by admin | Feb 10, 2011 | Blog, Company Insights
Well just 3 months ago, I had not heard of NPA. But the concept itself wasn’t new to us. We at Pragna were looking at ways to grow our business and we stumbled upon the idea of partnering with other staffing/recruiting firms to share requirements and leverage our trained team to help make placements. I found good level of interest among the folks I talked to and within weeks we were working with 3 firms on a split fee basis.
Then one fine day in Oct 2010, I bumped into a fellow owner of a recruiting startup. He said to me – what you are suggesting makes sense, but why not join NPA? You can reach out and partner with 100’s of firms instantly instead of one-by-one. Voila! this is no-brainer idea!
Here we are 3 months later. We are member of the network and very excited about the immense potential of this network. We are thrilled with the professionalism, attitude and responsiveness we have seen throughout the application process and interacting with member companies.
This is just a great way to increase the overall reach for our FTE positions and work with opportunities worldwide! I feel confident that we can provide better support to our customers using NPA network.
In a short time, NPA has become one of the key focus areas for the company!
by admin | Dec 22, 2010 | Blog, Company Insights
Working in a Start-up is always exciting, challenging and at times can be frustrating as well. People who have come from a corporate world can see huge difference if they enter into a start-up. Well both have its pros and cons.
Having been in Start-ups most of the time the main challenge I see is to motivate and retain employees. Employees need to be happy and satisfied more than any monetary compensation. The employees who always feel fulfilled are more productive in their work and can be an asset to the organization, and definitely stay longer with the organization. By implementing simple tips for retaining employees, you can keep your employees satisfied and can also be able to build lasting loyalty.
1. Share and Set Expectations- By sharing your expectations with the employees, they feel comfortable and stress free. You as an employer need to make them clear about the goals and objectives of the organization. You need to delegate authorities to them and assign responsibilities. Employees who really understand the importance of work can produce better results and really they enjoy being a part of a growing organization. Setting the right expectations will reduce misunderstandings and helps both employers an employee to achieve their goals.
2. Growth Opportunities- Employees join start-ups mainly to have good recognition and faster growth by taking risks. You can offer your employees different ways to grow ahead their current position. It is very important to tap their skills and assign right task and opportunities that yield recognition and promotion. The other way also can be by providing them ongoing education and training and also an option to learn while they are earning by providing extra and advance courses in your organization itself.
3. Feedback ( 360 degree): It is important to share feedback with employees. If your employees are doing good work then reward them by good words and extra perks. Incentives could be monetary also. Another important thing is also to listen to their feedback, which always helps a growing company in implementing new policies or procedures and for effective functioning.
4. Give Ownership: Ownership leads to responsibility and accountability. Motivate your employees to make good and better decisions that concern their job in the organization. If you throw your decisions on them they may react negatively to it. You should consider their ability to make decision and this will send the sense of responsibility among them and they can even perform better.
5. Work Culture: Employees spend good amount of their time at their work. The work culture and atmosphere matters the most. Treat them as your extended family and be sensitive to their needs. Create a fun filled atmosphere and have a weekly gathering and a monthly outing. These things are morale boosters and it helps them to get to know their colleagues have a healthy working environment. Always “We” culture works than “I”. Set a reminder for employee birthdays and have a small celebration, it makes them feel special.
At the end of the day Employees are our invaluable assets and retaining good ones helps an organization to grow into new heights. Follow these simple tips and techniques make your organization a good place to work where everyone is supportive and full of energy.
by admin | Nov 30, 2010 | Blog, Offshore Recruitment
It’s been sometime since I wrote Pragna blogs. I got little busy working on some new product ideas. However its been an exciting time here at Pragna where we have just launched new products. The economy has improved and new jobs are trickling in… But finding the “best” candidates for your job is still quite hard. Though there are new social technologies to assist hiring in the past few years; the hiring consultancies and commissions have not quite changed.
Tired of high recruiting fees and commissions?
The average commission rates in the recruiting industry are 20% of the salary and that adds up to quite a large amount for a handful of hires. In my view such high placement fees and difficulty in hiring right candidates is resulting lost opportunities in putting more people to work.
So we thought let’s challenge this practice of commission rates and come up with new products that helps our clients to hire faster and cheaper.
Fixed Price RPO – Flat $1800 monthly fee for any # of hires
How does it work? We assign a dedicated recruiter to work alongside your internal staff with specific weekly milestones for screening and sourcing. Typically they would source a minimum of 30-50 fully qualified candidates that meet all your criteria using job boards, social networking sites such as linkedin and zoominfo and direct head hunting.
Results: On an average the recruiters will help our clients close between 1-3 FTE positions monthly. That’s savings of 85% for our clients – Even if you assume only ONE hire a month using our Fixed Price RPO model
Typical consultancy cost = $ 16k (@20% commission on $80k salary)
Pragna cost = < $ 2k
Our Commitment: We assign trained and highly qualified people who source candidates. They are typically engineers, graduates in your area who can understand your domain quickly to source high quality candidates. If you are not satisfied with quality of our work and sourcing, we offer no obligation warranty.
We look forward to save a bundle of money for our clients and lower the unemployment rate!
by admin | Aug 10, 2010 | Ace the Interview
Many organizations identify “Passion” as a very critical component in the candidate hiring process. No doubt I have had personal experiences of my own performance as well as others that I have seen vary based on their passion and the inherent drive towards a given task.
This becomes even more critical in leadership roles where one has to constantly define and pursue a mission. Last week I heard Dr. Vivek Mansingh (currently R&D head of Dell in India) speak at the Leadership summit on a topic – Leadership begins where Logic ends. He says that majority of our brain area is the emotional part and very small portion is actually the logical part (for which I could find some scientific evidence online). Regarding the assertion that Einstein used only 4% of the brain, how much do we use? I couldn’t locate any real evidence and most articles I read on this topic seem to suggest that the 4% number is more a myth. However one thing was clear from his experience as well as mine that normally individuals use a small portion of the brain and the rest requires some emotional thrust to put to use.
So what happens with finding individuals who have passion for a certain task or job is that it triggers their emotional part of the brain and channels all the energies to the specific task or goal. That’s how seemingly normal people start achieving great things that once seem impossible. It’s the constant drive, hunger, energy, commitment that “Passion” brings in to achieve greater results.
That provides some logic around the need to identify “Passion” for the mission/task/project however hazily one can gauge become as critical as the skill evaluation in the hiring process for key people in a company.
by admin | Jul 13, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition
So far we have looked at imaginative searching of active job seeker profiles and being a good Linkedin Recruiter. Now we will look at another strategy to get more inbound leads for your open jobs through internet marketing using meta-search engines.
There are quite a few such job search engines (specific to jobs only) that are pretty popular on the internet. Infact I was surprised that the most popular job meta-search engine (www.indeed.com) has higher traffic ranking than Monster.com (Indeed is ranked 110 and Monster 135 per Alexa for US traffic / popularity). Here are a list of such job search engines that I have come across:
- Indeed.com
- SimplyHired.com
- Juju.com
- Workcircle.com
- jobs.oodle.com (classified site)
- vast.com/jobs (classified site)
- Sites for freshers like Jobsphere and Startuply
Now lets examine how to use these resources on your way to being a smart recruiter. Note that some of these are more suited for full-time jobs than contract jobs especially those that require very fast turnaround. It may take 24 hrs for the jobs to be live on the site and since its inbound and advertising based, it could take sometime for you to generate good quality candidates (2-4 days or more). But definitely works for job positions that have 1 week or more turnaround time.
Here are some of the steps to utilize this resource:
- Create an account or profile: Suggest creating an account in about 3 of these sites to start with (Indeed and SimplyHired are most popular and some of the others are stronger in specific domains/industry)
- Build a job feed: These job search engines are more structure driven than the typical search engine like Google. so they expect data in certain format on your website or you will need to build a specific XML feed for each engine. The guidelines for XML formats are available for each engine (for example – http://www.simplyhired.com/a/add-jobs/overview#creating ). We need to verify these jobs are picked up the search engine. This will ensure that your jobs are shown in search results.
- Advertising: This part works similar to Google advertising. You can specifiy a budget (say $50/job) and also the cost per click (say $ 0.50 per click). This will generate a few inbound leads to your open jobs. The art of managing this advertising dollars will require a separate post to understand how to maximize the value through right choice of advertisement, keywords, CPC etc. We will cover that separately.
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