Never ask a busy executive to meet you for lunch

A lot of people probably assume that those who work in business are always meeting each other for lunch, based on the way such meetings are portrayed in popular culture. In reality, there is a very good reason why most executives rarely have lunch meeting. It is a huge time sink.

Between driving to the restaurant, waiting for service and eating at an awkwardly slow pace because the real point of the get-together is to talk – meetings held over lunch wind up taking much longer than necessary. And when you're dealing with busy executives, you'll find that they don't have time to waste traveling to and from drawn-out lunch meetings that could be conducted quickly and easily in the office.

So, the next time you want to get together and talk with someone who you know has a lot on their plate already, don't invite them to lunch. Take the advice of entrepreneur Mark Suster and be direct. Ask if you can stop by the person's office for half an hour. Offering to pick up coffee on the way can be a great way to score bonus points.

Just as executives don't have all the time in the world to go out for lunch all the time, they are also pressed in many other areas. For instance, running the company's hiring process can be immensely time consuming, involving many separate tasks and necessitating a lot of irregular scheduling. Also, communication during the hiring process is critical and should be conducted with careful focus.

That's why it makes sense to work with professional recruiters. Hiring experts work full time, focusing only on the task at hand, which is to find qualified candidates for a company's vacant positions. This removes a lot of stressful time commitments from the plates of businesses' decision-makers and guarantees the quality of a hiring process because human resource professionals are able to bring their experience and complete focus to the job.