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Leveraging a Staffing Firm During High Unemployment

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Over the last year, the U.S. has watched the unemployment rate take some deeply worrying turns. Although unemployment is now bouncing back slowly, the consequences of mass layoffs and upended industries are still making themselves known.

A staffing firm can be a valuable ally during times of turbulence, including this period of high unemployment. Here’s why working with a staffing firm could be the right business decision for your company.

Staffing Firms Hire Faster at a Lower Cost

With more people out of work, more talented candidates are on the hunt for a new role. As a result, you’re more likely to see a deluge of applications for every open post, which complicates the hiring process.

Staffing firms are more adept at sorting through large applicant pools, including greater numbers of unqualified applicants. They also have existing talent pools that they can leverage to shorten the time from job advertisement to hire.

In short, staffing firms have the resources to shorten the time to hire and manage hiring during high unemployment while staying on budget.

Staffing Firms Help Manage the Risk of Hiring

High unemployment often coincides with a difficult business environment in which organizations need more staff, but the associated costs can be a risk.

Staffing firms can work with you to fill contract roles that allow you to get the help needed without committing to permanent roles with benefits. Temp-to-Hire can be a smart option if you see the need extending in the medium to long-term, but your tolerance for risk is low for the short term.

Additionally, recruiters have a keen eye for the hiring process. They’re better able to find you better quality Temp-to-Hire or contract consultants, which add value to your business and are more likely to turn into long-term partnerships when the time is right.

Get Started with Hiring Experts

High unemployment grants businesses access to more talent with less competition, but these periods of instability rarely leave businesses themselves unscathed. Working with a strategic partner to manage your talent pipeline can ensure you mitigate risk and stay on budget while also ensuring you get the help you need in the office.

Get in touch to learn more about RightStone nurtures consultant and client relationships to find the right fit every time.

5 Tips for Interviewing a Candidate Older Than You

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Sitting down to an interview with someone older than you is not as uncommon as it sounds.

Whether you need to hire for a very senior role or you have an applicant who took a detour on your career path, there are many ways you could find yourself interviewing someone who started their career while you were still in school.

Although the initial realization may feel awkward, interviewing an older candidate than you doesn’t need to be different from any other interview. Here are five things to remember when you find yourself in this scenario.

Don’t Bring Up Your Age or Theirs

Age is just a number. So, please don’t feel the need to make light of your age or ask questions about theirs.

What’s important is their experience and whether they fit the bill for the job. Bringing up the age gap will just increase the awkwardness. Make it a point to leave the conversation at the door and focus only on their qualifications.

Do More Research Beforehand

Research the candidate’s background to better understand what their experience and skills bring to the team. Doing so will give you a chance to ask more in-depth questions, which caters well to candidates who are more experienced than you are.

Rely Heavily on Emotional Intelligence

For some people, returning to an entry-level or mid-career job is part of a big life change, such as returning to the workforce after years or decades of raising a family, overcoming an obstacle like an illness, or finally getting the chance to pursue their dreams.

Empathy and emotional intelligence will help the candidate feel more comfortable. And they will remember how you made them feel above all else.

Go for Common Ground

What experiences do they have that you also have? Finding a point that you can both relate to, whether it’s a course or certification or project, will help the candidate open up and create a more conversational interview style.

Consider Outsourcing the Process

If you want to hire to bring on a more senior position than you currently have at the company, then you might consider outsourcing the recruitment process. Recruiters with expertise in your field will forgo the awkwardness associated with age or experience and have a better eye for the kind of candidate you need.

Are you looking for a new senior role in IT? Get in touch to learn about the RightStone 360 process and how we place the right consultant with the perfect employer. 

Keeping the Interview Conversational: 5 Ways to Conduct an Interview Like a Pro

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The best interviews flow like a conversation rather than an interrogation. Conversations work because it gives both the interviewer and the interviewee space to think laterally and creatively, which allows both parties to share more about themselves.

But how do you keep an interview conversational when you have so many to complete and little time to do it?

Here’s how to get the most out of an interview.

Break the Ice First

“How are you?” is the most obvious question you can ask, and you won’t glean much from the candidate by asking it. Instead, ask them a more specific question that allows you to make a minute or two of small talk.

Some questions include: 

  • What’s the best thing to happen to you this week? 
  • How did you find this job post? 
  • What are you watching on television at the moment? 
  • Tell me something you’ve learned this week.

These are questions that open up the floor for discussion but don’t veer far enough into the personal to be jarring. 

Practice Asking Open-Ended Questions

If the answer to a question is yes or no, then you’ll get a yes or no answer. While it may provide a perfunctory answer, you won’t learn much, and your questions will seem more like an interrogation.

Practice answering open-ended questions to get more from candidates. These questions usually begin with “why” or “how” rather than “can” or “do.’

Ask Questions (and Follow-ups) Relevant to the Interviewee

You won’t find cookie-cutter candidates because there aren’t cookie-cutter people. So, don’t ask every candidate the same list of questions. Instead, use their resume and their previous answers to riff on their experience and ask questions relevant to the candidate’s history specifically.

Lean on Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an often-overlooked part of the interview process. You don’t give anything away by being kind, warm, and yourself with a candidate, even if you aren’t sure they’re a good fit.

Lean on building a natural rapport with each interviewee where possible to keep the conversation flowing. Not only does it improve the process, but it also gives you a better sense of the candidate’s emotional intelligence too.

Let the Conversation Flow

Candidates regularly say that the best interviews feel more like conversations. And these interviews leave them with a positive experience, even if they don’t land the job.

Rather than rattling off a list of questions, let the conversation flow by demonstrating emotional intelligence and keeping each interview personal. You’ll find you both get more from the process when you do.

RightStone Can Help With Hiring!

Are you struggling with the hiring process? Let the experts help. Get in touch to learn more about how the RightStone 360 process places qualified consultants with the right businesses.

3 Reasons to Hire a Contract Worker to Join Your IT Team

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The way we work requires agility, particularly in the world of  IT. If your response doesn’t match the market reality, you put your whole organization at risk.

IT agility is your IT system’s ability to respond to external changes, and part of your agility comes from your people. That’s what IT contractors continue to be an increasingly popular choice for businesses.

Here are three reasons why hiring a contract worker is the right move for your IT team.

You Need Specialist Skills for a One-Off Project

You already have a few IT generalists and maybe even a security specialist. But your existing team may not have the skills and tools needed to complete a vital project.

If you need help with rolling out a cloud computing campaign, setting up an ERP, application development, or data center management, a contractor might be the best option. These projects usually occur over a set timeframe, which means you can hire a contractor for the project’s duration without worrying about finding work for them when you’re done.

You Need to Hire Quickly

Do you need to roll a project out in the next few weeks or months? Have you been given a hard ‘go live’ date by company leadership?

Hiring a full-time employee takes weeks or even months, depending on the skills you need. Contractors take less time to bring on board because they are a once-off investment. Plus, many of today’s top IT talent prefer to work as contractors, so you aren’t limited to candidates currently looking for a new job or getting ready to leave their current post.

The hiring process is more nimble, which means you can complete your projects on time.

You Need an Extra Set of Hands without the Expense

Hiring a new employee costs more than a salary: they have benefits, spend weeks going through onboarding, and can come with huge hiring expenses.

A contractor comes with a fixed fee, no need to pay benefits, and strict end date. So you can remain in control of your human capital costs.

Hiring a contractor makes sense for many companies, particularly when you have project-based work and a strict deadline. But just because you choose the contractor route doesn’t mean you can’t afford to find the right candidate.

 

Are you looking for an IT contractor? At RightStone, we place the right IT consultants with the right clients using our RightStone 360 process. Get in touch to learn more about how we match technical requirements and personalities.

3 Ways to Ensuring You are Immigration Compliant When Bringing On a New Hire

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There’s a whole world of talent out there. And with remote work becoming increasingly acceptable, there’s nothing stopping you from sourcing talent elsewhere.

However, hiring a non-citizen isn’t straightforward. With your hire, you take on new responsibilities.

The work process is tricky, but you can use these three tips to streamline your immigration compliance process.

Use Processes for I-9 Completion

I-9 compliance is perhaps the most laborious part of immigration compliance. Having I-9 processes set up, and or using an I-9 specialist or trained HR team member, will ensure you don’t miss a step.

Ideally, your I-9 compliance processes should:

  • Centralize I-9 procedures for completion and retention (including copy retention)
  • Ensure only trained staff complete the processes
  • Provide measures for dealing with issues (such as expired documents)
  • Include regular self-audits of both documentation and the systems

Ensure Re-Verification Takes Place

Even when you hire in a compliant manner, your efforts can be thwarted if you don’t have a stringent re-verification program. Re-verification programs keep track of immigration statutes to ensure both the company and the foreign employee take the right steps at the right time.

Legally, you only need to reverify when the employment authorization document expires. However, it is always best to schedule reverification before the actual expiration date and to perform the process regularly

Have a Formal Plan for Foreign Employees

If you intend to bring on any foreign employees, you will benefit from a formal immigration compliance plan. The plan should cover everything from recruiting to hiring to re-verification as well as the Labor Certification process. 

The legal and compliance benefits of a formal plan are reason enough to get to work. The clarification the plan provides also offers additional benefits. Your foreign employee recruitment plan can and should also help inform your job advertisements: you want to attract people most likely to succeed with a visa so as to avoid a prolonged recruitment process.

Are you looking to expand and enjoy a global talent pool?

RightStone offers reporting, documentation, and immigration compliance services. Get in touch to learn more about our unique IT staffing service offering.

The Importance of Screening: 3 Ways to Ensure You Find the Best IT Candidates

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Keeping your talent pipeline full and moving is a core part of business operations. Creating an effective screening process is a significant part of the process.

Screening applicants ensures you only move the candidates best-suited for the job forward. It also saves you a significant amount of time both in the initial review and later in the hiring process.

Applicant screening can include a wide range of processes. Here are a few of the best techniques for hiring the best IT candidates.

Skills Testing Technology

You know what skills are mandatory and what ones are nice to have. Most of your applicants come to you with those skills in some form, so if you want to screen them successfully, use skills testing.

Technical skills screening is simple to administer and delivers precise results. By employing this technique, you’ll cut the wheat from the chaff and narrow your candidate pool without adding more to your plate.

Paid Trials/Short Contracts

Often, a hiring decision is a close call between two or three highly-qualified people. But those qualifications may not mean the new hires work out. Trial periods can dramatically reduce employee turnover, dropouts before the start date and ensure you also get the right candidate for your culture.

Paid trial periods or projects give you both a chance to see their performance on the team without a commitment. It’s low risk for both parties, and when it works out, you have a better employee who is also prepared for the demands of the job.

Outsource the Initial Screening

Do you find yourself sorting through dozens or even hundreds of resumes? It’s not uncommon to have only 30 seconds to dedicate to each application received. While technology can do this job for you, many companies, particularly SMEs, still prefer to have the human touch.

Why not use a staffing firm to go through the big pile of applications? They can use your goals and their experience and resources to pull out the best from the pack. The process gifts you a smaller pool to make the final decision, so you can focus your energy and resources where it matters most.

Screen for Success

Screening your applications will produce better employees and shores up your hiring process. There are many ways to go out about the screening process, which means you can ensure it matches your business and talent pipeline needs.

Are you looking for new IT consultants who come pre-screened and match your organization’s needs? Get in touch to learn more about the RightStone 360 process.

Looking Beyond the Resume – The Benefits of Hiring an Underqualified Candidate

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In your quest to find the best candidate for your role, you likely have a long list of boxes to tick. There are certifications, education, and technical skills that your candidate needs to do the job well. Or are there?

Sometimes, finding the right candidate means looking beyond the resume and worrying less about qualifications. What are the benefits of hiring an underqualified candidate? They could add far more to your organization than you think.

They Automatically Push Beyond Their Limits

Someone who applied for a job that they aren’t technically qualified for may not have the technical skillset you desire. But they do have a skill you can’t teach: the desire to reach beyond themselves and push their own limits.

Finding employees who want to learn and grow in their field is far more valuable than finding someone who ticks all the boxes but enjoys the comfort of staying at the same level. A candidate who has been in the same role and held the same responsibilities for years may not be willing to grow with your company!

They Are Inherently Trainable

When you have a candidate who comes in and requires some additional skills, you have a unique opportunity: you get to mold them in a way you can’t with fully-trained ‘qualified’ candidates.

Having the opportunity to train them according to the latest information and your organizational processes will help them fit in quickly. It will also attract hungry learners looking for opportunities that they may not have had at their last place of employment.

Plus, as too many managers know, it’s far easier to teach an employee new skills than to help them un-learn old or incorrect ways of working. When someone “isn’t qualified” they don’t have giant egos or bad habits.

They Often Bring Unique Skill Sets

In today’s world, workers change jobs every 4.2 years. In some cases, they don’t just leave for a promotion: they go for an entire career change.

Career-change candidates are invaluable. They have experience in the job-market, a foundation of core training, and often unique skill sets picked up from other roles or careers.

It’s not just the soft skills they bring. They also have technical skills that may translate or inform their work and a valuable outsider’s perspective that allows them to use them.

Unqualified Candidates Add Value to Teams

Every job post comes with a list of duties and responsibilities and skills required to perform them. There’s no need to pass on the resumes that don’t quite tick all the boxes. Underqualified candidates often possess other value-adding qualities that may be what your organization needs to take the next steps.

Are you looking for that valuable ‘unqualified’ candidate for your IT role? Get in touch to learn how the RIghtStone 360 process places the right fight every time.

Leveraging Social Media to Find Top Talent

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Your number one goal for hiring isn’t merely to add a new employee. Instead, you want to attract the perfect candidate, someone who also happens to represent top-tier talent in their field. Doing that requires more than posting an opening online and waiting for applications to pour in.

To compete for the best, you need to be proactive. Social media makes it easier to seek out top talent and have meaningful conversations. But it takes a different approach than you may be used to.

Here’s a quick guide to using social media to steal top industry talent.

Extend Your Network

HR puts the job on your internal site, industry job boards, and of course, LinkedIn. You’ll find job seekers in these places, but if you want to compete for top tier talent, you’ll need to court those who aren’t necessarily actively looking for a new job.

Share your job on your social media pages, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. If you’re looking for a wider talent pool, you can consider using advertisements to reach more people. (Just make sure to cost control before posting.)

Keep in mind that posts on Facebook or LinkedIn pages should be more than a basic job description. These are great places to sell your company culture and let more people peek through the window into your company. So, skip the technical details and use personalized posts.

Start Discussions Online

The key to unlocking the power of social media is to zoom in on the first half of the phrase: social.

For too long, recruiters used social media as a place to learn more about candidates’ personal lives or professional interests. But those tactics don’t build a connection. To connect with candidates, you need to avoid talking at them. You want to talk with them. And to do that, you need to start and engage in discussions.

HR can do this by working together with the marketing department to craft messages and engage. You will also want to get involved with hashtags related to your industry, which often serve as meeting places for industry professional and prospective candidates.

Organic discussions help your company stand out, attract talent, and give you an extra chance to screen candidates.

Encourage Current Employees to Get Involved

There’s one secret to hiring through social media that most of your competitors forget about: referrals.

Referrals take on a new life on social media.

Ask the new role’s team members to share the job with their own networks, too. Current employees are your best ambassadors, and the qualified professionals in their networks may not be scouring the job boards every day.

Are you on the hunt for the perfect fit but having no luck? RightStone can help. Get in touch to learn about the RightStone 360 process for placing qualified consultants with great clients.

Facing the New Normal of Virtual Onboarding

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Living during a respiratory pandemic means making strategic decisions about the number of people you’ll meet every day. Experts say that fewer social contacts translate to a lower infection rate, so it’s no surprise that almost everything, from concerts to interviews, is currently happening via Zoom.

Employee onboarding is one of the many, many activities now taking place virtually. While the tech makes it possible, the process remains far from perfect. Here’s what companies like yours can do to improve the virtual onboarding experience. 

Create a New Hire Schedule of Activities

You wouldn’t onboard a new employee in a single hour in ‘normal’ times, so there’s no reason to do so just because you can send them links to all your documentation.

Every new employee should get a schedule of activities for their first week so they know what to expect. Include events like:

  • Going over the employee handbook
  • Completing paperwork with HR
  • Discussing company culture and expectations
  • Setting up technology with IT
  • Meetings with direct supervisors and other key stakeholders

Don’t forget to build time in for a conversation. Your goal isn’t just to inform but to build a relationship with your new employee. 

A few other good ideas include adding a ‘new hire social’ to the calendar. Set up a Zoom call for all new hires and their teammates to mix socially and chat. If you want to go the extra mile, you can set up a guided discussion or even a game to play during the session!

Go Further with Weekly and Monthly Check-ins

Don’t limit your program to the first week of work. Think of it like school: if your teacher never checked in after your first week in school, you could easily fall behind and you’d both be bewildered by the end of the term.

Schedule in sessions for check-ins, with supervisors, and with HR. Supervisor check-ins should be weekly, and company check-ins should be monthly. These give your new employees a chance to ask questions, clarify issues, and bring up any problems or roadblocks they face.

Use Starter Packs to Make Their New Job Tangible

For many people, a new job doesn’t come with much change. The only physical difference they see is in their direct deposit. You can make your culture and brand feel more real with some simple touches – like swag packs.

Send over a company polo, travel mug, laptop case, or whatever else makes sense for your group.

It’s a small touch, but it is a physical reminder that they’re part of the team.

Use Virtual Onboarding to Welcome New Employees

Virtual onboarding is here, and it could become the new normal for years. Companies can use it successfully, but you can’t rely on a single video call to do all the heavy lifting. You also need to find appropriate and on-brand ways to make employees feel welcome and engaged.

Did you know? Employee engagement starts at the interview stage. Get in touch to learn how RightStone recruits and interviews the perfect fit for every client.

4 Reasons Why You Should Consider Hiring Temp Workers

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Many hiring managers think they know the value temp workers provide. Some believe that temps are a thing of the past. In reality, temp workers are a core part of the U.S. workforce that may even be underutilized. 

Temp workers offer valuable skills, almost on-demand, and they do so without slowing down your business. The story of temp workers in the U.S. is a long one, and these essential employees have shaped the American workforce for the better in surprising ways. Do you need to scale your team? Here’s why you should consider hiring temp workers.  

Scale Up During Your Busy Season 

Whether you’re a ‘seasonal business’ or not, your industry likely goes through predictable peak periods where your teams are run off their feet. 

Hiring temporary workers helps you meet your needs during peak periods without worrying about paying the bills during your slower months. 

For example, you might choose to scale up before the holidays as clients prepare their sites for the season’s traffic. 

Get the Talent You Need During Short-Term Projects 

Do you have new or occasional clients who have unique needs? Taking on specialty projects requires an employee who offers those skills. But few can afford to hire these team members as permanent employees. 

Using temporary or contract workers means you can get the skills you need when you need them without worrying about finding something for them to do 365 days a year. 

Introduce Employees to Your Company on a Trial Basis 

More and more employers hire based on culture and personality rather than skills. Screening for culture isn’t easy. Moreover, even if you think the candidate is a great fit, they may decide the job isn’t for them a few months down the line. All of a sudden, you need to start the process over. 

Choosing the temp-to-hire route allows you to bring on new team members to experience the culture for themselves. The contract gives both of you an out at the end of the working relationship, which saves you from re-hiring a few weeks or months down the road. 

Save Money on Hiring 

Hiring a new employee is expensive. Back in 2015, Deloitte said the average company spent $3,500 on hiring a new employee. Given the talent shortage in IT and other industries and increase costs, you can expect it to be higher in 2020-2021. 

Working with contract employees saves your team from spending resources and productivity on finding one employee and gets you the talent you need faster. 

Ready to expand your team?

At RightStone, we know how vital temporary employees are in IT. We’ve helped change the game. Get in touch to learn more about how we place candidates with the skills and personality to help your business succeed. 

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