) â€" its about personal interaction. Thanks for your time, William. Thanks also to HR pro Jessica Lee for introducing us. Get recruited now.

Top 5 Restaurants in Mumbai to Savour Pan Asian Cuisine

Top 5 Restaurants in Mumbai to Savour Pan Asian Cuisine When it comes to food, everyone has a different taste. Some may love Chinese, while some others may prefer continental, and the list goes on and on. In this article, we would talk about the popular Pan Asian cuisine. If you are a fan of Asian food, then you are probably at the right place. Below are some of the best Pan Asian restaurants in Mumbai. Skky Ramada If you are from Mumbai, you would already be familiar with Ramada as this is one of the most popular Pan Asian restaurants in Powai. The most beautiful aspect about this restaurant is that candles on different kinds of reflective things make the atmosphere glowing and shiny. This is the perfect place to chill out during weekends and unwind yourself after hectic office hours. It is appropriate for all occasions. You can spend time over a family dinner or you can enjoy candlelight dinner with your soulmate. You can also have a relaxing discussion with your friends over dinner. China Valley China Valley is one of the best places to enjoy tasty Pan Asian delicacies. The restaurant has casual dining setup with plenty of space available. The decoration on the walls gives an Asian vibe with Chinese portraits framed and hung up. You can find a large hand fan hanging on the walls. The food at the restaurant is really amazing. Apart from Pan Asian cuisine, if you are explicitly looking for Chinese food, then this restaurant should be on the top of your list. The ingredients and the flavours that they use in their dishes are authentic and freshly sourced. So, the next time you are craving for good quality Pan Asian food, this is the place to drop by. Red Olives Red Olives comes third when we talk about the best Pan Asian restaurants in Mumbai. This is a classy restaurant with an oriental touch. The whole space gives you a warm and soothing feel as they have used earthly colours in the furnishings and décor. This restaurant reminds you of a monastery as the wall hangings and statues of Buddha give a new feel. When it comes to food, they serve amazing Pan Asian dishes. There’s a wide variety of Thai dishes, popular soups, and salads on the menu, which are popular among its patrons. The Yellow Chilli If you are looking for a place with really mesmerizing decor and great food, then this is the right choice. The Yellow Chilli is the concept of Sanjeev Kapoor, one of the most popular chefs in India. The restaurant has a warm and welcoming environment with rustic interiors, which give you the feel of calmness. The Yellow Chilli is known for its spices and rich aroma that will trigger irresistible hunger. You cant resist licking your fingers irrespective of the dish you order. If you are in Mumbai and craving for Pan Asian food, dont miss out on visiting this famous restaurant conceptualized by Sanjeev Kapoor. Ambrosia Ramada Ambrosia Ramada is well known for its spicy food since ages. If you love Pan Asian dishes and are a huge fan of spicy food, then dont forget to drop by at this place. The restaurant serves a variety of North Indian and Continental dishes. When it comes to ambiance and interior, it is quite catchy. Fine wooden tables and chairs with soft cushions give you comfort and ease. Colourful lamps hanging from the ceiling make the place look beautiful and on the top of that flowers on each table set the perfect mood to have a romantic dinner date. These are the five restaurants in Mumbai that you must visit if you are looking some mouth-watering Pan Asian dishes.

6 ways to dodge long hours

6 ways to dodge long hours Get more control of your time. Its hard to leave the office at a reasonable time of day when your workplace culture centers on long hours. But the cost of not leaving work is high: A half-built life and career burnout. Of course, if you never work long hours, you will never appear committed enough to get to the top ranks. So your job is to work enough hours to look committed but not so many hours that you risk your personal life and your ability to succeed over the long haul. People cannot work full-speed until they die. Pace yourself so you dont burnout before you reach your potential. 1. Find the back door. Figure out what criteria people use for promotion. It is never only how many hours you work. In many professions you need to work a lot of hours, but there is always a way to be impressive enough to cut back on hours. In the realm of superstars, achievement is based on quality over quantity. Figure out how to turn out extremely impressive work so that you can get away with fewer hours. For example, if youre a lawyer, you could pick up one, very important client for the firm, and then cut back a little on your hours. 2. Be clear on your schedule and clear on priorities. Once you figure out which projects matter a lot and which dont, get the high-priority work. Then you can jump at the chance to tell someone handing out low-profile projects that youre booked working on something that is a higher priority. 3. Go public. Tell people about your schedule ahead of time. For example, I have Portuguese lessons on Thursdays at 7pm. The class is important to me. When you plan a vacation, announce it early and talk about it a lot. The more people know about how much you have been preparing and anticipating your trip the less likely people will be to ask you to cancel it. 4. Find a silent mentor. Look for someone who is respected but does not work insane hours. This will take careful hunting because this person is not likely to be obvious about it. Watch him from afar and figure out how he operates. Few people will want to mentor you in the art of dodging work its bad for ones image. But you could enlist the person to help you in other areas and hope he decides to help you in the workload area as well. 5. Find a new specialty. There are some careers that hold no hope for shorter hours. Video game production and surgery come to mind. At the beginning of your career, youre in a good spot to change your path if you see no hope for a personal life on the horizon. A career change is easier when your career is new. Dont take this opportunity for granted; it will be much harder to change when youre in youve invested a decade in the career. 6. Respect your personal life so that other people will, too. If you dont create a life outside of work that is joyful and engaging then you wont feel a huge need to leave work. And if you dont project a passion for life outside of work then no one will think twice about asking you to live at work. So get some passion in your personal life. If you cant think of anything, start trying stuff: Snowboarding, pottery, speed dating. The only way to discover new aspects of yourself is to give them new opportunities to come out.

The 3 most important Personal Branding skills to have - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

The 3 most important Personal Branding skills to have - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career When trying to focus on every aspect of Personal Branding, especially in this generation, things get overwhelming and unmanageable. When a corporation releases a new campaign for a product or to promote their own brand, there are various media outlets and styles that need to be accounted for and different audiences that need attention. While some corporations have the luxury of human resource assets and capital for promotion purposes, individuals do not share in that fortune. This poses a challenge that people need to consider and that obstacle is not having the bandwidth to focus on too many objectives and promotional tactics at once. To narrow down this focus, I have presented the top three most significant Personal Branding skills that individuals should practice in order to enhance their brand identity and equity. The three skills that are most crucial when interviewing, networking or excelling in your career are writing, communication and technical skills. Each skill supports one another and when combined it forms a strong Personal Brand, which is valuable in the marketplace and in life. Writing skills: One of the most important methods of communication is writing. Your writing may appear in emails, blogs, papers, reports, presentations, websites and other media such as magazines and newspapers. If your writing is unsatisfactory it will be known by those you communicate with and you will lose credibility and respect out of it. Focusing on your writing is vital to a successful career, especially because the world is run by email and if you can’t spell or write in a linear fashion, you will lose opportunities. Learning to write can also be a challenge and it comes with time. To help speed up your development, enroll in classes at school or seek the aid of a mentor. Be sure to be consistent with your writing too and learn new vocabulary in order to have a stronger impact. Through writing, especially in blogs, your brand is highlighted and you touch your readers. Customize your writing to the audience, by conducting research and tailoring the content to the people who will be reading it. Communication skills: The larger the corporation, the more important good communication is. Also, interpersonal communication is valuable in networking and accomplishing tasks, wherever you are. Communication skills are present during a speech, presentation, day-to-day talk, elevator pitches to executives or between you and a peer. Each interaction is important to showcasing your Personal Brand in positive light. Presenting at work is a time where you can build credibility, network within the corporate environment and be seen as a leader or subject matter expert. Your credibility is at stake during a presentation, so be prepared to answer questions and be concise with your PowerPoint slides and vocals. Presenting is a formal way of letting your audience or managers know that you exist and add value to the business. The difficult part is the pressure that you endure before you present because you are being judged on your verbiage and subject knowledge. This is why preparation is the k ey to your success. Strong presentation skills are a clear path for leadership, which corresponds to management. Technical skills: If you thought communication and writing were important, technical skills are not only important but are required for most jobs in society today. Most job listings require experience using software packages such as Microsoft Office. More and more companies use these products, such as Microsoft Excel, for operational purposes in any job function. To be accepted into a position, you should invest time in learning computer skills or other skills that are needed in your field. Today, without these skills, you have a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace and become a commodity. Brand yourself through gaining these skills, especially the ones that are in high demand in your respected areas because it will differentiate you and make you stand out and be distinct.

Advice For Game Writing Resume

Advice For Game Writing ResumeThe advice for game writing resume is often expected to be easy to apply. However, if you are a writer or know someone who writes, you probably would expect that the advice for game writing resume is easy to apply and that it will be good for getting hired for the job you want. This article will help you find the answer to this.You should remember that the game you will be working on is the one that you love the most. The game that you love should always be the one that you choose to work on. That is why we do not recommend that you add any extra information that you feel that the employer needs.The game that you love will always be the one that you will focus on and your game writing resume should include the most details about your passion of choice. While these details might not be as detailed as some other details, it is better to have them in as much detail as possible. The best way to find out what is the best for you is to start with a sample of o ther games that you love. Find out what kind of information they have about that type of game.Then, start to go through the samples you have. Take note of all the details that are presented about the character. Do not rush to fill out your information. Taking the time to get a better grasp of what you want to convey to the employer will pay off in the end.Remember that even when you know what kind of information you want to present about yourself, you still need to add some advice for game writing resume to the one that you plan to use. The advice for game writing resume should be written specifically to the type of game you are writing. That is why it is so important to focus on the specific game you are writing before you start to write your information.If you are going to use an advice for game writing resume to give a general synopsis of what you have written for a game, then you will likely find that it is not something that is helpful enough to be included in the resume that y ou fill out. The point of the advice for game writing resume is to help the employer to tell the reader how to get more information about you. You should take note of this and take care to make sure that you do not give too much away in the advice for game writing resume.On the other hand, if you are just giving general advice for game writing resume, then it is more than likely going to be included. This is one of the points that the coach gets when he or she is looking for examples to be able to work on. These examples of general advice for game writing resume will give you a reference point that you can build upon.There are always things that will go wrong when you are trying to get a grasp of how to write an advice for game writing resume. It is necessary that you stick to the basics so that the guide you use is really the one that will be able to help you out. Otherwise, you might end up falling back on what you have already got.

Who Are Your Friends

Who Are Your Friends I am not a natural-born networker. I prefer hanging with those people I know well. I have a schedule that doesnt allow me to meet people after work. Those are great excuses for not networking, right?Actually, this is my situation. Yet, I still find time and ways to carve meeting new people into my life. Some stay around for awhile, others, well, not so much. It was just over a year ago I started blogging. Then I started Tweeting. I have made some solid friends this past year. I remember making my first on-line friend, Barry Hopson. Who, by the way just publisheda book he co-authored with Katie Ledger. (Visit the blog and read theget the book). Sounds kind ofhokie, I know. But it was sort of an Aha momentyou really can meet people virtually. I also began reading and commenting on blogs and met Miriam Salpeter of Keppie Careers.I considered her a mentor, whether she knew this or not. Now I have been asked to be part of her joint effort with Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter and others, Career Collective. This has provided me the opportunity to meet other great thinkers and bloggers! Entering into the world of Twitter, my earliest friend was helpful and local so we met for coffee, Karl Heinz Kramer (@khkremer). I continue to meet new people everyday on Twitter. As Deborah Mourey says, Twitter is a cocktail party. I dont even like going to cocktail parties, but heck, you meet some interesting people. That is why taking a leap into Twitter can be so interesting, especially for those who are introverted. Since starting on Twitter, I have made so many connections with so many great people. It has also been helpful in keeping in touch with real friends I dont get to see too often. Using social media has been a wonderful adventure. I am amazed by how easy and almost natural it is to meet new people. Perhaps Twitters new List function will make it easier for newbies to follow and engage in new tweindships. Susan Ireland recently wrote a post 14 Twitter Lists for Job Search about Lists and I found it basic and helpful. The key is to find peoplewho share common interest. For me it is anything related to job search and social media. What are your professional interests and who are you going to follow?

2 Ways to Boost Your Career with Online Branding - CareerEnlightenment.com

2 Ways to Boost Your Career with Online Branding Personal branding is at the cornerstone of career success. At every stage, front entry-level to CEO, those that make the final employment decisions are looking for applicants that brand themselves in a certain way.In this day and age, this kind of screening takes place mainly via the internet, as employers have access to all of their applicants web-based histories. To ensure that your past doesn’t come back to haunt you when you next go for a job, then, you have to clean up your online brand. Better still, you have to seek to optimize it, as that will be sure to better your career prospects going forward.To find out what you can do to boost your career with online branding, make sure to read on.Do something a bit differentApplicants that go above and beyond to showcase their expertise are the ones that stand out most during the application process. If you want to be the one grabbing all of the attention the next time you apply for a job opening, you should resolve to do something a bit different online. This means doing more than just setting yourself up with a LinkedIn page and starting your own website. Plus, it means starting a blog or creating your own online store. Want to Read More Articles Like This One?Sign up here to receive weekly updates from Career Enlightenment, and never miss another powerful job searching tip! SUBSCRIBE! You have Successfully Subscribed!We hate spam too. Unsubscribe any time. With regards to the latter, you have the potential to really make yourself stand out by creating your own online store, but only if you tread carefully with this kind of venture. Quite simply, an ugly looking, badly marketed, hard to navigate, overpriced, and poorly stocked store will do nothing but harm your personal brand. If you want to avoid this plight and make a real success of your e-commerce venture, be sure to remain abreast of the latest personalized shopping trends. By getting your finger on the pulse in this instance, you will stand a far better chance of creating an online store that does you and your online personal brand justice.Be socialSocial media is at the core of online branding, which means that you’re going to have to get social from time to time if you want to boost your brand. This will help you to forge connections with possible employers, and it will show that you aren’t afraid to put yourself out there.Here are a few tricks you should be aware of when it comes to socializing professionally online:Use an authentic screen nameUpload uniform headshotsSummaries your value proposition in your biographySum up your value proposition in a catchy sloganAlways link back to your websiteShare content consistentlyMix it up when it comes to your content (text, photos, videos, infographics)Join professional groups on LinkedInCollaborate with social influencersBe as helpful as you canIf done correctly, online personal branding has the potential to take your career to new heights. It will only boost you up your car eer ladder, however, if you are willing to take this kind of venture seriously. When seeking to do just that, the above advice makes for as good a starting point as any.