10 Lessons Learned at the Florida Staffing Association Owners Conference

1. The future competition is not just the newest recruitment / staffing firm offering better, smarter and more holistic talent solutions, it is also Monster.com and their NEW career portal as well as other specialty niche sites that aim to own the talent pool through various career pathing and career targeting technology.

As many of you know Keen embarked on creating a new kind of talent management firm 14 months ago and while we are having a great go of it and are making excellent margins, there is certainly something new to learn every time I turn around.

The most recent conference I led a key note for had a woman from Monster.com, Marica Biggar speak on the reality of the future for staffing and recruitment firms. She showed us demographics that were so evident of predicting our future the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. Obviously Monster.com has their hands on statistics that we only wish we had, and the good news is they are ready, willing and able to share it. She showed us a chart of supply and demand, I think I first learned about supply and demand in 4th grade, and the picture shown on the overhead was a caveman and a wheel. Looking back it was Economics for Dummies.

What was quite stimulating about this Monster chart was the linkage to Thomas Freidman’s predictions in “The World Is Flat”. The jobs and skill sets in America are changing, the talent pool is changing and is more diverse than ever; to attract and retain the best people will take skills and tools most of us have not even begun to think about. We in Recruitment and Staffing need to shift as well.

2. When there is a need and limited supply, they will pay; when there is no need and a surplus of people, they don’t need to. As our speaker continued to blow us away with facts and figures that have everything to do with the amount of money we have in our bank accounts; we learned exactly where we need to focus our efforts, now and in the future.



3. If you want to own the candidate market – you first must operate in a niche specific enough to do so and capitalize on the economies of scale both in your recruitment processes and in your business development processes.



4. I believe that the hardest pill for recruitment and staffing owners, staffers and business development leaders to swallow is that they are going to have to reinvent who they are for their candidate pool and therefore reinvent who they are for their customer base. What worked in the past is not working now and wont in the future. Technology is advancing faster than humans are, and technology does not have get over the fact that times have changed, it just does. People on the other hand are so busy fighting the trends that in many cases they miss the boat.



5. When you own the candidate market you are no longer spending your recruitment efforts on filling jobs, you are working on attracting and capturing candidates for their career life cycle. Imagine how much more profitable we’d all be if we focused on retaining relationships with candidates before during and after the placement, and whenever our niche candidates needed something having to do with their career (advise, coaching, training, internal progression marketing, a new job outside the company, development in their new leadership role) they could get served by your team. Imagine the power if people were tied to you and your firm first and foremost before they began their search.



6. When you own the talent pool – you own the market. If you are the name to know for Talent Management in Clinical Research, if your company is the one sponsoring Career Progression workshops, Leadership Development programs, Campus Recruitment events, then your company becomes the “Go To” for that Brand of Talent.



7. Monster.com says they are No longer in the job posting business, they are rolling our an immensely powerful tool that uses algorithms to manage their relationship with candidates and keeps them coming back to their site, even when they are not in ‘search’ mode.



8. Vocational training is HOT, and needed. If you ‘Re-Train’ people with the right skill and talent and get them ready for the new emerging hottest roles, you become part of the Obama Stimulus Plan and win in more ways than one.



9. When you host a meet-up, gathering, advisory council or web site that acts as a social connectivity point you own not only the candidate talent pool, you own those that want access to the information.



10. The time for reframing who you are as a staffing and recruitment firm is while everyone else is waiting and wondering when the economy will turn around. The time to build your plan and plant the seeds is NOW.



After all who you were coming into the recession is no longer relevant. It’s who you are coming out that matters.