KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Stay The Course

(a version of the following was originally published in the recent Fordyce Letter)
March Forward. Stay the Course.

Recession... Election.. Slumping Job Index.. Increasing Unemployment Rate.. Diving Dow..

It is tough to stay the course when media messaging is telling us everything around our economy is calling for a slow down; and in reality the only real choice any of us have is... to stay the course. While the course might shift and change a bit, the course we know - the work hard, stay focused, make contacts course, remains the same. When the going gets tough, the real men and women of the staffing industry get tougher.  As in the past, a recession serves as a course correction, and as in the past the strong will get stronger, better, and faster; and the weak will go find something else to do.

The Strong Company, Recruiter, and Staffing Agent's job is to analyze their business.  Find out what is working and what is not. It is their job to analyze their clients businesses and fully understand what is happening with their end users, as it is the end user that provides all of us with work in the first place. It is the astute staffing and corporate recruiter's responsibility to look out to the future with a curious and open eye and accept the changes that are occurring in business. It is the discerning and strategic staffing industry thinkers’ job to deal with the reality of the changing FLAT world; from globalization, outsourcing and offshoring to RPO, Selection, HR Consulting and everything in between. When conditions for change are right, the astute staffing industry business person has a tremendous opportunity to make their stake and claim their market share; if they are indeed are as open, astute, innovative and grounded in the reality as we know you are.   

Building A High Performance Team

ON SITE 8 HOUR WORKSHOP

If you are the sum of the 5 people who spend the most time with…it is important to look at who you are spending your time with. Are the people in your organization flourishing?

Are they hitting the mark? Is the company hitting its performance measures? Is the environment synergistic, empowering and engaging?
If the answers to these questions made your squirm then it is time to reevaluate your new employee selection, intake and on boarding program.

By establishing specific set hiring procedures, your company will avoid stepping into common hiring traps. You will see & experience the impact of an effective hiring process within the first 30 days.

That's the purpose of our on-site class, Building A High Performance Team - available through KeenHire Training.

Choosing Assessments Wisely

You've seen it before. A candidate stands in front of you, with an impeccable resume and impressive interviewing skills. The client is prepped and ready, and the candidate seems perfect for the role. You send her on to the interview, confident in a fee. When the phone call comes, you're expecting a congratulations and a promise to send a check. But something goes wrong. The candidate, perfect in your interview and on paper, fails the interview so badly that the client may never work with you again. What happened?

Every top recruiter has had this happen to them early in their career. Relying on a "gut instinct" instead of a formal process, we let our desire to get the candidate hired prevent us from working through every detail of a professional interview.

Some candidates are great interviewers, but terrible workers. Our job is to be put a system for interviewing in place, and follow that system EVERY TIME.

Interview failures happen because we fail to ask the right questions. Often recruiters focus on the technical and practical aspects of the job, without delving into the behavioral questions like, "how do you like to work" or "how don't you like to work?"

An executive recruiter is only as good as their weakest link.  Do  you understand interviewing in a way that  will help you increase your book of business?

         

 

A Little Taste Of Our New KeenHire Store

This is for our product, the KeenView Behavioral Interviewing Software

Filtering candidates in live interviews is the core of every recruiting business. Using scientifically validated behavioral interviewing, KeenView software helps you filter candidates by motivation, work style, personality traits, and other characteristics that will predict how he/she will perform on the job in a specific position.

"Gut Instinct" is a poor tool to sell a candidate on a client. Using KeenView, your recruiters provide statistically valid results of candidate matches. The easy to use software guides the recruiter through the interview, providing questions, answers, notes and rankings.

Purchase KeenView separately or in an assessments package, and start selling to Human Resource executives in a language they want to hear.

This is more than just assessments. Our software uses thousands of interview questions and walks your recruiter through the interview process, saving searches and keeping you fully in EEOC compliance.  It also helps you make better hiring decisions.  More soon.

 

Keen Hire Site Launch Coming Soon

I'm working on it, and come heck or high water, this site is going to be out by the end of March. The new KeenHire site will be up, and you'll be able to browse to your heart's content.

At that time, this blog will be mapped to http://blog.keenhire.com, and we'll add some other things to it like the LinkedIn button and other widgets suggested by my social media guru, Jim Durbin.

Think of the last three months as our beta period.  KeenHire.com  - coming soon!

You Can't Do It All On Your Own

One of the hardest things to learn as an entrepreneur is that time, not money is your most precious commodity.  If you're highly skilled enough at your profession to run  business, you're going to eventually run into the problem of working "on" your business versus working "billable hours."  For the small business owner (encompassing over 85% of the staffing world), learning when to pass the buck over is the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

So when do you look outside yourself for help?  You decide by looking at how you bill "your" hours to "your" company.

In staffing, it's normal to think in terms of contractor hours for your candidates.  That's the basis of your company.  But what about your profitability?  Try this.  In your head, you should have as reasonable sense of what your hourly rate is.  This is not your bill rate (what you charge to clients), but instead your internal pay rate.  To get this rate, figure out the total number of hours you work in a month, and divide it by the amount of revenue you bring in in a typical month.

This is your pay rate per hour.  It includes sales, invoicing, unpaid client time, and anything that can be classified as work. If your bill rate is $110 an hour, assume that it's about $50 an hour internally.  This works for placements as well as consulting.  If you bring $30,000 in a month and work 50 hours a week, then your pay rate is $150 an hour.

The question of when to outsource become simple.  For any given task, are you better served doing it yourself, or paying someone else to do it?  If you're making $150 an hour, any significant amount of time that you're currently utlilizing that can be outsourced for cheaper than $150 a hour is a good target.

Should You Hire People Smarter Than You?

It's one of the pieces of wisdom you read in business magazines.

     Hire people smarter than you.

You hear it from motivational speakers, successful entrepreneurs, and people who like to give advice on any topic.  "The secret of my success was hiring people smarter than me."  But is that true?

If that were really true, than the dumbest person in any corporation would be the CEO.  While some people may snicker behind their hands when they read that, most of us know that it's just not true.  So what's the behind the myth?  What does it really mean to hire someone smarter than you?  And does Corporate America follow it?

What Does Donald Trump Think?
"Management -- Donald fought the platitude pattern and said "You want to be smarter than your people." He thought the notion that you should hire people smarter than you was a poor one."

800-CEO-Read (The CEO Blog) has Bob Rosen weigh in:
"One of the most important aspects of being a leader is hiring people smarter than you. That’s why top leaders spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on planning, strategizing, or many other components of their job."

Small Business Bloggers Like Staff Writers Better Than The Top Guy:
"Skellie is a young writer who he hired in late 2007 to be Problogger’s first staff writer. I don’t know what it is about her that makes the writing better than his; it just is to me. Now, you may think this is a dig against Darren Rowse, but is it not—in fact, this is praise. The reason why I give kudos to Darren Rowse is because he is a very talented writer and yet he managed to find someone who is more talented than he is. I think that hiring people who have a high level of talent is the mark of strong leadership, forward thinking, and a commitment to quality."

And this Kiwi (New Zealander) buys into the notion:
"When we recruit new staff we encourage managers to hire people who are smarter than they are, with more energy and better ideas."

So maybe that isn't indicative of Corporate America, but Google ranks them the highest, and it brings a nice cross section of opinion.  But what does it mean.   Should we be shelling out IQ tests to candidates, and hire the ones who beat us?  Should we challenge our employees to Sudoku matches, with the winners getting a set of steakknives and the losers pink slips?

The Threat Of Recruitment Process Outsourcing

I've been fortunate in getting the opportunity to speak at a lot of conferences about the successes I've generated in the staffing world.  Those speeches tend to focus on ways to make third party staffing firms more competitive, because I come from that world, and I've seen what works.

One of the key takeaways from any speech I give is the need to understand what your clients are looking for, and what your competition will look like in the future.  Us old-school phone jockeys pride ourselves on our connections and the speed of our dialing finger, but in the complex world of corporate human resources, the comprehensive staffing firm is going to have a lot easier time then the smilers-and-dialers.

Corporate Human Resources departments are looking for partners who understand that making a few placements with a company is a net loss.  The time, focus, and money of making a few key placements spread out over numerous firms often turns HR executives into cold-calling punching bags.  They get so many calls that it often interferes with their ability to do their own work.  At the same time, smart companies recognize they can't fill all of their positions, and respect the work of genuine headhunters.

The threat to the industry isn't more technology, better job boards, and robust internal staffing departments.  The threat to staffing firms is Recruitment Process Outsourcing firms that offer full-service employment consulting in addition to recruiting.  We see some of this in the run to VMS systems in the last decade. There's not a recruiter out there that wasn't furious at being forced to make placements through a third party software vendor.  We adjusted (mainly by large staffing firms co-opting the model), and the model has shown some real weaknesses, but it's a warning sign to the third party recruiting industry.

Think about it.  Pundits have been forecasting (and sometimes wishing for) the demise of the staffing firm for decades.  Every new technology is supposed to end the era of the third party recruiter, and yet through early adoption, recruiters have actually grown in size relative to the industry.  We serve a useful function as the lubricant of corporate hiring.

There is no real alternative to our services that can dominate industry wide.  But what happens when a firm comes along that offers placement services, but backs them up with better hiring practices, benchmarking, and actually improves the overall hiring posture of our clients? What happens when Recruiting Plus becomes the model?