Attracting and retaining quality employees has become increasingly difficult with each new generation of workers. According to a survey conducted by The Conference Board, just 35% of workers under the age of 25 are currently satisfied with their jobs. That’s bad news for employers, because it means that the new generation of workers who are replacing retiring baby boomers may not demonstrate the same level of company loyalty that their predecessors did.

Reasons for Increasing Employee Dissatisfaction

Generation Y workers have far greater resources at their fingertips when it comes to job talent as well as job availability. Because young workers are increasingly talent-rich in technological fields, they are being courted by a broad spectrum of industry leaders. In addition, the internet has made it possible for this generation to work from home or strike out on their own if they’re not satisfied with current working conditions.

How Employers Can Close the Gap

For employers, the key to attracting and retaining quality talent in this type of job environment is engaging employees by identifying the reasons they leave, making them feel valued, and encouraging commitment to the mission of the company. Specifically, employers need to take steps such as the following in order to earn employee loyalty:

• Identify Flight Risks—Motivate employees to remain where they are by making sure they are a good fit for the position, promoting strong relationships, providing growth opportunities, and keeping an eye on external data such as job market and hiring trends.
• Invest in Most Valuable Employees—Invest your resources in those employees who will provide the most value long-term according to their growth potential and ambitions.
• Consider Flexible Work Arrangements—As the balance of work-life needs becomes increasingly difficult, consider offering options such as telecommuting, flexible hours, part-time opportunities, and job-sharing.
• Incorporate Both Financial and Non-Financial Rewards—While pay increases and bonuses remain strong motivators for employees, surveys also identify non-financial rewards such as benefit packages, increased autonomy, career development, and mentoring programs as reasons employees choose to remain with an organization.
• Promote From Within—Provide training opportunities and offer employees the potential to reach beyond their current positions.
• Conduct Routine Employee Interviews—Exit interviews can be helpful, but what about retention interviews? Consider interviewing the employees who are sticking around to find out why they’re staying, what they like and don’t like about their work environment, and what conditions might cause them to leave.

One of the most important steps businesses can take to increase satisfaction among workers is to listen to their concerns by promoting open dialogue. In a job market that has become increasingly competitive, organizations must focus not only on attracting the right talent, but also on keeping them satisfied in their positions.

Competitive intelligence involves systematically gathering, analyzing, and utilizing information about other organizations in the effort to gain a competitive edge. When it comes to recruiting, competitive intelligence relies on understanding the labor market, researching industry and company trends, and gaining an in-depth knowledge of employee needs. While traditional competitive intelligence methods still carry significant weight, companies can also incorporate new tools in order to gather information as efficiently as possible while remaining cost effective.

• LinkedIn—Most professionals already use LinkedIn, but you may not be aware of the wealth of information that can be gleaned from its pages. Start by following competitor pages and discover key information about new hires, employees who have left, organizational charts, promotions and more. LinkedIn may be one of the most important tools you add to your competitive intelligence arsenal.
• The Free Library—Search by category, business name, or date to find information on what your competitors are doing. This is a great resource for discovering information about company restructuring or reorganization, often complete with names and positions.
• SocialMention—Follow your competitors and receive daily alerts when they are mentioned around the web. SocialMention helps you stay up to date on developing news as well as branding efforts and marketing campaigns.
• Google Alerts—An excellent resource for monitoring press releases, news stories, and other information about your competitors. Alerts can be customized by company, name, and endless other specific information that may be relevant to your industry. Set up an RSS feed or have the results delivered to your email.
• Facebook and Twitter—These twin pillars of the social media realm should also form the foundation for your competitive intelligence efforts. Follow not only your competitors and their employees, but also the people that they are following.
• Glassdoor—Research job openings, salaries, inside connections, employee reviews, and interviews to discover what your competitors are doing.
• Slideshare—Find out who is presenting, what they’re publishing, and much more with a few quick searches on Slideshare.
• Indeed—Search for competitor job availability, salaries, hiring trends and more.

Competitive intelligence plays a key role in discovering and attracting the right talent for your organization. Many of the tools above require minimal time investment and can deliver vital information directly to your inbox. As you become more familiar with your favorite tools, you can begin experimenting with less familiar resources in order to expand the effectiveness of your competitive intelligence efforts.

ATLANTA & TAMPA, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Hire Velocity, a national Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm, announced that Amy Miller has joined its leadership team as Director of Sales. Miller has extensive experience building profitable markets through organic business development and operational best practices. She brings more than ten years of national and global account management to the position, with an emphasis on staffing and outsourced solutions.

Miller joins Hire Velocity from Yoh, where she served as Branch Manager/Group Director and oversaw IT staff augmentation services for the Southeast Region, covering 11 states and Puerto Rico. There, she operated in a hands-on leadership capacity, acting as a trusted advisor to clients across multiple industry segments, including Healthcare, Financial, IT, Energy Services and Retail. Earlier roles included global sales leadership and account management for Corpus, Modis and Technisource.

“Amy will play an instrumental role in both creating and executing business development strategies to maximize growth,” said Byron West, president of Hire Velocity. “With her deep industry background and passion for success, we expect her to hit the ground running and deliver the highest standards of excellence.”

Miller will be instrumental in launching an RPO-leveraged contingency search operation while enhancing prospecting activities for the firm’s high volume sourcing and screening services. Based in Atlanta, she will serve both small and medium sized businesses (SMB) and Fortune 1000 clients across diverse industry sectors. Miller is an active member of Women in Technology and the Technology Association of Georgia.

About Hire Velocity

Hire Velocity (http://www.hirevelocity.com) is a national Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm headquartered in Atlanta, GA, and a Hire Partners affiliate. Hire Velocity helps companies cost effectively meet high volume hiring demands by intelligently leveraging people, process and technology. Hire Velocity enables businesses of all sizes to reduce their time to hire quality people while driving down their recruiting costs. Follow Hire Velocity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+.

About Hire Partners

Hire Partners, LLC, is an emerging enterprise that provides capital, expertise and operational support to staffing, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and other human capital businesses. Hire Partners accelerates the growth and profitability of successful firms by injecting both strategic and tactical guidance. Visit us at www.hirepartners.com. Follow Hire Partners on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or Google+.

“The University of Tampa recently announced its slate of officers for the next two years.  John B. West of Hire Partners and Lion Investments will serve as vice chair.  To read the official announcement published in the UT Journal CLICK HERE.”

Talent mapping keeps qualified candidates at hand for when a position needs to be filled. With talent mapping you gain a peace-of-mind knowing that you have pre-qualified candidates for a position at hand who are ready to move in when necessary. Many companies, unfortunately, have found themselves suffering a great loss when a position becomes vacant within their organization. The time spent in the immediate search for a candidate to fit the position can takes weeks and even months, and can be very costly. This search can be even more damaging to the business when it is effecting the most critical positions. The impact this has on an organization can result in putting them behind competitors who have chosen to use services like Talent Mapping. Companies who use Talent Mapping are ensured that the position is filled right away and that there is a quick smooth transition of the candidate into the position.

Talent Mapping is a unique service, similar to Name Generation, but it goes a step further. In Name Generation candidates are generated and contact information is gathered from those that meet the required job specifications. Talent mapping requires a significant amount of more cold calling and research.  The candidates are pre-qualified and then mapped into the company’s hierarchy. This visually displays the hierarchy of pre-qualified candidates for the client which is extremely valuable to recruiting efforts.

Hire Velocity’s Atlanta team focused on giving this past holiday season. The Atlanta team participated in the Gwinnett County Department of Family and Children Services’ Foster Children’s Christmas Program, generously providing the entire Christmas for a 3-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy.  The children received much-needed items like clothing and shoes but also received many wish-list items like a bicycle and an iPod.

The purpose of the DFCS Foster Children’s Christmas Program is to help hundreds of foster children who are suffering from disappointments, hurts, and frustrations to put aside those circumstances on a day intended to be most memorable for children. Thanks to the efforts of the Atlanta Hire Velocity team, two of those children had a much merrier Christmas!

The “name generation” service is a unique service which provides a company with candidates from a list of competitors that they select. Researching names from completive companies with this service can narrow down those candidates in positions with similar job functions. Using a wide variety of search tools, the name generation service provides as many names, phone numbers, and emails of the candidates who meet the required job specifications. Hire Velocity has the ability to take this a step further and provide companies with additional information in their reports which describe the candidate’s education or degree as well as their years of experience in a particular field.

This service can be beneficial in gaining a strong advantage over competitors as it has the ability to target those talented candidates who are not actively searching for a new position. Receiving a report that includes the candidates contact information allows the company to reach out to them and present them with the new opportunity. Other key beneficiating factors of name generation is that most HR departments don’t have the time or resources to be able to produce the information that this service can generate, which when choosing to outsource this to specialists with the tools and experience needed will provide optimal results for a company.

In order to become a stronger company you must be able to consistently fill crucial positions within your company when necessary and do so as quickly as possible. Acquiring top talent through developed candidate pipelines has continually proven to be an effective way to do this. Developing candidate pipelines involves creating a ready pool of qualified candidates that are available for immediate contact when a position within a company opens up. Companies that are active in recruiting and creating a strong candidate pipeline are ahead of those competitors who choose to delay finding candidates till the last minute.

When you have developed a candidate pipeline you minimize the time between transitions of filling positions, helping to keep your company on track. Active recruiting also leads to an increase in brand awareness within a company’s industry. This helps your company to be the first to come to a candidate’s mind, making positions more desirable when they become available. In the long term developing a candidate pipeline will make a company stronger than it’s competition and able to fill positions quickly.

Hire Velocity has worked with many companies in the development of their candidate pipelines. By sourcing through hundreds of job boards and various social media sites, Hire Velocity can generate skilled candidates to fill crucial positions when needed. Working with a leading residential mortgage banking company recently led to over 1750 insurance agents, HR representatives, loan officers, and accountants hired.

Getting started with the recruiting process can be difficult, especially when you need to find a large number of employees to fill positions in a short amount of time. The task can be daunting for HR departments that don’t know where to start or how to go about approaching the process. Outsourcing to an RPO provider who offers the service of Pure Sourcing can take the stress away from the initial step of searching through resumes and job boards for qualified candidates which can be very time consuming. An RPO provider who offers this service is able to take on the responsibility and use the latest technology, resources and expertise to deliver a list that includes more choices for your hiring manager to be able to select the candidates who are best fit for the company.

With the Pure Sourcing service a multi-channel sourcing strategy is implemented.   This consists of an in-depth search conducted using a proprietary tool to search job boards and find resumes of the most qualified candidates. A list is generated that consists of those candidates whose skills and education requirements match each specific position.

Pure Sourcing is a strategy that Hire Velocity has been successful in using to find qualified candidates to fill positions in a number of companies. Utilizing the latest technology, social media websites and access to over 200 job boards, we are able to find top candidates who fit the positions you want to fill. This service simply finds and generates a list of those candidates that would be most qualified and does so without having to make any contact with them. This saves HR managers from having to weed through candidate resumes who are unqualified and allows them to focus on those with the skills and education required, saving the organization time, money and energy.