As a staffing and recruiting professional, what constitutes good news? Could it be more new clients signing on for your services? Or, could an increase in the number of Americans quitting their jobs be the positive news you are looking for? A recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor claims that more Americans are quitting their jobs, which suggests to experts that people are growing more confident in the job market. And that means that your potential pool of candidates could be growing.

The Associated Press reported that the number of workers who quit their job in April 2013 increased 7.2 percent to 2.25 million. This increase in the number of workers who quit their jobs in April is less than February’s level, which was the highest recorded in 4.5 years. While more Americans decided to quit – more also found new career opportunities. Overall hiring also increased in April 2013, as employers filled about 4.4 million jobs during that month – a 5 percent increase from March.

The report from the Department of Labor indicates that the number of professionals seeking new opportunities is on the rise and more employers are looking to either expand their staff or replace roles that have been left vacant. While the economy has not reached the positive level seen before the Great Recession, it is showing signs of steady improvement.

Employers are still cautious of the state of the economy, however, staffing companies are seeing more orders for temporary positions as employers look to bring on staff to handle their short-term business needs without committing to full-time employees.

“We’re still stuck in this labor market where employers don’t have a lot of conviction,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP LLC in Jersey City, New Jersey, according to Bloomberg. “You’re still talking about levels that are bouncing around in a range without a whole lot of upward tilt to it.”

Staffing and recruiting professionals who are noticing the uptick in the number of candidates looking for new opportunities on the market may find that they need more capable recruiting software. As has always been the case in staffing and recruiting, reducing your ‘time to fill’ ratio is a key measure of your success in a competitive market, and high performance staffing and recruiting software plays a crucial role in this.

As the economy continues to improve, investments in the right process-management tools will become increasingly important. How is your recruitment firm prepared to deal with the influx in business?

Back in March I wrote about how Google used a special algorithm to aid in hiring. Now they’re making hiring news for a different reason. Really, does any other company make as many headlines concerning hiring in traditional media sources as Google? The answer is most likely no, which is why when the tech giant admitted that its famed brainteasers, which were used to determine the qualifications of candidates, weren’t the best practice, both staffing and recruiting professionals took notice.

Brainteasers found useless in hiring at Google
The New York Times reporter Adam Bryant interviewed Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people and operations at Google, and there were some surprising clips. According to the news source, Bock claims that internal studies the company has done have found that brainteasers were pretty useless and more traditional hiring methods are actually worth their salt – surprise!

“On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart,” Bock told the news source.

Bock went on to say in the interview that structured behavioral interviews are a better method for assessing potential candidates, according to the news source. The real key to the entire process is consistency to determine which individual is the best for the position.

“Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, ‘Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.’ The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult,” Bock told the news source.

GPAs fall out of grace with Google
A Google study has found that brainteasers are worthless in determining the candidate who will best perform. In addition, the company’s past reliance on grade point averages is also a waste unless a person is just a couple years out of college.

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” Bock told the news source. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.”

The company also found that selecting leaders from outside the organization required a more detailed approach.

“On the leadership side, we’ve found that leadership is a more ambiguous and amorphous set of characteristics than the work we did on the attributes of good management, which are more of a checklist and actionable,” Bock told The New York Times. “We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.”

Besides providing an “AHA” moment for hiring managers who may have been reluctant to forgo traditional interview methods for the less-orthodox options Google touted for its success, this may also demonstrate the evolving trends in hiring. But I think that staffing and recruiting pros, with their deep experience and recruiting software can and do beat Google at the hiring game with great regularity.

The evolution of the workplace has created a new balancing act for employers and recruiting and staffing professionals. Millennial professionals, especially those in the creative and information technology fields, are looking toward the changing workplace as a sign that they need to be entrepreneurs. They are optimistic and idealistic that even if they are unable to get traditional employment, they will be ok because they are empowered by technology and a different way of thinking, reports The Miami Herald.

This mindset has led to an increase in the number of workers who are either completely freelance or working for themselves part time. More and more workers are looking at non-traditional employment options with the help of the digital evolution.

A new survey from oDesk has found that 72 percent of freelancers who have “regular” jobs are looking to quit and work entirely for themselves. According to Staffing Industry Analysts, 61 percent of those respondents are planning on quitting their job in the next year or two.

“We believe that the barriers of Industrial Age work simply don’t make sense for businesses that want to get more work done, or for workers who are demanding more freedom,” said oDesk CEO Gary Swart, according to the source. “No one today wants to be confined to a cubicle. As independent professionals embrace this freedom, hours worked on oDesk have increased eightfold since 2009.”

The study has found that this expansion in the idea of freelancing for a living is partially coming from the expansion of the work-life balance movement. Workers are looking for greater flexibility, which is now possible because of mobile technology.

“They are willing to trade traditional work experience for something that provides more freedom and flexibility,” said Swart. “They don’t want to be confined to a cubicle.”

As a staffing and recruiting professional, don’t for a minute believe that this will negatively impact business. With the right strategies and recruiting software, you can capitalize on this new trend. Businesses still require the work to get done, even if workers are not flocking to the corporate world. With the changes to the workplace, many organizations are now relying on these freelance workers or contingent forces to get things done. Capitalize on this need of workers and hiring managers by using staffing software to identify, place, payroll, and manage the right freelance worker for the job.

The financial industry is facing a change revolving around staffing. According to a Robert Half Global Survey, finding and keeping strong employees has proven difficult for companies in the industry.

“While some areas within financial services institutions have seen cutbacks, other more profitable product lines are receiving further investment which has resulted in additional hiring,” said Neil Owen, global practice director of financial services recruitment for Robert Half. “This is creating challenges in finding the requisite staff to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Competition for the industry’s top talent continues to intensify for middle-office and support roles, particularly accounting and finance, as well as operations positions.”

As a staffing professional, you have a clear understanding of what employees are looking for from their employer. If the finance industry is undergoing such a rapid change in employment satisfaction, you could find yourself with more clients looking to fill empty positions. Employers in the financial industry may not only be looking for more employees than usual, but the quality of potential candidates must meet their criteria.

According to the survey, a talent shortage is impacting the industry. The need for finance professionals is on the rise, but less-and-less high-quality employees are available, which is creating increased market demand.

“Institutions around the world need staff who can manage fundamental business needs, drive profitability and ensure compliance mandates are met. Building a team with these skills has become increasingly difficult as firms face situations in which the demand for skilled professionals often outweighs the supply,” said Owen. “A combination of factors, including heightened demand for skilled specialists in financial services, the growing need for regulatory expertise and operational changes taking place in the sector, may exacerbate current retention challenges. Employers will need to focus on competitive compensation, progressive perks and rewarding career paths to keep their best people.”

As a staffing professional, it’s important to deliver clients the right potential job candidates who can provide a wide array of skills and the ability to learn individual system processes that are unique to the organization. Recruiting software can help you locate and track the potential job candidates who can wow executives and hiring managers. The diverse array of social tools made available to you, and the ability to harness this resource and manage job candidates for every position allows you to fit the needs of the financial services industry.

Regardless of whether a company is small or large, selecting the right candidates from the very beginning will provide a recipe for success in the competitive marketplace of financial services. Your skills in recruiting and the various tools that you have mastered will allow you to locate and expertly prepare a potential job candidate for a client interview. With staffing software, you will be better able to not only track this person as they work their way through the interview process, but also gauge how well the candidate is prepared for other positions that customers are trying to fill if they do not get the first position he or she interviews for.

In the financial industry, there are a lot of details and certifications to check for before you’re able to decidedly choose one job candidate over another. Use cloud-accessible software to help you make the best hiring decisions.

Are you seeing an uptick in the number of finance clients you’re handling?

As a staffing and recruiting professional, you understand that how you are perceived by your peers and the stances you take will develop your personal brand. You also know that those qualities hold true for your digital presence or brand. You’ve worked hard to craft an individualized personal brand that thrives on successful and ethical staffing practices. Part of this process is the creation of a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. That’s why knowing how to leverage the differences between Google and Bing is important.

From the largest corporate brands in the world to the individual person, the successful SEO strategies deployed by one or many people have helped boost market success in a number of ways. However, when you are crafting an SEO strategy for yourself or your organization, are you aware of how your SEO keywords and branding will appear in different search engines?

If you’ve watched television in the past year, you most likely would have seen the marketing campaign Bing has taken on to encourage the average internet user to switch from the “ultimate power” Google to Bing. Entrepreneur reports that the main theme of the campaign suggests that blind internet users prefer the search engine results of Bing over Google by two-to-one.

Experts question whether Microsoft’s Bing has managed to finally advance enough to pose a threat to Google. Besides simple user preference, marketers and you as a staffing professional may need to question whether your SEO strategies are friendly to both search engines, because if not, you could be hurting your business.

According to a study by AdGooroo, Google’s AdWords algorithm still outperforms Bing Ads by serving 7.3 million more ad impressions in shopping and classified categories. However, for those staffing professionals working in the finance industry, watch out – Bing outperformed Google in the financial services category by nearly 30 percent – 5.31 million ad impressions versus Google’s 4.11 million. In all other categories, including: travel, education, computer and internet and business, Google may still reign supreme in ad impressions, but the gap between the two is closing, which means that SEO strategies need to integrate best practices for both search engine algorithms when possible.

Research conducted by experts at Entrepreneur found that Google still provides more relevant information for searches than Bing, but Microsoft’s search engine manages to integrate social networks better. The company’s contacts with both Facebook and Twitter has allowed Bing’s developers to display more social data to the average user of Bing. For recruiting and staffing, this social networking advantage may be significant.

As a result of all of this, your SEO strategy should comply with both search engines’ specialized algorithms. In addition, you should be prepared to search for potential job candidates using both tools when integrating information into recruiting software. If the differences between Google and Bing can impact searches relating to your business or personal brand, then those differences can certainly make an impact on how one candidate compares against the other in the digital sphere. Are you prepared to develop SEO strategies for both search engines?