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Drive down any major artery and you will see one ‘now hiring’ sign after another. The talent shortage is far-reaching in Maine, and it is leaving employers wondering how they can have an edge over their competition. Of course you can pay more, offer more competitive benefit packages, or lucrative sign-on bonuses, which are all great ideas, but are you missing the most simple of solutions? Your employee experience.

The old adage is: “the customer is always right,” and while we won’t argue that making your customer’s experience a priority is a fundamental piece of business prosperity, we must recognize that your employees are not only the people that ensure a positive customer experience, but your employees are ultimately customers too. If you want to be a competitive force in both the market and the war for talent, we suggest you make your employee experience an equal priority. This step can enhance your employment reputation, increase internal referrals, reduce turnover, and give you the edge you seek. Here are a few ways to do just that.

Trust Their Instincts

Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” When you have confidence in your hiring process, and confidence in your employees, you should make it a point to trust their instincts. Those that are doing the work are the ones closest to it, so when they come to you with an idea for process improvements or challenges, make a point to listen and flesh out their ideas. 

Give Them the Benefit of Doubt

It is inevitable that mistakes will be made. Employees can hit a slump and it can show up in their performance. When faced with a conflict or challenge it is important to know when to give the employee the benefit of doubt. Trust that when given the opportunity, highly accountable employees will acknowledge their shortcomings and demonstrate a willingness to work with an employer that is willing to work with them.

Build Authentic Relationships

Employee-centric employers value genuine relationships. Not just with their clients, but with their employees as well. The vast majority of employees will work harder for leaders that respect them as individuals, as they don’t want to risk losing that respect. Make sure your organizational leaders take the time to get to know staff and offer training on professional boundary setting. Without offering training on boundary setting, those relationship lines can get blurred and can cause a different set of headaches.

Give Them Feedback

Feedback doesn’t have to come in the form of an extensive annual review. In fact, more regular feedback (both positive and negative) can positively impact the employee experience as long as you balance offering both.  If an employee’s work is slipping, the best course of action is to catch it early and give them an opportunity and any necessary resources to improve. When it comes to positive feedback, a simple email or acknowledgement while passing in the halls goes a long way. Whether positive of negative, if you aren’t providing feedback, you could be sending the message that you don’t notice or you don’t care. 

Make Them Part of Your Story

One way to maintain a competitive advantage is by telling a compelling story. Ensure that your employees know what an important role they play, and when you tell your story to others, make sure you are including them. Everyone looking at your website, social media channels, walking through your doors, or browsing job boards is a potential candidate – seize every opportunity to show them through pictures and testimonials how your employees are happy and valued.

Even with the best compensation and benefit package, and building an employee-centric culture – you may still need to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to hiring and lean on a team you can trust to help you find your next team member. Manpower is happy to be that trusted partner, simply click the link below to contact us. 

Challenging professional experiences can happen to all of us. Maybe you had transportation issues in the past that led to poor attendance, or maybe your performance suffered because there were things happening in your personal life that affected your ability to focus during working hours. While challenges such as these can sometimes be difficult to overcome, they don’t have to define your future career success. Here are some great tips to help you tell your work story – challenges and all – at your next job interview.

Take accountability. 

Past mistakes don’t have to define you; it’s how you address and overcome them that will ultimately determine your success. When jobs don’t work out as we had hoped, it can leave us feeling frustrated, embarrassed, or even ashamed – and in those moments, it may feel easier to blame others for the outcome. However, humbly owning up to your mistakes demonstrates that you’ve gained the maturity and perspective needed to move beyond them so that you can do better in the future. So if you are interviewing for a job, and you have to explain that you were let go from a previous job due to poor attendance or other issues, don’t lie or make excuses. Keep it simple and state the facts – your potential employer just wants to know that you can take accountability for your actions, and that you have taken appropriate steps to ensure that what happened in the past won’t be an issue moving forward. 

Demonstrate that you’re ready for a second chance.  

First, check in with yourself to see if you’re truly ready for this new opportunity. If the factors that contributed to challenges at your last job haven’t changed, think very carefully about whether or not to proceed. It would be very unfortunate to be in the same situation again a couple of weeks or months down the line, and if you repeat those same patterns at multiple jobs, it can make the barrier to employment much more difficult to overcome. If you are indeed ready for a second chance, make sure that you clarify what has changed and what actions you have taken to ensure that you can be counted on to show up on time and ready to work. 

Don’t overshare.

It’s important to recognize that when it comes to interviews for employment, it’s best to stick with providing objective, relevant information. Your personal experiences are valid, but what a hiring manager really needs to hear about is what makes you a good fit for the job at hand. If you share too much personal information beyond that, it could draw attention away from where it belongs – on your qualifications. Do you want the hiring manager to leave your interview remembering the great skills you have to offer, or your detailed story about that one coworker who just wouldn’t stop picking fights with you?  

Focus on the positive, and highlight your successes.

You don’t have to pretend that you loved your past jobs if you didn’t, but you do need to be able to communicate what you learned from those experiences, how they helped you grow, and the skills you gained from them that make you qualified for this job. If there were tasks that you excelled at or found particularly enjoyable, mention those – it gives your enthusiasm for work a chance to shine! Sometimes people are reluctant to talk about their successes because they feel like they’re bragging, and while you do want to be careful not to come across as arrogant, it’s important to celebrate your professional victories! Doing so not only highlights your qualifications, but also shows that you take pride in your work.   

If your job search could benefit from the help of a staffing firm, we hope that you will consider partnering with Manpower. To get started, contact your local branch today by clicking here. 

As calendars flip to the month of July, and Independence Day is celebrated across the United States, there is no better time than now to take a historical stroll and tell you a little more about Manpower’s rich history and why we are so proud to serve you as members of the Manpower family. 

Like fine wines and cheeses, Manpower just gets better with time, and we have been leading the staffing revolution since 1948, and servicing the great state of Maine since 1961. Now a global company with offices in 80 countries and territories, and experience putting 3.4 million people to work worldwide, we take a tremendous amount of pride in our position as leaders in the staffing world. 

Think of all the ways the world has changed in the last 70 years, and think about the role that work plays in the growth of society, communities, and individual lives – now think about how the world of work has evolved in the same period. Manpower has been there, and just like any steadfast business, we have experienced highs and lows – but through it all, our commitment to being the best staffing services provider has never wavered.

1948: An Industry Was Born

Picture this: you and your business partner are on a tight deadline for a project, and you know that in order to meet your important deadline you need to bring on supplemental staff. You don’t have the time to weed through the candidates though, because every minute you are not focused on your work is another minute detracting from your deadline. That was the position that attorneys and business partners Elmer Winter and Aaron Scheinfeld were in when they discovered that there was no company that could provide this service. Manpower was then founded in Milwaukee, WI, and then an additional office opened in Chicago, IL. To start, these two men put their focus on the need for traditional office and industrial workers. 

As a matter of historical note, average annual wages in 1948 were $2,950, the cost of a brand new home was $7,700, and a gallon of gas a mere 16 cents. Yes, we can safely say, “times, they have changed!”

1950s: Expansion & Community Service

“If you build it, they will come,” and build it they did. A mere four years after opening their first offices, Manpower began expanding across the country by opening both corporate-owned offices and franchising opportunities. In addition to expanding to cities like New York and Boston, Manpower also became an international company by opening offices in Canada, the UK, and France. We think it is safe to assume that there was a large-scale need for contingent staffing services and more. 

But for these two philanthropists, it wasn’t just about business – it was bigger than that. It was about service and responsibility; to be successful meant giving back and providing opportunities by helping people gain the skills they needed to be successful in the world of work. It was in 1953 that Manpower launched the Manpower Foundation, whose mission is dedicated to supporting job training and education initiatives. Service and social responsibility remain at the heart of our organization all these years later. 

1960s: Explosive Growth & Recognition

From becoming a publicly traded company, to expanding into other continents, establishing a technical division, and of course, their greatest decision to date – opening a franchise here in Maine – Manpower was doing it all, and quickly distinguishing itself as the world’s employment expert.

In 1962, Manpower launch the first Employment Outlook Survey, a quarterly forecast of employment intentions across regions and different industries. In 2018, the quarterly employment outlook survey is still hailed as a valued indicator of the state of employment. The depth of Manpower’s forward thinking doesn’t stop there though – it also introduced MIDAS, which at the time was an innovative computer and communications system that provided centralized billing and payroll.

A new corporate philosophy was born: The Conscience of Manpower. Keep in mind what was happening in the 1960’s; there was the civil rights movement, we brought back the draft for the Vietnam War, and women were not regular fixtures in the world of work – it was a very difficult time in America. Founder, Elmer Winter, found a way to inspire greatness and equality with one simple philosophy that we still live and breathe to this day: recognize that a company’s people are the greatest asset to an organization, and encourage equal treatment to all. 

1970s -1980s: Weathering The Storm Through Innovation

Coming off the heels of a challenging decade for America, the 70’s and 80’s were challenged by stagflation with significant inflation and unemployment reaching 10.8% in the 1980’s. For a matter of note, at the height of the most recent recession, unemployment topped off at 10.2%. During this time of economic strife in America, manpower recognized more than 50% of its revenue was coming from their offices outside of the United States. 

It was in this same period that Mitchell Fromstein was named to the board of directors and later named President and CEO, where he served for the next 23 years until 1999. During this period Manpower was still leading the charge with innovations such as our Predictable Performance System, a proprietary process of interviewing, testing, and training workers with a comprehensive system to match them with positions they would perform well in.

Businesses and job seekers alike recognized the power in these validated assessments. If there was a need in the employment marketplace, Manpower was up for the challenge of meeting that need, introducing more training and assessment tools such as Skillware Training Software and Ultradex. 

1990s: There’s a Reason Everyone Loves the 90s

No, it isn’t because we finally moved past the days of 80’s hair-bands, or the release of the first Harry Potter book, or because Generation X and Millennials will tell you it was the greatest decade of all time. It’s because even after a rough couple of years to start, job growth was back, and when people are employed everyone feels good.

This includes Manpower. From opening an International Headquarters, to surpassing $10 billion in sales, and having over three-thousand offices in over 50 countries – we saw growth that even surpassed the boom we saw in the 1960’s. How did we do it? We stayed true to who we are.

Instead of grasping at straws, Manpower continued to do what it does best – “find the best in people and put it to work.” With the mass introduction of technology into the workforce, there was plenty of opportunity to skill-up workers to help them achieve success in the ‘new’ world of work. At the time when we were coming back from deep and dark recession, Manpower joined the Welfare to Work initiative, a non-profit organization that educates and encourages businesses to hire and retain former welfare recipients. Manpower also launched TechTrack, a computer-based training for IT specialist, and the Global Learning Center, a computer-based learning platform via the internet to provide skills-based training.

2000s-Today: The Human Age – Stronger & Better Than Ever

At this point, we hope you get a picture of the dedication Manpower has had to the businesses, job seekers, associates, and communities we serve. That dedication has rang just as true through the new century as it did when we got started, and since we provide services in over 80 countries, we don’t see that changing.

The 2000’s saw Jeff Joerres take the lead as CEO and Chairman of the Board for Manpower, and later our current leader Jonas Prising. In that time, we have gone through an extensive rebranding project as ManpowerGroup. Manpower is one of four distinct brands within the ManpowerGroup family, all of which serve a unique purpose, enabling businesses and job search success and reinforcing our corporate philosophy. In 2007, Manpower invested in a new consolidated headquarters in downtown Milwaukee, helping to encourage more development in a downtown district. 

Manpower continues to expand in new markets across the globe. We continue to offer validated assessments to ensure quality matches between employers and job seekers. We still believe in providing all workers with career development services, and offer robust learning and and career management platforms like MyPath and PowerYOU. Manpower remains committed to social responsibility by supporting equality, diversity, integration, and inclusivity in the workforce.

And most importantly, to those of you reading this article, we continue to value the relationships we have with the people of Maine, and are steadfast in our commitment to serve you with strong ethics and integrity, to provide innovative and effective staffing solutions, and to be good stewards of the communities we are in.

Your career is serious business, so it’s important to approach each aspect of your job search with thought and care. One thing to consider as you’re looking for work is whether or not to partner with a staffing firm – if you’re not familiar with them, you may not be aware of what they have to offer. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are a few great reasons to consider working with one:

You’re going through a career transition.

Maybe you’re re-entering the workforce after an extended period away from it, or you’ve just graduated and you’re trying to land your first job. It can be helpful to partner with staffing firms during transitions like these, because they are experts on the local labor market and have extensive relationships with companies that are actively hiring. They can help make the transition smoother for you by helping you get a sense of what is available, as well as helping you navigate the hiring process.

You’re looking for temporary work. 

You’re only available for a certain window of time, and you know that it will be a challenge to secure employment, because companies often don’t want to take the time to train someone who won’t be around for the long haul. Whether you’re moving, going back to school, or your regular job will be picking back up soon, a staffing firm can help you with your seasonal employment needs. In addition to filling long term, temp to hire, and permanent openings, staffing firms also frequently work with companies that seek help with short term projects, vacation coverage, and other temporary needs within their organizations.  

You’re trying to get your foot in the door at a highly competitive company.

Staffing firms like Manpower are successful at what they do because they know how to build relationships, both with their associates and the companies they partner with. They are connected to a vast network of companies, big and small, and they often include some of the most reputable companies in their respective industries. If you’ve got your eye on a really competitive company, but haven’t quite been able to get your foot in the door yet, a staffing firm may be able to help you bridge that gap. A company may be more willing to take a chance on you with a temp to hire opportunity, which allows you to prove your skills before they make the commitment to bring you on permanently.   

You want to make things easier for yourself by partnering with a pro.

Life is busy – we totally get it. One of the benefits of working with a staffing firm like Manpower is that one resume opens you up to a world of possibilities! By submitting an application, you can be considered for numerous positions that are available. Recruiters have their fingers on the pulse of the local job market, and when something becomes available that fits your experience and what you’re looking for, they present you with the information so that you can decide if the opportunity is something you’d like to pursue. They’ll help guide you through the interview and hiring process so that even when life is a little crazy, you know that your career goals are right on track.  

You’re not getting the results you want. 

If the job search you’ve been conducting on your own isn’t yielding the results you’re looking for, you could benefit from partnering with a staffing firm. In addition to helping you navigate the hiring process, recruiters can provide you with valuable feedback to help you improve as a candidate. From resume tweaks to interviewing advice, you can trust that they have your career goals at heart, and will do what they can to help make the right match and prepare you to secure an opportunity that you will be successful in. 

If your job search could benefit from the help of a staffing firm, we hope that you will consider partnering with Manpower. To get started, contact your local branch today by clicking here. 

Candidates’ preference for technology and their expectations for the job search process are changing rapidly. As employers, this leaves us with two distinct options: we can spend our time reminiscing about the good ol’ days and how it used to be, OR we can focus on how the recruiting process has evolved and do what it takes to get the job done. Which option seems more effective to you?

Technology is pervasive in every aspect of our lives, including hiring. It has set a precedent for immediate action and connection. Where candidates used to go out and look for jobs, now jobs that match their preferences are delivered directly to them using a plethora of platforms from texting to social media. Companies that recognize this, stop arguing with reality, and proactively respond to candidates’ technological preferences will ultimately win the war for talent. Those who don’t… well, let’s just say the future isn’t as promising. 

The NextGen Recruiting Game

For as much as the internet pokes fun at millennials and other younger generations, they sure do seem to be agents of change. They younger generations, including Xennials, Millenials, and GenZ, are taking the world of work by storm and living by the mantra “say no to the status quo.” While we may all agree that perhaps some of their expectations are more than what we can provide at the moment – one place we can easily offer compromise is the recruiting game. 

Embracing Social Media

From Facebook to Pinterest, every social media channel serves as an opportunity to connect with people, and isn’t that what recruiting is all about? If you were standing in line at the supermarket and you overheard someone saying they were looking for a job in your industry – if you were hiring, would you not attempt to inspire them to consider your company? Well, think of social media in the same way. According to Statista, 81% of people have at least one social media profile, and 29% of those using social media use it as their primary source for job searching. 

Each platform has its own unique following, which means you have to be aware of which platform to use for each position, and which message and design scheme will be most appealing to those users. And as a heads-up, just as soon as you think you have it all figured out – it changes. In addition, all of these platforms have developed their own sort of pay-to-play methods. So, especially where business exposure and advertising is concerned, obtaining significant organic reach can sometimes seem to be an impossible fete. 

Go Mobile

As smart phones get smarter and bigger, and data plans more robust and affordable, the time people are spending on their cell phones versus firing up the laptop or desktop is increasing. From Apple watches to Google Glasses, our mobile devices are basically an extension of ourselves. That means websites need to be mobile friendly, mobile responsive online application systems, email messages concise, and yes, it is time to embrace texting and even instant messaging. It is unlikely that the role mobile technology plays in our lives is going to decrease in significance – if anything, it will greatly increase – so the time to jump on board is now. 

Be Aware of Rules & Regulations

As HR professionals, you know better than anyone that there are laws governing how you interact with candidates and employees, and what ‘protected’ information you have access to that could impact a hiring decision. Recruiting is a form of both hiring and marketing with laws that govern how you can interact. Digital recruiting can pose a legal risk. Having a clear and concise policy on social media and technology usage for recruiting, as well as thorough training, is crucial to mitigating that risk. Review your policy with your legal team to ensure your are not violating any laws by obtaining and using information in your hiring decisions that is deemed ‘protected’ by state and federal law. 

Don’t Have Time For All That?

Then you can either continue reminiscing about those good ol’ days we talked about and spin your wheels while your positions remain unfilled, or you can partner with someone who has the time, expertise, energy, and resources to do it for you. The choice is yours, and if you choose the second path – we hope you will consider partnering with the Manpower team.