Why are you rejecting a candidate’s resume?

As a staffing professional, there are many reasons for you to reject a potential job candidate’s resume. But, do you know what the number one reason for rejecting a resume is?

According to an infographic from Be Hiring, the number one reason for rejecting an applicant’s resume is a typo or spelling error. That’s not some great revelation. After all, a typo or grammatical error indicates a person wasn’t paying attention or could be incompetent, which means that resume gets a first-class ticket to the trash can. Another key reason that many staffing professionals decide to forgo a candidate is that they received the person’s resume a few measly seconds after the job post was put up. This indicates that a candidate most likely did not tailor his or her resume or cover letter and may not even have spent considerable time thinking about the job requirements or the company.

Those are just some of the reasons that a candidate may never get a phone call from you or any staffing professional, but there are many more, especially as our recruiting software can help you weed out other workers with undesirable traits. Because of the streamlined approach to applicant comparisons that staffing software allows you to take advantage of, you may only need to spend a few seconds looking at a worker’s resume, which is the industry average, according to the source.

A candidate’s social media profiles are also rife with potential images or posts that make a worker undesirable, which is why more and more human resource departments and staffing professionals are making sure to include that step in a background check. According to Be Hiring, 68 percent of potential employers will find a worker’s Facebook account and explore as much as possible.

These and other reasons are why many job applicants are having their resumes passed up on a daily basis. It’s your job as a staffing professional to quickly determine if a candidate is the right person, which means a worker submitting his or her application must remain diligent about reducing potential flaws.

How to stop micromanaging your recruiters and staff employees

Do you micromanage your people or projects? You’re not alone. A lot of people tend to micromanage employees or projects for a variety of reasons. A particular project can be important for the business, your branch office is in charge of a large account or you could be responsible for a staff member who simply works in a manner you don’t understand. However, micromanaging can often cause more problems than it solves, according to some experts.

“Micromanaging is just another word for a complete and utter inability to delegate your troops or trust them to carry out your vision,” author Robert Whipple told NBC Chicago News. “[It] implies a lack of trust. The manager is not confident the employee can or will do a job correctly, so the employee is besieged with ‘helpful’ instructions from the manager on exactly how to perform tasks.”

Micromanaging takes positive attributes like paying attention to details and a hands-on attitude and makes them extreme. Now, you may not be trying to steal the glory of your workers by micromanaging, or you may just want to ensure a project gets done right the first time. However, if you don’t allow a worker to delve into a project alone, they will learn to lean on you like a crutch and you will end up stunting his or her growth as a key player in the business.

Like most things in life, moderation is key. Try to turn your obsessive need to control projects onto yourself and allow workers to handle tasks without your immediate supervision and providing feedback on every step of a process.

To curb your micromanaging tendencies, Inc.com recommends telling employees your preferred way of getting something done and to encourage workers to ask about that process so they can decide whether it’s the right option for them. If you require employees to immediately respond to emails, texts or chats, try and remember that they might be better off completing another task and just ask that workers email you when they receive a missive indicating that they will begin working on whatever tasks you corresponded about.

In the staffing industry, your workers have exceptional tools at their disposal like their recruiting software to handle their candidate sourcing and tracking. What’s more, you can also build workflow processes in the software to ensure that your ‘best practices’ for recruiting and staffing are followed. With clearly defined yet flexible workflows in place you can delegate tasks and allow your staffing professionals to do their jobs without your input. Give your employees the chance to excel and take projects on by themselves. Strong managers provide workers opportunities to succeed in the workplace, while weaker managers hoard opportunities and make sure success can be traced back to their input.

These and other strategies can help you reduce your micromanaging tendencies. Remember, autonomous workers are typically stronger employees and if your team has good recruiting software to help them get through tasks they will find the right job candidates for clients and drive your continued success – with less input from you.

How can you help close the talent gap?

Are your clients experiencing a talent gap? It’s not uncommon. Organizations across the country are finding a lack of qualified candidates in a wide spectrum of industries. Despite the 13.3 million people who are still unemployed, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, businesses are struggling to find workers with the right skills and experiences.

According to a 2012 Manpower Group survey, nearly one in three employers continue to have difficulties hiring the right people to fill vacancies because of a lack of available talent. Most of the shortages are in fields like technology, healthcare and the sciences.

Hiring expert Keith Cline wrote recently for Inc.com that “the demand for top-tier engineering talent sharply outweighs the supply in almost every market, especially in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. This is a major, major pain point and problem that almost every company is facing, regardless of the technology ‘stack’ their engineers are working on.”

Mechanical, electrical and civil engineers are in short supply, so businesses are forced to try and attract valuable workers from their positions at other organizations. This is ‘passive candidate’ sourcing and recruiting at its most difficult. You’re given the responsibility of finding the right candidates in this tough market and are using all of your resources to try and attract the attention and identify top workers. You’re using social media sourcing to find and add these passive candidates to your recruiting software. Only then can you effectively track and manage sought-after talent as it traverses the hiring landscape so that you can then offer your clients the ideal balance of performance and the right skills.

So, it’s no surprise to you that the skills gap makes fulfilling client orders more challenging for you in the recruiting and staffing industry. After all, here you are delving through your LinkedIn connections and the thousands or tens of thousands of resumes in your recruiting software looking for the needle in the haystack – figuratively. Your clients are depending on you to make the strategic decisions and place the right candidate in front of them.

Here are the top three ways the employment sector could decrease the skills gap:

1) Create strategic workforce planning. The Boston Consulting Group claims the talent gap is present globally and it will have a negative impact on industries. However, with strategic workforce planning, a company can model labor supply and demand for an industry by educating workers and creating initiatives that encourage individuals to enter programs designed to teach students to fill the skills gap for an industry. Refining education initiatives can boost the public’s interest in key workforce developments in an industry. As a staffing and recruiting professional, you can take a pro-active role in helping your customer perform a gap-analysis on their workforce planning needs and get the inside track on helping them fill those gaps.

2) Develop a talent training program. If a company is struggling to find workers with the exact qualifications it needs, but is seeing a lot of potential candidates that just don’t make the mark by a slight margin, it can create a training program to develop that professional to fit a specific role. As a staffing professional, you can even help your client identify the workers that will best take to the training opportunity and have the personality and background to easily adapt and learn necessary skills. Sometimes training workers to fit a role may be a more affordable and cost-effective human resource solution than leaving the position open and continuing a staffing search.

3) Check your compensation packages. A company that doesn’t offer a competitive wage and compensation package for a position is going to find it difficult to find and keep workers. ERE.net reports that employee turnover rates will be high and it will seem like no one stays in the role long enough to have in-depth knowledge. If you find that your client is consistently trying to hire for the same position or is offering a compensation package that is below industry norms, you may have to consider discussing the situation. Here is where your expertise in developing and delivering comprehensive and well-managed workforce solutions – whether they are for short-term projects or long-term contract positions – can truly benefit your customers.

How to connect with and recruit Millennials

Are you connecting to the Millennial workforce like you should to improve your recruiting? Generations, like individuals, have personalities, and Americans who fit in the Millennial age bracket have a certain way of thinking. Corporations have spent billions to identify what makes this demographic tick – so to speak.

According to Pew Research’s Social & Demographic Trends research, Millennials can be generally referred to as confident, self expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change. This group is also more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults, less religious, less likely to serve in the military and expected to become the most highly educated generation of Americans in history to date.

Despite most from this age group starting their careers during the peak of the Great Recession, many are still upbeat about the future of their careers and their economic prospects as a whole. As a staffing professional, you can benefit from Millennials’ generally positive viewpoints about the market. Because Millennials can often be more confident in the marketplace and more willing to take a less straight-forward career path to get where they want to go, you may be able to better communicate how the position your client is trying to fill is the right solution. Studies indicate that Millennials are generally less attached to the concept of employer loyalty than previous generations and you can use this to your advantage. These workers may be expecting to hop around and play the employment field to the best of their ability, so if your client is offering an intriguing opportunity, has a great reputation, offers competitive compensation packages or has great perks, you’re going to be able to effectively communicate and market a career change.

Millennials also are often very comfortable with being in front of the public eye and self expression. According to Pew Research, in 2010, more than 75 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 had a profile on a social networking site and that percentage has undoubtedly grown since then. This grand use of social networking sites and blogs makes it easier for you to craft an idea about who a worker is before you ever have to contact them. Not only that, but the availability of information will help your recruiting team respond faster to client demands because you are better able to fill out and handle work-flow issues with recruiting software. If the information isn’t available online, you’re able to call or email Millennials and can generally expect them to contact you back in a speedy fashion (Millennials are, after all, attached to their smart phones greater than any other generation).

Think connections, because for Millennials, it’s all about communicating on their level. According to The Week, Millennials are making changes to the workplace – think Lena Dunham from the HBO series Girls. As a staffing professional, you can leverage overall generational trends to help you complete your staffing objectives. Millennials are generally seen as more open to change, more positive about the workforce, more adaptable, more connected and more willing to provide information about themselves – as long as the rewards comply with their need for personal freedoms, autonomy and create feelings of worthwhile productivity.

So, first consider adapting your social media profile to communicate more freely with workers that are included in this generation, learn to effectively scope out social media accounts, or “stalk” as the kids would say, and feel confident that the opportunity you’re offering them is something they most likely will jump at – or at least try for.

Isn’t it Time You Improve Your Sales Proficiency?

This is a guest blog post by founder and managing director of the Menemsha Group, Dan Fisher. The Menemsha Group provides sales training and consulting services to the IT staffing industry. You can connect with Dan on Linkedin, Twitter, or on his IT staffing sales blog.

Have you ever heard the tale of the woodcutters? Woodcutter A cuts wood all day long. Woodcutter B keeps stopping and sitting down. At the end of the day Woodcutter B has three times more wood than Woodcutter A. Woodcutter A asks “how could this be, you were resting all day?” Woodcutter B says, “I wasn’t resting, I was sharpening my saw.”

I remember after my first year in sales thinking to myself, “I want to double my income next year. I just need to double my activity level.” While I did accomplish that goal, I also remember waking up to many cold Chicago winter mornings at 5:00 am so that I could get into the office and fit all of my sales tasks and activities into the day. Looking back on those days, I feel pretty foolish. What a rudimentary thought process! That was almost twenty years ago.

What continues to amaze me to this day IT staffing firm however is that when I consult with IT staffing firms and work with IT staffing sales professionals, the mentality, philosophy and core strategy still hinges almost exclusively on activity levels. This philosophy is flawed because it’s not scalable and it is rooted in the belief that sales is primarily a numbers game. But is it? Seriously, think about it. Is sales a numbers game? I think not.

Over the years I have learned that top performing sales people are usually not the hardest working nor do they work the longest hours. I could go on and on about the guys I worked with at Oracle (who killed it without working very hard) but that’s another story. Top performers are top performers because of the quality of the work they produce and their ability to execute. It’s not the number of meetings they go on but what they accomplish in those meetings that sets them apart.

Imagine if you could make three more placements per month without exerting any addtional effort? Even better, what if you could close more deals per month AND work less? There is a way to accomplish this. I know there is because I have done it and I have helped others do it as well.

Are You Ever Going To Get Off That Wheel?

woman-on-hamster-wheelNow please keep in mind that I have worked with thousands of sales reps in the IT staffing industry, so what I’m about to say is NOT bravado but based purely on experience. For the most part, IT staffing sales professionals “wing it.” That’s right. 2% call planning, strategy and execution, 98% “no guts no glory.” How can I make such a generalization? Those of you who have been through my workshops know that I often start them by playing the objection rebuttal game. Real simple….I put people on the spot by giving them an objection and they have to offer up their best rebuttal. The objections are basic, stuff you hear everday. But 95% of the rebuttals I hear would never fly with a real client. Many of the rebuttals are not credible and the delivery of the rebuttal….let’s just say it’s not a smoothe and polished delivery. This little exericse tells me that most sales reps in the industry are investing little to no time at practicing and honing their skills. Instead of practicing and working on improving their ability to execute, they simply hop back on the hamster wheel. Why? Because sales is a numbers game. More activity means more deals right? Let me ask you, how hard and for how long can you run? Who are you, Forrest Gump?

Close More Deals….Work Less….How?

MG_coverWhat if you knew exactly how to execute every possible sales scenario-objection, negotiation, candidate feedback, email response, f2f client meeting, etc-you face as an IT staffing sales professional? You’d clearly be a top perfomer. You can. You just need to create a sales playbook. What is a sales playbook you ask? A sales playbook is a documented guide containing content specific and experiences on the most successful ways to sell your service. Your sales playbook is the accumulated wisdom of your sales reps, and entire staff who have had experience selling to your customers. Every scenario that your staff enounters is documented so that you can learn from it and practice. The worlds leading organizations across a multitude of industries are utilizing sales playbooks. In fact, a recent study conducted by CSO (Chief Sales Officer) Insights revealed that the number one priorty on the mind of CSO’s in 2013 is “improving sales effectiveness.” Not on cross-selling, improving customer loyalty or opening new accounts. Improving sales effectiveness. This means improving how you execute each step of your sales process.

When you (or your employees) are in any customer facing situation, you’re in one of two categories. Either you have practiced the situation before and know exactly how to handle it or you don’t have the information and you have not practiced how to deal with it. Which category would you prefer to be in?

If we learned anything from our friend Woodcutter B, taking the time to sharpen your tools and hone your skills will make you FAR more productive in the long run. Think about that before you step back on your hamster wheel!

Happy Selling.
Dan Fisher

Are you taking advantage of mobile job searchers?

It’s not a surprise that job seekers aren’t combing newspapers for help wanted ads, and people have pretty much forgotten many job boards, but did you know that a rising number of job candidates are even skipping LinkedIn?

A Comscore study from 2011 found that 77 percent of job seekers are now using their mobile devices and carefully calibrated applications to find available positions. CMS Wire reports that the number one reason job seekers are using mobile applications is the ability to quickly react to a new job posting. That reason is followed by the ability to job search anywhere and at any time, and another 17.65 percent enjoyed the discretionary ability of browsing online job boards.

Not surprisingly, the majority of job seekers using mobile devices to conduct searches are part of the younger crowds. Millennials are seeking entry-level positions and college-graduate level jobs and make up 24.8 percent of all mobile job searches. Geography seems to be another distinguishing characteristic, as the survey found that an astounding 20.9 percent of all mobile application searches originate from Manhattan. Meanwhile, technology jobs only made up 6 percent of searches – as finance and healthcare both beat out the industry with 8.3 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively.

It’s an interesting development. As a staffing professional, you already know that everything in the industry is becoming mobile accessible. Look at your own staffing software – it allows you to peruse job candidates, track their progress and make on-the-spot decisions so that you can excel at your job. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that as you try to find the best job applicant for a position, a job seeker is monitoring potential openings.

What does this mean for you? It means that your potential job candidates are more mobile-accessible than ever. You most likely will be able to contact them about a position via a mobile device – with an application, text, Tweet or email – and receive a quick response. It also may mean that your strategies for keeping tabs on the industry could be changing in the near future and become more mobile-based. We don’t know yet, but it certainly is an interesting time to be in the staffing industry.

Is the traditional resume dead?

It’s a changing world out there for a staffing professional. It used to be common for job candidates to snail mail a paper copy of their resume to a recruiter, now everything has gone digital. You receive digital copies of candidates’ resumes, cover letters, portfolio pieces – you even store all these details and more in your mobile-accessible recruiting software that combines the information from digital and traditional resumes into one efficient portal.

However, could the job placement process be changing more than we think? Are resumes the next Dodo? Some experts think so. Jeanne Meister recently wrote for Forbes on the potential extinction of traditional resumes. She claims that companies are choosing to rely on other means than the standard skills, experience, education formulaic outline of a resume to determine what potential job candidate has the chops and innovation to really succeed.

Now, Meister doesn’t present any hard data, but she does have a few interesting examples to highlight her point. For example, Shawn McTigue posted a fun video resume to Youtube in an effort to gain Mastercard’s attention as a video resume. According to the news source, Mastercard asked all intern applicants to develop a “creative” approach to the benefits of living in a cashless society – a new campaign the company was working on.

The rest of the application process required candidates to engage with the company’s Facebook and Twitter page and submit resumes via LinkedIn.

That’s the real change – instead of filing paper, the resumes you are seeing are coming from LinkedIn and your staffing software is being populated with information from this digital resume. Candidates aren’t hampered by the one-page resume format so you’re able to get a more complete idea of who a person is and his or her work experience.

Your clients are looking for candidates who can demonstrate their expertise, and social media, blogs and other forms that show a digital presence are the way to do that. So yes, the traditional resume may not be extinct yet, but without the right digital footprint, a potential candidate’s career might be – or, at least limping.

mBLAST to Provide Social Profiles for erecruit’s Enterprise Staffing Software

Today we are excited to announce erecruit’s partnership with mBLAST, which will deliver unrivaled social media intelligence to all users of erecruit’s enterprise staffing software. With this integration, erecruit users will gain valuable insights into the qualifications, history and expertise of the people behind the resumes they are reviewing as well as being alerted based upon candidates’ and contacts’ online activities, allowing immediate, thoughtful, warm follow up opportunities.

erecruit_mBLASTPeople post a wealth of information online everyday that could be used by Social Profiles for Staffingrecruiters and sales executives to improve the qualification of those they want to speak with most about potential jobs or sales opportunities. There are numerous tools everyone uses to monitor blogs, articles and social networks. That’s easy. The hard part is sorting through all the data you get back in order to intelligently identify who matters the most. That’s where mBLASTcomes in. mBLAST takes media monitoring, influence management and social media search and analytics to the next level by providing insight and identifying exactly who you need to target.

mBLAST’s dISTIL™ algorithms discover, analyze and rank the public content individuals create online – not only in popular social sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, but across the entire web, including mainstream media, blogs, forums and discussion groups – to deliver detailed, scored profiles of a person’s comprehensive “web presence.”

Based on this information, erecruit customers can better identify true subject matter experts by understanding and measuring their impact on specific topics or communities of interest, as well as perform targeted sourcing of candidates and clients – whether or not they’re currently “in the market.” Additionally, the combination of erecruit and mBLAST provides a documented, repeatable process for the use of social media during screening, ensuring recruiters conform to regulatory and corporate guidelines.

“We are excited to be integrating social media and web presence history directly into erecruit,” said Judd Hoffman, Co-CEO of erecruit. “This important enhancement will give our users the opportunity to quickly learn much more about their candidates and client contacts through the creation of real-time social profiles that take LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and hundreds of thousands of free web data feeds into account. erecruit users will now have the ability to understand their candidates and contacts in greater depth and to better evaluate who is most ripe for a warm recruiting or sales call.”

As the leading enterprise staffing software solution, erecruit is committed to unifying the entire staffing lifecycle into one enterprise-class platform, empowering mid- and large-sized staffing firms to deliver exceptional talent, value and service. With the integration of mBLAST, erecruit furthers the tool set its sales and recruiter users can leverage to find, qualify and close more business.

You can find the full press release here.

mBLAST to Provide Social Media Profiles for erecruit’s Enterprise Staffing Software

erecruit customers gain valuable insights into candidate qualifications, history, expertise

mBLAST, the leading provider of web presence analytics, today announced that erecruit is integrating mBLAST’s patented social analytics within its industry-leading enterprise staffing software to provide erecruit customers with intelligent “social profiles” for potential and existing candidates and client contacts. With this integration, erecruit users will gain valuable insights into the qualifications, history and expertise of the people behind the resumes they are reviewing as well as being alerted based upon candidates’ and contacts’ online activities, allowing immediate, thoughtful, warm follow up opportunities.

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