For more, check out our services offerings, or contact us.

Some great advice for job seekers in the internet age (from WorkAwesome):

Resumes and Cover Letters Still Matter

Yes, these two pieces of paper are still important (check out CallMe!’s our previous advice here).  Maybe they’re attachments to your e-mail. But you need to give the hiring managers something to print and read.

While you’re at it, make sure you use proper grammar and spelling. One HR professional says she cuts and pastes all the cover letters she receives into Word so the spell check can tell her who gets it wrong.

Use Social Networks

College students are ignoring Twitter but the people who want to hire them are on it. Get in front of the people who are looking for your talents. Network in their circles.

Don’t Abuse Social Networks

Take a look at your Facebook account. How many times do the words “drunk,” “wasted” and “PARRRR-TAY” appear on pages? That doesn’t cut it with most employers. Sure they did it when they were your age. But not they’re responsible adults who want to hire people who know how to pretend they’re responsible adults.

Don’t put anything in a tweet or update that you wouldn’t say in a job interview.

• Bonus Tip: Change your Facebook privacy settings so that the only photos of you that can be tagged with your name are ones you tag. So all those beer pong photos don’t show on your wall.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn can be a valuable tool for finding a job. Make sure your public profile looks as good as your resume.

Clean up Your Email Address

Do you know how many people in your industry want to hire someone with the email address party_girl69 at hotmail.com? Unless it’s more than 90%, you’d better create a new job search email address. Any clean variation of your name will work fine – unless you’re John Smith.

Also, employers are searching social networks for candidates’ e-mail addresses. So give them one that’s not attached to your MySpace page.

Get Creative

Of course creative is a relative term. You don’t want to be seen as avant garde when you’re looking for a job in accounting, insurance or banking. But you want to stand out in a good way and show you know how your industry works.

Consider Alex Brownstein. The copywriter identified five creative directors he admired and started using Google Adwords campaigns for their names. When the directors Googled themselves, they saw this ad at the top of the search page:

“Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling [sic] yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too”

You’ll never guess who got his dream job.

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• Social Media for Job Seeker Customers (slideshare.net)
• You: Ways to Use Social Networking to Land Your Next Job (washingtonpost.com)

From SimplyHired:

May 2010 Metro Area Job Trends Report

In a recent article from insidearm.com on the issue of agent turnover and attrition, Dr. Brooks Mitchell stated,

If you want to attack the problem of high employee turnover, you only have two choices. You can try to change your organization: pay, working conditions, supervisors, etc. or you can try to change the people you hire…

I suggest to you that it is easier to change who you hire than it is to try to change your organization…

Research has proven the best way is to try to understand the basic characteristics of the people who are staying with you and then do a side-by-side statistical comparison of those same characteristics of the collectors who are prematurely leaving you.

As call center staffing experts, we are strong believers in this technique at CallMe!  When recruiting agents for our client’s call centers, our process flow always begins with a complete assessment of our client’s current call center staff.  In this assessment, we seek to establish baseline metrics against which we compare our new applicants.  We not only study the high performers, but also, we focus on those performing at or below expectations. Our experience is that by understanding the personality types that are both successful and unsuccessful in our client’s call centers, we can better target new applicants.

It has also been our experience that each call center is unique in its personality make-up.  What might work in one call center very well might not work in another.  Some call centers thrive on a high energy, high emotion environment while others are more staid and professional.  Understanding our client’s call center allows us to target the right personality types for each unique environment giving both our client and our agents the highest likelihood of success.

Again, from Dr. Mitchell,

There are many other measurable characteristics that could differentiate the good from the bad agents. Once you can understand the pertinent characteristics, then you can apply them to future job applicants and hire more people like the good employees you already have.

For an example of putting this into practice, check out this article on Harvard Business Review about how Zappos studied its culture to create a hiring methodology that guaranteed that their culture would continue to scale.

If you would like to learn more about CallMe!, our process, and our results, check out www.callmestaffing.com, download a PDF detailing our recruiting and screening process, or contact us.

Doing your homework before interviewing is an often overlooked step that can greatly enhance your chance of success.  Gist.com is a powerful tool that can help job seekers create a networking dashboard that can consolidate information into an easy to use format.  Most interesting is the ability to create a 1-page tear sheet of information – great for use prior to a meeting for instance. Check it out:

For additional resources and advice pertaining for job seekers, check out the Resources section of our site.

From the American Staffing Association:

Staffing employment in March is 15% higher than in the same month last year, according to the ASA Staffing Index.

The index for March is 83, up from 80 for February, suggesting that staffing employment has increased almost 4% over the past month. Staffing payrolls showed steady growth over the five weeks of the past month.

The ASA Staffing Index, which estimates weekly changes in the number of people employed in temporary and contract work, is reported nine days after each workweek, making it a virtual real-time measure of staffing employment trends. The reference level for the index was set at 100 in June 2006. The current level of 83 suggests that staffing employment is 17% lower than in June 2006.

ASA releases a monthly report on the index to preview the nonseasonally adjusted temporary help employment numbers reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in its monthly employment situation report (generally issued the first Friday of the month). Index trends have been tracking BLS data.

BLS will release the latest employment numbers for the month of March this Friday, April 2. The ASA Staffing Index monthly report, released more than a week before the BLS employment situation report, compares weeks containing the 12th of each month, making it comparable to the reference period used by BLS.

Data for the index are gathered by ASA corporate partner Inavero Institute for Service Research, a market research firm. To learn how your company can participate in the ASA Staffing Index survey or to view weekly index data, visit americanstaffing.net.

Related articles that may be of interest:

• Weighing the Week Ahead: Jobs in Focus (seekingalpha.com)
• Huge Growth Projected for Web Tech, Software, Systems Job Market (readwriteweb.com)