I am a runner, I bike, I swim, and I compete in triathlons – not to win, just for fun and adventure. I really thought I was doing all this training to look and feel great in my fabulous forties. I did not realize that it would actually position me to become better at my job, rebuild the stamina that got me here in the first place, and enhance my ability to climb those recruiting hills and glide down the other side, and it has.

Before the Fordyce Forum conference, I knew I was changing my approach in my business. I was set to launch my new consulting firm this October and slowly hand over my recruiting business to another. At the conference I was re-awakened to my love for the actual art of recruiting, making the right match and creating the placement. I was enlightened to some things I was doing that were burning me out on the day-to-day hunt. When I came back I made a declaration to become a Recruiting Tour de Force and committed myself to making the necessary changes I needed to have that happen.

After analyzing my business, it was clear to me that we had a pretty large base in one general industry, which I have now labeled Drug & Medical Information. With only a few changes of ink I rebranded my company as specializing in that field, and I flew out to the DIA conference only three days after I returned from the Fordyce Forum. My son went online and built a plan for me so that I could use my four hours of time as wisely as possible when I arrived in Atlanta. I quickly walked the floor of the exhibit hall and met the players I set out to meet, made my contacts as an EXPERT in Drug & Medical Information, and flew back home the same night. I came back and called every referral I had and within two months signed up five new key clients in medical education, drug launch, and drug development.

My message to these companies and candidates is clear and simple. I am the person to know in the Chicago market, I am different because I benchmark each role, I meet the key players, I assess not only the candidate but also each opportunity and the company, and I present only the best of the best, oh and I almost forgot – the caveat is that I source names of people who are already working at your competitor or a targeted company or in a targeted industry of your choice. AND it is working! My largest customer even delivers me a fresh list of source names to call each month.

Yes, all these changes are positive and things are working out, but I won’t mislead you. My team and I are still working hard to build the new brand and the database. One of the things that keeps us going is when a staff member does something they never tried before and the fear that previously consumed them is released into a LOUD, JOYFUL HURRAH – that growth process feeds everyone else and gives us the power to keep pushing forward.

I am going to share my learning lessons from the last six months. My experience of what’s hot, what’s not, what’s worked, and what hasn’t as well as training tidbits from some of my seminars.

What’s HOT?

1. War on talent impacting every company on the planet
2. RPO – recruitment process outsourcing
3. Emerging industries – RPO, sourcing, selection, and retention
4. Major link between vacant chairs and loss of revenue
5. Niche recruiting disciplines
6. Industry experts
7. Recruiting being divided into sourcing and selection – some companies boast they can do it all; others segment into best services offerings in each category
8. Retention focus
9. Sourcing focus
10. Pipeline concern
11. Managers being held accountable for talent sourcing
12. Management being held accountable for retention
13. Management being held accountable for employee development

What’s NOT?

1. Generalist recruiting
2. Only using the job boards
3. Unemployed candidates
4. Running advertisements
5. Internet focus rather than people communications focus
6. One person being a hybrid expert at everything
7. Lone rangers
8. 35% fees for sourcing names only
9. Inflexibility of candidate interviews – location and time
10. Candidate evaluation based solely on gut instinct

What’s HOT with SOURCING?

1. RPO – complete sourcing and selection teams
2. Sourcing training
3. Direct recruiting
4. Ethical headhunting
5. Social media networking
6. Page ranking through blogging
7. Niche disciplines – everyone wants to know the expert
8. Virtual recruiting – work/life balance – stay-at-home moms raking it in
9. Corporate and agency contract recruiters making $25 to $105 per hour
10. Split boards and networks
11. Internal corporate and agency “sourcing” teams
12. Offshore sourcing
13. Active network association memberships
14. Agency high-performance teams – sourcers, evaluators, relationship managers
15. Sourcing systems, processes, and planning

What’s HOT with SELECTION?

1. Pre-employment screening
2. Pre-employment testing
3. Background checking
4. Credit checking
5. Social Security traces
6. DMV traces
7. Google searching
8. Lie detector testing (retail)
9. Benchmarking winners
10. Personality assessments
11. Behavioral-based interviewing
12. Values-based assessments
13. Competency testing
14. Skills testing
15. Pre-interview Online testing
16. Committee interviewing
17. Team-based assessments
18. Communication style assessments
19. Hiring systems
20. Clear expectations at time of interview
21. Pre-employment onboarding
22. Score and rank systems comparing candidates

Do’s and Don’ts of being a RECRUITING TOUR DE FORCE

DO

1. Get your clients’ commitment to you conducting the search.
2. Find out who your competition is, inside the company and out.
3. Find out what else they have done to find this person or these people.
4. Set the stage for you to control the hiring process.
5. Require that they put some skin in the game ($, time, resources).
6. Create a benchmark of values, behaviors, competencies by assessing the current key players on the team.
7. Gain more buy in that you are the recruiting force to be reckoned with.
8. Get a list of industry movers and shakers from the executives.
9. Get a list of companies to source from the executive directors.
10. Make it clear that all their competitors are calling the same list.
11. Clearly define the state of the talent pool and the challenge ahead of you.
12. Create a plan of action that utilizes 10 to 15 different resources for the search.
13. Set a goal to generate 10 new names per day, and reach out and touch 5 to 7 per day.
14. Limit your time on the boards.
15. Source good résumés.
16. Set the pace to harvest five names from each résumé.
17. Give the client a list that states when they can expect to get either results from you or reports on results from you.
18. Make a list of the social networks or resources you will use:
- LinkedIn
- Ning
- MySpace
19. Make a list of the traditional or recently traditional resources and boards you’ll use:
- Monster
- CareerBuilder
- Dice
- TheLadders
- Other niche boards
20. Run searches to see who comes up.
21. Contact these people and find out who they know.
22. Ask for introductions.
23. Ask for referrals.
24. Be an expert when you make those calls.
25. Use every call to brand yourself and your company and your discipline.
26. Ask who they know like themselves who is excellent at what they do and might be interested or who can route you in the right direction: remember, birds of a feather flock together.
27. Use some sort of system to qualify candidates so you can spend your time with the right people and generating more contacts.
28. Qualify your top candidates and compare them to the benchmark you established.
29. Continue to give your clients a view into the challenge of your search.
30. Be in communication about things like good candidates you are taking out of the running, new and similar search assignments, or pending candidates that you might be presenting. Let them know you are working for them. Stay in the loop on their progress as well.

DON’T

1. Jump into a search before you know what you are truly looking for.
2. Allow yourself to be treated like a vendor.
3. Take a brief specification or download the job description from the company website.
4. Overlook the importance of meeting or speaking with the key players – assess them through your own instinct or use appropriate tools.
5. Underestimate the power of an RPO or large vendor presence.
6. Get trapped into the find-the-right-résumé game.
7. Recruit only off the boards.
8. Get lazy or complacent.
9. Undervalue the time you’ll need to spend on shaking the referral tree and building your network.
10. Avoid planning.
11. Ignore your promises of what you said you’d produce.
12. Reject documentation or tracking of your results.
13. Work for free.
14. Spend too much time in one resource.
15. Let the candidate or the client run the show.

As I am taking my recruiting operation and merging it with my consulting firm, I am excited about the opportunities to compete in new markets, take on major projects, and play the recruiting game at a higher level. How exciting change and reinvention is!

I look forward to sharing more of my thoughts, lessons, and learning on the Tour de Force of Recruiting in my upcoming articles.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at http://www.alliancehrnetwork.com/employers/industry_training.asp.

I have, firsthand, experienced building a relationship from the ground up several times. I made one or two placements and before I knew it, I had made 20 or 30, or even 200 over a period of time. I am sure we have all had the experience of a very large account that, over time, uses us less or even stops using us entirely. In some cases, the hiring manager leaves the organization, and our relationship goes with him. In other cases, the company grows so significantly with our unique contribution that we work ourselves out of a job because they have added to their recruiting staff and can no longer justify our fees.

Either way, no matter how good you are or what great service you personally provide, companies change, people change, jobs change, responsibilities change, and often our key contact is out of the picture before we can blink an eye, and very shortly after that, so are we. We all know that relationships are critical in our line of business, yet that alone is not sufficient to guarantee our prosperity and long-term success as talent management professionals. It is the systems, processes, and operating practices that we utilize to deliver our services that withstand the test of time, personnel changes, and cost-saving measures.

There is NOTHING that differentiates and solidifies like standardized systems, processes, and service offerings. How many of us would be willing to promise or guarantee that our service consistently operates with and makes the best choices for their customers? For our industry to grow collaboratively in volume, VALUE must be present on a continuous basis.

For a moment use your imagination, the science fiction part of your brain, and go 20 years into the future. How will recruitment in 2027 be the same? How will it be different? Given the exponential growth taking place in the frontal lobe of the human brain over the past 300 years and the human mind’s capacity to expand and innovate, my theory is that some things will stay the same while everything will change.

Companies can and will find what they need through a myriad of alternative resources, other than a traditional 32% search and placement firm, and we as an industry must band together and innovate or we will see our fees, our margins, and our market share disintegrate.

I just read today in a leading staffing industry report that Adecco purchased a recruitment process outsourcing provider, which was no surprise to me after visiting the SHRM conference this summer and seeing 15 brand-new RPO providers exhibiting. Furthermore, I was recently advised to Google “baker’s dozen RPO” and came to find that again the industry leaders are jumping on the RPO bandwagon. These companies charge flat fees and conduct massive nationwide hiring programs; they systematize the process such that they can take advantage of the economies of scale. They charge much less than a standard placement fee and sign contracts with key members of the management team affording them exclusivity within multiple departments and with hiring managers within these companies. While other recruiters pooh-pooh these concepts, and companies, frankly their existence rocks me.

Recruitment outsourcing is here, and like Monster.com, it is another means to commoditize what many of us have been doing to earn a living for a very long time.

Am I fearful that this signals our industry’s demise? Certainly not. What I am concerned about is the future perception of our industry, and that we continue to be respected as the founders, leaders, and experts in the recruitment field.

There are obvious advantages to incorporating functional and repeatable systems and processes within your company. It begins with using these types of processes to differentiate and separate yourself and your service from the sea of competition. It is sustained through systematic management of those operating systems and processes that serve to augment the delivery of your service efforts while enhancing your ability to deliver on the promises of your sales representatives. Addition-ally, another aspect of having solid systems and processes is that you will see a dramatic decrease in the time it takes for a new recruiter to make her mark and generate a financial return on your hiring investment. Finally, you can reengineer your internal staffing plan to include a person or two who thrives on managing and working within defined parameters, and it leverages your overhead substantially because the rainmakers make it rain and get paid for that.

The taskmaster plans and prepares for the rain, catches the rain in buckets, and utilizes the rainwater for a myriad of purposes, and gets paid in accordance with that contribution. This also leaves the rainmaker to focus on the profound privilege of making it rain.

Some of the systems that I have built within my recruiting firm are search processes, applicant screening checklists, a front office intake system, and interviewing systems and guides. I have also harnessed some of the leading assessment tools and talent evaluation programs, as well as developing some of my own, to aid my staff in recommending the very best talent for our clients’ needs. Additionally, I have implemented a “Sandler,” a.k.a. Alliance, Selling System, as well as a marketing protocol structure and a proven order-fulfillment method. Actually, all in all I have developed a comprehensive 26-step “A to Z” recruitment and sales system that itemizes every step of the day-to-day operation, creates maximum efficiency, and eliminates many of the pitfalls encountered in the staffing and recruiting process.

Whether we are competing against corporate HR with lucrative hiring and referral bonuses, or with Monster, CareerBuilder, and the like, or with virtual recruiting networks, offshore recruiters, or RPOs, things certainly are NOT getting any easier; they are becoming more challenging every day. My call to action is to arm yourself with what the big guys are arming themselves with – systems, structures, and processes that afford you the ease to leverage your time, money, and resources. See my article in this issue on the RPO function.

Best in success.

Margaret Graziano
President/CEO
Alliance HR Network, Inc.
85 West Algonquin, Suite 170 Arlington Heights, Il 60005
(847) 690-1312

We all see the sweep of the human resources outsourcing craze (HRO) and how it enables companies to stay focused on their core competencies and not worry about the things they never meant to worry about in the first place, like payroll, benefits, compensation, hiring, assessment, succession planning, performance programs, etc. For many the HRO craze has created pathways of new revenue sources and grown current income sources, and for others the HRO craze has been one heap of frustration.

The business process outsourcing (BPO) movement has greatly impacted the staffing, search, and recruiting industry as we know it today. RPO is a form of business process outsourcing where an employer outsources, or transfers, all or part of its recruiting, selection, and onboarding activities to an external service provider. As companies strive to stay competitive, they are exploring ways to create efficiencies in their operations, and BPO, HRO, and RPO are ways to narrow their focus, play to their strengths, and leverage their power.

Because of a demographically declining slope of skilled available people, the normal ebbs and flows of business, and a global war for rising and shining stars, the RPO market is heating up. Players from Adecco to Kelly are jumping on the RPO band-wagon, and more are engaging every day. There are even two associations and large forum conferences serving the RPO community. The concept of an employer outsourcing the management and ownership of part or all of its recruiting process was first realized during the late 1990s, and today it permeates corporate America like the smell of freshly baked apple pie in a country store. RPO was originally created to fill the talent gap in the late 1990s. Between the dot-com boom and the Y2K crisis, companies simply did not have the resources to manage their recruitment internally, and their outsourced recruiters were reportedly not giving them the quality of care they required, hence the birth of RPO.

Cutting costs is often cited as the main reason for other forms of business process outsourcing, and this may also be the case with RPO. However, when most organizations consider RPO, it is not necessarily to cut costs, but rather to make their recruitment costs more variable and more closely aligned to organizational business cycle dynamics. While there is certainly a need for temporary staffing, executive search, and contingency recruiting, where RPO dominates is in the area of multiple hires for a similar or a group of similar roles. While this is okay for many private recruitment firms, why not put our hat in the ring and compete to fill 40 to 50 similar positions? Clearly the economies of scale and scope would only leverage our ability to grow and earn stronger profits.

The biggest distinction between RPO and other types of staffing is Process. In RPO the service provider assumes ownership of the process, while in other types of staffing the service provider is part of a process controlled by the organization buying their services. Given that there is a ton of training on “client control” and “owning the account,” I would think that for these reasons alone as an industry we would be champing at the bit to land good solid RPO contracts.

A main point to consider is that once the RPO masters the clients’ staffing requirements and creates efficiencies in the recruitment process, they could very easily become the single source provider for a company’s hiring needs. Given the mass access to offshore, virtual, and contract recruiters, who is to say that a great RPO cannot master every level of the client’s hiring needs, including the executive level? So if anything is possible, and it certainly has proven to be, why couldn’t a single source or a team of single sources band together and provide the same quality and quantity of sourcing, searching, assessment, placement, onboarding, and retention services?

The Benefits of RPO

RPO promoters claim that the solution offers improvement in quality, cost, service, and speed. RPO providers claim that economies of scale enable them to offer recruitment processes at lower cost, while economies of scope allow them to operate as high-quality specialists. Economies of scale and scope are said to arise from having a larger staff of recruiters focusing on individual clients rather than jumping from one assignment to the next; a continuous population of customized databases of candidate résumés; investment in peer-to-peer networks, associations, and educational affiliations; capital investment in sourcing tools; and high-volume buying power of hiring and selection tools.

Potential Concerns with RPO

Outsourcing of company recruitment processes may fail if not implemented correctly and with the right mind-set. An improperly implemented RPO could reduce the effectiveness of recruitment. Additionally, the costs charged for recruitment transactions may total more than the cost of the internal recruitment staff, if the internal staff is not using agencies and tools that increase their overhead. Additionally, an RPO solution may not work if the service provider has inadequate recruitment processes or procedures to work with the client.

How Can You Benefit From Incorporating an RPO Process in Your Firm?

Beginning with concrete job/role analysis and bench-marking through sourcing, assessment, and selection, as well as customized retention, onboarding, and employee-development programs, your firm can attract the same level of business that an RPO can serve. Many times, companies will choose an RPO for the process, systems, and assessment, onboarding, and retention tools and overlook a traditional search or placement company because they lack those tools.

Contrary to popular belief, most recruiting consultants who choose this profession as their life’s work embrace such service offerings, saying that they catapult their credibility and position them as true consultative partners in their clients’ businesses.

Whether you provide a complete soup-to-nuts approach or simply augment your current staffing services with segments of what the RPOs are offering, you will catapult your credibility with your clients when they are clear that you are well aware of what is happening in their world and that you are armed and ready to contribute to their talent management program at the level they require.

Competing in the HRO market allows you to leverage your economies of scale and scope while improving your efficiencies, making more placements, guaranteeing a steady stream of direct placement income, and growing your market share!

Innovate or evaporate: What are you waiting for?

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at http://www.alliancehrnetwork.com/employers/industry_training.asp.

It is a great time to be in this industry! The future is both exciting and distinctly different from recent years. There is room for all kinds of services offered by professionals who find, evaluate, and place people. In my opinion there has never been a better time to engage in both full-time direct placement and supplemental temporary staffing, simultaneously.

Everything from CEO briefings to The Wall Street Journal to CNN suggests that a top strategic initiative of many companies is to hire not only new talent, but also the right talent. Even with the diminishing available talent pool in this country, and the tempting message about the lower costs of skilled and unskilled offshore labor providers, I anticipate that employers will put their money toward hiring solid people and creating positions that leverage opportunities to innovate, compete, and achieve corporate objectives. In my 22 years of running a staffing and placement desk/company, my observation of this talent “shortage” is that clients are demanding more, not less, and are unwavering in their expectations to attract and hire “difference makers” and “key contributors.”

This not only adds opportunity for temporary-service firms to cash in on supplementing those vacancies while their clients hold out for the right hire, but it also affords a magnitude of opportunity for the human resources service provider that masters the fit and executes in a manner that continually provides that fit to their customers. It provides even more opportunity to companies that can effectively do both.

Consider that unemployment is as low as most of us have seen it. Our candidates are fully aware that the opportunity to work, and work full-time, is there if they so choose. They are becoming choosier. If at all hirable, most candidates who want a full-time job are interviewing for perm positions, even while temping for you. So, offering perm placement to your temporary talent pool is just good common, as well as business, sense. It tells your temporary employees that you have their best interest at heart and are always on the hunt for a full-time job for them, and it gives you unique leverage as the current employer who will serve as the reference. Temp employees whose intention is to have you give them a good recommendation make the very best type of temporary workers.

While temp and perm are very different, they share many commonalities. Companies do business with people they like. Even when a company has a temporary service agreement with Manpower, or Spherion, they will almost always take quality, “difference making” candidates from other placement firms that understand their culture, needs, and fit. Just as a great service coordinator on the temp side masters the art of duplicating “right” and builds a strong pipeline of available talent, the astute perm recruiter is well aware of the replication processes and their clients’ hiring cycles, ready to deliver when their clients have a need.

Additionally, before a temp staffing company enters the perm placement business, there are other things that must be considered. In addition to the obvious, such as who will do the work, a major consideration is whether people will run a blended desk, where both temp and perm placement are provided, or if a separate team of folks will be developed who are dedicated to identifying perm candidates and marketing those candidates to existing or new customers. If the decision is to open a perm service and maintain two separate divisions, a policy will have to be set forth for candidate and client ownership because there is sure to be a squabble over who did what, and what that contribution was worth.

Likewise, the temp staffer and the perm recruiter share many of the same behaviors. Both typically have a strong sense of urgency, have varying degrees of competitiveness, and enjoy variety and customer interaction. And top performers on both sides are aware of and eager to hit their production goals. The most glaring difference I can see is the time in which the employee is expected to produce a result, and that cannot be underestimated. I was once told that working a temp desk is like running the 50-yard dash, while running a perm desk is like the mile-and-a-quarter race: fast at first, then slow and steady, then come in with a strong stride. The other big difference is that most of the work on the perm side is done before the placement happens, while most of the work on the temp side is done after the placement starts. Temp takes a strong service and a light sales mentality, while perm takes a strong sales and a discerning service mentality.

Temp companies should also recognize the difference in the sales process. Temporary sales are typically an industrial selling solution and a client-centric order-fulfillment philosophy, whereas the most popular form of perm selling is running with an MPC, and the emphasis is on getting great people great jobs. From what I have seen, heard, and experienced, the spin selling system works well in both sales scenarios. What works the same in both types of staffing is that you are perceived as ONLY as good as the last person you placed. Everything you do can and will be held for or against working with you again in the court of more business.

There is also the infrastructure: the systems, operating practices, and day-to-day functionality of the office. What works on temp may work on perm, but you will need to modify your screening and selection process as well as add a few steps to manage your teams’ effectiveness. And then there is candidate control, preparation, counteroffers, navigating multiple offers, and negotiation.

Working out billing issues in advance is smart. Will your company offer temp to perm with no fee? Or will you stand on the ground that you will offer perm placement and ANYTIME someone takes someone out of their assignment parameters, a fee will be due? Or is your policy determined on a case-by-case basis (not recommended).

Another item to consider is the caliber of people being placed. Are they the same people you are placing on temp? Or are they higher-caliber, harder-to-find people? Can you interview them both in the same office? Or do they need separate entrances? It seems trite; however, birds of a feather flock together, and often when high-caliber perm candidates come in for an interview and see five industrial-labor applicants in the lobby, those perm candidates will unconsciously select themselves out before they even know what your company is offering. First impressions are lasting.

Compensation is another item to consider, as perm recruiters typically get paid very differently than temp. Answers to most of the questions above will determine the answer to the compensation question.

Finally, how you will differentiate your company from your competitors? Are you in a niche market? Is your service offering totally unique? Is it your recruiting maneuvers that set you apart, or your selection process? What can you leverage to make your company special?

The first thing to do before offering perm placement is to investigate the other services that your clients are already using: what is working, what is not working. Second, take pen to paper and answer the questions listed in this article. Third, evaluate your team and determine whether they have what it takes to offer perm placement at the level that your planning efforts lead you to choose. The only mistake in launching is in not planning and heading face first into the water. As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war for talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at http://www.alliancehrnetwork.com/employers/industry_training.asp.

Here it is July 2007, the halfway point of the year, and my business instinct tells me a shift needs to occur for my contingency staffing and placement practice.

For 22 years I have been placing business professionals in companies, and for 22 years I have been getting paid after I make the deal. Some days I feel like the most powerful person on the planet, but other days I feel like one of many mice on a wheel aimlessly chasing an illusion of cheese.

Recently, I find myself resenting some of my clients, resenting staff that cannot produce fast enough, resenting that 80% of my income is based on a contingency fee, and resenting the constant chase for the illusive cheese.

Why the resentment? Because over the past two quarters, my contingency placement business has been facing some significant challenges. The type of assignments we had been receiving – and filling with ease – are slowly disintegrating. Today, the types of assignments we are receiving are much harder to fill because of tougher specifications, and the fact that umpteen agencies are working on the same assignments. In a market like this, my experience in the contingency placement business make me feel like we are all a bunch of mice in a cage running on a wheel – and getting nowhere. With a void of candidates facing everyone, I am seriously reevaluating my business and making those necessary shifts.

As the business leader in my company, I ask myself: “What needs to shift?” “What do I want?” “What will it take for me to love what I do every day, or almost every day?” “What will make us more profitable?” “What will make our work more fun?” “What business am I really in? Is it retained search? Contingency placement? Employment agency?”

As I ask these questions and feverishly search for answers, I suddenly hear a voice from the past. When I was 22 years old and just starting out in the placement agency business, my first boss said to me, “Margaret, it is important that you understand our business model. We don’t fill job orders here; we place candidates. And THAT philosophy is at the center of everything we do. Don’t forget that.”

When I started my business, I consciously made a choice to be different from other placement agencies. Alliance’s mission statement would reflect a service philosophy to meet our clients’ needs in the best way possible, period. Since September 1993, there have been many times I have seen, experienced, and felt the huge positive impact of that choice and there have been many times that I have seen, felt, and experienced the sober negative impact of that choice.

At this point, 80% of the income generated from my company’s administrative and business services placements comes from contingency fees. While that is pretty normal in that line of business, the issue is that we have become so client-centric that we operate more like a retained search firm, with in-depth processes, high-quality send-outs, personality assessments, and behavioral inter-viewing; each client who inter-views a candidate from Alliance experiences the red carpet treatment.

This model has been successful in regard to account penetration and referral business. It has also landed us some big accounts with multiple departments and multiple openings. But it has required our focus to be very narrow in the sense that we are here only to fill client needs, as opposed to candidate needs. Candidates who didn’t fit immediate needs were put on the back burner, stored in the database for a potential future.

We have not dedicated ourselves fully to finding employment for these high-quality candidates. We haven’t dedicated sufficient time, attention, concentration, and focus on running candidate MPC campaigns. While there have been weekly email campaigns sent out featuring our “best of the best” candidates, there has not been a disciplined effort to represent a candidate and market that candidate to a specific set of companies that might have a need. The entire focus of my team has been to fill our clients’ jobs, and it has been that way as long as I can remember.

However, given today’s market shift and talent scarcity, I sense that my business model and my attitude need to be adjusted. Many of my business colleagues agree that not only is the cheese down that tunnel a bit moldy, but there are also too many mice trying to nibble on the same bit of it.

Don’t get me wrong: we are making money. Yet we are working 10 times harder to make the same amount of money we made last year. I am spending much more on recruiting resources than I did last year. The time-to-fill metric is creeping up. And we are dealing with too many distractions such as goofy, unrealistic job orders pounding on our door. In some circumstances, good clients are becoming bad clients because they are not managing their open job requisitions strategically, they are waiting too long before listing their jobs, and then they are so desperate to fill jobs with the right people that they are machine-gunning their orders out to anyone and everyone who will work for them: filling the maze with mice running for the cheese.

Much as a car wreck stops traffic, the other day I had a pretty significant interruption of the maze running and cheese chasing. My 16-year-old son, James, who is interning for us this summer, was working hard to “find” candidates using some of our new search technology. After a day and a half of researching he said, “Mom, why are we working so hard to fill jobs that everyone else is trying to fill when there does not seem to be many people to choose from, yet there are other higher-level candidates out there who we could be representing like a talent agent? Why aren’t you doing that, Mom?”

My immediate reaction was, “Nice point, Millennium child, your impatience is getting the best of you, but we need to fill these orders, so just get back to work and stay focused.”

And then it hit me. After all these years of running things my way, I forgot what my first boss taught me. I forgot about the basics. I forgot how I built that book of business in the first place. I was humbled to realize that it’s time to get back to the basics of my rookie training.

Back to Basics

In hindsight, the way I made it to a six-figure income after just three years in the business was really pretty simple. Reaching the Pinnacle Society resulted from more of the same, over and over again. I used the system that my mentors taught me and it worked: I made money, I got people jobs, my clients were happy, and I was in total control of my destiny.

The system required taking a really great candidate – some-one with whom I had forged a relationship, knew had market-able skills, knew would be a key player wherever they would go – and then getting on the phone and calling anyone who might need this person. I called similar industries, similar companies. I called old job orders. I called newspaper ads. I did whatever I had to do to market this person, like a talent agent would market a movie star. Additionally, I did that for three to five people daily. Somewhat how Ari markets Vince in the HBO series Entourage.

As I engage the old memory bank, my head floods with the way we used to do this job. From 1983 to 1987, my first employer had 40-something employment agents. We were all paid from a draw on commission and a 16% payout of each side of the deal. The house provided the resource budget to find candidates. The average income per employment agent was $85,000. Those earn-ing less than $65,000 were considered low producers.

To maintain candidate owner-ship, we agents had to have candidates come to the office and work side by side with us until we placed them in jobs (we called them “repeats”). These were candidates we were committed to placing who were also committed to us placing them. They came to the office every day. They took turns sitting at our desks while we would call through the Rolodex and phone book, and crisscross directory or job ads for them. With 40 or so agents doing this, it seemed like there was always somewhere to send my “repeats.” While I was on the phone looking for Mary, one of my coworkers got a send-out for Suzie, and vice versa.

Following this effective and slightly crazy system, I was able to close an average of 10 placements per month and fill 10 job orders per month. I did this in 43 hours per week. There was not time to match candidates to open orders that were not obvious during the day, so I did that at night. There was not time to do quality-assurance calls during the day, so I did that at night. My “admin” work was done at night, while my people work was done during the day. I never used email because I didn’t have it. I didn’t use the boards because the Internet was not a “tool of the trade” yet. I did however use the phone, nonstop.

I still remember having a lunch break with one of the partners of the agency; our average lunch hour was 30 minutes. She was talking to us about how to get back on track when things did not seem to be working. She said, “If you ever get to the point that deals are not closing, or you’re spinning your wheels, and are not getting job orders or send-outs, then get up and stretch, or go outside. Then come back to your desk and wipe everything off, except your telephone and your Rolodex or prospecting resource. Then pick one candidate you think is placeable – someone who is highly skilled, marketable, hungry to work with you and will do anything and go anywhere you ask, and is flexible about money – and then call everyone you can about her or him until you earn a send-out. Within two days things will pick up, I promise.”

That model worked for me back then, and I believe some version of it could work for my company now in a market with significantly more jobs than there are talented people. To effectively implement this new/old philosophy into my company, I want to review what worked and what didn’t back then and decide what can be revamped, tweaked, or improved for today. I plan to mine any gold nuggets of wisdom that I can from previous employers and my early days in the business as an effort to set us mice on a more fruitful path.

It is crystal clear to me that the conscious choice I made in 1993 regarding a client-centric philosophy has served its purpose and may continue to serve a purpose in a new retained search venture. But it is no longer sufficient (for me) in my contingency search business. It is time for a new conscious choice that applies to today’s market and which honors and utilizes the lessons learned from yesterday as well as the innovations of today.

One of the shifts I will be making in my contingency placement business is to become candidate-centric. Other changes I see on the horizon will include entering niche markets and adding a retained team in an effort to completely separate my contingency and retained businesses, as well as my staff’s focus. We will offer clients the level of service they are willing to pay for. If a client is listing a job with more than my company, it must be a job for which we already have the candidates in the house or one for which we can easily locate quality candidates. No more mice tunneling for cheese.

In implementing a candidate-centric approach to running the contingency placement side of my business, I plan to include some practices borrowed from my first employer as well as things I’ve learned over the years. Another idea is to offer a dedicated marketing campaign for highly qualified working (and hungry to make a change) candidates. We will market these candidates using email campaigns, telephone campaigns, and specific invite-only career fairs. I think if it is done right, candidates might pay for it. Look at how the coaching business has taken off: People of all levels are paying for advice.

Additionally, or as part of the campaign, we can create a candidate certification using our assessment program to certify that a candidate is in the top of the range among the bench-marked best for a specific role, level of accountability, and/or industry.

Another change I will make, as the leader of my organization, is that I personally will work on only retained and consulting projects to leverage my time, effort, talent, and wisdom.

If there really is a skilled labor shortage – and from all indicators there is – we will all need to make some adjustments. Some of us will make subtle adjustments and some of us will make significant adjustments. I know I am up for the game.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliance hrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Down-loads section at http:// www. alliancehrnetwork.com /employers /industry_training.asp.

One of the most critical Success Principles is using your time wisely. While squandered money can sometimes be replaced, wasted time is gone forever.

The pace at which the world is moving seems to be increasing exponentially. We now have the tools to monitor a universe of information continuously: companies buying and selling; changes of ownership; economic ups and downs; the war on terrorism; the war for talent; the war on drugs; natural disasters; racial tension; campus massacres; and at home my kids growing by inches every time I turn around. Things are different now, and downtime is diminishing.

So, how do you muster enough power to accomplish everything you need to get done in a frenetic world where information overload is the norm, and stay committed to being the best you can be at work and home?

My personal breakthrough in time management has to do with gaining mastery on three levels: leveraging my power, choosing my opportunities wisely, and becoming a power user in Outlook. Each level took me time to grasp, master, and implement. The breakthrough into power, freedom, and peace of mind I experienced came from a course I attended years ago (when I was a Landmark Seminar Leader) called Mission Control. That course certainly had an impact on me; it showed me that I was spending a considerable amount of time doing things that did not “light me up,” that I was not particularly adept at, or that were simply distractions on the path to achieving my goals.

That course made me realize there were many things I needed to delegate, outsource, or simply stop doing. Over time, I built a business in which anything that I was not any good at, did not have value to me personally, or did not bring forth new opportunities for Alliance, was delegated. Using the power of talented people and resources has enabled me to essentially clone myself 25 times – through the use of full-time, part-time, and “virtual” employees, or off-site consultancy capacities. Now I have much more time to watch my sons’ basketball games and to be a part of their lives, and all because I do not try to do everything myself. This is a continual learning process because discovery takes place each time I ask, “Is this the best use of my time, and if not, who can I find to take care of this and how can I structure it so it works for everyone?”

The second level to gain mastery of was attracting and choosing my customers and business opportunities wisely. Who are the people you find pleasurable to work with? Who are the people who respect and appreciate my 22 years in the recruiting and selection industry as a top performer ranked for quality and integrity? Who will pay me to save their time? Who has a compelling mission that people can wrap their hands around and to which they want to contribute? Who offers a well-managed work environment that fosters excellence in employee performance as well as in development?

The more specific I am on what type of customers and opportunities I want to represent, the easier it is to spend my time on things that have a payoff or make a difference, and that use my best skills and talents. When I compromise any of the above for the sake of “getting a deal,” I always wind up spinning my wheels, becoming frustrated and exhausted. The technique of choosing your clients wisely can also be applied to attracting and choosing your perfect mate and/or employee and is based on a process called the “law of attraction,” a process detailed in the book Attracting Perfect Customers (Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez).

The last level that I needed to become powerful with was using a tool like Microsoft Outlook to foster mastery in productivity and eliminate time bandits. I learned about every function that Outlook offers and how to use those elements of the software to impact the way I spend my time as well as to create efficiencies in my workday.

The message is clear: time – there is a limit on it; we have only so much of it; and as the song says, “You only got 100 years to live.”

Best in Success.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at http://www.alliancehrnetwork.com/employers/industry_training.asp.

After 22 years in recruiting and staffing, I am energized by what I see ahead for our industry. The future is both exciting and distinctly different from where we have been in recent years. I feel there will be room for all kinds of services, offered by professionals who provide the traditional employment agency service – those who headhunt and represent only employed candidates, and those who choose to expand toward more of an organizational-development approach to their clients’ talent needs.

What I have read, heard, and observed from The Wall Street Journal to CNN to CEOs suggests that a top strategic initiative of many companies is hiring not only new talent, but the right talent.

Given the diminishing available talent pool in this country, and the compelling message about the lower-cost skilled labor and processes of offshore providers, I anticipate that employers will put their money into hiring people and creating positions that leverage opportunities to innovate, compete, and achieve corporate objectives. In my experience, as a result of this talent “shortage,” clients are demanding more, not less, and are unwavering in their desire to attract and hire “difference makers.” The days of “if they breathe, they’re hired” are over, and won’t soon return. If a company is in desperate need of a body, they won’t have to pay large placement or staffing fees; they can settle for a body from a $1,000-per-hire offshore recruiter. For that matter, if the job can be done remotely, what would prevent them from hiring someone who lives in Asia or India and is willing to do the job for a whole lot less than the rest of the world? I believe that recruiters who learn to master the organizational-development aspects of their customers’ talent needs, and who practice a holistic recruiting and hiring methodology, will not only boost their reputation but will also increase their marketability, credibility, bandwidth, and income.

In every industry, things change. The innovators and early adapters ride the wave and are agile enough to deal with the ebb and flow, while the old-schoolers often get left behind.

Industries that have gone by the wayside or have been replaced with faster, more efficient, and, in many cases, higher-quality services and products include textiles, software development, and telecom. Someone else, somewhere else, can do it better, faster, and cheaper. It is a deep concern of mine that as an industry, we must band together to raise the bar on what we expect from ourselves. Otherwise, there will be no value proposition differentiating us from the many alternatives that provide similar services. To some extent, we already compete with our clients’ internal HR departments, and their established hiring systems, processes, assessments, and instruments.

Additionally, many of us are fighting price battles against over-promising, under-delivering low-cost providers. If we intend to stay out of the Wal-Mart game, something’s got to improve.

The branding expert who aided me in creating Alliance’s value proposition persuaded me to redefine my company as an HR consulting firm specializing in the acquisition and assessment of top talent. It took some time, but now when I look at my business and client list, I see the difference this has made in my business. Our clients continue to call us because candidates who pass our assessments will pass theirs. We have even developed benchmarks for entire departments, so that we have influence over the fit of that department and have the access to “replicate” the fit over and over again. We do this by first knowing how to attract the right person, then by knowing what traits they need to have walking in the door to be a natural fit. The beauty of this type of differentiator is that no other resource can accommodate our clients’ needs as efficiently or as effectively as we can.

The assessments we utilize evaluate everything from a candidate’s motivations, values, and behaviors to their communication style, personality traits, and organizational abilities.

In today’s competitive talent market, with candidates demanding top salaries, companies have the right to know what they are getting, as well as the right to expect a return on investment with each hire. As the specifications get tougher and tougher to meet, I continue to position myself as an organizational-development consultant. My aim is to partner with my client companies in creating the specifications for whom the person needs to be, what they have to accomplish, and how they will interact in the company, rather than to be another recruiter chasing the “perfect” résumé.

There are many choices available in assessments. I recommend that you start by familiarizing yourself with the categories of assessment that exist in the marketplace. Some are hiring tools that focus only on one dimension of a person’s ability, such as mental acuity, while others focus on a person’s motivation, communication style, or personality traits. It is imperative that you choose the right assessment for your service delivery and for your customers’ specific needs. I strongly recommend interviewing your clients and finding out what they want, as well as what would leverage your placement and consultancy power with them. You may find that what is most important to your customer is to utilize a management-oriented assessment tool that enables them to better communicate with and mentor their newly hired employees.

You may find that what they really need is a formalized comprehensive assessment that encompasses all 10 dimensions of personality to aid in the candidate-evaluation phase of the hiring process. You may find that your clients really need people of a certain mental capacity because their business process is rapidly advancing, requiring someone with very strong conceptual-reasoning skills. The bottom line is that every business has different needs. Knowing and understanding your clients’ assessment needs helps you choose the right assessment wisely.

Validation is a key factor. If you offer one single assessment tool, you really need to have evidence that it has passed a validation process, and that the assessment you are choosing to market has broad application and appeal. Some assessment companies state in their marketing material that their offerings are not to be used as a hiring tool, while other assessment tools fail the 4/5th rule. The 4/5th rule is a mandate that states if 4/5ths of a protected class cannot pass the assessment, then that assessment is most likely a discriminatory assessment. Another form of validation is benchmarking. When an assessment is given to over 100 top performers in a specific role, the benchmark validation is the average sum of the results in each category. Another form of validation is a measure on the assessment that indicates the amount of times candidates distorted their answers. When a candidate distorts on the assessment, the validity of that assessment is greatly diminished.

Partnership is another aspect of picking the right assessment to represent. Consider carefully how the assessment company views your business specifically and our industry in general. Do they see you or our industry as their competition? Do they consider you a high-level strategic partner, upon whom they are counting to leverage and grow their market share? Over the past eight years I have taken, sold, represented, and administered over 22 different assessments. Each company has its own specialty and its own philosophy.

Some love our industry, some hate our industry; some are waiting for our demise so they can swoop down and chomp on our clients’ staffing budgets. Some refer to our business in “less than professional” terms, and others categorize us as they would a used-car salesman. I caution you to take your time and partner with someone who respects what you have built and the livelihood you intend to maintain. Find out about their training and certification courses, research their programs, and discern how they will integrate with your current business practices. Selling an assessment you know nothing about and using it to determine a candidate’s ability is akin to walking around with a loaded gun without reading the instructions or getting fully trained in its use. I strongly encourage you, if you choose to offer an assessment as an element of your business, to choose wisely. Be prepared to answer tough questions and to sit in the hot seat when a candidate that the CEO wants to hire has many red flags and he or she wants your advice on how to proceed.

Commitment is another key element in the decision to utilize assessments in your business. Are you prepared to get certified and operate a unit of your company that specializes in assessments? You will need to have someone on staff who can learn these assessments, understand the validation process, and is conversant in the results they provide. I am not suggesting that you will need someone full-time initially. If you are a big producer, sitting on the phone reviewing assessment after assessment with your client will eventually get boring, or get in the way of your selling. I personally review key candidate assessments with my clients when the role is significant, or when I have been hired specifically for the purpose of evaluating the top three on the short list, or if I am being paid as an assessment consultant.

The other element to consider is the training and development of your recruitment team. If you are selling and marketing assessments and they are being fully integrated into your business offerings, the people searching for, assessing, and representing the talent must be knowledgeable so they can make educated business recommendations. As an alternative, you can simply offer your clients another tool and pay a price to have a third party do the analysis. This way you don’t have to get wrapped up in training and developing your team to interpret and integrate the assessment with your existing business systems. You can buy assessments on an as-needed basis. You will merely need to have a high degree of confidence in a person whom you select to aid you in interpreting the assessment.

Determining your pricing model is an important step in your process of using assessments in the placement process. Are you offering this service as a “value add,” or as an additional fee for service? I do both. In some cases, we charge a slightly higher fee for our placement services, or a retainer, and all the assessments are included. In other cases, the employer purchases a group of assessments from Alliance and then we are available to interpret those assessments as they are administered.

My goal in offering assessments is to distinguish myself as a prominent talent-assessment firm first and a recruitment company second. This type of messaging frequently gets me the search assignment that previously might have gone to someone else. Additionally, this differentiated offering affords me the opportunity to be perceived as a single-source consultant, and as a true partner. I often find myself explaining to a client why I am not presenting a candidate who looks really great on paper. This leads to instant credibility.

My advice to you in choosing to assess or not assess is to first hire a coach or an advisor who is not trying to persuade you to buy their assessment. Using an unbiased third party will enable you to make the right decision for you and your company.

Secondly, take your time and conduct due diligence. There are scores of people every day who jump in, pay the fees, sign up, take a Web-based seminar, and are off and running, only to find out that they are running in the wrong direction. Assessments should not get in the way of your business; they are a tool to aid in your business. If you are not fully attuned to how you will use them, and how much value or revenue they will generate, then hold off until you are clear.

Third, get yourself training, and learn to interpret all levels of these assessments. Knowledge is power, and lack thereof is a ding to your credibility.

Many client companies are familiar with and utilize some sort of assessment tool or assessment methodology in their hiring process. Several of these companies are partnering with assessment consultants in their hiring and leaving us out of the final decision-making process. These companies are confiding in and taking advice from a “different” third party, who does not necessarily have the depth or breadth of understanding of our clients’ business and personnel needs that we have. In conclusion, I recommend partnering with an assessment company that you trust. The sooner you expand your ability to serve your clients in a more holistic manner, the sooner you will gain the ability to leverage yourself as the key consultant in all of your clients’ hiring decisions.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at www.alliancehrnetwork.com/ employers/industry_training.asp.

“People get hired for what they can do and
fired for who they are.”

Employment turnover cost the U.S. economy a trillion dollars last year. What is it costing your company? The estimated costs of a poor hire run from three to seven times a person’s salary. With stiff competition, costs rising, and margins shrinking, no company can afford $300,000 in poor-hire losses. When I say costs of a mishire, I don’t mean just the wrong hire’s salary. I am talking about the management and training hours eaten up, the dissatisfied customers, the compromised processes, and employee morale issues – it all adds up.

Have you ever hired someone who wowed you in the interview, had a great résumé, said all the right things, even got good references – all in all you had a great feeling about this person – only to find out after she started the job that she made excuses for not achieving objectives; she had poor follow-up skills, compromised your company’s values, and was either unaware of how to, or simply unwilling to, turn her performance around?

On the other hand, have you ever hired people who are just gems? No batteries or in-depth training required, they come in and hit the ground running just because of who they are, what they value, and how well they use their strengths. These people take virtually no ramp-up time, everyone loves to work with them, and you count your blessings every day they come to work because you feel really lucky to have them. Every one of us wants someone like the latter; they are often self-starters, are quick thinkers, and believe in being proactive. Given these two very different scenarios, the question becomes “So how do I get more of the great matches, steer clear of the not-so-great ones, and improve my hiring batting average?”

When you are aware of the costs associated with bad hires and choose to turn that around, you are one step ahead of the game. Then, by choosing a solid system, obtaining thorough training, and again being committed to changing how you hire – along with a good old dose of patience and discipline – your company will soon be geared up to eliminate the rest and hire only the best.

Putting a systematic hiring process in place, using it consistently, holding people accountable for the activities and objectives of the system, and identifying the core values that the position and company require is the only way I have seen, read about, or experienced to obtain more employees of the second type. With only four full-time people, my company has often knocked results out of the park, and when I look at the competitors in my industry, many of them need three to four more staff members than Alliance to produce what we produce in margin. This is due to my ability to say no to the wrong people, terminating early when I get duped, and my unwillingness to compromise my company’s core values and processes.

Knowing the core behaviors and values of the person you hire allows you to look into the future and know who the employee will be on the job after the initial six-month “honeymoon” is over. This shortens ramp-up time, increases productivity, reduces turnover, and decreases costs. When creating a behavioral interviewing process, first and foremost hold your company values and operating standards in the highest regard, and ask yourself and the management team, “What are the non-negotiable operating standards that must be met for us to maintain our reputation (for whatever you are known for, as it is different for every firm), be profitable, and continue to deliver high-quality service to our customers?” After that, very methodically and systematically verbalize and define the smart objectives, or Key Performance Indicators, required to achieve in the role. Then, drill down and ask yourself and the management team, “What are the day-to-day big-picture activities or core functions that this person will have to fully engage in to effectively achieve these objectives in the time frames we expect?” Once you have this knowledge and are crystal clear about what you expect from this person, then it is time to determine who they need to be, what they need to have done in the past, and what mandatory walk-in skills and talents they need to have.

The part of the search-planning process that I find most rewarding and fun – heck, I even charge my clients for this service – is the drill-down process. This creative and strategic type of thinking has the hiring managers and the recruiter really discuss and debate who a person really needs to be to naturally perform at the level of competence the company requires.

In the system that Alliance uses, and Keen Hire developed, we use a model that encompasses the four main categories of behavior; and it delves into the candidates’ approaches to thinking and solving problems, modes of acting, styles of interacting, and core motivations – all very important things when you consider how a person will go about doing his or her job. Consider whether you have someone who is very money-motivated but does not have much commitment to service, does not build solid relationships, and does not really believe in your core values or value proposition – uh-oh, be concerned about customer retention. What if you hire someone with lots of passion but no organizational skills, or poor planning and delegating skills? This person can mess up a two-car funeral.

How about if you hire someone who is all about the quality, but has no discernment and is not proactive in day-to-day activities? This person will certainly spend many hours a day making sure things are right, but won’t initiate any training to prevent the wrong things from happening again. Often these types of people feel victimized on the job and work long hours – not because they have to, but because they don’t see any other way. I could go on and on; I have seen almost every goofy scenario and often experienced it. I wonder how some of these people make it in business, and then I understand that most of their bosses probably have the same issues, which is why American companies are in such deep doo-doo and the American workforce is predicted by so many to be headed for trouble.

There are people everywhere who can and will do it better, cheaper, and faster, and given the opportunity, they will. My 22-year staffing veteran’s philosophy is that we are the people supplying corporate America with their people, and we need to not tolerate this craziness and ineffectiveness in the hiring process within our own firms. We need to ante up our inside hiring practices so that we can deliver the same level of service on the outside. Frankly, our people need to be better than these mish-mashes of bad habits all rolled up into one person. Our people must be exemplary models of what we say we do, otherwise there is no integrity in what we say we do.

Getting back to selecting better people: The next step is to facilitate a conversation between the key decision-makers for this role about what the critical behaviors are that lead to success. Many times, taking a good look at the best performers, literally watching them operate on the job or having them behaviorally interviewed in depth, will pull forth a magnitude of critical information about what right looks like. The biggest challenge I find is that as soon as someone gets a glimpse of the power of this industrial-psychology model, they want someone who has every great trait under the sun. Then I have to remind them that there is no job that someone that powerful would apply for – they either already have their own company or they are a self-development guru like Jack Canfield or Stephen Covey. I then have to coach them to pick only the most important traits.

In the behavioral interviewing and industrial psychology industry, I have been told, the average selection is between six and nine traits per role, and when the role is the utmost senior level, maybe 11 traits, at the maximum. To narrow the gap of wanting everything, often further education or coaching makes all the difference. A thorough understanding of each trait, and what complements and leads to other traits, can help narrow the list. For example: if someone is naturally proactive and has a desire to be the best in the workplace, this person will often develop a love of learning, and mastery will be a natural form of self-expression. Or if a person is proactive, loves to serve people, and enjoys seeing people progress, he or she will often grow to become a great developer of people.

Once you get flat on the six to nine or so traits that you are choosing, with at least one trait coming from each of the four main categories of behavior (thinking, acting, interacting, and motivations), you are ready to decide which questions and answers best home in on your company and position-specification needs. The whole process of isolating the right traits, debating about it (I highly recommend that, as I find that the best critical thinking is done in a group of three to five committed people with similar values, yet unique points of view), and developing a behavioral questionnaire takes about three hours when you do the first one, and much less time after you get good at it.

The good news is that a solid behavioral-interviewing system not only has behavioral traits but also has solid questions and real-time answers with coaching tools to aid you in determining whether your candidates’ answers are an appropriate indication of their truly possessing that trait.

At Alliance HR Network, we do behavioral interviewing for the following reason: Behaviors, more than experience, will predict success. Experience is only one dimension of a person’s profile, and every company has a different infrastructure and a different set of operating practices and core values; one size certainly does not fit all. In all actuality, experience is very often the least predictive of a candidate’s fit or success in the role or the company.

Another reason that we conduct behavioral interviewing is to capitalize on management’s time; most companies spend 80% of their time trying to fix the bottom 20% of performers. This happens because companies are always behind the eight ball with hiring, managers are desperate to fill their open positions, and quality suffers – and in the long run, so does the manager. It is much easier, rewarding, and lucrative to practice behavior selection than behavior modification.

Additionally, the purpose of any staffing process is to identify and choose those individuals who can deliver the behaviors needed to successfully perform in a given role, and we need to evaluate and select the whole person. Furthermore, we would rather hire slowly and fire quickly because hastily made hiring and promotion decisions usually lead to big problems later, and predominantly, these problems could have been avoided had a deliberate, thorough process been followed up front.

Yes, it seems like a lot of preplanning time and preliminary work, and it is. The advantage is, as a professional in the staffing and placement industry, understanding and possessing the ability to integrate behavioral interviewing with your recruitment process will not only leverage your personal service-delivery power, but it will also increase your market share, boost your operating margin, and decrease your headaches and misery. Even better news, when you get really good at selecting your talent through a model like this, you can even recoup your training expenses and charge your client’s companies for this level of consulting service. Isn’t your future gain worth the investment?

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, and making the right hires. She has earned over $5,000,000 in personal “desk production” income and has placed more than 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at this address:
www.alliancehrnetwork.com/employers/industry_
training.asp.

When I called and looked for pricing to get a facilitator to conduct a two-day strategic planning workshop for my group, I was amazed at the kind of money these people are getting to come in and lead this conversation.

After calling around to four well-known organizational-development consultants and comparing the prices with the deliverables, I decided to go about leading the planning myself.

The first thing I had to do was to see what my intention of creating the plan was, like why I was planning in the first place. Well, I want to take my business to the next level. I want to deliver even better service to my candidates and clients; I want to diversify my recruitment methods; I want to diversify my client base; and I want an employee’s total compensation to not only be contingent on their production volume, but also on the quality of their work. Ok, so just a few things to discuss and hammer out in a few days time.

I went digging for all the planning documents I had used over the past 22 years, when I was planning for myself, when I was working for someone else and planning for my team, and when planning for my own company. The first document I uncovered was the “What do you Expect to get out of Planning” document, which covers overall concerns with planning, who will lead the facilitation, how long the planning session will last, the critical issues facing the company at the time of planning, the time you’ll devote to planning, who will help with the plan, internal sources, or external sources.

I decided that I would facilitate, and that everyone who does anything for the company would be involved: recruiters, sales, management, front line, and accounting. I figured if I wanted an empowered workforce, I ought to ask everyone, at least to speak their opinion on alterative ideas, and to bring the group together, so they feel as if they had a part in not only the planning phase, but determining the compensation for achieving the plan.

The next document I looked into was the Environment Scan Worksheet. This document called for customer surveys, candidate surveys, reviewing the company’s current state – in sales, in percentage of temp business, percentage of perm business, the split in administrative and general business placement versus management placement, the fill ratios, the misery index ratios, the number of candidates in, the sendout to placement ratios, the unfilled orders, and not only for ’06, but for three years’ back. When I saw all the material I had to gather and assess, my brain said, “just wing it;” your gut and brain have never let you down before; however, my commitment was to really conduct a specific placement industry strategic planning session using data, modeling and live customer feedback, so I pressed on.

Again, I had to look at the critical issues facing not only my company, but our industry as a whole, my niche market, and my geographical market.

Per the same document, it required that I get the industry operating standards so we could compare what we were doing with what the best in the business are doing. Additionally, the Environmental Scan worksheet suggested that we take a look at aspects inside that are working and that are not, the good old strengths and weaknesses of the organization, as well as aspects outside of the organization that can affect us, sociologically, economically, politically, and technically.

The Environmental Scan recommends speaking to industry experts, in the industry who support the industry, and who are stakeholders in the industry. Their whole concept on an environmental scan is to get a bandwidth of information, and then sort the critical from the superfluous, and then make solid business moves based on the good information that you gather. One of the final pieces in preparing for the two-day strategic business planning meeting was to determine where I wanted the company to be in three to five years. Even though this plan was only for 18 months, I wanted to make sure that wherever I take this company, it is headed in the right direction for 2012.

“The Strategic Direction Worksheet” is sort of a dream sheet, in a perfect world, ‘who’ would my company be being, where would we be geographically, physically, and financially; who would we be serving, what services would we be offering, and how would we get paid. There is a book that really teaches this concept, and it is called, “Attracting Perfect Customers,” by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez.

The final piece in planning to plan was setting the agenda. I went online, looked for samples, and came up with some cool games that would get us in the frame of mind. We will be playing the “Beer Game,” which is a game of supply and demand, where the participants get to see and experience the real life version of too many orders, not enough supply, and they develop communication strategies for working within an unpredictable system; not unlike staffing and recruiting.

Another game we will be playing is called “Cash Flow, by Robert Kiyosaki, “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” so that the participants can really experience for themselves what truly being in charge of your own destiny can provide.

And finally, we are doing an expertise on situational leadership, as when working in a high-performance team, each person will have to step up and take over for certain search projects. Situational leadership not only aids someone in determining their preferred style of management, but it aids in determining how someone manages, and how oftentimes, the style that works for them does not empower others to operate at peak performance.

I engage in planning very soon, so I am sure I will have peaks and valleys in the process, and I’d be happy to share what worked and didn’t with you. One thing I know for sure is that after doing all this work, the surveys, having my employees do the surveys, and looking at the numbers, everyone is right on track with where we have been, what our customers want, and what we need to do to grow. You’re probably thinking that this is a lot of work, but wouldn’t it make more sense to plan, and then work your plan, versus working with no plan, only to find out that you were working in vain?

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, making the right hires. She has earned over $5,000,000 in personal ‘desk production’ income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s e-mail is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077.

The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at this site: http://www.alliancehrnetwork.com/employers/industry_training.asp

What is it for you? What is your core differentiator?
How will you stand out from the sea of competition?

With the impending employment crisis budding, barrier to entry being virtually null, margin erosion, and a new and provocative competitor around each and every corner, now more than ever, we need to differentiate ourselves against the sea of competition.

There I am sitting in the training room with a group of people, or organizational development professionals as they call themselves. I had come to get trained on how to give a myriad of assessments for a myriad of situations, candidates, job openings, succession planning, retention, heck, even on ‘getting along better in the work place.’ I came to learn about a new suite of products, and what I learned is that we as an industry better wake up, smell the coffee, drink it fast, and then get out into the world and see who is after our market share.

Now I am not naive enough to think that the way it has been (with terrorist attacks, and a major economic dip aside) is the way it is always going to be, but what I heard in that room stunned me. When the instructor began the day it was focused on marketing and selling. They showed us how to discredit recruiting companies, how to prove that the fees being paid out to head hunters and recruiters could easily be turned into fees being paid to them to identify and assess candidates. In addition, they had methodology that demonstrated how we as an industry are in it for the quick buck, and that return on investment and the stay-ability of the candidate needs to be looked at first and the need for a warm body second.

As the morning continued, I heard many, while disturbing, very good go-to-market strategies, and consultative sales approaches that are simply way more sophisticated than the average recruiting and placement firm’s sales process.

The next day I am in a conversation with another assessment company, and the agent tells me that he is in a RFP process for Monster where they will offer for a fee, a validated hiring assessment on each and every candidate that applies, so that only the candidates who do well and score about 80% as compared to the national benchmark, will get forwarded to their customers. Couple that with last year where 48% of all candidates that were hired were hired through the job boards, says Peter Yessne from SI review, and WE my friends have a REAL PROBLEM & A REAL OPPORTUNITY.

We already knew there was a sea of competition. Now that sea is turning into a very vast ocean, and that ocean has inlet water streams that flow to many other industries, as well as many other countries. Not to mention, last time this country faced a people shortage, every shoddy sales person who loved making a quick buck penetrated our market and pummeled our industry’s reputation, so that even in some circles the word “RECRUITER” has some people react as if what they just heard was a sound not that different from nails on a chalk board.

If you thought you had to be good on a daily basis to keep your clients coming back, NOW you have to be great. And you have to be different. Whether it’s offering assessments, which anyone can do, as they are electronic and there are no barriers to entry to sell them, or it be offering a staff that is certified in a validated behavioral interviewing program, or having it be offering recruitment brand strategies, or offering onboarding and retention programs for our placements, it NEEDS to be something.

The Age of Unreason is upon us.

When I started my own business, my greatest concern was to fill my clients’ requisitions, and to serve my customer by sending them the best suited fit for their company. I had been focused on retaining customers, because cold calling to me, while thrilling when I made the kill, was very boring and mundane. Due to my aversion to boredom, and the feeling of power I gained by placing multiple people with the same client, and then watching them get promoted, and I unconsciously developed myself into a “Job Order Counselor.” That was what we were called back then.

Most of my openings were repeat business, referral business by either clients or candidates, or fresh business that I happened to stumble on because I asked good questions in an interview. I was a job order person first and a candidate person second and, of course, I knew enough even way back then that you cannot have one without the other. It just so happened that one of my strongest natural talents was curiosity, and another one was relationship building, and then, maybe not natural but developed, was tenacity; I did have a child to support after all. With that combination, coupled with a commitment not to fail, I did anything in my power to hold on to good customers.

During my first few years as a business owner, I enrolled myself in a course at the University of Illinois, and it was the equivalent to a MBA program, but for already successful business owners. At that time, I was ‘strongly encouraged’ to look at my business differently, and we had to create a business plan that took my company into the next 10 years. It had to include a complete SWOT analysis, and a clear and real value proposition.

What I turned in as a first draft was outright rejected by my strategy professor. I had a plan that looked very much like what the last ten years in the staffing business had looked, and my core differentiators were things like, ” I place better people,” “My clients can trust me,” and “Our service is better.” The professor pointed out that everyone in the class had the same differentiators –which meant that they were NOT differentiators after all.

It seemed that even while I was running an effective business, the need for a business plan was becoming more real every day. The problem I was facing is that I could not see in front of my next commission check. The business was beginning to experience somewhat of a boom, and I was not sure how long it would last, so I wavered back and forth between growing strategically and planning for the future, and processing the multitude of needs that were coming in. Part of me thought, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” – and part of me wanted my “A” and wanted to know that I had the smarts to create a business plan so that, regardless of the economy and other external factors, my business would sustain.

As I dug deeper and did the research, my eyes began to open to the real weaknesses of my company and the major threats facing our industry, as well as the immense opportunities that would come to be available in the recruiting industry. I was very well aware of my firm’s strengths but I never knew the real possibility of leveraging them in my ‘go to market strategy.’ Needless to say, this course at the University of Illinois Center for Entrepreneurial Studies was by far the most influential training and development in business that I have experienced. What came out of the experience was the development of a foundational core differentiator that the entire future of my company would be built on.

Grippingly, I was then sitting on a whole new way to do business and a tremendous opportunity to differentiate my service and to diversify my income stream. The problem was I did NOT do anything about it, not until September 12, 2001. Before that point WHAT WAS THERE FOR ME WAS A FEAR OF CHANGE and a FEAR OF LOSING WHAT I HAD. Prior to that time, the gnawing need for people, the thriving business climate, the dot com craze, and the impending Y2K crisis had me busy working in my business 10-15 hours per day, so there in my mahogany drawer sat my great ideas and my business plan, tucked away for ‘someday, but not now.’

It took a terrorist attack, 1500 local recruiters defecting from the industry, staffing and recruiting businesses and offices closing around me, and moments of silence that lasted hours for me to pull out the plan and forge to the future. My perception was, at this time, it could not get any worse and there was nothing to lose. I went for it! It began with a name change, a service offering paradigm shift, and a lot of Internet marketing. We went from Personnel Network to Alliance HR Network, and from an employment agency placing temp and perm people to a full scope HR consulting firm specializing in

Talent Attraction, Selection and Retention.

Since 2004, I have been offering these services on a regular basis, and they have not only brought me a new revenue stream, they have allowed my company to differentiate ourselves from the sea, and I mean the sea of competition. And it does not stop here. My role has shifted from an operating president to a CEO accountable for new business, products and service offerings. I just became a certified retention specialist and have already taken that service to market with existing clients.

Our staffing and recruiting world never stops changing, and we are soon to face more competition than we have experienced since the heydays of 1997-2000. The thing to remember is that competition does not always work in our favor. They erode margins, squash our reputation, discredit our power, and basically muck up the water, and blur our prospects’ and clients’ view. Whether you alter your brand, add additional offerings, or even the perception of your offerings, you will be affected by the world around you. The question is “How will you respond?” Will you take the offensive approach and create something no one else is doing, the arrogant approach and do nothing, or the defense approach and fight back?

There are resources available everywhere that will help you differentiate yourself, your desk, and your company from the sea out there, IF you take the time to find them. I recommend doing your research. Make sure your clients have a need for what you think you want to offer. Make sure everyone in your market is not doing the same thing. Find something different, and align your passions and key contributors on your team’s passions, with service offerings. Keep your offerings simple and focused around your core functions – people and employment.

After all, as Terry Petra once told me, “there are NO other experts on this matter in the world. We live in it every day, all day, 365 days per year.” If you chose not to alter any service offerings, ALTER your ‘go to market strategy’ and your sales process, create and establish a marked variation in your sales process – with how you present your offerings, with the way you ask questions, and what you do with the answers. Get better and stronger, hire better talent internally. Leverage your ability to service your clients by partnering with people through Top Echelon or IPA or another split network. Find people in the industry that share the same values as you, and work together to synergize your efforts. DO something, just DON’T stand still.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of 3 has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, making the right hires. She has earned over $5,000,000 in personal ‘desk production’ income and has placed over 2000 candidates in direct hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development and human capital consulting services thus diversifying Alliances revenue streams and gaining new and exciting Talent Acquisition and Assessment consulting opportunities.

Margaret Graziano
Alliance HR Network
847-690-1312