I've talked to several of my contemporaries over the past couple of weeks and the consensus was Q1 was not great for the IT Staffing business. Many of us haven't recovered from the usual drop in headcount at the end of the year and are wondering when things will start to recover. We've seen a couple of clients start to pick up and I am hopeful that Q2 isn't the disaster (maybe too strong a word - struggle?) Q1 was. I will stick with disaster personally because yesterday we were forced to cut 2… Continue

Sometimes you just have to laugh at how people approach trying to secure employment. The following was posted at the top of a candidate's resume on Dice:



No Recruiters, DIRECT HIRE ONLY!



If you are a recruiter or work for a recruiting company, please read carefully.



You DO NOT have permission to submit me to jobs EVER!



You DO NOT have permission to add my information to your database.



If I find out that you have used my name or resume… Continue

You just got an offer for the services of your consultant from two clients - now what? Well first off this is a good problem to have - it shows that you're doing a good job assessing talent. But this situation does need to be handled delicately from many aspects, especially when there are multiple salespeople & clients involved.



From the client perspective we've got a "first right of refusal policy" that basically says first company to interview gets 24 hours to offer before… Continue

Maybe it's just me, but my Sales 101 class told me that if you leave a message 80% of the time you're not going to get a call back. Rather than listen to our team lament about how people don't call back I decided to ask a few pointed questions. Question one was "are you making more than one attempt?" and their answer told me I didn't need to ask any more questions. So I implemented a procedure using our ATS to increase our call back hits & wanted to share it with you.



First off,… Continue

Call me old fashioned, but I don't have a MySpace page. I started one several years ago to blog on, but closed it because I just didn't find any value in a professionally focused MySpace page. That also was about the time I ran into LinkedIn which to me was a more valueable professional networking tool. So I'm just scratching the surface of the Web 2.0 scene outside LinkedIn - a rookie if you will. That's why I'm going to get involved in more blogging and reading this site, ERE.net,… Continue

I met with a candidate this week - very nice fellow. Was engaging in the interview, able to articulate his background quite well, seemed to be someone that likes to go above and beyond, good image / body language / eye contact and just left me with an overall positive impression. We quizzed him about his education and he seemed offended that we'd have the audacity to ask a question about his educational credentials. That's where it all went south. It's right there on the paper - see - it says… Continue

I read a blog today that threw out the "BIG R" word - it posed the question "so, are we in a recession". So what do I think? Q1 certainly didn't set the world on fire for us. We're a contingency IT services firm in the midwest. We service a variety of industries but two of them are "early adoptors" of a recession (marketing agency & print/publishing). Both are struggling to hit numbers.

So, are we in a recession or not? I'll tell you at the end of Q2.