All posts tagged: recruit

Waiting for Talent is Unacceptable

June 8, 2015 lean recruiting, recruiting, talent inventory No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message We live in an on-demand world. Every day, we access more and more products and services at the click of a mouse, touch of a button, or by dialing our phones. Many companies have installed apps, websites, and other devices allowing their employees to order food, report updates, and procure supplies the moment they are needed. This same convenient access must be applied to acquiring talent.

“Downloading” the next hire should not be a reactive process where people access resumes to begin a search. Every company can increase the flow of candidates. When a more substantial pool of talent is combined with better selection, interviewing, and quality checks, companies can build a Talent Inventory, people that are ready to go the moment they are needed.

Quick and decisive hiring (filling roles with greater speed, more accuracy, and less effort) should be a non-negotiable standard for leaders to keep their jobs.

Effective Hiring is Never a Solo Act

April 27, 2015 recruiting, staffing No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message Companies are remiss if they go it alone in trying to recruit good people. Most organizations are unable to fulfill all of their own needs for full-time employees and temporary help. And that is okay, as hiring is not their core business. This is why the staffing industry is a vital contributor.

Staffing and recruitment companies must do a better job of delivering services that allow their customers to always hire someone today or acquire contract talent in an instant. Almost every customer needed someone yesterday, so it makes little sense to make them wait until tomorrow.

Recruiting professionals must also deliver this same level of service to themselves. It is baffling that they often do a better job of fulfilling their customers’ needs for talent than they do for their own open seats.

Effective hiring is never done alone. It is done with accuracy, precision and speed. It is this last element, in particular, that needs quite a bit of attention.

Achieving More by Doing Less – The Lean Approach to Success

March 16, 2015 Uncategorized No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message While less is more is a popular statement, many people find that saying it is much easier than living and working in this manner. Achieving better sales, recruiting better talent, and being more effective as a leader requires doing less while focusing on always taking action on the next right thing.

Here are the three steps to create the space and focus needed to become a leaner and more proficient leader, salesperson, or recruiter:

Identify which aspects of your job you are attempting to perform at or near perfection.
Instead of investing the extra time on getting each item done perfectly, focus on just getting each of them right.
Repeat as often as possible.

Perfection is overrated and often takes time away from getting other equally important things done. Focusing on success, not perfection, not only gets the job done, and done well, but allows for doing much more in much less time.

Play Big and Go Home

November 17, 2014 leadership, recruiting No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message It’s all too easy to play the game their way. Following their rules, their pricing, their way of doing business. They are the customers, your competition, the majority of the market, and playing their game doesn’t serve most firms very well.

If you’re really satisfied with playing the game their way stop reading, because this post is not for you. For the rest of you, here’s how you play the game your way:

Identify five ways you could play bigger, then pick the easiest to get started.

This could include:

Setting your price and sticking to your price.
Creating a better process and sticking to your process.
Inventing new ways of adding value.
Finding areas of your business that you can streamline, reducing effort and freeing up people and resources.
Letting go of buyers or candidates who waste your time, energy, or effort.

Whoever said “play big or go home” must not have been in staffing and recruitment. By playing big, or even bigger than you’ve ever imagined possible, you can go home more satisfied, with customers better served, happier candidates, and your life richer and more meaningful.

So play big and go home because it’s your way, your rules, and your way of doing business, unless you make a conscious choice to play by their rules instead of your own.

Inspired Recruiting

June 23, 2014 recruiting 1 comment

Scott's Monday Morning Message Some interactions with candidates almost seem to be divinely inspired, while others feel like you’re trudging though mud and muck, getting nowhere fast. What’s the cause of these very different scenarios?

Inspired Recruiting, an almost effortless interaction with a candidate, always has two components: trust and compulsion. Without both of these, recruiting becomes a more difficult task.

Without trust and compulsion, you experience Shields Up, the recruiting equivalent of the shields in spaceships in science fiction. Candidates deploy a variety of shields to protect themselves from recruiters, especially when they feel mistrust or they lack a compelling need to speak with you. Trust must be built first before compulsion can move the conversation towards a mutually beneficial relationship where the needs of all parties are met.

If a candidate can benefit from what you do and trusts you, yet, doesn’t feel an irresistible urge to pursue your opportunity, you have someone who is just going through the motions. He feels good, you feel good, yet these good feelings are doing nothing to benefit either of you long term. In order for a trusting candidate to gain the compulsion to pursue what’s being offered, the recruiter must engage a collaborative dialogue where the candidate sells himself on buying into the job or assignments at hand.

You get a resistant candidate when she has a need to make a change but doesn’t fully trust you or your company. Time, energy, and effort to build trust are the next course of action.

Trust and healthy compulsions are each, in and of themselves, valuable commodities. In combination, they create an alchemy that produces golden results for everyone. The task of every recruiter who wants to make more lasting matches is to ensure that both elements are part of every relationship.

Uncommon vs. Commodity

June 9, 2014 sales No comments

“When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.” – George Washington Carver

Too many firms in the staffing and recruiting business still compete on price even though it’s the least sophisticated way to sell. At times, even highly talented, seasoned veterans use this harmful technique when they’re afraid of losing a deal.

Our industry would do well to remember that buyers know that the lowest price rarely means the best investment. Competing on price positions recruitment, staffing, and contract services as commodities, not worthy of the true respect due to people who have such tremendous impact.

Emphasize value, not price. If you ask Launching Questions and practice Mind Over Mouth, you’ll be able to identify what your customers genuinely care about. If you take the time and make the effort to ask engaging and provocative questions, you’ll be able to identify what your customers need and value.

When you’re clear about what your customers value, you’ll be able to offer options they desire. At that point, as long as the value is valuable, they’ll feel much more confident about the investment…and then you’ve got yourself a deal.

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Sales Yoga is helping people across the globe sell more with less words and effort through practices like Mind Over Mouth. Get your copy today.

It’s a Small, Big World After All

May 12, 2014 recruiting No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message While going global would be a prudent measure for many reading this, learning from global patterns is the next best thing. Trends don’t last and, as a result, are not reliable indicators of actual market conditions and emerging opportunities. Patterns, on the other hand, are virtually infallible barometers as they demonstrate the momentum of where things will continue to flow.

Last week, I spent time in London with a number of clients I advise while also meeting with prospects, colleagues, and officials from the US Embassy and Canadian High Commission. In comparing patterns in the UK and Europe with those of my clients in North and South America and APAC, the following four patterns are of utmost relevance:

1. Margins and profits across the globe are rising at the fastest levels ever.

Companies that are providing innovative value, both tangible and intangible, are seeing significant expansion of profits, regardless of location. Even markets that have seen recessionary conditions persist the longest, including the UK and Australia, have a growing number of companies with rapidly expanding profitability.

This week on GAIN, I’ll be revealing the Value Blueprint, which details more on what these companies are doing differently.

2. Talent rules and will for years to come.

Regardless of any future changes to economic conditions, acquiring and retaining talent will be the top differentiator that impacts outcomes. Companies that are relying too heavily on reactive recruitment methods are already seeing declines in market share and net profits. Conversely, those demonstrating a pattern of active and anticipatory recruiting, called Revolutionary Recruiting and Retention, are deepening their reach with current and new buyers.

3. Niche doesn’t always mean niche.

Focusing on an industry or market sector, such as IT, Oil & Gas, or financial services, isn’t being a niche player. Those that go an inch wide and mile deep within these and other industries are improving faster than their competitors in all aspects of their financials. This is true of SME’s and larger corporations throughout the world.

4. The Knowledge-Action Divide is shrinking in the most profitable companies.

Call it execution, accountabilities, or the Nike (Just do it!); leaders who are holding people to an unwavering, no excuses form of responsibility are the darlings of the business world. By practicing Radical Accountability, they accomplish this without any heavy-handedness or micro-management. Their companies are achieving substantially better results along with industry leading retention.

Patterns persist while trends come and go. While it may be trendy to go with the latest in fashion, following trends in business is a surefire way to quickly go out of corporate style. As the song goes, “there’s so much that we share that it’s time that we’re aware” of the patterns and what they tell us about what to do next.

It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears
It’s a world of hopes and a world of fears
There’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all
– Lyrics from Disney’s “It’s a Small World”

Why Skill Marketing Isn’t a Best Practice

May 5, 2014 recruiting No comments

Customers don’t buy candidate skills or experience; they benefit from what these individual ingredients will achieve for them (ROI). A clearer focus on telling a candidate’s story, especially their top accomplishments, shifts the conversation away from the typical battle over price and reframes it around ROI. This approach, called Front of the Box Marketing, doesn’t just attract buyers (which skill marketing sometimes achieves), it consistently increases margins by at least three or more points.

For example, a candidate who helped prevent a $4.5 million loss offers significant ROI potential for the next company that hires him. By leading with this accomplishment, he’s not only more attractive, the first impression is that he’s worth more to the buyer.

Contrast this with how Tara was recently marketed by the firm representing her. Tara’s featured attributes included her tenure and being responsible for “revamping a proprietary computer system in one of her previous positions.” This experience is pretty dull without the rest of the story – what that did for the company. I’m betting it either saved money, made money, improved efficiencies, or possibly all of these things. That’s the real lead story. This type of focus, used in marketing content and sales conversations, enables you to get buyers to focus more on ROI. They receive better value, candidates land better jobs and assignments, and you earn higher profits

Front of the Box Marketing combined with effective selling is like a tag team duo that pins the competition, making them irrelevant as a result of the attention you gain. Even Hulk Hogan sized competitors can’t win that battle.