KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Join The Next Generation Of Recruitment At KeenHire! Chicago/ San Jose

As a KeenHire Recruiter/Sourcer you are a core member of our team responsible for delivering top of the funnel candidates to our Full Life Cycle Recruiters. You are a high achieving self-starter with exceptional candidate sourcing skills and a strong desire to work with top tier customers, co-workers and candidates. 
You enjoy prospecting for and making outbound calls to new candidates outside of job boards and top of mind resources. You pride yourself on exceeding production goals and quotas.

You are a persuasive communicator who connects and builds rapport with new people quickly and easily. You have a keen ability to read, evaluate and glean people’s competencies, talents, passions and goals quickly.  You are creative, intuitive and tenacious. You have the drive, passion and quick wit to plan your sourcing efforts, independently work your plan and pivot as needed.

We are KeenHire Talent Management; we provide the next generation of Recruitment and Human Capital solutions to growing organizations where hiring the RIGHT mission critical, key contributor and leadership talent for the right roles for the right price is imperative to their success.

You enjoy the flexibility of working remotely, are available at least 2 evenings per week, have a home office and updated office technology. You are excited about the opportunity of expanding your career and learning cutting edge Recruitment and Human Capital solutions.

The ideal opportunity for you allows you to play to your strengths, enjoy the freedom and financial rewards that a Recruiting/Sourcer role with performance incentives offers you, and a career that puts you in the forefront of a game changing Talent Management solution.

Job Requirements 

• 5-10 years outbound calling / sales experience
• Strong Sales Experience
• Excellent phone voice
• Persuasive communicator
• MS Office
• You must have the ability, skill and desire to source candidates for Sales Opportunities

Begin delivering Top Grading initiatives and join a recruiting mission critical to leadership talent!

APPLY NOW!

New Part-Time Internet Research Position Now Open! Silicon Valley

As a KeenHire Internet Research Associate, you are a core member of our team responsible for delivering qualified resumes and job leads for our company. You have a keen ability to read, evaluate, and determine quality of written material with grace and ease. You enjoy searching for new candidates and job leads using on-line resources.

You tap into your organizational skills and apply an analytical approach that aids you in delivering results through on-line resources.  You understand the need to meet results and the impact that it has on a team and our customers.  You take pride in your work, exceed expectations and consistently produce.

KeenHire is growing and needs difference makers to help us scale! We offer a remote work environment, great benefits, leading edge services and a game changing recruitment business model for fast growing organizations. You enjoy the freedom to work remotely as well as the opportunity to come in to the office and experience the synergy of working with an inspiring team. You are excited about the monthly chance to travel, the strong emphasis on professional development as well as the opportunity to elevate your career path. The ideal role for you allows you to play to your strengths, be a ‘go to’ team member, be in charge of a process, add value and make a difference for your customers and peers.

You thrive with an opportunity to work with a team that equips you with state of the art tools and technology and provides complete training in recruitment and human capital solutions.  This ideal opportunity allows you to play to your strengths, learn new things

KeenHire operates under the following values: We bring energy and fun to everything we do and everyone we work with, we learn something new every day, we deliver more than we promise, we are 100% responsible, we are committed to being impeccable in our word, work and outcome. Our commitment is to transform the employment life cycle into a strategic business process that directly impacts the profitability and effectiveness of our customer’s organization.

 Requirements

• 2 years internet research, data collection, data mining

Work on your own, while partnering with a core team to achieve exceptional results! Apply Now!

New Exceptional College Graduate Finance Opportunity! Chicago

You are a recent college graduate with a degree in Finance or Entrepreneurialism. You are a highly motivated, driven sales professional-at the core. You have already made up your mind to establish yourself as a financial services career professional. You are thrilled with the idea of having control over your own destiny and experiencing an unlimited earning potential. You are one of the well connected recent graduates, and you are an excellent communicator with a plethora of contacts. Fundamentally, you believe in providing high value consultative services that generate security and financial stability for your customers.

We are representing GCG Financial. GCG has been built on principals that create success for their Advisors and customers. As the 8th largest Financial Services firm in Chicago, they have been led by the Levitz family and leadership team, instilling ethics and morals, as the cornerstone of their business.  The end result is a culture of respect and a team environment where Advisors enjoy both working and representing GCG Financial to their prospects and clients.

As a full-service firm offering one-stop shopping to their customers GCG Financial presents a healthy portfolio of unlimited products.  This permits Advisors an opportunity to become an expert in Insurance, Assets under Management, or Benefits. With a team of nearly 100, the Advisors are fully supported and therefore have more time, to focus on developing their business and portfolio.

You want to bring your personality, tenacity and creativity along with your relationships to an environment that supports your ambitions and mentors you to master the field.
    
GCG Financial believes there is no greater reward than making an impact on other peoples’ lives.  Rewards are prominent at GCG Financial. Monetarily, Advisors experience unlimited income potential and when Advisors are at the upper echelon of productivity, they become eligible for club recognition in the Leader’s Club, Master’s Club, the Circle of Excellence, or for the elite Advisor, the prestigious Black Tie Club. 

Job Requirements 

• 2 years sales and heavy networking during college
• Strong relationship builder 
• Concern and care for your customer's best interest
• Willingness to make outbound sales calls
• Ability to grasp financial concepts, insurance terminology and investment language

Take control over your own destiny and experiencing an unlimited earning potential, apply now!

Flourish Your Career! Recruiting Coordinator In San-Jose/ Chicago

You are an articulate, upbeat and professional minded Recruiting Coordinator with strong attention to detail, excellent written and verbal communication skills and comprehensive Microsoft office expertise. You thrive in a role where you are supporting a busy team in a customer-facing environment, where you act as the right arm and the person who ensures what is happening on the front end is properly executed on the back end. You have the ability to work remote and also enjoy coming into an office at least 50% of the time and working with a team.

We are KeenHire Talent Management; we provide the next generation of recruitment and retention solutions to growing organizations where hiring the RIGHT mission critical, key contributor and leadership talent for the right roles for the right price is imperative to their success.

AP survey: Outlook for 2011 economy is brightening

WASHINGTON (AP) — Employers will hire more workers this year, and the economy will grow faster than envisioned three months ago, according to an Associated Press survey that found growing optimism among leading economists.

But unemployment will stay chronically high — nearly 9 percent by year's end, the latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows. A majority of economists say it will be 2016 or later before unemployment drops to a historically normal rate of around 5 percent.

Economists have become more confident 19 months after the worst recession since the Great Depression ended. Lower Social Security taxes and higher stock prices will embolden Americans to spend more and help power the economy, they say.

Hiring, Managing, Engaging and Thriving With Your Virtual Workforce

When you have to do more with less, hiring virtual employees could be the perfect solution, just remember to Choose those virtual team members wisely. When you make the choice to open your doors to the virtual workforce you open yourself and your company to a whole new world of responsibility such as performance management for virtual employees, virtual team building and retaining virtual employees.

Keep in mind certain aspects you take for granted in managing and engaging your in house employees must be addressed, shifted and tweaked when hiring, managing and engaging with the virtual workforce. It is extremely important that you get it right in the beginning as more and more of your workforce will choose the virtual option and more and more companies are offering it.

Virtual team members carry more than just the burden of remembering which time zone they're working in. Business and Hiring Managers need to recognize the different way that virtual team members experience signal and noise. In order for a team with virtual members to work well, some effort needs to be spent up front on team governance and organizing communication processes into a tune with a good beat you can dance to.

 

 I'm thinking about the distractions around virtual team members because I stumbled on a great, if somewhat geeky, article in Information Technology & People that speaks to what my company does.  The gist of it is that co-located teams and virtual teams have different ways of getting to trust and team commitment.  In short, co-located teams develop trust through irregular personal interactions, whereas virtual teams build trust out of regular processes and clearly defined working relationships. 

 

This makes a lot of sense.  If you work side by side with your teammates you get cues all the time from them about how to work together.  In fact, you're receiving peer pressure, process pressure, the persuasion of the team leader and company pressure all at once, all the time.  It’s like listening to a symphony – notes and melody swirling around, but with somebody guiding them in the same direction.  Not much of a surprise then that it's relatively easy to get to a high level of team commitment with all that conducting going on. 

 

But put yourself in the shoes of the virtual team member.  Boy, what fun!  You get all the interaction of your local environment, but what you're tasked with focusing on is something invisible, unfamiliar and that doesn't give much feedback.  It reminds me of a pledge drive: I'm trying to just drive the car and not to hit anything when the music stops and the man asks me to pick up the phone.  We all know how well that works: I turn down the distraction and stay on the road. 

 

What I read in this article is that, in general, it's hard to focus in a noisy environment, and that people are really bad at thinking on their feet when they're under pressure.  I've always thought that it's a good idea to have a protocol to follow in the event of a surprise, so that you don't have to actually think on your feet.  Fortunately, for co-located team s these surprises and the resulting pressure are (usually) infrequent events that occur and get resolved.

 

But in a virtual team, the members are always under pressure. What they need is more like sheet music to guide from beginning to end.  And what the authors are suggesting is that it's that note by note guidance that makes it possible for the team to get its work done at all.  The team’s sheet music helps keep everyone together so they can create a soundtrack, not just background noise.  A pledge drive is easily turned down and ignored, but a good regular four-four beat gets turned up and sung along to.

 

The team leader has to orchestrate those rhythmic processes and clear relationships at the outset when he or she has the best chance of being heard.  That's the time, early on when an awful lot of us would likely be thinking about the schedule, that we should be spending our energy on governance. That’s when we should be setting up the relationships, performance management standards and processes that inform how work actually gets done.  After all, a schedule tells me how long I can wait until my tasks go critical. But what a virtual team needs early on is members zeroing in on their responsibilities and understanding the process for communicating regularly to the team that they're on the beat.

 

It's all about making it easy to do the right thing. The world is full of distractions. The challenge for a virtual team is to systematically make teamwork simple enough and regular enough to cut through the noise. 

 

 

David Kershaw

Founder, eVisioner

http://www.evisioner.com

MetaTeam :: Revolutionizing The Way Teams Work!

 

What Really Grinds My Gears? Recruitment Versus Selection

 

Composed by: Stephanie Marberry, PhD 

You know what really grinds my gears?…Lindsay Lohan….just kidding!The focus of this discussion is on the difference in the distinction between recruitment and selection. Some of you may say there is no difference, some of you may say that they are completely different processes, and the rest of you may say who the heck cares!

 

The truth is that some terminology resonates better with business professionals than others. Certain words, like recruiter, carry a particular stigma because there is a certain perception that the recruitment industry does not add value. In my world this is not always the case, some of my best clients are recruiters and my partner for the past 2.5 years owned her own staffing firm and was a recruiter! Where the distinction exists is when recruiters incorporate selection into the hiring process. However, I have witnessed that no one really understands what the term selection means and why it is different from the recruiting process.

There is a distinct difference between the way companies define recruitment. What I have heard from senior executives, and hiring managers is that recruitment by a 3rd party is a process where people or resumes are thrown at them without any regard to quality or fit. This is not always the case but somehow this is the perception that exists. I have even heard the term head hunters, which creates even more of a negative connotation implying that anyone is fair game!!!! When we talk about 3^rd party recruiters I do think one bad apple has spoiled the bunch. The 3^rd party recruiters that I have been working with are actively looking to incorporate selection into their process in order to become a true partner with their clients.

So what’s the real difference between recruitment and selection besides the fact that one word carries bad rap? When I teach on the topic of Industrial-Organizational Psychology there is not much emphasis placed on the science or strategy behind recruitment. In fact there are only a few pages dedicated to a discussion on recruitment in most textbooks. Recruitment is defined as a process to increase the pool of job applicants that meet the organization’s legal and social obligations thereby also increasing the success rate of the selection process. In the classroom I discuss various ways to source candidates and the effect that specific messages or people might have on the candidate’s first impression of the company. So the strategy surrounds different ways to find and attract the most candidates for the job and company.

What is emphasized in the world of Industrial Psychology is the idea of personnel or human resource selection. Human Resource selection involves a scientific process that begins with the development of a selection program which includes a full job analysis where the tasks, resources, work environment, and performance measures that characterize the job are defined.  The creation of a selection program also involves the identification of worker characteristics required (i.e., knowledge, skills, and abilities), the development of various assessment devices (e.g., tests, interviews, personality and behavioral measures), and the validation of these devices (e.g., does the measure predict performance on the job). In the end the selection process should allow a company to systematically collect and combine information from valid selection instruments to make hiring decisions that result in top performers to drive the company’s efficiency and effectiveness. Companies can even take this one step further by evaluating and monitoring their selection process through a utility analysis or with other ROI forms of measurement (i.e., turnover, profitability, satisfaction, engagement).

As a consultant for KeenHire I find myself involved in both recruitment and selection and I see that they are highly inter-related (you can’t have one without the other!). So why does this gap have to exist where recruitment is offered separately from selection? These are distinct terms but they should not be offered independently. Further, selection is the necessary piece in making the right hire and if is not conducted appropriately it can lead to negative outcomes. Both corporations and recruiters who are not incorporating a selection system into their hiring process need to look at what it is costing them. For corporations it might be wasted time, money and resources hiring and developing an employee who is not the right fit and does not make any impact on the job. For recruiters it might be lost business due to less expensive alternatives that deliver the same results because they do not offer anything different than the competition.

So is it truly a lack of awareness about the distinction between recruitment and selection or is there some other reason why selection is under-utilized? I am still struggling to find the appropriate answer to this question but in any event, it grinds my gears!!!

Cost Savings In Recruitment

Is Your Company Maximizing Your Recruitment Effectiveness?  

The world has shifted; the economy has changed- we all need to do more with less.  The U.S. we are now entering into a Global Talent Marketplace. Companies can hire top talent labor cheaper than ever before.  Competitors in your marketplace are popping up all over the globe.  What happens when your competition offers your customers a better solution for less money?  As we slowly crawl out of the recession we enter a brand new age, new business models, a new age of pricing and a new age of service delivery. We all must maximize our effectiveness while minimizing our costs. Going forward one of the ONLY competitive advantages a company will have is the people working in their organizations. 

The U.S. talent market is shrinking while the global talent pool is expanding.  In the next 4-6 years, companies will face the most challenging and tumultuous times in building and retaining their workforce. Your company has choice in recruitment solutions.  You can build your own, In-source it, outsource it, or wing it. Below are some cost saving methods for maximizing your recruitment and retention effectiveness without paying high fees.

1. Benchmark your key contributor talent, clarify the DNA of winner in your company and then use that DNA to validate new hires.  
2. Identify KPI’s for each role
3. Utilize a contingent recruitment workforce – bring in skilled, accountable recruiting talent, ONLY when you need them
4. Eliminate wasted time, effort and money by implementing screening tools at the top of the funnel. 
   
5. Create steps in the recruitment process that bring forth the best and eliminate the rest.
6. If you use assessments do NOT buy them from the publisher, they are selling you their tools they are not helping you select the best tool for your roles, circumstances and culture.
   
7. Use Behavioral and Values based interviewing in the finalist interviews.
8. Have your recruiters trained in selection, retention and performance management so they understand the whole talent life cycle and make better matches.
9. Evaluate your current workforce: what is working, what is not, what needs to change and then hold Managers accountable to make that happen.
   
10. Implement performance management across the board.
11. Tie everyone’s performance and compensation to the company’s profitability.
    
12. Get help in making the final selection of candidates for key roles.
    
13. Make employee engagement a priority.
    
14. Set up futures meetings with your key contributors.
15. Exploit the grapevine.
    
16. Select 1 job board and maximize that relationship.
17. Measure recruitment success.
18. Measure retention success.
19. Monitor steps in the process for new efficiencies.
20. Outsource pieces of the process.
21. In-source pieces of the process.
22. Train your Managers to recruit, select and on-board key contributors and mission critical talent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silicon Valley Continues to Lead N. American Metros in Strength of Its High-Tech Industry

Silicon Valley Continues to Lead N. American Metros in Strength of Its High-Tech Industry, but Growth in Other Regions Shows Integration Across Continent, Says Milken Institute Study

LOS ANGELES – Silicon Valley, the largest and most influential high-tech center in the world, continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in North America in the breadth and scope of economic activity it creates through technological innovation. But many other metros have built strong and diverse industries that should allow them to prosper when the global economy recovers, according to a new report from the Milken Institute.

“High-tech industries are an important and sustaining anchor for regions to survive the slump and to rebuild their economies around high-wage jobs,” says Ross DeVol, Director of Regional Economics at the Institute and author of the newly released report, North America’s High-Tech Economy: The Geography of Knowledge-Based Industries.

“Every sector has been impacted by the current economic downturn, but high-tech centers will come out on top,” continues DeVol. “In 2003, many said that the era of technology-based economic development was over. However, the industry defied the naysayers and grew rapidly in the following years, proving that regions that promote and sustain the vital inputs to a high-tech sector are best prepared to recover and generate broader stability and growth.”

According to the study, which ranks the top high-tech centers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, most of the top tech metros are well known – like Seattle, Cambridge, Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco. But there are many lesser-known regions that have made tremendous inroads in the past decade to build their technology assets, such as Toronto, Canada; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and even Baja California.

The top-ten rankings for the preeminent high-tech metros in North America: