Many job seekers and employers are confused about how recruitment agencies work. Its a real headache to find a perfect candidate, interview them, negotiate salaries, and put together all the necessary instructions.

Read these essential tips if you are new to recruiting and want to know how to find an employment agency, how they work, and what are the benefits of working with staffing companies. Recruiters work as a connecting link between a job seeker and an employer. If you want to find a worker quickly and effectively, especially when it comes to part-time jobs, temporary or remote work, you really do need to turn to recruiters. There are different types of recruitment agencies, some of them specialize only in long-term, permanent work, while others are industry-specific. Lets discuss the benefits of hiring a recruitment agency for an employer.

Most business owners want to hire a professional when they need one and at the same time, make sure this person is productive as quickly as possible. A recruitment agency can not only find a suitable candidate fast but also ensure this workforce is able to adapt to the changing demands of the client’s business.

These days the hiring process is more complicated than in the past, particularly in competitive, specialized industries. It takes a lot of time to find suitable talent. Get more advice about keeping a work life balance at work. This is important for both candidates and employers to consider. A happy workforce is less likely to change as often as an unsatisfied one. Constant changes in staff are not only disruptive to the workplace but also extremely costly in both time and money. For the candidate, it can mean time without a salary and a lot of stress in the meantime.

If you’re returning to work after having a child, sending in your CV while you’re on leave is a good way to get on the books of a top recruiter and let them know when you’re ready to return to work. Its time-consuming for HR managers to screen resumes, interview candidates, check all the references, and so on. This way, a staffing agency can help you find candidates that will most likely fit the position. And your managers will spend less time on a hiring process.

Running a business also means you need to deal with employment laws and regulations. This includes taxes, insurance, and other paperwork. If you work with a recruitment agency, they will help with all these responsibilities. When you start using a staffing firm, they check if they have a suitable candidate for you already in their database. In a situation where they don’t have a person who can fill your position, they will post an advertisement on various job boards (and other sites where job seekers are likely to see the posting).

Then, they review all the CV’s they receive as a result of this advertisement. Also, they find passive candidates. These are people who are not actively looking for work but are open to relevant, career opportunities. Recruiters may also reach out to people they see on LinkedIn who work in similar positions and may ask them to apply to the new job opening. It may work out if a person is not entirely satisfied with a career, salary, or package he or she has at the moment.

After that, a recruitment agency interviews the best candidates for your opening and sends you the most suitable applicants. At this stage, you will need to spend your time selecting the person whose skills and expertise most closely fit your business. Depending on your contract with the recruitment agency, they may also help a new employee with the onboarding process and train them for their new position. Try to build a good relationship with a staffing firm and stay clear about your needs. Doing this will mean that the next time they will likely find you a suitable candidate faster.

Partnering with an IT recruitment firm for your organizations hiring needs can help you save time, money, and effort and to top it all, can guarantee a great outcome. Find out more

Heres a quick look at the top 5 reasons why you should consider using a recruitment agency to fill in the vacancies at your company.

1.) Market knowledge: The best recruiters have exclusive and updated information on their specialised niche from availability of talent to salary benchmarks and hiring complexities, they can offer you insights that are crucial for decision-making. The recruiters will work with you to manage these challenges and situations to find the right employee for your needs.

2.) Access to key skills: With talent shortage being the number one challenge facing hiring teams, it is not surprising that most companies are now looking to engage with specialist recruiters for their hiring needs. Agencies have a vast network of consultants, collaborators, and clients that help them tap into the talent pool and find the best profiles for you. With these sources and connections, they also have access to highly skilled passive candidates that might not be accessible through a regular job post.

3.) Customised to your needs: During seasonal rush or peak demand periods, you might need immediate access to temporary workers who are qualified to get on-the-job straight away. There is no time for training and other on-boarding activities. A recruitment firm comes in handy during these periods of seasonal increase in work and demand for workers. A top employment firm already has a ready database of qualified candidates who are available to work on a temporary/contract basis.

4.) Save time: For any business to be profitable, judicious use of time is imperative. When you partner with a recruitment firm, you save up on several hours of groundwork that includes filtering applications to find the relevant ones, screening candidates with a preliminary interview, testing the shortlisted ones to determine their skillsets, and so on. All this and more can be managed by the recruiting agency, so you can focus on the more critical aspects of your business.

5.) Cost effective: Recruitment costs can creep up as there are a lot of different areas that are needed to employ new staff. These are expenses associated with advertising the job openings across various portals, subscription costs of employment boards, hours invested in screening profiles and interviewing candidates, and finally training and on-boarding a new employee.

When you choose to partner with a staffing agency, you save on the time and effort required for the screening and initial interviewing processes. This, in turn, leads to better productivity and profitability. Since staffing agencies are well-connected and have a better reach, their advertising expenses are also lower but with better results. They get highly skilled and well suited candidates to work for you, ensuring that the training time is shorter. Training and onboarding are significant expenses and if not done properly, can lose a good worker just starting out in a new job. Then you will be back on the interview cycle trying to find new staff. Recruitment consultants will give you support to manage these difficult aspects of taking on a new hire.

Business success depends on efficiency. This is where all activities in a business are done on a timely manner and with precision, this helps in cost cutting and good customer relationship.

Business leaders often think of “efficiency” and “productivity” as synonyms, two sides of the same coin.

When it comes to strategy, however, efficiency and productivity are very different. At a time when so many companies are starved for growth, senior leaders must bring a productivity mindset to their business and remove organizational obstacles to workforce productivity. This view differs substantially from the relentless focus on efficiency that has characterized management thinking for most of the last three decades, but it is absolutely essential if companies are going to spur innovation and reignite profitable growth.

The common definition of labor efficiency is: “the number of labor hours required to accomplish a given task, when compared with the standard in that industry or setting.” The typical way of assessing labor efficiency is to compare the number of hours actually required to produce a given product or service with those usually required.

Efficiency is about doing the same with less. Companies most often improve labor efficiency by finding ways to reduce the number of labor hours required to produce the same level of output. This translates into savings because the company spends less on wages and other labor-related costs. Efficiency, then, is about shrinking the denominator — inputs (headcount, labor hours) — in an effort to improve profitability.

If efficiency is no longer the secret to superior performance, what about productivity? Bain & Company recently completed a comprehensive study of workforce productivity and performance. We collaborated with the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey more than 300 senior executives from large companies worldwide. We complemented these survey findings with the results of two dozen in-depth organizational audits to identify the steps companies can take to unleash the productive power of their teams and accelerate profitable growth.

This research, combined with our experience as consultants working with senior leaders over the last three decades, highlights three fundamental tenets of a productivity mindset. Leadership must recognize:

Most employees want to be productive, but the organization too often gets in their way. Our research indicates that the average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity — more than a day each week — to what we call “organizational drag,” the structures and processes that consume valuable time and prevent people from getting things done.

Leaders that take a productivity mindset seek to eliminate organizational drag at every turn. They simplify their organization’s structure and align their operating model with the true sources of value in their business. They fight bureaucracy and create ways of working that allow employees to focus their time on delivering for customers and shareholders.

The company has a few talented people who can have a disproportionate impact on strategy execution and performance, but these “difference makers” are too often put in roles that limit their effectiveness. Despite the countless millions that have been spent fighting “the war for talent,” our research suggests that relatively little has been devoted to safeguarding the spoils. Fifteen percent of most companies’ workforce are star players, employees with exceptional performance and the potential to have an outsize effect on strategy execution. Both “the best” companies and “the rest” have roughly the same amount of star talent.

But leaders with a productivity mindset make sure their scarce star talent is assigned to business-critical roles. In retail, for example, if superior merchandising is essential to competitive advantage, then leaders ensure that most (even all) critical merchandising roles are filled with star talent. This allows for more and better output from this function and better (and faster) execution of the company’s strategy.

Sourced from: https://hbr.org/2017/03/great-companies-obsess-over-productivity-not-efficiency

We need to know the difference between efficiency and productivity. This will help us know that the ultimate goal of a business is to have good productivity this is where quality standards and cost are considered.

But perhaps our noble pursuit of efficiency is becoming something more like a frenzied — and self-destructive — obsession. The latest rage in tech is apps that call on-demand dogwalkers, personal assistants, concierges, butlers. Are these really the game-changing innovations that they’re heralded to be? Or are they something more like the rumblings of a new feudal age, in which a small number are masters, and the people formerly known as the middle class servants? And if they are, should we desire such an economy — not for moral reasons but for the sake of prosperity?

Here’s the problem.

Efficiency is a stagnating economy’s problem — not its solution. We live in what is already probably the most efficient economy in human history. One where you can drive your car down the super highway to the local mega warehouse store and buy giant jars of peanuts for peanuts.

Efficiency is being able to utilize resources at the lowest cost. And boy, are we superheroes of it. We’ve mastered it to a degree that’s profoundly unhealthy: we’ve beaten the costs out of our employees, people, managers…roles, departments, organizations, industries, sectors. And now we’re at a point where a lot of economic “growth” depends on tiny marginal gains in efficiency.

Today, economists are furrowing their brows and searching for causes of a productivity slowdown.

I think the answer’s hidden in plain sight. It’s damned hard to come up with life-changing breakthroughs when you’re trapped 25 hours a day on minimum wage being an on-demand insta-butler…dogwalker…chauffeur. And yet these services are in demand because the people who want them are also working 25 hours a day for the companies that make the smartphones, drone-deliver the toilet paper, and coordinate the on-demand cars. 

The point isn’t to demonize the consumers or users of efficiency apps. It is to think a little more wisely about them, to note that Silicon Valley’s single-minded focus on them isn’t likely to deliver significant economic gains, nor should such apps be lionized as groundbreaking innovations that yield higher standards of living.

And so we’re trapped in an economy that has become all about efficiency — so much so that most of us now use the words “efficiency” and “productivity” interchangeably. Productivity is about “producing” not just actual, tangible things, but true, real, value-creating breakthroughs. But the most “efficient” company is just software running software. The most “efficient” economy is just 99% of people working as servants to the 1%.

Civilized societies should not want a class of neo-servants. Not merely for moral reasons — though there are moral reasons aplenty. But also, and perhaps and more subtly, for economic ones. A productive economy relies on breakthroughs which increase standards of living, and so create justifiably worthy inequality, higher wages, and middle classes that prosper instead of decline. Beyond productivity lies real social progress. But we cannot create real breakthroughs if we are too busy being servants.

So the challenge for us, as leaders, investors, inventors, dreamers, and doers, is this: not merely to settle for apps which make our lives a little easier. But to create the earth-shaking breakthroughs which make lives truly better — and give others the chance to do so as well.

Sourced from: https://hbr.org/2016/03/our-economy-is-obsessed-with-efficiency-and-terrible-at-everything-else

For about twenty years, banks and financial institutions have determined that appealing to individuals hearts is the method to get them to open their wallets.

Affinity charge card have a charity logo on the card; each time the card is used to make a payment, balance transfer or withdraw cash from an ATM, the bank contributes a percentage of the quantity of the transaction to the charity.

Will You Need Donations After Using a Charity Credit Card?

The principle of the affinity credit card (otherwise called charity credit cards) is excellent: every time you purchase something you had to get anyway, you can use your credit card and contribute to charity. Lastly, you can feel great
about using your plastic to make your purchases! But is it worth it?

Most of the charity credit cards offer little donations in comparison to the amount of interest the cardholders are needed to pay, and the majority of the time, they charge relatively high yearly charges.

If utilizing the charity card to contribute $6 a year to the homeless leaves you needing to make contributions yourself, it might not be such a smart idea to utilize the charity credit card no matter how warm and fuzzy it makes you feel
do using it!

The typical contribution given from affinity cards to charity is about.05 percent. A $100 purchase made with an affinity card equates to a 50 cent contribution to the charity affiliated with the credit card. If you spend $100 a month on
your credit card, you’re looking at about $6 a year in donations.

In addition, charity charge card do not usually supply the very same perks that traditional credit cards use. You ‘d be hard pressed to find a charity card that uses money back, travel insurance coverage, or extended guarantee protection.
These would all be additional items that are ending up being more common on standard charge card.

High Spenders and No Balances

If you are one of the few, however, that charge large volume transactions regularly using credit cards, and settle the balance in full on a monthly basis to prevent the majority of the interest and charges, an affinity card might be an
affordable choice for you to make regular contributions to charity.

Another thing to bear in mind when thinking about affinity cards for contribution functions, is that contributions and contributions made through the use of a credit card are not tax-deductible given that the contribution is really a contract agreement between the card issuer and the charity- and not from your pocket.

Popular Affinity Credit Cards

In spite of the truth that people pay greater interest rates and yearly costs when they use charity charge card and where they get fewer perks than a traditional charge card, these cards are popular. Target’s charity card has actually contributed over 19 million to Take Charge of Education, a company that provides scholarships to teachers and students. This specific charity credit card permits the cardholder to designate the school in which their 1 percent contributions are sent out to, making the card exceptionally popular with households with kids in grades k-12.

Competitors is Fierce

The charge card market is a highly competitive one, with banks and card issuers actually attempting to out-best one another in hopes of keeping and bring in new cardholders. Credit companies enjoy affinity cards due to the fact that the cardholders are typically extremely faithful. They keep their credit cards and use them frequently since they think and care about the cause they are contributing to.