Employers

Leaders Unleash the Power of “Yes”

August 16th, 2018 by Veronica Blatt

Today’s guest blog is from People 2.0, a premier global contingent workforce deployment platform and full-service business process outsourcing (BPO) provider for the staffing and recruiting industry. People 2.0 offers comprehensive back-office support and a complete employer of record (EOR)/agent or record (AOR) platform—empowering individuals and organizations to focus on growing their business and placing top talent.

As a leader, have you unleashed the power of yes with your team? In particular, are you offering unequivocal “yeses” as often as possible? Every leader or manager knows that saying “yes” to an idea, proposal, or request can positively impact morale, engagement, and performance. The power of a “yes” is that it encourages more problem-solving, initiative, and proactivity in a team and among team members. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Key Questions to Ask A Recruitment Firm

July 27th, 2018 by The Imagination Factory

There is no question that currently the hiring needs of employers require more time and diligence than ever with much of the power in candidate’s hands. When you are considering signing on a new recruitment agency, consider asking these questions to ensure you are contracting with an elite agency.

What are the top reasons a company would use your services to recruit?

In the history of knowing independent recruitment firms, our network believes the answer to this should come from longevity and results. A firm should be able to show stability in business and understand how to effectively build your talent in a sustainable manner for the growth of your company. Regardless of your expansion efforts, a strong firm will have a specialized and locally based recruiter able to provide you the top candidate in the market.

Are you able to take on international searches?

While many independent agencies attempt to say yes to multinational and international clients, unless there is a localized approach, the search can result in less than satisfactory results for the client. With a true global firm, the recruiter speaks the language of the search. They understand the culture, common terms, idiosyncrasies, and the demands each part of the world brings to executive level placement. The result is the top candidates presented at every search they recruit on.

Why should I use an agency instead of internal resources?

Many employers may shy away from hiring an external agency suspecting they will save money by first utilizing internal resources. However, in many companies, this cost savings will be severely miscalculated and further result in wasted time and money. When a company hires an external agency, most times they have already spent nearly 6 months trying to fill the role internally. Those 6 months are hard to calculate from a monetary perspective, however during that time your employees and organization are undoubtedly under an extreme amount of stress and pressure.

While these questions are not all inclusive of what you should be considering when hiring an external agency, they should get the conversation flowing to determine if it is the right fit for your business. Please visit npaworldwideworks to learn more on choosing a recruitment firm for your needs.

Qualified or Likeable? How to Figure Out Who Your Candidate Is

June 28th, 2018 by The Imagination Factory

As recruiters or employers, we all know that the ideal goals of interviewing a candidate are to expose potential issues, reveal strengths, ensure that there is a fit with salary and compensation, evaluate personality against company culture, and verify qualifications, skills, and abilities for the role. Unfortunately, human nature often can cloud some of these key points when you relate personally to certain candidates over others. Many times, you can be drawn to personality traits that cause the candidate to appear stronger even if they are not the best one for the role. Even more than personal taste and bias, many are also likely to try and hire a similar employee to the one who was last in the role if they were successful, or the opposite if they were not highly reviewed.

Here are five important concepts to keep top of mind in any interview, regardless of the amount of experience you have.

Standardize your interview process. Before you start to recruit and further qualify candidates, create a new job description that lists only the essential skills and experience required. As Betterteam states, “A good description shouldn’t over describe. It should focus on what is absolutely necessary for someone to be successful in the position, and describe what success looks like over specific periods of time – typically 30, 90, 180 days and 1 year.” Rank, or color code these in order of importance and keep your own radar up on knowing what extra qualities or transferable skills could fill in the gaps, but the top ones make sure you are keeping as a hard barrier to moving a candidate forward. It is always a good idea to have a partner, colleague, or team member also double check for matches of skill, experience, and cultural fit. This will help further cement confidence in final candidate choices. Each interview should also include a real work sample to see how the candidate would start and finish a task similar to what they are going to be encountering.

2. References are provided but you need to dig deeper. Obviously, most times the references provided by a candidate will be ones they assume would be very positive. Due to this, sometimes recruiters or employers take this less seriously, when in reality references and your network could be the best source of who the candidate is and how they would fit in the environment when they are not on stage. Focus on the tone and specific examples the references give when referring to the candidate, and try to describe your organization or the skills you have considered a top need for this role and see how the references believe the candidate fits in. Linked-In makes it slightly easier to also consult your own network to determine any cross over with someone who has worked previously with that candidate to gain their opinion as well.

3. What is their motivation to work each day? This is a question that should not be skipped over or assumed when interviewing candidates for roles. This exact question will be one that you are able to constantly revert to during negotiations and offers, and the answer could remove poor fit candidates from the beginning as well. For instance, those that show more energy and curiosity tend to exhibit pragmatic thinking, stay on top of trends and what is happening in business around them, and their natural energy usually translates to leadership or energizing those around them. If they are willing to invest in themselves, they usually also grow and learn well from others, which helps teams develop more unified and collaborative working environments for better culture.

4. Know your bias. The strength of hiring a good candidate is sometimes realized by knowing your own weaknesses. A good exercise is to practice interviewing or having one on one conversation with those team members or employees that fall outside of the standard personality traits you are drawn to, and be able to analyze their qualities in a subjective manner. If you are someone who is drawn to humor and sarcasm, try and build a better relationship with a coworker who is the opposite and see what other strong qualities you deem them to have that you might not have immediately noticed. The more differing personalities you sort through with this exercise, the easier you will be able to turn off your natural willingness to interview those more similar to you or what you are drawn to.

5. Stay up on the millennial shifts. The time of millennials in the workplace and taking on higher roles is upon us. The Millennial Branding survey revealed that 43 percent of employers want to hire employees who are a great cultural fit. For millienials, this has a lot to do with work life balance, and a company with staff who butts heads on what this balance looks like tends to create conflict and hostility in the work force. As a recruiter, a good initial question to begin incorporating is what does the work life balance of the team look like? What are ideal working hours daily or weekly for this team, and how important are benefits or flexibility?

Naturally, this is not an end all guide to evaluating each candidate, but perhaps you have realized that your standardized process could use a refresh, or you may spend some time evaluating new interview questions your candidate may hear at further interviews. Review these sample interview questions from The Balance Careers to further refine your core categories for interviewing candidates.

Salary History Becoming Off Limits for Recruiters

May 29th, 2018 by The Imagination Factory

Our guest blogger is Anthony Carabba, Jr., who has been an employment lawyer for nearly 25 years and is the founder of Carabba Law P.C., a New York City employment law boutique. Anthony assists organizations and individuals in navigating all aspects of the complex, ever-changing employment law landscape. He may be reached at 212.430.6400 or acarabba@carabbalaw.com.

In a swell of recent legislative activity with particular importance to recruiters, numerous states and cities have banned employers — as well as their agents and employment agencies — from asking job applicants about their current or prior salary history during the hiring process. New York City recently enacted such a ban, joining Massachusetts, California, Delaware, Oregon, San Francisco and Philadelphia. It’s a hot-button issue, with numerous other states and municipalities considering enacting similar bans, while many businesses remain opposed. In one noteworthy development, the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce sued the City of Philadelphia to stop the enforcement its ban. The ban is now stayed pending court determination. Read the rest of this entry »

Elevate Your On-boarding to Retain Talent

May 24th, 2018 by The Imagination Factory

On-boarding a new hire is not a new concept, however, as we hear more and more about company culture and changing workplace structures, it is important to also keep your on-boarding process up to speed. Turnover is expensive, and many C-Suite executives state that a key factor in employee retention efforts lies in the on-boarding strategy. As a company, your goal should be to build your new hires trust in the organization along with teaching them the relevant job skills. Here are a few ways to freshen up your existing process.

“Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.”Source: “The True Cost of a Bad Hire,” Brandon Hall Group

As mentioned, the goal with onboarding should be to build a new hire’s trust in the organization. If you present a welcome package and environment already set up for success with a clear outline of their first two weeks of employment, it sets a clear tone that you were expecting them and have your priorities organized well.

A great example of this lies with Twitter. This social media giant has an elaborate 75-step process for the first day. On the first day, new hires not only have breakfast with the CEO followed by a tour of the company office, but when employees arrive, the company has their email ID, a t-shirt and a bottle of wine waiting at their desk. A tour is followed by group training on the tools and systems relevant to their role. Twitter also does a monthly new hire happy hour where they introduce the senior leadership team.

Another idea to make a memorable first day is to eliminate the load of paperwork. Many companies have an overwhelming amount of forms to sign and complete as soon as a new hire enters the building and this does not create an immediate grand environment. Consider using a software such as Zenefits to spread the paperwork out and give new hires some independence in completing it on their own time before and during their first week. You will still be able to assign due dates and track progress, but it allows a much more relaxed feel to signing all the dotted lines.

Linked-In chooses to settle some of the HR topics in a lunch and follow up session titled “Investing (IN) You” which covers company benefits in an appealing manner that shows how invested they are in their employees. They close the first day by providing a new hire on-boarding road map that gives a week by week guide outlining how to be productive and successful in their new role.

Also, switch up the feedback loop. “In a recent poll, 38 percent of employees felt that when leaders dismiss their ideas without entertaining them, they tend to lack initiative. An active and committed employee base is one of the benefits of listening to your employees.”Source: “5 Reasons Why You Should Listen to Your Employees,” SHRM

While a new hire is not likely to tell you anything is awful straight away, avenues for open feedback allow new hires to present problems or solutions that you may not even be aware of, and can work through to change what could be a foreseeable trouble spot.

A closing great practice is to circle back with the recruiter who initially sold the candidate on the position. Especially when using agency recruiters, they have likely developed a strong relationship with the candidate and are keenly aware of what made your position or company a good fit for that individual. Working together to create a brief on what to highlight during the new hires initial 60 days will result in a more personalized on-boarding process that the new hire can feel the value in. A tailored approach is the new best approach.

If you’re looking to build a relationship with a trusted recruitment agency, click below to learn even more benefits of using one of our 500+ firms worldwide.

Leverage Recruiters for Success

April 10th, 2018 by The Imagination Factory

This is a message that is equally useful for both employers seeking great candidates and candidates in search of great work. Leverage recruiters and leverage the numbers of recruiters you have working for you.

Perhaps you have found one recruiter that works well with you. They always have time for you, they understand your niche, they have good knowledge of the geography you are searching. That is superb! Do not mess with success. Stay the course. Read the rest of this entry »

Hiring Mistakes Cost – 5 Ways to Avoid Them

February 6th, 2018 by Veronica Blatt

Today’s guest blogger is Bill Benson with WilliamCharles Search Group located in Grand Rapids, MI. WilliamCharles is an executive search and professional recruiting firm specialized in finding managerial and executive talent in finance, HR, operations, sales/marketing as well as president/CEO roles. They have a concentration of clients in Michigan but they also work across the US. Bill is the chairman-elect of the NPAworldwide Board of Directors.

There is no hiding from hiring mistakes. One HR professional once told me that a controller’s mistake is tucked away in a financial report but an HR mistake is walking around the company. The costs of these hiring mistakes are significant. Just search “cost of a bad hire” on Google and read about the consequences. Most studies indicate that the cost of a hiring mistake for a professional level person is 2 to 5 times the annual salary. So what is the root cause issue? Read the rest of this entry »

Salary History is History

January 16th, 2018 by Dave Nerz

In North America some laws regarding the collection of salary history information have gone into effect and there are others pending implementation for January 1, 2018. The locations and jurisdictions will become more difficult to monitor and, in some cases, you need to consider that a candidate lives in a covered location, the employer has an operation in one of these locations, or that a candidate might be in one of these locations while a phone interview or screen is happening. Assumptions otherwise could end up creating risk for you as an independent recruiter. Read the rest of this entry »

Your International Recruitment Agency Might Be Next Door

December 21st, 2017 by Dave Nerz

Demographics are pointing toward a continued global talent shortage. Experts are predicting a greater need for employers to consider hiring internationally and opening their minds to foreign staffing options for hard to locate talent. These shortages are going to become obvious in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) areas before other executive/professional talent segments experience shortages. Read the rest of this entry »

Manpower Reports Strong Q1 US Hiring Plans

December 19th, 2017 by Veronica Blatt

Manpower Group has released its employment outlook survey for the first quarter of 2018. The survey asks some 59,000 employers across 43 countries to indicate their hiring plans for the upcoming quarter compared to the current quarter. US hiring plans are at their strongest levels in a decade, which certainly bodes well for recruitment firms who are working with US-based employers. Some of the other highlights include: Read the rest of this entry »