An Industrial Staffing Firm with a Difference

Kudos to Prime Industrial Recruiters in Tulsa, OK!

It's rare that you find an industrial staffing firm that really knows how to differentiate itself. Here's one that gets it!

Check out their TV commericals for an excellent example of how a staffing firm can position itself against the competition.

The Candidate Experience - part 2

What's it like to look for temporary work? To be blunt, it sucks.

Think about what we make candidates do. There’s telephone prescreens, application forms, interviews, assessment tests, reference checks, background checks and in some cases drug screening. The process can take as long as 3 hours!

And if that wasn’t bad enough, reception areas are frequently uncomfortable and uninviting, there’s often no place to complete paperwork, and in the worse environments, interviews are conducted in public areas.

It’s exhausting. It’s uncomfortable. And after all this, what happens?

Usually, nothing!

We send the candidate on her way and promise to call as soon as “the right” job opportunity appears…which may never happen.

Can you imagine being a candidate? Would you put up with this?

Last summer, I helped a client of ours to map out their application process. It was an amazing experience. No one (including the staffing firm’s executive team) could believe all the steps. At one point, someone actually yelled out, “no more, we get it, there’s a problem.”

Want better talent? Improve the experience!
If you want to attract better talent, and attract more talent, take a hard look at your candidate experience. Map out every step that an individual must go through to work with your firm--from this initial appplication to post assignment follow-up.

Then, look at every step a candidate has to go through with your firm, and ask yourself: “Is this step necessary?” “If so, how could we make it faster, easier and/or more enjoyable.”

Custom experience is one of the most overlooked marketing tools in the staffing industry. How will you make your experience extraordinary?

The Candidate Experience: part 1

Last week I had a rare treat. Because most of our clients are small to mid-sized staffing and search firms across the U.S. and Canada, we usually do all our work remotely. Last week, three of us had the chance to visit a nearby client, and what a great experience it was.

Working with people who are 5 feet away is always easier than working 500 miles away, but in this case the site visit was essential in reinforcing a couple of critical marketing lessons, and those lesson are:

1) You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
2) Your reputation is only as strong as your weakest link.
3) The experience you provide must match your positioning.

Let me explain...

The purpose of out team's visit was to help the CEO of this firm brainstorm ways to transform her company from being a mainly industrial staffing into a firm offering more higher level, higher margin services. But within 2 minutes of arriving, I knew we were going to have a problem.

So what was the problem? It was the reception area.

Now unlike some industrial staffing firms I've visited, this company did have a clean, corporate reception area. It was attractively painted and had comfortable furniture with seating for 5. So what was the problem?

Well visualize what this reception area might look like 30 days after the CEO begins to reposition her firm. In this rather small waiting area, you may have laborers, secretaries, IT professionals, and executives all sitting together. See the problem?

If not, let me be blunt. Some people don't mix well. If a candidate feels uncomfortable visiting your firm, he or she won't come back. While this is not a very politically correct view of the world, bad candidates will drive away good ones. And this can work either way with professional level talent who feel a bit snobish about sitting next to laborers as well as with well-qualified industrial candidates who feel out of place in an environment that's too corporate.

Your reception area speaks volumes about your firm. So does your website. As does the way you answer the phone. If you want to be seen as a high end firm, every point of contact with clients and candidates has to match that positioning...especially the first points of contact.

My Question to You:
How does your candidate experience match your positioning?

Think about how you want to be seen by your candidates...and your clients. Does every point of contact you have match the message you want to send? Go walk out in your reception area and take a look. Review your website with the mindset of a prospective candidate. And even call in as a candidate and see how you are treated.

Not only should the experience be pleasant and professional, but it MUST match the way you want to be seen. Any weak point can seriously damage your reputation.

So what did we tell our client? We told her that she needed to think about new offices. Either moving to a facility with a larger reception area that could be better set-up to accomodate different types of talent or even creating separate recruiting centers. It was an expensive recommendation...but a lot cheaper than having her repositioning effort fail because of having the wrong candidate experience.

I stand corrected: Cold Calling Ain't Dead

Cold calling is dead.

Or so I've been told...and I believed it too. I, like many marketers, have been beating the drum that cold calling is 99% wasted time. After all, less then 1 in 10 cold calls produces any sort of result (a 2005 Direct Marketing Association survey found that lead generation telemarketing gets a response 8.55% of the time).

And then I read an e-mail today that completely changed my thinking. While I still believe that cold calling to pitch your services is a huge waste of time, this article showed a technique that I am 100% certain (okay, at least 99% certain) will work.

Take a minute and read: Cold Calling Works, You're Just Doing It Wrong

Marketing 2.0: Hype or Essential Tool?

What are other firms doing to market to HR professionals? You can find the answers in Trends in HR Marketing, Forays into Marketing 2.o and PR 2.0 developed by HR Marketer, which you can dowload for free from the above link.

This article reviewed the impact of "Marketing 2.0 and PR 2.0" on HR marketing, as well as the trends in marketing investments. If you're not familar with the term Marketing 2.0, it refers to newer online marketing tools, such as blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds, and according to the report:

Marketing 2.0 also creates more opportunities for reaching prospective clients with a more relevant message. The increased segmentation of media has created more platforms for a company’s message, and prospective clients can find these messages by searching for topics that interest them. When companies reach out to prospects, list segmentation allows marketers to craft messages specific to the prospective client’s business vertical and position in the buying cycle. Personalization allows the marketer to go even further, customizing the email based on interests, position, etc.

So what does this mean for you?

Marketing 2.o offers significant opportunity to enable your firm to truly differentiate your services, teach clients and prospects about the strategic value of your services, position yourself as a thought leader, and build credibility--which in turn will make your traditional sales and marketing efforts more effective. If your goal is to become a trusted partner to your clients and/or sell higher margin solutions, you should look at these power of blogs, RSS and other content distribution tools that will enable your to demonstrate your expertise...before your competitors do!

Is Marketing 2.0 just hype for web geeks or a marketing reality?

Marketing 2.0 is just hype, and has little real value Marketing 2.0 is coming of age, and will be very important in a few years Marketing 2.0 is essential today

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Time to turn marketing upside-down?

I was just doing some quick research on the future of marketing, and I came across a facinating (and likely dead on) analysis of trends in the field of marketing. If you're serious about engaging clients and candidates (and getting them to seek you out), invest 5 minutes to review this article from author and consultant John Hagel:

Mastering Marketing Perspectives

Lessons for Staffing Firms:

1. Stop using cold calling as our primary business development technique. Cold calling is a dinosaur of Intercept marketing that has significantly lost its effectiveness in the past decade, and will continue its march toward obsolecense in the coming years.
   
2. To attract clients and candidates, we have to create an experience that is radically different (and better) than current staffing models. We have to stop thinking transactionally (i.e., do you have any staffing needs) and become proactive problem solvers (i.e., what's going on in your business / industry that is going to impact your needs for talent?).
   
3. "Assisting" may be the key to selling higher margin solutions and moving up the food chain in client companies. The more we can assist clients with understanding new ways to use our services (i.e., the more we can people them about using staffing strategically, as a tool to reduce cost, drive productivity and manage business risk), the more value we will offer to our clients (and the more irreplacable we will become).
   
4. Look for more opportunities to partner. It's always easier to get in the door by referral than by direct calling; however, taking this a step further, partnering represents not just a way to generate leads, but a way to transform your business. By selecting the right partners, you can literally transform your capabilies and develop the ability to sell solutions to more strategic problems.
   
5. Redefine your value proposition from "we have great people and great service" to "no one knows your business and your specific needs better than we do, and no one can offer the same mix of services to address those needs".
   

My Question to You:
Can staffing firm's break away from cold calling? If so, what would be a smarter approach?