Tag Archives: recruiting

4 Tips for a Successful Relationship with your Recruiting Firm

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Even if you’ve worked with a recruiting firm before, there are several considerations for getting the most out of your relationship. PSG President Aaron Green shares his tips for choosing and managing a recruiting firm:

 

Tip #1: Consider the Fit – It’s important to find a partner that can accommodate your needs and has the right industry experience and a successful track record with other firms of your size and organization type. A recruiting firm that sells a broad range of services will be able to offer a broad range of solutions for your needs.

 

Tip #2: Look for accessibility to their recruiting base – We all have become accustomed to on-demand services and the recruiting industry is adapting to this same trend.  Successful recruiting firms make themselves accessible to their candidates. For example, PSG responds to new candidate inquiries within five minutes of receiving a qualified resume on weekdays between 8am-9pm.

 

Tip #3: Ask how the firm adapts to the needs of the market – Not only do recruiters need to understand when to engage candidates, they must understand how to engage them. Many candidates expect instant access and answers. Recruiters that leverage technology, including online chat and mobile apps, for communicating will have an edge. Interview your potential recruiting partner to explain how they use technology to engage with candidates.

 

Tip #4: Remember that a relationship is a two-way street — Consider how you can make yourself attractive to a recruiter — many of whom are turning away business in this tight employment market. This may mean partnering with your recruiter to provide quicker, detailed feedback or taking other actions that make you a more attractive client without spending a dime more.

 

Aaron Green 0904 22

Adapting to a Candidate-Driven Job Market

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This post was originally published in NEHRA’s April e-newsletter. 

 

New England-area employers and hiring managers are experiencing first-hand a shift to a candidate-driven job market. They’re finding that it’s become more difficult to land top talent and that candidates are increasingly in the driver’s seat.

 

This shift is a result of several market conditions that drive demand for skilled workers, including:

  • 4.8 percent – Massachusetts’ unemployment rate in March 2015
  • 10,500 jobs were added to the Massachusetts economy in March, about double the monthly average job growth over the past year
  • 2 percent of the U.S.’ eligible workforce is participating in the labor market; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor participation rate in March was the highest it’s been since June 2010
  • There are now 5.1 million job openings in the U.S., an increase from 4.2 million in 2014 and a rise of more than 21 percent

 

This demand for highly skilled workers – across all industries – continues to rise and has become a central challenge for recruiters and hiring managers. Recruiters and hiring managers are becoming well aware that this candidate-driven market exists and they are responding.

 

Highly skilled workers have many job openings to choose from, and are ultimately receiving multiple job offers during a typical job search. Skills and experience in IT, professional services and healthcare continue to be among the highest sought after. For example, temporary contractors with IT skills and experience are seeing multiple offers for future projects or permanent positions before wrapping up projects they’re currently on.

 

Not only are skilled candidates seeing multiple opportunities and then fielding several offers, but compensation and benefits are also affected. Salaries across the U.S. have remained mostly stagnant, but for highly skilled IT, Project Management, and niche financial and healthcare professionals, it’s a completely different story. One banking client of ours in Boston hires several experienced consultants to facilitate cyclical financial reporting projects. According to him, “Recently, there are just fewer immediately available candidates with the specific skills [he] needs to hammer through these reports, and they are able to demand higher hourly rates simply because of supply and demand.”

 

Our clients are faced with a critical decision over how much budget to allocate for each new hire. If they allocate too little, they will lose candidates to other offers. Large tech companies like Google and Facebook are setting new standards for both compensation and benefits, forcing other companies to follow suit. A large social media and tech company just outside Boston recently offered select highly skilled software engineers salaries at three to five times the market average, and is increasing company-provided lunch from three days per week to five days per week starting in July this year. Employers are trying to be flexible and think creatively about how they attract talent.

 

Companies in the Boston and New England area have been forced to rethink how they go about getting work done, the type of candidates they end up hiring, and the process through which they hire. It seems obvious, but I’ll elaborate a bit. In today’s economic climate, where demand for skilled workers has steadily increased, companies going through organizational change, merger or acquisition, implementations, upgrades, growth or decline will face difficulty finding available talent that meets their exact need. The more prerequisites or more specific the skill-set is, the harder it is to find the perfect match.

 

Hiring managers feel the pressure of time to meet deadlines and manage through change, and more frequently than ever before, they are utilizing temporary or contingent workers to fulfill those needs. According to the BLS and Staffing Industry Analysts, temporary workers as a percentage of total employment is at an all-time high and trending upward. Some firms find that it is faster and more affordable to utilize a staffing firm to hire a temporary consultant than to post a job and find the perfect full-time employee.

 

Hiring managers who hire quickly win. With a talent pool on the decline and demand on the rise, those who shorten the time it takes to find and onboard candidates are winning the best available talent when they need it most. Many of our clients have elected to trust our screening and interviewing process, asking us to send our best available candidates, rather than requesting to see and screen resumes and then interview themselves. This can mean the difference between getting the best available candidate or the second or third round, and it saves our clients money and time toward deadlines and goals.

 

On another note, clients who are generally more flexible with required skills and experience are finding access to alternative talent pools more efficient and successful than waiting for the perfect candidate to turn up. Intertwined in our screening and interview process is a detailed and rigorous extraction of skills and experience not appearing on resumes. Another way to speed the vetting and hiring process up a bit is simply by using technology – like Skype or other video conferencing tools – to ease requirements for meeting in-person.

 

At PSG, we rely heavily on our ability to build strong relationships with clients where this process is a true collaboration, and we commonly coach and advise clients on effective search techniques. In today’s tight market, shortening identification and onboarding time, being more flexible with prerequisites and offering competitive wages and benefits are keeping our clients at a competitive advantage in this new candidate-driven market.

 

If you or your company would like to discuss hiring in a candidate-driven market, please feel free to reach me at nbrown@psgstaffing.com or 617-250-1000.

 

Nicholas Brown is  Director – IT, Finance & Accounting, Creative and HR Staffing Solutions at Professional Staffing Group

 

 

 

 

There’s more to recruiting than meets the eye

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If you’ve worked with a recruiter – either as an employer looking to find the right talent or as a job seeker looking for the right opportunity – you may have wondered what it is, exactly, that the recruiter does. Perhaps you have even second-guessed their process.

We think this Recruiter.com article, Why Recruiting Looks Easy, does a nice job of summing up the recruiting process. We agree with the author that, while recruiting may look easy – “few professions look so simple. It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper, right? You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves, “Yeah, I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.” – there’s certainly more to the recruiting process than meets the eye.

The article mentions the behind-scenes recruiting work like identifying, spotting, finding and assessing talent; understanding the job and culture; working a database and connections; possessing insight into the department’s or hiring manager’s psychology; and the persistent calling and online searching to bring people together.

PSG’s Frank Gentile  agrees with the author’s conclusion that “anyone or any recruiter can luck out and make a placement or two. But the background required for long-term recruiting success is much different. It involves the deep study of companies, products, markets, assessment, and professions coupled with a kind of brute force stamina to doggedly pursue the talents of other people.” Frank has worked in the recruiting field for more than 20 years. As someone who hires and trains recruiters, Frank says that the best recruiters share several traits, including the ability to maintain the stamina and tenacity to focus on long-term goals and a strong sense for evaluating intangibles such as culture fit and matching candidates’ career aspirations with employers’ business objectives.