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This is not about the online professional community business model, rather, it is about distilling people’s participation in those communities down to the economic terms most of us live by. It is also about why these communities are taking off and why you should look at this rapidly developing resource.

Superstars are like art - you know them when you see them. I find they share three core characteristics: they are smart, creative and they get things done. I think most people know a Superstar when they see one. They are the people who, through smarts, guts and sheer force of will, drive great companies to do great things (or keeping middlin’ companies alive). Then why are there so few Superstars in evidence at most companies and is there anything you can do about it? Would like to turn some of your “B and C Players” into “A and B Players”? You can make your existing team stronger and hire even more strength by creating or changing the way you do a few core people processes at your company.

If you are building a company you are charged with creating the product vision, attracting the talent to build your product, and then leading the charge to market and sell that product. But what about the finance and accounting (F&A) team? Where do they play in all of this? When is the right time to bring in the people who help you understand your market’s economics and those of the very company you are building? When should you start counting the beans? Is it important to get audited? Do you need help raising money or managing the money you already have? Is there someone watching and managing the internal operations of your company? These are questions which are often left behind in the rush to market, and to the great detriment of founders, leaders and investors of growing companies. Ignore this and you may see your growth capped early or you may fail to get out of the starting gate. Do it right and you give your company a tremendous advantage in fundability, profitability, scalability and even market success.

As a manager and executive over the past twenty years I have read thousands of resumes, looked at countless online resources, and hired hundreds of people to work for me, my fellow executives or for others in the organization. Unsurprisingly, I get a lot of people coming my way looking for work. I am, however, surprised at how often their “hiring persona” is in shambles. If you want your best foot forward in the hiring process you must be prepared with sharpened tools from both the offline and online worlds.

In an attempt to teach a recruiter how to better vet resumes for job openings I came to discover firsthand two of the core faults of recruiting today: the false positive and the false negative job candidate. The former results in the hiring manager being inundated with off target resumes which is a waste of precious time. However, the latter and more pernicious result is the false negative which regularly results in quality candidates not making it through the first level of recruiter screening. How many world-class candidates have you not seen because the person doing the vetting did not know what to look for?

Service providers should give more than they get. More service, more value and more results. ProfessionalSourcing is a recruiting firm run by executives with decades of real world experience in operating positions and executive management. Our core committment to our clients is to deliver the best recruiting services available and then some. The "and then some" is embodied by this blog, where we hope to provide insight into successfully growing your team and company through our hard-won experience in business.

We hope you find this information helpful in learning the ins and outs of building great engineering, IT, finance, accounting and HR teams and the companies they support. We welcome your input in the form of public comments to any discussion, direct interaction with us, and suggestions for new stories or new views on existing entries. We look forward to hearing from and serving you.