Don Lang, Blue Key Partners (North Fulton Business Radio, Episode 586)
Don Lang, Co-Founder of Blue Key Partners, joined John Ray to discuss talent and all things hiring. He talked about the importance of getting the right person for the job, the staggering costs of a bad hire, how to prepare for and begin the hiring process, how to assess candidates, common interviewing mistakes, success stories, and much more.
North Fulton Business Radio is produced and broadcast by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® inside Renasant Bank in Alpharetta.
Blue Key Partners
Blue Key Partners helps clients to assess, select and develop talent with customized leadership development and learning solutions. We also provide expert advisory and training services that support organizations to hire the best.
Formed in 2013, Blue Key Partners brings together the capabilities of Talent Effects, led by Don Lang and The Learning Point, led by Laura Butcher. Don and Laura have collectively served clients of all sizes across numerous industries around the world for more than 60 years. In 2022, Don and Laura released their book, Hire the Best: Find, Interview, and Select Top Talent—a must read guide designed for managers, team leaders, and anyone else who has responsibility for finding, assessing and selecting talent.
Don Lang, Co-Founder, Blue Key Partners
For over fifteen years, Don has focused his work on coaching and developing leaders and teams. He leverages a diverse background that spans from human resources management, line operations, account management, and P&L responsibility, to enhance his contribution to leader development through coaching and related advanced learning programs.
Don works with leaders to develop strategies, build collaborative relationships, form, and lead high performing teams, and to develop, execute and achieve key business objectives. For leaders and organizations operating across borders, Don contributes key insights and perspective from years of hands-on consulting assignments in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Don support to leaders and organizations includes:
- Team and leadership coaching
- Leadership development program design, development, and delivery
- Talent assessment for hiring, succession, and M&A
- Key talent acquisition consulting and training prior roles
Don’s prior roles included human resources management assignments in Fortune 500, information management and financial services for firms at both the corporate and field levels. Later, Don held several line operations and technology management roles in insurance/health care services. He also was Director of Healthcare Systems for a systems solution firm where he served as channel marketing development lead. He then became a VP and Principal at Mainstream Access, Inc., a global consulting firm focusing on talent assessment and development. Later, he served in a P&L leadership role as a Managing Director in the Human Capital Consulting Group of Spherion Corporation, a global outsourcing and consulting firm.
He founded an independent coaching and leadership development business in 2022, and in 2012 Don co-founded Blue Key Partners, providing advisory and training services to support organizations in their objective to hire the best. Don holds an MBA from Georgia State University and a Bachelors Degree in Economics from Lafayette College. He has completed an Executive Coaching certification program at Columbia University. For over ten years, Don lectured on high performing teaming and coaching for leaders in the Executive MBA program at Kennesaw State University. He continues as adjunct faculty for KSU’s Coles College fo Business Executive Education programs.
Questions and Topics in this Interview
- Importance of getting the right person in the right job (costs of a bad hire)
- Importance of leaders/Manager to have a talent mindset (building a talent brand and creating a virtual bench)
- Beginning the hiring process with job and candidate specifications (what is each and how to prepare)
- How to prepare for the interview process
- What are the skills anyone interviewing needs to be effective in
- How to assess candidates
- Common mistakes interviewing candidates
- How to on-boarding and retain talent
North Fulton Business Radio is hosted by John Ray and broadcast and produced from the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® inside Renasant Bank in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link. The show is available on all the major podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon, iHeart Radio, Stitcher, TuneIn, and others.
Renasant Bank has humble roots, starting in 1904 as a $100,000 bank in a Lee County, Mississippi, bakery. Since then, Renasant has grown to become one of the Southeast’s strongest financial institutions with over $13 billion in assets and more than 190 banking, lending, wealth management and financial services offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. All of Renasant’s success stems from each of their banker’s commitment to investing in their communities as a way of better understanding the people they serve. At Renasant Bank, they understand you because they work and live alongside you every day.
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