Tom's Talent Blog

In June, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Ohio Staffing and Search Association (OSSA) virtual conference.  Hats off to the OSSA board and Jeanne Hoffman, Executive Director, for pivoting to a virtual event!  And, thank you to the sponsors for continued support of OSSA!

Watch my session, Slingshot to Your Best Second Half Ever!

As the economy recovers, talent acquisition leaders have an excellent opportunity to improve their company's recruiting programs. ScoutLogic has launched "Win the Recovery" thought leadership series to aid in these efforts. This series features video and written interviews with recruiting leaders sharing their observations and best practices.

I'm speaking at the StaffingTec 2020 Technology Conference, May 5-7 in Austin, TX. Take a deep dive into staffing industry technology and get a year’s worth of technology insights and strategies in just three days. My session is Leveraging Your Candidate and Employee Data for Competitive Advantage.

At the end of June, the national unemployment rate was 4% and every business owner I spoke with was in a talent crunch.

There are few industries today that aren’t experiencing a significant talent shortage. Additionally, every leader I met with struggled with some lack of accountability in their organization among current employees.

It creates an interesting conundrum that is keeping many a business owner awake at night…

What do you do when you can’t find quality talent? How can you hold existing talent accountable without losing them to greener pastures?

...for recruiters and clients.

Why do people get married? While there are a variety reasons, ranging from religious to legal rights to “that’s just what you do,” the main reason is commitment. Marriage is both a tradition and a legal contract that binds both parties to a higher level of obligation. It shows that everyone is vested in the relationship. Sure, you can break this commitment, as many do, but it’s not easy, and it sure is a lot harder than just breaking up with someone you are dating.

Research tells us 60% of who we are we're born with - the other 40% is what we have control of to manifest our destiny. Don't know if you thought these percentages were higher or lower, but it's interesting. To clarify, the stuff we're born with are things such as addictions, physical attributes, pychological idioms, etc. Suffice to say, we can change much and none of this should dimish our chance of living a successful life!

So what then do we do when it comes to hiring or dealing with people in the workplace? In my humble opinion, three things we can do to avoid people mistakes.

Compensating salespeople effectively is one of the biggest management challenges for a growing business. When a well-designed variable compensation plan is implemented it can have an enormous impact on the bottom line and future growth of your business. When developing your compensation plan for your sales professional, always consider what you want it to do. Here are 3 initial points to consider when designing your staffing sales variable compensation plan.

A few weeks ago we shared an article on our research study to hire only A-player recruiters. That article focused on only professional recruiters. We also gathered and analyzed data for commercial recruiters. For the study, we defined commercial recruiters as those that focus on positions in light industrial, manufacturing, construction, trades, logistics, warehousing, hospitality, general labor, and so on. There were clear distinctions for high-performers depending on whether they identified as professional or commercial recruiters.

The skills gap is widening and it’s getting harder to find great internal talent. In the November-December 2015 edition of the ASA Staffing Success Magazine, staffing execs were asked, “What do you look for when searching for a great recruiter?” In addition to experience, characteristics like self-motivation, sense of urgency, being detail oriented, and people skills were included in most comments.

Interestingly we asked ourselves a similar question just a few months ago. How can we increase our chances of hiring an A-player staffing recruiter? If you’ve been a leader in the staffing industry for a while you could come up with a viable list of characteristics similar to those comments in the magazine article. But, how do you know for sure that you’re going to get an A-player? We still seem to have recruiters that just don’t perform at the level we expected when we hired them. Maybe performance isn’t to the point of being fired, but the result is our office is filled with mostly B- and C-players that just don’t produce high results.

Instead of just using our gut, we sought a scientific approach to identify key traits and competencies.

If you're like most sales reps, you tend to take on each day as it comes. Make a bunch of phone calls, read and respond to your emails, and hopefully go on a couple of appointments. The more activity the better, right? Well yes, and no.

Certainly there is a correlation between activity volume and sales results, but activity for the sake of activity is not a strategy. We refer to this as the “shotgun”, or “throw spaghetti against the wall” approach – throw enough of it and something has to stick.

Unfortunately this hit or miss approach yields hit or miss results. Without a clear plan, opportunities are missed or lost, and you can spend much of your time spinning your wheels. This is why it is so important to take a few minutes to review your accomplishments from the prior week, and plan out your most important tasks for the coming week.