For Many Job Hunters, Money Is Not a Priority

They say money isn't everything, and that's true for many job hunters. While it may seem intuitive that most are concerned with compensation, it isn't always top of the list. Priorities change not only during a job, but also over a career.

When "early career" workers -- those up to age 35 -- and workers in their 40s have acquired skill sets and are deciding where they want to settle for the long run, they often take a look around, says Steve Gravenkemper, a consulting psychologist for workplace consultancy Plante & Moran LLP of Southfield, Mich., and that's the point at which many companies lose people in whom they have invested time and training.

A recent study conducted by consultancy Accenture Ltd. in 21 countries on six continents found challenging and interesting work topped the list of employer characteristics that job candidates sought when considering a new position. Rewards and compensation were a close second, and opportunity for advancement third, followed closely by a company's long-term prospects. But other popular concepts like corporate citizenship and workplace diversity were at the bottom of the list of 15 qualities.

"There are basic needs: compensation, challenge. But once you get employees in the door with these, they'll move on to looking for other things" like working for a responsible company or one that encourages teamwork, says John Campagnino, Accenture's global head of recruiting. "You need to offer recruits a package with as many of these characteristics as possible. Priorities shift over time."

Beyond entry level, the decision becomes complicated by more responsibilities -- not just marriage and children, but also the time workers have invested in honing their skills, where they have chosen to settle, and long-term goals such as retirement benefits.

"There's a paradox," says Plante & Moran's Mr. Gravenkemper. "At midcareer, people may realize how important job security is to them, and yet job security may be an illusion. Workers used to go into a company knowing ... that if they did a good job they would be employed for life. Now that's no guarantee. They want to know 'What's in it for me?' "

He adds, "I was working for one company with a group of high-potential employees...and one employee said, 'I'm so glad to see you -- I never knew I was high-potential before.' It's often the strongest performers who leave because they have the most options."

Maturing needs are why many alumni continue to utilize career services, says Beverly Principal, assistant director for employment services at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., which offers students career counseling for life.

Ms. Principal says she often sees former students who are trying to make the transition from entry level to the next step, or to start their own business. Five or six years after they start a career, "people may have a family and want completely different things. They need help figuring out the transition."

Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., has two staffers dedicated solely to helping alumni. "When the economy is good we see people looking to make more drastic changes," says Donna Goldfeder, director of career services. "When the economy is tight and things are scary" they will be more cautious about such transitions.

Companies can retain workers they have invested in, she adds. "Supervisors should show their appreciation, give compliments. It's really still about the human touch. Are your workers happy?"

By Teresa Rivas
From The Wall Street Journal Online

The Recruiting Landscape from 60,000 Feet

Recruiting is critical to business even if not all executives buy into this idea - in reality, it is the future of any business. So, as long as capitalism is around, the future of the recruiting industry is very bright. Add to that the looming talent shortage with baby boomers leaving the workforce and the population aging in general, and the need for recruiters - especially savvy, creative recruiters - is greater than ever and will continue to grow. But are recruiters working harder not smarter? Has internet recruiting become more of a distraction than an enhancement? What recruiters and their employers need to remember is that even though new tools come along there are strategies and skills that will continue to be required for recruiting success. Here is a brief introduction to some of the issues I've seen in today's recruiting landscape.

I've seen many companies today use recruiters in the wrong way and as a result many recruiters don't know their place or their value for companies. Companies should use recruiters as offense, not defense, because hiring the right talent is a competitive advantage regardless of the role they're in - and recruiters should be proactive in finding this competitive advantage rather than reactive in letting resumes come to them. As a founder and manager of multiple companies, the most costly mistakes I've made have all involved hiring the wrong people. At the end of the day, recruiting is all about having the right person in the right position, yet there are so many companies (and recruiters) out there that don't even know where to start and thus end up turning to the nearest job board.

Job Boards certainly have value and a place in the recruiting market, but the best candidates are the superstars who aren't looking for a job or even anticipating a recruiting call. Of course, many in the recruiting space talk about this audience, but I don't believe most recruiters truly grasp how and where to find these perspective employees. More training and focus is needed on how and where to find the right candidate that will deliver a competitive advantage for the company/client. They won't be found hanging out in social networks, and they certainly aren't going to be milling around job boards. They are happily executing; they're performing. Performers don't have time for social networks (although their friends might, so there can be some use for these tools).

Recruiters simply need a way to quickly identify that targeted population of passive candidates by going beyond providing shallow "connections" to provide the context they need to know if this person could be a fit, such as who has relevant experience via past companies and industries. Recruiters need to be able to simply define the ideal persona of a candidate - via education, location, title, industry, credentials, or whatever it may be. And then, using tools like [business search engines] that search the entire business web, find a narrow - but highly targeted - list of people that fit that persona.

Then comes the hard part - what most recruiters are still missing is that they still need to do the legwork. The best way to find great producers is through actual communication - picking up the phone. Where they get the contact from is almost irrelevant as long as this person is performing and looks to be a good fit for the organization. While speaking to someone who is happily producing for another company can be a daunting experience, with practice and tools that provide the recruiter with a great opening for the initial call - all but eliminating the "cold" side of a cold call - they can find quick success.

In the end, recruiters use job boards because finding the right candidate takes a lot more time than finding a bunch of wrong ones.

As the talent shortage becomes a reality, the recruiting industry will continue to need new and better tools but they also need to remember the basic skills and business models that have proven successful time after time.


By Russell Glass
Employment Marketplace
July 2007

Do You Really Have a Recruiting Strategy?

Most leaders in the Staffing Industry in search of management talent for their organizations:

• Can't even define the term "strategy" as it relates to their needs
• Don't know the available strategies in recruiting
• Don't have a name for their own recruiting strategy
• Don't know the steps involved in preparing a recruiting strategy
• Have never written down their strategy so that others can follow it
• Have never compared their strategy in recruiting to their competitors' recruiting strategies in order to ensure that theirs is superior
• Measure the effectiveness of their recruiting strategy

What Exactly Is a Strategy?
The basic premise of having a clearly defined strategy is that by focusing your efforts and looking at the big picture, recruiting activities will produce results aligned with needs and have a significantly larger economic impact on the business.

Having a clearly defined strategy sets up an architecture to focus your efforts and planning beyond basic tactical recruiting and towards establishing a competitive advantage in recruiting. A strategy focuses the actions of a recruiting professional, or group, telling everyone what to concentrate on and what is unimportant.

From a practical standpoint, being strategic includes these elements:

• Establishing a competitive advantage. The primary goal of a strategy is to drive actions that gain your office a sustainable competitive advantage in your industry. It demands an ongoing competitive analysis of major "talent competitors" and adjusting of strategy to keep competitors from mirroring or gaining an advantage over current recruiting efforts.
• Demonstrating economic impact. Strategic impact is measured in profit, return on investment (ROI), increased revenue, higher market share and increased margins. They rely on extensive information gathering and forecasting of the business environment.
• Continually evolving. Being strategic means continually evolving and reacting to any change in the environment. It requires you be proactive and aggressive. If requires that you seek out problems and opportunities.
• Data driven. Strategic functions rely heavily on the analysis of data and the measurement of outcomes.
• A way of thinking. Being strategic is as much a way of thinking as it is a way of managing.

What Are the Available Recruiting Strategies?
Depending upon your resources, marketplace, lines of business, and company objectives the right recruiting strategy for your organization is unique. In fact, strategies cannot be “generalized” from company to company. Recruiting strategies are complex and individual to the organization. A solid strategy, does, however, contain up to 12 distinct elements. In order to develop a complete recruiting strategy, select one or more items from each of the twelve elements. These elements include:

• The primary goals of recruiting
• The prioritization of jobs
• The performance level to target
• The experience level to target
• The employment status of the candidate to target
• When to search
• Where to search
• Who does the recruiting
• Primary sourcing tools
• What skills to assess
• How to assess skills
• Primary selling points to offer

Comprehensive recruiting strategies cannot be accurately covered in with a single word or even a simple phrase. Before you can put a name on your strategy, you first need to make a variety of decisions within each of the 12 different strategy elements.

The net result is a strategy that might, for example, sound something like this:

An external, hire-to-learn strategy targeting top performers: Our strategy is a skill-building, "hire to learn" strategy focusing on hiring experienced top performers (who are currently employed by competitors) into pre-identified key jobs. Our strategy employs a pre-need, external "within the industry" search that primarily utilizes sourcing and recruiting specialists. A branding strategy and employee referral program are utilized to attract candidates. Candidates are selected primarily through interviews that screen candidates for pre-identified corporate competencies. The primary "candidates selling" approach is a great culture and proven learning and growth opportunities.

With a strategy in hand, you can not only focus your internal resources to the task of attracting top talent, you can bring into line outside resources to your company’s distinctive strategy to ensure consistent messaging in the candidate marketplace regardless of the spokesperson.

Longer Resumes Becoming More Acceptable

The “keep-your-resume-to-one-page” rule may be on its way out. While 52% of executives who responded to an Accountemps survey said they believe a single page is the ideal length for a staff-level resume, 44% said they prefer two pages. By comparison, a decade ago, just 25% of executives polled cited two pages as an optimal resume length, and 73% preferred a single page.

Although employers may be willing to review longer resumes, job-seekers shouldn’t go overboard. “Employers want to see that applicants can prioritize information and concisely convey the depth of their experience,” says Accountemps chairman Max Messmer.

Issue Date: Staffing Industry Review Magazine
June 2007 Issue, Posted On: 6/1/2007

What Should Good Staffing Management Do?

1. Provide leadership. Everything starts with strong leadership. People need direction, focus, controls and a fair system of rewards. Although they don't require a charismatic leader, they do need someone they respect, who can follow and lead by example, who is open to input from staff, and who has a strong ethical compass.

2. Make sound decisions. Good managers use both their gut instinct along with an analysis of the facts to make good decisions. The gut is really their analog computer that tells them, based on their experience, if something either makes sense on the face of it or doesn't. When things are not obvious, they have to run the numbers and ask questions to figure things out.

3. Create teamwork. A company should be a team effort and is only as strong as its individual members. If you have a great sales rep who brings in the orders, but your recruiters are not filling them, or vice versa, you can't succeed. Providing team-based incentives leads to the identification of weak links. Get close to your staff socially, but always remember who the boss is, and don't let friendship cloud your judgment.

4. Streamline your company. Don't have more people than you need. Streamlining the organization not only saves money, but also people who are fully utilized are happier campers. And in today's increasingly fast-paced world you can't wait until critical information works its way up the food chain before you know about it and can act upon it. Streamlining maximizes your span of control so that you can get as close to the action as possible, and reduces the likelihood that information will be filtered before reaching you.

5. Be connected. Our rate of change makes it incumbent on you to utilize electronic communications (e-mail, pagers, etc.) to stay connected, as long as you don't become overloaded. Don't operate in a vacuum of your company information alone. Be connected to the world around you and integrate that information with your internal data in order to make sound decisions. Join industry as well as eclectic associations. Be on the Internet and be well read. Seek advice from others including outside experts. One of our clients used his social connections to entertain the movers and shakers in his community for both seeking advice from successful people as well as opening up doors for his staff. Never stop learning, and if you are doing great, don't think that now you have all the answers.

6. Retain control. Always remember that it is your equity that is at stake in your own business and that even if you have a bank loan, it is your house that may be held as collateral. Having a good staff is critical, but it is only the owner who will do anything to ensure the success of the enterprise. So stay in control, have adequate checks on the decisions that affect the financial viability of the company and make sure that you sign off on all key decisions (see Case I, above).

7. Be analytical. Most staffing company owners and managers are not as comfortable with numbers as they are with people. That is understandable given that we are in a people business. But you don't have to be an accountant to understand the meaning of not making a profit or not having sufficient cash flow to cover payroll. You need to be able to understand which numbers are important and how to fix things if they are flashing red. You can always hire people to do the number crunching, as long as the numbers are being crunched competently and are then translated into something that you use to run your business. As noted above, your gut alone is not usually enough.

8. Think "boundaryless." You don't need to be large to extend your staffing business boundaries. This also helps when your margins are thin or your market share is low. A good way to do that is to create value-added services. Some of our clients have done this via training workshops, performance guarantees, employee retention programs, profit improvement programs, alternative billing methods, career counseling, customized reports and proprietary screening methods. They first created, branded and copyrighted the services. They then promoted and bundled the services, which increased their margins as well as their market share. Project solutions offer a similar way to extend traditional boundaries, but this does involve greater risks as you are now responsible for deliverables, not just staff augmentation. The results can be impressive with an increase in profits of up to 60% higher for those who are able to perform in this arena.

9. Communicate well. You need to clearly communicate whatever your concepts are to others, unless you want to do everything yourself. Good communications start with explaining why you are requesting that things be done in a certain way and then what the benefits are to those parties involved. If you come up with a new compensation program for your staff, for example, you will need to explain how that plan (if it is designed well) will make the employee, as well as the company, more money. You should be prepared to provide examples and answer whatever questions arise.

10. Be creative. GE had its 4Es, QMI, six sigma program, its unique grids and charts. Create your own tools and convert them into your own buzz words and mystique to energize your staff and stand out from the competition. Last March we wrote about some of the creative concepts from Blink, The Tipping Point, etc., such as viral marketing, thin slicing problems and connectors. Build on those concepts and be better than your competition by staying one step ahead in the creativity arms race.

Exerpt. Issue Date: SI Review - March 2007, Posted On: 3/9/2007