Staffing Talk | Staffing Software News and Opinion

As Newspaper Business Sours, Quality Goes with It

2009-07-10T12:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.examiner.com/x-16413-Cincinnati-Business-Development-Examiner~y2009m7d10-Temporary-agency-secrets-they-dont-want-you-to-know?#comments

If this link about the staffing agency business from the Cincinnati Examiner was a troll, then I apologize in advance to Kevin O'Reilly, a Cincinnati "Business Development Examiner", whatever that is.

But if in fact he is real and it was an article he wrote to be taken seriously, then he gets the employment idiot-of-the-week award.

First his numbers. He can't add. $5600/wk is $290k+ annum not $67k.

Second, he doesn't understand employer taxes and worker comp which wipe out most of the 'profit' that he claims the staffing company gets.

He gets worse, libelous even, from there...however one of his claims is true - that agencies tend to advertise a position in advance to an actual job order. They also tend to tell client companies that they have job candidates in advance to actually having them vetted.

God help those looking for work in Cincinnati if Kevin O'Reilly actually works as city business examiner because no reasonable employer would stay.

This Week in Staffing

2009-07-07T13:17:00.001-07:00

Monster (MWW) Leads the Downturn

Stifel Nicolaus analyst James Janesky deconstructed the recent crash in staffing stocks in this Dow Jones Newswire article. The article outlines exactly what I’ve been seeing across a broad spectrum of staffing companies, that the uptick which we saw at the start of the second quarter (that would be April) has fizzled out. We’ve reached what Janesky calls ‘stabilization at depressed levels’.

Janesky advises to hold off on buying staffing stocks: "You generally want to own staffing firms six months ahead of true stabilization or growth in the employment levels," he said. "To own them now seems premature."

I see more to the current stock price downturn than the bad economy. Just as with print media and other industries, public staffing companies can’t change their DNA fast enough to keep up with changing times.

Dutch Staffing Market Drops 28%

It’s not just the USA staffing market that is down. The Dutch market according to this article is down a whopping 28% in billable hours.

How to Achieve OFCCP Compliance

At Tempworks we’re getting calls from staffing companies concerned about OFCCP compliance, a requirement for landing federal contracts - something our clients are very good at.

OFCCP is the department of the ESA in charge of auditing for discriminatory hiring practices, and their website lays out what you need to do to stay in compliance.

Advertisement: Tempworks is uniquely positioned for OFCCP compliance because of our strong role-based security and the audit friendly electronic storage of all employment documents and processes. We’ll be monitoring the OFCCP as regulations change: http://www.tempworks.com/products/software/recruiting-software/ofccp-compliance.aspx

If You Don’t Cannibalize Your Market, Someone Else Will

2009-07-02T15:06:00.001-07:00

A Woman-Cannibal, by Leonhard Kern, 1650

Amazon is reinventing the book industry with its Kindle product and cannibalizing its own printed book market along the way. You should be thinking the same way about your recruitment company.

As much as I’ve been a fan of Borders, Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com itself, paper books are going the way of the rest of print media. Any doubt I had about that I rescued myself from this last week at the lake cabin by reading three entire books off my Kindle.

That same cannibalization is at play in the staffing software market. It’s increasingly less about software and more about funding, back-office outsourcing and simply creating profitability in the staffing sector.

If you have any doubt in my belief in that, check out the latest versions of Tempworks Freemium which in many ways is a cannibalization of the core Tempworks software market.

This last week we’ve been having many discussion not about how to position the Freemium product, but how it will fit in the Tempworks ecosystem. Just like the Kindle may well end up displacing many suppliers and employees of Amazon, a cannibalistic offering like Freemium is having a big impact on who does what at Tempworks.

We’re facing many of the same dilemmas as others who have been down this road like Steve Singh, CEO of expense-tracking company Concur. Steve sees beyond the technology market that drove Concur to initial market success and gives a transparent view of how his cannibalistic strategy involved much more than offering a product “on-demand” or “Saas”.

I see several of our staffing customers doing the same and can’t give away their secrets here, but at the end of the day they start from the same realization:

If you don’t cannibalize your own market, someone else will.

How to Handle Inbound Leads from the Web

2009-06-29T13:51:00.001-07:00

How do you handle inbound leads from the web? Pounce? Pause? Putz?

It’s an issue I talk about a lot with the sales staff here at Tempworks. Obviously the phone-in leads we handle right away. Anecdotally the phone-ins are the best, and so we display our phone number prominently on our website.

But what about emails from prospects or webform conversions from the website? How quickly should you respond? Two bloggers I follow closely, Mike Damphousse and Craig Rosenberg aka the Funneholic, recently took up the question with Craig championing the pounce.

Let me tell you how I handle it at Tempworks and please let me know in the comment section whether I’m on track or not.

First thing to know is that I personally receive all of these inbound leads (200+ per month) and am in charge of dispatching them or not to the appropriate party. I like to handle them because it gives me immediate reinforcement on the different ppc (pay-per-click) and social media advertising programs I have going.
Second, when I get them I determine if they are hot on the trail of a purchase, that is those that make sense to include in Craig Rosenberg’s graph win-rate/time-to-respond graph:

I immediately forward these hot-leads to the appropriate sales person.
Third, a lot of the leads we get are from start-ups or simply people thinking of starting a staffing agency. For those I’m more likely to welcome them to the website and suggest they join one of our free seminars.

What’s Black and White and Red All Over?

2009-06-29T04:32:00.001-07:00

What’s black and white and red all over? Watch the humor clip below from Jon Stewart to see the answer.

Myself, I’m just back from a week of walleye fishing near the Detroit Lakes in upstate Minnesota where the official unemployment may be high but the underground economy of fishing guides, dock installers, and corn-stands flourishes. With payroll and sales taxes weighing down every transaction, it’s no wonder off-book activity is booming.

While I was gone, staffing indicators gave little reason for joy as we moved into late June, putting the brakes on the tiny recover we saw in April and May. I’m working on a thesis that the staffing industry slow-down owes itself as much to the ‘employment penalty’ as it does to the faltering economy.

All this can be said in a cartoon like the one from New Yorker.

What It Looks Like to Outsiders When You Get Into a Pissing Match with the Competition

2009-06-21T09:24:00.001-07:00

How Microsoft Bing Will Give Google a Run for Their Money

2009-06-19T15:24:00.001-07:00

Many of the leading voices in social media drink the Google kool-aid straight up. You can tell because they began denigrating Microsoft’s launch of Bing from the get-go. They’re missing out on a lot.

At Tempworks we see huge potential for Bing. I’ve already been a fan of the Microsoft search engine on MSN which is the same as the one on Bing simply because it brings a lot of traffic to Tempworks and at a better price than Google.

Bing is also loaded with accoutrements like Virtual Earth which is a much friendlier mapping system than Google’s. Tempworks has integrated it tightly with its enterprise software.

You can see from this clip that the instantaneous way that both the street map and the pictorial view show up can be a great aid to a recruiter giving directions to candidates on their way to a job interview.

Secrets of a Staffing PR Genius

2009-06-18T07:01:00.001-07:00

I like to write about social media – blogging, search engines, viral videos – but the reality is that despite its predicted demise traditional media like newspaper and TV still get many times the eyeballs. Staffing companies that can leverage that media with free PR have a leg up on everyone else.

Over the years I’ve watched my brother Michael Dourgarian of Manpower who recently got mentioned again in the national news outrun competition and consistently grow revenue in part because of his PR genius.

Here are a handful of observations on why television and newspaper reporters turn to Mike so readily:

He’s funny. Let’s face it, most business people are total bores. We don’t get funny. We don’t work on it. We consider being funny unlearnable. Not Mike. Ever since I can remember he’s worked hard on impersonations, joke telling, stand-up comedy and working a crowd. He studies Jim Carey like I study software heuristics. It’s hard work, and he does it.
He’s empathetic. Mike understands job candidates. When you watch him on TV talk about how to go about getting a job in California’s beaten down economy, you realize that he empathizes 100% with the job-seeker.
He’s handsome. Ok he’s got some genetic advantage here but he’s always dressed right for the occasion. He’s somebody the TV people want to put on the six o’clock news because he looks like the authority figure people will listen too. It’s not just the dress, it’s how you stand, how you hold your head – just ask Susan Boyle.
He tells stories. I think he learned this first from our father, but again it’s something he works very hard at. Story telling entertains. When he tells a story about how an unemployed single-mother got a great job, people feel good about themselves. The TV anchors love it too and repeat the story on the late news and the next morning news as well.

Summary

The bottom line here is that the skills for killer PR are learnable. The people like Mike that are really good at it got that way because they wanted it and worked hard at it. If you get good at it, you too can generate demand for your staffing business with great PR.

Good Read

2009-06-18T06:09:00.001-07:00

My wife and I are reading and enjoying Summer Guest, a novel by Justin Cronin, an arch-political-enemy-turned-friend from my activist days in Iowa City.

Justin was the editor of the university newspaper there and did me the favor of teaching more about writing in two hours than I had learned during my entire undergraduate year.

We’re reading his book on my new Kindle DX which my wife first dissed (too heavy, no new book page smell) but has now swiped and won’t let go of. We’re searching for a new-book perfume to smear on the Kindle to complete her conversion.

How to Manage Healthcare Staffing Costs

2009-06-16T09:50:00.001-07:00

It’s an amazing contrast, the American and the French healthcare systems.

One discriminates against the poor and leaves many without adequate care. It suffers from rampant fraud and is ruled by administrators instead of doctors and nurses. It’s perpetually broke and makes it impossible for anyone living in remote areas – anyone but the wealthy – to gain access to quality care.

Then there is the American system. Yes, you are reading that right. As bad as we have it here in the USA with the many healthcare insurers and the complications in choosing or switching among them, we enjoy a magnitude of order better care than nationalized systems like the French have. And it all has to do with choice and freedom.

“I would never take my children to the hospital here,” Guillaume the director at the school my children attended when we lived in an extreme suburb of Toulouse told me one day. “They just don’t have and can’t afford the necessary care.”

France today is consumed in a healthcare nightmare. Strikes, budget cuts, and an exploding deficit have transformed what was supposed to be an equitable system for all into a system ruled by administrators and characterized by unacceptably lengthy waits for emergency care and the centralization of services that many do not have access to. Only the very rich can find ways around the problems.

Between the unions and the government, healthcare workers in France are getting a raw deal. This cartoon by dessindepresse shows a potential healthcare worker having his legs split apart by competing forces in the unions and the government that make it impossible for him to get a job. Nationalized healthcare would be an even worse disaster for the USA.

President Obama of course doesn’t see it that way and seems hell-bent to spend yet another trillion dollars we don’t have to emulate the broken systems of our European friends. He’s all excited about technology especially medical record systems that would cost something close to $80k for each practicing doctor. Mr. President, I love technology too but some things just don’t make sense.

Hospitals have better choices now than socialism. Jason Lander over at StaffingRobot makes the case for smarter staffing and purchasing. He underscores how group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and hospital associations (HAs) can work a lot smarter and create more efficient markets for staffing medical facilities.

Jason describes both the risks and rewards of vendor management systems and in my mind how the decentralization of decision making creates a more competitive market.

MSN Career Site Talks Up Daniel Group’s Social Media Strategy

2009-06-16T06:49:00.001-07:00

They give me blank stares like what is this software guy trying to sell me now when I talk to most prospects about how they need to embrace social media.

So it came as a pleasant surprise when MSN featured one of my own clients, The Daniel Group, as a transformative agent in the emerging space of social recruitment.

Here is what MSN had to say in an article written by Rachel Zupek, a CareerBuilder writer:

The Daniel Group/Dan Temps, for example, decided to take advantage of social media to enhance its brand recognition. Jarrod Daniel, president of the executive search and staffing firm, says the firm saw an opportunity to communicate better with its associates and candidates on topics like employment, market issues and internal events. Plus, having an active Facebook page has helped candidates find them and increase visibility.

"Our Facebook recruiting project has increased our visibility in regards to the job postings that we have. We used to get an average of 30 applications per posting before we created the Facebook page," Daniel says. "Since that page was created, the applications have gone up to an average of 150 applications per posting. That is a 500 percent increase in applications per posting in only three months."

While Dan Temps clearly figured out an effective strategy, not every company is in the same boat. Many firms know they need to get in the space, but once they're there, they have no idea how to leverage their existence. As a result, employers need people with social networking skills -- like you -- to come on board and take over.

How to Make Armenian Style Manti

2009-06-15T14:48:00.001-07:00

Crunchy 'boats' of meat pies in a tomato based broth topped with yogurt make for one of the mideast's best but little known delights. Using a pasta roller speeds up the process of creating the boats. My innovation is to add cilantro and seeds to the meat/parsley/onion mixture.

Sales Lead Generation for Staffing Companies

2009-06-15T14:23:00.001-07:00

How I want from being a 99-pound wimp to an internet marketing heavyweight who brings his sales folk dozens of hot sales leads each week.

How to Get That Dream Job: Part 1

2009-06-15T06:35:00.001-07:00

I’ve been watching my 16-year-old fumble through the process of getting a summer job. She’s in the “I applied but they didn’t call back” stage right now.

This got me thinking about all the job solicitations I get and how little resumes matter in a tight job market. One solution to the candidate-glut is to stand out not with your resume but with your approach, particularly the cover-letter.

Here’s one story of a guy who did his cover-letter homework and landed a plum web design job.

New HR Technology Industry Site Based in UK

2009-06-14T10:15:00.001-07:00

I recently joined the newly formed HR technology community website Callabor8 hosted by consultancy Pan Eight out of the UK and copied below my first discussion entry there.

Hi. My name is Gregg Dourgarian, and I'm the CEO of a staffing software, payroll funding and back office services company in Minnesota (USA).

This is my first discussion on Callabor8 so I thought I'd kick it off with some initial data I'm seeing for June of 2009 across several dozen independent staffing companies located primarily in the US.

Although volume shot up in Q2 and remains improved into June, the numbers are still down about 20% YTY. I guess that's bad news although it's much better than the 40% YTY drop we were seeing in Q1.

Market strength varies in the USA by geography more than by specialization. Markets where oil or government are prominent (Maryland, Texas) are doing much better than manufacturing states like Ohio/Michigan or housing/retirement states (Florida, Arizona). California is a special case and is perhaps the worst off of all.

That said, on the specialization side, professional service contracting is doing much better than labor especially construction oriented labor. Nurse staffing has tanked badly with census counts at hospitals down significantly. We still see strength in allied medical i.e. physical therapy.

I wish the best for the Callabor8 community as there seems to be no strong staffing/recruiting community out there any more.

Celebrating on Lake Minnetonka

2009-06-13T16:48:00.001-07:00

Minnesota is famous for its lakes. Pictured above some of the Tempworks team were out celebrating some recent wins on Lake Minnetonka today.

This exceptionally beautiful girl benefits from genuine Italian-Armenian genes inherited from, ahem, her modest Dad. She caused a stack overflow on hot-or-not and bills out at a couple hundos an hour (that’s for sql development, btw). In her spare time she keeps the Tempworks books and is currently developing an updated accounts receivable reconciliation system for staffing companies.

How to Land That New Job

2009-06-13T16:28:00.001-07:00

Jeff Taylor (pictured, left) , the founder of Monster, offered great advice to job-seekers this last week during his appearance on Hubspot’s weekly inbound marketing telecast.

Quite the showman, Jeff moonlights as a DJ and electrifies the conversation. It’s no wonder he was able to keep Monster so much in the public eye during its rise.

Jeff’s advice to job seekers was to go into your interview knowing everything you possibly can about the hiring company and hiring manager. With tools like Facebook and search engines, there is no excuse for not being informed. Great advice when considering that there are many candidates for each job opening in the current market.

I agree with Jeff but he doesn’t go far enough. The interview is not about you. It’s about THEM. How well do you know THEM? Have you read THEIR blog? Are you following THEM on Twitter? No one cares that you were vice president of sales or that you were in the top 10% of producers or made quota every year. We don’t believe that stuff anyway unless we have some backdoor proof of it.

Hubspot has been running these inbound marketing telecasts for about a year now, and I learn something new from each one. The hosts, Mike Volpe and Karen Rubin, do a great job although I find them a little to hung up on Twitter.

Race Card Played in Temp Payrolling Scam

2009-06-12T18:50:00.001-07:00

http://www.gazette.com/articles/companies-56320-defendants-indictment.html

Barack Obama may be president, but there is no shortage of scammers seeking protection with the race card.

According to the grand jury indictment, David A. Banks, Demetrius K. Harper, Gary L. Walker, Clinton A. Stewart, David A. Zirpolo and Kendrick Barnes conned several different Colorado temporary services into payrolling ghosted employees on fictitious work orders.

Similar Scam in Philadelphia by Eric Ward of “Keeping It Real Tour”

According to a temporary service in Philadelphia, the same fraud was used against them by Eric Ward of “Keeping It Real Tour”. Ward conned temporary staffing firms to payroll his ghosted employees, and one of those temporary services which was a Tempworks customer has since gone out of business.

Sadly enough, this same Eric Ward plays a high profile in the African-American community and according to this article by Kia Gregory of the Philadelphia Inquirer will be visiting 60 inner-city schools around the country to teach motivation and leadership skills.

God help those poor kids.

How to Get Your First Customers

2009-06-12T13:40:00.001-07:00

This morning Jack Terrana and I did our weekly show with 25 entrepreneurs from around the country, and quickly it became obvious that the hot topic of the week was how to get those first few customers for a new staffing agency.

That’s me by the way pictured above with my Japanese counterpart and Megumi, my customer-provided escort (no, not that kind) , during one of my many trips to Japan Air Systems (JAS) and Nippon Airlines in the 1990s. JAS was one of my earliest and biggest airline software deals, and the experience of landing them as a Supertrace client taught me some crucial lessons on landing a first set of customers:

Show them the love. To win Japan Air’s favor, I studied Japanese relentlessly for two years, completing the equivalent of a college minor in Japanese at the University of Minnesota, before ever making a presentation to them.
Get an inside champion. I got in the door at JAS by keeping up a good relationship with a soccer buddy here in the USA who eventually went there as a contract programmer and influenced them to look at my products.
Patience. Some things take time. The big deals take a lot of time. It took four years from initial presentation to the signing of the deal. In between Christmas cards were exchanged as well as telephone calls and telexes (a telex was the pre-internet version of email).
Constantly evolve the product. It wasn’t fun but to earn their favor I rewrote a hunk of display code to handle the Japanese character set.
Be easy to do business with. In retrospect I could have done things a lot smarter with JAS. Buying and installing my package was hard, hard, hard. I should have started out by selling them training which is a great silver bullet for enterprise software.

Big-Time Tempworks Contributor

2009-06-10T07:26:00.001-07:00

If you’re in sales you know unpleasant it can be to go out on a road trip, especially if you don’t have the right kind of support back at headquarters.

Fortunately, our Tempworks road warriors have an invaluable service developed by Hassan Hemani (pictured above). Hassan’s sales lead integration system makes sure our sales folk get maximum lead penetration when they go into a territory.

Here’s an example of how it works.

Cory Hintz is now on the road down in southeast Texas. Cory does a phenomenal job of visiting clients and helping them through any issues they have with our service as well as making them aware of services like payroll processing, webcenter and text messaging.

Before Cory left on the trip, we used Hassan’s sales lead integration service to import a couple hundred sales leads from Jigsaw into our Tempworks database. The leads come in with phone number and email address, so while Cory is travelling around he can use twMobile to develop new prospects.

Prominent Newsletter Coverage

Hassan also got some prominent coverage in the Tempworks June 2009 Newsletter:

What are the contributing factors to his happiness and success at TempWorks?

His co-workers! Hassan enjoys working with a dedicated and motivated team. He also enjoys some of the other perks of working at TempWorks, like the ping pong table and the endless supply of snacks stocked up in the snack room!

After graduating from Mankato State University with a Computer and Information Sciences Degree, Hassan went to work for James Tower in the Quality Assurance department. He spent almost two years there, testing software applications and making sure the systems ran smoothly.

In his spare time, Hassan enjoys playing cricket, singing, and playing ping pong. For twenty-one years Pakistan was his home, but, for the last eight years, Hassan has called Minnesota home. He currently lives in Eagan, along with his wife, Masooma, and son, AliMehdi.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About Tempworks Freemium

2009-06-08T12:03:00.001-07:00

Today we officially launched our Freemium program, and with it came a lot of questions from people both inside and outside of Tempworks. I try to explain most of it in this clip, and in case you missed there is an actual demo of the startup process here.

Top Staffing News for the Week of June 8, 2009

2009-06-08T07:22:00.001-07:00

It’s the NBA finals so why not check out the Steve Nash videos on employment branding.

Jim Lanzalatto writes in Workforce Management that staffing suppliers are in a brutal stretch over the next year but some are making gutsy bets: “Forward-thinking C-level decision-makers are picking their spots to expand their businesses, making gutsy, strategic decisions in what they think are growth markets, hoping to offset weaknesses elsewhere in their firms. And they’re not guessing. They’re making these calls after doing their homework, listening to their customers and making hard decisions.”

You’ve heard of just-in-time manufacturing. Tempworks client Instaff in Dallas has matched it with just-in-time staffing. Getting dozens of workers to a jobsite immediately via text messaging makes all the difference.

Public staffing stocks have not been left out of the bull run during the last three months:

Barron’s has a bullish story on HR outsourcing…HR outsourcing predicated on the thesis that unemployment is in the early stages of normalizing,” and that “large companies will outsource an increasing amount of HR functions and hiring trends stabilize.”

Adecco, Manpower, Spherion say the sky is not falling according to Reuters.

A Payroll Marketing Clip That Doesn’t Mention ‘Staffing’

2009-06-05T06:41:00.001-07:00

Harut our main non-staffing payroll sales guy exhorted me to do a clip about our payroll services without mentioning ‘staffing’. I thought it came out pretty good although i have reservations about mentioning the competition names like ADP and Kronos.

Btw I have a $10 Starbucks card for anyone who can tell me how to make the ‘play’ button not appear smack dab in the middle of the Youtube screen.

Our pitch: Why opt for expensive payroll when you can get processing, time clocks, online time entry, recruiting tools, crm all for a lower price and with more personal services?

How Seth Godin Ruined the Internet

2009-06-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

I curse Seth Godin and the popularity of his “opt-in” or Permission Marketing. It’s become the biggest source of spam on the internet.

Now it’s not entirely fair to blame Seth although he does engage in some amount of spam himself. No, it’s not him but the legions of email marketers out there who have adopted the “opt-in” religion as a license to harangue and bore subscriber lists, filling their inboxes with irrelevant, repetitive crap.

At Tempworks we use a spam deterrent service called SpamFighter that does its job quite well, sending almost all unsolicited junk to my spam folder. But the one thing it doesn’t stop is the emails I get from sources that I once perhaps absent-mindedly gave “permission” to send me email.

The reality is we don’t mind getting email, even if it is not opt-in, as long as it is relevant and interesting. Like yesterday I got such an email from a guy putting on a recruitment conference here in Minneapolis. He made his invitation funny, local, and a little supplicative, and guess what I’m going to his conference.

In contrast, you have email marketing companies, even the best ones like Exact Target and its resident blogger Al Iverson (to be fair, Al’s got a good column going despite this as does Morgan Stewart also of Exact Target) who will tar and feather anyone that sends him an email that he didn’t specifically give permission to.

I’ve signed up with a number of these email marketing companies and astonishingly once they have you on their “opt-in” email list, they inundate you with emails about how great their opt-in service is.

Perhaps all this will work itself out and only the email marketers focusing on relevance will win-out, but that seems a long ways off.

If You’re Thinking About Internet Marketing, Think ThinkSEM

2009-06-03T14:50:00.001-07:00

This is a testimonial clip I did for Clint Danks at ThinkSEM who has been instrumental in helping me revamp our internet marketing at Tempworks over the last six months.