Magic Pot of Jobs

There is a very interesting article in the most recent addition of Fast Company that explains how businesses in India must “recruit” the parents of their intended hires. And while the percentage of young workers in their 20s and 30s that live with their parents is far higher in India than in the United States, it would seem that there’s a recruiting angle here that could be important in the years to come. In addition to the increasing number of U.S. companies that are outsourcing positions to India, the parental influence among Indian workers living in the U.S. should be a significant concern for recruiters as well. Perks for parents in India include gym memberships, interest-free loans, and a personalized dialogue regarding their child’s successes in the workplace. Parents in India often hold great sway over the professional decisions of their children, even well into their adult years.

Although the family-centric culture in India may be extreme by our standards, there is a trend toward greater parental control in this country. Helicopter parents are omnipresent and highly involved throughout the schooling of their children and it would only seem natural that this would carry over into career choices especially the positions chosen immediately upon entering the workforce.

At this point, recruiting talent in the U.S. doesn’t require too much concern for the parents, but at some point pleasing Mom and Dad may be just as important as the six-figure salary for securing top talent.

Mick Wist

http://www.insourced.com/

This CollegeRecruiter.com Blogswap article is courtesy of Recruiting.com at http://www.Recruiting.com and CollegeRecruiter.com at http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students and recent graduates who are searching for internships and entry level jobs.

~~~~~~

Checkout physician jobs on The Recruiter.com.

Maybe it’s because DC is such a lawyer-heavy town, or maybe it’s a reflection of how some people who used Frontpage to build a website once want to hang out their shingles as web developers but we’re experiencing sort of an odd but more frequently recurring issue here at the MISF.

My office, as you know, focuses on Creative and Interactive professionals- designers, web developers, information architects, etc. Our talent often have their hands in some of the most critical products of our clients- clients which include PR and communications firms, design studios, and web shops. As such, it is of course vitally important to the clients that the work be of high quality. (That’s not to say that it’s not important to the clients of my colleagues who focus on administrative talent, but there’s often more riding, in both a legal and a profit sense, on the work of our talent.)

As the specialty has grown and as more and more staffing firms have gotten into this space, it stands to reason that there would be occasional screwups from the talent placed. Code doesn’t work, files not placed where they should be, confidential work leaked out all over town, and worst of all, flat-out dishonest talent who misrepresent the work they do for the client. It’s an unwelcome fact that those of us in staffing hesitate to talk about in public- some people are temps for a reason.

In response, we’re noticing a marked upswing in the number of clients who want us to sign detailed and complex contracts. Fair enough, but the contracts always read like Professional Services Agreements, of the type that the client might itself have had to sign for one of its own clients.

The problem is that this approach doesn’t work for a staffing situation. I understand that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for the screwdriver anyway. A professional services agreement is fine for when you are contracting the services of a web development studio (whether that studio is comprised of one more more people) that will work independently of your own staff, and who is accountable to a list of deliverables.

A temporary web developer brought in through a staffing agency, however, is much more like the web developers on your own staff, who work under supervision of your own project managers and tech leads, and who can be fired for incompetence much more easily than a vendor with whom you have a contract.

A rule of thumb: if you want your staffing firm to sign a contract that warrants that there will be no “trojan horses or back doors” in the code the talent write because you don’t have anyone on staff who can read the code for him or herself, what you need is not a staffing firm, it’s a web development studio.

But meanwhile, I’m wondering if anyone else is experiencing this trend. I’m looking at you, Aquent and TalentZoo bloggers, I’m looking at you in particular. Does this happen to you, and if so, how do you handle it?

I have returned from a couple of days off due to a nasty cold. I know there are people out there who are thinking, “Pfah! A cold? Get up and go to work anyway, you sissy twit!” In fact, I used to be one of those people. But then I started working in a more people-oriented field, where I’m shaking hands all day, answering my coworkers’ phones, and just generally in close contact with lots of people who are in contact with lots of other people.

I have concluded that it’s a thoughtless and counterproductive workplace culture which demands that employees come to work when their heads feel three feet thick, they’re coughing and sneezing, and carting around a big box of Kleenex. Consider:

• An unchecked cough can turn into bronchitis, leading to even more sick time.
• People’s immune systems vary- an employee who toughs it out and comes to work because “it’s just a little cold” could pass it on to employees with less efficient immune systems, who then can get sinus infections, bronchitis, or any number of other things, leading to yet more lost productivity. Or those people can pass it on to their spouses or children, which can also lead to time taken to care for family members.
• Employees whose bosses take their health seriously and encourage them to rest when they are ill are employees who feel valued, and therefore are more inclined to stay.
• Many occupations allow the employee to accomplish at least SOMETHING at home. If the employee feels well enough to do some work, encourage them to participate in meetings via phone, send emails, or do research while they’re out of the office. If employees are less out of the loop, they’ll feel more comfortable about taking the time they need to get better and won’t be risking their own health and that of others just to slog to the office. Don’t forget to adjust how much sick time they’re charged accordingly- there’s no reason an employee who is working from their couch when they’re sick needs to be charged a whole sick day.

In my office, we actually ban each other from the premises when we’re sick. One of my coworkers doesn’t fight off upper respiratory ailments very well and once had a cold that turned into literally four months of suffering, antibiotics, and repeated doctor visits. So if I get a cold, it’s specifically for her that I don’t go in to the office. I can source candidates from home, after all, and because our office culture encourages us to rest when we’re ill, I can be confident that I won’t face any negative peer pressure when I return, no snide comments about how I took two days out of the office to recover from “the sniffles,” and no professional repercussions.

There are too many workplaces where never taking a sick day is seen as a badge of honor. I think those people need therapy. It’s time to start paying attention to this issue and stop creating environments where people feel like they can’t take time out to care for their health. It’s good for productivity, it’s good for retention, and frankly it’s just the right thing to do.

~~~~~~

Checkout accounting jobs, UK at AccountantCareers.co.uk.

Late this afternoon, nearly at closing time, we got a call from a professional contact of a recently-departed manager. It’s a manager at one of our competitors, calling to ask an awkward question and hoping we could help her out.

A client that she has been working with, a client who also works with us, has been trying to convince her that all the other agencies they worked with were letting talent convert for free with them after 90 days. “Well, [National Creative Staffing Firm] and [Major International Staffing Firm] let us have people for free after 90 days,” they said.

So this colleague was calling around to see if that was really true, and of course it is not. There’s no reason we should have to give away business like that in this market.

Let me be absolutely clear- there is a lot of competition in staffing, and a lot of rivalry between competing firms. But even with all that, any recruiter with half a brain knows better than to stand by while a client, ANY client, tries to devalue staffing services that way. If you bully my competitor into a free conversion, it makes it that much harder for me to stand up for my fee when I’m in that position, and I’m surely not going to cooperate with you in making my job harder.

What’s more? Creative/Interactive staffing in particular is a reeeeeally networked business, and chances are, if the person you’re dealing with has been in this field for any length of time, she knows people at all the similar agencies in town. It’s a very small community, and recruiters generally like to maintain cordial relationships with other recruiters. So while you might get away with that crap for a receptionist or an office manager, you’ll never get away with it on an art director. We WILL band together to protect our collective business.

So this colleague is heading back to the client for another meeting this week, at which she will say, “That’s so interesting, because I spoke with my friends at [NCSF] and [MISF], and I know that you were charged X for this person, and Y for this other person. So I think my fee is really quite reasonable, actually.”

Silly, silly client.

Via Recruiting.com I found this article about Best Buy’s radical approach to work/life balance. Go read it. Seriously. Now. I’ll wait.

There’s a lot of talk about whether the Results-Oriented Work Environment approach will translate to every company, Best Buy’s culture is very young but what about companies where the management is older and has different values, blah blah. These are valid questions, of course, but I think the real lesson that Best Buy has to teach is the importance of being able to look beyond your most basic assumptions about what a “job” is and truly examine what it is you’re paying these people to DO, anyway. The quote about thinking of work as something that is DONE, rather than something that you GO to, every day, during specific hours, ought to become the mantra of every company with more than a lip-service committment to employee work/life balance.

The takeaway here is not “hey, clearly EVERYONE should let their employees skip out on being at the office whenever they want,” but instead, “so at the end of the day, what is it that we actually need our employees to do, and how else can it get done?”

Clearly, there’s a lot of value to face time, and of course there are plenty of perfectly good reasons why employees would need to be physically in an office during traditional business hours. But it seems to me that an approach as radical as ROWE could be adapted to the specific needs of those kinds of teams- who wouldn’t be willing to keep one day at a regular business schedule in order to get their other four days free, for example? Can the company provide VOIP phones that can plug into any network so that people can be available to clients from outside the office?

It’s a big leap of trust, certainly, but it seems to me that even if the specific approach isn’t right for your company, the questions it forces you to ask are worth thinking about no matter what approach you adopt.

One of my coworkers has a client who expressed irritation that a long-term freelancer he was working with had demonstrated the audacity to - gasp! - bring in a small framed photo to put on her desk.

“Freelancers are like guests in my home,” he pontificated. “They shouldn’t act like it’s their home.”

First of all, I don’t think I’d ever want to have dinner at this guy’s house if he’s that uptight. Of course there’s a line that a professional shouldn’t cross on a temporary assignment, but a small, tasteful, framed photo isn’t anywhere near it, particularly on a long-term gig.

Secondly, and more importantly, this is a stupid attitude to have toward temporary staff. Freelancers are more like the plumber you call into your home to fix your flooded bathroom. No, it’s not his house, but you called him in because you needed his expertise in solving a problem that was beyond your ability to handle yourself. So if he leaves a wrench on the back of your toilet seat, you don’t get all bent out of shape, because he just fixed your bathroom.

And frankly, it would be nice to bake him some cookies to show your appreciation.

Via my Technorati cosmos, I found Isabont’s blog, at which Simon describes a recent conversation with a recruiter about trying to match career changers and people whose qualifications are otherwise not exactly what the client has in mind to available openings.

Meanwhile, over at Hiring Revolution, Amy is writing about agency clients who need to rethink their insistence on candidates with agency experience.

I run into this issue on a regular basis. The client frequently has a long list of things they think they need in order to hire a candidate (and most of them are ad agencies or PR firms), but what they fail to notice is that ALL the agencies in town are growing, which means they’re ALL looking for people with agency experience, so the number of positions requiring agency experience are growing, but as long as they continue to insist on hiring only agency people, the pool of people with that experience isn’t going to get any bigger.

Meanwhile, I’m a voice, shouting in the desert about this, and some of my clients know me well enough to trust my judgment on that, but most of them are obstinate and continue to insist on that agency background. And I run into the issue that Simon describes- I either present candidates that make my clients question whether I’ve even read their job description, or I don’t present candidates at all. And then they wonder why I’m not sending them candidates, and I have to tell them that it’s because they aren’t listening to me when I tell them that there are no more agency people. The agency people are all working, and their employers are clinging to them like cold death. Even my clients who are accustomed to being barraged with candidates simply because of their reputations for doing the cool work are finding themselves scraping for people. So clients are going to have to get used to considering candidates with non-ideal backgrounds, or they’re going to have a lot of unfilled seats.

It doesn’t help that when I ask my clients whose work they like, they might name four firms, and three of them will be my clients who I can’t recruit from. In that sense, I suppose I’m a victim of my own success, since I work with almost all the cool kids.

But we’ve been beating our heads off this particular wall for days now in my office- the people we want are working, they aren’t reading postings, they aren’t going to networking events, they’re just out living their lives and not paying attention to the job market. So how do we find them? Direct recruiting, one by one, works, but isn’t that efficient. So how do we get to know these people?

I’ll tell you what, I’m about a minute from walking up and down K Street with a sandwich board that says, “Work with the web? Hate your job? Talk to me!”

Oh, my beloved MagicPotHeads, I have such a rant for you today.

The phone rings this morning, and I pick it up: “Thank you for calling [Major International Staffing Firm]. This is Tiffany, may I help you?”

“Hi this is [Angry Woman] from [Client with Spammy-sounding Name]. My rep was [Departed Coworker], and she told me I should be contacting [Current Coworker], but I’ve emailed him several times and I haven’t heard back. And I wasn’t going to use [MISF] anymore, because you clearly don’t want my business, but I thought I’d give you one more chance because maybe there was an error on your end about who my rep is.”

What I want to say: “Well, maybe we DON’T want your business.” What I actually say: “It’s very unlike [Current Coworker] to not respond promptly, are you sure you have the correct email address?”

We go round and round about this until my coworker returns to the office, and I let him deal with her. She was, of course, nasty to him for the whole conversation.

It turns out, she emailed him once. A week ago. And had never actually worked with us before, so none of us would have recognized her name.

There are some lessons here, boys and girls. First of all, email is not so reliable that you can trust it as the only method of communication with someone. We have an aggressive spam filter here that routinely eats legitimate emails, particularly from a client who has a common spam word in its name. No, we can’t control it, and no, we can’t just whitelist a whole domain from the field.

Secondly, why would you just assume that someone is ignoring you if you don’t get an answer to one email? The aforementioned spam filter issue could be causing the problem. You could have gotten the email address wrong. Your message could have just gotten buried in the literally hundreds of messages we receive per day.

Thirdly, why would you wait 6 business days to follow up with a phone call if your need is that urgent?

Fourth, is it really necessary to be a raging bitch? Do you think that’s going to make us want to work with you more? Guess what y’all, in this market, the individual client needs us a lot more than we need it most of the time. We can choose not to work with the assholes.

Say what y’all like about the new Recruiting.com format (I haven’t totally made up my mind yet), I do have to say that I’m finding a lot more interesting stuff from other blogs on it.

Like this fantastic post I read today about why big companies lose their best talent. This is a topic I feel particularly passionate about these days.

My favorite one is #5:

Shifting Whims/Strategic Priorities. I applaud Yahoo!’s plans to build an incubator or “brickhouse” around their talent, by giving them new exciting projects to work on. The challenge for most organizations is not setting up a strategic priority, like establishing an incubator, but sticking with it a year or two from now. Top talent hates to be “jerked around.” If you commit to a project that they will be heading up, you’ve got to give them enough opportunity to deliver what they’ve promised.

Aside from just generally hating to be jerked around, top talent craves interesting work, and if you take away their proverbial cookie, they don’t have much reason to stay. If you aren’t providing your top talent with interesting work, I guarantee your competitors will.

~~~~~~

Search for jobs and careers at JobCentral.

Welcome back from the holiday weekend (at least for us in the US), MagicPotHeads. I hope it was relaxing for all of you- I had a lovely time destroying all hopes of future off-hours productivity by getting myself good and addicted to World of Warcraft. I’ll be tearing myself away from it for the evening, though, because the season premiere of House, MD is tonight.

Why do you care? Because Greg House is the prime example of what NOT to do in the workplace. He went on a date with his female employee, he makes cracks about how his black employee must know how to rob a bank, he makes lacivious comments about his boss, he’s rude to the patients, he neglects his clinic hours. He’s about ten different lawsuits waiting to happen, but they put up with his antics because “he’s the best damn doctor in this hospital.”

Ironically, the thing they all seem to have the biggest issue with, his Vicodin addiction, is the thing covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

So you see, my devotion to this show is professional, and has nothing to do with the novelty of Hugh Laurie playing a smart-ass American. Right.

~~~~~~

Visit Recruit.net to find Australia jobs.