Tom's Talent Blog

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.

Have you ever played the card game War? This is the simplest of simple games, in that the 52 card deck is dealt out evenly between two participants, and the object is merely to flip over your cards, one by one, with the winner of each hand being the one with the higher card. There is no strategy, no skill, and no advantage that one competitor has over the other (unless one of you gets a chance to stack the deck).

How about Chess? This is essentially the opposite of War. It involves strategy, intellect, patience, and skill. A more advanced player has a significant advantage over a novice, and will consistently beat their opponent. The premise that the game is built on is that your very first move, and all subsequent moves, sets you up for future ones. It’s all about positioning yourself early and often so it is easier to win later on.

Everyone in our family has an iPad, even our four year old son.  We are an Apple family with three iPads, two Macbooks, and three iPhones. And obviously we aren't the only ones - reports show that Apple has more cash reserves than the United States! And this from a company that was on the brink of bankruptcy less than 20 years ago.

In today’s staffing climate, businesses are created to satisfy needs within their surrounding community. But often in the scramble to build the business and capture the market ahead of something else, it becomes nothing more than a commodity – something that is readily available, but is hardly indistinguishable from all of the other businesses that are similar in nature.

No, the title is not an insightful quote from Jack Welch or Steve Jobs, or even Confucius - it's a line from a song by one of my all-time favorite bands Dinosaur Jr . I love well-written music lyrics the way that I imagine some people appreciate poetry. The song I quoted in the title, Thumb , is about 20 years old but has always resonated with me and the line becomes more pertinent every year.

Optimism is back in the staffing industry. Business is up, clients are calling us again, and all seems right with the world. But along with that optimism is a false sense of security, resulting in missed opportunities now and long-term consequences later.