How do you choose a staffing firm?
I frequent geeky new technology events and the most common question I get right after I tell people that I work for a staffing firm is - what am I doing there?
Why, I’m there to learn about new technologies and meet new people. In that order.
Most assume that when someone from a staffing firm comes to a tech event, that we’re there to harvest leads. Why it’s so unbelievable that I’m there to actually learn is beyond me. What’s there to learn? Plenty. Why learn? As someone who earns a living placing people to work on your stuff, doesn’t it only make sense that I know what your core business is about?
Which brings me to another myth about staffing firms. A recruiter’s job entails more than just matching keywords with resumes or making sure that our candidate has great communication skills to impress a hiring manager during the interview.
The staffing firm is an organization’s representative to a candidate. It’s cliche but considering the number of hiring managers who have told me that all they really care about is whether we can find the people for a reasonable price, maybe it isn’t so obvious.
There are so many things that ride on the hires we bring in. The cost of each wrong hire can mount quickly and the damage that the wrong staffing firm can bring to your company’s employment brand can be irreparable.
How do you choose a staffing firm? I will write posts about this, but just to start, “the right staffing firm” isn’t going to come in the form of the lowest bidding responder to your RFP, nor will it come as the vendor with the best looking brochure or website.
But before I put in my two cents, if you have found The Staffing Firm for your organization, how did you find them and how did you know they were The One?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
LinkedIn profile pics: you CAN turn it off
This has got to be the most useful feature from LinkedIn. Not only do you have the ability to set your photo’s visibility on LinkedIn, you can also choose not to view OTHERS’ profile pictures. It’s definitely a valuable tool for those of us who feel that the photo feature could compromise anti-discrimination hiring practices/expose corporations to possible discrimination suits (from the few sue-happy folks who will use just about any excuse to squeeze a buck).
The option is under your account settings and is the very last option under privacy. Or. You can just click here.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
LinkedIn Recruiting
There are two schools of thought in the use of LinkedIn. On one end of the spectrum you have the so-called LinkedIn Open Networkers who publish their e-mail addresses so that they can get invites to connect. They typically have 500+ contacts on LinkedIn. The idea is that the more people they are connected to the more people they have access to. The question, however, is what kind of a relationship do you have with that “professional network?”
On the other end of the spectrum you have those who use LinkedIn as their online contact management tool. They connect only to those they truly know and trust.
It seems that a lot of recruiters who use LinkedIn lean towards the first group. It does make sense to use it this way in recruiting as your network becomes a free candidate database.
While I totally understand the approach, I think it has contributed to the recruiting industry’s bad reputation in social networking circles because there are those who have (ab)used their network by asking them to introduce them to their contacts rather than using the information in the profiles to contact candidates directly. There are also those who spam their networks, using it as some sort of a mass mailing list for whatever reqs they are working on, regardless of whether they fit the position.
How do you use LinkedIn in recruiting and do you have a set of guidelines/best practices that you follow when it comes to the use of your social network?
Update:
Found this post by Scott Axel about LinkedIn invitations.
On LinkedIn Answers: Have Recruiters Perverted LinkedIn?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Hiring in a hurry
The cost of hiring entails more than just the person’s hourly rate. These costs start to incur before before the employee works his/her first hour and may continue on even after the employment is over.
When you are hiring in a hurry and in volume, these costs and risks get magnified. This is an area where contingent staffing could provide a cost-effective solution.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Recruiting in Virtual Worlds
Was browsing through some staffing blogs today and found this post from Martineau Recruiting’s Voice of IT about Second Life. I’ve blogged about my personal experiences with Second Life before here and here, and with other virtual universes here.
The post poses the following question:
…and because of this built in fudge factor (not really lying, but creating a false impression of who you are by altering your reality) I wonder why companies who try to weed out this same action during a real interview process (with various levels of success) would purposely invite someone to lie to them in the hopes of finding a quality employee. So why not bite the bullet and do the hard work of finding employees through cultivating your real life processes? Sure people still aren’t a 100% truthful, but I find that they have a much more difficult time perpetuating some falsehood about themselves when you meet them in person.
While it is a valid point, I think the question was presented on the premise that companies who recruit on SL eliminate the screening process by doing the initial contact on Second Life rather than a phone call or e-mail or other First Life means.
I’ve spoken to some of the folks who have set up camp in SL such as Cisco, Intel and got a guided tour of IBM Islands by their Virtual Worlds Research Project Manager and when posed with the question of why they were there, recruiting was a common denominator. These companies are going beyond job boards, career sites and user groups so that their candidates can not only find them but also so they can experience the company and connect to them. IBM holds developer events there and also have an IBM Redbook library available to users. If it interests the candidate enough to work for IBM there are links that direct to IBM’s job listings.
On the staffing firm side I have visited Manpower’s Second Life facilities and I am fairly impressed. They have an avatar there 24/7 ready to answer questions about jobs or contingent staffing. They also offer group memberships which basically is kinda like a subscription that alerts you to their events on SL.
And I think that’s just the way recruiting in Second Life needs to be. I think the staffing industry should see it as a place to connect with candidates and allow them to experience our brand rather than a venue for active recruiting/solicitation. I know that there are definitely a bunch of stories out there about actual interviews happening on Second Life though I believe those are for virtual jobs. I’m sure there have been real life companies that have done interviews on SL for real life jobs but I think that’s just ill-advised. At least for now. I’ve also written that a reputation system is critical to the viability of companies doing any sort of real life business on SL.
So I’m taking a wait-and-see stance here and say that while I won’t recommend heavy-duty recruiting (sourcing, interviews) on Second Life I’d also have to say that we also shouldn’t be so quick in dismissing it as a viable place to connect with candidates.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Job boards facing extinction?
When Monster announced last month that it was laying off 800 employees I wasn’t really shocked. Watching how job boards haven’t really evolved much to adapt to the changes brought upon by Web2.0, it was just a matter of time before we started hearing news of the sort.
Since that info is about a month old now I won’t dwell on it and maybe put in my two cents on why it wasn’t a shock.
I’ll cut to the bottom line. Pricing. How much can you really charge to access a database of resumes and the ability to post jobs? In 1999, it was definitely worth the hundreds and thousands of dollars annual spend, but in the Web2.0 era where you could search LinkedIn and Facebook and people search engines such as Spock, the pricing doesn’t seem so reasonable anymore. And less so in a market short of candidates and recruiters are having to seek out passive job seekers (”I’m employed but tell me what you’ve got…”).
And no, passive job seekers normally don’t post their resumes on job boards because they know their employers most likely has access to those job sites and it would be the kiss of death to be employed and have your resume found there (unless you informed everyone that you were looking). Oh. And not to mention recent incidents of job seekers’ info getting compromised. See here.
Now I’m not saying that people who post their stuff on Monster or Careerbuilder aren’t good. There are still great candidates to be found on those sites. I’m just saying that access to those resumes aren’t worth the thousands of dollars in subscription fees. Not anymore.
Ok fine they let you post your jobs too. But then again. With your target audiences probably looking elsewhere (blogs, anyone?), again, it’s probably not worth the current prices. Especially with new options like Simply Hired that would let you post jobs on blogs, I think the conventional job boards will have to evolve and adopt to the new trends. And when I say “evolve,” this (and raising their fees) is not what I had in mind.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Staffing firms are more than just middlemen
I think I mentioned it here before but a while back I did a presentation to a group of jobseekers consisting of project managers, financial analysts and some engineers. The presentation was about “how to work with a staffing firm.”
I had a few slides prepared but didn’t really get to use them because my audience quickly took over with their questions before I was done with my first bullet point.
Judging from the questions my audience believed that staffing firms serves no other purpose than be the middleman.
I was just revising the presentation so here’s a quick rundown on what purpose staffing firms serve — from the job seeker perspective.
Advocate — As your recruiter is trying to place you, your recruiter is basically your advocate. A good recruiter has well-established relationships (read: “is trusted”) by the hiring managers he or she is working with, as well as with the candidates he or she is trying to place. By design, contingent staffing is set up (at least in my experience) to ensure that “pushing bodies” does not happen. How? Most contingent staffing programs are set to bill by the hour so the only way to be profitable is to keep each placement in billing capacity (ie working). Staffing firms cannot achieve profitability with high turnover rates, so it is NOT in the staffing firm’s interest to push a candidate that’s simply not a fit for one reason or another because that person will not last and therefore not bill. Just like any other industry, we gotta deliver great products to keep our consumers buying. Keep this in mind when talking to a recruiter who is trying to place you on contract. That recruiter wants to give you an assignment/contract that’s the perfect fit. Sounds cliche, I know. But really, that’s the way it is.
Employer — a lot of job seekers don’t realize this and fail to take this into consideration when accepting an assignment or a contract. It’s not just about who can find you that assignment, but more importantly, who would you want to work for? The staffing firm’s role does not stop at placement. They cut the check, provide benefits, and handle your issues if anything goes wrong (workplace injuries, conflicts, sexual harassment complaints, you name it). If you don’t think that’s a big deal, imagine someone who missed a paycheck because the staffing firm’s payroll messed up. Sure that happens anywhere, but how would the staffing firm handle it? How quickly do they resolve issues? It doesn’t seem like a trivial thing now, does it.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I hate the word “temp”
I’ve always hated the word “temp.” Not sure exactly when it happened but the term carries such a negative connotation now. Maybe I’ve been reading too many Dilbert cartoons or watching too many episodes of The Office that I think of Ryan The Temp. Or maybe it’s the hundreds of conversations I’ve had back in my recruiting days when people turned me down because it was a “temp” job and not “permanent.” Never mind that the project was going to last a year, and never mind that there is no such thing as “permanent,” at least in The Valley.
So over the years I’ve been promoting the terms “contractors,” “consultants” to describe the placements, and “engagements,” “contracts” and “projects” in place of the term “assignment.”
We place contractors/consultants to do project-based work. I feel that these terms are more accurate to describe our services.
An administrative assistant who is placed in a 3-month contract is there to fulfill the projects of the direct employee who is out on maternity leave.
A software engineer is placed on a 6-month contract is there to do work for a specific phase of a project.
One might argue that terms are just terms and euphemisms and what not, but I believe they carry a lot of value. If it makes the difference in terms of employee satisfaction — the contractor performs better because he realizes the importance of his role instead of the temp who is doing a mediocre job because he is just a “temp” filling in — I’d say that small change in industry terminology could prove invaluable.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
The value of the right hire
I went swimming today and the thing about it is that when you’re swimming, there’s no one to talk to, there’s no iPod to listen to. It’s just you and the water. Plenty of thinking time.
So on this morning’s workout I was reminded again of Steve’s post on how complicated the staffing industry has been. Why can’t we just go back to basics? Why can’t it just be about the best candidate for the best price?
I agree with Steve, it should be as basic as that. But the thing is, the industry feels that just providing the candidate for the best price doesn’t present much value to it. Heck, even I, as a college student working my first agency job, thought it was gonna be a piece of cake. Find this person for this job. Match ‘em up. How hard would that be? So we add on things that, as Steve’s post demonstrates, complicates things.
But anyone in the industry knows it isn’t that easy to match up a candidate with a job. We all look for things. We all have our individual recruiting practices. We all recruit based on our individual criteria. And we all know why we go to such lengths to screen candidates — it’s because we know what’s riding on our placements.
Which is, I think, all that needs to be the main message communicated to our clients. It’s not this reporting feature or that online invoicing feature that we offer. Those are just tools for convenience.
What’s riding on our placements?
No matter what we recruit for, whether it is a front desk receptionist, a PCB assembler, or a software engineer, they are individually crucial to a company’s success. The critical roles they play in a company should be value enough for a staffing service.
The receptionist you place will represent your client and will be the very first person that greets their clients when they walk through the door. Pick the wrong one and it could just break your client’s image.
The assembler you place will be holding a hot soldering iron on that costly printed circuit board. Pick the wrong one and it could cost your client thousands of dollars in damaged components.
The software engineer you place will be writing the code to what could be your client’s next cutting edge application. Ask the client how much damage a bad code can cost and see if that cost is worth the penny-pinching in hiring a mediocre staffing firm based on price.
That’s where the value of a staffing firm lies. The value of the right hire.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Recruiting and social media
I went to the Lunch2.0 event yesterday at Netgear and was chatting a little bit with LinkedIn’s Community Evangelist Mario Sundar about social media and employment.
LinkedIn is becoming quite popular with recruiters these days because it allows them to tap into passive candidates who are not otherwise available on Monster or Dice. And as other social networking sites (MySpace, FaceBook, etc)become more mainstream with job seekers publishing more information in these sites, recruiters are also starting to tap into them not just as a resource for candidates, but also to research their candidates.
In addition to social networking sites, there are also new services popping up targeting the job seeker/recruiter market. A lot of them are designed to make the recruiting process more personable through the use of images, video and reference tools to allow the prospective employer to see the candidate beyond their skill set.
We already do this in recruiting. They are called in-person interviews. But social media allows recruiters/employers to see a more complete view of things that may not be mentioned in their resumes such as their personalities and communication skills before they even proceed to the interview, so in theory, shouldn’t social media be a valuable tool for recruiters?
In theory…yes. But in a litigious society, maybe not so.
Remember the old recruiting days when we used to toss out resumes that had pictures attached because employers didn’t want to be exposed to for racial, sex or age discrimination suits? Never mind that the photos were unsolicited? In the world of blogs, MySpace and FaceBook, pictures don’t have to be attached, they can be easily found via a simple Google search. If a candidate is not hired for some reason and a potential employer appears on that candidate’s site traffic report, can that person claim discrimination? “I applied for a job and employer A came to my blog, saw that I am Asian and decided not to hire me.” What about video resumes on YouTube or ResumeBook?
I mentioned this concern to Mario and he mentioned that this was actually one of the reasons LinkedIn members do not have the option to upload photos as part of their profiles — because the company recognizes that LinkedIn is used not just as a networking tool but also as a recruiting tool.
LinkedIn also has a recommendation tool that allows clients, partners, co-workers and bosses to comment about a person’s quality of work or credentials. I think this is a great tool because it allows recruiters to do a reference check before even possibly contacting a candidate. But as a former recruiter I seem to also remember widespread corporate policies prohibiting managers against giving references to former employees. Now…LinkedIn, despite it being a “professional” networking tool, is still a personal tool so I guess the point here is that social media definitely blurs the line between what is official and what is “personal.”
At the risk of being redundant, if recruiters/employers don’t find it on LinkedIn, it takes but two seconds to find it elsewhere.
I won’t offer any opinions here, other than to say that I am at a wait and see state. It would be interesting to see how the staffing and employment industry adapts to new trends in technology and social media.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
-
About This Blog
Lisa Amorao is currently the Marketing Programs Manager for ATR International, a Silicon Valley-based contingent staffing firm.
Lisa has held roles in recruiting and sales before moving on to her current role in Marketing.
The opinions expressed here are her personal opinions and does not reflect those of her employer or any of its clients.
-