If there were ever two words that are almost interchangeable, it’s commitment and engagement. The Collins English Dictionary (CED) describes both as accepting an obligation or pledging allegiance. But when you look, it’s not hard to drive a wedge between them. And driving a wedge is essential to understand how, as a manager, you motivate your people for optimum performance. First there’s commitment. Then there’s engagement. Engagement follows commitment. Here's how it works.

In the UK today there are around five million people who work for themselves. They run either sole-trader or limited liability firms in which they are the only employee. Those workers seek to sell their labour to entrepreneurs. This labour market gives the entrepreneur rich picking of very skilled and motivated individuals without having to employ them. So how does the entrepreneur tap into this resource?

Research suggests now that that inferred personality can be used with targeted emotion-laden stories to drive a person's behaviour. This blog updates on this research and notes how this links to psychometrics used in recruitment.

Most managers think they can interview. Many even believe that they are good at it. And yet precious few have been trained and fewer still understand the true role of interviewing in ensuring fairness and valid assessment. Simply, structured interviews win. But they must be built vacancy by vacancy. Here's how to improve the predictive ability of your interviews.

In the UK, we get the idea that our staff need to be technically trained, but we have little or no understanding that the job of 'manager' is neither innate nor obvious. It can't just be learned by trial and error. Simply, we don't train our managers and, as a nation, this lack of management training is killing us. Here's what to do.

Hiring managers are faced with young people seeking apprenticeships and employment without previous experience in the mainstream workplace. So what should hiring managers do to judge which young person will perform well in the role? Since vocational identity predicts performance, hiring managers should listen to the young person's story.