StlRecruiting

2011 List Of St Louis Staffing Firms

Got an email from a young salesperson looking to get into recruiting. I told him to call you folks.  And in doing so, tried to remember all the recruiting firms I could in St Louis. 

Here's my list. 

Bradford Galt
Teksystems
Aerotek
Kforce
Net Effects
Technology Partners
Spherion
Manpower
Robert Half
Creatives on Call
Express Personnel
Adecco
Matrix
Technisource
Yoh IT
S3
OCI
Comsys (they have a new name)
Modis
Elite IT
The Newberry Group
Preferred Resources
ChameleonIS
Ibridge
Spherion
Quilogy
Ajilon
CDI
ISSG

Not a bad memory there, eh?  Of course, some of them may be out of business or have new name changes.  So I went to google and found out that Net Effects has their own list of St Louis staffing firms. It's such a neat SEO trick for their website, I helped them out there with the link. 

If you do feel like comments, answer whether or not a 24 year old with two years of sales experience could get a job at your firm calling in and saying something like, "I have a list of 30 firms I'm calling to find out which one will hire someone not afraid to answer the phone."  Is that you? 

Videoblog: The Importance Of Salespeople In The Labor Market

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Picking A Technology Staffing Firm In St Louis

This blog has been awhile longer than most, and Google trusts it, which means I regularly get requests from people by email and phone to find a reliable recruiter.  

It's not as easy as it seems to make such a suggestion.  Sure there are fine firms in the St Louis area that in general, I would recommend.  Kforce was always good to me, thought I haven't worked there in six years.  Bradford and Galt seems to be the genesis of every independent staffing firm, having been around for a long time and maintaining a good reputation.  Comsys and Technisource are national names, OCI and Technology Partners are local ones.  Matrix has a good national brand. 

And there are more.  But how do you pick? 

This is for clients:

First, recognize you're not working with a company, you're working with a person and their team.  Don't get fooled into thinking that a big name means big service.  It can, but I've seen national firms with two people working, and local firms with fifteen.  Generally, you're better off with a larger local presence, but you only know if you're willing to visit their offices. 

You should, you know.  You should see what candidates see when they walk in the door.  There's no excuse not to, and it will tell you much about how the compay functions. 

Looks aren't everything.  The second thing you should do is find out exactly who is working full time on your positions.  Do you have a specific recruiter who runs your account?  Is it a pool?  Are you competing against other companies for the best recruiting team?

It works like this.  An account manager brings in a job requirement.  Who works on it?  Do they have control over a recruiter, or is it just posted on a board?  Do they have someone they trust, a recruiter they sit down with and give the good reqs to?  Will the account manager tell you what a good req is and what a bad one is?  (if they say there is no such thing as a bad req, they're either clueless or lying.  Bad reqs are vague, hard to fill, little response back from manager, low bill rate, or low gross margin rate).  

Most companies don't think about such things.  They want to be sweet-talked into assuming a beaming workforce is just waiting to make calls on their behalf.  There may very well be a beaming workforce back at the offices, but do they roll their eyes when they hear your name? Does the recruiting manager tell them to check their boards, but work on the fillable reqs?

Bet you never heard the term fillable req from a sales guy.  

The truth is hiring is hard, and the system matters more than you know.  I never really made it as a staffing guy until I recognized that I had to do all the work myself.  In St Louis, the best ratio of sales to recruiting I ever had was 1:1. At one point I had one recruiter for three salespeople (three good salespeople).  Try hiring 60 people a year with that kind of recruiting power.  Ultimately, a lack of recruiting strength helped me make the decision to strike out on my own.  If you're doing all the work, why not do it all yourself?

Conclusion: 

1) Find out if the account manager knows anything about the technology you're hiring for.

2) Ask the about the structure of their recruiting process, including who works on the job

3) Ask to see the office, if only for five minutes

4) Ask the sales person who will actually work on the job, and what it takes to make your job a fillable req. 

 

 

 

Christina Tedesco Joins Creatives On Call

Christine Tedesco, who sounds like a female version of me, has joined Creatives on Call, an agency specializing in marketing and digital and all that.

AdSaint has a cool write-up on it, and I for one plan to give her a call.  A marketing, recruiting, small business owning St Louisan!  Someone needs an interview!

The State Of St Louis Staffing

I've been talking to quite a few staffing firms, and business is steady in St Louis.  It's down, no doubt, but there are still jobs to be had.  The problem, as always, seems to be the easy money has dried up, and recruiters have to work harder to pay the bills.

Clients are more cautious about hiring, but that's a trend that has been accelerating for some time.  Job Descriptions still fail to adequately explain what is needed, and far too often the skillset requested is a compilation of older requirements.  Companies big and small post boring descriptions that don't mean anything, and then wonder why they can't get jobseekers to read the position before applying.

In a world where social media is touted as a cure-all, it's shocking that hiring information is still at a premium.  Jobseekers flood to LinkedIn and Facebook and job boards, but I'm not hearing much about it benefitting them.  LinkedIn is a part of the puzzle, but too many people are replacing, "I clicked Apply Now" with "I have a LinkedIn profile." 

Not to blame jobseekers - recruiters spoiled by lots of jobs and posting are realizing that the phone, that accursed tool for talking with people, is still a requirement in staffing.  Email and IM and Twitter are good for communicating process - setting appointments, adding value - but no one is persuading a candidate to take a job through text.  And as for new requirements - being interesting and connected are requirements for getting heard.  Hiring managers are getting more calls, but worse calls.  That's a shame - as making connections when they don't have an open position is the backbone of your long-term financial worth.

Here's where I sound like John Sumser. We're learning that the old ways still work. Personal connections, industry experience, and the recognition that activity drives results on both sides of the equation are back in vogue.  There is business and there are jobs to be had.  Listening to recruiters, I sometimes long for the simple days of having no responsibilites but smiling and dialing.  I'd make a killing in this market.

   

OCI Joins The YouTube Revolution

Okay, this is pretty funny, and if you're a developer, then it's really, really funny.

OCI, a provider of Java and OOD services, and well-known in St Louis for training classes, has started a YouTube Channel to help in instruction.  It's silly, but it's also informative, and it works for the developers looking to learn.

More companies in St Louis need to start looking at ways to connect with candidates, and this is a good start.  Something to keep in mind - if as a company, you are not involved online, someone is going to come along and fill that niche, and then you'll be paying them for access to the candidate pool.

Good job Kristen. 

Structural Negotiation In Recruiting Sales

I'm reading a book on negotiation, and it covers the importance of negotiating with decision makers.  The example given is that of a car dealer, where the salesperson actually has no authority to make the decision on a deal.

If you've ever been annoyed when a car salesman leaves to go speak to the sales manager, it's helpful to remember that the salesperson isn't actually the decision maker.  The process is set up so any negotiations have to be "run up the flag pole for approval."

In the book, the correct negotiating tactic in these situations is to do an end run to the decision maker, which got me thinking about the way that recruiters tend to make an end run around Human Resources to get to the hiring manager.

Clearly, HR isn't the final decision maker on hiring a candidate. The manager is. But the manager is in a weaker negotiating position, as they need the candidate, and thus may be open to price manipulation as they value the candidate for their impact.  Human Resources in this instant is a shield put up to protect the company from high pressure tactics.  The implicit promise of company-wide business, and the threat of gaining no business (or breaking the deal) puts the company in a better overall negotiating position, as Human Resources doesn't feel the personal pressure to hire a particular candidate.

The war between outside recruiters and Human Resources is sometimes seen as unnecessary, but it's clearly a structural barrier put in place by corporations to blunt recruiting salespeople.  Going around HR is a good tactic, but a risky one, as it's flagrantly pitting internal divisions (line managers versus HR) against each other. 

The truly interesting piece is that the success rates of the strategy have little to do with the efficacy of the salesperson, and everything to do with the comparative internal position of the hiring manager versus the human resources employee.  And in a further note of irony, the more successful the strategy, the more likely that the balance of power shifts to human resources over time, as the hiring manager is always in a weaker negotiating position, and thus is open to less economic candidate choices.

The Effect Of The Anheuser-Busch Merger On The St Louis Staffing Market

InBev did it.  They came in and merged with the All American brewery, amidst the beating of breasts and rending of garments from St Louis loyalists.  It's a fact of globalization, but it's a tough blow for a city that keeps losing household names to global mergers.

Do the household names matter?  St Louis has a lot more here than the Fortune 500 headquarters.  We have a stable, loyal, conservative workforce, decent housing prices and transportation, and a reasonably relaxed state and local government.

So we'll be okay, but there will be changes, and one of those changes is the local information technology staffing business.  AB-MSG is the umbrella organization for all of the IT at AB.  They started swallowing up smaller divisions like the brewery, the theme parks, packaging several years ago, and employed at their peak, some 500 contractors to add to their 500-700 employees.  That's a lot of contractors, and the result was a vendor list of the top staffing firms in St Louis.

The problem?  Working with AB is a bit like working for Walmart.  They bring you a lot of revenue, but once you're in, you're terrified of losing their business, and scramble to put your best people on the account.  You've heard of the 80/20 rule?  80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients?  With AB, for several firms in St Louis, 80% might be a bit low.  One Client shops aren't that strange in the recruiting world.  When an account manager has a good client, you want to work with them as much as possible, and there was definitely a ego piece to working with AB.  Contractors liked it, and so did you friends and family.  Anheuser-Busch was the holy grail of employment in St. Louis.  That was true for a long time for both full time employees and contractors.  It wasn't just the two cases of free beer.   

So what happens now? Patrick Thibodeau of Computer World writes about the possible impact of the merger.

The future for Anheuser-Busch's IT may be in outsourcing. In 2005, InBev outsourced its IT functions, including its data center, to IBM and its global communications infrastructure to BT Global Services. More than 160 InBev IT employees were transferred to IBM. InBev followed that move a year later with further consolidations as it moved to shared services.

InBev's decision three years ago to outsource its IT department fits with a general trend of companies deploying IT outsourcing to help prepare for mergers and acquisitions, said Linda Cohen, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "It just makes the deal easier," she said. And unless an acquiring company is experiencing problems with its current outsourcing relationship, merging firms will often extend their outsourcing arrangements to the acquisition. "Once you start outsourcing, you tend to do more of it," she said.

InBev likes to use managed outsourcing, which could mean IBM, Accenture, EDS, or another company coming in and running the show.  Anyone who has been through a merger like that knows it doesn't work out for the staffing firm.  Margins have to be squeezed to accomodate the new managed service, and when margins are tight (which they are), the only recourse is to cut the contractor or drop off the vendor list.

Experienced Recruiter/Branch Manager/Sales Manager Hits St Louis Market

Got a note from an experienced recruiter that he's on the market.  If you want someone to run your office and manage a team, especially if you don't have a team and need to build one he's your guy.

Experienced in Information Technology Staffing, Executive Search, Sales, and Operations.

Drop me a note if you want to know who it is.

I put this up on Twitter too - we'll see which is faster for responses.  To follow me http://twitter.com/smheadhunter

Speaking At The MAPSS Event March 19th

I'll be speaking at the morning meeting of the local St Louis chapter of MAPSS on March 19th.  It's a closed meeting, but if you're a local member in St Louis, it will be worth your time to join us.

The topic will be Utilizing Social Media In Recruiting, but I prefer the title, How Staffing Firms Can Use The Internet To Make Money.  We'll cover websites, blogs, LinkedIn, MySpace, Video, and basic strategies to improve your company's and your personal online profile.

The speech will be focused on third party staffing firms, and it will be an executive overview.  I strongly suggest that local regional managers and public staffing firms come join us.  (ed.If you don't, the people there are going to learn how to eat your lunch).  Seating is limited, and the event is over by Olive and Mason in Creve Coeur.

Hope to see you there.  Cost is $30 for members and $50 for non-members.   Sign up at the MAPSS site.