I attended the Staffing Industry monthly webinar the other day and they presented a slide based off feedback from staffing companies reporting that selling is now easier for most markets and has been for about 3 months. I have noticed the cycle has started to flip and we are approaching a candidate driven market. I always preferred a client driven market because I enjoyed the challenge. I am not saying I want to go back rock bottom, I just appreciate what starting out in a client driven market taught me.

Although I always agree in adjusting your strategy as cycles alter, DON’T STOP SELLING! Remember how hard it was to get a sale, 12 months, even 6 months ago? Don’t lose that tenacity you had, instead continue to utilize the things you learned when you had to truly sell your services hard.

Some of the best staffing and recruiting firms are those that start with a candidate not a job. So, we know the best way to make a placement is to fill a candidate when a job never existed. But once selling becomes easier again, we go back to what is comfortable, just filling orders.

I love the thrill of the hunt and creating a job is much more satisfying then filling an order. I thought I would pass along some of my favorite tips in case you have gone back to the comfortable zone of just filling orders.

1. ALWAYS ask a candidate where they would like to work – A conversation with a client or prospect always goes better when you start off with” I just met with somebody that specifically said they want to work for your company”. Do you have a field in Bullhorn to document this? You can even create a field that is a list of companies so you can do a backwards search!
2. Search your old (Lost) job orders – Why is it that you find that candidate for an order the day after you lose the opportunity? You never know how that candidate is working out for your competition. For those who didn’t know this, you can actually conduct a detailed search on all your jobs in Bullhorn. Just go to the Jobs Menu and then Search.
3. Set a goal – I never used to like doing this activity, but after I made myself make three calls a day it became habit and once I got my first hit… I was hooked!
4. And last but not least: managers, create a competition to foster an environment that encourages candidate marketing. After all, if you don’t encourage it, it most likely won’t happen.

So, take a look at your candidates (tearsheets hopefully) and find your top three right NOW. Find out where they want to work and call those clients! True recruiting combines the best of recruiting AND selling!

I was traveling last month visiting clients in Detroit and overheard a few people at the hotel talking about an article in the Wall Street Journal. Anytime I hear a conversation that has anything to do with people looking for a job, my ears always perk up. After all… once a recruiter always a recruiter. I reached over and picked up the Journal to see what the buzz was about. I saw the article on the first page, “The Unemployed Worker’s New Friend: Outsourcers”. My first thought, it may be a candidate’s new friend, but a recruiter’s worst nightmare!

The article described candidates’ experiences using outsourcing services to blanket their resumes all over job board cyberspace by leveraging keyword recognition. If a keyword match was found, these services would send off a resume and a cover letter in response using the candidate’s own email address, so that the application appears to be from the candidate. In one case, more than 10,000 different job applications were made for a single candidate. In one example, an outsourcing agency submitted a sales director to any job with the word “sales” or “retail” in the job description. Quite unsurprising, it ended up that he was overqualified for most of the jobs including one as a receptionist for a hair salon. The stories continued, but, in the end, workers said that they are using these services because they feel it gets them in front of a recruiter. After all, aside from paying a fee from $40-$500 per month, they don’t have to do anything to have their resumes submitted to you 10,000 times.

These services seem to be going strong and generate a lot of revenue from candidates looking to automate the job application process. This leaves me with a bad feeling and raises some interesting questions–

How DOES a staffing agency manage the tremendous volume from these outsourcing agencies?

If you get 200 responses, do you review all 200 to find that 1 perfect candidate?

What is the right sourcing strategy that will make the most of a recruiter’s time?

Do you hire somebody to screen these people, or consider an outsourced solution?

Now is the time of year where job board and other sourcing alternatives contracts are ready to renew and clients find themselves asking if they need these services or how they can make better use of them. Along those lines, how do you measure the impact of a solution to assess its value?

I often get clients asking about sourcing strategies and if they should utilize a sourcing or resource team. My answer is always the same– it depends. Each business is different because of company culture, clients and competition. Even though the end result may be the same, the way in which you get there is not cookie cutter. There is no magic formula. Certainly you can embark on a new adventure and try something new, but how are you planning on evaluating if it works and how are you going to integrate it into your current process so that it has the greatest chance of success? How do you know that you are choosing the best option for your business and not just a good option? This can make all the difference.

As a former Bullhorn user, I am the first one to admit that I bleed Bullhorn and LOVE the software. While Bullhorn can make the world of sales and recruiting amazingly more efficient, it can only get you part of the way there. If your internal processes aren’t aligned, there is only so much software can do. Over the past few years here at Bullhorn, my role has been to help clients integrate their processes within the Bullhorn system, as well to help them start from scratch and reinvent more efficient ways of running their businesses. Our Bullhorn Professional Services team has consolidated the experiences from these engagements and started a new division that is solely focused on refining and improving client process and workflow. We want to help clients to address those questions listed above and make the best choices. This new division is Strategic Consulting. We provide 5 types of consulting offerings that can provide you a deep dive into the people, process and technology of your recruiting and sales processes.

As you start to think about your sourcing strategy and how you manage candidates, we recognize that it is the right combination of technology and process that can make the difference to your business. To give you some tips on the technology side, Bullhorn Professional Services will be offering a free webinar series beginning next month. The first topic is about Effective Candidate Management on Wed, September 14^th. To register for this webinar, click here.

To get more information on Bullhorn Strategic Consulting Services, click here or feel free to reach out to myself directly at mrosen@bullhorn.com.

To view the original WSJ article, go here.

The first day of Bullhorn Live was full of excitement.  It has been great to meet so many new faces of customers and help them network with each other. 

I was really struck by Danny Cahill’s presentation today.  With every bit of media helping us to think “the world is coming to an end,” he put some great perspective on it.   This is NOTHING new, we have weathered this before and we will do it again and even come back stronger.  I wrote down a really interesting stat he gave us.  Back in 1984, the government bought an 80% share in Continental Illinois Bank.  Why was this so profound?  This bank is now known as Bank of America. 

I presented a session this morning on using Bullhorn as a Sales tool.  It was interesting to see how many customers truly forget all these tools are there.  We all know that to pull us out of this we have to work harder and these sessions are great avenues to helping clients create new ideas to do this. 

I would like to thank Danny for a great thought I walked away with…”I create my own reality,” because we truly do. 

Ultimately, it is attitude that gets us through the rough times and I am so moved by the excitement at this conference.  Those who are attending need to go back to your organizations and spread the buzz.  

I attended the first Bullhorn Live in June 2007 and was a current customer at the time. Since most of those who attended last time have already registered, I thought I would reach out to those who haven’t signed up yet to help you understand what you will experience. 

Since becoming an Account Manager at Bullhorn, I have had numerous clients say to me “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  Well, this is the conference where you will find out what you don’t know.  You will be on information overload, in a good way, and come home armed with so many things you can do differently.  

I came home with new reports I could use, some tools I didn’t even know existed and knowledge from other companies on how they were taking Bullhorn to the next level by integrating the system with their other systems. 

I didn’t just learn from the jam packed sessions, but I got a big return on my investment with networking.  Even though I was always in a room with my competition, it was as if we were all among friends.  I am sure the ice sculpture that doubled as a Cosmopolitan dispenser helped, but everyone was willing to share stories and strategies.  We compared notes and helped each other work through some common challenges.  I had the most productive brainstorming sessions in a very long time. 

It really is hard to put into words how much I learned from the conference, but I can say that I never expected to learn so much and certainly had homework on the flight home prioritizing what to do first.  I was grateful to the network I was able to build inside the staffing community and kept up many of the conversations after the conference.  They became a great sounding board. 

This is what this conference is for; we want you to meet other users and learn with each other and help each other.  

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious reason why you should attend… Vegas Baby.  I will tell you, Bullhorn knows how to throw a party, and there are pictures to prove it. 

Check out photos from last year here 

Once you register, be sure to join the LinkedIn group for Bullhorn Live 2009 Attendee’s.  This is a great way to network before the event.  

Bullhorn Live 2009 Attendee Networking Group
 

As I opened my email this morning I had another social network invite to something called BEBO. 
 
Do you find yourself saying, ‘’If one more person invites me to ANOTHER social network…”  I think I have gotten them all, LinkedIn, Spoke, Facebook, Plaxo and now I have heard it all… BEBO.

In the past I was willing to connect to these various networks and I did sign up for all these sites and tried my best to make a go at it time after time. However, I found LinkedIn to provide me the best tools for sourcing and researching sales prospects.

SO.. I was extremely happy when we were able to enhance our LinkedIn integration on Clients inside Bullhorn… have you used it?  If not check it out. This allows you to see how many connections you have to people at this company EVEN if they are NOT in your system.  Think of how many new candidates and clients are just waiting in LinkedIn for you? Go to the little IN button on the top right of a company profile.

LinkedIn is the best social network for the staffing industry in my humble opinion.  It allows you to easily get names of people by job title or company alone.  I know we all know that it is best to hunt for the passive resumes, this is your “link” to them. This is also a great connection to those key decision makers.

Go ahead, jump on and start searching for folks.. you will be AMAZED at what you will find. 

Need something to get you started? Click on my link, get signed in and then… go into all of your prospects in Bullhorn and find connections you do not already have in Bullhorn! 

I recently read an article on one of my favorite recruiting websites, Electronic Recruiting Exchange, http://www.ere.net/ . The article was titled “Seven days without sourcing makes one weak”.  I couldn’t have come across a more perfect title and know how true it is.
I have been in the staffing industry for about 15 years with my former role in managing and training recruiters.  In training classes I was facilitating, I found myself describing the common scenario where Monday is a new day and we quickly jump to a job board and print out a bunch of resumés for a very hot order and then something comes up…yada…yada…yada.  The next thing we know, it is Thursday around 3pm and we suddenly come across those printouts of resumés from Monday.

I am always amazed as I look around the room after this story and meet their eyes as if they are saying “Yes! You too?”  This is a secret that recruiters share and don’t often speak of.  Every recruiter has good intentions but unfortunately this is an industry of constant interruption and balancing too many plates in the air.  Even top performers have those lingering resumés that slip through the cracks or go days without a single new sourced resumé.

The consequences of not staying on top of your sourcing can be costly.  Ultimately candidates have many people calling them so speed is everything.  This leads to lost candidates, lost positions and ultimately you are behind the curve ball on the job orders you are working on.

As a former Bullhorn customer, I have had the experience of trying to mesh proven techniques of managing your sourcing plan with Bullhorn; in fact, one of the reasons I love Bullhorn is that it is a natural fit to some of these common sourcing strategies.  My clients know I am a true believer in tasks and tearsheets.  Trust me I am not a hypocrite, as a manager of staffing I lived it and preached it… now in an Account Manager role, I still live by my tasks and tearsheets!
 
I wanted to offer some advice in creating a Sourcing Plan and integrating it with Bullhorn.  Sourcing plans should help you plan to be pro-active on your typical staffing needs.  No one truly forgets to be reactive, as is the nature of the industry.  A good sourcing plan is a typical plan of attack no matter the job description.

I have suggested to recruiters to follow this plan in order:
 

1. Search Tearsheets – Tearsheets are a great place to store your pre-screen and evaluated candidates.  This allows you to make some quick submissions to your orders.
2. Bullhorn Queries – You should always have queries of typical job openings that have been saved and can regularly be run as new resumés are added to the database. If they fit your query they will be right at the top of your list.
3. Leverage external sources – For example, utilize Dragnet to source candidates from CareerBuilder, Monster, and other sources.
4. Use your “people I placed” distribution list – I always recommended recruiters create a distribution list of people they put to work.  This way you can use this list to email for employee referrals… remember “birds of a feather flock together.”

Lastly, utilize tasks and your calendar to plan for sourcing time and set yourself tasks on individual jobs to remind you to source.  Use the resources you have to not let things fall through the cracks.

I hope some of these ideas help and I would love to see comments from you folks on what you find helpful or if you have other things that you can share that have helped.

Referenced Article “Seven Days Without Sourcing Makes one Weak” by Shally Steckerl
http://www.ere.net/2008/07/23/seven-days-without-sourcing-makes-one-weak/