KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Shaking Hands and Never Letting Go

Today the challenge for all of us in the staffing recruitment profession is establishing and maintaining customer relationships that last.  I have heard many times, “I am only as good as my last placement” or “How do I convince the customer that I am unique in an over saturated marketplace, where everyone makes the same promises and very, very few actually deliver?”  

KeenHire Talent Management is built to deliver a higher quality of service  to our end user as well as to maximize the time and effectiveness of our recruiting partners. 

Our recruitment, hiring and retention programs elevate how we are viewed by business leaders and position our consultants as the full life cycle solution to their talent management challenges.  

As the founder of KeenHire, I have spent five years investigated leading industry technology, new age sourcing solutions, lean recruitment processes & tools and dug deep into enough assessment and on-boarding instruments to make anyone’s eyes glaze over.

The coolest part of my research was that I sat in the seat of a recruiter for over two decades, I have a keen sense of what works, what doesn’t, what’s fluff and what’s real.  The result of these efforts is that my team and I created a world-class hiring process that maximizes our ability to put the right person in the right job for the right period of time. The technology and efficiencies enable us to do it all for the right price. 

KeenHire is committed to transforming the way staffing and recruitment is delivered. We have vetted and designed a conscious-hiring process that maximizes Keen Certified recruitment and retention professionals’ effectiveness.

Imagine you show up at your customers’ door, no one but people in your circle are offering the level of service you did. Imagine your customers invited you in to planning meetings and strategy sessions.  Imagine your recruitment and hiring process is the fabric of your customers’ talent acquisition and retention strategy.
 
As an independent recruiter or contract staffing professional, jumping from one gig to the next has got to be exhausting. Sure the money is great but when the jig is up, it’s up. Not to mention that you become part of most company’s dysfunctional hiring process and you pretty much have to go with it or say something and make waves. For most people making waves is not a lucrative option.
 
Imagine yourself as the Sheppard of a world class recruitment and hiring process, fully armed with the tools you needed to do the best job in the minimum amount of time and are paid an engagement fee, a project fee and a performance bonus for work well done. Furthermore, visualize you as an integral part of the new hire on-boarding and employee engagement process and achieving another bonus for effective retention.
 
Imagine participating in on-going training and development and elevating your ability to deliver better candidates in a shorter time frame and offer leading edge talent management solutions to your customers.  Imagine being surrounded by and serving like-minded customers, working with philosophically aligned professionals and being known as someone who truly makes a difference in their work.
 
There you are, shaking hands with your client and never letting go. Be a KeenHire Certified Talent Management Provider and experience all the above and more.
 
 
 
Service Provider Track                         Sales/Business Development Track
 
Talent Strategy 3.0                             Talent Strategy 3.0
Talent Delivery Model                          Strategic Selling
Behavioral Interviewing                       Talent Delivery Model
Assessment Interpretation                   Success Factor
 
 
56 hours of intense training, coaching and certification over 7 weeks. 10 hours of follow up mentoring and coaching that solidifies your mastery of the systems, tools, training and technology.   66 hours of career altering training and development.
 

Regular cost is $4592 when you register for all three courses you save $919.00. Your price is $3673.00 per person or $55.65 per hour of training.

Recruitment Process Management

Every company is charged with the assignment of doing more with less. The movement to create efficiencies in every component of running a business has lead to a huge movement of outsourcing everything from office administration, technology, recruitment and manufacturing to accounting, supply chain, staffing and in some cases customer service.  Many of the largest companies in America have been among the first to explore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for some it is the best thing that they have ever tried, for others the results have been disastrous.

In the area of business that I specialize in I have been researching the RPO movement. Recruitment Process Outsourcing, is about removing the recruitment and staffing function from inside the company and having an outside vendor manage, execute and deliver people on an as needed basis. The choice to RPO has for the most part been about price, economies of scale and efficiency.  The most popular roles that I have read about RPO filling is call center, front line banking, customer service, retail, and medical.

Some user reports say this is the most efficient way for a National or Global organization to staff, others say their quality of hires has declined, unwanted turnover has increased and candidates are left with an ill feeling about the companies employment brand. 

What I have learned for sure is that RPO is not for every company; a company has to have certain staffing objectives that make an RPO offering appealing.

Just because RPO might not be the right answer for your company does not mean that there is not work to do to create an efficient, effective and highly successful recruitment function within your organization.  After all, your company is only as good as the people inside and an ineffective, inefficient recruitment process is a barrier between you and your next level of talent.

Over 10 years ago, when I owned Alliance HR Network, one of my mentors asked me for our operational quality ratio of interviews to hires. I did not have the number. He then asked me how many candidates we had to talk to, to generate a live interview, I did not have that number either. I began to see that my lack of managing those important numbers was in the way of me running an efficient recruiting operation and that was costing me money.

Efficiency

The journey was a painful one, back then we were interviewing 10 people to place 1 and we had to talk to 100 to interview 10. That meant that 90% of our time did not result in generating revenue. I began to understand more and more about lean manufacturing, operational excellence and performance ratios.  I chose to enroll in a certification program in organizational development and in that 12 month program I learned a great deal about why companies lay so many people off in recessionary times. 

I decided to go to work on my own company looking for ways to bring operational excellence, improve productivity, lower costs and continue to deliver a high quality of service.  What I learned and implemented was the impetus for the making of KeenHire. 

My team and I went to work on our business processes, we analyzed performance ratios in each of our core functions and worked on eliminating tasks that were irrelevant to effectiveness. We incorporated time saving technology that allowed team members to focus on high impact functions. We created a system for candidate intake that dropped our ratio from 10:1 to 3:1.  

Effectiveness

Considering quality was what my company was known for I knew I had to find a way to stand behind that claim beyond in words. This is what lead me to implementing behavioral interviewing and 'fit' assessments into our hiring and selection process. This not only aided us in the validation of the candidates we submitted, it save us thousands of man hours. It became much easier to select the best and eliminate the rest and was instrumental in my ability to quickly ramp up new hires. Our recruiters were making placements within 2 weeks on a desk, because I was hiring the right people and giving them a great process to follow. 

Our customers were delighted with the amount of data we had on each candidate we were representing. The real benefit was when our customers requested we manage the complete staffing of entire department, leadership and launch teams. The implementation of this conscious-hiring process not only saved us money and time, it was directly responsible for an uptick in work, sales and profitability.

Whether your company chooses to run recruitment from the inside or the outside it is up to you to manage performance in 3 key areas.  In no particular order, ensuring high quality hires, managing efficient recruitment processes and delivering a high quality of service to all of the stakeholders is critical to maximizing your return on your people investment and imperative to being an Employer of Choice.

How Can You Improve Performance Metrics and Employee Productivity?

A study of the Corporate Executive Board found that since the recession began, managers have become less effective at defining employees roles and accountability. Before the recession, only 60% of employees said their managers did an okay job of effectively communicating expectations, since the recession that number has dropped to 45%, which considering is quite low.  Before, Front Line and HR Managers told employees how they fit in to the overall strategy and market share objectives, now they tell employees to get to work and be grateful they have a job.  Ouch…….that is pretty short sighted thinking.

The highly interesting part of this is that when employees understand how what they do fits into the overall strategy of the business and the achievement of their corporate objectives productivity can increase by 10% at a minimum. Ten percent of ten employees equates to an additional headcount.

When I lead my Maximize Your People ROI workshop and keynotes I speak a great deal about Jim Collins’ call to action, “Put the right people on the Bus”.  Five years ago I learned two provocative processes for assessing, evaluating & validating job specifications, at Keen we call these Benchmarking and Role Analysis.  Both of these tie Organizational Development and Recruitment processes together and drastically improve hiring metrics and recruiting success rates.

If you want to attract more of the best, you first have to truly understand why some of your employees are high performers. Is it coincidence, dumb luck or a lot of hard work when a key manager assembles a team of high performers?  Or is it a calculated and well-executed strategy?

Experts say that building a high performance work-group does not happen by anything other than a well defined, executed recruitment plan and selection hiring process. High performing teams are not created by accident.  There is always a plan of attack that attracts people with solid competencies, required behaviors, complimentary traits, and shared values.  Companies like HP create programs for this by assessing their top performers and understanding what drives their performance; aspects like competencies, motivators, behaviors, values, work style, and emotional intelligence.  They then build a hiring model that vets candidates with similar winning formulas.

This is what KeenHire refers to as benchmarking.  The Keen team has assessed over 1000 high performers conducted over 200 corporate benchmarks since our launch.  In one company alone, we saved the employer over $1,000,000.00 in poor hiring costs  Download Keenhireclarknatcasestudy because they stopped hiring people who they thought would fit and they started hiring people they knew would fit.  This new age Talent Management stuff really works!

Conducting a Role Analysis on positions that you are filling whether through an internal promotion or a new hire impacts not only your ability to put the right person on the bus, it effects your companies ability to improve workforce production and engagement. When your employees know that you chose them because they had the natural ability to do the job in a way that amplifies the companies mission and vision and they know what is expected as well as how these accomplishments impact the big picture; they are awake and aware to exactly what you are counting on them to achieve on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis they are much more likely to achieve it. 

The Bottom Line is if you want a more productive, engaged workforce hire the right people for jobs they are well equipped to do, make sure they know what you expect from them and then encourage them to use their natural talents and abilities to get the job done.

If you have professional HR Management, Contract Recruitment staff or In Sourced Recruitment consultants on your team make sure they are trained in these critical hiring selection programs and strategies; if you do not and you need to go outside to Recruiting services require these service providers to offer solutions that enable you to hit your hiring and retention metrics. 

2010 Goal Setting and Accountability

It is January 26th, Have you Set your 2010 Goals and Action Plans yet?

Here is a quick overview of the process that Keen Coaching utilizes with our Emerging and Executive Leaders. 

1. List 2009 Successes - Celebrate, pat yourself on the back, kiss the mirror, get a hug, give a hug

2. List 2009 Resentments, In-completions and Disappointments - then say what you need to say, burn them, laugh at them, but get over it.

3. List your 100 Life Goals 

4. Look 5 years old and imagine your life as the masterpiece you want. What are you doing? Where are you living? What is your bank balance? How does it feel? Create Affirmations for each area of life that is important to you, be very descriptive of how life looks, feels and is in the future that you create. 

5. Create a 1-2 page 2010 Plan - Business & Personal Goals in the areas of life that are important to you. For me it is Fitness,Family, Fun, Financial, Love Life, Work - not in that order. Chose what your overarching area of concentration for 2010 is going to be. Chose the Values that you will use to monitor your behavior. Set dates to each goal. Make them measurable.  Add some ZIP and ZAP to the goals. Loose 10 lbs gets old and boring, like washing the toilets. Looking fabulous and sexy in the speedo is a bit more enticing. 

6. Create a monthly habits chart - things you will do that bring out the best in your. Drink lots of water, do Yoga, meditate, Say thank you, etc. Download MonthlyHabitschart

7. Create a monthly score sheet for your goals so you can track your progress.

8. Create a Weekly Activity Tracking Sheet Download WeeklyGoalTracking2010

9.Use a daily 6 Most Inspired Actions worksheet to keep yourself attached to the weekly, monthly and annual goal.

10. Create a HOT, Fun, Inspiring Vision Board  -See  Above..... :)

11. Engage  buddy you can count on to schedule weekly accountability calls with you, have a consequence for blowing the call.

2010 - Your Time To Ascend !

Stop Jamming A Square Peg Into A Round Hole

As a manager, have you ever had the experience of trying to ‘make’ an employee change, forcing an outcome from an employee to improve their performance or even worse; have you ever attempted to have them work differently by encouraging them to alter their natural work style, values, behaviors, beliefs and personality so they would perform better in their role, or for the betterment of the company?  

As leaders of people, we often have to deal with ourselves to overcome the syndrome of

“I can fix and change people".  As a peak performer in recruitment, for years I found myself placing the best and hiring the rest. As a small business owner, I was hiring 'C' candidates, because they were more affordable and selling myself on the myth that they would be better if someone just helped them and then I expended enormous amounts of my personal effort trying to overcome their ineffectiveness.  My shortsightedness had me saving money on the front end and spending 3 times the savings on the back end. Until I went  through a basic training from Vistage (formerly known as TEC),   I was not present to the profit erosion that these non strategic hiring practices were causing.

Once having my eyes opened, I embarked on a hiring process development journey. I was committed to fixing my problem and I took courses on organizational assessment, behavioral interviewing, top grading, organizational development, personal transformation and executive coaching.  Over the course of a decade I invested $100,000 in mastering 'putting the right people on the bus'.  After much resistance and many breakthroughs, I finally learned the lesson handed down to me from my first mentor.  "People are whole and complete and have everything they need to be successful, as long as you put the right people in the right role." It is your job to Choose Wisely"

There have been many books, articles, lectures and even case studies written on this subject. Companies like General Electric, PepsiCo, Spielberg Productions, DreamWorks, Google, Microsoft, The Limited and more have all publicly stated that a KEY factor to their enormous success was the people they chose to employ in key contributor, mission critical and leadership roles.

The new game in the business of Recruitment Process In-Sourcing

7 Easy Steps To Becoming An Employer Of Choice

Step 1 – Establish Your Employee Value Proposition

 

Tie your employment brand with your business strategy. Understand why people want to work for your organization and develop a program that attracts more ideal candidates through your doors.

 

Recommended Reading: Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity, by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez.  

 

 

Step 2 – Establish a 'Cracker Jack' Candidate Sourcing Strategy

 

Do the work to find out where your ideal candidates are right now. Where do they hang out? What do they read? What do they do for fun?

 

Include Social Media tools, this means be a proactive social media presence. Have a credible, passionate, authentic person from your company talk to your ideal audience all the time, whether you are hiring or not. Provide value.  Keep ideal candidates coming back for more, get them on your web site, create reasons for website and social media stickiness.

 

Be a talent scout. Enroll your team into scouting for additional contributors and mission critical players. Reward your people for quality recommendations.

 

Hire the right recruitment talent.  Select your partners as wisely as you select your teammates. There are a ton of ‘recruitment’ alternatives in the marketplace. Choose a partner who is committed to your end game and will do a great job surfacing, selecting and assisting you in on-boarding top tier people for your organization.

 

Step 3- Conduct a Role Analysis – Let the job talk.

Define performance criteria before you start searching. Sit down and work through the KPI’s, Core functions and specific Selection Criteria with the key stakeholders impacted by the success or failure of the hire. Predetermine the “who” in who you need to hire. What values do they honor? What is their work ethic? For that matter, what are their ethics? What are the non-negotiable competencies, behaviors and emotional intelligence levels required in the role?

 

Recommended reading: The Truth About Managing People and Nothing but the Truth. Stephen Robbins.

 

Step 4- Establish a hiring process that holds your hiring team accountable for selecting the best and eliminating the rest.

 

Create a process and choose to stick to it. All to often a great process is defined and then a decision maker meets someone who strikes their fancy yet clearly does not meet the selection metrics required. The decision maker calls the shots, ignores the very process they implemented and pulls the trigger only to discover that a slick talker with a good story has bamboozled them into paying way to much money for way too little in return.

 

Step 5 – Begin amplifying the employment brand during the hiring process.

Some Aspects For Staffing Companies To Think About

A trend I have noticed is those who cut all costs necessary to operate their businesses are financially in worse shape than those who have methodically evaluated where to focus cost cutting.

I call these "knee-jerk" blanket cost cutting decisions Emotional Management and will suggest that everyone be wary of it. Are you cutting costs because of a fear of the unknown - the length of the recession, the direction of the economy, the ability for you to make a sale next month? Or are you cutting costs because you are determining which costs are necessary for survival, which are necessary for growth, and which costs are "lifestyle” costs? Food for thought.

 By Adam Peterson, CEO, Vipe Inc

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It is all about differentiation.  Keen recently surveyed over 25 large staffing and or recruitment firms, what is on everyone of their minds is how to generate more business and come out ahead of the rest. The following is a brief summary of what they said.

1. You are either the largest in your niche and you differentiate because you are the biggest

2. You have some new innovations that separate you from the competition

3. Your price is better

4. You have a means like RPO or VMS that catapults you to the front of the line.

5. You dominate multiple markets all selling to the same end user

6. Your brand is known to all

Think about it.....what is it for you? If you don't know, figure it out, and figure it out fast.

Best to You 

Margo

What I Love About Working With Recruitment And Staffing Businesses

Someone recently asked me why I enjoy working with staffing and recruiting people.  The answers probably have something to do with why I myself, spent 25 years as an active member of the industry.

Lets start with the industry as a whole; overall the staffing industry, temp, perm (oops direct), contract staffing and executive search all have something in common. We surround ourselves in people contact all day, every day; as an industry we have a better finger on the pulse of why people stay at companies and why people leave companies than any other industry on the planet.   We also know what the job market needs and what it wants, before the newspapers and CNN have even begun to think to ask.  Additionally we are amongst the first that feel the onset of a recession, so in some ways we are pretty astute economic fortune-tellers.  As an industry we put people to work, we give people hope, dignity and purpose.  As an industry we make new friends easily, keep friends and maintain our networks.

When I look at the people who flock to and make it in the staffing industry, I see so many commonalities, many which bring a smile to my face, some don’t and I’ll list those as well.

Most people I have met, are friends with, or have assessed all share a strong sense of urgency about their business, how they make decisions and how they serve their customers.  They also are for the most part bit on the competitive side, they like to win the games they play and the business they go after. They like a lot of action and enjoy the frenzy of the flurry of the deal or multiple deals coming in or closing at once. They know the numbers tell the story so they watch the numbers and encourage healthy activity.  They learn from their mistakes, as one can only spend so much time with the wrong candidates, clients, prospects, orders or co-workers.  They also like being evaluated on performance, the bottom line. They do or they don’t, trying is not something an experienced successful staffing person enjoys saying or hearing, especially out of their own mouth.

I would say most of my colleagues in staffing have a good sense of humor, and learn as time goes by, to find the humor in every no show, mis hire, client debacle, lost fee or candidate betrayal.  What starts out as a disappointment or angry rant typically dissipates into some long lasting joke or key lesson for future hires to laugh over and learn.

On the not so cheery side, most people in the staffing industry have a very healthy dose of Ego, with a capital E. At times that Ego, while shielding them from rejection also gets in their way of getting better, hearing the truth and making needed changes – in business and in personal relationships.  I know this because I have lived it.

And then there is the shoemakers kids, the staffing industry by far a has the worse turn over of any professional services industry. Although the BLS does not track our industry independently, most agency owners report close to a 45% turn over of established staff in tough times and 65-68% fall offs of new people hired who lack the right stuff to stay long enough to make the impact the company needed to justify the hire.  That is darn scary. Some people attribute the turn over to us making the job look too easy, because we are just so great at it, others say we adopt the practice 'place the best and hire the rest', and others say it's because we take care of ourselves and our businesses last.  

All in all, the staffing industry houses some of my favorite people, fondest memories and life long friendships, not to mention every aspect of my entire adult business life.  I am glad to be a part of it and happy that I am working with so many great new comers, established professionals and successful business leaders. In an effort to better serve our readers and customers we are asking that you click on the following link and take this Keen offerings survey. Thank you for your partnership and your support.

https://app.e2ma.net/app2/survey/25372/15365/9edbcfae7b/

Branding Yourself As A Recruitment Professional Of Choice

Keen just completed leading another Certification in Employee Retention for NAPS, in the 16 hours of content course titled Talent Strategy 3.0 our seasoned search professionals were inspired, engaged and clamoring for opportunities to service their clients in a more strategic manner.

People always say when the student is ready the teacher appears, well this past week at the NAPS pre conference I experienced that when the teacher is ready the students appear. By far this was the most challenging, thriving group of early adapters I have worked with and they took me to a whole new level.

I could have worked with them for 3 more days and they would have pulled everything I had out of me and more. I completed the course excited, invigorated and ready for more.

Highlights from the course were specific strategies for building search, selection and retention programming around the recruitment process, adding value and positioning these firms as the Choice for Recruitment. These days everyone says they offer something unique yet when asked to define what and how they are unique, every firm sounds the same. We headhunt, we only work with working candidates, we have better sourcing, we know our candidates, we know our industry - well if everyone is saying the same thing, how does one stand out?

These are some of the ways we teach our firms to stand out from the competition, win their clients loyalty and be invited to the table for strategic talent workforce planning:

1. Role Analysis
2. Stake Holder Assessment
3. Talent Gap Analysis
4. Match Matrix
5. Top Grading
6. New Hire Users Manual

Keen Certified recruiters and search professionals position themselves at the table with CEOs, VPs and Sr Hiring Managers. Keen certified consultants know about the talent issues facing their clients and are uniquely poised to deliver solutions to those problems. They are trained to talk the talk and walk the walk.

Our programming and training is not for everyone, actually from the 50 or so people we have trained they tell us that they believe our training is only for the top 12% of recruiters committed to dominating their market and strategically positioning themselves as Talent Management Specialists integrated into their clients' operation.

Calling All Human Capital Talent - We Need Your Help !

TO BETTER OUR SERVE OUR CLIENTS

We as the Human Capital Industry MUST improve our internal human capital processes. We need to better define our roles, select the right people the first time, give them the training and tools they need to succeed and reward and engage them the way they want to be rewarded and engaged.

 

Never has walking our own talk been more critical than now, between  SHRM and WorkForce research studies, the bureau of labor statistics and CNN; everyone is concerned for the future highly skilled talent shortage. The time to build your infrastructure is BEFORE the perfect Talent Storm hits.  

To better serve our Human Capital Customer Base, Keenhire is building industry wide hiring benchmarks for several Human Capital roles and we need your help.

If you provide us the data, we will provide you with the analytics.  We will sign an NDA and  No Recruit Policy and keep your performers information completely confidential.

We are hiring building benchmarks for the following roles

Branch Manager

Business Development / Hunter
Talent Acquisition – Direct Candidate Sourcing (headhunting)
Talent Acquisition – Social Networking
Researcher – Resume Sourcer
Staffing Manager (temporary)
Hybrid Desk – Sales  & Recruiting Direct Hire
Account Manager /Farmer

Specific Industries we are looking to benchmark within are

Engineering
Energy
Management Search
Medical
Pharma
Natural Resources

Corporate
Talent Acquisition Director
Corporate Human Resource Generalist
Corporate Recruiter/ Sourcer
Training and Development
Retention Specialist

All individual assessment results of your staff will be forwarded to ONLY you and PhD in Industrial Psychology will compile the Results in an over allstudy which will be given to participating companies upon competition.

Please email smarberry@keenhire.com the email address of up to 5 people on your team who ARE consistently performing in their ROLE.  Please have the candidate NOT put their full name on the assessment and have them put the title closest to the matching title on the list.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTAL OF PARTICIPANTS IS APRIL 15TH

We look forward to sharing the results with you by June 1, 2009.