Have you been having trouble getting the right candidates in your door? Maybe you simply haven’t been getting as many applications as you used to. One of the best ways to improve your candidate experience is to test your application process.
Pull Factors for Your Company
Have you ever stopped to wonder why people choose to work at your company? For many, it’s all about the pull factors—the things ‘pulling’ candidates and employees into a company. Last week, we talked about the things pushing employees out of your company, but what about the things pulling them in or keeping them there? Whether you cultivate these pull factors or not, they are there.
What Are Your Company’s Push Factors?
High turnover rates and low retention are major issues for a lot of companies. Not only do high turnover rates cost lots of money, but they can cause potential employees to be turned off from your company. No one wants to work at a company that is known for having several push factors.
Continue reading “What Are Your Company’s Push Factors?”
Writing Great Job Postings
Are you tired of candidates passing your job postings? Not getting the response to your advertisements that you hoped for? One thing you need to evaluate is the way you are writing and presenting your current job postings. You may not think too much about it, but candidates can easily be turned off from your company and job opportunities if you are publishing poorly written job posts.
5 Reasons to Consider Temp Staffing
Your workforce determines how productive and successful your company is. Without the right employees and associates, your company could be incredibly undervalued right now. So how do you get those employees in your office, on your manufacturing floor, or in your call center? Partner with a staffing firm that can help you find the best temporary employees possible. Temp staffing solutions are great ways to improve your business, reduce costs, and increase profitability.
What is Company Culture?
In the past several months, you’ve probably seen headlines, articles, blog posts, and even news stories surrounding company culture. If you’ve looked at any job postings, you’ve probably even seen some boasting a great work environment and company culture, but not all of those stories answer the question: what is company culture?
While company culture looks different in every office, there are a few things that are central to the idea of company culture. Something else you need to be aware of is that every company has a culture, but you need to cultivate a culture in which employees want to be a part of and feel included. When you do this, you can improve and grow your business because ultimately it is your employees who will do this for you.
Defining Values
The first step in creating, maintaining, and understanding your company’s culture is to define the values in which your company operates under. These values go beyond the mission and vision statements you have. Company values provide direction, support, and standards for employees, managers, and even owners of companies. Through values, you can begin to form and shape your culture into one of a successful company.
Work Environment
If you take a look around at articles discussing companies that have great cultures, you may notice high tech, design-heavy and creative offices. This might make you think that your company will never have a great culture, but the work environment is about more than pure aesthetics. Sure, having black walls and no windows probably isn’t a good idea, but work environment goes much deeper than that. Creating an environment where employees feel respected, trusted, and cared for is much more important. Provide employees with an environment that allows them to get their work done, but done in a way that allows for creativity and passion, and you’ll be on your way to improving company culture.
Engagement
A critical piece of the company culture puzzle is engagement. This goes beyond just talking to your employees every morning. Engagement is meeting with employees, discussing their work, their career development, their goals. Engagement is finding out what you can be doing better as an employer or manager. It also means being accessible to your employees. Create an environment in which employees feel comfortable talking to you about their work, issues, and ideas.
Employee Programs
Employee programs often get confused with fun things like ping-pong tournaments and beer Fridays. But what it really means is setting up beneficial programs for employees. These programs can include things like health initiatives, tuition reimbursement, community programs, monthly lunch, or annual company events. Employee programs serve to help you engage your employees and go above and behind to help them lead better, healthier, and happier lives.
How do you define company culture? Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below!
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3 Ways Staffing Agencies and Small Businesses Team Up
Imagine opening up a new business that starts booming quickly. You suddenly find yourself in need of an employee or maybe even a couple of employees. The problem is you’ve never hired anyone. You don’t know how to onboard someone into your company let alone go about finding them. Some research will show you that you need to post the job online, read resumes, interview, screen candidates, and even get tax information prepared.
Maybe that situation isn’t hard for you to imagine. Finding and hiring new employees is a common problem for small and growing businesses. Whether you are in need of one employee or several, you need a staffing solution that will work for your plans and processes. One option you have: partner with a staffing firm that can bring you custom solutions. Here are three great ways how staffing agencies and small businesses can work together to find great solutions:
- Testing Out Employees. As a small business, you’re probably still going through some growing pains, which means money could fluctuate on a month-to-month basis. You may not be quite ready to make that full-time hire. When you choose to hire a temporary worker or even a temp-to-hire worker, you allow yourself the time to adjust to the growth and test out the waters. See if the employee will work well within your company and if you can handle another full-time employee before you actually make that commitment.
- Ease the Stress: Finding employees is a full-time job and can be overly stressful. In order to find the right employee, you have to post your open position on job boards, read resumes/cover letters, and interview candidates in order to find the right hire. As a business owner or even a manager, you don’t have the time it takes to really find that right fit. No matter your needs, specifications, or requirements, a staffing firm can help find you the right candidate for the job. Instead of looking through dozens (or more) resumes, a staffing firm will simply send you a few candidates after pre-screening and screening them. These candidates will be the best choices for your staffing needs.
- Make Onboarding Easier: One of the biggest issues with hiring new employees is the onboarding process. It can take months for an employee to become fully acclimated to a new work environment. Partnerships between staffing agencies and small businesses can make this process more effective and easier through presentations, testimonials, mentor programs, multimedia tools, and tours. When your new employee starts, you want them to be as prepared as possible and a staffing firm can help make that happen.
Your life doesn’t need to be stressful because you need to hire an employee. Instead, rely on a team of experts to target, engage, and qualify top candidates who can help you successfully carry out your plans and effectively manage your processes.
Leave your staffing questions in the comments section below!
Image Credit: freedigitalphotos.net
The Diverse Staffing Benefits
There are thousands of staffing firms across the country. So what is the Diverse Staffing difference? What makes us so special and valuable to your organization? Our award-winning service is unmatched. And our candidates are among the most highly qualified you will ever find. The Diverse Staffing benefits include great features and services:
World-Class Recruiting
With Diverse Staffing, you partner with experts who possess more than 100 years of combined recruiting and staffing experience – strategists with a rich background and extensive training in your specific business areas.
Critical Needs Analysis
Diverse Staffing works with you to develop a comprehensive study of your organization’s immediate and long-term staffing needs. Our important and highly-detailed discovery phase helps us to understand the exact skill requirements necessary for each vital position you need to fill. Most staffing firms can only fill such critical positions with talented “A” candidates some of the time. Our award-winning process helps us to fill your positions with the right candidate every time.
Research-Based Recruitment Methods
Many staffing agencies only rely on regional job board postings to help fill open positions. Diverse Staffing goes much further. Our award-winning, research-based recruiting methodologies include in-depth, proprietary research, valuable information obtained through referral-based communities, and data gleaned from corporate networking systems.
Drug & Background Screening
At the client’s request, Diverse Staffing offers a quick and thorough drug screening, as well as comprehensive background checks on each eligible candidate—tests performed locally for accurate, immediate results at no additional cost to you.
The Candidate/Client Introduction
The first day a new recruit joins your team, a representative from Diverse Staffing will be onsite to help establish responsibilities and priorities. We help streamline an effective communications strategy—one that strengthens your organization’s plans and processes and promotes clarity and constant improvement.
360° Total Quality Management (TQM)
We work with you to craft a real-time, complete feedback system that ensures greater opportunities for improvement and peak performance.
Employee Recognition & Retention
We offer various, user-friendly candidate management programs to help attract and retain talented recruits. As well, we inspire greater employee loyalty and motivation through special incentive programs and rewards for meeting and exceeding quality performance goals.
Customized Quarterly Reports
As part of our award-winning service, we offer at no additional charge a number of customized quarterly reports, which allow you to chart the progress of each recruit, as well as the overall status of your project.
Location
Diverse Staffing offers several regional locations to cover the regions you serve in your businesses. HR personnel are always comforted to know that a Diverse Staffing office is “right down the road,” with experts available immediately to help answer your questions and concerns.
Payroll & Billing
If you wish to “preview” talent with no risk to you and no burden to your internal accounting department, hire the candidate through us. Diverse Staffing will put that employee on our payroll and handle all project billing for the candidate. You have no long-term obligations to either Diverse Staffing or the candidate. And you can ensure that each potential employee will work out in advance of your eventual hire.
Reference Checks
Diverse Staffing guarantees due diligence in tracking each candidate’s employment history and performance.
The Diverse Staffing benefits can help you successfully carry out your plans and effectively manage your processes. Call us at 317.803.2910 to learn how we can start helping you today.
The Anatomy of a Comprehensive Staffing Service
When you begin searching for a staffing agency to help with your work force needs, it helps if you understand the anatomy of a comprehensive staffing firm. In order to avoid working with a firm that may not provide you the best features or even all of the features you really need, you should be sure that you are receiving comprehensive staffing services. Below, you will find a short guide to comprehensive staffing services and what you need to be on the lookout for.
Evaluating Your Needs
Clients turn to Diverse Staffing, to design a custom, research-based recruiting program built on a unique, metrics-driven staffing model. Unlike programs offered by most recruiting and staffing firms in the market, this extremely proactive Diverse Staffing recruitment system incorporates “Best Staffing Practices”. This allows us to help corporate clients like you identify, build and track a specialized, national database of the country’s most highly skilled job candidates.
Customizing Solutions
Utilizing this powerful proprietary system, Diverse Staffing then “goes the extra mile” by helping to recruit these candidates on behalf of our corporate clients. Our integrated staffing model serves corporate clients through five phases:
- A Research Phase – in which Diverse Staffing creates a customized, research-driven recruiting database
- A Recruitment Phase – in which Diverse Staffing works with the clients to identify and attract top recruits
- A Submittal Phase – in which Diverse Staffing submits top candidates to client for final consideration
- An Offer Phase – in which client and candidate come to terms on employment arrangements
- A Retention Phase – in which Diverse Staffing performs periodic follow-up evaluations with both client and new employee in a systematic review process.
Measuring Results
Diverse Staffing does not stop working after the “offer phase.” We want to ensure a quality work environment and streamlined communications, as well as increased opportunities for retention. That is why Diverse Staffing follows up on every assignment with both employer and employee by implementing a 360-degree Total Quality Management (TQM) feedback system. This TQM system employs a systematic, data-driven process and allows for feedback and continuous improvement, not only between the client and the employee, but also between any party and Diverse Staffing. We are all looking for opportunities for greater improvement, and this TQM feedback system is the very best in the industry.
Best Practices in Employee Evaluation
A key goal for any staffing agency is to find you and other corporate clients the best and most qualified job candidates. Not all firms offer the comprehensive services that enble them to reach that goal. Our evaluation processes deliver consistent and measurable improvements when it comes to placing qualified talent: Applicant Interview – During the interview, details about skills and experience are discussed. Testing – For certain positions, such as for office/clerical applicants, typing and data entry skills will be required. Thus we will test individuals on their software and clerical skills. We also offer certification of Forklift Operators and ensure that CDL drivers have the required licenses.
Additional employee screening should always include:
- Reference Checks – References from previous employers are verified.
- Drug Screening – Applicant drug screening can be performed at the client’s request.
- Criminal Background Check – Criminal background checks are performed at the client’s request.
- Ongoing Recruitment Programs – Through our various recruiting methods, we ensure that we always have the right candidate for you at the right time.
- Employee Benefits – Employees can qualify for paid holidays and vacations, 401(k) plans and group health insurance plans, available from Diverse Staffing. Direct Deposit of paychecks and a Debit Card program are also available to all Diverse Staffing employees (thus eliminating the overhead costs to our corporate clients).
- Satisfaction Guaranteed
Diverse Staffing even offers you this pledge: If you are not completely satisfied with one of our employees, notify us within the first four (4) hours of the assignment, and we will replace that employee with another and not charge you for the initial hours.