Why You May Not Be Getting Great Candidates From Your Agencies

How many times has this happened? You open a job to your agencies and they begin submitting candidates. One by one you review the résumés, separating the candidates into “yes” and “no” piles, but quickly the flow of applicants turns to a trickle and the quality of candidates seems to stagnate--or even worse--decline. Your boss and HR is pressing you to fill the position and you throw up your hands, saying, "I need better agencies.” Your first reaction may be to put the job out to more agencies, but there may be something you haven’t considered... you!
 
As soon as the opening is in the hands of the agencies, too often the employer goes dark, or at least dim, but that’s the wrong approach. In our two years of research, what we’ve learned is that employment agencies will take almost any job order, placing the job into one of three buckets. We’ll call them Buckets A, B, and C. Here are the criteria:
 
Bucket A: The agency has direct communication with the hiring manager, the job expectations and salary range are believable, and the job has been out less than a week.  
Bucket B: The agency has direct communication with the hiring manager, and the job requirements and salary expectations are believable.
Bucket C: It’s an open job, with a pulse.  

A new client opportunity will almost always push any job to the A bucket, but only temporarily. Agencies prioritize, giving their highest attention to Bucket A, and will reevaluate on a weekly basis. Do you get it yet? As the employer, if you are not giving the specific feedback your agencies need to find your candidate--if you're not part of the process--if you don’t help them help you, then the job will go to Bucket C. And you do not want to be in Bucket C!  

Bucket C is the like the Island of Misfit Toys, where job orders go to die.  To avoid this, when giving agencies rejection feedback say what was right with the submittal then use the “Why, Why, What” method.

 

• First Why: Reason for the rejection (i.e., “Candidate is not a cultural fit.”)
• Second Why: Follows on the first (i.e., “Your candidate does not have experience working in a startup.”).  
• The What: What you are looking for relating to the rejection (i.e., “We need someone who can be a part of a close-knit team and can change course quickly”).  

 

Good agencies are the ones who ask lots of questions up front and throughout the process. Let the agency know you’re approachable by engaging in a dialogue with them. Anytime you get a question, give the most complete answer possible and then invite follow-up questions to ensure they’ve got it. Put everything together and well-done feedback will look like this:

“Technically you're right on, but this candidate is not a fit culturally because they do not have experience working in a startup.  We need someone who can be part of a close-knit team and can change course quickly.  Let me know if you have any questions.”

Research shows that success in staffing comes down to prompt action and good communication, which is why we built our application around them.  

Avenue Bridge is a project-management utility, built around hiring best practices. If you're interested in making fast-acting, good communication and stellar hiring easy visit us online at http://www.avenuebridge.com.

Salesforce CEO Points To Social As The Future Of Enterprise

The tech blog communitity has been a buzz coming off the recent Web 2.0 Summit.  Here attendees heard from Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff's and his prediction for the future of enterprise.  His prediction: Facebook was at the center of everything.  You can read the full article here. 

The argument, as Benioff says is "Facebook is eating the web."  With consumers spending more time on Facebook than anywhere else online, it makes sense that the enterprise want to be where the customers are but perhaps there's a another more profound evolutionary explanation.  

Going social gives us the ability to put an entire experience in one place...online! When this happens we are able to promote the good behaviors and move away from the not so good ones creating better efficiencies.  Lets face it; the enterprise is all about better efficiencies.  There is no argument that Facebook is the undisputed king of connecting people online but wide scale netorking is just the beginning.  For the enterprise its all about connecting people for a purpose.  So where as the future of enterprise may or may not be Facebook it will most definately be social.  

We made this bet over a year ago when we sought out to create Avenue Bridge.  We bet that the future of the staffing industry would be social. By putting the entire "staffing" experience online, we bet we'd be able to create a standard for staffing that was the most efficient and satisfying in the industry. 

Thanks Mark for backing us up on this one. 

If you're an employer or staffing agency and woulde like to learn more about how Avenue Bridge can help your business drop us a line.  We'd love to talk to you. 

Recruiting: A priority for VC's

Leena Rao over at Techcrunch wrote a great little piece on Greylock Partners, one of the Venture Capital elite, officially getting into the recruiting game for its portfolio companies.  You can read the full post here. 

A venture partner recrutiting for their portfolio companies is nothing new.  More often than not, in addition to providing capital, expertise and connections, a venture partner will assist or even lead the talent acquisition initiatives.  Why?  They have great connections to talent for one and can free up their companies to focus on their business's world changing products. The fact Greylock Partners is formalizing the responsibility is whats most interesting, for a couple of reasons.  

First: Although the jobs market is stagnant, the tech sector is telling a much different story.  Looking at just technology one would think that the Bulls have the market. Its not just startups that are hiring tech either.  Everyone from a 10-person scrapper to a Fortune 10 is beefing up on tech talent which equals a hyper-competitive landscape for everyone.  A good VC will have its tentacles into the talent scene and can recruit faster, convincing the top tier candidate to make a jump based on endorsement alone.  

The second reason is a bit more timeless and speaks to the value of the staffing industry.  The VC's know that the success of a company is not as much about the companies' product as it is about its ability to execute.  Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that the ability to build a great team is the keystone of execution and will undoubtedly make or break the company.  Avenue Bridge is built upon this very principal.  We believe that innovating the hiring process will have the most impact towards helping businesses succeed.  

 If your a staffing agency or an employer and are interested in learning more about how Avenue Bridge can help your business we'd love to talk to you.  

 

Tips for Staffing Agencies to Win More Customers

You can show your weaknesses to sell your strengths

 

In The VIP (part 1): The Why

I love big problems!  Any time one presents itself I get excited because big problems to me mean big opportunities.  Whether it be personal, professional, in technology, in society, etc., big problems serve as the foundation for positive change.

The staffing industry has some really BIG problems!  Don’t get me wrong, the staffing industry provides a lot of good.  It provides jobs for millions of people and helps companies grow but the problems are there nonetheless. It was these problems that served as the inspiration for us to create the vendor Intelligence platform or VIP for short, and what many believe can create a paradigm shift in the staffing industry.   So what is a vendor intelligence platform and why is it needed?  Before we get into the VIP, lets talk about the inspiration. 

The staffing “vendorverse” is big!  Really big!  To give you an idea of just how big i’m talking, there are almost two staffing agency offices for every single Starbucks. And not just the Starbucks stores but any place you can get a cup of Starbucks coffee!!  I know right!  Holy staffing Starbucks!  Come to think of it, if you’re listening Starbucks, market directly to staffing agencies.  Having been in the industry for a long time I can attest that we live off the heavenly brew!  But I digress.  

The fact is that when the relationship between staffing vendor and employer is good, it’s really good and there are buckets of smiles everywhere.  Unfortunately when the vendor employer relationship is faltering, it’s not just frustrating for both parties, it’s expensive and there are way too many non-productive relationships out there today.  So how do companies and agencies avoid staffing purgatory and get their buckets of smiles?  That’s a great question and within that question live the big problems i’m talking about.  

Let's dig a little deeper.  Today, there are around 20k staffing offices and around 30k SMB’s (small and mid-sized business) all bumping into each other trying to find their right staffing soul mates and mainly relying on trial and error because there is no other good way to do it.  This confusing paradigm results in lengthy time periods to fill jobs, high costs on both sides, low confidence, contracts and billing nightmares and the list of pain goes on from there.  The bottom line is that staffing today sucks!  I’ll say it again...staffing sucks!  Harsh?  Maybe, but true!  But here’s the thing, the staffing industry provides a valuable service.  If it didn’t then companies wouldn't spend $110B a year on it.   So you have this invaluable service but a really crappy experience for both the buyer and seller.   Imagine what might happen if you took this invaluable service and provided a great experience for both agencies and employers.  Thats exactly what we did and that ultimately is the VIP.  Check back soon for part 2 and and a deeper explaination of the "what". 

 

How many staffing agencies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Last week I had the opportunity to visit with our friends over at Hubspot, one of the hottest, fastest growing companies in Boston.  My overall perception was everything I expected it to be.  They had a very cool, modern office with bright colors.  The conversations happening around me were thought provoking and relevant to the tasks at hand.  The vibe was laid back and intense at the same time and in the best possible way.  Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, seemed to love what they were doing.  I can tell you this much!  if I didn't truly love what I was doing, I would be throwing my job application into their mix and praying to the gods of employment to get me in there.  So whats the problem?  In my opinion, their problem is the best problem to have.  They're growing....fast!  So fast, in fact, that they can't possibly hire fast enough, on their own, to keep up with the work load.  For this reason, and being the smart guys that they are, they enlisted the help of the pro's.  By that I mean staffing agencies.  In conversation the question arose,  "how many agencies should we be working with?" or as I like to say "how many staffing agencies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  Thats a great question, and one that I see a lot of companies get wrong so lets set it straight.

The total number of agencies you engage with will depend very much on your company size, the skill sets you're looking for, location, and over a dozen other variables.  Sound confusing?  It is!  So don't look at it from a company level.  Instead work from the bottom up, meaning, how many agencies you should engage per open job?   This question is much more tackle-able.  In 90% of all cases you should be working with no less then 2 agencies because the 2 means competition for the agencies which is a good thing for you.  Competition keeps the vendors on their toes, speeds up the hiring process, helps to control pricing and encourages the best candidates.  I'm not saying that giving an agency an exclusive opportunity is never a good thing, but this should be done sparingly and for good reason.

So what is the maximum number of agencies you should have working on one open position?  I find that the magic number is to have no less then 2 and no more then 5, but why a max of  5? Why not 500?  In this case less is more for a couple of reasons.

1) Preserve your time:   More agencies means more candidate submittals which means more more resumes for you to review.  To keep the resume count in check, it's always a good idea to ask the agencies to submit only their top 2-3 candidates and THATS IT!  An agency is going to perform best when you give them some room to present a few candidates to you.  Don't assume that they know what you're looking for, as well as you do, because they probably don't, but they don't have to to be effective.  A good agency will understand your need well enough to give you a menu of 2-3 candidates to pick from, with one of them usually hitting the target.  But, even with the cap, you're still going to be stuck reviewing 10-15 resumes.  Do you really want to be sifting through more then 15 resumes while your core responsibilities are pushed aside? I didn't think so.  Remember you can always ask for more later but, like I said, less is more.

2) Show the love with a little vendor loyalty:  Finding a good candidate is an art and takes effort.  Often times an agency is going to have to evaluate  at least 10 candidates for every one that they submit to you.  Your vendors are going to want to know that this hard work does stand a chance in hell of paying off.  Competing with 2 other agencies is a 50% chance of success in an agencies eyes where as competing with 20 agencies is going to be a 5% chance of success. Big difference!   If you're shady (shame on you) and think you can keep your suppliers in the dark on how many other agencies you're working with, think again.  A good staffing agency is going to have their finger on the pulse of the market and will be speaking with candidates, like the one you want, all the time.  The more agencies you have working on a job the greater the risk of more then one of your agencies speaking to the same candidates.  When agencies start bumping into each other like this, the job will be branded as "saturated" meaning finito wether you've found your future rock star or not.  Furthermore, you run the risk of loosing credibility with your vendors all together. When that happens good luck getting a good response on any future job openings.   The easiest way to remain on the top of your vendors"to do" list is to show some loyalty which means make your staffing suppliers feel like an elite few rather then a mob.  If you want to score some extra integrity points, tell the vendor exactly how many other agencies you're working with up front rather then waiting for them to ask.

Bonus:  On rare occasions it is ok to work with one agency but reserve these as a way of saying thank you!  If a supplier has consistently done good work for you then an exclusive is a nice way to thank them, but if you're going to do this, put a time stamp on it.  Tell the agency that you'll give them a 3 day to 1 week head start before releasing the job out to other agencies.  This way they'll know they have to get the lead out in order to take advantage on the gift you have bestowed?  Also, spread the wealth around and alternate your exclusive opportunities between your vendor pool, so they all have a chance to feel appreciated, but always set the expectation up front that this is a "thank you" for all their hard work.  Make this a consistant part of your vendor relations and they'll be bending over backwards for you. You'd be surprised how much more you can get in return when you give a little and show some appreciation every once in a while.

Having at least a couple staffing agencies on hand for when you need them is always a smart move, but managing your staffing vendors through the Avenue Bridge platform is frickin' genius.  We took this and a kabillion other staffing related questions (legally I can say kabillion because its not a real number) and built a platform around the answers.   If you'd like to learn more about how you can be crazy good at getting the best employees and enjoy doing it, enter your contact information on our main page and well get back to you in warp speed.  Also, we like it when people like us so, if your feelin' the love, let us know by hitting us up on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

As you may have figured out, there is no punchline to the title joke.  All of the ones we came up with were lame but we'd love to hear your high-larious endings so post them on Facebook or Linkedin.  The chosen winner will receive bragging rights and a shout-out from Avenue Bridge.          

Are you making the most of your relationships?

First let me preface by saying that i'm not referring to making friends, being a better spouse, which bros you’re going to hang with on game day or your bff for manni’s and peddi’s.  I’m talking all business, baby!  Now, i'm not a psychologist and have no desire to be one.  I have however been in, and am fascinated by many, many different types of buyer/seller relationships and what i've found is that the rules for success, whether it be personal or in business, are the same.  Here are the three rules that I live by when it comes to relationships.

1. When choosing a relationship, use the force and choose wisely you must:

Ok, so that’s something that Yoda might say to Indiana Jones when asked which cup would give everlasting life but it applies here...really!

When it comes to choosing relationships I think Dane Cook, one of the most successful comedians ever to throw out a punchline, said it best when he said:

"...we've all been there, everybody's been in that situation where you will stay with someone and you don't even like them.  Two weeks in and your already like "pshh", no way, I can’t stand this person. I'll hang around another 5 or 6 years then we can end this thing violently."

Hopefully you're reading this with a smile, but seriously, how many times has this happened to you in your professional life.  Whether you are the seller or the buyer early on you know, in your gut, that things just aren't jiving yet feel the need to push.  If you’re the seller you may have your back up against a quota, if you’re the buyer there may be an urgent need for the product or service in play.  Whatever the reason, if the mojo ain't flowin, it is the wrong reason!  Walk...no...RUN away!  If you're not sure if the relationship is fated for greatness or doomed then use your gut, which I like to call the force! Early on, if you're tuned in to the power of the force, then you’ll always know.

Rest assured that “breaking up”, before the relationship has a chance to bloom into a flaming bucket of yuck, is always a good move and won’t keep you from reaching your overall objective.

• Buyers; there are probably other companies that provide this particular product or service and if there isn’t, then ask for a different sales person.  It may sting a little but you're doing the both of you a favor.
• Sellers; the tenacity is appreciated but not everyone should be sold. This is for your sake and for theirs.  If your company is selling something that is truly unique then refer the prospective client to an associate of yours that you think would be a fit. Can you imagine what would happen if you said to the customer, "I can tell that we're just not a fit and I believe that relationships are important, but I also believe that my product will help you, so I'd like to refer you to someone who I believe you would work welll with".  Holy cow! The sale would practically be a done deal!  So what if you didn't get it. There will be many other opportunities and thats the stuff that gets noticed and elevates sales people into sales legends!

Speaking from experience, forcing a square peg into a round hole is a BAD idea and although it may not end in fisticuffs (hopefully), it will always end, and it won't be pretty.

2. Be like Buddha:

No, i'm not talking about shaving your head and donning a red and orange robe.  I'm talking about empathy and compassion; looking at things from the other persons point of view. It is easy to get caught up in deadlines, budgets and quotas, but often times these things can get in the way and leading with them can create conflict.  Chade-Meng Tan from Google gave a great talk on compassion and you can view it here.

Good business deals are all about the win-win but in order to get there you need to be able to see both "win's".  You already know what your ideal win scenario is (if you don’t, then you're not ready to put a deal together) but without the other parties perspective you have no way of seeing the other side of the equation.  By the way, I'm suggesting you do this for selfish reasons.  Not understanding the other parties goals and objectives is how deals blow up and how you waste a lot of valuable time without getting anything in return.   So what’s the secret to enlightenment? What can you do to truly understand what the other person wants?  Are you ready to blow your mind? You ask!

Put your cards, all of your cards, on the table and come together with transparency (sellers this includes not only disclosing that you expect to turn a profit but exactly how much of a profit you would like to make).  Most likely, not everything you both want will match up at first, but together you can find a common ground and both walk away happy.  If a common ground can't be found, then isn't it a good thing you addressed this upfront, before you hit the slippery slope and risked not just this deal, but future deals together?  In either case putting it all out there will only strengthen the relationship.

I mean c'mon! If compassion, empathy and transparency worked for Buddha and Google then maybe, just maybe, it can work for you too.

3. Use your relationships to the fullest: This one is my favorite and it is the reason why we designed the Avenue Bridge platform to be a relationship powerhouse.

Have you ever met someone that you liked or admired that didn't like helping people?  If you have, then you should call the NSA and report an ET sighting because that person is not a person. The desire to help and connect to people is in our DNA.  Feeling like we matter is part of what drives us; when we help we matter.  So why is it that the buyer and seller's relationship is, most often, only reserved for just the sale?  Think of what might happen if you were to open up your business relationships for additional outlying and unintended benefits, for example; what if you relied on your seller for knowledge as well as product or service?

The staffing industry, in my experience, tends to have an unusually low buyer confidence level which could be greatly increased just by implementing this one principal. The sellers of staffing services, like sellers of other products and services, are usually very knowledgable in there field. I'm not just talking about who's the best person for the job either.  They are experts of the labor market including up-to-date trends of cost and time-to-hire for each and every skill set.  Actually they're probably the most knowledgable because their data is in real time. They live it and breathe it every day.  Isn't “cost” and “time” important when planning...well...anything?

If you're a buyer and are already asking these questions then you are AWESOME! Even if I was missing a thumb and a pinky i'd still be able to count on one hand how many times a client asked me for this type of information regularly.  And here's the thing,  I was happy to give away my knowledge for free because, as part of the planning, I was able to forecast my sales funnel and revenue potential with greater accuracy, plus it just felt good to feel needed.  Now take this knowledge potential and multiply it by 5,10, or even 20 because that's how many vendors, in staffing anyway, a company is using at any given time.  Hmmm, multiple knowledge points, on a specific subject, each with a slightly different perspective?  Thats an advisory board!

Sellers... one word...referrals!  Assuming you're doing everything else even halfway right then your customers like you (hurray)because people buy from people they like.  If you're not asking your existing client base if they can help you grow your business then you're not doing yourself or your company any justice.  Remember, your customers are people too and, like you, they enjoy helping those they like, when and however they can.

Having been on both sides of the buyer and seller's fence I've had some very bad experiences and some very good ones.  In a few cases, I've been blessed with some pretty good friends that were at one point or another a client of mine, or I of theirs,  and the only way that that professional relationship could cross the divide into a personal one was by using these principals.  At the very least you'll do better business, faster, and with a greater sense of satisfaction.   At most, who knows, you may even end up with a new bro for game day or a new girlfriend for manni’s and peddi’s. Send us your feedback, follow us, and friend us via Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.

Inspire to Hire!

What a great feeling it is to realize that all of your hard work and preparation is paying off.  You may have just received a massive amount of money to bring your vision to life. Perhaps it's because you're  kicking butt and executing with surgeon like precision.  What ever the reason may be, the result is the same.  "It's time to grow."  If you haven't already done so....pause for a minute....do a little victory dance around your desk. Maybe even throw a fist bump or  a high five, or even raise the roof.  Now come back down to reality.  You're work is just beginning.

The scenario above is just one of many examples of why business’s in the United States spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on staffing.  So here's what gets me scratching my head.  If you ask any hiring manager if they would rather have a mediocre workforce or an incredibly talented workforce, what do you think they're going to say?  If you said mediocre then you have bigger problems and probably shouldn’t be hiring anyone.  Of course you want a talented workforce!!  So here's the problem, everyone wants the best workers for their business which means competition.  If you don't believe me then I challenge you to name a company that has never lost out on their top choice candidate because the candidate decided to take an offer elsewhere.

Back to the head scratching.  It's astounding how much upfront money and time is spent seeking out "the best" talent and how little time is spent reeling them in.  It is safe to assume that even in a down economy, like the one that just left us all bruised and battered, your first choice candidate is going to be entertaining at least 3 competing offers at the same time.  If you're not operating under that assumption then, again, you have bigger problems.  Here's the real kicker! The ammunition needed to secure a first round employee pick is probably already in your bunker, and IT'S FREE!!

I'm talking about the age old art of selling.  We all do it!  As stewards of our companies we are all selling our hearts out, whether it be to our boss, our employees, a prospective client, a trade group, whatever. We are always selling our beliefs in why we are awesome and why the company we work for is awesome,  that is unless we are interviewing a potential candidate that we really really like for a mission critical position.  For them, the approach is almost always:

"So tell me about yourself and why you feel you'd be a good fit for this position?"

What?

Guess what!  The pendulum swings both ways and that amazing candidate is probably amazing because he or she wants to be a part of something meaningful, so its not just on them to sell you,  you have to sell them too.   Maybe a little less of  "so tell me about yourself" and a little more  "I know you're awesome, here's why me and my company are awesome, and together we can be the awesomest!!" is in order.  Ok, so maybe the verbiage could use a little tweaking but you catch my drift; fewer question marks and more exclamation points!  When it comes to hiring, be willing to fight for what you want.  A little passion on your part goes a long way.  After all, “passion” is probably the reason you want to hire this person in the first place.  

A Start-Up From the Heart

I’ve spent quite some time thinking about what would best serve as the Avenue Bridge inaugural post.  The first of anything is never an easy feat. It sets a tone, its a first impression and if not done from the heart , can be easily over thought.  Such is the case of Avenue Bridge, a first mover invention, setting a tone, and although not easy, it was built from the heart and its been well worth it.

I think the best way to start this conversation off is to answer the question I most frequently hear: “What is Avenue Bridge?”  As simple as this question may seem, it has been the cause of many a debate and considerable time spent at the whiteboard before landing on something we could all agree on.  But before we get into what Avenue Bridge is, id like to say what we’re not and we are anything but typical.  The very nature of Avenue Bridge was founded on the idea of pushing the envelope and challenging the status quo so that we may strive to to create change for the better.  Engrained in the culture of Avenue Bridge, the founders sought to create something that was about thinking outside of the box and incorporating advanced technologies with uncommon business models to move industry forward.  Most importantly the experience had to come first and could not be compromised, ever! In order to do this, words like “typical” or even “can’t” had to be omitted from our cultural dictionary.  In addition we knew that our best ideas had yet to come and, more importantly, these ideas wouldn’t even come from us.  They’d come from our customers who use our products and have the most to gain.

So what is Avenue Bridge? The technical answer to this, the one with all the buzzwords and SEO potential, is that Avenue Bridge is an application leveraging social commerce for the benefit of workforce management.  So what does all this mean?  It means that we make hiring and growing your workforce cheaper and easier.  By combining web 2.0 social practices with the combined buying power of social commerce for business’s everyone wins.  The companies win a highly skilled affordable workforce, the vendors get more great customers and a more effective way to support them, and the employees get jobs and wages that they love.  And about the experience, I think our CTO said it best when he said “we want something so non-business feeling that we almost want to trick people into thinking they’re not working.”

Today, with unemployment bouncing between 8 and 10%, and companies spending less and less while still having to push forward, industry needs a way to grow its workforce easily but with reduced costs.  Furthermore a solution such as this has to require zero risk and zero capital investment (after all, companies are trying to cut costs).  The solution should require little setup and no training.  Oh, and the user experience had to come first.  Thats Avenue Bridge, a no realized cost, no risk, web based application, making hiring enjoyable and built around a world class customer experience

We hope that you’ll find the Avenue Bridge blog roll thought provoking and informative.  Our intention is that this will be a go to place for those individuals wanting to keep up to date about all things in cutting edge development, new and enlightening business practices, and employment news as well as being the soundboard for all main AB enhancements as they’re introduced to our applications.

We welcome any comments to any blog contribution.  If we goof’ (yes we’re human) feel free to call us on it.  After all, as the techies we are, learning from breaking things is how we learn best.  Please don’t wait for us to make an error  to speak up however (as funny as that is).  It is our hope that this can be a venue for an active conversation where everyone can learn a little and have some fun.