Given the obvious, COVID-19 is a seminal event. No one has a playbook for doing business in this kind of pandemic, but some basic principles remain intact. These basic principles, especially as they relate to talent acquisition in both good and challenging seasons, remind us that concepts like partnership, collaboration, even-handedness, and teamwork are timeless. [...]
“Our only agenda today is to find out what your agenda is.” This is the way I have opened many client meetings - meetings where the goal was to craft a superior contingent labor and workforce solution for them. As opposed to a monologue or a “show up and throw up” presentation approach, the [...]
Despite the common business psychobabble and overwhelming advice of not-so-sage pundits, I believe that a fear of failure is a good thing. And it’s not that I’m just a contrarian – we all know that fear can be healthy and provide safety. This is why we carefully and passionately tell our children about situations that [...]
Contingent staffing is a critical part of many companies’ overall business plans. This is especially true since the Great Recession, as organizations have built workforce buffers of a certain percentage of contingent workers to protect them from any potential downturn. Allocating a ratio of, let’s say, 20-30% of extended workers - and I don’t recommend [...]
You could impale me for being obvious if I said the labor market was tight. That wouldn’t be news, nor would me saying this is the most difficult hiring landscape I’ve seen since I first took the plunge into the staffing industry in 1983. (This is not a typo, folks - and, yes - [...]
In my workforce solutions role, I read a lot of contracts. I’m not an attorney, and I don’t play one on TV, but I find many staffing contracts to be quite interesting (read strange, laughable, curious, creative, out of touch with reality, etc.). After all of these years, I have compiled a list of some [...]
Very early in my career, I was given a project by the owners of the staffing company I worked for. Using the company database, I was to track where our applicants came from and where our clients were located. After looking at hundreds of data points and carefully putting a small round sticker (blue for [...]
Words matter because words have explicit and implicit meanings, both of which can convey a positive or negative message. Anything that diminishes the importance of words, and the way they are used, strips language of any real value and reduces words to ambiguous strings of letters. For example, being careful with what we call [...]
I believe there was an intermittent, but gradual, pendulum swing of power away from the people (workers) and into the hands of corporations over the last few decades. Among other things, we saw the waning influence of labor unions and the decline of defined benefit pensions as indicators that companies had started to reject the [...]
My last article (Are People a Commodity?) addressed the dreadful commoditization of contingent workers (people) and staffing companies (people services). Now, I want to address the fact that the staffing industry, of which I’m a proud member, is culpable in this reality. With more than 30 years of experience in the industry, I’ve watched as [...]
