Adecco Issues Five Best Recruitment Practices for 2008

A Refresher for Employers on Better Recruitment for Better Retention

MELVILLE, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Adecco Group North America, the world’s leading workforce solutions and recruitment company (www.adeccousa.com) issued five recruitment best practices for 2008. With unemployment remaining below 5% for the past two years, it is increasingly challenging to find the right talent – talent that will succeed within your organization for the long term. Adecco’s philosophy is that improved retention starts with strong recruitment practices.

To help employers kick off the New Year focused on better recruiting, Adecco, the company that connects more people to more jobs at more companies than anyone else in the world, shares some of its best practices for hiring mangers.

	1.		Start at the top. Take a close look at the top performers in your organization and determine what the key characteristics are that enable them to succeed. Incorporate these into your job description, discuss them with your recruiters and address them with candidates during your interviews.
	2.		Look ahead. As you begin hiring for a position, consider what success will look like a year from now for the person you hire. What will the person need to have accomplished to be deemed a success? Which key stakeholders will play a role in this person’s career at the company? How will this person fit culturally with these stakeholders and the rest of their core team?
	3.		Clarity. Have a clearly defined job description at the onset. Avoid being generic. It will only make more unnecessary work for you, your recruiter and your management team in vetting resumes. If you take the time to really capture what the job is and the key requirements for success, you’ll be able to attract more targeted candidates. Also, when you are interviewing candidates, be clear and candid about the ins and outs of the job. Quick turnover happens as a result of a lack of clarity around what a job truly requires.
	4.		Communication. It’s essential to take the time to communicate consistently with everyone involved in your recruitment process from the team the person will be working with to your recruiter and of course the candidates. First, clearly define as a team what your hiring needs are and the type of person you are looking for. If you work in a team environment, it’s essential to have buy-in from the people who will be working with the new person on the key skills and other characteristics this person should possess.
			Second, it’s very important to help your recruiter understand your needs. Whether it’s an internal recruiter in HR or from a recruitment firm, the more information you share with the recruiter the better a job they can do for you in identifying high potential candidates. The more you align your recruitment team with your business, your culture, the skill set you need and the characteristics you are looking for, the better results you’ll have with your search.
			When you do identify candidates to interview for the role, be sure you communicate all aspects of the job to them and what success looks like. This will help them understand the long-term requirements of the job and enable them to better assess whether it’s the right fit or not.
	5.		Recruiting is marketing. Every point of contact builds a brand, and recruiting is no exception. As you post jobs, interview candidates and introduce them to your company it’s an opportunity to help build your company’s reputation. Whether the candidate turns out to be the right fit or not, you should always market your company and its products/services in a positive and enthusiastic way. One, it helps generate excitement from the candidate and two, you never know if that candidate will become a customer or other type of business partner to your company one day. Also, we can never forget the impact that word of mouth has in the workforce today, so always put your best foot forward with recruits.

“It’s often so easy to let the most fundamental best practices of recruiting go when we are busy in our everyday work lives,” says Bernadette Kenny, Chief Career Officer for Adecco Group North America. “We’ve issued these five best practices as a helpful refresher or guide for hiring managers to reference as we enter another year with increasing recruitment and retention challenges ahead of us.”

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Do you really want to be a consultant?

When somebody asks you if you are happy doing what you are doing what do you say? If you are anything like me, you probably tell them that you love it. I get to advise the leaders of industry, I am at the heart of change, and I can see the world revolve from where I sit. Along with that people pay me well and I get to travel around the world at other people’s expense.

Fantastic job, what I always wanted to do when I was growing up in the remote Australian Outback. Yes, sounds great doesn’t it, well be careful what you wish for.

Consulting is a great managerial discipline to be working in, and it does have all of the advantages above, as well as a few others. However, it also has a great deal of sacrifice, hard work, and strain associated with it.

I travel a lot; in fact, I have traveled just about every week this year away from my family. I get to see my two small kids every weekend (sort of like prison really) and the strain of raising our family has fallen squarely on the shoulders of my wife.

Like you, I work long hours. 8-hour days exist only in my distant memory. During the day, I am often client facing, and in the evenings, I have to catch up with everything else we are supposed to be dealing with, for all the other clients, the prospects and our own internal processes.

Then there is the continual self-promotion and networking activities. If you are a consultant, you need to be doing this sort of thing. Alan Weiss recommends a book, or a product of some sort, every year. Why? Credibility, notoriety,, being recognized as an obvious expert within your field, and to create gravity towards you in the marketplace.

The networking for me is a lot of fun. I have been doing this my entire career now so it is more of a hobby than a duty. Nevertheless, it is still there, meet, connect, share experiences, and find common ground, drive opportunities their way, etc, all part of the great game of building a network.

Does that sound like fun? Sometimes, at other times it is just a string of empty hotel rooms with my life on the end of a cell phone.

Jack Welch, put it clearly in his book titled “Winning”. Very few people in the world actually get to have it all. The Life/Balance thing is wonderful for consultants to talk to others about, but in reality, it does not exist. Either you can choose to be on the fast track, or you choose to be on the slow track.

That is the balance – you get to choose. Spend all the time with your family that you want to, and make sacrifices relating to your career. Alternatively, spend most of your time promoting your career or your business, with the sacrifice being on the side of the family.

Consultants don’t often get to choose this really. Our lives are ones of continually striving to keep clients happy, continually trying to justify the size of the fees that are paid, continually looking for the next purchase order – and so on.

For me right now, it is okay. I like it, I really like it actually, I miss my kids, but I have chosen things to be like this so that later I can spend all the time I need to with my wife and my kids.

The day I don’t want to do this anymore, then I need to find a way to make the work come to me rather than travel all over the world going to the work.

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Talent Management and the Resource Crunch

For a management consultant there has never been a time like right now. Business is booming all over the world. Resource shortfalls are in almost every industry, particularly those where I operate, competition and regulation are driving all companies to try to get an extra “edge” over others in their sector, and many markets are starting to use consultants more and more. (UK and USA being cases in point)

The other side of this is that it has never been harder to find good resources to help you.

There are ways however, some take a lot more effort than in the past, but you can still find and keep people of good character and skill levels to work in your consultancy. Here are a few tips that I have seen working in different countries around the world.

1. Use niche job boards – The big job boards are flooded with roles, literally. So much so that it takes a heck of a long time for anybody to wade through them until they find something that suits what they think they should be doing.

Niche boards, on the other hand, focus on specific industry requirements. Our own board focuses entirely on consulting resources and roles for consultants.

2. Use LinkedIn – Depending on the size of your network, you will be able to access hundreds or more management consultants who could be working in the areas you are looking for.

The benefit of a product like LinkedIn is that the people who turn up in searches are not necessarily looking for work. I am on LinkedIn and I am not looking for work anyway. Therefore, instead of waiting for people like this to join the job market, you get the opportunity to approach them first, giving you a first mover’s advantage.

3. Other network options – Tap into your suppliers maybe, your competitors definitely, go to your local chamber of commerce or similar enterprise group.

4. Get a good head hunter – Not a body shop, not a recruiter, but a real honest-to-goodness headhunter.

The kinds of people that will scour your competitors companies, scour his own networks, rip through social networking sites, and act as a filter for you. The downside, real head hunters cost real money, small investment for the person you need.

5. Pay good money – And advertise it! When I was in the job market if the figure was not there neither was my attention. Let us not kid each other, money matters! It matters a lot. Moreover, as time goes on it seems to matter more and more.

Offer good money, and deliver what you offer. There is nothing worse than getting stiffed on a job application. And there is nothing more likely to get people to reenter the job market.

6. Offer additional compensation – Real players get equity. Give equity, profit share, things that are going to tie people’s fortunes to the company and, if they do well, will reward them beyond what they would normally receive. Sounds like a hit on profits? It is, but only on short-term profits.

If you have hired well, using the head hunter, then your new hire is good at what they do, they have the emotional connection to your company, and as time goes on they are only going to increase in their ability to generate revenue for you.

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The Consulting Pulse Jobs Board

Taking a leaf out of our own books we are linking up with our friends at SimplyHired to publish our own jobs board here at Consulting Pulse.com.

This is the first of a number of specialized jobs boards that we will be launching over the next couple of months. With others focusing on more specialist areas of the consulting field.

We were toying with the idea of creating our own jobs board and launching it, and we still might do in the future. However, the benefit we get from tying up with SimplyHired is that they already have a bristling board filled with a lot of top quality appointments.

And the whole goal of this site is to provide value fro consultants, so this seemed like the best option to start with!

Why launch a job board into an already crowded market? Easy! Because the market needs niche players.

Let me explain a little. I am a seasoned job hunter, since starting my career I have worked with over 60 different roles, contracts and positions. This has taken me on a journey through 27 different countries, most industrial sectors and a variety of managerial disciplines.

And at no time did I ever get a job from any of the big players such as Monster.com or HotJobs. Every one of the roles I was able to get came from small, closely knit, network types of sites or tools.

So this is what we are going to build for our readership. A network of jobs posted by people who want consultants, and read by people who are consultants.

No surfing through hours and hours of possibly related postings. If you are a consultant, and you want a job, then look here!

Our goal is to be able to build on this through being able to provide a focal point for consultants and companies looking specifically for consultants.

Always interested in hearing your thoughts on what we are doing here. (So feel free to comment)

We have included a few categories that are not the norm on most job boards around the place. Categories like SaaS, Business Intelligence, Strategy and Executive; to try to cover all of the wide range of fields that exist within the world of managerial consulting.

I hope it is of use to you.