How to build an exceptional team

The success of a business is largely dependent on its ability to hire the right people. We all know that. However, did you realize that hiring the workers is more than just picking individuals with the right skill set and drive? Employees’ ability to work together in a cohesive manner organically can have a drastic impact on the efficiency and output of a team.

Whether a team’s goal is to create an innovative service, crunch the numbers or manage a group of people, the dynamic between the individuals who make up that group matters. Merging personalities, backgrounds and the strengths and weaknesses of a team takes more than filling in a quick skill chart.

According to Harvard Business Review, high-performing teams are the result of individuals with superior levels of cooperation, participation and collaboration driven from trust and a shared strong sense of group identity. These exceptional teams posses high levels of group emotional intelligence and have confidence in their effectiveness as a team.

“When you create a climate of trust and the sense that ‘We are better together than we are apart,'” Vanessa Urch Druskat, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire, told the news source. “It leads to greater effectiveness.”

Staffing firms helping their clients fill roles are aware of the desired team dynamics that promotes high-performing departments. However, with all of the data involved with appropriately filling these positions, a recruitment agency can quickly become overburdened with details, which can lead to an unorganized mess that promotes inefficiency. Firms desiring a more effective approach will find that up-to-date, intuitive staffing agency software, developed by industry professionals who know the staffing business, provides the details recruiters need in an easy-to-access format. The information that will help drive effective contingent staff placing and better allow a consultant to recommend the missing link in a department will be readily available.

Here are a few tips on how to create a strong team:

1. Balance power displays. Amidst the team dynamic, a manager exerting his or her control over the group constantly can squelch discussion and intimidate workers. However, fearing the position and being unable to lead a group will have negative consequences as well. Instead, your best strategy would be to let workers keep personal autonomy and feel free to discuss and bounce ideas around with the team. When it comes time for execution or making a decision you can lead the pack, while still listening and taking into account other people’s opinions.

2. Celebrate success. It’s unavoidable – there are lows to every job. However, there are highs as well. Building a high-functioning team will involve celebrating the highs and recognizing the individuals who help bring success. Both individual and group achievements should be celebrated and it doesn’t always have to be something big. Positive people help make a team friendlier and are willing to congratulate someone, clap or offer words expressing solidarity.

3. Define workers’ roles. It’s unlikely that members of a team will have the same job description or be directed to the same tasks. However, to avoid conflict it’s best to clearly define everyone’s role in the team. Hypothetically, if a worker knows his or her place in the team’s inner workings, regardless of whether a person is a contingent worker or permanent, they will feel more comfortable. Understanding the role and the expectations that come with that position will allow an individual to merge more effectively in a group dynamic and get acclimated to a job faster.

 

Are you attracting the passive job seeker?

It’s a changing workplace. I know it, you know it, and we both realize that the staffing world is being impacted by advancing trends.

Today, about 80 percent of workers are considered passive job seekers. This means these individuals already have jobs, but if the right opportunity came along, they would consider it. The other 20 percent are sending out resumes and actively pursuing job boards.

What real-world results have occurred because of this?

Social is on the rise. Reuters reports that LinkedIn, the popular professional social media network, achieved a 81 percent increase in fourth-quarter revenue in 2012. Following the release of this news, shares of LinkedIn Corp rose nearly 21 percent in midday trading on February 8, 2013.

Meanwhile, the online recruiting company Monster.com is struggling. According to News and Insight, Monster shares fell about 14 percent to $5.01 on February 7, 2012. The organization posted its second net loss in two years during the fourth quarter of 2012.

What does that mean for staffing firms?

Identifying the high-quality workers isn’t about finding a resume anymore. It’s about monitoring the social sphere. Who’s showing the qualities and skills that could wow a potential client? Staffing firms need to target these passive candidates if they wish to appropriately fill the roles their customers are looking for.

The most highly advanced staffing software can help a recruiter better tackle the task of organizing and placing the right professionals with the right skills to achieve instant success at a client’s company. Get aboard the social train and seek out the passive job seeker who can offer a customer the combination of skills that will get the job done – in whatever industry.

Should your staffing firm draft a social media policy?

The digital world has made interconnectivity easier than ever, which means the line between an individual’s personal life and his or her professional life is blurring. Websites and social applications such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram are providing a portal into the lives of co-workers and friends in ways never previously possible.

According to a paper by staffing experts Joel A. Klarreich and Jason B. Klimpl, social media outlets may be excellent platforms for staffing employees to network, locate potential candidates and promote their agency’s business, but those same tools can create problems. One of the easiest ways to resolve issues before they ever occur is for a staffing firm, while using recruiting software, to outline a social media policy for all employees, and job candidates A social media policy can help avoid an awkward situation from developing and provide a procedure if anything were to occur – alleviating a lot of the stress that can occur.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued three reports detailing social media use in the workplace. A Mashable article detailing the reports suggests that the last one regards the design of social media policies.

“[The report] provides a window into what the NLRB considers legal and illegal, not only with respect to employers who discipline employees based solely on social media content that employees publish, but also as to social media policies that employers implement,” Eric B. Meyer, a partner in the labor and employment group of the law firm Dilworth Paxson LLP, told the news source.

The report isn’t the law, but it does offer businesses, including staffing firms, the details that would make crafting a social media policy easier – offering a checklist of items to keep in mind.

Eliot Johnson, senior manager of global social media at KPMG told the news source how he and his coworkers went about designing KPMG’s social media policy.

“As part of our global social media strategy, we’ve created a series of foundational materials to enable our global network, one of which was the social media guidelines. There was much debate about whether this should be a policy or a set of guidelines. In the end we chose the latter given there were already policies in place; particularly with regards to client confidentiality, protection of intellectual property and our brand,” he said.

Managers must be aware of how their corporate brand identity can be made or broken when expressed via social media. According to the paper from Klarreich and Klimpl, a third-party looking in on a comment could be led to believe that a worker is speaking on behalf of the company, which is why it is important to focus on outlining what can and can’t be said about the company.

Furthermore, staffing firms should be open with employees and candidates that monitoring their social media accounts is lawful in pursuit of protecting business interests. Staffing firm recruiting software can be used to research and manage job candidates – allowing staffers to determine the professionalism of workers displayed on social media networks to see if they are the right fit. The demeanor, tone and topics a job candidate discusses on their social media networks could enhance his or her professional credibility if posts concern industry topics.

 

 

How will Facebook’s Graph Search Impact the Staffing Industry?

As you’ve likely heard by now, Facebook, recently unveiled a potential revolutionary game-changer that could impact the staffing and recruiting industry…Graph Search. This tool will allow in depth searching of Facebook user profiles, which could be quite useful to recruiters looking for talent. Whether you’re a believer or not, the fact that Facebook has 1 billion users is reason to take note.

According to ABC News, the innovative search engine could potentially modify the way the world uses Facebook.

Facebook_Graph_Search“Until now, the search bar you saw when you logged in to your Facebook page wasn’tvery powerful. You could only search for Timelines – your friends’ pages, other peoples’ public pages and business or product changes. But now, after close to a year and a half of development, the new “Graph Search” will allow you to search and discover more about your friends and other information that’s been put on the world’s largest social site.”

Even though the release of Graph Search is only in the beta version, it is speculated to have the capability to transform numerous industries. One business that could benefit from the new Graph Search Engine is the world of recruitment and staffing.

Stephane Le Viet, CEO of Work4Labs, fully explains the new product and how it relates to the staffing world in her article for Forbes.com.

“Graph Search will change the game again. It allows passive and active candidates to become recruits. As this product rolls out and improves over the next few months, recruiters will have a chance to search for whom their unfilled jobs are relevant. That relevance is the most exciting part…Graph Search is about discovering people—their work history, their education, their interests and their motivations—and using that discovery to recruit better.”

In response to a blog post about Facebook’s Graph Search by John Zappe of ERE, Glenn Gutmacher, founder of recruiting-online.com, is more apprehensive and cites concerns over Graph Search’s dependence on user content.

“Its usefulness as a recruiting tool is limited by the number of users who have complete profiles.” If the data that Facebook uses in order to generate results is the sum of your posting history, group affiliations and friends, then recruiters and sources are going to be frustrated by a lot of false positive results..”

Gutmacher goes on to ad that, “The most hopeful part of this article was the link to Facebook’s profile completion testing. Hopefully it will push people beyond just filling out their city and start asking for the data that recruiters need to separate wheat from chaff (e.g., current job title and company, if not skills).”

If implemented correctly, it is rumored that the Facebook Graph Tool may empower job seekers to market themselves in new ways, similar to LinkedIn. If that becomes reality, recruiters will have yet another go-to source to uncover the best talent. How do you think Facebook’s graph search will impact staffing and recruiting? Not sure? Here’s a collection of recent articles that shed more light on the subject.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2013/01/28/graph-search-and-online-recruiting-how-facebook-is-transforming-an-industry/

http://mashable.com/2013/01/27/graph-search-recruiting/

http://www.ere.net/2013/01/29/facebooks-graph-search-is-the-future-of-social-recruiting/

http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1204926

http://www.blogging4jobs.com/social-media/how-the-new-facebook-graph-could-benefit-recruiters/

http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/infographic-how-use-facebook-social-recruiting/

http://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

Image Credit: niallkennedy

New jobs report indicates strengthening employment growth

The latest U.S. Department of Labor jobs report is out and with it comes some positive news. American employers added 157,000 jobs in January 2013, and hiring at the end of 2012 was stronger  than previously thought – even as companies struggled with the uncertainty of the fiscal cliff.

In addition, the nation’s overall unemployment rate remained relatively the same from December 2012 to January 2013, according to the Department of Labor.

The hiring picture is gaining in complexity as experts look toward the hiring sputters that did occur in various industries. However, the overall hiring picture is looking stronger as payrolls increased and relatively significant changes in hiring trends. According to the Department of Labor, construction companies added 28,000 jobs in January 2013 and 100,000 over the past four months. Retailers also featured strong hiring, adding 33,000 positions in January, healthcare added 23,000 in the first month of the year and manufacturers increased by 4,000.

“The strong and steady job gains from retail trade and construction look a lot more like a normal economic expansion,” Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West, told KTUL News. “This is a sign that consumer spending is playing a far more important role in this expansion than it has so far.”

The slow and continued growth in employment indicates a return toward a healthy national economy. An interesting development is the slight decrease of the number of U.S. temp jobs in January – down 8,100. This is the first time that temporary hiring has seen a decline sine September 2012, according to Staffing Industry Analysts. In December 2012 the number of temporary workers increased by 9,100, in November it rose by 26,500 and in October the number increased by 9,000.

Despite the decline in January 2013, experts are still predicting that corporations will continue to depend on contingent employees as the economy continues to waiver. Staffing and recruitment firms are still filling their customers’ needs for long-term contract workers at a steady rate, which is expected to continue its previous trend – increasing a staffing agency’s need for an integrated system that can streamline internal workflow processes.

In the potentially convoluted staffing industry, where many variables combine and can create information overload, recruiting software can offer the right solutions and ensure superior customer service. By investing in a system that offers extensive tracking and reporting, a staffing firm can better ensure compliance with relevant governmental immigration, EEOC, tax and health-care laws as well.

 

Top staffing software trends for 2013

There are a number of positively disruptive technologies on the horizon for staffing firms. From mobile to cloud computing, agencies are updating staffing and recruitment software to incorporate the use of more secure and adaptive solutions. 

If your staffing and recruiting firm is not leveraging the use of these new technologies in a cost-effective and efficient manner, your customer service, time-to-fill rate and overall efficiency may suffer. As a result, customers are likely then to forgo your service and take the hiring process into their own hands — or worse, go to your competitor. 

Cloud computing and distributed databases
Regardless of whether you are meeting with clients, managing branches or interviewing potential clients, the cloud is at work. Cloud computing allows a staffing firm to spend time conducting the business that matters, instead of working to update its information technology system. 

Cloud-hosted software operations allows for distributed databases. Instead of storing data and information in one physical location, a distributed database involves the use of multiple, loosely connected sites. So, if your storage center in one location goes down, the others are there to pick up the slack so that you avoid any interruptions to the day-to-day business of your staffing agency. Equally important, cloud computing enables staffing and recruiting firms to quickly add branch offices and enhance their growth without adding more internal servers and other IT infrastructure. 

Cloud security upgrades
As a staffing firm, you are dealing with the personal details of professional individuals who trust you to keep it secure. With the evolution and growth of the cloud, information technology developers are working to incorporate the latest in data security protocols.

Research from GigaOM has forecast that the cloud market will more than double from $70.1 billion in 2012 to $158.8 billion by 2014, according to Mondaq. With such expansive growth, staffing firms will find their cloud solution providers continuously conducting updates in 2013. A staffing firm using a private cloud provider with the right set of security protocols and detailed contractual agreements concerning the arrangement should feel confident. In addition, according to Computer World, ongoing progress in the area of data security standards will further mass security technology adoption.

Cloud efficiency
Due to the nature of the work involved in the staffing industry, cloud computing will be found particularly useful. A whitepaper by Tim Giehll, Chief Marketing Officer at Bond International Software, titled, “Cloud Computing: The Future of Your Staffing Office is Out of the Office,” outlines the numerous staffing software trends recruiters will benefit from with the adoption of the cloud. Managers will be better able to track performance metrics and maximize the productivity of both branches and individuals. Recruiters can decrease response times, improve the accuracy of candidate matching and leverage online tools to reduce typical recruiting costs. 

 

Bond Pioneers the Next Generation of Search

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Bond International Software, the global provider of recruitment and human capital management software and services, today announces a revolutionary, intelligent search and match functionality – Adapt Insight –available in the latest version of Bond Adapt – the specialist portfolio of recruitment applications. Bond will be showcasing Adapt Insight at the Recruitment Agency Expo, 26-27th February 2013, Olympia London, Stand 18.

The Adapt Insight functionality offers a ground-breaking tool which understands what the recruiter is searching for and is able to carry out an intelligent, contextual search on all candidate information held within the CRM system. The new functionality saves time, removes the risk of human error, ensures no relevant candidates are missed and, crucially, returns superior search and match results.

Until now, recruiters have had to rely on a combination of structured data searches and free text keyword searches to match candidates to a particular role within their CRM. This is an extremely arduous and administratively time consuming task, the success of which is reliant on the accuracy of the information entered into the system and the individual recruiter’s attention to detail and their competency to do the job correctly.

Daniel Richardson, CTO, Bond International Software, comments, “In the past, the effectiveness of search and match technology has been limited by the individual using it. But Adapt Insight changes the game for recruiters – it brings a competitive advantage, actually enabling recruiters to do their job better and quicker.”

The new Adapt Insight functionality provides contextual searching capability that is able to search on unstructured raw data, as well as structured data, which bases its results on understanding what is contained within text, rather than the filename or the associated fields.

This capability will equip recruiters with advanced search and match technology to extract maximum value from the candidate data that resides on their CRM systems, enabling recruiters to capitalise on the wealth of information now available to them.

Richardson concludes, “Where a link may not have been made before between a candidate and job specification during a keyword search, a contextual search will ensure that relevant candidates are not missed and therefore a potential fee is not lost for the recruitment agency. Through the new Adapt Insight functionality, Bond is pioneering the future of recruitment, offering a previously unprecedented search tool which will revolutionise the recruitment market.”

More on Adapt Insight

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