Today’s blog features our very own Sara Moss, Vice President of Staffing Best Practices for erecruit™. Sara gives her best advice on the final stages of the enterprise software selection process, providing her top 10 list of key questions to make sure you ask yourselves before signing an enterprise software deal. Read more
erecruit™ announced that it will be attending the APSCo ‘Out of Africa’ Charity Ball in aid of ChildLine tonight, Friday 28th November 2014, at the InterContinental London Park Lane, London. erecruit will be sponsoring a gold table at the 15th annual charity ball, along with the SuperBooth, which will provide attendees with an interactive photo booth experience. Read more
erecruit is excited to be the exclusive sponsor of the SIA Staffing 100 for 2013. Making this list is certainly a badge of honor within the staffing industry and the entire erecruit organization is happy to help draw attention to these leaders. We are especially thrilled to have five honorees as partners and wish them and the entire Staffing 100 all the best in the year ahead.
The list has mavericks, thought leaders, and business developers that have helped to drive success and change while pushing for respect and acceptance across all industries. Of particular importance is the current state of political and financial uneasiness and the challenges that have been faced by our industry in these uncertain times. This is when true leaders step up and provide clarity and direction.
Please join erecruit in congratulating all of the honorees on this year’s SIA Staffing 100 list and we look forward to seeing many of them and others in the industry at ASA Staffing World, being held October 8th-10th in Orlando!
The Staffing Industry Analysts annual Healthcare Staffing Summit is right around the corner. The conference will be held in Dallas, Texas from September 8-10.
Are you communicating regularly with clients and candidates? Or, to put it another way, are you treating job seekers like potential customers?It seems like a no-brainer, something everyone should do. Isn’t there a “Golden Rule” that states you should “treat others as you want to be treated?” But if we are honest, for a variety of reasons, we rarely communicate as we expect others to communicate with us.
In the staffing and recruiting world, this couldn’t be truer. Candidates lack visibility into the recruiting process, and a lack of follow-up and check-ins can create a black hole that alienates high-potential candidates. This is especially devastating for firms that differentiate based on talent and speed to market.
with “visibility.”Let’s be honest. The last few years have not been easy for employers and employees alike. Everyone has been impacted by layoffs, hiring freezes, reduced budgets and smaller profit margins. Between a tumultuous economy and new legislation, some may ask – how can staffing firms afford to invest heavily in employee culture to retain and attract top talent?
More appropriately… how can they not? Investing in workplace culture is no longer an option.
1. Redefine your staffing firm in 2014.
SIA’s Barry Asin will kickoff the Executive Forum again in 2014. Hear the latest research, trends and industry outlook in an increasingly complex eco-system… you won’t want to miss it.
2. In case you haven’t heard – ACA is a BIG DEAL
What are others doing? ACA will be the buzz of conversation during breakout sessions and cocktail receptions. Want more? Attend the Pre-conference Session dedicated to cutting through the confusion, telling you what you need to know and must do about it.
This is a guest blog post by Vice President of Business Development at Credential Check Corporation, Dawn Standerwick. You can connnect with Dawn on LinkedIn.
The Federal government is shutting down today. Many companies are wondering how this will affect them and their workforce screening programs.
The biggest impact we foresee will be upon companies utilizing E-Verify. E-Verify has officially ground to a halt. The majority of other background screening services should not be impacted.
During the time that E-Verify is unavailable, employers will not be able to access their E-Verify account. This will also impact companies who utilize E-Verify through a designated agent (background screening company and other 3rd party solution provider). Perhaps one of the biggest impacts is that employees will not be able to resolve Tentative Nonconfirmations (TNCs).
As a result, the ‘three-day rule’ for E-Verify cases is suspended for cases affected by the shutdown. USCIS will provide additional guidance once this federal office is reopened.
Employers may not take any adverse action against an employee because of an E-Verify interim case status, including while the employee’s case is in an extended interim case status due to a federal government shutdown.
Employers should note that this will NOT affect the Form I-9 requirement— employers must still complete the Form I-9 no later than the third business day after an employee starts work for pay.
In addition to the below E-Verify functions, E-Verify Customer Support will also be unavailable.
Aside from E-Verify, many regulatory offices will be closed, suspending their current activities. The highly anticipated look into the role background checks played in the Navy Yard tragedy by that was to take place today by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be postponed.
We will continue to monitor this situation and keep our clients apprised of any changes.
If your organization has any questions or concerns about how the government shutdown will affect you, please contact our offices at (888) 689.2000 or email us at info@credentialcheck.com.
Can you describe all of your distinctive attributes in 140 characters or less? Better yet, can you sum up your entire job résumé into one “tweet”?
Many people are starting to speculate that Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read short messages, has the capability to transform the world of recruitment and staffing.
With more than 200 million active users, Twitter certainly has the scale to become a fundamental recruitment tool.
“Twitter is becoming the new job board. It is also becoming the new résumé,” states Rachel Emma Silverman and Laura Weber in their article for the Wall Street Journal. “Fed up with traditional recruiting sites and floods of irrelevant résumés, some recruiters are turning to the social network to post jobs, hunt for candidates and research applicants. Job seekers, in turn, are trying to summarize their CV’s in 140 characters…”
So how will recruiters use Twitter to find the best candidates? erecruit just announced a partnership with MBLAST, which will provide extraordinary social media intelligence, including alerts about a potential job candidate’s Twitter activity, to all users of erecruit’s enterprise staffing software.
Despite the format of a “twesume” being restriced to a limited character count, it is evident that the concept of landing a job via twitter is #trendingworldwide. Even the Twitter Spokeswoman, Alexandra Valasek, believes that the social networking site, “Allows you to develop a certain rapport with recruiters and companies you otherwise would not have access to. A tweet is much easier to send than an email or a phone call.”
Prafful Sharma, Co-Founder of HireRabbit, fully explains through statistics why the staffing industry should be using Twitter as a recruiting tool in his article for TheUndercoverRecruiter.com.
So how does a jobseeker go about creating a 140 character tweet that encompasses every aspect of their résumé?
According to an article by Joe Turner, a veteran recruiter for The Ladders, every Twitter résumé should include the following four major elements:
Example:
RT #Donna Molinari seeks a LEAD/SR QA ENG JOB http://bit.ly/1ThaW @teTalentNetwork – http://bit.ly/QB5DC @TweetMyResume #resume #QA-Jobs-CA
Since we live in a society where the use of online social networking is becoming more prevalent by the day, should Twitter readjust their service to better target the needs of the staffing and recruiting industry? With thousands more people signing up every day to share announcements, images, videos, and thoughts maybe Twitter should get the ball rolling on incorporating the “new elevator pitch” into their business model.
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?
Now 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?
What 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
