KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Staffing Industry Executive Forum Recap

2011 marks anew for all industries alike. The Staffing Industry is not immune to change, nor should it pretend to be. Since 2009 a lot has changed, and the Staffing Industry is becoming a whole new animal. From Margaret attending the Staffing Industry Executive Forum in Miami, we've accumulated some valuable information for anyone and everyone involved with the Staffing Industry.

Recruitment: Why Change is Good

Global employment is changing rapidly. Within the last 20 years, we've witnessed highs and lows that have redefined the way talent is acquired, assessed, and implemented into the various business environments of the modern world. This change has been a result of global events, government regulations, and a changing economic climate that has demanded efficiency. Not only is this change revolutionizing the recruitment and hiring process, but is benefiting both recruiters and growing companies alike.

Choosing To Win During A War For Talent

By: John Kurzatkowski.

I currently work with Margaret at KeenHire as a Sr. Recruitment Consultant, and wanted to share with you a bit more about how to win in the midst of a war for talent. 

As the business-news media competes for our attention by flashing information on the impending talent shortage, some of us listen with a keen ear while others turn to more urgent, pressing issues. After 22+ years in the human resources business, I don’t need the media to tell me there is going to be a problem; I already feel it in my bones, similar to how my grandfather used to know it was going to rain by his knees aching. When your business is the business of finding talent you are the first to feel ANY inkling of change in the marketplace. Although I may feel like I run a best-in-class business, and I may have evidence that I know how to skin the cat better than the competitor, KeenHire is all the more faced with the challenge of locating new talent for myself and my clients in a diminishing talent pool marketplace. 

Lets Talk Retention

According to Noah Webster, "Retention is the act or power of keeping or retaining. Corporately, retention is the power to keep employees actively engaged and committed to being an integral part of the organization."

Webster separates employee retention from standard retention. However, I have read about, seen and experienced a direct correlation of employee retention with stock price and EBITA. When a company does a great job of hiring the right people and then they do a great job of retaining them, they maximize their ability to secure and retain market-share. The businesses that have cracked the code on recruitment and talent management hold on to customers longer, are in a position to proactively solve their customers’ problems, and have the ability to be on the leading edge in offering new and innovative solutions to their customers because of a steady stream of new knowledge and solid relationships. The correlation between employee retention and profitability makes perfect sense.

Impacting your company’s ability to retain your key contributors, mission-critical players and next-level leaders begins with you understanding where people are at from a  of view.

It is important to note that today’s workplace psychological state is at an all-time low—peopleare too discouraged to go the extra mile; they are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The workforce of 2010 is mistrustful and skeptical. The top issues affecting workplace psychology and employee engagement are “warm chair attrition,” when the body shows up but the mind and heart have been left at home, and “corporate cocooning,” when the mature, highly experienced worker is hoarding information, afraid to share with or train others for fear of being replaced. Yet another is young working parents choosing their families first. Many in this group opt for working at home or only going to the office part-time. A great many people in this demographic are looking for “life/work navigation,” as they have seen firsthand how putting the job first and family second is crippling, un-fulfilling and littered with false rewards. One thing for sure is that in most situations and for most of your workforce: Corporate Loyalty Is Dead.

Competitive, astute employees are adopting a free-agent mentality and building their own relationships outside the company with vendors, customers and ex-employees so they are always ahead of the networking curve. Additionally these mission critical players, key contributors, and highly sought after next-level leaders are constantly improving their skill set so when the ax falls, they have opportunities lined up and waiting.

Recently HR Executive magazine conducted an engagement survey with hundreds of high-performing high potentials from all over the nation, and what they published was somewhat surprising, to say the least. Their study reported that 45% of all internal “candidates” within anorganization’s promotion pipeline are currently looking to leave the organization.

In another survey, conducted by Harris Poll and CareerBuilder, the results were just as compelling:

• 41% of employees are not satisfied with their jobs
• 46% say their workload has increased
• 33% feel they’re at a dead end at their current job
• 78% believe they are coping with “burnout”
• 56% are not glad they chose to work for their current employer
• 63% believe their top management does not display integrity and morality.

Any company that values the power of their human capital, believes that their people are their competitive advantage, is aware of the cost of replacing a great employee, and does not have a progressive talent strategy in place should be nervous. If you are not, take a look at this chart. It makes a great visual. Think about if your company lost their best salesperson to the competition. These days even your ironclad non-compete would most likely only slow them down. They might not call on your customers, but they can take their brain and everything they learned while in your operation and use it against you.

The problem is a big one and a strategic, systemic one at that. Not having enough knowledge-workers leads to longer development times, lower sales coming into the organization, fragmented customer service, a reduction in innovation and, eventually, lost customers. Hiring the wrong people because you are in a “rush” leads to more unwanted turnover, and that turnover comes at a high cost. Not knowing what makes your people tick leads to an incubation of the “free agent mentality.” The bottom line: the demographic and psycho-graphic challenges facing our companies cannot be avoided or ignored. Furthermore, the cost of doing nothing far outweighs the cost of being proactive and creating high-impact solutions that affect your bottom-line profitability and stakeholder equity.

Your company must decide if people are your competitive advantage, and if they are, you must strategically cause a corporate transformation, adopt a talent mindset and lead the way. Once you adopt and engage the rest of the leadership and management team in the talent mindset,you need to develop a people, or better said, talent strategy that lives and breathes throughout the organization.

Applying the Win/Win principle to the “War” for Talent

As the business-news media competes for our attention by flashing information on the impending talent shortage, some of us listen with a keen ear while others turn to more urgent, pressing issues. After 22+ years in the human resources business, I don’t need the media to tell me there is going to be a problem; I already feel it in my bones, similar to how my grandfather used to know it was going to rain by his knees aching. When your business is the business of finding talent you are the first to feel ANY inkling of change in the marketplace. Although I may feel like I run a best-in-class business, and I may have evidence that I know how to skin the cat better than the competitor, KeenHire is all the more faced with the challenge of locating new talent for myself and my clients in a diminishing talent pool marketplace.

The looming & ‘impending’ talent shortage seems to be creeping up right from under us. KeenHire has more specified search requests than we have had in 5 years. As companies proactively deal with succession planning and building bench strength, we are seeing salaries going up, qualifications becoming more stringent, and expected outcomes for the candidates showing up as more measurable as well as difference making. All this with less people to chose from makes for a very competitive market place for employers and candidates alike.

So how does a company who has ambitious goals compete for talent in the midst of a WAR for it?

You could outsource. You could offshore. You could take on employing the at-home passive work force, like Jet Blue and Southwest. You could take on hiring the flexible work force, students, retirees and parents. You could home grow your talent, become a farm club of sorts, which many of my clients are doing very successfully. You could pay large retainers and then wait while the search firm does the searching. You could develop your company as an employer of choice where 'win/win' is the norm; where people feel they are not just serving your corporation's needs, but their needs are getting fulfilled as well.

Excellent New Talent Needed For Recruiter Position

You are a high achieving self-starter with exceptional people skills and a strong desire to work side by side with top tier professionals.  You have recruited and placed over 500 people in full time roles throughout your career. You pride yourself on making high quality hires that exceed performance metrics and advance your customer’s retention goals.

We are KeenHire. We provide Insourced HR, Recruitment and Talent Management solutions for strategic-minded Business leaders committed to building with the best. You are a persuasive communicator who connects and builds rapport with new people easily. have a keen ability to read, evaluate and glean people’s competencies, talents, passions and goals with grace and ease.

You are creative and intuitive.  You appreciate proven systematic processes that aid you in delivering results.  Your drive, passion and intelligence facilitate you in learning new systems quickly, training others and efficiently managing growth.      

We partner with top executives and international business leaders to build In Sourced recruitment and Talent Management programs while maximizing our customer’s returns on their people investments.  We deliver the highest quality results in cost effective manner and create long-term impact.

You are highly motivated to become part of a 21^st century consulting firm and catapult your career!

 

Requirements:

    5 years of recruiting for high touch (sales, management, service) roles

    Expert at Internet and live candidate sourcing, i.e. name generation

    System and Process orientation - quality and efficiency driven

    Strong integrity

    Management potential 

Click HERE to apply!

Recruiting As A Career

You are considering employment in one of the fastest growing industries in business today. The Recruitment and HR Consulting industry is challenging and rewarding and solves real business issues such as workforce scalability, organizational effectiveness, operational efficiency, corporate profitability and market expansion. 

You are considering employment in an extremely competitive industry, one where only the strong, ethical and top tier Recruitment and HR consultants thrive.

Successful consultants have a driving force of internal motivation.  They come in early and stay late.  The first five years in the Recruitment and HR consulting industry requires intense learning. Effective HR and Recruitment consultants bring mastery in learning, focus and intensity.  Focus and intensity is determining what actions you need to take and what there is to do and then actively doing it.  Winning HR and Recruitment consultants produce the results they promise in the time frame they promise. 

Most importantly, triumphant HR and Recruitment consultants have a strong sense of urgency and serve customers in the time frame allotted.  Robust Recruitment and HR consultants have an innate ability to read people, to listen intently and facilitate a quality match between the right candidate, the right role and the right company.

Exceptional recruitment and HR consultants are known as honest, forthright business people who have a strong code of ethics. Self-assured Recruitment and HR consultants realize that mistakes happen and they learn the lesson the 1^st time, fail forward and quickly turn the problem into a solution.

Every successful expert in any field from professional athlete and musician to computer inventor and sales person invests a minimum of 10,000 hours perfecting their area of discipline and recruiting is no different. A flourishing Recruitment and HR consultant is constantly evaluating their performance, they celebrate and diagnose their success and autopsy their failures as well as use their lessons learned as grist for the mill. Any recruitment consultant that is effective, successful and fulfilled after their two first years in the business typically chooses Recruitment and HR Consulting as their life’s work.

Welcome you to the best industry on the planet!  Expect to make an impact every day. Expect to earn a salary commensurate with the results you produce. Expect to change lives, businesses and expect to be thoroughly engaged and fulfilled every day!

 

Margaret Graziano

Founder, KeenHire Talent Management

KeenHire Recruiter Certification Training - November 11, 2010

Performance Based Hiring Model Certification Training Agenda 11.11.10-11.13.10

THURSDAY AFTERNOON – Margaret Graziano

1:00-1:40         Montage, KeenHire Story, Charter  

1:40-2:10         Business Case

2:10-3:15         KeenHire Business Model Presentation

3:15-4:30         Conscious Hiring Presentation

4:30-5:00         Download 26step Conscious Hiring Process

5:00-6:00         Keen Case Studies (Duncan, Discovery, Clark, Les Mills)

6:00                  Social

7:00                  Dinner – Thea, San Jose  

FRIDAY MORNING – Margaret Graziano

8:00-9:30          Benchmarking/Role Analysis Overview

9:45-10:45        KPI Role Play

10:45-11:15      Task Analysis

11:15-11:45      Cluster Tasks

11:45-12:30      Selection Criteria (working lunch)

FRIDAY AFTERNOON -  Dr. Stephanie Marberry

1:00-2:15         Assessments & Behavioral Interviews - Why are they keys to hiring success?

2:30-4:00         Assessment Presentation

4:00-6:00         Introduction to Behavioral Interviewing Presentation and Software

6:00                  Social

7:00                  Dinner – Maggianos, San Jose  

SATURDAY MORNING – Dr. Stephanie Marberry

8:00-9:30         Behavioral Movies

9:30-10:00       Matrix Ranking

10:00-10:30     Pick Questions & Overview of Keentip and scoring (recruiter)

10:30-11:00     Mock Interview Role Play I

11:00-11:30     Mock Interview Role Play II

11:30-12:00     Rapid Recall

MANUALS & RESOURCE MATERIAL

• 26 Step Process
• Behavioral Interview

SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS

• 26 step overview (in manual)
• Sample Assessments (KeenClues, TriMetrix, Achiever)
• Behavioral Scan
• Training documents for sending and pulling assessments

 

 

Poaching- Recruitment Market 2010 -The War For Talent Is On

By Sharon L. Florentine

 

Poaching. Logic would have predicted the high unemployment rate would have put an end, at least temporarily, to the practice of recruiters and hiring companies competing for each other’s employees. Logic would be wrong, said a number of recruiters and hiring experts who spoke to TheLadders.

High unemployment has simply created more competition for employed candidates. “Our clients want the candidates who are currently working for their competitors,” said one Texas-based executive search professional who wished to remain anonymous. “They feel that these folks are obviously valuable since they haven’t been laid off, and they’d rather hire them than a candidate who may have been unemployed for some time and who they see as undesirable.”

As a result, executive search firms are under increasing pressure to poach employees and are forced to hone their skills at dislodging candidates from employment, which became harder to do during the recession that bred a desire among employees for job security above all other entitlements.

It’s usually about more than just a higher salary, said the recruiter from Texas. These ‘poachees’ are offered greater upward mobility, the opportunity to work on new products and up-and-coming projects, a better work-life balance, educational opportunities, etc.

When it comes to poaching, most executive recruiters practice a two-step tactic to dislodge the employee, the recruiter said. The executive search firm plants the seeds of doubt about leaving safe employment for a better opportunity and the hiring company (usually a human resources manager or hiring manager) picks a ripe candidate when they’re ready. It’s a bit of salesmanship, he said.

“We have to plant the seed of doubt, and then the hiring manager has to close the deal. In partnership with our hiring manager, we put on our salesperson hat, and we go to work finding out what we have to offer to incite those folks to move out of their current job.”

Once the candidate is sufficiently intrigued, and the seeds of doubt are planted, the recruiter said, the hiring manager or human resources manager at the client is responsible for closing the deal and making good on what the recruiter has promised.

“If we’ve accomplished what we set out to do, then by the second interview, these candidates are starting to think, ‘Maybe I’ve been too focused on this company (or job or career path).

Choose Your Executive Search Firm Wisely

In Today’s competitive climate for talent many companies are counting on

HR Executive Search professionals to be their field talent scouts. It makes perfect sense that progressive talent minded organizations would require a top notch Executive HR Search partner to augment their internal Corporate Talent Acquisition team.

 

Whether you are building your Internal Talent Acquisition team or hunting for the right Executive Search partner it is important that you ask some fundamental talent acquisition questions; such as:

 

1.     What is your Role Analysis process?

2.     What is your talent mining process?

3.     Where do you find your candidates?

4.     What percentages of hires are generated from which sources; job boards, social media, corporate talent mining and existing databases?  

5.     What is your hiring process?

6.     How do you validate the candidates you recommend are the right candidates for our roles?

7.     What is your on boarding program? 

 

At KeenHire, our teams of tenured Executive Search, HR and Recruitment partners are each skilled in segmented niches and stages of Executive Recruitment and Employee Selection.  Every Keen partner has been working in the HR, Executive Search, Talent Mining and Employee Selection field for a minimum of a decade and has a long list of successful projects, programs and customer references. Segmenting the Executive Search process allows for highly skilled people to focus on their areas of proficiency increases our throughput and effectiveness which brings you highly qualified candidates who match your criteria, faster.

 

We approach building your team strategically and deploy expert level Talent Mining and a Conscious Hiring process in every HR Executive Search project we accept. 

At KeenHire Talent Management, our Executive Search model begins with a complete Organizational Culture and Role Analysis.  We diligently follow Stephen Covey’s philosophy of begin with the end in mind.  We work with your organization to understand your Organization’s direction, values, competitive advantages, objectives and challenges.

 

Once we know who you are, where you are going and what your barriers are to getting there, we help you discern what competencies, behaviors, beliefs, values and emotional intelligence levels your leadership team must possess walking in the door.  Our proprietary Role Analysis process has been utilized in over 100 companies and is the foundation of all of our Executive HR Search projects. This process has successfully led our founders in placing over 2500 business leaders.

 

KeenHire’s team of highly skilled Talent Acquisition, HR and Executive Search professionals are certified in our Conscious Hiring process, the benefit to you is that each and every candidate presented to your company is fully vetted and benchmarked against the Role Analysis.  We only present candidate with the right behaviors, competencies, values and emotional ability to do the job, in the right way for the right period of time.

 

In most Executive Search operations the founders have deep domain expertise in the firms area of specialty. At KeenHire, we too have deep domain expertise in our field of Human Resources, Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, Executive Search and Organizational Development.  We have worked in these areas for over a quarter of a century.  What makes us different is our commitment.  Keen’s brand, unique selling proposition and core differentiators are all driven from our founders expertise with Top Grading principles and building Good to Great companies.  We built our business with outside in strategic thinking. We built our business to help you scale your organization and achieve your goals.