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 | 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.
by admin | Jul 2, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition
Its almost a month since my previous post. As part of ramping up our team, we have been training them about how to use the job boards effectively, its an art that takes some time to master. I keep saying if you can locate the right candidate faster than others – relying on job boards is perfectly fine. But as you move from quick contract placements to Full time (or FTE) positions, it becomes harder and harder to find good candidates on job boards.
That’s where the next strategy of a good “Linked-in Recruiter” comes about. True Linked-in is pretty well known and many people use it; In fact there are 65 million users (mostly professionals). However a majority of them, say 80% may not be actively looking for a job, so to be effective at using it and tapping into it is an art as well. Here are some of the tips to get better at using this resource.
- Prepare your profile – Create a good profile with nice picture, add a detailed description of your job role, skills, education information as well as some fun stuff like your favorite pastime or movie etc. Then make sure you describe your company and who you are recruiting for really well (should be a sales pitch for the company as well as positions you are recruiting for)
- Build your network – Besides inviting your friends, colleagues, family into your network, feel free to invite these sales/marketing professionals who have large number of connections. These folks normally “accept” most requests on their way to reaching astronomical number of (many have 5000 or more) connections. After that start joining associations related to your work – Examples could be Local “Networking Groups” in each geographic area that you belong to / recruiting in – say Seattle area professionals or south bayarea networking events etc. In addition join groups related to specific disciplines you are recruiting in for example – SharePoint users and developers, Ruby on rails etc. Also add yourself to plenty of recruiting groups that are out there. Just search for “Groups” using keywords and majority of them are easy to join and easily get accepted. Then start inviting some of the members to your network to build your network. Its pretty easy through these mechanisms to add 500 or more people in a matter of days.
- Share updates / tweets – This helps to be on top of most user feeds. It is important to post to your network the current job opportunities you have and some interesting stories/happenings from your daily life such as technology trends, funny stories about candidate conversations (minus the name ofcourse), difficulty you are facing in certain types positions etc. This helps to broadcast your updates to your network. In addition you should be active in some of the groups you join – perfectly OK to ask dumb questions or add comments to ongoing threads. Another tactic is to add a bunch of Linkedin Apps that capture some information like TripIt. All of these tactics will make you more visible.
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- Identify Candidates – Use fewer search terms than job boards since its very unlikely candidates would put detailed skills and capabilities. Use “imaginative” search criteria I described in my earlier post such as using competing companies, university names, ethnicity/language, location etc. to target/limit your results. Then select the right candidates to contact by reading people profiles to identify good match – this is similar to looking at the resume in a job board except that you will focus more on their current/past job details, most importantly the companies they have worked for, how long have they worked etc. Look through their “settings” to see if they seeing job opportunities.
- First “cold” contact – Once you select a candidate to contact, a significant majority can be directly contacted by choosing them as a “Friend”. Now the trick is to write a good compelling message to them – It will help if the message is unique and targeted – for example, relating how the job opportunity is a logical extension to their careers or the job gives them higher degree of responsibility etc. Write a compelling message that highlight the company, career level, job type and how it matches their interest. Ask them to “add you to the network if they are interested and to pls ignore the message if it does not interest them”. So that way Linkedin does not penalize you for adding a whole bunch of unsolicited requests.
Finally be patient and diligent in your follow-ups. Do not take “Lack of response” personally and continue to chip away – remember you are targeting the 10-20% of job seekers within the vast user base. Also two things that determine your response rate are (a) careful selection of right candidates to contact which is even more important than the job boards and (b) compelling message that you include in your introduction.
P.S: Linked-in is way way ahead of others, to be fair there is also similar sites like Zoominfo, hi5, Spoke, Plaxo, PartnerUp and others.
by admin | Jun 5, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition
Candidate sourcing is starting point of the Recruiting Process. In a series of blogs I will try to capture some of the nuances that I have learnt.
In the first part, lets look at maximizing the results from job boards like Monster, Dice, Hotjobs etc. They are a great resource for finding active job seekers. But the common complaint from every client is that they have either seen the candidate profile already or they do not have the ideal skills/competence etc. Why so?
The reason is that every recruiter looks there and looks at the top few pages of results. No doubt that one should look for low hanging fruit and quickly pounce on new candidates. But good recruiting also means looking beyond the most obvious and easy to find candidates. That’s where your IMAGINATION comes in to play to hunt down the right kinds of profiles in the vast repository of millions of profiles. Here are some ways to do imaginative searches to look for such candidate profiles:
- Competence search – This is the most basic searches where you are trying to match competency/expertise requirements of the job. For example, if you are looking for C# and .Net developers with Networking experience, you will use those keywords in your search. Here again looking for alternative representation / expressions of the technologies, tools etc. will certainly help (for example look for “protocol development” or “TCP/IP” while looking for Networking since they are similar)
- Company / Competitor search – Look for companies that are similar to the company you are looking to hire for – they could be competing companies or complementary to the business. So add a bunch of company names in addition to some technical competency for example (“Intel” or “Honeywell” or “Yahoo” or “HP”) and (“.Networking” or “Protocol development” or “VOIP” or “TCP/IP”). That way you will likely located people who worked in these companies before or worked on projects for these companies
- Top universities / school search – always produce good candidates; identify top schools and try to put them in your search term as “OR” options so you will likely find good candidates – For example looking for Indian universities can be (“IIT” or “Indian Institute of Technology” or “NIT” or “Anna University” or “SJCE”) and (“.NET” and “Networking”). Some examples of top university lists –
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
http://www.successcds.net/engineeringentranceexam/Top-100-Engineering-Colleges.php
There are plenty of such lists - Ethnicity and locale search – Certain pockets of people / ethnic groups or universities have made a name for themselves and become specialized. For example I have seen many Russians are extremely good at Maths. So for positions that require good analytical skills, they are a good ethnic group to look at. So your search terms can include special groups in addition to some competencies like (“Russian” or “Russia” or “Poland”) and (“.NET” and “Networking”) so you are looking for specific pockets / ethnic groups that are normally successful.
One word of advice is that when you are adding specialized keywords like university or ethnicity, then expand your search to include candidates who have updated resumes in past 6 months or 1 year as well. That way you could dig deep into great candidates who might be dormant for a while.
Next up, lets look at Social Networking.
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