Managing Recruiters

Managing Recruiters

What is the best way to manage recruiters in your office? While some manager prefer a heavily hands on approach others are much more hands off. When does the hands on approach become too burdensome and curb the natural productivity of a recruiter and when does excessive hands off development lead to recruiter failure and potential burn out?

The best way to manage recruiters is with a limited hands on approach that does not stifle their natural creativity yet does not leave them with a feeling of “survival of the fittest”. Manager A will hover over his recruiters and demand that certain productivity markers be met. He will harp on these numbers daily, often coming around to make sure that the call volume is not sinking and that the submittal machine is in full swing. This manager will be keen on forcing the recruiter into his mold recruiting on positions that may or may not be good strategic fills. The most positive note of this style is that the recruiter will feel that the manager is there for him and will stay on his toes in terms of performance and actual labor input. One negative side effect is that this recruiter will not be able to recruit creatively and will find ways of foiling the statistics, whether by submitting unscreened candidates or calling though the white pages without focus to fulfill their quota.

The lax manager on the other hand will sit back and watch the machine run. If one cog in the machine is not operating at the production level, this manager will dully note this occurrence and will passively attempt t correct the behavior. At times, the manager will give no input into how the performance should be improved but will merely state that performance is not up to par and will leave it at that while the floundering recruiter will be left to wonder about what exactly is going on and why his numbers are not matching up to the company totals. The hand’s of manager will hire new employees and instead of hovering over them and ensuring smooth integration into the machine, will let them sink or float. IF the recruiter begins producing so much the better, if the recruiter flounders then a new body will be brought in to replace the dead weight.

The most effective method of managing is to fuse these two approaches and attempt to isolate the causes that are the destructive forces within each style. The perfect manager would bring on a new hire and coach them in the ways of the business. Even seasoned recruiters need this approach for the machine they are leaving is seldom the same machine that they are entering. The hand holding should depend on the maturity of the recruiter. If the manager hovers too much, the recruiter may become dependent and be unable to perform independently when weaned from the initial care of the manager. If the recruiter is let alone and allowed to continue his previous style of recruiting without early correction, the recruiter may waste valuable time in applying the wrong style to the current machine without proper adjustments. While senior recruiters should be encouraged to develop their own style within the confines of the recruiting strategy of the company, new recruiters should be supported until they are comfortable.

Survival of the fittest is a sound strategy for creating cut through recruiting practices and while it makes for effective sales people it undercut the team mentality that many companies are attempting to enact.

Thus a manager should be neither too hands off and reliant on numbers, nor too restrictive and vigilant of every phone call a recruiter makes. A golden rule should be to monitor progress without overly strict interference and harmful criticism that may jeopardize the employee team relationship by appearing to single out recruiters based solely on unsound statistical analysis.

Selling Your Site: Outsource or Homemade?

EnkiTel.com is a site that I designed and made on my own. I considered having a professional firm develop it, but once a company based in Boston quoted me $400 per page, I quickly lost interest. To the starting internet entrepreneur, there is nothing more discouraging then the erroneous realization that your dream for a self sufficient business cannot be realized without a heavy investment. This may be why so many people shy away from the internet; seeing all the flashy sites, many of which are $50 templates, people are afraid to enter the world of internet sales and marketing.
One obvious, but perhaps frightening option is to build your own. You may do this in a variety of ways from purchasing a hosting package that comes with templates, to designing your own. A template is usually easy to spot, although many templates are of excellent quality and can serve as a great starting point for your ancient website. A great site for getting templates is Templatemonster, here you will find many templates that cater to your general business interest. You may easily integrate them into your site and start promoting your site in this manner.
Another solution is outsourcing. If you do not have a corporate venture backed budget you may want to consider getting a freelance firm from India, Pakistan, or Russia or any other country where the dollar still carries weight to do your design. Russian companies tend to be more on the technical database development side, while Indian companies are all around excellent designers. One of the best sites for this freelance recruitment is Freelancer.com. They provide a forum where the companies bid on your project, any budget, any website you will get dozens of eager freelancers ready to make you your dream site. Freelancer.com is an excellent way to get your site up and running or even update your existing site within a reasonable budget.
The choice between making your own site and outsourcing it is hinged on a very simple concept known as CMS, a content management system. In other words, how much freedom do you have to manipulate your site? How much will every update cost? The same company that quoted $400 per page also quoted $20 per 15 min of upgrade time, the reasoning that it is faster for the company to do an upgrade, meaning that a 30 second link exchange would cost you $20. For this reason EnkiTel.com looks home grown, however I can manage its content instantly, design and redesign at a click as inspiration strikes and I am not dependent on anyone, I love that.
Hence freedom becomes a central issue; if your site is a static site and you do not plan to actively ad links or change content day in and day out, then you do not need the flexibility, otherwise be very careful when choosing your web design company. There are many options, make sure you do your research. Then again you can put your heart into it and do it all yourself, it’s the content, SEO, and link exchange approach that will get your site ranked and showing in the top organic results in the end, the site appearance becomes more important once you start getting the heavy traffic, when eye appeal becomes more important.

Sales and Crawlers, Update! Update! Update!

The importance to the algorithmic web crawlers that speed throughout the web is crucial to the successful marketing campaign of your site. Your site would simply be a pretty compilation of HTML, XML, Java and the sort if search engine crawlers did not come around and look over your site. These amazing little creatures are absolutely incredible software inventions those only purpose in life is to “crawl” the web.
Jumping from site to site through links, as though in a web, (hence the WWW) these programs evaluate not only the relative importance of your site, but also have the uncanny ability to know whether or not you’ve been updating. Updating your site is one of the most crucial things you can do for your internet marketing. The crawlers love updates, they love fresh new content, and from EnkiTel.com experience, they visit your site much more frequently if you update frequently. They are hungry little fellows, always looking for new relevant information to add to the enormous indexes that Google, MSN, and Yahoo compile day by day every hour every second.
Checking when a “bot” has been to your page is easy, simply go to the cache hyperlink in the search results for your site keyword. This will tell you when Google last indexed your page along with the relevant changes on the home page. The more often your site is visited the better. Although PR algorithms are a trade secret, it is almost certain that having the Googlebot as a guest as often as possible will increase your relative importance and help drive traffic to you site. Traffic means sales.

Prepaid Calling Cards and Terrorism: Where Did All The “Chatter” Go?

Does that necessarily mean that there are no terrorist communications happening, or does it simply mean that terrorists have found other effective ways to get their twisted plots across continents? The advent of prepaid calling cards and the proliferation of Voice over IP telephony have made mobile phones almost irrelevant.
In a case study, a prominent telecom company A discovered that several thousand dollars worth of phone time had been purchased using stolen credit cards. Despite extremely heavy security, this company still succumbed to the effective measures of people who were clearly bent on obtaining airtime. The subsequent tracking of IP’s indicated that not only had the orders been placed using heavy IP masking, but that they originated from hacked computers and the traced ended in Lebanon. Careful analysis of the Call Records (CDR’s) indicated that hundreds of phone calls had been made using the same prepaid account to a number of high threat countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, UAE, and a few European countries.
One of the more interesting points in investigating the originating phone numbers was that most of them were fake. With Internet technology, directing and redirecting calls from one IP to the next is as easy as looking it up on Google. Indeed, with VoIP you can easily have a local New York phone number literally anywhere in the world.
The intent was to hide any and all trace of the conversations. The extent of this operation is unknown; however it is certain that companies that had lax security measures lost thousands of dollars. The chargeback’s from the customers always hit the merchants. What is certain is that people are making phone calls to countries that harbor terrorists using stolen credit cards and high tech methods of masking the origin of their outgoing phone calls.
The FBI was duly notified and a subpoena issued for the CDR’s. However it is not certain how much headway the FBI had into the case. Most telecom companies protect the identities of their clients and their CDR’s be they peaceful citizens or hell bent terrorists. Unfortunately there is also no effective law that provides for timely gathering of much needed sensitive CDR’s. Hence the answer to where has all the chatter gone can be answered using prepaid calling cards and VoIP that have made it possible to completely mask phone conversations and take the chatter underground.

Internet Small Business and Fraud

Be careful of sites that promise to send you “instant pins”. These companies usually have lax credit card security and can afford customer charge backs from fraudulent transactions. Instant gratification, so coveted by our lifestyles, is something to be very wary of in the realm of online business.
Sites that approve your credit card use only simple information that can be easily stolen from you via statement or computer hacking constitute the vast majority of online business. From the point of view of the consumer, this kind service is best and most convenient. However, the small business owner can acquire a potential financial nightmare if the outmost care is not taken when approving transactions.
The best method of fighting this kind of credit card fraud is too costly and time consuming for huge companies that deal with thousands of transaction per day. For these companies, a couple of stolen identities present only a minor problem as chargeback’s take time and effort; while many fraudulent credit card transactions are never reported.
For prepaid telecom a company, the way to fight this kind of fraud is to makes sure that every single order is verified by phone. Sometimes it is a nuisance to have to wait for a pin to arrive and to wonder where it is. On the other hand the consumer should be grateful that the company is taking such steps to protect itself and the consumer from possible fraud.
Every customer has the right to know that their credit information is safe and that the merchant takes great care to make sure that fraud is perpetrated neither against the company nor against the consumer.

Basic Setup

How do you set up your very own website? If you actually want to set up a website that will be independent of other companies and one that you can control and manipulate at whim then you should probably consider getting a hosting service and registering your own domains. When buying domains you may even consider buying several, and using them to some extent but with the ultimate intent of making a business investment. Generally looked down upon if you simply buy a website and sit on it, you can use it for small time marketing in the sector you are interested in and then sell it off. Thus, you can earn money with your unused domain names if you decide to go this path. There are whole hoards of speculators who make good money, but unlike the spot market these investments usually take longer to mature. Although you could always get lucky.
Thus you have your domain name, you have chosen from among the thousands of various subjects one that you are most interested in and have taken an appropriate name for it. EnkiTel for example comes from the combination on Enki, the Sumerian God of wisdom, and Telecom the field that I am promoting most heavily. When I looked for the name I wanted something that would be short and easy to remember, or perhaps to say. Many companies have extremely long names and at times are impossible to locate on the internet. Interestingly enough I was not the only company who was using Enki, however the only telecom one and with business law being what it is quite legal.
Once you have your site registered you are ready to start looking for a quality host. While hosting is not necessary, as you can park your site with Sedo.com and earn money by promoting the site name and receive commissions from Sedo, I like to have my own hosting because it allows me to personalize my site and hold control over my advertising content. EnkiTel hosting is done by 1AND1. This is one of the cheapest domain registrars I have seen on the net. The offer you a great software package that allows you to delve deeper into the world of web design. You can use templates or you can build your own site, depending on your taste and experience. You can also have an outside company design your site, but that tends to be pricy unless you can think of an example in economics that will help you out, or you can ask. ;-)
So you have you site, and you have your hosting, all you need to do now is start marketing…

Fancy Sites Vs Plain HTML

There has been an explosion of fancy flash sites all over the internet. Depending on the creativity of the designers these site can look quite good and be very impressive. However, despite the impressive effect, the web search functionality of some of these sites may be lost if too much flash or animation is used.
The web is constantly being “crawled” by the so called web “spiders”, programs that jump from one website to the next through links as if on a real spider web. The programs send back information the Google, MSN, and Yahoo mainframes which then compute the relevance of a given website and make it appear accordingly in “organic searches. An organic search is a search that brings up results that are deemed relevant by the search engine. The opposite of these are sponsored links that appear on the side and top of the search result pages. It’s a bit of information, but its quite relevant if you want to get into the internet marketing business.
Understanding how these search engines index and rank pages is not giving to the ordinary human being, at least that’s what the mega search companies want. They constantly change and upgrade their algorithms for better search capability.
So back to simple sites vs. Flash sites. I prefer simple html sites. They load faster and they are search engine friendlier. Obviously with the right combination or $$ and skill flash sites can be search engine friendly as well. I just prefer simplicity over grandeur.

Affiliate Marketing

People spend years surfing the internet and they will have never heard of this concept. Devised to help business grow and acquire new clients affiliate marketing is simply the internet way of reselling through outlets. Every sale generated by an affiliate creates a commission that is then paid out to the affiliate. Entire sites are built on nothing but this concept.
It is a win-win situation. Some companies provide prefabricated websites that look exactly like their own for the purpose of attracting affiliate marketers. The company that reaches out gets free marketing and sales while the affiliate gets a good product for which there is already demand. It’s a brilliant setup.
The beauty lies in the setup cost for the affiliate which can be $0. Joining programs such as LinkShare.com gives you access to hundreds of companies that provide affiliate marketing support.
Along with free blog sites that enable you to publish websites on their own you virtually do not need to invest any money to create a full fledged marketing business.

Marketing, Good Question!

The world of internet marketing, vast and terrifying. Vast absolutely, terrifying not so much. Although the competition is fierce the market depth is incredible. For a lone proprietor trying to build and compete with the giants on the market the odds seem absolutely staggering.
However, there is not much to fear if the approach is correct. You don’t just drop your job and dive into affiliate marketing and internet business overnight. Well you could, perhaps, still I don’t recommend it. Rather feel out the market place and do some research. As with any startup making sure there is market for your product or idea is essential, however with affiliate marketing this research can perhaps be summarized by the success of the company that you are marketing. For example, www.ldpost.com has a Google PR of 6, a very respectable PR in a superbly competitive market.
So the idea is to figure out a creative marketing approach and spread the word about your site and about your product as effectively as you can using legal means as opposed to illegal ones such as SPAMing. No how creative you get is up to you, naturally however this is the big challenge. Traditional methods will not work as well on the internet, while spending a lot of money on a good SEO company is also out of the question. Some will charge as much as $500 per PAGE. Market rate. I have 23 pages…There goes my business.
Intense…

Credit Cards. Where do they come from and who controls them? Such questions are not asked by the average consumer that would visit my site. Instead, questions such as: will anyone be able to steal my credit card information or see my personal information come to mind. These are very relevant questions, however at times they are taken to the extreme by certain customers who refuse to give credit card numbers in fear of being cheated or ripped off.
Although there is a certain validity to identity fraud, and although it is rather prevalent in the US, the credit card in itself presents on of the best ways to combat identity fraud especially when it relates to the use of credit cards. Most credit card companies have at this time implemented online monitoring services that help people stay in touch with their credit cards on a daily basis. While this is not practical for everyone, and since not everyone who has credit cards has computers at home, it is nevertheless an extremely powerful tool to maintain your own financial security.
All the merchants’ features on EnkiTel have 128 bit encryption systems when it comes to ordering. 128 encryption is the standard for internet security and is very hard to hack. 128 bit encryption is hard enough to break that it is very safe and used by all the banking institutions and anyone who is serious about processing money. I personally never shop on a site that does not have 128 bit encryption and consider it a sign of professionalism when a site does have this.
To sum up, credit cards, if used properly can be very safe and efficient, only when you have 50 of them and don’t know what is going on with your financial life then you may be in trouble. However if you are doing business with a credit card merchant, always make sure the merchant has a secure site.

Enter EnkiTel

Although it is far from the beginning of the internet marketing era, it is still far from the end. Millions of people have yet to be introduced to this incredible marketing tool. EnkiTel Communications is built on the concept that the internet market is virtually bottomless.
The challenge is to attract new customers using various Sear Engine Optimization techniques, Link Exchanges, Pay-per-Click campaigns and other various methods of gaining an upper hand on the competition. So industries, such as prepaid calling cards for one, are saturated with competition. This has the effect that any new players on the internet will find it exceedingly difficult to climb up in the rankings.
There is an entire industry devoted to SEO and rank building. The foundation of this rank craze lies at the foundation of Google, Inc, the creators of page rank and the controllers of this fascinating technology. Page rank can have a staggering effect on a companies internet rate of return.
The idea behind this blog and enkitel is to experiment with various methods of internet marketing and perhaps discover new ones. Maybe this blog will give ideas to new comers, or perhaps so old sea dogs will give some sage advice.
The internet is bottomless. As a market it is the dream of any entrepreneur, and those who find a niche do quite well, as in the real world. The internet is just at the beginning of its full potential growth and that right now is just as good a time to get on the train as there ever will be.