Chapter 1: What is the significance of spring cleaning for our workspace?
Thank you.
Hi, and welcome to the Talent Trade Podcast. I am Stephanie Moss, partner with Thinking Ahead. Today, I'm super excited to talk about a ritual that most of us do this time of year in our homes. And that ritual occurs typically when we have a significant change in seasons, especially going from winter into spring. Most of us call it spring cleaning.
In fact, this past weekend, I was so excited, so motivated, so amped up to do all the things that involve spring cleaning. I went through my closets. I went through my drawers, took things to Goodwill, detailed my car, cleaned off the back porch so I could start enjoying mornings out there again. It was awesome. I started grilling for meal prep for the week. I was so energized and enthused.
As I returned to work the next week, it got me thinking about, hey, I spent a lot of time working on my home to get it ready for spring. What do I need to do with my desk to make sure it's ready for the next season? So I came up with a little bit of a list. Some of these are absolutely applicable to the grind of what we do every single day.
Some of these a little bit more behind the scenes and hopefully will serve you mentally or emotionally. So there are four categories that I look at when it comes to spring cleaning my desk. The first one is mental. I really encourage you to take a good look and say, OK, we all know how the new year starts. Hope, enthusiasm, renewed vigor for what we do and how we do it.
And usually about the 90 day mark, even if we're having a great start or everything's coming up roses. It's a great time to revisit and say, hey, what did I do in the last 90 days other than just the job to better my mental game? So for example, what books did you read? And again, when it comes to the mental side of our desk, I do like books that have something to do with what we do.
So something in the nonfiction realm, although I'm a huge fan of fiction as well. But did you read something that makes you a better recruiter? Did you participate in training of any sort that you walked away with specific ideas or thoughts that you were going to apply to your desk to make you a better recruiter? What have you done mentally to better your desk?
And again, this is not a time to beat yourself up. Sometimes the first 90 days of a year roar and it's all we can do to keep pace. Hey, no problem. Sometimes that's what we've realized. Man, I intended to get all this done and all this reading and do this training and do this and that. And time completely got away from me. this happens.
But let's make sure then we have a plan for the next 90 days. So if we didn't get to what we wanted to, what are we going to do over the next 90 days to sharpen our sword at our desk? And then if you were able to do some reading or attend training or participate in anything that makes you better, what have you actually applied?
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Chapter 2: How can I mentally prepare my desk for the next quarter?
Where have I gotten off track? Where can I use some more help? And again, if you're doing good, thumbs up. This is not the time to beat ourselves up. Quite frankly, when I took my car to get detailed, I was like, oh, I just feel like I haven't cleaned my car out in forever.
The truth of the matter is it wasn't really a mess. Yeah, I mean, it needed a good vacuum and a little bit of the trash, but it wasn't terrible. And it felt really good just to clean up whatever needed to be cleaned up. But it wasn't like, oh my gosh, I've had three months of food, snacks, and all the other things kids put in there. I mean, not a little bit, but
I do a pretty good job, generally speaking, maintaining things. So if that's you, great. Give yourself a gold star. Make sure you have a plan for the next 90 days and move along. At the same time, if something's gone awry, then let's just do what we can to put things back on track. This is what spring cleaning means for our desk.
And let me just help draw it down just a couple of more times to really show how this impacts our desk. Sometimes when we look at our desk and we're in this spring cleaning mode, sometimes what we need to do is go back and look at the searches we've worked on. Look at the candidates we've placed.
Look at, you know, just really do a nice deep dive into our KPIs or, you know, where we've been frustrated at work or, you know, what have we tried that didn't work and so forth and so on. And sometimes what we discover is, hey, we are holding on and working searches and that we're no longer excited about. We've sent tons of candidates. There doesn't seem to be any urgency for our clients.
Or, hey, we've told this client we're working the circle and we've had it for 45 days and we've only submitted one candidate and we're hoping like heck they get the job. Well, that's not good work. And that's not what we do well. So part of this is really digging into the details of your desk and saying, hey, how does that translate into What kind of marketing or business?
What kind of searches really get me fired up? What do I want to target? Where do I need to hunker down and really scrub the market for better candidates for these clients so that I know I'm serving them well? This is spring cleaning at our desk. And it is very holistic because that's what we are.
Even though I think at times recruiters have this unbelievable ability to compartmentalize, it's a short-term defense mechanism. And at the end of the day, we operate best when we're operating in a fully holistic way. So let's make sure that we approach our spring cleaning the same.
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