We all have lived our boring stories of “should be hardworking, high analytical skills and excellent communication skills, ability to multi-task and good leadership qualities”. I say “If you possess all these qualities, give me a break please!!” It is not realized many times that what we think about the “right strategy” is not always right, and many times, organizations pretty much pass through an entire lifecycle without filling this huge “hiring gap”.

“What are you talking about” you would ask. Aren’t the above listed qualities “make or break” in any company setting? Well, I say just look back and tell me with what percentage of employees are you happy with? How many times have you given yourself false-assurance about the nature of “how things work?” Many times, companies just give up hopes of perfection, when in reality; all it takes is setting up a simple questionnaire and method to interview candidates.

The situation probably arises when hiring manager asks wrong questions from the candidates (as shown above, thanks to cartoonstock). The above picture is indeed happening all the time, albeit in various forms.

I want to discuss few of “litmus tests” that should probably be used as baselines for any form of hiring in the future (well I had to shed some modesty there!!)

Few of them will include:

• Personality vs Skills
• Lies, lies and more of them
• Bureaucracy
• Biology or logic?
• Preferences or Performances?
• The root of all evil (as they say)

…to be continued

Everyone is trying to sell something, which is all what business is about. If we don’t sell, we cannot play the game. We all have done it at some point of time or another. Everyone from the janitor to the Multi-million business owner has sold something to somebody, and how well he/she succeeds in doing that shapes the way a company or an individual does in a life span. We people in staffing industry try to sell and up sell all the time, which is what we do time after time and again. The different kinds of people we talk to everyday, the different situations and different environments one has to understand while dealing with the people directly and understanding their needs is unparalleled in any other industry (I guess). And that is why I say that staffing industry should be the place to start for young and aspiring people seeking a career in future.

So why do I say so? What makes me think that we can learn more about selling in staffing industry than most of the others? Hmmm…well I already said few things, but let me present some details:

• For a start, we always have to start with the client, which is our first step. We are not selling some consumer products that are made by some body, and we are not selling something where we need to sell no matter if somebody needs the product or not. This is great, this means that we have to talk, we have to understand, we have to demonstrate that we can work with the clients; we have to maintain a relationship.

• Now that was the first part, working in staffing industry is about understanding both the sides of the coin. After understanding requirements, we need to understand what the people are looking for, and we need to match that with the requirements. I feel this requires special sales skills, since we need to get on a personal level of communication with the candidate to evaluate if both the candidate and the client are a fit for each other.
• I don’t know if such a saying exists, but I think “A good sale sells forever”. What? Yes, a good sale will always be valued by the person who buys it and they will always refer your product/service to others. In the same way, a good sales person always maintains the relationships with the client through sheer hard work and results, and we all know how much important that is in staffing industry.
• I think sales in our industry demand immediate results; one will be found out if the case has shortcomings. It is true that there is a trial period, but that is very small compared to the sales that happen in the “old school”. The sales here have to happen despite the skill shortages, and the sales have to be good. That is pretty tough road you’re talking about.

Have you ever picked up a phone to sell anything? Where do you think you want to go?

The industry continues to see efforts being made towards using social media and social networking to get candidates and jobs. As a part of the same effort, popular extension of Twitter, TweetDeck has launched a new site that directly is meant for recruiting industry—Job Deck. Previously Job deck existed as a separate entity, and recruiters and candidates had to search for the tweets that are targeted at recruiting. An increased demand for having a separate solution–JobDeck seems to be the right response.

Essentially, JobDeck:

Scours twitter and indexes all the tweets that are job opportunities

Provides an interface that can filter out relevant jobs for the candidates (filters out noise)

Still connects to other social media sites and makes cross connection easier.

As a recent announcement few days ago by the tweet deck team, you can now integrate your LinkedIn account to the TweetDeck, which means a direct access to millions of profiles that exist on LinkedIn. The job search has built in geo-location feature that allows you to target jobs that are available right next door (well that is lazy; we don’t want our candidates to have that!!J)

Apart from the candidates, this is now an opportunity for people working in staffing industry to leverage this tool and narrow down their list of candidates. As a result, we don’t need to go through each and every site and search for our requirements.

Happy hunting.

Apart from the use of non-traditional ways of recruiting and the sleepless nights for Monster and CareerBuilders, the shift in economics will call for a change in the methods and ways of hiring. Diversity always topped the list while hiring, at least for the top companies. It seems that diversity in hiring will see a new chapter this year. Previously, we saw companies hiring people from diverse backgrounds mostly in one department, but the management and other positions still remained “close”. A need for shift in thought process will see more and more people from different backgrounds and skills being hired for important “decision-making” positions of a company. We might even see “unusual-hiring”, where people without any experience in a domain will be hired to improve the approach and the process of another domain services. Clearly, top companies have been able to attract diverse talent and diverse clients, and it augurs well for the world and staffing companies across the world.

More and more well skilled professionals would opt for temporary form of employment. The shift will be based on their understanding of the scenario and their want for making most of what is available, rather than driven by the employers and their need for contingent labor. But direct hire should be stronger by the end of 2010. Moreover, many of the projects that were put on hold because of the economic meltdown will be again started in 2010, and hence more need for contingent labor.

More and more staffing companies will come into the forefront as many companies realize that the extensive HR operations are of little use and they want to outsource all the HR functions to RPO agencies. As the demand for labor will shoot up, so will be the need for staffing firms of various kinds. Though, it is believed that HR operations may now start playing roles in making a strategy for hiring and long term hiring strategies of a company.

Many staffing companies by now would be confused about the state of affairs. Previously, these companies might have done a good job, but due to lack of sufficient expertise to deal with increased and diverse demands, these companies might consider merging into bigger staffing companies. Clients are fussier about consolidated spending, and want to come up with pricing bids, something that we staffing companies would not be too happy with.

I would like to end by saying something similar to what I started with, staffing companies will start moving the operations online, more and more candidates searching, filtering, and submitting will take place online. Most of the people in staffing are looking forward to a better year, hope the analysis of trends will be of some help as we all work towards a better strategy for our staffing companies.

The quotes by some of the staffing industry leaders are a boost for everyone who has their fingers crossed for the state of industry in the coming year. So as promised, we are here to discuss some of the challenges that might be faced by the staffing industry in the coming year.

One of the biggest challenges among all the hype of recovery of the economy is that the recovery is going to be very slow. The recovery won’t be complete, simply because the boom that tailed recession was not a real one!! So organizations will be confused through out the year about hiring. They will be wary of what happened in the past, and they won’t be ready to take chances. By the end of the year, we should see a significant rise in hiring, but it will be a stiff battle between the “hiring managers” and the recruiters. The recruiters might still face the “fussy” managers, which was the case through the year 2009.

One thing I have noticed a lot in the market is that there are people who are over-qualified for the jobs that are out there. I met a friend this week who had several years of experience in IT, but was ready to work for small sum just because he was jobless. It remains to be seen how industry will reinstate these people into jobs that they deserve to do.

The number of people currently out of work is large. The unemployment taxes are rising, and it can directly affect the margins for the staffing industry. Staffing companies need to communicate this to the organizations, other there could be significant restructuring in the margin amounts, which we saw as it happened after the previous recession. More and more companies want to keep the costs low, hence are asking for more services at the same cost. Staffing companies have to make sure that the margins don’t slip.

Another challenge would be the restrictions surrounding H1B visas. Time has come that the government understands that “world is flat”, and organization are rejecting candidates with H1B. We don’t yet know how the problem will be circumvented, but it has to be taken care of for sure.

Nobody likes uncertainty, and that is going to be the biggest hurdle this year. From companies to staffing agencies to employers, everybody is unsure about what is going to happen. Efforts have to be put in to instill some kind of homeostasis in the state of affairs.

In the next post, we will discuss some of the trends that will rule the roost this year. A happy birthday to Martin Luther King, have a good weekend.