Key to Success for Staffing Account Managers

I thought of sharing my experience as what makes you a successful Staffing Account Manager. Most of us will/have encountered the scenario while working in a staffing organization that the career/salary growth is limited. You keep working as a recruiter, then get promoted as Sr. recruiter than possibly a lead/manager(If you stay for long), than what next....???

Well organization will expect you to participate in the revenue generation 'directly' rather than keep supporting development/account manager in order to pay you more.

So, that's the 'change', which not everyone is comfortable about. There is definitely a difference between making a call to a candidate and a call to client. As a recruiter, you are only managing the expectations of one-end, the candidate, and possibly you can fight with another end, which is your account manager. But having put yourself in the shoes of account manager, you can no more 'fight', you need to meet expectations of both the ends, that's the change. Unless you do so, you can't 'generate revenue', means no success. So let's put a bulleted list of success mantra, which might make things easier for you while accommodating yourself in the 'change':

1. Make yourself available: First key point of success while you are in customer service industry: Make yourself available. Customers doesn't like (a) if your cellphone is not reachable most of the time (b) if you change your contact number frequently (c) If you don't acknowledge the receipt of email instantly, you might not give them answer asap, but acknowledge that you received the communication and it's in your to-do list now.

2. Understand requirement correctly: That's the technical job, again not everyone is comfortable understanding the tech jargons. So how to interpret as what customer wants. There is a way to it, Ask questions, do not hesitate. Customer would be happy to help you because they feel you are trying to ensure quality by the way of narrowing down your search of quality resumes instead of bombarding them with bulk resumes, which will kill their precious time and reduce productivity.

Changing trends in IT outsourcing!

If year 2008 was the year of collapse, year 2009 brought many changes to IT world functioning. On the one had we saw few IT biggies utilizing their cash reserves to buy similar size companies or to enter into completely new domain like Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems, which will gain them entry into IT hardware domain and fine tune their software offerings according to Sun platform, HP acquired EDS to strengthen its software services offerings expanding its portfolio from traditional hardware/storage offerings, Dell’s acquisition of Perotsystems came as surprise to many analysts, since the company was already struggling to maintain its hold on serves market and instead of strengthening its bleeding line of business, they decided to enter into lucrative services market, which can ensure them a better .

On the other hand we also saw companies disintegrating their business units to focus on the core expertise, where we saw IT giant IBM quitting PC& servers business and latest in this series is Bearingpoint. We also saw the biggest IT consumer market, USA, taking some ‘protectionism’ measures to safeguard their domestic interest.

So how did this change IT outsourcing?

The answer isn’t simple. We saw biggies campaigning for ‘single window solutions’ to the customers comprising hardware/software/networking solutions under one umbrella. We also saw IT services biggies like TCS, Infosys giving discounts to retain customers in tough economic times and customers cutting-short their vendor list for the ease of manageability and reduce costs by giving bulk order and signing long-term deals. So is it the only impact, not really, we have seen some interesting trend change this time compare to last downturn post in 9/11. Let’s look at some important shift in IT outsourcing trends post economic downturn in 2008/2009:

Near-shore outsourcing: This has emerged as a new trend with political lobby campaigning in favor of boosting domestic employment or insisting on having relation with culturally similar countries. Brazil’s growth in IT/ITES market is a perfect example of near-shore outsourcing.

CV or Resume: Is there a difference?

While most of us use the terms 'Curriculum Vitae' (CV) and 'Resume' interchangeably, there is a difference between these two documents.

All over the world (including India) except the US, employers ask potential employees for a CV while applying for a position. While both documents are used in the job application process -- there is a difference in what the contents of each should be.

To understand this, let us look at the literal meaning of these two terms:

Curriculum Vitae: The course of life; Resume: summary

A close look at the meaning of these terms makes things clearer. While a CV discusses the course of life of a person, his Resume is a brief summary of his skills and achievements. The meaning of the words offer the basic differences between the two:

* While a CV is detailed, a Resume is to the point

* A CV is longer than a Resume. Usually, a CV is two or more pages long while a Resume is essentially one page long.