SURVEY QUESTION:

We recently posed a question to the Top Echelon Network Membership in the form of a survey in the Members’ Area.

That question was as follows:

Which days are you working during Thanksgiving week?

SURVEY RESULTS:

The choice of answers that were offered is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that selected each answer:

• Monday through Wednesday and Friday — 20.0%
• Monday through Wednesday — 45.7%
• Monday and Tuesday — 22.9%
• Just Monday — 5.7%
• I’m not working any days — 5.7%

SURVEY ANALYSIS:

Once upon a time, the majority of recruiters didn’t work at all during Thanksgiving week.  Because they had billed so much to that point in the year, they didn’t feel as though they had to work during the week.  However, times have changed.

As the results of this survey indicate, 20% of Top Echelon Network recruiters plan to work four days this week.  The only day they’re taking off, of course, is the Thanksgiving Day holiday.  In addition, nearly 46% of survey participants are working Monday through Wednesday and taking off Thanksgiving and Friday.

As for those recruiters who aren’t working any days during Thanksgiving week of 2013?  Only 5.7% of those who responded to the survey question plan to take the whole week off, a far cry from what used to be the case . . . once upon a time.

FEEDBACK:

How many days are YOU working this week?  Is it more than you’ve worked during Thanksgiving week in years past?  Less?  What are the reasons?

SURVEY QUESTION:

We recently posed a question to the Top Echelon Network Membership in the form of a survey in the Members’ Area.

That question was as follows:

How much longer do you plan to work your recruiting desk full-time in 2013?

SURVEY RESULTS:

The choice of answers that were offered is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that selected each answer:

• Up until Thanksgiving — 2.3%
• Up until the middle of December — 10.7%
• Up until Christmas — 38.2%
• I plan to work full-time all the way through the end of the year. — 48.9%

SURVEY ANALYSIS:

What’s interesting is that nearly half of survey participants (48.9%) plan to work full-time through the end of the year.  There was a time when that wasn’t the case.  In fact, once upon a time, way more than half of all recruiters stopped working full-time shortly after Thanksgiving or the beginning of December.

Speaking of which, 10.7% of recruiters plan to work “up until the middle of December,” while 38.2% plan to work “up until Christmas.”  A scant 2.3% plan to work only “up until Thanksgiving,” which will be here before you know it.

The results of this survey fall in line with the prevailing sentiment that recruiters may be billing as much as they have in the past, but they’re working longer and harder to achieve those billings.

FEEDBACK:

How much longer do YOU plan to work full-time this year?  Is your answer the same as it is every year?  How much is the state of the economy affecting your decision?

SURVEY QUESTION:

We recently posed a question to the Top Echelon Network Membership in the form of a survey in the Members’ Area.

That question was as follows:

How many Network split placements do you think you’ll make in 2014?

SURVEY RESULTS:

The choice of answers that were offered is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that selected each answer:

• One or two — 20.0%
• Three or four — 31.2%
• Five or six — 17.5%
• Seven or eight — 11.2%
• More than eight — 20.0%

SURVEY ANALYSIS:

More recruiters chose “three or placements” more than any other answer in the survey, with 31.2% of them doing so.  Both extremes tied for second place at 20%: “one or two” placements and “more than eight” placements, displaying quite a balance between conservative and aggressive.

That put “five or six” and “seven or eight” in the middle at 17.5% and 11.2%, respectively.

The Network recruiters who participated in this survey clearly have enjoyed past success in making split placements in Top Echelon.  They’re also clearly confident that they can enjoy success making Network splits in the future, some of them supremely so.

That bodes quite well for the Network—and its recruiters—in 2014.

FEEDBACK:

How many Network placements do you think you’ll make next year?  One or two?  More than eight?  Somewhere inbetween?

SURVEY QUESTION:

Sure, the unemployment rate has remained relatively high, but does that mean grade-A candidates are in abundance?  As you might expect, the answer to that question is “No.”

In fact, not only is it just as difficult to find those types of candidates now as opposed to before the Great Recession, but it might also be MORE difficult to do so.  Is that possible?  If so, how can it be possible?

But we digress.  Back to the first question: how difficult is to find candidates?  To get an answer, we posed the question to the Top Echelon Network Membership in the form of a survey in the Members’ Area.

That question was as follows:

How difficult is it to find the candidates your clients are looking for?

SURVEY RESULTS:

The choice of answers that were provided is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters who selected each answer:

• Just about impossible — 6.2%
• Very difficult — 49.5%
• Moderately difficult — 38.1%
• Sometimes difficult — 6.2%
• They’re easy to find! — 0.0%

SURVEY ANALYSIS:

According to the survey results, over 50% of recruiters believe that it’s difficult to find the candidates for which their clients are looking, to say the least.  In fact, 49.5% chose “very difficult” as their answer, while 6.2% are of the opinion that it’s “just about impossible.”

Further down the scale, 38.1% of survey participants indicated that finding those candidates is “moderately difficult,” and 6.2% chose “sometimes difficult” as their answer.

Not a single recruiter selected “They’re easy to find!”  Perhaps that is more telling than anything else.

FEEDBACK:

How difficult has it been for YOU to find the candidates that your clients want to hire?  Almost impossible?  Very difficult?  If so, why has that been the case?

With almost 1,000 recruiters, Top Echelon Network represents a veritable plethora of recruiting knowledge, experience, and know-how.  (When was the last time somebody worked “veritable plethora” into a blog post?  On purpose?)

One of the things that we strive to do here at Top Echelon Network is help Preferred Member recruiters share information with one another.  One of the ways in which we accomplish, of course, is through the Split Candidate Database and the Split Job Order Database, whereby recruiters are able to share their jobs and candidates.

But what about the other information?  In other words, how recruiters deal with the everyday issues they face on their desks.  And when we’re talking about the issues that they face every day, we’re talking about not just recruiting-related issues, but business-related issues, as well.

There are a few avenues through which we attempt to help recruiters share valuable recruiting-related and business-related information with one another.  One, of course, is in The Pinnacle Newsletter Blog.  An example of this was in last week’s issue of the newsletter, when we published an article regarding how Preferred Member recruiter Jim Strickland of BioSource International has used “Google Places” to help enhance the search engine optimization (SEO) of his recruiting firm’s website.  To read that article, click on the link below:

Using ‘Google Places’ to Boost Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking

We’ll be publishing articles such as these in the newsletter, sort of a “knowledge exchange” between recruiters.  We know how busy you are running your desks and your firms.  You don’t have all the time in the world to unearth this information, so we’re going to try to do it for you, as much as we can.

We’re also going to gather information in another way—through our poll questions and email surveys that we send out on a consistent basis.  The poll questions run in the Members’ Area every week; I’m sure you’ve probably seen them.  And we’ve been sending out our email surveys since the beginning of the year.  We’ll be continuing to send them out throughout the remainder of 2011.

You might be wondering where we got the ideas for our email surveys. The answer is we got them from you—through the use of an email survey. Ironic, huh?  These are the topics that you wanted to know about the most.  As a result, our goal is to find out about them, including by asking other recruiters.  Once we’ve compiled the results of these surveys, we’re going to package these results and make them available for everybody to see.

At the moment, we publish the results of the surveys as blog posts—as well as the Members’ Area polls— in the Recruiter Training Blog.  While that’s all fine and good, what we publish isn’t comprehensive.  These posts cover more of the highlights of the survey results, as opposed to the details.

What we would like are more ideas about what topics you’d like to see covered in our email surveys.  Is there a question (or questions) about a specific topic that you’d like for us to explore?  If so, let us know.  Just send an email to marketing@topechelon.com.

In the meantime, be on the lookout for the release of the complete results of our surveys, although we’ll certainly be announcing it in The Pinnacle, as well.  As always, thanks for being a Preferred Member of the Network.

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MDeutsch@TopEchelon.com
(330) 455-1433, Ext. 125