“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

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?

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.

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.

“Clearly, we believe that the worst is over,” says Yonas Prising, executive VP of Manpower and president of Manpower’s Americas operations. “The question now is: What does the comeback look like? There is nothing to tell us that we would see a roaring comeback, but [instead] moderate growth.”

“The goal is to eventually be at 60% professional staffing and 40% general staffing. We have plenty of room to expand. I hope we fill up every open seat we have over the next year. It would just be wonderful if that happened”—Krause, CEO of Spherion.

“We believe we can grow again in 2010 with focused execution even in a tough environment, in particular with our favorable business mix, which is about 70% physician-focused”—Mike Weinholtz, CEO of CHG Healthcare.

“We had never seen a recession of this magnitude before. We really had to change the way we looked at our business. –Same as above person.

“Some companies want to just receive staff augmentation services, and they have little process in place,” Yoh explains. “Others may prefer an enterprise solution with technology, service level agreements, etc. Our goal is to deliver the solution that best fits the culture and desires of the customer.”—Chairman of Philadelphia Yoh.

“Some companies want to just receive staff augmentation services, and they have little process in place,” Yoh explains. “Others may prefer an enterprise solution with technology, service level agreements, etc. Our goal is to deliver the solution that best fits the culture and desires of the customer.”— Amy Langer, partner in SALO LLC.

“Our company received GSA certification in October 2009 and plans to start providing staffing services to the federal government this year”– Amar Panchal, CEO of Akraya, a Sunnyvale CA-based information technology staffing firm.

Let us ponder upon the above quotes for a moment and discuss the challenges that may be faced when everybody is so optimistic about the things to come.

I was reading the above comment on an article that speaks about non-traditional ways of employment over the last few years and somebody pointed out that that industry has already moved towards few of the solutions without even getting observed. The number of contingent workforce that is employed by the organizations have scaled up to high levels, and except in cases where employers are trying to protect some intellectual property, the trend will continue to be so.

2010 will see a continuous rise in Temp, contract, and consulting work. More and more factors are pointing towards the fact that such will be the case. More and more organizations are seeking employers with miscellaneous and multiple skill sets. I myself have experienced this situation for the company I work for, and it will continue to be so. Both the facts are connected—since such employees who have multiple skills and such people would like to use their experience to work for more people. On the other hand, companies would want to employ such people more, and hence they would even agree for a temporary assignment for such people.

This fact directly relates to the fact more and more young people are ready to downsize their life styles and ready to offer skills which do not put them under pressure. Employers and contingent labor companies who provide services to hire temp workers have to keep these things in mind when trying to source talent. We believe there will be at least 2x times temp hiring in 2010 then 2009.

I am not here to say that there are not enough blogs and economic columns that deal with the topic (the recession), but it seems very few of them made the effort to COMMUNICATE the news to the general public. People have been found to be confused about the state of affairs; lots of them have even resigned to the fact that it can ever get any better. Worse, even the people in the industry who are working everyday don’t seem to be very savvy about the downturn, its causes, and their responsibilities to deal with the same. There was an interesting blog-post I came across, which talks about how employers should communicate with the employees and attain a higher level of awareness inside the organizations. But, the article was too employee-centric, and I would like to say that the communication levels we are talking about goes beyond just the employers and the employees. It has to pierce the general public, you and me, who are looking for jobs, people who are trying to get into the job scene—it is them who need to be communicated to more.

If you ask” “whose job is it?” I would day it is the job of the organizations, and it is surprising that organizations are consumed so much by their own businesses, that they forget that they have got to play better roles in the societies. The discussion can get us into “moral values in businesses”, but we would rather want to stay away from that. We already know one company who has done lots for the public, but it is never given the credit because it makes the most of the money too.

I want you to think about few things about the topic and tell us your views about how organizations can attain a better level of communication, by getting into the public and telling them about what’s up with the economy. The blog is open to commenting for the next 7 days, and the comments will be discussed in the further blogs.

Happy new years from the Sai Family, good luck.

It is not surprising that the way organizations have been behaving in this market has been leading to people being opinionated about the companies, directly affecting the brand in the process. The turnover rates have kept on increasing through out the year, people are surprised, yes—but they won’t be as soon as somebody points out these facts. Onboarding is something that has been practiced for decades in the organizations, yet, when it came to a bad situation, we all have panicked. My friend in case is a case in point, when we all know that on boarding reduces the turnover rate in the first 30-90 days, and increases the productivity, lessons are to be learnt!! (Over usage of exclamations was necessary to stress the point).

Onboarding is more of a “cultural” process that is handled differently by different organizations in different countries, it is way organizations welcome new people into their business, and try to realize the company goals at the same time. The concept of organization being a family has taken a blow in the recent times. One can retort saying that companies are here to run business and are not running non-profit organizations trying to help people. But that is my point, following processes which can benefit and hence profit in the long term is something we should stick to—success of an employee is success of organization, how can we relent on the basics?

The year has seen numerous examples where similar things have happened. Recruiting companies are oblivious to most of the situations I guess. Recruiting companies like us face similar problems when it comes to our own staff. Have recruiters asked the right questions? There are enough things for us to ponder upon, let’s hope we get them right in the coming year.

As we have seen before, the hiring has stepped up, and has been rising for quite sometime now.  But the market is still relying on temp workers. The reluctance to do so marks the prudence of how the managers are approaching the hiring process as well as the pick-up points. Clearly, the aim of the companies is to fall back on smaller staff if things don’t smoothen out (just in case). The demand and supply graph has always been an indicator of how the companies and managers think about the situation, but the rise in demand is not necessarily sign of future demands, and hence the organizations are approaching the whole process in a different way this time around.

And that is not bad in the long term one would say. In the past, companies have employed people indiscriminately, and then fired them when the demand did not meet their expectations. Temp-workers are getting paid after all, and most of the temp-workers are highly skilled and get paid more then they would get paid normally. And formally speaking, they contribute to the figures of labor statistics.

The companies now seem to value employee relations more than ever now. Some of the top companies are employing the laid off employees again as temp workers. The conditions is uncertain though, as temp-workers are not free to spend that much, hence the demand is low than it would be if the permanent employment is more.

Given the nature of surge that has already taken place, one expects better things in the future, but the mixture of caution with aggression is not a bad thing at all. Only time can tell whether this mechanism would last, but the temp agencies are certainly busy and it keeps companies like us very busy.