An employment agency’s relationship with his candidate

As a recruitment agency and employment business we are responsible for attracting candidates to our client and their job role; we are also responsible for matching the candidates we attract to the right company and the right positions.

Through building strong and open relationships with our clients and candidates we gain a better understanding of the recruitment needs and employment preferences for both parties.

We work closely with our candidates to fully understand the skills and experiences they have as well as the job they are looking for, but we also take the time to understand the sort of person they are, their characteristics and personality traits so we can match the person to the business and not just the skills to the job.

Here at aspire cambridge we class ourselves as one of the most pro-active recruitment agencies and recruitment businesses in Cambridgeshire because we ensure that we treat our clients and candidates extremely well – we always aim for that ‘match made in heaven’ for our placements based on skills and experience as well as personality. A person and a company need to fit for the placement to be successful and enjoyable for both the client and the candidate.

We have seen research that states a candidates biggest frustration when working with a recruitment agency is the lack of feedback; our recruitment consultants here at aspire cambridge ensure that we give feedback wherever possible from the application form right through to the interview; whether the candidate is successful or not. Our recruitment consultants have all been through the recruitment process themselves so they know how important feedback is to a candidate.

We work hard to always provide our candidates with the best possible candidate journey; ensuring that we treat our candidates as we would like to be treated ourselves. We don’t treat our candidates as our next pay check, instead we treat them as our friends and our clients, making sure they get the right job for them as we know this is what makes a successful placement and gains us trust and respect from both the candidate and the client. If the candidate is not happy in the role the client won’t be happy either, so we will never try and force the two together.

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Essential steps for a successful recruiting process

Whether you are an experienced hiring manager or a new business owner hiring your first employee, there are several factors to consider that will help make your recruiting process a success.

1. Look within
Before embarking on a search for new talent outside the company, consider the talented people you already hired and developed. In some cases, it may be more effective to redeploy an employee who already knows your organization than recruiting externally, especially if an outside candidate with the right skill set is hard to find.

Studies show that employees who are promoted into jobs perform significantly better than workers hired externally into similar roles. In addition to the practical cost and time-saving benefits, hiring from within can help create a culture of loyalty. Employees are more likely to stay with a company if they are given opportunities to improve through training and can see a clear path for career growth.

2. Understand the costs
Employee turnover is expensive. There are external costs to consider such as advertising, recruiter fees, background checks, pre-hire screening, and in some cases travel reimbursements for candidates or cash awards for employee referrals.

Internally, the costs to the business can also add up: downtime and lost productivity, and the increased workload of other employees which may include overtime compensation. After a candidate is hired, there are on-boarding and training costs to consider as well.

Make sure you have recruiting strategies and detailed processes in place for your business to help forecast and manage these costs efficiently.

3. Have a process
Long before you begin interviewing people, there are several necessary steps to take to ensure the hiring process is thorough and transparent. An organization should determine or revisit the primary purpose of an open position, including the operational necessity of the job, its financial impact to the company and the reasons for creating a new role or filling a vacancy.

After the primary purpose is determined, create a job description through an in-depth job analysis:

Create a recruitment plan that clearly articulates the duties to be performed and qualifications required by the organization

Develop a consistent salary structure for the role, based on the relative level of duties, responsibilities and qualifications of each position in the organization
Develop specific hiring criteria and interview questions to be used during the search.

4. Follow the law
Companies are typically aware of their regulatory obligations after an employee is hired, but compliance is just as critical when recruiting and interviewing job candidates. The recruitment process involves ensuring equal employment opportunity.

Nondiscriminatory criteria must be established and included in the written job description and nondiscriminatory strategies should be developed when mapping out the plan to attract qualified candidates.

5. Get technical
These days, technology and recruiting go hand in hand. Using social media sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed can maximize any recruitment strategy by helping to reach a large audience quickly, reduce advertising spend and target the right people.

Some companies also use talent acquisition systems to help build a talent pipeline and engage prospective job seekers during the application process. For example, some talent acquisition solutions allow you to run tests to evaluate skill levels and even measure how well the candidate will fit into the organization’s culture.

6. Check the facts
Companies should leverage technology whenever possible when sorting applications, but resumes should always be carefully reviewed by actual hiring managers. When deciding who meets the requisite qualifications for a job, remember to consider responses to practical questions on the application such as the candidate’s availability to start work, and if included, the compensation the job seeker is willing to accept. These factors may outweigh some deficits in experience or specific skill sets that can be developed quickly on the job or with some training.

Also, don’t forget to ask about non-compete agreements. Any candidate with such a contract should be required to submit a copy to the interviewer for legal review.

Ultimately, recruiting and cultivating talent is hard — and it should be. People truly are a company’s most valuable asset and essential to maintaining an organization’s competitive edge.

That is why recruitment is not a function for the human resources team to manage alone. In some cases, a company needs the help of experienced specialists to get the job done right, and most importantly, the entire organization must be committed to the success of the process.

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Successfully Calculate Your E-Commerce

You always want to invest money so that you get back more than you originally invested. However, if you don’t know how to properly estimate what it is that you are getting back, you might be missing out on revenue opportunities. Knowing how to properly calculate your return on investment also enables you to make smart decisions when it comes to investing your money.

 

To accurately calculate your ROI, you need to make sure you have taken the necessary steps to track all sales and conversions. There are two ROIs that will allow you to accurately evaluate how your campaigns are performing.

First, you can track direct sales, meaning that that the user goes to your website and makes a purchase, or a one-click sale. This is not an ideal way to track your sales because most users do not purchase right away. This will be your ROI No.1, which is calculated by finding the difference between the value of sales and the cost, and then dividing that by the cost, or (value of sale – cost)/cost.

In order to track sales that are indirect, you will need to tag your ads. This adds additional values in the URL that do not change the URL destination. They also allow you to see exactly what the user clicked on, such as an ad that led to your homepage, contact page or a specific product. On Facebook and Bing, you can add these as UTM parameters; Google uses auto-tagging.

Most advertisers think the Facebook pixel does this; however, the pixel only tracks direct sales and indirect sales within a short time period. If you were to go back to the website and purchase after a few hours, the UTM parameter would catch this, not the Facebook pixel.

Once you have tags in place, you will then be able to track assisted sales, which brings us to ROI No.2. Assisted sales are those who click your ad, go to your website, leave your website and buy later. For example, if you are shopping for a pair of shoes but leave the website to see if Amazon has a better deal, then go back to the brand website and purchase, this is an assisted sale and can only be tracked by UTM parameters.

Facebook tracks sales through the Facebook pixel. If Facebook tells you that you have eight sales and you go to Google and see you have five sales, then you have a difference of three. Those three conversions are assisted conversions. To see those and know where they came from, you need UTM parameters.

ROI No.2 includes your direct sales and assisted sales so that you have an accurate ROI calculation. It is calculated by adding your direct sales and assisted sales, subtracting the cost from that number, and dividing that difference by the cost, or ((direct sales + assisted sales) – cost)/cost. This is important when analyzing the bottom line of your business. Your ROI No.1 could be negative, leading you to think that you have a negative ROI, but when factoring in the ROI No.2, your business most likely has a positive ROI overall. With this in mind, it is important to know how to accurately optimize your ROI.

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Indian staffing industry

New Delhi, Dec 1 (PTI) Indias staffing sector, with estimated total revenue of Rs 27,000 crore, is expected to register 12 per cent this year, says a report.

According to Indian Staffing Federation, an apex body of flexi staffing industry, the sector which comprises 15 leading firms that account for Rs 270 billion in revenues is projected to grow 12 per cent this year and 10 per cent the next year.


In India, the staffing industry clearly does not have a challenge of addressable market and it is gratifying to witness the rapid growth being shown by each of the organised staffing firms to tap into this opportunity on one hand and enabling rapid job creation on the other, ISF President Rituparna Chakraborty said.

The report noted that the top three firms including two home grown firms TeamLease and Quess along with Swiss headquartered Adecco together account for 20 per cent of the total market share in India.

The five largest staffing companies in India, based on 2015 revenue include TeamLease with a revenue of Rs 1,986.9 crore, Quess Rs 1,959.4 crore, Adecco Rs 1,500 crore, Randstad Rs 1,348.5 crore and Manpower Group Rs 799.1 crore.

Chakraborty further said demonetisation and implementation of GST in recent times shall definitely be a force multiplier to the growth of staffing in India.

The staffing industry provides a platform for recognised employment, work choice, even compensation, annual benefits and health benefits for temporary workforce that constitute a sizeable segment of Indias total workforce. PTI DRR SBT SA

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Things That really Matter in your HR Career

1.Give them what they need, not what they want
Many years ago at another company my then Managing Director had a great idea for a leadership program and its content. I delivered it. But the program got terrible feedback and I nearly got fired.

My lesson from this was if you do things only to please people, you are unlikely to help them - or their organisation - to succeed.

2.HR is not about HR
I enjoy working with HR thought leader and academic Dave Ulrich. I’ve found from practical experience his writing about the purpose of HR is spot on: HR is not about HR, the scorecard of HR is the scorecard of the business, and the real customer of HR is the customer of the business.

3.Eat your vegetables before dessert – get the basics right first
I have done a number of HR transformations in my career. Before I get started I always ask four critical questions:

What do we keep?

What needs to change?

What can we do that will make the biggest difference?

How can we build it quickly, cleanly, and simply - and get it to stick?
By answering these questions from the customer perspective, we can build the internal mechanisms to deliver great customer experiences.

I joined NAB in March 2016, and again we are focussed on a handful of key priorities to delight customers and make NAB an even better place to work.

We still have work to do, but we are on our way to executing on a simple (not simplistic), focussed strategy that drives better people and business outcomes.

We know that when people are capable and talented and have good leaders, they will perform. Wrapped around this we must have the right values-based culture to inspire and engage people, and to ensure that the customer is at the heart of everything we do.

There is no cookie cutter approach to this. The things that really matter for success in each organisation will depend on their individual context.

4.HR is the chef, not the waiter
HR is there to help and coach the rest of the business, not to do the important work of line managers.

Line managers with the right skills and aptitude remain absolutely critical in any organisation. Research & experience shows the most important thing for employee engagement and performance is the quality of their immediate leader. HR’s role is support leaders to be their best through tools and frameworks.

5.Be ambitious – for yourself and others
In my 20s I was working in HR for a mining explosives company when I was put forward for an accelerated program. By backing me, before I backed myself, my company changed what I thought I’d be capable of.

To have a high performing organisation, we need to ignite ambition, encouraging people to reach their potential and to have a learning mindset. That’s why we have evolved how we manage performance at NAB to encourage managers to act as performance coaches for their direct reports. We also have a strong focus on developing our high potential talent.

6.Know your stuff and keep learning
I‘ve done three degrees and all of them have helped me in my career. My MBA helped me to speak the language of business, which is very important in HR.

It’s not just about academic learning. Be curious. Meet people in your profession, outside your company, dealing with the same issues. Go for a breadth of career experience. Apply your learning to find better solutions and continue to evolve.

When we get HR right, people benefit, from customers, to employees to shareholders.

I’ll keep learning and stretching myself as an HR leader. As author and cook Julia Child has said You’ll never know everything about anything – especially something that you love.

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HR Solution Platform

Bangalore-based employee onboarding and engagement platform Tydy has raised $275,000 in angel investment from a group of individuals, including existing investor Bhupen Shah, former co-founder of Sling Media. Others who also invested in the firm are Jayesh Parekh, managing partner at Jungle Ventures and co-founder of Sony Entertainment in India and Sanjay Sathe, founder of outplacement firm RiseSmart, which was later acquired by Randstad.

The startup will use the capital for marketing and sales. We have grown to a phase where we can focus on making repeatable profits, therefore, our focus now is more on sales and marketing and managing deployments, Kiran Menon, chief executive and co-founder of Tydy told VCCircle.

Tydy’s mobile-first HR automation solution offers three key components to enterprises – employee onboarding, engagement and retention. ‘Tydy Onboarding’ automates the entire onboarding process, helping enterprises save on costs and strategic resources. For employees, it offers a gamified, mobile-first interface to easily complete the enrolment forms. ‘Tydy Listen’ is an employee engagement tool that helps firms receive regular feedback and sentiment analysis from employees. ‘Tydy Score’ is a predictive engine that collates data points right from onboarding, feedback, and sentiment analysis to create a single profile or score for every employee.

Owned and operated by Pagestitch Inc., Tydy’s client base includes Lowe’s, Taj Hotels, Kotak Mahindra, Sanofi, and Bajaj Finance.

Tydy was founded in 2013 by Menon along with Nikhil Gurjer and Gaurabh Mathure. Menon worked with web browser firm Opera Software and Gurjer was associated with mobile services firm Mobivatar Interactive and Crystera Technologies in the past. Mathure, who handles Tydy’s US operations, previously worked with advertising agency R/GA.

Initially, the firm offered a mobile collaboration tool for sales and marketing teams. The platform helped businesses manage their content and communications. Later, Tydy pivoted its entire product and launched the beta version of the HR tools in December 2015.

We consciously decided to stop that product and relook our assumptions. We did market research again and realised the need for mobility solutions was much higher in the HR departments of organisations and in a few critical processes. That’s when we made the pivot, Menon explained.

The company had raised $138,000 from a group of angel investors, including Sling Media’s Shah, in September 2014 for the sales product.

The startup was part of the maiden edition of IT major Oracle’s startup accelerator programme, which was held last year in June. Other firms that were chosen for the programme are ExpertRec, a plug-n-play search and recommendation engine for online marketplaces; Niyo Solutions, a fin-tech startup focused on alternate payment mechanisms; Ray iCare, an Internet of Things and artificial intelligence-based non-contact health and sleep monitor for babies; and Vear, an AI and VR-based content distribution and marketing platform.

The six-month Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator Programme (OSCA) provides emerging firms mentorship from Oracle and industry experts, a co-working space, access to Oracle’s customers and partners, and free access to Oracle Cloud including training. On the last day of the programme, startups can pitch their idea to technology investors and leaders.

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