Category: Management & Leadership

As much of the U.S. settles into the changes brought on by the pandemic, employers are working to adjust accordingly. One area that your business may be overlooking: maintaining a strong company culture.

See, just because your employees are working from home, that doesn’t mean creating a collaborative, inclusive work environment isn’t important. In fact, it’s more essential now than ever to ensure your workers don’t feel isolated. Help promote engagement and remote team bonding with these virtually inspired ideas.

Encourage Water-Cooler Chats

While collaborating with colleagues through email and instant messaging is a common practice in the workplace, encourage your team to reach out to one another for non-work related conversations, too. Strong interpersonal relationships among coworkers breeds trust and results — a sense of unity toward achieving a common goal.

Video Conference, Video Conference, Video Conference

Sure, text communication is valuable and a preferred method by many professionals. But nothing can beat the ease, clarity and comfort of face-to-face conversation — lucky for us, video is pretty close. Schedule routine video chats to touch base with your team, and utilize ice breaker activities to engage your employees. For example, gauge how members of your team are doing by playing a quick round of “Red Light, Green Light” to start the conference. Or, take a page from the past by having each person “show and tell” a chosen item or household pet for a few minutes to kick off the meeting. Any exercise that inspires team-building can quickly dispel feelings of isolation, while getting to the root of potential concerns early on.

After-Hours Fun

Signs of a great company culture can be seen by how the team interacts off the clock, too. Happy hours, group lunches and the like also spur a sense of belonging — and, most importantly, can translate remotely. Free video apps like Zoom are a great place to host virtual meals and drinks. While game-based applications allow users to see one another in a fun, competitive environment. Houseparty is an easy-to-use tool that’s gained recent popularity, allowing players to enjoy games like Quick Draw and Trivia and naturally promotes remote team bonding.

Is your team adjusting to remote work? Check out our blog for more tips and insights.

CEOs agree: finding the right talent remains one of their biggest challenges. See, a bad hire is costly. There’s the loss of dollars put toward recruitment and training, as well as revenue from having an open position. Surveys by The Predictive Index, XpertHR and Gartner, Inc. each present this challenge in different ways — illustrating the impact the current lack of available skilled talent has on CEOs’ sleep and overall risk a poorly staffed team can pose to a company’s bottom line.

It’s time to get smart about your investment. Lean on recruiting and staffing firms that have their finger on the pulse of the regional talent pool and know which professionals are ready to make a career move. Or, take the time to flesh out the role and type of candidate you envision being the perfect fit. Director of Client Services Jordan Wood shares the best early practices employers and hiring managers should follow to find that next great hire.

1. Appraise the position.

When Wood first starts working with a company, there are key questions he needs answered. The first: why is the position open? This not only gives Wood a better understanding of how to fill it, but is an opportunity for the employer to reflect on the role, as well. If this is a reactive situation and you’re replacing an employee, why did they leave? It’s also a chance for the hiring manager to consider the type of professional they see in the role. Do you want someone with a similar skill set to the previous worker or are you seeking something different? “It’s important to understand how they’re approaching this next hire,” he says. “It opens up a lot of avenues of where to go next.”

2. Establish a process.

Pinning down the hiring process is helpful to both the company and a third-party firm. Employers should know the number of interviews, people conducting the interviews and overall timeline. Temporary and permanent positions tend to dictate the speediness of the process, but should coincide with the ideal start date for either the type of roles.

3. Go beyond the job description.

Detailing the responsibilities of the role, requirements, type of position and salary are all concrete points that should be nailed out early on. But it’s just beyond that where you can really identify your true expectations. Wood refers to it as the must-haves and the nice-to-haves — the skills, credentials and experience that a desirable candidate must or should possess.

“I often ask if there’s anything else not listed on the job description that’s important for the role that they can share with me,” Wood says. Here’s a good place to figure in the company’s culture and work environment, he adds. “Is it fast-paced? Is the environment social or do they just put their heads down and work? That type of information helps us find the right candidate that can work in that specific environment.”

4. Take the call.

There are a few reasons why staffing and recruiting firms are a great solution for companies that find themselves strapped for talent. Staffing firms have access to candidates on a larger scale, knowing which professionals are available and have the background to address a specific employer’s needs. But it takes more than a bullet-point list to yield a successful outcome. In fact, a simple phone call can make all the difference.

“There’s only so much you can cover with a few notes passed back and forth,” Wood says. “I can hit those key points within a short conversation. Those 5-10 minutes can save you a half hour with a candidate that really wasn’t a good fit in the first place.”

Do you need help building your team? Check out our temporary and direct hire staffing services to learn more.

BY: Ron Proul, CEO

This hot, candidate-driven market reminds me of the bubbles of 1989, 2001 and 2007. And just like with those markets, many companies are understandably employing strategies that reduce outside fees. However, many of these strategies end up backfiring, rather than accomplishing the goal of attracting the very best talent.

In Century Group’s new series, CG Recruitment Trends, we’re going to take a look at some of the strategies that we’re seeing clients utilize in order to save on costs. As we demonstrate, it plays out like the classic scenario of saving on costs upfront, simply to pay more later. One such method: investing solely in internal talent acquisition. Unfortunately for these companies, this often does not yield the returns they had hoped for.

The Limitations of Internal Talent Acquisition

In contrast to utilizing a recruitment firm, developing an internal talent acquisition team takes time, is costly and requires talent itself — a Catch 22. Still, many companies choose to make this investment. But the volume of placements an individual or even a few individuals can handle has its limits, and it can become difficult for one person to specialize or develop a truly robust list of candidates. In contrast to internal talent acquisition teams who work with a limited pool of candidates, recruitment firms develop lengthy, up-to-the-minute lists of top-tier talent.

Recruiters Can Access Top-Tier Talent, Fast

As we outline in A Recruiter’s Guide to Finding Your Next Great Hire, recruitment and staffing firms have their finger on the pulse of the regional talent pool and know precisely which professionals are ready to make a career move.

At Century Group, we even pioneered a practice called The Group Concept, where recruiters are encouraged and incentivized to work on searches together. This philosophy ultimately magnifies search capacity as well as results for the client. Recruitment firms will save you cost and uncertainty while optimizing your search’s reach.

Reactive vs. Proactive

Most internal recruiting strategies are reactive — the talent acquisition team can only produce candidates interested in engaging when an opening occurs. Specialist recruiting firms, however, are proactive. Recruiters are constantly developing and refining a target list of talent — talent that represents the best of the market — to be tapped when the appropriate search arises.

When a client’s talent acquisition department says, “We have been looking for this position for months and you produced the candidate within weeks,” it’s indicative of how good recruiting professionals develop a deep talent pool and nurture relationships over a long period of time — maybe even years — so that they are able to immediately match the right candidate to the right opportunity.

The Value Proposition of Recruitment Firms

Many companies think recruiters just sit there passively waiting for the opportunity to send a bill for anyone who can pull from a job board. This common myth is due to the fact that the majority of recruiting professionals don’t adequately explain their value proposition.

At well-established recruitment firms like Century Group, recruiters nurture long-term relationships with skilled candidates and track these candidates throughout their career. Recruiters also have the advantage of being seen by candidates as an objective third party who can bring candidates multiple opportunities, which encourages candidates to engage more with clients.

Consider how a recruiter presents their value proposition when selecting a recruitment firm to work with — it will speak to how well they can negotiate on your behalf. In this market, a recruiter knowing and stating their value is not only paramount to their success in negotiations, it is also crucial to your success in this competitive marketplace. As Malcolm Forbes said, “Too many people overvalue what they are not, and undervalue what they are.”

When companies try to save on recruitment costs by investing solely in internal talent acquisition, the return on their investment suffers when it comes to talent, time and the reach of their job search.

In Part 2 of CG Recruitment Trends, we’ll explore the strategy of reducing fees and markups. Part 3 discusses the troubling trend of “tempnapping” and its detrimental effect on securing the best talent.

BY: Ron Proul, CEO

In the last installment of CG Recruitment Trends, we took a look at tactics for maximizing the ROI of your company’s recruitment strategy. This week, we’ll examine a troubling trend I’ve seen emerge in the recruitment industry over the past several years: an epidemic of companies and individual hiring authorities who, to put it simply, try to steal candidates.

With the ready availability of information online, companies have begun to help themselves to candidates after the agency introduction — even when a price and agreement are in place. The direct hire business has a name for this: backdoor hires. In temporary staffing, the American Staffing Association coined the term “tempnapping” in reference to this pervasive trend.

A Likely Story

It always starts the same. The client says we are going in a different direction and the candidate ghosts the agency. Back in the day of fax machines and phone call introductions, tempnapping happened once in a while. You would find out a few months or a year later. The paper trail could be difficult to assemble, but diligent recruiters always got what they were due.

I remember one candidate calling us years later saying, “Remember when I told you that I was leaving my temp assignment for a family emergency? Well, I didn’t. I conspired with your client so that they didn’t have to pay a fee for me.” The candidate intuitively knew it wasn’t right, but the client told the candidate that was the only way they would hire her. The client was a large real estate investment company, but somehow couldn’t afford the recruiting fee. When we asked the candidate the reason she was telling us years later, she said, “I am dying of a brain tumor and I want to have a clean conscience.”

Back in the day of fax machines and phone call introductions, tempnapping happened once in a while. You would find out a few months or a year later. The paper trail could be difficult to assemble, but diligent recruiters always got what they were due.

The Legal and Ethical Ramifications

In the digital age, we don’t need an act of confession because we find out almost immediately. The electronic trail is so easy to follow that when companies do it, I am honestly amazed. In any industry, there is a credit risk. But to have a company outright steal your product or service is shameful. Not only is it strikingly unethical, but as the American Staffing Association attests in their issue paper on tempnapping: in many cases, it is also unlawful.

The ASA points out that, “Merely offering employment to another’s employees is not in itself wrongful…” But if staffing firms are able to show fraud, coercion or other misconduct, the company’s actions can be found to be wrongful in a court of law. In these cases, a company’s efforts to cut costs results in costing them so much more.

Century Group once worked with a national retailer that wanted to hire someone. When we wouldn’t flex on pricing, they took our candidate and referred them to another temp agency that would. Thing is: the company misled the candidate, too. So when her assignment ended, the first thing she did was complain about the company’s ethics, forwarding us the LinkedIn solicitation from the company asking her to go around us. The company’s defense: we could never come to an agreement on pricing for that candidate. Our response: You could always find another candidate on your own. Whatever the justification, this type of behavior by companies is tantamount to shoplifting.

A Typical Defense

Each month, my team at Century Group uncovers one or two of these instances. Many companies don’t deny tempnapping and acknowledge that they owe a fee. But some resort to tactics akin to corporate bullying, threatening: “We won’t use you again if you charge us for this one.” Other familiar defenses we’ve heard: “We hired the candidate for a different position.” Or, my personal favorite, “The person who signed your agreement didn’t have the authority to bind the company.” The candidate doesn’t pay a fee, so it’s very easy for the company to entice them to go along with it in exchange for the benefit of a job.

I still remember the first time this happened to me and how I felt.  A company representative at a large entertainment conglomerate told me, “If you don’t like it, maybe you should get out of the contingency business.” This perception was so prevalent at this particular company that they eventually incorporated a clause in their contract to enable them to backdoor hire. I never worked on another deal there, and I managed to bill millions of dollars without that client.

Knowing Your Value

Ultimately, tempnapping and backdoor hiring are not only unethical — they also can lead to legal proceedings and costly consequences. A respectable recruiting firm will not want to work with a company that condones and entertains unethical behavior. Period. And respectable candidates will not want to work at companies that condone that behavior.

One story illustrates how the best recruiters and the best candidates don’t ever lower their standards. Why? Because they know their inherent value. Years ago we submitted a candidate’s resume for a high-paying investor relations role with a large public company. Upon receiving the resume, the hiring authority said, “I am not paying a fee for this person because someone on my staff knows them.” We let the company and the candidate know this wouldn’t stand, but the company still called the candidate directly to arrange an interview.

A respectable recruiting firm will not want to work with a company that condones and entertains unethical behavior. Period. And respectable candidates will not want to work at companies that condone that behavior.

During the interview, the hiring authority actually used the exact resume we sent them with our recruitment firm’s logo right at the top. When the interview was done and the company extended an offer, the candidate did something so honorable I got choked up when she told me. She said, “Sir, you claim you won’t pay the agency because my former coworker works for you and you already knew about me. But I didn’t know about you until the recruitment agency called me. At first, I didn’t know what to think, but you are actually interviewing me using the agency’s resume with their logo right on top. I can’t, in all honesty, work in investor relations for a company with such an egregious lack of business ethics.” This candidate was very intuitive about the company’s ethics: eventually that company’s CEO ended up in front of Congress for fraudulent lending practices, and his name is still in the news ten years later for the company’s flagrant misconduct.

Bottom Line

The best candidates, as well as the best recruiters, know their worth and never settle for less. In this market, a recruitment professional must select their clients carefully (steering clear of clients with a history of tempnapping and backdoor hiring), explain their value to both clients and candidates and they will be rewarded with a long, prosperous, and fulfilling career.

Competitive compensation is key to attracting and retaining top talent, right? Yes, but it’s not always enough — especially with this new generation of workers.

In a tight labor market, companies must appeal to the candidate on multiple levels. And when it comes to giving millennial employees what they want, a focus on employee development is a must. Take our 2019 Salary Guide, for instance. We found professionals are seeking roles that bring about personal gratification as well as financial, and are more likely to accept a position that provides growth potential and mentorship opportunities.

Here are three reasons why investing in professional development isn’t just a perk for your employees — but can positively impact your company’s success, too.

Increases Engagement and Productivity

This one is obvious: employees who feel stagnant or bored in their role are less likely to be engaged at work. A quick fix is to encourage growth throughout their time with your company. But don’t just take our word for it. According to a 2017 study by Association for Talent Development, companies that invest in professional development “enjoy a 24% higher profit margin” than those that don’t. Another study by the National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce showed that a focus on education, rather than equipment, was more effective in increasing workers’ engagement.

Helps Upskill Current Workers

Talent shortage? No problem. A great way employers are sidestepping this issue is by training staff to meet their current needs. Some companies are even letting their employees take the lead on what they’d like to focus on. If you can, include workers on new projects. This provides a challenging change of pace that helps stretch their skill set and inspires new ideas and company strategies.

Reduces Turnover and Attracts Talent

The career game may be all about who you know, but what you know still matters in today’s competitive labor market. And the best way to get ahead? Continue learning. Employers need to invest in professional development or employees will find a company that does. A Deloitte study shows that the millennial workforce is the most interested in professional development, with 71% reporting that they’d leave a company within two years if they’re unsatisfied with how their skills are developing. Employees want to know there’s a path to grow and move up in their role — and highlighting these opportunities when courting a candidate is key.

Brush up on more hiring trends by downloading our 2019 Salary Guide. Need accounting or finance staff? Contact us for your temporary or direct hire hiring needs.

BY: Ron Proul, CEO

Stellar recruiting strategies are key to company growth, but some tactics designed to save on recruitment costs end up undermining your goal of attracting the very best talent.

According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends report, 35% of businesses cite “limited budget” as one of the biggest talent acquisition challenges they face. But in implementing cost-saving strategies, many companies are losing sight of what provides the most long-term value and ROI when it comes to talent acquisition. In the last installment of CG Recruitment Trends, we looked at how engaging recruitment firms yields a greater ROI than investing solely in internal talent acquisition. This week, we examine the three ways companies undermine their ROI in recruitment by negotiating reduced fees and markups.

Losing Out on Talent

Let’s talk fees. Because what we do as recruitment professionals is incentive-driven and we work on a contingency basis, negotiating deep discounts is a less-than-effective strategy and counterproductive during a talent shortage. In a highly candidate-driven marketplace, a company deciding to reduce the amount they are paying for talent defies the most basic economic law of supply and demand.

The most talented professionals work on assignments that pay at market rate for services. Lawyers do it, accountants do it and the best recruiters do it. When a company negotiates a deep discount, they move down the food chain, and come out short when it comes to acquiring top-tier talent. In a competitive market, the best candidates are going to go to the highest bidder. Period. Paying less than market value for a candidate takes a toll on the quality of your candidates, as well as your employee retention in the long-run.

The Value of Time

Negotiating lower fees also limits the amount of time that recruiters are able to dedicate to a search, ultimately prolonging the process for the client.

When you work on a contingency basis, you get rewarded based on the hours you put into a job. Put yourself in the recruiter’s shoes for a moment: a work year is 2,080 hours. If a recruiter gives a 20% discount, they have to work 460 more hours to make up that time. And if you find a recruiter that is looking for an extra 460 hours of work at a discounted price, what kind of professional are you hiring?

The only way the discounting argument could logically pass muster is if the client said, “We are going to streamline the hiring process and let you and your firm make our final hiring decisions.” Sound ridiculous? Well, of course it does. So why does a discount seem like an effective way to motivate a recruiter with a fixed amount of time to produce the same volume of work? The math just doesn’t add up.

Recruiters are going to prioritize and invest their time in the searches that will bring the greatest value. When companies negotiate reduced fees, they are inadvertently reducing the amount of time a recruiter can dedicate to a search, undermining the ROI of engaging a recruiting firm.

Discounting Your Search’s Reach

Over-negotiating reduced recruitment fees also diminishes your search’s reach. At recruitment firms like Century Group, recruiters are encouraged to work on placements together, which ultimately magnifies the scope of your search as well as results for the client. When companies try to negotiate deep discounts, it makes it difficult for recruiters to get the whole team to work on an assignment. There isn’t an incentive for other team members to provide candidates — unintentionally shrinking your search’s reach, and making it more difficult to reach passive candidates.

In sum, when companies try to negotiate deep discounts, the return on their investment in recruitment suffers when it comes to talent, time and the reach of a job search. Fee-reducing strategies employed by the client are often the result of a phenomenon we’ll explore in the next installment of CG Recruitment Trends: recruiters not adequately presenting their value proposition.