Cost Effective Recruiting

Posted by Amy Nutt on Jul 3, 2009
by Amy Nutt

A typical small to midsized company doesn’t have much fat so watching and controlling costs is an everyday part of life. One cost under routine scrutiny is the cost of recruiting. Most of the largest costs of talent acquisition are hidden in variations in new hire performance and management time spent on trying to do it yourself. Cost effective recruiting involves attending to these real costs, not just the direct cash outlays. In this article we will help you understand what is driving your cost of recruitment and help answer the question: “Is there a better and cheaper alternative?”

The Biggest Cost: Variation in New Hire Performance

The biggest cost an organization can incur in hiring is getting a poor performer. Hiring a person is not like buying a physical asset (like a PC) because the variability in new hire performance is so much greater. You may calculate that a Dell notebook will have a lower total cost of ownership than an HP notebook or vice versa; but you won’t go far wrong with either brand. The same can’t be said for hiring. It’s easy to go very wrong with a hire and the costs of making a sub-optimal choice dwarf all the other cash costs involved in recruiting.

The obvious wrong hire is the one you fire or who resigns after a couple of months. All the direct and indirect costs of hiring and onboarding have to be incurred a second time to replace the failed hire. However, the largest cost to your organization is not the obvious failed hire; it’s the poor hire that is slow to learn the job, never performs very well, doesn’t fit the culture of the company and is certainly not bench strength for the next level up. This type of person will cost your organization money month after month and most likely will become a turnover statistic.

So the CFO’s number one question when looking at controlling hiring costs has to be “Are we reliably following the right hiring process to ensure that we are attracting and hiring only top performers?”

The Second Biggest Cost: Wasted Management Time The second biggest cost for organizations that don’t have a specialized recruiting department is the cost of management time. Does the plant manager end up spending a couple of hours crafting a poorly written job placement ad instead of looking at ways to cut defects or improve productivity? Is the sales manager spending the afternoon sorting through 50 unqualified resumes instead of shadowing a rep on a sales call?

Recruiting is time consuming and if your managers are spending time doing work that a specialist could be doing faster and better then that is a waste of an expensive resource. It’s not just the cost of a manager’s salary that is of concern; it’s that they are distracted from leading their department, being productive and adding value.

The CFO’s second question is “Do we have the right people working with the right hiring process to ensure that we are attracting and hiring only top performers?”

The Final Set of Costs - Direct Cash Outlays

The direct cash costs of recruiting are highly visible and are mainly sourcing related (e.g. the newspaper ad, the job board ad, the cost to attend a job fair) or agency fees (if you use a search firm). From an accounting point of view what is nice about these costs is that they are easy to track but they difficult to define in term of receiving value for money spent. Value here should be defined by a great quality of candidate response not a great quantity of responses. Would you rather attract five candidates with the skills, knowledge and behaviours to be a top performer than 50 candidates who are far from qualified? Time spent implementing a poor process to attract poor quality is a wasteful and costly burden on your recruiting staff and is unproductive.

The risk is that in trying to reduce these visible costs, organizations inflate the less visible costs. If cutting back on sourcing or employment agency expenses leads to lower quality of hire, longer time to hire or more management time spent on recruiting then it is a false saving.

The Argument for Outsourcing and Agencies

As we’ve discussed, if you look at the income statement you won’t see the two biggest costs involved in recruiting (poor quality of hire and the time your managers spend in running an inefficient recruiting process); what you may see is the cost of using a recruitment process outsourcer (RPO) or employment search agency. Is this a cost to be avoided?

The argument for using third party service providers in recruiting is the same as for any other aspect of the business: very often a specialized third party has the expertise, a finely honed process, an investment in technology and the economies of scale to do the work better, cheaper and faster than you can do in-house.

One shouldn’t underestimate the value a third party can bring to recruiting. A good search firm is up-to-date on the latest search tools, they have a modern applicant tracking system, and they are well trained in sourcing and selection. In particular, if they really are experts in this area then they have access to passive candidates that your firm just won’t have. Passive candidates are people who are not actively looking for a job but can be lured to the right opportunity. Professional recruiters invest a lot of time in building a network of high quality passive candidates, something very few organizations can do in-house.

If a third party can deliver top quality candidates then chances are they are saving you a lot of money not costing you a lot of money.

What About Your HR Department?

As soon as we talk about recruitment outsourcing or employment agencies someone will say “Shouldn’t our HR person be doing all our recruitment?” The quick answer is “No, maybe not. Let’s understand why. If you talk to full-time recruiters working in a Fortune 100 company they’ll take pains to explain why their job isn’t anything like HR. A good recruiter has a singular, aggressive, sales like approach quite removed from the multi-disciplinary process oriented style of a great HR professional.

If your organization has a single HR generalist then they will certainly know something about recruiting, but they won’t be an expert. It’s also unlikely that they’ve been allocated sufficient time to do a thorough job of sourcing and selecting candidates. Depending on your needs an HR generalist may be able to handle most duties effectively, but for many companies it’s asking too much for them to create and implement an effective recruitment process. Drawing upon the expertise and resources of outside service providers can assist to fill in the gaps in the process and produce better results. This is a far better option compared to making a bad hire and compromising your productivity, performance and profitability.

What to Do

Recruiting is a tough area for CFO’s to tackle because the most visible and easily calculable costs are not the most important or even the second most important costs. The job of the CFO is to ask tough questions around “Are we confident we are getting top quality candidates who will add value to this company?”, “Are we allocating recruiting work to the right people using an efficient and effective process?” and “Are we shooting ourselves in the foot with senior managers spending time recruiting at the expense of their real job?”

We can’t just assume that a good HR generalist can do all the work so we need to look at the value of third party providers. The value of a search agency or RPO is assessed on the quality of people they bring to your organization. Focus on quality and the value will be there.

Now can you afford not to use an employment agency?

About the Author:
Members of the Drake International Group of Companies are global leaders in the field of human resources, productivity and performance improvement, staffing and HR consulting. Visit us online at drakeintl.com

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Making Money Mnline

Posted by Jossef Sal on Jul 3, 2009
by Jossef Sal

When people start to look at ways to make money online they start with the term Fast, because they want to make money fast, some of them will end up either losing some money on hypes and useless products, and quite the idea fast.

Others are really serious about making money online, so they will start going through hundreds of pages, articles and eBooks to learn the process, they will end up learning fast but not making money fast. But because they have absorbed a lot of information about the process the feel like it is a hard task to accomplish. Then they move to search for making money easy. You dont need 100 different ways to making money online. All you need is one way that works. When you know it, know how apply it and do it exactly as it need to be done, you will end up making money easy and fast.

You do not need one way that might work if you get a lucky break. Not one way that will work if youre some kind of genius. You need a single approach that will work for regular people who have a desire to succeed, and a willing to put in at least a little effort and time to make that happen.

And the term easy will be knowing what you are doing, how to do it and doing it. If you are looking for a system that require a push of the button or a plug in system, to make you money, keep dreaming, there are no such things and any one claim differently is scamming you. However there are hundreds of ways to make money online as a simple step by step process. There are ways that could give you good results fast, others will take more time but return better results.

So first of all making money online is possible, no one can deny this fact. And yes every one with access to an internet can do it.

I dont want to be a hypocrite, so I want to show you a way to make money that I am successful with. It requires some time but its returning great results for me.

Making money with affiliate marketing.

If you have spent some time looking around on the internet for ways to make money, you have probably realized that the ultimate money making opportunities are affiliate marketing and network marketing, but not as a hobby, but as a serious business online.

The concept of making money with affiliate marketing is to publish content online and refer your readers to affiliate products related to your content. But to do it as effective as possible with the maximum results, you need to have your own affiliate website.

Making money with affiliate marketing has 2 steps, step 1 is to publish useful and helpful content online with links to your affiliate products; the second step is to bring people to read this content and hopefully click on your affiliate links. There are affiliate marketers who publish content and do hopping that people will reach this content. But to have a successful affiliate business you need to know exactly where to put your content and how to bring people to that specific address.

And to do it the best you better have your own address, it will be your own domain name and website, and with your website you can publish different content and have different affiliate offers.

Having a website is the easiest, cost effective way to making money online, after having your own affiliate website; you can then add more ways to generate income from it.

About the Author:
Learn how to set up you Affiliate Website and start making money online as fast and easy as possible. Read more about making money online at the Work from Home Business

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The New LG enV3 Cell Phone Review

Posted by Daniel Newbury on Jul 2, 2009
by Teddy Broughton

Latest in the LG enV series is called LG enV3 and has just hit the shelves. It certainly is a very powerful update to the series but have they made the best QWERTY phone on the market?

The features on the enV3 look really good. It has a Stereo capable Bluetooth and MicroSD memory port. The inside of the clam boast a very impressive 2.6″ screen and a QWERTY keyboard and the phone now has a 3.0MP camera with flash and a camcorder.

The great thing about the number pad is that it’s huge and that makes it very easy to dial. The same applies to the QWERTY board on the inside, the keys are large and widely spaces that gives you great speed when texting.

The flash on the 3.0 Mega pixel camera helps you takes great pictures, even when there is little light, small detail that does a lot for this phone. The camera however is only mediocre. If you are a real camera fan then you are better off with the LG enV Touch.

The GPS navigation uses VZ Navigator and has turn-by-turn directions. You can close the shell once you have started a navigation session as the front screen will tell you when to turn and the street name. The phone finds you quickly and has no problem tracking you with accuracy.

Calling is obviously an important feature of a cell phone and you will not be disappointed with the enV3. The quality of the sound is very good and the reception was also good. The phone is also loaded with very nice calling features.

The enV3 is more than just a phone as it has a variety of multimedia functions. It has a very nice video application and the music player is simply great. The quality of the sound speakers is also good. The phone has access to the Verizon Wireless V Cast music store.

The phone has a scaled-down version of the Obigio Web browser that is in the high-end LG enV Touch. It’s not quite as fantastic as the full scale version but still very impressive.

The LG enV3 cell phone is available now from Verizon Wireless for $50-$80 with a contract. It can be bought in various stores online but there is a link at the bottom of this article to the best deal I could find.

The design of the phone is simple and very elegant. The pros of the phone are definitely the big QWERTY keyboard as well as the impressive 2.6″ screen. I have to say that this phone outplays the predecessor in all aspects.

There are a few cons to the phone. The web browsing and the camera quality are a not as good as they could be and the messaging apps should have been worked on a bit more. I also think that even though the exterior screen is very good it could have been made so much cooler.

About the Author:
I hope that this excerpt from my full LG enV3 review was somewhat helpful. I you want to read it in full you can check put my full LG enV3 Cell Phone review. If you want to buy the phone you should check out the best online deal I could find.

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Using Low Cost Scanning For Your Digital Scrapbook

Posted by Pete Fontaine on Jul 2, 2009
by Pete Fontaine

Traditional scrapbooking may soon be taken over by its digital cousin. The digital scrapbook craze has made huge headway into the world of scrapping. Because all digital scrapbookers posses the necessary computer skills to enjoy their hobby, it means that they can avail themselves to vast online resources. Free and low cost tools, creation software, and video tutorials are everywhere. If you need tailor made advice, technical assistance, or friendly community you’ll find it easily.

Don’t limit yourself to just using just your digital photos. All of your old photos can be sent to a low cost scanning service to be digitized. For as little as a nickel apiece you can add hundreds of your favorite memories to your scrapbook.

Scanning photos for your scrapping hobby has the added advantage of preserving them from deterioration due to moisture, mold, or age. Saving your photos to a DVD also allows you to store a copy in two or more places permanently shielding them from loss or damage. Scanning services make it possible to give a complete set of all your pictures to family members.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a photobook or upload your photos to a photo sharing site then you’ll have an additional benefit to scanning photos for your scrapbook. Want to build a slideshow to view on TV? You can do it online or buy inexpensive software. You can even add your own music. Want to create a T-shirt with a crazy photo on it? Just search “photo t-shirt”. It’s that easy!

The optimum resolution for scanning your photo prints is 300 dpi. Don’t accept lower and don’t pay for higher. Nothing is gained by scanning at a higher resolution than 300 dpi, and you’ll be handling much larger files. That means any use of the scans will be slower. Do make sure your scans are saved as high quality jpeg files. This means that the scans are saved with very low compression and thus higher quality. You will be able to use free photo editing software to reduce the file size for copy to use on the web, if needed.

If your scanning service offers automatic photo enhancement in the deal make sure to take advantage of it because a good photo enhancement program will do a nice job of improving most of your photos. But don’t overpay. The most important thing is to make sure enhancements are done from a copy of the master scans. Always use a copy of your master scans to edit or enhance. Remember that rotating or manipulating the scan file will eventually reduce the quality of the photo.

Spend a few minutes searching the web and you’ll find educational E-books, classes, organizational software, layout ideas, and scrapbook embellishment of every kind. Then find an inexpensive photo scanning service and make your precious memories come alive.

About the Author:
Scanning photos for digital scrapbooking rescues them from the possibility of destruction and deterioration. Photo Scanning makes it easy and inexpensive to share a complete copy of your family’s photographic history with everyone in the family. Find out more about photo scanning at Pete’s website www.nickelscan.com

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Thoughts on Cisco CCNA Training Described

Posted by Jason Kendall on Jul 2, 2009
by Jason Kendall

Should you be interested in Cisco training, then a CCNA is most probably what you’re looking for. Cisco training is the way to go for those who wish to get to grips with network switches and routers. Routers are what connect networks of computers to different computer networks over dedicated lines or the internet.

It’s vital that you already know a good deal about computer networks and how they operate and function, because computer networks are joined to routers. If not, it’s likely you’ll run into difficulties. Better to find training that also includes the basics (CompTIA Network+ as an example - maybe with the A+ as well) and then do a CCNA course. Some companies will design a bespoke package for you.

If you haven’t yet had any experience of routers, then qualifying up to the CCNA level is definitely sufficient - don’t be pushed into attempting your CCNP. With a few years experience behind you, you’ll know if CCNP is something you want to do.

A knowledgeable and specialised consultant (in direct contrast to a salesman) will cover in some detail your current level of ability and experience. This is useful for working out your starting level of study. If you’ve got a strong background, or sometimes a little commercial experience (maybe some existing accreditation?) then it could be that your starting level will be very different from someone who is just starting out. For those students starting IT studies and exams for the first time, you might like to avoid jumping in at the deep-end, starting with some basic Microsoft package and Windows skills first. Usually this is packaged with most types of training.

Of all the important things to consider, one of the most essential is always full 24×7 support via trained professional instructors and mentors. Too many companies only seem to want to help while they’re in the office (9am till 6pm, Monday till Friday usually) and nothing at the weekends. Avoid those companies who use ‘out-of-hours’ call-centres - with your call-back scheduled for typical office hours. It’s no use when you’re stuck on a problem and need help now.

The most successful trainers utilise several support facilities around the globe in several time-zones. By utilising an interactive interface to seamlessly link them all, no matter what time you login, there is always help at hand, with no hassle or contact issues. Seek out a training provider that is worth purchasing from. Only proper round-the-clock 24×7 support truly delivers for technical programs.

Being a part of the cutting-edge of new technology is as thrilling as it comes. You become one of a team of people creating a future for us all. We’re barely beginning to get a handle on how all this change will affect us. How we correlate with the world as a whole will be significantly affected by technology and the internet.

Always remember that on average, the income of a person in the IT industry throughout this country is considerably higher than in other market sectors, so in general you will probably gain significantly more with professional IT knowledge, than you could reasonably hope to achieve elsewhere. The requirement for certified IT specialists is certain for a good while yet, thanks to the continuous increase in the marketplace and the huge deficiency still present.

Students will sometimes miss checking on a vitally important element - the way the company segments the courseware sections, and into how many bits. Trainees may consider it sensible (with training often lasting 2 or 3 years for a full commercial certification,) for many training providers to send out one section at a time, until you’ve passed all the exams. But: What could you expect if you didn’t actually complete every section at the required speed? Sometimes their preference of study order doesn’t work as well as some other structure would for you.

For maximum flexibility and safety, it’s normal for most trainees to insist that all study materials are posted to them in one go, with nothing held back. It’s then up to you at what speed and in which order you want to finish things.

Be alert that all certifications you’re working towards will be commercially viable and are the most recent versions. Training companies own certificates are often meaningless. From the viewpoint of an employer, only the big-boys such as Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe or CompTIA (to give some examples) will get you into the interview seat. Nothing else will cut the mustard.

About the Author:
(C) Jason Kendall. Hop over to LearningLolly.com for quality career advice on Cisco CCNA and Cisco Training.

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