Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Power Has Shifted to the Candidate - 2

The Top 15 Changes That Are Required to Compete in a Candidate-driven Market

In addition to re-examining literally every recruiting strategy, process, and tool, you’ll need to make almost all of the following changes. These required changes are listed in the order in which they occur during the recruiting process.

1- Your recruiting strategy must shift – if you have a flexible corporate recruiting strategy, it already has a component that allows it to easily shift all of its components into “candidate-driven mode.” If you haven’t already planned for the shift, you may need to adopt a new “passive prospect” growth strategy. This type of recruiting strategy includes centralized recruiting with a focus on a strong employer brand, rapidly scalable hiring capabilities, proactive direct sourcing, a focus on employed top performers, a talent pipeline, and a strong relationship building and selling component. Because the competition is so intense, the strategy will also have to include a competitive analysis that ensures that your recruiting approaches are continually superior to those of your talent competitors.

2-Prospect and candidate research becomes essential – candidate needs and expectations will change frequently in this highly competitive marketplace. As a result, market research and survey techniques will be required in order to identify how top candidates look for a job, what criteria they use to select a target company, and what criteria they will use to select their best offer. In a candidate-driven market, your ability to fully understand and to sell prospects and candidates becomes the No. 1 new success factor.

3-Employer brand image improvement – brand image becomes much more critical in a candidate-driven market. Don’t expect recruitment advertising to work very well anymore; your targets will look for others outside the firm to say good things about you. Without a strong and highly visible viral employer brand image, you may literally have no chance of landing a single top performer.

4- Shift from active to passive recruiting tools – the recruiting tools that worked on the active prospects who dominate an employer-driven market will not work when you have to seek out and convince employed individuals (the so-called passives) to consider your jobs.

5- Stronger relationships and trust are required to poach – desperate applicants don’t require a relationship or any courting. But prospects who are in high demand (who already have a job) require a relationship that builds trust merely to get them to apply for an outside job. Obviously the power shift has already increased employee turnover. But because smart firms and managers will dramatically ramp up their retention and counteroffer efforts, it will be especially hard to poach away top employees from other firms.

6- Your corporate webpage and social media presence must improve – in an Internet and social media world, most will get information about your firm from neutral sources. As a result, your corporate web page and social media landing pages must still be judged as “stunning and compelling” by those who visit it. They must be compelling and clearly superior to your talent competitors. Authenticity becomes a critical success factor when prospects have so many choices. If you are to have a formal application process on your corporate webpage, it must be amazingly quick and painless. Using LinkedIn profiles instead of resumes to apply will give your firm a major competitive advantage in this tight labor market.

7- Position descriptions must be compelling – because top prospects have numerous job choices, your currently dull position descriptions and job ads will instantly drive them to other firms with more compelling jobs and descriptions. Unrealistically high qualifications will also severely limit applications, because of the large number of firms that are now seeking the few highly experienced/highly skilled individuals looking for a job.

8-The resume screening process must be more accurate – the current screening process which I label “we have so many applicants it doesn’t matter if we miss a few good ones” can no longer be tolerated because it may have as high as a 33 percent error rate. Sorting software and hiring criteria that have been proven (a high correlation with on-the-job performance) must be used to ensure that no qualified candidates are prematurely rejected for minor reasons.

9- Referrals are No. 1 because of your employees’ selling capabilities - referrals have become critical because we now have metrics that show that they produce the highest quality hires. But because selling prospects and candidates will become at least 50 percent harder, they must become the primary and highest-funded recruiting source. The strongest feature of referrals is that your employees are the best salespeople for convincing skeptical individuals to come work at your firm. In a candidate-driven market, your top employees are the most effective finding, relationship-building, and selling tool that you have. The target should be making referrals over 50 percent of all hires and the highest-rated source for quality of hire.

10- The mobile platform is the No. 1 communications platform – after referrals, no recruiting channel is more important than the mobile platform. Prospects and candidates must be able to do everything from applying to accepting jobs directly and seamlessly from their phones. Because it has the highest message response rate, all recruiting communications and messaging must migrate to the mobile platform.

11- The interview process must be improved – no other recruiting process needs more revision than this one. It must be faster, painless, and you must have a remote interviewing capability. But more importantly, up to 50 percent of interview time must now be spent on selling the candidate if you expect to land a single top performer. If you are slow to assess top candidates, they simply won’t be around when it’s time to make them an offer.

12- You must speed up your hiring process – when candidates have multiple options and offers, slow hiring will mean that you will lose up to 70 percent of candidates who have other offers. Both recruiters and hiring managers need to work tirelessly in order to take every single delay out of the hiring process. For the few highly sought-after candidates, a one-day hiring process will be required.

13- Recruiting and hiring manager behaviors must change – you will need better-trained recruiters and hiring managers who have lost their arrogance and replaced it with the ability to excite and sell candidates. You will need higher-quality recruiters who are simply exceptional at selling difficult to convince prospects and candidates. Unfortunately, the demands for excellent recruiters will soon far outstrip the supply (so begin hiring them now).

14- The offer process must be faster and better – everything about the offer process will have to be made faster. In addition, offers will have to be data-driven and more personalized in order to make your offers more competitive. Exploding offers and identifying and meeting the job acceptance criteria of candidates will be essential. Salary surveys will have to be done much more frequently and they will have to be regionalized and much more accurate.

15- The candidate experience must improve dramatically – even if your recruiting process doesn’t change, the average recruit’s assessment of your current candidate experience at your firm will shift from okay to dismal, simply because the power shift has allowed candidates to expect much more. In addition, with the pervasiveness of social media, everyone will know almost immediately if your candidate experience isn’t perfect. You won’t be able to make that quantum level of improvement without more accurate and frequent candidate experience measurements.

by: Dr John Sullivan

The Power Has Shifted to the Candidate

If you are frustrated because your recruiting approaches are no longer producing great results, you will be happy to know that there is a logical reason behind it. I estimate that 90 percent of recruiting leaders and hiring managers have yet to realize that the power in the recruiting relationship, which for years has favored employers, has shifted over to the jobseekers.

The technical term for this change is a shift from an employer-driven market to a candidate-driven market. And The Recruiter Sentiment Survey by the MRINetwork has revealed that 83 percent of the surveyed recruiters have realized that the power has now shifted to the candidate.

Knowing the reasons for shift is less important for recruiting leaders and hiring managers than recognizing that when jobseekers hold the power in the relationship, your current array of recruiting tools and approaches will literally stop working.

Another interesting phenomenon happens after the power shifts.

That phenomena is that your firm’s hiring managers will begin a seemingly endless round of complaints about how candidates have “an attitude” and how there is a shortage of talent or a skills shortage. If you’ve already heard those complaints at your organization, realize that there are actually more available candidates today. But those quality candidates are now acting differently (i.e. poorly in the eyes of hiring managers) because they have already realized that the power equation has shifted in their favor. As a result, these candidates will no longer tolerate weak employer brands, painfully slow application processes, death by interview, and a distasteful candidate experience.

You can complain all you want about the shift in power, but individual firms simply can’t change the power relationship. The only thing you can do is to radically change your recruiting strategies, tools ,and approaches, so that they now better fit the new level of power that candidates now hold.

Now that the power shifted, candidates who only a short time ago would easily tolerate slow hiring, no feedback and hiring manager arrogance will simply now drop out of the hiring process or gladly accept an offer from another firm.


Six Factors That Caused the Power to Shift to Candidates

If you were a recruiter during 1999, you already experienced the last quantum shift in power to the candidate, which occurred during what was known as “The War for Talent.” If you’re curious as to why the power shifts to the candidate, here are the major factors that can cause this shift to occur. The shift occurs when:

1- The unemployment rate drops (the U.S. rate is the lowest since 2008).

2- Turnover rates dramatically increase (turnover rates went up 46 percent last year).

3- Firms are not raising salaries, so employees must seek jobs elsewhere in order to get more money (wage improvements last year barely kept up with inflation)

4- Many more new jobs are open and they stay unfilled much longer (the job openings rate increased 22 percent since July 2013).

5- he competition for talent between firms increases dramatically because, as a result of company growth, the demand for qualified talent in key jobs exceeds the supply. Firms must fight over desirable candidates who now have multiple job openings to apply to, and now that the finalists receive offers from multiple firms.

6- Prospects, applicants, and candidates all realize that they now have multiple options, so they raise their expectations.


When that power shifts and prospects and candidates raise their expectations, currently effective “active-job-seeker” recruiting approaches like career fairs, print ads, large job boards, walk-ins, and your dull corporate career site will simply stop producing quality hires.

by: Dr John Sullivan

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Tax Mistakes to Avoid

Here are some tips on what to avoid doing for the 2015 tax season:


1- Waiting to0 long to file

2- Filing the old-fashioned way

3- Forgetting to update your household status

4- Deducting too many or not enough business expenses

5- Forgetting to file all the required forms

6- Forgetting to closely track any charitable contributions

7- Failing to keep your paperwork organized

8- Make math errors

9- Going off old or incorrect numbers

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

15 jobs with the highest starting salaries

Salary potential shouldn't be the sole thing that attracts you to a major in college; things like passion, interest, and aptitude should also be considered. But it's still nice to know which degrees pay off the fastest.

1. Petroleum Engineering

Median starting pay: $102,300
Median mid-career pay: $176,300

2. Chemical Engineering
Median starting pay: $69,600
Median mid-career pay: $116,700

3. Computer Engineering
Median starting pay: $67,300
Median mid-career pay: $108,600

4. Nuclear Engineering

Median starting pay: $67,000
Median mid-career pay: $118,800

5. Computer Science & Engineering

Median starting pay: $66,700
Median mid-career pay: $112,600

6. Electrical & Computer Engineering
Median starting pay: $66,500
Median mid-career pay: $113,000

7. Electrical Engineering
Median starting pay: $65,900
Median mid-career pay: $107,900

8. Aerospace Engineering
Median starting pay: $64,700
Median mid-career pay: $107,900

9. Electronics & Communications Engineering
Median starting pay: $64,100
Median mid-career pay: $113,200

10. Materials Science & Engineering
Median starting pay: $64,000
Median mid-career pay: $105,100

11. Computer Science (CS) & Mathematics
Median starting pay: $63,200
Median mid-career pay: $101,400

12. Mechanical Engineering
Median starting pay: $62,100
Median mid-career pay: $101,600

13. Industrial Engineering
Median starting pay: $61,900
Median mid-career pay: $97,200

14. Software Engineering
Median starting pay: $61,700
Median mid-career pay: $99,800

15. Computer Science
Median starting pay: $61,600
Median mid-career pay: $103,600







Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Here are the best cities to get a job in 2015.

10. Minneapolis
Unemployment Rate: 3% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 3.6% (as of December)

Encompassing 11 counties in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the metro area boasts its Chamber of Commerce boasts its diverse economy, including agriculture, food processing, computing, printing and publishing, large- and small-scale manufacturing, health care, arts and entertainment as well as medical instruments, education and finance.


9. Boulder, Colo.
Unemployment Rate: 3.2% (as of November)

State Unemployment Rate: 4% (as of December)
Just 40 minutes outside of Denver, Boulder is the state's 11th largest city. As the home to Colorado University at Boulder, the city has long been an affluent, vibrant center of research and education, with multiple national labs and tech concerns helping to contribute an unemployment rate that's 2.5 points lower than the national average.


8. Fort Collins, Colo.

Unemployment Rate: 3.2% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 4% (as of December)

Roughly one hour north of Denver, Fort Collins is the regional economic center for Northern Colorado. Fort Collins capitalizes on the presence of Colorado State University, which is helping to drive innovation through research and development as well as jobs in the local economy. The town is also the home to the Budweiser touring plant, where the brewer's famous Clydesdales horses reside.


7. Omaha, Neb.

Unemployment Rate: 3% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 2.9% (as of December)

Warren Buffett may have put Omaha on the map but this town has become the poster child for vibrant Midwest towns, with its low unemployment rate, strong economy, solid population growth, particularly from young professionals, and continued livability to set a gold standard.


6. Provo, Utah
Unemployment Rate: 3% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 3.5% (as of December)

Provo, Utah is the third largest city in the state and roughly 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City. It's the hometown of collegiate powerhouse Brigham Young University which provides Provo with a highly educated workforce, and has helped attract and retain companies like Google GOOGL Fiber, Novell, Ancestry.com, and Adobe ADBE as employers in the area. - Provo was recently named Outside Magazine's No. 2 Best Town in America, based on its vibrant economy and access to outdoor recreation.


5. Odessa, Texas
Unemployment Rate: 2.8% (as of November)

State Unemployment Rate: 4.6% (as of December)
Oil is the lifeblood of Odessa, Texas, which is probably best known to most Americans for its rich high school football tradition. Recently pegged by Forbes as one of the fastest growing small cities in the U.S., this small West Texas city has impressive job creation rate continues to outpace the expansion of its burgeoning population.


4. Sioux Falls, S.D.
Unemployment Rate: 4.2% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 3.3% (as of December)

Less than three hours from Omaha, fast-growing Sioux Falls is a regional economic engine which consistently ranks in the top tier of small cities for job growth. Though popular for financial services companies due to its lack of state corporate income tax, the state's largest city has been diversifying beyond that.


3. Rochester, Minn.
Unemployment Rate: 2.6% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 3.6% (as of December)

Health care dominates Rochester, Minn., the state's third-largest city. Rochester, located less than two hours south of Minneapolis, is home to the world-renowned Mayo Clinic.


2. Fargo, N.D.
Unemployment Rate: 2.2% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 2.8% (as of December)

Fargo is North Dakota's largest city. The city's job growth and income gains have outpaced the national average. Most impressively, job growth has kept pace with Fargo's double digit population growth over the last decade.


1. Lincoln, Neb.

Unemployment Rate: 2.1% (as of November)
State Unemployment Rate: 2.9% (as of December)

Nebraska's second largest city is also its capital. Lincoln is ranked No. 6 on Forbes' list of Best Places for Business and Careers. The city, located approximately one hour from Omaha, has a "killer combination" of low unemployment, strong job growth and low ratio of applicants to open jobs.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

10 surprsing jobs you can do from home

Most people think of telecommuting as something that cubicle dwellers request, but more and more employers are looking for new hires who seldom, if ever, come in to the office in the first place.

One reason is that having employees set up their own home offices can save companies a bundle in real estate, utilities, and other overhead costs. If everyone with a portable job and a desire to work from home (or from the road) did so just half the time, U.S. employers could save more than $700 billion a year, according to a study from research firm Global Workplace Analytics.

A sampling of 10 telecommuting positions, filled through the site last year:

Senior pharmaceutical scientist -- Oversee development and results of clinical drug trials.

Fish biologist -- Monitor tagged salmon and maintain database of statistics. Some travel required. (Upstream, maybe?)

Environmental engineer -- Design equipment and processes to prevent or reduce air pollution.

Director of international sales -- Develop sales strategies and manage customer records.
U.S.-based, travel required.

Senior branding/naming expert -- Evaluate market research and name new products. Seven years' branding experience required, MBA preferred.

Chief public affairs officer -- Manage national public relations and internal communications. Oversee staff of 125.

Chief operating officer -- C-level department head to do strategic planning, business development. Some startup experience required.

Chief executive officer -- Oversee daily operations and long-term strategy for statewide chain of assisted-living senior homes. Regulatory experience preferred. Travel required.

Vice president of sales -- Based in the U.K. Seven to 15 years' experience in financial services account management required.


Considering a career change? How about something like this?

Ohio Valley Beer Ambassador -- Coordinate and attend events in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky to promote beer and spirits. Candidate must be "very outgoing." Translation: Party animal preferred.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

9 things you should think twice about before purchasing

While you don't have to be a billionaire to purchase any of the items on this list, most of them are luxury items that usually only people in the upper tax brackets can afford. All of these expensive items however are things that you can do without regardless of your budget.

What follows, in no particular order, is a list of 10 things that you probably shouldn't buy...

1-Bicycles
This choice definitely deserves a caveat. For regular bikers an expensive bike is a great investment, if you live in the suburb but expensive bike thefts are on the rise in places like New York City.


2-Vacation Homes
The negative cash flow associated with vacation homes despite the potential for positive cash flow through collecting rent is reason enough to think twice about purchasing that exotic getaway.

Maintenance costs like insurance, utilities, marketing and other expenses will be a constant drain on finances if one does decide to purchase their future retirement home.


3-College Textbooks

After paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition each semester to go to college it would be pretty silly not to do the reading for your courses. However, there are cheap alternatives to buying new books from your campus bookstore. Buying used books, renting them, or checking them out at the library could save a student (the parents) hundreds of dollars a semester.


4-Snowmobiles/ATVs/Jet-Skis
Unless you live somewhere where using a snowmobile on a daily basis is a necessity, then snowmobiles definitely fall into the 'rather rent than own' category.


5-Designer Denim
Designer jeans from brands like True Religion and Balmain can run you thousands of dollars, while denim from Levis that will last you years can cost under $100 and the quality of denim between the brands is pretty much the same.


6-Recreational Vehicles
Recreational Vehicles also fall into the 'better to rent than own' category due to the potential for a minimal lack of return on investment.


7-Extended Warranties

Most items like electronics already come with a manufacturer's warranty that covers most product flaws and malfunctions.


8-Boats
With the maintenance costs and upkeep being so exorbitant the old age saying is that the happiest two days in a boat owners life is the day he purchases the boat and the day he unloads it, is often proven to be true.


9-Time Shares
Besides the fact that it is often more cost effective to rent a time share than buy it, time shares come with a bunch of hidden costs, and owners should expect to lose 50% of their investment upon resale.