Archive for the ‘Intelligence’ Category
Sunday, June 20th, 2010
When the economy turns south, cuts are necessary, layoffs happen and the survivors are miserable. We all know the whole “do more with less” routine … but what happens when employees have spent a few years in that situation? Well, some new expressions enter the corporate lexicon: “turnover intention” and “quit level.” They mean exactly what you think they mean. As economic conditions recover, you need to prepare for an exodus from your organization – unless you take smart steps to prevent it.
Of course, there will be cases where you can’t do much to keep an employee in your organization. When this occurs, you need to be ready to replace talent that has followed its “turnover intentions.”
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Tags: BYTE, economy, employees, turnover, unemployment, voluntary turnover
Posted in Intelligence | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
As you meet with promising candidates, consider whether they have access to other people who may also have competencies your organization values and seeks. Ask for referrals and personal introductions. Even if these people aren’t actively looking, you’ll be top of mind when they start. Also, you may be able to lure them over to your organization before they decide to look actively.
Using your professional relationship with candidates to access to a broader network of talent can help you:
- Develop talent pools for future use
- Gain market intelligence
- Determine which desirable resources are working for your competitors
- Gauge working conditions and morale elsewhere in the market
- Fill positions faster as they open up
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Tags: candidates, HR outsourcing, HRO, human resources, outsourcing, recruiting outsourcing, STREAM, talent, talent pools
Posted in Intelligence, Strategy | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
LinkedIn is pretty much the premier social networking platform in the business world. In addition to calling it home for resumes and professional contacts, not to mention endorsements from clients past and present, LinkedIn offers plenty of job ads and postings – and makes it easier than ever for a job-seeker to reach a hiring manager or corporate recruiter directly. Of course, this could exacerbate one of the greatest challenges already faced by the world’s hiring infrastructure: over-communication.
This isn’t exactly a new theme on my blog – as it isn’t in the corporate recruiting profession. Twenty years ago, the profession looked nothing like it does now. With the advent of websites – and then websites dedicated to the job market and attracting millions of people – the number of resumes submitted for a single position surged. Then, social media took us through this same growth explosion again, compounding the communication that corporate recruiters and hiring managers receive from prospective employers.
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Tags: BYTE, Corporate Recruiting, HRO, InMail, job seeker premium account, LinkedIn, outsourced recruiting, outsourcing, recruiters, social media, social networking
Posted in Intelligence | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Recruiting for key positions can be tough enough, especially when competition is fierce, even when you know what’s coming. Add the element of surprise to the mix, and the time and effort you need to fill an open req increase exponentially. Unexpected vacancies are a part of professional life, especially for important positions (particularly those in the C-suite) where the top talent may be well known and highly coveted. If your superstar is poached, you may have to do the same to another competitor – or find the next household name while he is still undiscovered.
Historically, this sort of succession planning has been reserved for a company’s top executives. With KGTiger’s STREAM service, though, you can extend that readiness to key people across your company.
Here are five ways to have a solution to unplanned vacancies that’s always ready:
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Tags: open positions, risk, risk management, STREAM, succession planning, vacancies
Posted in Intelligence | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
You’re at the top of your game: no open req is too difficult to fill. Even in a tight market, you can find several viable candidates for the toughest positions. There’s nothing in the corporate world that you can’t do. So, what’s the secret to your success? Chances are it isn’t what you spend most of your time doing.
Taking a look at how corporate recruiters spend their time, you’d think the characteristics of a top corporate recruiter are:
- The ability to sift through thousands of resumes to find minute details
- A superior command of Microsoft Word formatting features
- The patience to make countless unproductive phone calls every day, often going hours without actually talking to another human being
- A willingness to spend large chunks of the day scouring job boards and social media outlets for a resumes to fill particular position
Does this sound like you? Would you admit it if it does?
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Tags: BYTE, candidates, Corporate Recruiting, HR outsourcing, HRO, human resources, interviewing, outsourced recruiting, outsourcing, recruiting
Posted in Intelligence | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Do you know how well your company’s investment in talent is performing? Up in the C-suite, there are many measures used to gauge this, including revenue per employee, top- and bottom-line trending and even some sophisticated approaches around market capitalization created on a per-employee basis. You can get as creative as you want … but what are you really seeing? There’s no substitute for getting your hands dirty!
I have to admit: I’m a bit suspicious of reality shows, and the new Undercover Boss series was no exception. But, the commercials alone made me wonder, in a more conventional sense, what revelations hiring managers are missing in their offices every day. It may not be feasible for a CEO to step into the trenches, but it sure is possible for a corporate recruiter to look at the workforce and ask: “What am I missing?”
Here’s what you’ll probably find:
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Tags: BYTE, Corporate Recruiting, HR outsourcing, HRO, human resources, outsourced recruiting, recruiting, recruiting outsourcing, talent, talent acquisition, talent management, talent market, Undercover Boss
Posted in Intelligence | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Accounting, consulting and law firms tend to hire talent when the need is pressing. In fact, this is a common practice among all professional services firms. Only when the market has clearly recovered will they begin to add headcount. As client work rolls in, they rush to find talent, bring it in the door, often pushing them out to client projects very quickly. In a people-intensive business, you can’t have well-compensated professionals sitting on the bench for too long.
Unfortunately, the delay in hiring leaves corporate recruiters at professional services firms with incredible workloads to be completed in short periods of time. Any delay, in this scenario, translates to lost billable hours, making the impact of this approach to corporate recruiting (i.e., doing it at the last minute) all too real. Failing to fill a req quickly means lost revenue … and probably a net gain for the competition.
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Tags: business cycle, consulting, Corporate Recruiting, hiring, hiring managers, HR, HR outsourcing, HRO, outsourced recruiting, outsourcing, professional services, recruiting outsourcing, STREAM, talent acquisition, talent market, talent pools
Posted in Intelligence | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
In just about every business, the potential value of Facebook has been kicked around. Corporate recruiting is no different. There are 350 million users on this site – the most popular social networking platform on the web – and it’s still growing aggressively. So, the upside is only going to grow. Add to this the fact that there’s a robust application development community outside Facebook, which provides a steady stream of fresh, innovative thinking, and you can see the wide range of possibilities for professionals in our business.
But, it gets tricky. Facebook is a destination for both personal and professional information, so it can be difficult to engage candidates the way you would in other online venues, such as LinkedIn. Balance your hunt for talent and information with a healthy respect for personal boundaries, and you’ll gain better results in this environment.
The critical component in successful Facebook-based corporate recruiting is time. You need to be able to commit to the development of your recruiting presence, from content to community growth. Think of it as similar to the development of any concentrated talent pool (after all, that’s exactly what it is). It’s easy to wind up overloaded with social media tasks … and you still have the business of sourcing, interviewing and placing candidates to which to attend.
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Tags: BYTE, Corporate Recruiting, Facebook, LinkedIn, social media, social networking
Posted in Intelligence, Strategy, Transformation | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
So, what can we make of the talent market right now? A year ago, the situation was nothing short of dismal. Job cuts peaked in January 2009, according to the latest data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, with 241,729 layoffs announced – the largest one-month reduction since January 2002. And, the five months that followed continued to be severe. Since the start of the recession, 2.5 million positions have been cut, Challenger says, with 1.6 million of them coming between July 2008 and June 2009.
Yet, the second half of last year wasn’t nearly as bad. After January, the layoff rate did fall, though it stayed above a monthly average of 130,000 for the first six months of 2009. The situation became much better after July 1, 2009, and the monthly average for from July through November was only around 69,000, with November (the last month reported) coming in at slightly above 50,000 cut positions.
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Tags: BYTE, Challenger Gray and Christmas, hiring in a recession, job cuts, layoff, layoffs, recession, talent market, unemployment, unemployment rate
Posted in Intelligence, News | 1 Comment »
When you first started building your referral base, you used simple but proven techniques like talking to key people, asking for your existing candidates for referrals and joining professional social networks groups like