Archive for the ‘ talent acquisition ’ tag

Happy Designers Produce Amazing Work – Thank you PSAV : )

There are 100s, 1,000s … 10s of thousands of amazing designers in the United States alone. How many are relevant? How many are practical? How many do you trust?

You’ve been through several agencies and there hasn’t been a good fit, yet. You’ve saved the last 50k of your VC money to find and hire the most talented agency on the planet.

We’ll be honest with whoever knocks on our door. You can hire The Arland Group because we are reliable, intelligent and trustworthy. But, if our work isn’t beautiful … really, what’s the point. We encourage all of our prospective clients to “shop the look”. We DO produce amazing results for our clients because we are very talented folks, but most importantly because OUR CLIENTS TRUST US.

You fancy yourself as a great designer, photographer, social media guru? You just might be. But, you’ve knocked on our door and you’ve put your trust in The Arland Group. Now, let go and enjoy the experience.

Our design team doesn’t always focus on being “Out of the Box”: We’d rather “change what the box looks like”.

Take for instance one of our favorite clients: PSAV

When PSAV contracted us to imagine their employment branding and recruitment website … we were ecstatic.

PSAV needed a simple tagline that expressed a fast-paced, demanding, exciting lifestyle that is a PSAV associate. “You’re On.” not only harks back to “showtime”, it says “you’re the (wo)man”. You are in control. You are in the drivers seat. You contol your success.

BOLD is what our design team had in the back of their minds when conceptualizing PSAV’s career website. PSAV’ers are techy and fast paced – they embrace the latest in social networking and technology, thus Real-time Twitter feeds. To our best knowledge, no other recruitment website has taken this approach. We also built microsites to better target segments of PSAV’s employment initiatives: Another first in the industry.

Of yeah … and it doesn’t end there …

Kudos to all at PSAV for “changing what the box looks like”!

Posted: January 13th, 2011
at 4:07pm by Jonathan Galbreath

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Categories: Employment Branding, Identity, Uncategorized

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I Answer to Many

I Answer to Many
One of the hallmarks of the Talent Acquisition Group at The Arland Group is that we work as an extension of our clients’ recruiting teams. One day I might be writing job descriptions, the next could involve identifying key trends in source of hires or assisting with the implementation of a multi-faceted social media campaign, and in between I could be researching CRM’s or wrapping up the sale of a career site. Much of our company’s success depends on the interaction between Arland and the client or “partner.” And, because of the nature of the projects on hand, I “report” to a specific project lead at each company and I become part of that partner’s team. My contact varies on each assignment. I work with recruiters, HRIS leaders, marketing folks, recruiting admins, managers, directors and VP’s of recruiting and human resources; vendor managers, procurement, retail operations and legal teams. Because of the different levels of interaction, I think of my role as a game: adjusting my style, my personality, my skills and knowledge to fit into a particular company’s recruiting structure and process. If I don’t adapt, I don’t succeed. Success is eminent though if I work effectively with each new “boss” and deliver strategic solutions that fulfill needs, budget and timeline.

By the way, if you are known for hating every boss you work for, you shouldn’t work in recruitment marketing sales. I technically have about 45 leaders in my life, all and I answer to each one as if he or she is the President of The Arland Group. My friends ask me, “How annoying is that, reporting to so many people?” I don’t have to think long before responding, “Yeah, sometimes it’s not so fun and can be overwhelming, but I love what I do!” I am still in awe that after 2 years on the job I still get excited when starting my work day. I consider myself pretty lucky as many people I know can’t stand what they do for a living. For me I find satisfaction in that every day at Arland is different. Every day I learn something new. Every day I get to make an impact on our partners’ recruiting missions, saving them time or money or improving their brand equity. And, I enjoy the challenge that comes with juggling multiple projects. Trust me! There is never a dull moment in my life! This is a very good thing for someone like me who has adult ADD. Most of all, I love the relationships that develop along the way. So many of my clients become good friends and there is wonderful sense of camaraderie- who could ask for more? I’m happy to say that I answer to many chiefs and dig every minute of it!

Posted: June 29th, 2010
at 2:07pm by Deb Andrychuk

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Stop the Deletions

I was talking to my boss earlier in the week and he was reviewing my prospective new business report. Discouraged by the lack of new appointments, he sighed and mumbled something sarcastic like, “I could get 10 meetings a week when I was in your shoes.” At first I felt embarrassed and somewhat defensive and then it occurred to me that he was right. 10 years ago, HR or talent acquisition wasn’t the cold calling target they are today, and get this: HR would not only take your calls, but they would dutifully listen to your entire voicemail, sometimes taking notes and writing down your contact information and then actually return your phone calls, regardless of whether they were interested in working with you or not. Amazed by the thoughts of this Happy Land where caller and client are evenly paired? Well, it doesn’t exist today, so time to wake up and face the new reality. Remember that before the advent of job boards, job aggregators, applicant tracking systems; CRM’s and social media solutions, vendor to client ratios were not so wildly disproportionate as they are now. And even though current HR behavior may seem downright rude or insensitive at times, it’s obvious that these poor souls are drowning in the sea of incessant calls received from sales people hawking their wares on a daily basis. So, it makes sense that as a vendor, if you can’t find a way to stand out amongst the gazillion people leaving a message with a given prospect, you run the risk of getting deleted before you can even begin to share your value proposition. So, how do you prevent your prospect from hitting “*D” on their phone and sending you into vendor purgatory?

Here is a day in the life at Arland: I will be diligently looking for fresh opportunities to network and make new business calls, when without fail, I get the call. It’s someone in my industry- the recruitment advertising world, calling to complain about the injustices bestowed upon them by HR Directors, VP’s and recruiters alike. To hear Mr. Yukkity-yuk talk, you would believe that the HR community owed him something for his poorly constructed elevator speeches and equally dismal deliveries of said messages. UGH! It’s during these moments I wish I could just slap a giant pause button and say to my newly muted friend, “If you think about all of the technology that has been developed over the course of the last decade, you’re CUH-RAZY if you haven’t noticed that your prospect is now the target for an unprecedented number of vendor calls and emails, and the quantity of these marketing calls continue to escalate every day! “

So, how do you deliver your message to your target audience without getting discarded before you have stated your purpose? Mike Grennier who heads up talent acquisition in North America for Wal-Mart might have the answer. He recently tweeted, “Dear Vendors: Voice mails longer than 30 seconds will NOT be returned. Think twitter-length. Thank you.” Hhhmm might seem a little harsh, but seriously, maybe Mr. Grennier is on to something here. Maybe we should all take his advice…if your message is longer than a typical Facebook status update or is more than 140 characters, trash it and start again. Besides condensing your message, I think we should all think about emailing our clients first. If you were in your prospect’s shoes, wouldn’t you rather have the option to answer an email at your convenience versus feeling obligated to return a voicemail? And, I think we vendors should all receive harsh jolts of electricity every time we leave messages with trite sayings like “saves you time, money and will increase your ROI.” We can do better than that, can’t we? I for one am going to apply what I know about social media to the development of my new and improved voicemails. I pledge to keep it concise, keep it real and honest, provide true value to the recipient and I will be polite. Above all, I will strive to keep it memorable and unique. I remember a top sales person at a previous employer of mine who used to tell mini-jokes on voicemail when he couldn’t get in touch with a decision maker. He would say something like, “Wow, sorry to hear about your broken arm” to someone who he had never met before. He would then chuckle and continue with, “I’m assuming it’s broken because you won’t call me back!” Believe it or not, this unusual approach worked more times than not, probably because it was unique and he used humor to his advantage. This sales person was smart enough to realize that no one really cared about his credentials, his product differentiators, or the slick article written about his company in Fortune Magazine last month. But he knew if he could make a personal connection with his prospect he might have a shot at getting a meeting and a potential sale.
So, in true Twitter fashion, I leave you with this final thought: Dear Vendor, craft a unique message that is concise, useful, engaging and honest. Email first, call second.
PS Call me in a week and I will let you know this works for me, that is, if I don’t delete your message first…

Posted: June 10th, 2010
at 11:35am by Deb Andrychuk

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What is a Black Hole?

What is a black hole? Some may say it’s a “region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape. …” or some may say “that’s where my sales rep went after the contract was signed.”

At The Arland Group (TAG), our Talent Acquisition group guarantees that the media partners included in your recruitment media plan will not disappear into a black hole but rather, become stars and shine their knowledge even more brightly after the sale. To this point, we recently setup three media partners to appear at our customer Ministry Health Care within six weeks of the 2010 Media Plan contract being signed.

We firmly believe in helping our customers truly get the very most for their investment. At The Arland Group, our “account management actions” meant that we invited three vendors who are key partners in the 2010 Media Recruitment Plan to cover best practices, competitive benchmarking, time-saving tips, etc.  Monster, Simply Hired and Healthecareers came to our customer’s headquarters in Milwaukee where they had 15 people, primarily recruiters/end users who came eager to listen, learn and brainstorm about how they can best utilize specific products to fill their job openings.  Each media partner brings a distinct strength to the media plan, and in this group setting, by pulling the entire recruitment team together, also allowed for our customer to pro-actively at the onset of the contract term, establish their own internal best practices.

Mike Schmidt, Director of Recruitment at Ministry Health Care, said his recruiters considered this Vendor Summit as “one of the best meetings we’ve ever had.” With the introduction of many new tools available outside of the traditional job postings and resume search, having direct contact between media partners and end users/recruiters is invaluable to help them best use new products.

This post-sale support and “product on-boarding” are even more critical as new products are introduced with the advent of Web 2.0 and trends developing around social media. Monster’s Media Specialist, Dennis Stevens, said having the entire recruiting team assembled to discuss new products now in their mix will help ensure that one of Monster’s unique and most successful products, Career Ad Network, will garner the best possible results.

Healthecareer’s strategy involves developing partnerships with industry-specific associations to help drive job seekers to their site so they had Jennifer Badding, Senior Manager, Association and Partner Development, in attendance to speak directly with the Ministry recruiting team about associations that were meaningful to them and their specific job openings.

Meanwhile, Simply Hired in the job search engine space, will help Ministry reach job seekers in new places and help them connect with seekers who are searching solely by location and industry/job title.

Now that a baseline has been established, and expectations established externally with media partners and internally among recruiters, Quarterly Reviews will be more significant and informative. It also makes a contract more than a contract; it turns a piece of paper into a true partnership. If you’d like to learn more about how to keep your media sales reps out of the black holes and keep them as stars, you can reach me directly at slynch@thearlandgroup.com .

Posted: June 1st, 2010
at 8:10am by Sharon Lynch

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