At Top Echelon Network, we are ALL about continuous education and training.  After all, we traditionally hold two conferences a year (the National Convention and the Fall Conference), and we’ve been offering FREE online recruiter training webinars this year.

So in addition to joining us for the upcoming National Convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, Tenn., we’d also like to invite you to attend the Fordyce Forum 2012, a conference for search and placement professionals from the publishers of The Fordyce Letter.  This year’s event is scheduled for Thursday, June 7, and Friday, June 8.

However, for the first time in five years, there’s a new venue for the Fordyce Forum.  In years past, it was held in Las Vegas.  This year, though, the site is the Hotel Palomar in Dallas, Texas.  Below is a description of the conference, taken from the Fordyce Forum website:

We know your time is valuable, and we strive to bring you the best information from top recruiters and leaders in the third-party recruiting space.  We also know that change is important for you to take your business from good to great, and we’re doing things a little differently this year to help you with this.  Fordyce Forum 2012 will truly be a “working conference,” at which recruiters and recruiting firm owners will participate in activities and workshops to develop skills and thought processes that you can bring back to work and immediately implement.  And you’ll be networking directly with your peers and colleagues during these workshops.

As usual, the Fordyce Forum will boast some of the most popular speakers in the recruiting and staffing industry, including Jon Bartos, Barb Bruno, Greg Doersching, Jeff Kaye, Bob Marshall, and Rob Mosley, to name just a few.

Click here to see the complete lineup of speakers.

Click here to see the agenda for the Fordyce Forum.

Click here to see the sponsors for the conference.

Click here for more information about the location.

Click here to register for Fordyce Forum 2012.

If you sign up before Friday, March 2, you’ll save $300 off the price of Regular Registration, so register today!

Big Biller, the leader in online recruiting software; Hiring Hook, recruiting websites for recruiters; and Top Echelon Contracting, the recruiter’s contract staffing solution are all proud sponsors of this year’s Fordyce Forum.  So we hope that you’ll attend the event . . . and that we’ll see you there!

What’s that?  What about the title of this blog post?  It’s the Top Echelon Network joys of staying in “Regular Communication” with your Trading Partners.

What did you think it was?

Anyway, as you can see in this week’s list of Network split placements, the catalyst for every single one of them was “Regular communication with another Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiter.”  As we’ve mentioned on many occasions, “regular communication” has always been the number-one way in which recruiters make split placements in Top Echelon Network.

The facts are indisputable and the evidence is insurmountable: if you continually stay in contact with your Trading Partners and keep contacting recruiters in an effort to form new Trading Partner relationships, you increase your chances for making split placements tremendously!  How much?  It’s like night and day.  Feast and famine.  Or maybe that should be “famine and feast” . . . since the famine comes first.

Never mind that.  The point is that the placements listed below represent further proof that “regular communication” leads to split placements.  Period.  End of story.  That’s all she wrote.  Now make sure that you stay “regular.”

In your communication, that is.

THIS WEEK’S COMPLETED SPLIT PLACEMENTS!

Job order recruiter: David Kersey of Kersey & Associates, Inc.

Candidate recruiter: Gene McQueen of the Cameron Craig Group

Job title: PLANT MANAGER

Fee Percentage—20%

Action causing split placement: Regular communication with another Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiter

 — — —

Job order recruiter: Janet Miller of Computer Management, Inc.

Candidate recruiter: Coleen Balogh-Walther of The Provident Search Group

Job title: PROGRAMMER ANALYST

Fee Percentage—20%

Action causing split placement: Regular communication with another Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiter

 — — —

Job order recruiter: John Barry of ITech Consulting Partners, LLC

Candidate recruiter: Marc Tappis of Opportunity Search, Inc.

Job title: IT AUDIT/SECURITY MANAGER

Fee Percentage—25%

Action causing split placement: Regular communication with another Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiter

 — — —

Job order recruiter: Joe Noto of Regency Search Group

Candidate recruiter: Donald Walker, CPC of Search Team One

Job title: SERVICE MANAGER

Fee Percentage—25%

Action causing split placement: Regular communication with another Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiter

 — — —

Job order recruiter: Debbi Reiger of Reiger Technical Search

Candidate recruiter: Kaleb Dumot of Emerald Resource Group

Job title: SENIOR JAVA DEVELOPER

Fee Percentage—20%

Action causing split placement: Regular communication with another Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiter

 — — —

If you’d like to see the amount of the fees associated with each of the split placements listed above, login to the Members’ Area and click on the profiles of the recruiters involved.  The fee totals will be included along with those split placements.

Remember, you can opt out of having your split placement highlighted.  Just send an email to marketing@TopEchelon.com indicating your desire to be left out.  Once you do so, you won’t be included in future installments of this feature.

— — —

330.455.1433, x125
MDeutsch@TopEchelon.com
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
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You don’t need the “luck of the Irish” to make split placements in Top Echelon Network (although . . . I suppose it wouldn’t hurt).

No, you just need to do those things that lead most directly to making splits, and one of those things is participating in Virtual Core Groups.  Luckily, we hold Virtual Core Group meetings every month throughout the year.

Virtual Core Group meetings are regularly scheduled conference calls for Preferred Member recruiters who work in the same industry or niche.  During these calls, the recruiters share information about the activity they’re seeing and they also bounce ideas off another other.

Below is the Virtual Core Group conference call schedule for the month of March:

The first two Thursdays of the month are filled with conference calls and the third and fifth Thursdays are wide open.  Please note that there is NO slot in the schedule for the fourth Thursday in March.  That’s because that’s the week of the 2012 Top Echelon Network National Convention in Nashville, Tenn.  Yours truly will be at the convention—and I certainly hope you will be, too!

Anyway, if you don’t see your industry or niche represented in the chart above, I am ALWAYS open to starting a new group.  If you think you’d like to start one—or join an existing one—please contact me as soon as you can.

Participating in Virtual Core Group conference call meetings is just one of the many things that lead directly to making split placements.  I’d also like you to contact me if you have questions about other things you could be doing to maximize your Network Membership.

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330.455.1433, x156
Drea@TopEchelon.com
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You’ve heard the old adage: TEAMwork = Together Everybody Achieves More.

Do Top Echelon Network Preferred Member recruiters want to achieve more?  Of course they do, and the way they want to achieve more is by earning more and billing more.  Since “Together Everybody Bills More” is the equivalent of TEBMwork, let’s go with “Together Everybody Earns More” instead.  (Just humor us for a minute.)

Okay, why the misspelling lesson?  Because in this week’s installment of “Comments and Compliments,” we’re featuring four Preferred Member recruiters who utilized TEAMwork (or TEEMwork) to close deals that might not have happened otherwise—and probably wouldn’t have happened as quickly, even if they did.

When members of Top Echelon’s recruiter network tag-team a placement situation, they bring twice the knowledge, twice the expertise, and twice the effort . . . and that’s an equation that often means the difference between a deal coming together and a deal falling through.

So we’d like to congratulate the recruiters featured in this week’s installment, and we’d love (yes, we mean love) to feature YOU in the future.  If you’d like to compliment a Trading Partner for a recent split fee recruiting placement, send an email to marketing@TopEchelon.com.  And we forgive all spelling errors.

— — —

“Jim was pleasant to work with; he had two experienced MD’s apply for a more senior level role I was working on for the same client. We filled the senior job together and when my client approached me about wanting to train this more junior person Jim was very reasonable about their request for an alternative fee.”

Submitted by Denise Milano Sprung of JA Pharma, Inc. regarding her split placement with Jim Strickland Jim Strickland of BioSource International

Position Title—PHYSICIAN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
Fee Percentage—Flat

(Editor’s note: this is the second split placement that Milano Sprung and Strickland have made together in Top Echelon Network.)

— — —

“Dave Wick is great!  I called him as soon as I received this job order . . . and he sent me a superstar candidate right off the bat.  Things moved quickly on this, and as a result, we’ll be starting 2012 by splitting a check!  Thanks, Dave!”

Submitted by Veronica Snyder of Career Professionals, Inc. regarding her split placement with Dave Wick of Career Center of Cincinnati, Inc.

Position Title—VB.NET SENIOR DEVELOPER
Fee Percentage—20%

(Editor’s note: this is the first split placement that Snyder and Wick have made together in Top Echelon Network.)

— — —

Remember, if you have compliments for a Trading Partner regarding a split placement, please email them to marketing@TopEchelon.com.

(Editor’s Note: This is the next in a series of guest blog posts about contract staffing, courtesy of Top Echelon Contracting, the recruiter’s back-office solution.  Similar posts will appear in future issues of The Pinnacle Newsletter Blog.)

For various reasons, some workers prefer to be paid on 1099 instead of a W-2.  But it’s not the worker’s decision.  The IRS guidelines determine whether a worker is classified as a 1099 independent contractor or a W-2 employee.

Still, recruiters and their clients often get pushback when trying to convince their candidates that they need to be paid as a W-2 employee rather than a 1099 independent contractor.  So how do you convince them that they need to be paid on W-2?

For starters, you may want to point out the risks.  Independent Contractor misclassification audits have increased on both the federal and state levels over the past few years.  There has been a lot of focus on how this affects companies, but workers can also be subject to audits.  If it’s found they’ve been misclassified, they could be required to file amended tax returns, which could result in additional taxes and penalties.

Plus, there are many advantages to being classified as a W-2 employee.  By being a W-2 employee, workers will:

• Receive a weekly paycheck with the option of direct deposit
• Have access to medical insurance, vision, dental, and life insurance
• Have access to a 401(k) plan
• Be eligible for unemployment insurance
• Be covered under the employer’s Workers’ Compensation plan
• Not have to negotiate and/or write a client contract
• Not have to generate invoices to the client
• Not have to handle collection issues with the client
• Not have to float expenses while waiting on payment from the client
• Not have to do their own quarterly tax filings
• Have half of the Social Security Tax paid by the employer
• Have half of the Medicare Tax paid by the employer

By pointing out the risks of being classified as an independent contractor and the advantages of being paid on a W-2, you can convince even the most reluctant candidate that being properly classified is in their best interest.

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888.627.3678
DFledderjohann@TopEchelonContracting.com
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