Interesting question from a temporary employee on asking the agency for a raise. A sign of a tightening candidate pool? http://ping.fm/fYnw3

How are people finding jobs?

Referrals still #1 way to get a job, but they come by way of social media more and more. No surprise, LinkedIn rates best. http://ping.fm/qDkLn

Is your staffing firm successful in spite of itself?
http://ping.fm/zU8Mi

What to do about skittish buyers?

With all the consistently inconsistent economic news lately, it’s no wonder companies are hesitant to pull the trigger on making a full-time hire – or even a contractor, for that matter.

One month the unemployment picture looks OK, the next it looks bleak.  The stock market is up, then it’s down.  One day the U.S. government has a plan to get the country out of debt, and the next day it’s gridlock again in Washington.  No one has a crystal ball, but we can’t walk around wringing our hands with worry about what the future brings.  Those skittish buyers know they still need to get work done, and that requires people.  They’ll have to have the right talent on board, and you’ll help them find it.

The best thing you can do for buyers of staffing services worried about the future is to be a consultant who helps them put things in perspective.  Bring some order to the madness.  Help them move past focusing on the uncertainty of the future and understand what’s really happening in their organizations to resolve their staffing challenges now.  Is it possible the jobs they MUST fill now (and yes, every month the private sector is still creating jobs) aren’t those for which the currently unemployed have the skills to fill (the answer there, if you listen to employment researchers, is YES – that’s the case, especially with respect to IT, technical trades, and  healthcare).  If your prospects tell you they can’t find the skills to fill the few openings they have and neither can your competition, you can stand on your head doing the same thing they’re all doing and you won’t be any more successful (what’s that definition of insanity again??)!  What you CAN do is help them figure out how to get people trained to do the work they need doing.

Get educated, have advisory discussions with your buyers to help quell their anxiety, and get creative with your solutions.  They’ll view you as a port in the storm.

Staffing firms, why are we showing all our cards?

I am troubled by a trend I’ve seen growing in the last few years in the staffing industry.  Sales reps are disclosing their mark-ups to prospects during the sales process.  In fact, price becomes a key negotiating point early in the game, and we’re letting the buyer dictate our price – even for retail business, it seems.

If you’re selling this way, I ask you, when you buy a gallon of milk at the grocery store, do you know what the grocery store’s cost and mark-up on that gallon of milk is?  Is that information disclosed, right there on the price label?  No, of course it isn’t.  

Somehow, somewhere along the line as competition has increased and buyers have become more sophisticated about using temporary help and further commoditized our services, we have fallen prey to the pressure to disclose our pricing strategy as a key selling point.  Outside of contract business with large volume users of temporary help where full pricing disclosure is required to play, we should NOT be disclosing our mark-up.  This open-book mentality is in party why the industry is so commoditized. 

What to do?  First, figure out what it is you do better than your competitors and sell that value proposition.  When you get to price in the discussion (at which point they should already know they want to do business with your firm), quote a bill rate range.  Tell the buyer you can confirm the rate when you locate the ideal talent and know what you have to pay.  And if requested to “honor the X% mark-up”  of your competitor, deflect the question by referring the buyer back to your value proposition. 

If all else fails, ask him his grocery store discloses their mark-up on a gallon of milk.   With humor, of course.

What does a coach really do for your people?

In all my years in the industry, I’ve never seen such demand from the senior leadership of staffing firms to engage third party coaches for their people at the manager and director level – not just VP level and above.   What’s going on? 

I say it’s because  in today’s post-recession world of fewer resources, today’s leaders just don’t have the bandwidth to spend quality one-on-one time with their direct reports.  And those who are more enlightened get the importance of providing support for the people on the front lines who make it all happen.   

So what will a good coach do to support a senior leader’s lower and middle managers?   Hold them accountable to your expectations for their performance.  Because what gets measured gets done…and what doesn’t get measured may not. 

If you don’t have the time to spend holding your people accountable at an individual level, “rent” the expertise.    Or you could leave their performance to chance…

Lessons learned from Chili mining incident: Sage leadership advice from IO psychology expert and colleague Carl Greenberg http://ping.fm/WObnY

Staffing employee accused of violating non-compete using social network. http://ping.fm/ztI5r

#1 rule in sales: it’s not about you

It’s never about you (you, the sales person, that is).

And after many years in sales, I really get both the simplicity and the power of this statement.

I have spent my entire career in business development.  I’ve attended sales training sessions of all kinds, and I’ve built and delivered sales training for others.  I have been both the coachee and the coach, striving to increase effectiveness.  The commonality in all sales training and coaching is the trainer/coach finds multiple creative ways to convey the obvious (ever heard “uncover the buyer’s needs,” “identify the buyer’s points of pain,” “have a value prop that resonates with the buyer,”): if our role is to sell, the guiding principle to keep front-of-mind if we really want to be successful is that it’s not about us. 

It is only about the customer, always.

That means from the very beginning of the sales cycle through closing, implementation, and servicing an account, our single objective should be to solve our customer’s business problems. 

The extent to which we stay focused on this single objective and develop creative solutions to make life easier for each of our buyers will drive our success (or failure).   If we mentally pretend we are our buyer, the question we want to as ourselve is, what is my pressing business issue today? 

Once we really get this, the rest is easier.

August Employment

Private sector jobs up, 4-mo. avg 72,000; demand for temps strong
http://ping.fm/8zYQI