This Week in Staffing

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

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

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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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?

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

How Microsoft Bing Will Give Google a Run for Their Money

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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. 
3. 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.
4. 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

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

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

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.