NAHA Elections: How To Elect a Leader
- Elizabeth Ashley: The Secret Healer
- 28 minutes ago
- 24 min read
For many years, I worked as a commercial recruitment consultant. My job was to recruit members who worked in office-based organisations, and these could be from a secretary or an administrator right up to Finance Managers, based on the level of relationship I had with my clients. I would sometimes also recruit members of staff for hospitals including on one occasion an Occupational Therapist. Recruiting staff is about looking past the well written CV and the sharp suit to the substance of someone's experience to analyse how much experience has to do a job. Recruiting someone is not the same as electing someone, however the ability to analyse the quality of someone's answers may empower you to make more reasoned assessments in the upcoming NAHA Elections.
Earlier this month, we had our first opportunities to question candidates on their plans and abilities at NAHA's 2026 AGM. I am sure many of you have watched and been impressed by the quality of the experience and the plans in the room. I know I was.
Colleagues who know my commercial experience have asked me what I thought of the event, so I decided to put pen to paper, not to make judgments upon the candidates, but to give you an opportunity to see the quality of the answers given, through the eyes of a recruiter.
You have two main sources of information outside of the candidates social media, which are their platform statements and the questions asked of them at the AGM in July.
For ease, I shall attach these here, but you will be helped in your assessments by reading the post in its fullness before applying your new skills to watching.
And a link to the AGM meeting recording where you can appraise people's answers.
At the base of the post there is also a Candidate Assessment Sheet
and a Social Media Questions Tracker, that will help you asssess the quality and tone of answers that candidates are giving to questions being posed to them by their members on social media.
This is a long post of several stages. (It had been suggested to me that it might be better as a series, which is probably warranted, but I have decided to keep it as one post.)
I shall repost the statements and recordings at each point for you to revisit.
Should you decide to do this as a project, I would suggest that you break it down into positions.
Vet presidency candidates side by side, thinking who would I choose to do this job, then assess treasurer for example.
Do not try to do all candidates in one go.
Fill each vacancy in turn.
For ease, I have created you a candidate assessment form, which you can access at the bottom of the article.
When Will the NAHA Elections Be?
Elections will take place for the NAHA board in the days from 1st September. Since NAHA now has over 7,000 members and about half of those are now international, there will be a 48-hour window to accommodate for all time zones. You are being asked to vote on several positions.
Understanding The Term "Director" in NAHA
NAHA has two types of Directors. First, it has regional directors. In the US, these regions are usually states, so for example, there are regional directors for Ohio and Wyoming. Regions can also be wider, and they can also be international, so I am the UK Director, for example. There is then a board of directors, which are president, treasurer, public relations, secretary, and currently there are also director co-ordinator and international director. The election is for NAHA members to elect new board members only.
Why are the NAHA elections taking place?
You will hear much hullaballoo about "Term Limits" and how changes should be made to term limits. Our bylaws speak of these limits; however, these term limits only work insofar as there are candidates to move into the shoes of people incumbent in positions. For many years, this has been a challenge for NAHA as there has been a dearth of candidates wishing to step up and offer 15-20 hours a week, unpaid, to serve on the board. When that happens, and there is only one person saying they want to do the job, since there is little point in the election, the next year goes on the same as the last, and in fact Annette George has now been the incumbent president for eleven years.
Annette decided this was the last year she could allow that to happen, and asked Raghda Abdel Makhsoud, the incumbent International Director Co-ordinator, if she would consider taking on the role after her massive success growing the international side of the organisation.
After some weeks of reflection, she agreed she would, then Jade Shutes challenged her election, announcing that she would also like to stand for the role of president.
Who is Standing for NAHA President?
There are two presidential candidates.
Jade Shutes, a former NAHA President who has served two terms previously, from 2000–2003, then 2013–2015. She has not held a director's position in NAHA since leaving her previous term as president. Jade is the founder, owner and principal teacher at the School of Aromatic Studies and has announced her platform of "Unified Healers", as a preselected board of colleagues whom she has chosen to govern with her. This is unorthodox in NAHA history since it is the first time (to my knowledge) that candidates have come forward as a group.
Raghda Abdel Makhsoud is the regional director for Egypt and is chair of the International Relations Committee in NAHA. Raghda is the founder member and the principal teacher at the Ebers School of Aromatherapy that is based in New Jersey, in the US where Raghda lives.
Other Positions Being Contested
I shall not outline the backgrounds of the other positions. This is homework you can do for yourselves, but these are the people vying for election into the posts.
Vice President: Sharon Chapman, (for clarity and traceability through her published works, formerly publishing under the name Sharon Falsetto) and Denise Cusack.
Treasurer: Eric Davis (Incumbent Treasurer) and Bekki Kuber.
Secretary: Rose Chard (Incumbent Secretary) and Margo Herzfeld
Public Relations: Bobbi Mitisi, Jennifer Pressimone, Cecile Ellert
Director Co-ordinator: Dr. DorothyBelle Poli
Since the position of Director Co-ordinator is uncontested, DB Poli will be our next Director Co-ordinator.
For clarity then, Raghda, Rose, Sharon and Jennifer are already serving members of the board. All but Rose are serving in different posts to the ones they are applying for. Rose is asking to be elected to a role she has now held for a number of years.
Candidates versus The Platform
NAHA bylaws state that we vote on individual candidates in the election.
For the first time this year, a group of candidates have stepped forward and presented themselves as an entity which they refer to as the Unified Healers.
The Unified Healers Platform are: Jade Shutes, Denise Cusack, Bekki Kuber, Margo Herzfeld, Bobbi Mitisi.
Bobbi and Margo are listed as tutors for Jade's school on her website.
Are We Voting for Platforms or Individual Candidates?
The purpose of running as a "platform" or "slate" of candidates has certain benefits to candidates that are worth considering here. Their joint values mean that they have an alignment of ideas and values and share the workload of promotional content.
However, we vote on individual candidates.
My Recruitment Experience
I worked in recruitment between 1999 and 2008 where I worked my way up to Commercial Manager, where I oversaw a team of five consultants as well as running a large call centre campaign, of which I was the sole supplier of staff. This was an extremely large company which required a large number of candidates, which meant I also needed to source candidates from other recruitment agencies who also became my customers. In 2008, a wave of redundancies in the company I worked for coincided with my having developed a blood clot in my lungs while pregnant with my youngest. I started ghost-writing as the Secret Healer during my maternity leave, and wrote seven Amazon Best Sellers for other people, before deciding to write for myself. The success of my first book would go on to secure me the role of UK Director of NAHA.
It benefits the reader to understand how recruitment works, because it is often misconstrued as an HR position. It is not. Essentially a recruitment consultant is someone who sells people who can do jobs, so if a company has a vacancy because someone leaves for example, the consultant's job is to replace that person with a new member of skilled staff. Likewise, if a member of staff is off sick or on holiday, this leaves a vulnerability for the company because no-one is doing that job, so temps are put into those seats for the period of absence.
Recruitment is a high pressure, overly competitive sales job where reputation is everything. When you get a client, you must continue to service a client's need excellently, or the client will go elsewhere. A recruitment consultant is only as good as their last placement. It is a fiercely competitive space, and recruitment agencies are only interested in one thing, profit margins.
On the surface then, it might seem like good profit margins relies upon placing good candidates with more clients than your competitors, and that would be true, but more important than that is that the candidates stay in the positions where you have placed them and of course this is not really in the consultant's hands. Clients pay a recruitment fee for finding them the right candidate. If that successful candidate leaves in the first six weeks, their fee is reduced down to zero if the candidate leaves in the first week…or is sacked. In other words, if the client does not like them, because they are often late, have poor attention or simply can't do the job…you are in trouble!
So, finding the right person for the right job can sometimes be easy, sometimes hard, but it relies on being able to see who has done the job before.
Stage 1 Of the Recruitment Process: Identify Who or What the Team Needs
Clearly, recruiting someone and electing someone are not the same thing, but there are some ways that you can transport things from one exercise to the other.
The single most powerful thing you can do when recruiting for someone else is to ask "What's the Most Important Thing You are Looking for From the Candidate?
It doesn't seem that big a question, but it really is.
Let me show you.
One client might say "Oh well we use xyz piece of software. It's a real pain to train someone on, so they must have used that before."
Ok then. Don't waste your time thinking about any buyer that does not have SAP experience. Got it.
Another might say "That they fit in. We have got a great team here. Everyone gets on. I don't want anyone too disruptive."
An organisation's culture is way more important in teams than many people give it credit.
No-one wants to have to manage disturbance every day. The most productive teams are the ones where people get on.
Your secret weapon then is not in the CV. It's not even in the interview. It's clocking how many times they ring you. How pushy they are and the single biggest question you ask in the reference "Would you employ them again?"
A third company might simply say "That they can do the job."
I want to see evidence that they have done the job before, any other stuff, I'll manage.
In the first two instances, a good consultant knows they have wiggle room to "differ to spec". That means acknowledging that you may not have the perfect candidate who has done the job before and you can help change the job spec a little. So, for example, client one's perfect candidate for his buyer's job needed to have knowledge of SAP software. If the software knowledge is the important bit and you have a Sales Co-ordinator who knows SAP inside out, that's great, you can probably fill that vacancy.
Similarly, if you have got three sales reps going to a company who pride themselves on their slick suits and company cars, and there is absolutely nothing to choose between their sales records, send all three for interview by all means, but have other companies lined up to interview your scruffiest candidate next week.
MIT (Most Important Thing) of the Candidate
Same question, different viewpoint.
Consider that a good candidate may have several options open to her, so you want to be sure that if you send that person for an interview, they will in fact want that job if offered. You really don't want to piss off the client by presenting them with the perfect candidate who then turns down the job because they have been offered something better. Sometimes, the power move is to say, no, I'm not recommending you for that job because it's not enough money etc.
It is kind of like "Why do you want this job?" but not quite.
Really what it is asking is "What's the most important thing that you are looking for a job for it to be right over a long term."
For me, the MIT is always hours. I want to be able to work around my first job which is my family. For others it might be a nice team, location, money…
These are the things that mean a person is hopefully going to get past that first six weeks to get you paid.
But "Why do you want this job" is just as important, because this candidate's perspective must align with the client's vision.
For example, "I'm looking to move into the next role up in my career ladder" might be perfect for some companies, not for others.
These are absolutely questions that you should feel you know the answer to before you put a person forward.
So how does that translate into your job as a voter in the election?
Do you know what your MIT is for the candidates? Actually, it is a weird question to ask yourself but this is absolutely core to strategic vision.
If you can work out what is the Most Important Thing to You right from the outset, it will make your job very much easier.
(Mine is that I feel we need to be thinking about how to remain commercially viable in this AI world, for example.)
Here are some examples that might help you:
Is it that they have done the job before?
Is it that you feel they will get on with other team members?
What is it that you want the leadership to represent and do you see this represented in their vision?
Does their sense of what is important seem to be the same as yours?
Your reference links:
Do You Understand What is The Most Important Thing to Them?
Just as important as understanding what the client wants from the candidate, I want to understand the reasons that person wants the job.
Sometimes it's very obvious, sometimes it is not.
In my experience, if it does seem to be difficult to understand someone's agenda, it's because they don't want to tell you.
I'm a naturally curious person, with an innately suspicious mind. If the agenda is not obvious, I would always judge that to be specious, by which I mean that it's been veneered to look like one thing, but actually the truth might be different.
So, interrogating a candidate about their reasons for wanting to do something is not only valid but important.
Then you must ask yourself whether you feel that their "Most Important Thing" is congruent to your "Most Important Thing".
Do you feel that will serve your own business agenda or will it be in conflict?
I am amazed how many people have said to me "I know I should be thinking about the organisation, not my business…"
No! Your NAHA membership is a business expense and the decisions you make in this election should be assessed selfishly first and foremost.
Which candidate best serves your commercial vision?
Your reference links:
Stage 2: Assessing The CV
Ok, it would be an absolute gift to have a CV to work from, instead we have two things really.
We have the information given in the candidacy statements when people originally pledged to stand and we have the interview questions from the AGM.
It's not much, I'll grant you, but…
The first thing I am looking for is a candidate experience match. Has the candidate done the same job before or something similar enough that this would be seen as the obvious next step on the ladder.
For example, you might have three head teachers and one assistant head going for principal roles. That makes sense. The school secretary applying does not.
Experience can be seen in three main ways in the CV:
Job title
The breakdown of duties
Understanding of what is deemed to be successful in that role
Let's start with the last point.
From a personal perspective, we might say "How do we measure success? Surely that's different for everyone?" and that would be true if we were talking about our personal lives, but we are not.
In a corporate role, I want to see evidence of an overarching experience of having been held accountable to certain tasks; yes, because these are success measures, but it also hints at the kinds of questions a person has been asked before. Does that person know how to steer their vessel in the same direction as their bosses?
So, for example, I want to know the terms of the biggest client the salesperson secured. How much money does it bring in each year? What were that person's targets? How have they performed against them?
I want to see history.
How much money did a buyer save the company? How was stock inventory streamlined?
What processes did they bring in that made the account's department job easier?
If we translate that into aromatherapy, we might look for what kind of clients the person specialises in? If the job was in a hospice for example, I'd probably discount someone who had mainly made perfume.
What I absolutely do NOT want to see is "I've done a similar job".
One of my biggest tools to success is to recommend candidates to other agencies. In the recruitment world, inexperience means incompetence and incompetence means both complaints and credits. I'm not particularly partial to either.
I bloody loved sending other agencies credits!!!
Your reference links:
Understanding The Job Description
A well written CV enables the recruiter to clearly visualise what that person does day to day. I want to see the tasks that make up the journey.
For example, an accounts clerk might say "Matching invoices to delivery notes", or a telesales person "Cold calling 60-80 companies daily". If someone is a manager, specifically who or what do they manage? If it is a team…or how many?
When I see these things, it reassures me that the person has indeed sat in that seat and delivered.
Job Titles, Dates & Recency
One of the reasons to be inquisitive about the job description is job titles are slippery things. A senior software engineer in one company may have a vastly different job to person with the same title from another. Sometimes companies who cannot afford wage increases will agree to inflate job titles instead (think about going to the hairdressers, the poshest title means customers spend more, so companies like doing this, but from the candidates point of view, it means they can immediately start looking for better paid jobs).
Inflated job titles are a recruitment nightmare because, like I said not all software engineers are equal, but this trick makes it seem like they are.
And lastly, dates…
How long did the person do the job for, and how recently did they do it?
MASSIVE question:
Why did they leave their last jobs and especially why did they leave ones with familiar titles?
Were they asked to leave?
Did they decide the job wasn't for them?
Did they leave for more money?
When it comes to interviews, I'll be wanting to hear their answers, and then I'll be hearing the other sides of the argument when I take their references.
Gaps in History
Where I worked was a very rough area geographically, so most gaps could usually be construed as someone having been in jail, in fact more than once it was probation officers that gave references! I don't envisage that to be the case in the NAHA elections thankfully so gaps in history are definitely things to explore.
Similarly, you want to interrogate the reasons that sit behind the reasons.
Many women legitimately take time to raise kids, and so it's easy to hide being fired from a position behind "I felt my family were suffering my long hours". Leaving a job to be with your kids is a legitimate and worthy endeavour…as long as it's true. Sometimes it's a useful mask.
Always be slightly suspicious of gaps in work history and interrogate them well.
Why has your candidate left their job?
Accept that answer as truth…but what other reasons? Most people can find a way to live with one irritation…there is always something underneath. That's what you want to find out. Have there been court cases, accusations, irretrievable team breakdowns?
If people left a job and then returned to it, what changed to help them make that decision?
Are They Job Hoppers?
Do they move between organisations a lot?
Movement between jobs is a very interesting one…All companies want to attract candidates with tons of industry knowledge, because of all the competitor information they bring. They have inside track on your competitors, they have a super contacts list. People answer the phone to them because of who they are. These are often the same people who won't answer the phone to you. They have a ton of financial knowledge in their heads...
OOOO yes, we want to attract those people!
Those people are immediate ins with customers our clients don't yet have.
In this case you are not just looking to access skills and knowledge; it's a power grab from a competitor. Head hunting not only benefits you, but it actively maims the organisation they came from.
Headhunting is a great business strategy as far as it goes, but then it becomes a bit like living with a partner of someone who has cheated.
You start to develop a kind of paranoia. How long till they do it again?
The question of whether you can trust them becomes moot. "Do you really think they are capable of doing that?" Well, you've just answered your own question. You know they are capable of betraying their employer, because you set them that task to come over to work for you and they did.
They are more than capable.
They have a track record.
But this time that track record's not for the good.
It's a very delicate balance for a recruitment consultant…
On one hand, you have something so rare it's a treasure. The perfect job match. The person knows the job inside out. They are from that industry. They have all the accreditations, and they can sit in that job and just do it.
Rocking Horse Shit, we called it.
This rare and precious treasure.
Something that would at first get you really excited. It's a gimme for a score on a placement, but then over the years as you become more experienced, you start asking how will this play out if they move on?
No-one wants to see years of work sidle out the door with a career climber.
So, transparency about why someone wants a job is vital.
Ultimately, do you trust that person?
Contemporaneous Experience
This is definitely a balancing act.
On one hand you want someone with the experience of doing a similar job, but on the other, there is a requirement to recognise that jobs change over time.
Later, I'll tell the story of the client who insisted people came to work with their shoes polished and it was a massive factor of whether they got through interview to a job offer or not. It was an excellent screening tactic at the time, but now it's become obsolete, since most interviews are done on zoom. This is often an issue with non-contemporaneous history. Jobs silently develop and change, without you even noticing.
Here in the UK for example, someone might not know about how privacy laws have developed with GDPR, or how to do export documentation after Brexit, they had been away from an operational role for ten years.
You must always weigh the two landscapes by the time they have been away from their role. How are the landscapes similar and how are they different?
To my mind, (and therefore only my opinion,) promoting someone is often safer than resorting to another candidate with a large career break. (That is at a high level incidentally. I'm not sure it would be that important for a midlife-returner at an admin level, who has been raising children, for example.)
Your reference links:
Stage 3: Preparation for Interview
This is barely a stage, but I have a story to tell about one client who used to do the most infuriating thing and that was to insist that all candidates brought a paper copy of their CV with them.
Reasonable you would think.
For ease, I'd make sure I emailed him a copy every time and get annoyed when he would say "Yes, no not him. I didn't get a copy of his CV".
I'd put the phone down and rant that he was a "f-ing liar", he did have a cv because I sent it. Then one day he said something else with it "He hadn't polished his shoes" and for a moment I was ready to smash something, but then suddenly I thought I could see what he was doing. He wanted everyone to look like they were going out to sell for him, that they would always have the company brochure in their hand when they saw a client and they were by nature someone who looked smart.
Eventually, one evening when we had taken him out to dinner, I told him I had finally worked him out, and he said something that stuck with me.
"Anyone can do an excellent interview, but I am looking for traits. Do they follow instructions and how much do they care about what I think about them? I've said I want a print CV so that is what they should care about, that they want to deliver on my instructions. I think that anyone that ignores what I want will keep doing that. It's important they understand that what the clients want is way more important than their own agenda. Plus, no-one ever got turned down for a job for having shiny shoes…but scruffy ones? That's a different story!"
This is so insightful, I think.
It's a very easy way to find out…does that person care about what the client wants, or will they simply assert their own agenda.
Your reference links:
Stage 4: Analysing Answers to Interview Questions
Scoring Interview Questions
Many of the jobs I used to recruit for were for the social sector, housing associations and social services for example. They have a clever way of marking candidates in interviews. This is a very useful thing to know (and incidentally, you should teach this to your children! It is the single best thing to know about getting a job, in my opinion.)
Housing associations mark questions thus:
Competency Based Questions
In this system, as long as someone gives an answer to an open-ended question that is deemed to be a right answer, they can score either one mark or five marks.
Nothing in between. Just a one-mark answer or a five-mark answer.
That sounds odd until you realise that what they are assessing is competency – obvious given their name – but they want to see that you can demonstrate that you have been competent in this role before as opposed to being able to imagine what the right answer might be.
I'll show you.
Imagine that an interviewer asks:
"A customer comes into the store and makes a complaint; what would you do?"
A one mark answer would be to give a hypothetical answer of what you would do.
So, for example, "I'd say take down all the details of what they were annoyed about, apologise if necessary and direct them to my manager".
Actually, in terms of showing that you understand what the job is, that's a decent answer.
That example is not going to win any customer service awards, but it demonstrates how a person will often answer "this is what I would do" rather than "Let me give you an example of when I have done this before". However, it only shows that you have an idea of what the job might entail, not that you have done it before.
A five-mark answer might go something like this:
"Oh gosh, this really reminds me of a time when a mom came shouting because her child had trapped her hand in the door. She was so upset, and honestly, it wasn't anyone's fault but the child's, but she was upset and angry and I wanted to make sure she was heard. So I got her a cup of tea, and a bit of cake for the child, took down all of the details of what had happened, before fetching the customer services manager to join us. We documented the accident and gave the lady a $10 voucher off next week's shopping."
Whether you agree that is the best customer services you have ever seen or not, hopefully you can see how this a better answer.
In some ways this is an extension of the printed CV and polished shoes man…if the question asked for "Can you give me an answer of when you have done this before…" what the interviewer wants is reassurance that you have done the job before!
If you wanted to apply this in your own interview I would say, always try to over deliver on the request. Do not set your own agenda.
In a series of five interviews, if a person gives evidence of when they have done the job before, they will have 25 points versus 5 points of the people who may or may not be making their experience up.
Always look for evidence in the answers you hear.
What Does a Zero-Mark Answer Look Like?
Well, I guess a wrong answer, certainly, but it's not very easy to give a wrong answer to an open question. More that it is not quite the answer someone is looking for.
But politicians also give zero-mark answers…they avoid the questions and try to pull the narrative over to the story they want to tell. They kind of sound like they are answering the question to begin with but really they want to give you their prepacked version of the truth. Sales people are the worst for this.
Their answer might look something like "Yes, tackling complaints is so important to keeping your customers, aren't they? I used to be targeted against complaint resolution as well as customer retention and new client acquisitions. For me though it's about making lasting relationships yada yada yada."
Notice how it sounds like it might be an answer, but it's not. It's a sales pitch designed to distract you. Two things are happening. Either they are avoiding the question because they don't have an answer, or they are abusing the process because they see it as beneath them. Either way, you should put a line through the answer and give it zero marks because there are very good reasons why interview questions are asked, it's the candidate's fault if they have not taken time to assess why they are being asked and what they are being scored upon.
At all points, look for evidence, evidence, evidence.
Absence of evidence may mean avoidance, it may mean an absence of that experience, or it may mean they have not properly assessed the job in hand.
Any or all of those things say to me, inexperience.
Your reference links:
How Much Should Inexperience Worry Us?
This is a really difficult question to answer.
Inexperience means mistakes, but then so does complacency which often happens if someone has been in post for too long.
As stated before, contemporaneous experience in a slightly lesser job could arguably be seen as way more useful for someone whose knowledge might be outdated.
I think inexperience is probably vetted in terms of the team they are going into. Are there ample people to show them the ropes? How fast will they be able to get on with the job in hand if there is a lot of new stuff to learn etc. Is there a safe pair of eyes that understands where mines might be detonated, otherwise how do you know what you don't know! I think there is more to a management position than skills, there is also perspectives. Perspectives come with experience.
Within this election there is a great deal of discussion around term limits, and while I do absolutely agree that people should not bed-block positions so to speak, I also think there are huge benefits of having board members with experience.
Your reference links:
Stage 5: Speak to Past Colleagues and Employers
Ok, so let's imagine that we have decided who the person is that is going to change our worlds and we are ready to issue a job offer….
So exciting, and honestly a relief in recruitment because that's a potential fee on your board that will keep the sales director's questions away from your door, at least for today.
But STOP!
Resist the urge to make that decision before you have checked their references.
We want to go past "what was their attendance like?", "sick record", "honesty" etc.
Fundamentally, what you want to know is how well they did the job they were employed to do and more so.
Would they want to work with that person again?
Even in the UK now, previous employers are not allowed to give bad references for fear of being sued but read between the lines. If someone really liked their old colleague, they will tell you. Actually, they tend to rave "Oh she's marvellous. We really miss her…"
If you get a reference that does not rave, take another, and another, and another…
Talk to as many people as you can about their time in the past role. What do they think of your candidate? Do they think you should employ her.
If more than two references tell you no, I would not want that person back again…you have a problem.
Absolutely do not ignore it.
Someone once said something to me, that was wise.
"If someone shows you who they are, believe them".
Likewise, if you get a less than great reference, believe it.
Irritatingly then, you 'llneed to start the whole flipping process again!
Your reference links:
Candidate Assessment Sheet
The Voice Outside of The AGM
One aspect that is different to when I was working was how big social media now is, and one of the most interesting parts of this election, I am finding is the questions people are asking.
Really clever ones about things like how directors will approach cultural representation, uderstanding that AI is listening, what are the long term objectives for education...so many intelligent things, I would not even have thought of.
The problem with social media is that it is fleeting, and quickly gone. So it's hard to remember who engaged with each question and how. Therefore, I am also including the online form I am using to add these answers into my assessment summaries.
To be very clear, these do not save. I cannot see your answers. It is a form, that's all. I am old school, I print everything off, so feel free to do so.
Social Media Questions Tracker
In Summation
It's very easy to get confused in recruitment and selection because it can feel like an overwhelming responsibility to get things right.
In reality though, there are very simple steps to follow which mainly require common sense.
First: Know what it is that is important to you. What does your business need them to deliver and does it look like a) they have an interest in doing that b) do they have the required experience to start working on it?
Second: does the candidate look like they may have done something similar before and how long ago was it.
Third: Are they using language that convinces you they have done the job before, or are they hedging that you might not actually know what the job involved either? Do you feel they gave you evidence of what they've done before? (Don't forget 1 mark versus 5 mark answer.)
Fourth: If they are given instructions of how to conduct themselves in an interview, have they followed? If they have or haven't, what might that tell you about them?
Fifth: If you like them, are they a cultural fit? How are they going to get on with people around them? Do they seem like they will work as a team with the people you plan to put them with?
Sixth: Get references, endorsements and testimonials. What do the people who have had to work with them day in day out have to say about them? Importantly, would they re-employ them in that role.
Sticking to this framework will help you to make more informed choices to work towards the best board possible for NAHA.
Very last point before we leave, this is potentially the biggest change NAHA has faced in a decade. As NAHA members, we have a responsibility to play our parts in this decision making. Please make sure your email address is correct on your NAHA record, and that you have registered to vote.
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