We recently heard a few of shocking numbers from a client that Solomon helps with technical staffing. The first is 38: The number of minutes work a staffing agency did to place him at his current job. The second is 366: the number of days the agency took to follow up with him to make sure he was getting on well in the new position. And that wasn’t the real reason for them checking in. He suspects that they just wanted to move him somewhere else so they could get another commission. The third number is 0: the number of times the staffing company met with him in person.
This story is troubling and yet illustrative of the main problem besetting the staffing industry in the past decade. People have become secondary to transactions, speed of placement and chasing profit. Certainly, every business wants and needs the latter, but rushing people into positions they may not fit in so you can move onto the next client can have horrendous consequences, both for the individual and their new organization.
For the employee, they may be unhappy with a company whose culture doesn’t match their personality and skills – almost inevitable when the placement organization does no face-to-face meetings to really get to know people. And for the business, hasty placements often put people in jobs they’re not well suited to, or in which they’re out of their depth. Both scenarios increase turnover, and so hike up immediate and long term costs.
Needless to say, when it came to our protagonist needing to fill technical vacancies at his company, he wanted something better than he experienced: a people-first approach that focuses on relationship building with clients and their possible hires. That’s why he chose SolomonBI.com, and why he now thinks of us as “partners” rather than recruiters.
We’ve since placed several individuals at this company in both full time and consulting positions. When he gets a call from us, this executive says we’ve found the right fit “99 percent of the time.” The reason? “Solomon works hard to understand our culture, to communicate regularly even when we don’t have openings and to match us with the right candidates.”
Another way in which Solomon has exceeded this individual’s expectations is by gathering feedback from staffing candidates who have interacted with his company and sharing this so the organization can continually improve.
“Solomon gives us constructive feedback on how we’re perceived, what candidates like and don’t like about our company and how we can improve. There’s a long term payoff from this two-way dialog, which I haven’t seen from any other technical staffing group.”
The foundation of this success comes down to a simple truth about Solomon’s approach: people, not paychecks.
