Video Clip of TempWorks Staff in the Midst of a Cutover

I caught Jathan Moline and Alisha Arnold in the midst of a big cutover going on at Tempworks this weekend.

Pay-Per-Click Still the Crowned Prince of Inbound Marketing

Say what you want about social media and organic search results, pay-per-click is still the crowned prince of lead generation.

I’m reposting this clip I did on search engine guru Clint Danks of Thinksem, a consultancy that handles our pay-per-click advertising with Google and others.  He continues to do an incredible job maximizing our ROI by writing ads, making suggestions and monitoring our bids. 

 

How an Impromptu Promotional Clip on Time Clocks Went Viral

Ok maybe not LonelyGirl15 viral, but for a slapped-together, boss-walking-around-the-office-with-camera doing blatant self-promotion video, hitting the 1k view mark is pretty cool.

At first I just stuck it on my blog.  Then our newsletter editor picked it up as a sound-bite for the month.  Sales people started sending it to prospects.  Then we put it on our website, and the hits started coming.   A competitor actually commented to me about it: “Gosh, you guys actually get to have fun.”

 

How to Lose a Star Performer In 10 Days

This is a repost of my Dad's story about how he built up a New York based technical services company and ended up leaving it for Manpower in 1966:

Take This Job and Shove It

The company was doing about $2.5 million in sales when I joined [in the early 1960s]. Mr. Signorelli was handicapped as a result of having suffered Polio as a child. He came to work about an hour before closing and I would brief him on what I had accomplished that day. He often would request that I join him for dinner at his favorite Italian restaurants. This meant I arrived home quite late, since commuting late in the evening from New York to New Jersey resulted in long waits for the trains.

I soon started to commute by auto so that I could join our family before the children went to bed. In the four years that I worked for the company, I built the business to the $14 million sales level with a great increase in profit. Mr. Signorelli never gave me a raise.

I noticed an ad in The Wall Street Journal for a Director of Technical Service with Manpower Temporary Service. The requirements spelled out in the ad gave me the assurance that if I applied I would be hired. I then approached Mr. Signorelli for a raise in salary and he turned me down. I was hired by Manpower and I gave notice that I was leaving.

During my tenure, Mr. Signorelli would be advised when I was letting an employee go or had been notified that an employee was leaving for another job. He always advised me to immediately have the employee leave but to pay them for whatever time they gave of notice. I assumed that he would do the same to me, so I gave him a one-month notice that I was leaving. He first offered me a raise, but I told him I had already committed to my new company.

He then let me know that I would have to continue working that final month. My hope of a month’s vacation with pay vanished.  After I left, I learned sales had dropped to $8 million. Signorelli sold the company to Victor Calculating Co., who finally closed it down because of losses.

Career Builder Soon to Have Monster Problems

I’ve been using Careeer Builder on and off over the last few years to search for candidates.  My usual process is to enter my skill criteria “Microsoft SQL Programmer and Accounting”, and out it spits a list of candidates.  Beaucoup candidates.

Too many, and that’s been the problem.   By entering limiting criteria like location or  education, I can shorten the list but the result is largely unordered and still way too long.   Other job board technologies I’ve tried (standard Monster, Dice) suffer from the same weakness – too many results.

Enter Monster’s new “Power Search” facility.  Rather than keyword or density matching, they’ve upped the game and built in Google like relevancy to their result sets.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a hot topic in the search business.  Rather than matching on keywords, keyword densities or synonym rings, LSI moves beyond terms and concepts by allowing relationships to be built between terms and documents.  

If you remember matrices from high school algebra, you can get an idea of the calculations that go on with LSI.  And with the speed of modern processors these matrices can now be super huge and processed by complex mathematics with the result being a wide array classifications.  Those classifications can get astonishingly accurate when applied to a specific domain like job candidates.

I’m not privy to Monster’s source code, but the search results (see below) reflect what you’d expect from an LSI based engine.  Thus in a matter of seconds it’s able to give me a ranked list of candidates.  It seems to get the idea of what a SQL programmer is.  It knows a SQL programmer is not an Oracle DBA or a schema architect.

The search business is not for the faint of heart.  For all I know Career Builder has something similar in the works.  Or maybe 800-lb gorilla Google will preempt them all.  But for the moment Monster has an offering worth looking at.

Google’s Adwords Program Getting Better But Still Bad

Last year Google’s employment branding reached its peak.  Baristas, 20% time off to work on what you want, free gourmet cuisine.  Who would want to work anywhere else?

This year, backlash.  Every HR blogger out there is telling the story of a Google interview gone bad. 

Myself, I don’t care about their employment practices.  I would just like their Golden egg of an adword system to work better.  Wouldn’t you if you had a $200 billion market cap that was riding on the effectiveness of a single program want to make that program really easy to use?

This morning I was looking at the Google Adword “day-parting”  feature that lets you set higher bids during the day.  I’ve been noticing competitors jack up their bids during the daytime hours.  I’m not sure why – nighttime leads are just as good from what I’ve seen.  Nevertheless, if the bidding goes up, it goes up, so I have to raise our bids to get the positioning I want.

The day-parting form provides a flip between a basic mode and a bid adjustment mode (see screenshot), except that it doesn’t work anything like what the labels would suggest.  To wit, if you decide to investigate the Basic mode, you have to wipe out all your Bid Adjustment mode settings.

Also, you have to go through day by day, hour by hour making your settings.  If you run 20 or more campaigns like TempWorks, this can be a real pain.  And remember, if you ever decide to look at the alternative mode (Basic), all your settings get wiped out.

Sloppy stuff.  Sloppy like all the interview nightmares the HR bloggers are writing about.

Stuff you only get away with only if you have a monopoly.

Unemployment by Metro Area?

Popular finance blogger Paul Kedrosky posted this graph of unemployment rates across 50 metro areas but he doesn’t give a source for the data and a lot of it seems suspect. 

Sure Detroit is hurting and government-intense Washington DC is doing better than average, but he’s got three Ohio cities average to above average.  Ohio above average?  Besides Michigan, Ohio is the most hurtin’ place in America from what I see.

He shows Florida hurting which makes sense but Texas only fair to midland.  Strange because Texas has been doing well especially with the oil prices back up.

What do you see?  Does your metro area appear in the place you’d expect it?

What Does Green Employment Mean Today?

I’m not a big fan of IBM’s advertising, especially the annoyingly repetitiveads they tend to run during those really big games.  But their series on green initiatives and how they tied the environmental notion of green to the bottom-line green, that I did like.  Trying to do the same here.

A Summary of the TempWorks Venture Offering

Cost Control Became the Motivator for VMS in 2009

This last week a staffing client won a large contract because they got to know their customer really well and also because they presented a solution that reflected underlying economic realities.

In fact, throughout the recession of 2009, our client deployments of VMS brought an increased emphasis on extended cost control as companies are placing increased scrutiny around the process of vendor selection, and trending certainly suggests an increase in business process outsourcing.

As BPO offers the opportunity to eliminate many fixed costs while creating operational and fiscal efficiencies, more and more companies are turning to vendor management solutions that will allow for increased reporting functionality, turn-key style functionality for line managers, and seamless integration with front and back office functions.

Of all the components in the cost control diagram above, flexible workflow may have the most consequential effect on costs.  If contingent staffing decisions can be efficiently routed through the correct approval processes, everyone wins.

We also recently introduced a major upgrade to the TempWorks VMS Workflow Engine.  The new facility supports a variety of serial or parallel approval processes that can get routed either to single contacts or groups of contacts.  It supports tiered approval processes that would for example include the CFO for a six figure job order but little more than the branch manager to replace a receptionist for a day.

With that and the recent success of our clients in this space, I’m anticipating an exciting year coming up.