JTL Services, Inc. has decided to implement a program that allows friends, family members and co-workers to benefit by referring a job candidate to them.
This year is starting out completely opposite to last year. This time last year instead of hearing the phone ring you heard the crickets outside! I’m very excited about what I am seeing and if you’re a job candidate it is time to get prepared.
Make sure your resume is up to date and if you need help with that I can refer you to some great resume writers. There is nothing worse for me than having a great candidate to submit to my client knowing that one phone call will get them an interview but the job candidate’s resume or application is not in my hands.
The jobs that we are looking to fill are mostly technical jobs in the IT vertical. If you know someone who you think is a great candidate just refer them to me and if we place that candidate with one of our clients we will pay you $1,000 for the referral. Keep checking back to our jobs page for updates which do change every day and keep in mind not all of our jobs make it on the site.
Desperate times perhaps, but there is no need for stupidity! Everyone knows someone who currently is out of work. Hell, I have file cabinets filled with resumes of laid off workers. The issue isn’t that the normal paths of finding employment have changed, its just that the paths are currently closed! Those of us that have clients still hiring and using us to fill their roles, we are grateful for, but it doesn’t mean that some “yahoo” out there who wants to charge you money is going to help you. The problem out there is that there are too few roles and too many sharp candidates to choose from.
Over the past year Career Coaches have been popping up on the internet more than people getting the swine flu! The CDC needs to create a shot to give the unemployed to keep their money in their pockets. I have been getting calls every single week from job candidates asking me about this new phenomenon. The call usually starts like this: “Have you heard of XYZ Career Coaching, Resume Writing, Interview Training, Action Plan Guiding, Branding Me Extraordinaire Networking Guru For a Fee Company LLC? They say that they’ve worked in HR for years in fact, ran the HR department for the whole company so they seem to know about jobs”. My response is “Really, they sound like a home run”!
There are good people out there that haven’t just thrown up a sign on a shingle announcing that this is now what they do. If your talking with a Career Coach or someone who claims they can help you just make sure that they’re not just an opportunist looking to make a quick buck. And just because someone wrote a book doesn’t mean anything other than, they wrote a book. I understand if you’re like me, and can’t write well, that it make sense to pay someone to help you with your resume, that’s fine. I understand that there are very talented people who can help you in that area. I’m talking about the person who claims that they are this guru at finding people jobs. If they are truly good at it then why are they not being paid by the companies?
I’ve been told that these Career Coaches charge anywhere from a thousand dollars and up. Most recruiting agencies will charge a percentage of the job candidate’s first year annual salary, typically 25%. My question is if you are such a guru at helping candidates find jobs, why aren’t you recruiting and making a lot more? Perhaps there are more opportunities in charging people than clients willing to pay a fee for someone. All I know is even in this bad economy we are still in business and doing quite well.
If someone is going to charge you money to help you find a job, there are things you should look into.
1) Check with your State to see if they are licensed with the State to charge job candidates money. I know in the States of Connecticut and North Carolina you need to be licensed and monitored by the State.
2) Ask how long have they been legally in business.
3) Get references.
4) What are their fees? Do they put that in writing?
5) What guarantee do you have that you will find me a job?
Recruiters don’t have guarantees they offer job candidates. I can’t promise anyone that I can find them a job. I also don’t charge them for my advice, preparation, editing of their resume, reference checks, cold and warm calling to my 10 plus year client list promoting their background and to top it off, I will negotiate their compensation package for them.
Some people don’t get it do they. What makes someone an expert? The best way to explain what I mean comes from
movie “Back To School”. Rodney tells the professor how it works in the real world. How does he know? He knows because he has done it, and there is nothing more powerful than actually doing something. You can talk to me about theory until you’re blue in the face! Just because you worked in HR doesn’t mean you can help someone find a job. Just because you wrote a book and have a website doesn’t mean you can help someone land a job.
A free site that can assist you is MyJobCAST.com. This site has been created to assist people that are not getting help from anywhere else. I am taking the knowledge that I have gained over the years and put that into a automated web 2.0 application. We are soon adding the free job portion of the site that will allow small businesses to list their jobs for free.
I posed this question about the rise of Career Coaches in LinkedIn and I must admit the answers were excellent even from the Career Coaches themselves. They have said the same thing about checking the legitimacy of the Career Coach. I would like to end with a statement that came from Charlene Norman from Toronto Canada and she summed it up by saying ” if you can’t do, teach”. Brilliant!
Tara LeFevre, Managing Partner JTL Services, Inc.
If you’re searching for customer service and someone to really focus on your needs then try a small search firm. In today’s business environment it’s pretty easy to find out what other companies are doing. With networking being the “word” of the new century, it doesn’t take much effort to find out what’s going on at XYZ Recruiting Firm. Being in the business now for 12 plus years, I have made some good friends that happen to work at large recruiting companies. All I will say is business as usual is still the norm. I guess that works in a “burn and churn” environment. That’s why the next call you might get is from your “new” recruiter at XYZ, because your old recruiter is no longer at the firm.
When you’re working with a company that’s business model is based on “numbers”, the problem is you as a client are up against their plan rather than yours! I equate this to what happens to be my favorite past time and that’s shopping.
I prefer to shop at small boutique stores that focus their attention on me and quality stuff, instead of filling their shelves with mass produced stuff and no one to be found. These large firms focus on the numbers and less on you. At the end of the day the recruiter on the job needs to show good numbers to their managers. The “good’ numbers consists of how many people did they recruit, how many jobs orders did they get, and how many send-outs did they have today?
Is there anything in there about you? Perhaps you’re the job order that they got, but the focus is not on you, it’s on the numbers. Have your ever heard the expression, “if you throw enough mud on the walls some will stick”? Well mud doesn’t look good under my nails!
When I first started recruiting that’s what I did. I worked the numbers instead of working for my clients. What I found is spinning my wheels all over the place took so much time and not enough progress for my clients! So needless to say I changed my focus on the clients that really want to work with me and their jobs? I started to get focused on finding the best talent for my clients and help them as quickly as I could.
That is why today I work with only a handful of clients and why my success rate is much better than ever before. My clients love the fact that I am always available for them and flexible to work the way they need me to work. Even in this economy it has been a winning year! Visit my profile.
One question we seem to get asked a lot is “What do I do with my 401K when I leave my company for a new opportunity?” I know what many people do and that is to simply roll it over to the new employer’s plan. BIG
Jim Coleman
MISTAKE! Why don’t you take charge of your retirement plan and don’t limit yourself to what funds you can invest in?
very good friend of mine Jim Coleman, is a Financial Advisor, and has always given me great advice. Jim, the President and Founder of Coleman Financial Advisory Group,located in Connecticut, was recently published in Kiplinger’s Magazine this September for “A sideways pyramid”. In 2005 he was featured in Connecticut Magazine as a financial professional that stands out from the multitude of investment firms and advisors.
Jim has always taken calls from our candidates that we have placed in new opportunities and has always given our candidates the best advice on what to do with their rollovers. Regardless to where you live if you are changing jobs you should know what to do with your 401K plan. Call Jim and tell him that “Jeff” sent you!
Who is representing you with your job search? The landscape of many large, well known search firms have gone through some major changes due to the economy. Search firms have been hit hard and more recruiters have lost their jobs more than any other time. Recruiters who have been successful for years are no longer around. In this down market recruiting firms have decided to cut back instead of trying to spend their way out of the problem. That does seem to be an action that is not only prudent, intelligent, responsible, and something that requires common sense, but what do I know? They then hire low draw or commission only people and allow them to work the existing database. The only problem with this tactic is the new people they hire are learning how to be a recruiter in one of the most difficult times to date! All I can say is good luck with that.
Tim Peters started with me 10 years ago and he is someone who really did fall off the boat! Tim, a Merchant Marine working for a division of Hess Gas as Chief Officer, wanted a change. I knew Tim for about 2 years prior and knew that he would succeed as a recruiter because succeeding was something that he only knew. Days of being out to sea were wearing on Tim and he had the confidence to do what ever it took to succeed. Tim works in Connecticut and handles many different verticals and has built some strong relationships.
Bryant Madore has also been with me for 10 years and he worked as a training supervisor for Payless Shoe Source before jumping into the recruiting world. Bryant has a strong work ethic and he works out of North Carolina. He enjoys working on the really hard to fill positions and seems to always fill them regardless to where the job and he knows how to get the job done.
That being said there are still jobs out there to be had. We have seen an increase in activity and expect it to continue. So before thinking the way to land your next opportunity is to call one of the large staffing firms think again. Do your homework by checking out who you will be working with and how long they have personally been in the search business.
