New England Cable News: Paul Harty on April's US Bureau of Labor Statistics Jobs Report

By Brock Bair , 5/6/13

On Friday, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released its report on the state of the US labor market in April 2013. The news for the month was good. The economy added more jobs during the month than was expected, and unemployment ticked down another notch from last year's highs.

Seven Step President Paul Harty contributed his expert commentary on the report to NECN. Like all of us at Seven Step, Paul's optimistic about the direction we're headed in, especially in several of the industries we know best, like manufacturing and retail banking.

(Special bonus: all of the workplace footage in this piece was shot in our Boston Delivery Center, which was abuzz with sourcing and hiring activity, as always.)...  read more

Four Secrets to Hiring Hard-to-Fill at Volume

By Paul Harty , 5/1/13

After the housing bubble burst in 2007, banks were required to make several changes to address the needs of their customers. One major initiative that stemmed from this crisis was the single point of contact (SPOC) regulatory requirement, announced in 2011. The SPOC required banks to provide any borrower seeking to avoid foreclosure a one-on-one relationship with the organization. In response, banks were forced to make significant hires. To make matters more difficult, prior to 2011, there wasn't a defined career path or pre-existing role that fit the qualifications required for these positions, making them extremely hard to fill.

One example you may remember is Chase's announcement that it would hire 1,000 employees to its mortgage-servicing business in Ohio. Recruiting 1,000 new employees is a difficult task, however, finding financial services talent in Central Ohio made the task doubly difficult. This was no easy task, however challenges like Chase's have become commonplace in recent years.

Chances are, if you work in financial services, information technology, or manufacturing, you've been faced with a similar hiring challenge – perhaps you're in the midst of one right now. But while hiring under these circumstances can be a headache, there are a few tactics your team can employ to streamline your process and achieve success:...  read more

Three Key Elements of Successful Recruitment Training Programs

By Beth Gilfeather , 4/18/13

Imagine a newly minted doctor deciding that she knew everything she’d ever need to know about medicine simply because she had completed her formal education and residency. That would be ridiculous, right? In most professions, it’s understood that continuing education is required to keep your skills up-to-date. Professional training programs, annual certifications, and industry conferences exist for just that purpose.

Unfortunately, recruitment seems to be a discipline that often fails to live up to this standard. When we talk to potential clients about their RPO needs, we often ask about their existing recruitment training programs. Most admit that there’s not much there. If training for their internal recruiters is offered at all, it's infrequent, and typically utilizes generic third-party programs that aren’t tailored to the company's culture and processes. Consciously or not, it seems that many companies expect internal recruiters to come to them with an in-place body of skills, and that, like with our misguided doctor above, these skills are the only ones they’ll really ever need.

They’re wrong. Recruiting changes as rapidly as any other professional discipline – maybe even more so – and with talent-war success growing in bottom-line importance, it makes no sense to rely on skills that might be years, or even decades out of date....  read more

Release: Seven Step RPO Starts Year Strong With Record First Quarter Revenue Growth

By Brock Bair , 4/11/13

Boston, MA - Seven Step RPO, a leading provider of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) services, announced unparalleled growth in the first quarter of 2013, increasing its revenue by 101 percent over Q1 of 2012. Additionally, 70 percent of Seven Step’s clients chose to expand scope within the last two quarters, most notably within the financial, insurance, retail and manufacturing sectors.

“The increases we’ve seen to our client contracts validates that our unique recruitment model is helping clients get ahead of their hiring challenges,” said Paul Harty, President of Seven Step RPO. “Our recruiters are able to tackle challenging business verticals quickly, while delivering deep analytics that empower our clients.”

Highlights from the Quarter

Customer Growth –In the first quarter of 2013, Seven Step increased its hiring scope by 173 percent over Q1 of 2012. Additionally, a major financial institution expanded its recruiting services program with Seven Step from 600 annual hires in 2012 to 7,000 annual hires in 2013. Seven Step also tapped into the transportation and logistics sector for the first time in Q1 with a Fortune 100 company win. ...  read more

Key Sourcing Benchmarks – Defining Your Application Completion Threshold

By Seven Step RPO , 3/27/13

What if 30% of applicants that start your apply process don’t finish? What if 60% don’t finish? Do you know how many applicants are lost? This candidate fallout during early stages of the application process can be a serious phenomenon, one we’ve defined in an earlier post. To recap, the Application Completion Threshold is the point at which a candidate does not complete their application. So at this point we’ve covered why candidates don’t complete the apply process. The next step is to measure what its impact is on your business.

In this post we’ll cover how to calculate the percentage of applicants that hit their Application Completion Threshold. This percentage is a benchmark that can be used to track improvements or regressions in the apply flow....  read more