Edison, NJ February 4, 2009 – Last week Everett Reiss, project and account manager for AST, was the main speaker for the first of six seminars that NJSA is presenting at the Sheraton Edison Hotel, in the Raritan Center.  Reiss spoke on “Social Media Success Stories in the Staffing Industry” and gave the 70 plus attendees three action points to use in formulating a social media strategy for their staffing firms.  To engage the attending staffing executives and professionals, Reiss used a video interview with Tracy Tillapaugh, technical recruiter for Contemporary Personnel Staffing in Liverpool, NY; and a panel consisting of Elaine Balady, Co-Owner of The Assurance Group, Robert Derbabian, Vice President at Wells Fargo Capital Finance, and Steve Isenberg, President and Founder of ASJ Partners.  Find highlights of the interview with Tracy Tillapaugh at AST’s Mad Staffing Blog.

NJSA’s next “Web 2.0 and the Staffing Industry” seminar is going to be presented by a Northeast Account Executive, John Hassett, on “How To Use Linkedin for Staffing Firms” on February 23, 2010 from 5:00-7:30pm at the Sheraton Edison Hotel.  You can register for this evening forum on the ten easy steps recruiters and sales staff can use to build community on Linkedin on the NJSA website.

NJSA’s remaining four forums, all of which are at the Sheraton Edison Hotel are:

• “How to Use Social Media to Bolster Your Recruiting Efforts” presented by Everett Reiss, project manager for the staffing software firm, AST on March 23, 2010 at 8:00-10:00am.
• “How to Twitter and Source Candidates” presented by Rob Tyson, CPC, President and CEO, Bonifield Associates on April 20, 2010 at 5:00-7:30pm.
• “Building Awareness, Influence, Reputation, and Authority Using Facebook for Staffing and Recruiting Professionals” presented by Tracey Madden, CPC, CTS, President of McIntosh Staffing Resources, LLC on May 18, 2010 at 5:00-7:30pm.
• “Building Profitable Web 2.0 Activities Into Your Daily Work Lives” presented by Everett Reiss, project manager for the staffing software firm, AST on June 22, 2010 at 8:00-10:00am.

For more details on the “Web 2.0 and the Staffing Industry” seminar check out the NJSA’s 2010 Business Issues Expert Resources Forums e-brochure that Patricia Koziol, Executive Director & Recording Secretary of NJSA put together.

About New Jersey Staffing Alliance (NJSA): The New Jersey Staffing Alliance (NJSA) is an industry trade association of direct hire, contract and temporary staffing firms. NJSA represents members professionally engaged in all areas of personnel services including search, recruitment, placement and temporary help services. All levels of employment and vocational disciplines (from warehouse and distribution staff to scientific and medical personnel) are served by specialists among the members. We are an affiliated chapter of the American Staffing Association and the National Association of Personnel Services, the national organizations representing direct hire and temporary staffing firms in all fifty states.

About Applied Systems Technology (AST): Applied Systems Technology provides fully integrated staffing agency software to mid market staffing agencies throughout the United States. Its unique ‘outcomes’ approach to automation starts with helping senior management align the projects around very specific measureable goals relating to the operations of their business. By fusing their business processes to automated tools, the client companies are able to grow their businesses with significantly improved operating ratios. The ability to script business rules around desired outcomes in the staffing software itself provides staffing operators significantly greater control over the business.

The Governor said his administration will ask the federal government to forgive the debt, but he said the state can’t afford to pump money into the fund to stop the tax increase. New Jersey faces a deficit of more than $9 billion for the 2011 budget year, which begins in July. Christie said that over $3.6 billion has been raided from the fund over the past decade.

There will be five other breakfast/evening sessions on web-related and social networking topics – the most complete educational series on these important tools for the staffing industry.

You can click here for the registration brochure for all the sessions, and please feel free to sign up for all of them or one at a time.  The breakfast sessions are FREE and the evening sessions are at a nominal cost.

Plan to attend with your recruiters, sales associates, and technology staff.  If you have any questions, call the NJSA office at 973-283-0072.

By

Carl Capato

A recent study conducted by the University of Massachusetts at Boston confirms that companies who hire people with disabilities achieve a higher placement in the public’s collective esteem than employers who either may not hire people with disabilities or don’t bring attention to their hiring policies with respect to people with disabilities. Among surveyed consumers: 92 percent felt more favorable toward companies that hire people with disabilities; 87 percent said they would give their business to companies that hire people with disabilities; the employment of people with disabilities ranked third as an indicator of a company’s commitment to social justice; and 98 percent of respondents who had been served by a worker with a disability reported that they were “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the service they received. According to Working Together, a group of businesses in Maine who collaborate to meet their goal of hiring more people with disabilities, and who reported the results of the U. Mass. Study referenced above, http://www.expandingmainesworkforce.com/benefits.html,

there are real, bottom-line benefits for companies who look to the often untapped resource of job seekers with disabilities to fill staffing vacancies.  These include:

Increased Market Share:  According to recent census data, nearly one in five Americans has a disability.  This population has a total annual income in excess of a trillion dollars, and a discretionary income estimated at $200 billion.  People with disabilities prefer businesses that are sensitive to their needs and that represent their population, and companies have found that it makes good business sense to have a workforce that is representative of the communities they serve.  According to research conducted by Simmons Market Research Bureau, 48 percent of people with disabilities are the principle shoppers for their families.  They have influence over not only their own spending decisions, but those made by other family members as well.

Did you ever wonder why some email campaigns are successful and others are not? It’s really rather simple. A successful email campaign will focus on several key areas: a strong call to action, a compelling reason to act and the ability to drive traffic to your web site. If you can succeed in these aspects, you will have developed a successful campaign. Email marketing is the most cost effective way to reach your desired audience. One of the most important jobs of a successful marketing executive is to create an aura of excitement around his/her product or service. Our goal is to focus the customer’s attention towards our product and away from the competitors. How we articulate our value proposition will determine success or failure in many instances. Many unsuccessful campaigns can be attributed to failure in one of the following: the call to action, a compelling reason to buy and a poorly crafted value proposition. When developing a campaign, remember your goal: to get noticed and generate traffic to your site. In today’s environment it’s imperative to keep your brand in front of your clients to enhance and grow your brand equity. As you begin developing your campaign ask yourself a few simple questions: 1. Where am I driving the recipients of each email campaign? 2. Did I clearly articulate my value proposition? 3. Is there a strong call to action in my campaign that will cause consumers to act upon it? If you answer yes to all of these questions, you’ve established a successful email marketing campaign. Remember the goal of advertising is to generate new sales opportunities and inform customers know about your product or service. Successful campaigns help motivate your internal staff and cause existing customers to feel good about their prior purchases. Human nature to always seek confirmation about our purchases; advertising enables us to feel good about ourselves.

Steve Isenberg is President and Founder of ASJ Partners. ASJ Partners is the fastest growing marketing firm in the staffing industry. You can visit ASJ Partners on the web at www.asjpartners.com or reach Steve at 610-348-5805.

I’ll never forget the most miserable hour of my day when I first started in the business.  It was ‘plan time.’  This dreaded hour was spent hand-writing names and numbers of those people who I was going to call, and if I didn’t call them, then I’d have to spend an entire hour the next day hand-writing the same numbers and names over and over again.  This was before computer databases existed and it was a miserable experience, so I did what any fun-focused recruiter would do:  I blew it off.  And my production reflected my lack of planning.
 
But a few years later, when databases became main-stream, I found that I didn’t have to hand-write the names and numbers over and over again. All I had to do was print out the names and numbers of who I was going to call.  I didn’t really have much focus of when I was going to call them and I was supposed to develop some sort of a plan, but I figured that I’d just randomly follow the call list and I did what any over-confident technology-savvy recruiter would do with planning:  I blew it off.  And my production reflected my lack of planning.

Follow these seven secrets of planning and see how much more you can bill in the next 90 days:

1.    First, start each day with a specific focus:  “What are the two or three things I need to accomplish today to be considered successful?”  Write those goals down everyday and think about them throughout the day.

2.    Review your activity sheet.  Identify those four or five searches that need to be ‘touched’ in the day.  Do you have to extend an offer for search assignment A?  Do you have to prep and debrief interviews for search assignment B?  Do you have to qualify candidates who you recruited yesterday for search assignment C?  Do you have to find candidates for search assignment D?  Do you have to source names for search assignment E?  Review your activity sheet and make notes each day on what action items need to happen to keep the rhythm of the searches moving forward.  Ask yourself this question when you look at each search on your desk: “What is the most important thing that needs to happen with this search, right now?”

3.    Carve out specific blocks of your time for each of those four or five action items.  Thirty minutes of sourcing can give you thirty names if you do it right.  (8 – 8:30) Three hours of recruiting can give you coverage of fifteen candidates if you hustle and stay on the phone and keep your initial recruit calls to six minutes or less. (8:30 – 11:30)  Two or three hours of prepping, debriefing and qualifying can help you bring your candidates forward in the process and give you more information on those who you wish to present to your clients.  (1 – 3) An hour blocked out for your client and candidate who are getting ready to bring closure to your deal is enough to close it, but be flexible on this because this type of call is the most significant of your day and takes priority over all other conversations. (3 – 4). And wrap up those calls at the end of the day that are still important (4 – 4:30) and leave at least thirty minutes to an hour at the end of the day to strategically plan where you are going to spend your time tomorrow ( 4:30 – 5 or 5:30).  Each day is different, but this gives you an idea of how you can keep your desk balanced.  You can also shake it up by scheduling business development calls with warm prospects and other business-generating activities a few times a week.

4.    Respect the phone time of others.  Would you interrupt a surgeon in the middle of surgery to talk about your weekend?  Why do you do that with your colleagues?  Are you working on a search together with another recruiter? Then schedule your ‘connection time’ in advance so both of you know when you’re going to talk about it.  Set up specific protocols of when it is acceptable to socialize and when it’s not.  This doesn’t institutionalize a cold and formal culture in an organization.  In fact, it frees it up to know when it’s time to hustle on the phone and when it’s time to goof off.  Goof off time is important, but it’s important that you do it when it doesn’t interfere with the core business of building external relationships.

5.    Schedule your own breaks in advance.  Schedule your stretch-breaks and lunches in your plan.  Reward yourself once you have completed each blocked group of time.

6.    Hustle throughout the day, especially after a good call.  Did you just close a deal?  Then spend the rest of the day involved in business-development activities or marketing a candidate.  The biggest mistake that recruiters make after they achieve success is that they limit themselves to that one singular success and take the rest of the day off.  Success begets success.  Leverage it to your advantage to get you to the next level of success that you deserve.
 
7.    Inspect each other’s plans.  We’re recruiters, for crying out loud. We don’t do anything unless we know someone else will be checking up on us, so at your next team meeting, discuss what your plan for the week is and bring a copy of your plan for today.  Show your colleagues how you block out your groups of time (you can even just print out a blank page of Microsoft Outlook’s daily calendar and schedule your time on that in pencil) and how you assemble your call lists from the database.  Make a commitment to each other that for the next 90 days nobody leaves the office until they have a plan in place for the next day.

To summarize, here are the three components of a solid plan:

1.    Specific goals of achievement written out: Two or three things that need to be accomplished.

2.    Blocks of time carved out on a daily calendar, and what you are going to accomplish during those times.

3.    Printed out call lists from the database for each of those blocks of time.

Bonus tip:

Seven Secrets to Recruiting Success

 1. Sell more!  Most recruiters spend way too much time behind their desks and not enough time in front of their customers.  Getting in front of your customers will help you build more relationships and get a leg up on your competition.  Make sure that you are not only selling them on your capabilities but you are selling every one of you candidates as well.  Too often we click and submit our candidates and this strategy won’t pay you well in a tough job market.

2. Get back to the basics.  Many of us have fallen pray to a post and coast type strategy where we post the job and wait for candidates to submit their resumes.  This is a great time to push your self out of your comfort zone and start direct sourcing or better yet asking for referrals once again.  The best recruiters find the best candidates and in order to survive you must submit top talent faster than your competition.

3. Expand your Niche.  If you are a specialized recruiter this is a great time to expand your business’s practice areas.  If you have been recruiting in IT for the past few years now would be a good time to expand in to engineering or maybe even go as far as scientific.  Now is also a good time to expand your geographic footprint.  If you only recruit locally, consider servicing a few neighboring states.

4. Find a mentor.  If you haven’t already, swallow your pride and ask for help from a seasoned recruiting professional.  Right now, everyone is struggling with something so don’t think you’re alone.  Having someone give you sound advice to help you through these challenging times is invaluable and it might just save your career.

5. Bring more value.  Most of the head hunters and recruiters I encounter do nothing more then fill requirements for their customers.  Most of your clients are hurting right now and could use your help or advice on topics such as sourcing, retention, diversity and outplacement.  Bring more value and you will build better relationships and create the edge needed to get their next job order.

6. Invest in you professional development.  Now is a great time to go back to school, maybe pick up a new certification or just attend an industry seminar.  To be a top performer you have to sharpen the saw every now and again.  The recruiting industry in littered with coaches, trainers and places to get the tools you need to build your book – make sure you use them.

7. Set goals for yourself and your business.  I know this might sound a little old fashion but you would be amazed at how many people fail to execute this fairly simple task.  Over then past 8 months or so the Job market in New Jersey has changed significantly throwing many of us into a tailspin.  Now is a perfect time to sit down reorganize and set goals for yourself and your business.  It’s is also important to note that these goals should be specific, measureable, attainable, realistic and have a timetable.

Before you throw in the towel or decide to settle for average results consider this advice from New Jersey’s top recruiters.

While we continue to to lose jobs in manufacturing, customer service and retail there is still modest demand for top talent in the areas of engineering, software development, accounting, science, healthcare, energy and pharma.  If you are looking for a great way to improve your search business I would make certain that you have your company’s strategy developed around these key areas.