On Thursday, July 26, I will be hosting a webinar sponsored by eRecruit on Metrics for the Staffing Industry. In this webinar, I will discuss how the right metrics portfolio can empower management decision making to ensure both short and long term competitiveness. It is important to understand that the right metric portfolio can help executives and leaders Measure Results Provide a Leading Indicator Identify Operational Weaknesses Reveal Investment Opportunites Drive Individual Accountability Measure Change In this webinar, we will discuss Financial Metrics as well as Personnel Metrics and Operational Metrics. The Operational Metrics will include both the Sales and Delivery Model. Once the right metrics portfolio is in place, the metrics can help quantify change, determine if change is feasible, provide data for effective change management and hold all levels of the organization accountable. I look forward to having you join us on this Metrics Webinar. Mike Cleland President, Charted Path
SIA Executive Forum: The Most Direct Path to Greater Profits
On Wednesday March 14th, I will be presenting at the SIA Executive Forum on aligning your recruiting organization with your client buying patterns to improve profitability. The impact of effective alignment can be quickly realized in the bottom line results and are typically of a substantial scale. Why is the impact of improving operations so significant? Well, because delivery issues are oftentimes driven by self imposed process inefficiencies. Yes, the talent pool may be tightening, but don’t fool yourself that the lack of productivity is out of your control. Spend the time to drill down into your delivery organization and honestly evaluate whether it is truly aligned with your current client base. I have worked with client’s who are married to old processes because they worked in the past. However, this is an expensive mistake. Managers must look at their processes in relation to their account base and customize their delivery accordingly. The good news is that these types of improvements can lead to stunning results. I have seen results increase by over 40% and will present these case studies during my presentation at the SIA Executive Forum. In contrast, addressing bottlenecks in the sales strategy takes longer and typically … Read More
Relationships Still Rule, But…..
Back in the early 90s when I entered this business, I was exposed to a simple yet accurate description of the staffing industry by Al Dubuc of Oz Enterprises- “People selling people to people”. The crux of that definition was that this business runs on the strengths of one-on-one relationships with clients and consultants. However, as clients have changed how they purchase staffing services and candidates have change how they look for jobs, the business has become more complex. While the ability to build long lasting trusting relationships is still critical to a staffing company’s success, other critical factors have crept in over the last decade and altered the landscape of how we need to view and manage this rapidly changing business. Developing Internal Talent: Companies are frustrated by the inability to hire qualified sales and recruiting talent. Relying on hiring experienced and qualified talent that are willing to leave their current position has become exceedingly difficult for a variety of reasons. The alternative is to hire less experienced people and train them. However, most companies are ill prepared to hire and develop inexperienced talent, but you don’t have to look far to see the return on such an approach. … Read More
Planning for Success
How would you respond if someone asked “what’s your growth plan for next year”? In answering the question, you may find that you really don’t have a satisfactory answer. One of the causes of this lack of planning is the tendency to derive business planning from the budget process instead of the other way around. The budget should give the financial backing for the business plan to be executed. By deriving the business plan from the budget process, managers often miss critical business issues that need to be addressed in the coming year. Throw in the year-end reconciling of financials and it’s easy to see how planning is dominated by analyzing and discussing numbers on spreadsheets. Effective business planning requires a more holistic approach where management not only is aware of the financials, but also will evaluate each core driver of the business to identify areas of improvement for the upcoming year. The three core drivers that need to be reviewed and challenged include your sales strategy, operational effectiveness, and the performance driven culture. Some questions to get you started are listed below. Sales Strategy: Is defined by your value proposition, the buyers you are targeting, and the sales process … Read More
Letterman’s Legacy
Recently, I stumbled across some articles that made some interesting claims including the “The ten dumbest management trends” and “The ten worst business ideas ever”. It makes me want to write an article titled “The top ten management articles that make controversial overgeneralizations to drive web traffic”. I understand why people structure their articles around lists, and if you want readership, then it pays to be as dramatic as possible. Drama is entertaining. Also, it certainly sets the expectations that the article is going to be relatively short and what manager wouldn’t want to know the top ten of anything? People love lists. You see them everywhere on the internet from major news organizations to everyday blogs. Lists suggest both a level of research and authority. Initially, many lists were around interesting facts or well researched theory. Lists are easy to digest, make for good trivia and provide a level of entertainment. Lists can also provide important structure around management issues that can be difficult to define. My upcoming webinar incorporates “Five Sales Drivers” is one example of that technique. However, reading these lists on management practices gives me cause for concern. Lists that make sweeping generalizations are more about … Read More
Are the Scales of Talent Tipping?
From my discussions with many staffing owners and executives, things are getting better. Job orders are up, clients are moving faster and it seems more and more likely that the worst of the great recession may be behind us. This uptick is especially true for IT staffing. This is good news, but it does bring with it issues that managers have not faced in a long time including hiring and retaining top talent. Staffing companies live off of the need for talent, but we are facing a bit of a crisis of our own. I speak with staffing managers every day and the common focus area is hiring top sales and recruiting personnel. The sales side can be particularly vexing for managers that are just looking for “A hunter that can bring in business quickly”. These people may exist, but I make a point in my TechServe Rainmaker article that it is less a hiring strategy than it is wishful thinking. Similar issues are found in finding recruiting talent. The fact of the matter is for the foreseeable future in order for companies to build competitive teams, they need to build three critical capabilities: Retain Existing Talent: These last two years have been … Read More
The End of Management
A couple weeks ago I was browsing through the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and stumbled on an article titled “The End of Management”. Contrary to what it suggests, the point of the article is not to rid companies of management, but to challenge the perception of the role of management as it faces unprecedented change. One only has to look at the hyper-accelerated changes in the marketplace to realize that hierarchal or bureaucratic management approaches are outdated and in many cases are harmful to a company’s ability to adapt. This dynamic is captured in the following paragraph discussing creative destruction: “Yet in today’s world, gale-like market forces—rapid globalization, accelerating innovation, relentless competition—have intensified what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of “creative destruction.” Decades-old institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns now can disappear overnight, while new ones like Google and Twitter can spring up from nowhere. A popular video circulating the Internet captures the geometric nature of these trends, noting that it took radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach audiences of 50 million people, while it took the Internet only four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years to do … Read More
The Price of Excellence
Recently the last of US combat troops left Iraq and crossed into Kuwait marking a significant milestone in a long hard fought war. Regardless, of your view on the war, the support for our troops justifiably crosses political spectrums and is a unifying force for most Americans. I believe much of that appreciation stems from the willingness of our men and women in uniform to make sacrifices that most of us would not consider, but that we know are required for all of us to live prosperous and free lives. However, regardless of the level of our appreciation, we tend to underestimate the lessons we can learn from our military. PBS has a compelling documentary, simply titled “The Marines” that sheds light on the nature of what motivates these men and women and what they are willing to go through to achieve their goals. Early on, it becomes clear that many of the Marines are primarily motivated by two things. First, is they feel called upon to protect the country and second they want to become part of an elite group. As they arrive at Parris Island they sacrifice their individualism and put themselves through physical, mental, and emotional turmoil to … Read More
Pardon the Interruption
Most everyone these days has a DVR. I personally love the technology, mainly due to the fact that I can skip all the commercials pitching products and services I don’t need nor want. Fast forwarding through these advertisements makes me think of all the wasted time and effort spent on just trying to get someone’s attention. On top of that, we are inundated with other interruptions to sell us something including radio, magazines, newspapers, buses, subways, and movies to name just a few. This inundation is making us immune to traditional selling techniques, as buyers we are looking for more. This same dynamic can also be found in the highly fragmented world of staffing. Our buyers are inundated with calls from staffing companies. Leading many staffing managers and sales people to understand that we need to change how we market and sell our services to be heard by our clients. Seth Godin attempts to resolve this problem in his book Free Prize Inside. Gone are the days where companies can rely on “interruption marketing” (i.e. advertising) to build a compelling brand. Seth’s assertion is that effective marketing focuses on providing more value in the product or service itself to provide something … Read More
The Power of Habit
I was just reading a book called the Power or Habit by Jack Hodge. The primary narrative of the book is that we, more than anything else, are defined by what we do, and close to 90% of what we do is determined by habits both good and bad. I am not sure how he determined the 90%, but we all know that our habits are a powerful force in our lives. However, I would argue that we as managers may underestimate the power of habits in managing and coaching our teams. This make me think back on a conversation I had with one of my past employees a few years ago. She came into my office to discuss the relevance of my monthly training topic. Her point was that everyone already understood the best practice we were going to discuss. It was in her eyes a waste of time. It was then that the light bulb went off. I wasn’t training because they didn’t already understand the best practice; I was training because they weren’t doing the best practice. So in a way, my training was an infomercial on the best practice and a platform to explain my expectations to the … Read More