More than 75,000 people applied to work at Google in just one week back in February 2011 (according to AOL.com) many of them new or soon-to-be-new college graduates (Google even has a “student site” for new grads to learn more about career opportunities at the company).

But you’re no Google. You’re no Nike or Accenture, either You have no “brand name” to attract new graduates.

So how can you become more attractive to the newly-hatched college grad? Read below for some tips.

Remember back when you had just graduated college? Remember what you were looking for in your first career position? Weren’t the things you sought something along the lines of

• work variety,
• potential for career growth,
• training and education opportunities, and
• interesting and fun colleagues?

Today’s grads are not much different. One thing they may look for that you may not have, however, is a work/life balance. Today’s grads are more concerned with “having a life” than high salaries (although they do want to make enough to pay off those student loans, save for the future and have a bit of fun).  In fact, new grads tend to say they’re more interested in your company’s ethics as well as training/educational opportunities than in benefits and salary.

Take a look at career growth ladders. Do you promote from within? Do you have a mentoring program? Do you nurture employees and help them become all they can be in their positions?

It can be tough to go from the days of sleeping in until 8, staying up until 2 in the morning, having three hours for a lunch break and not having to worry about getting to the dry cleaners before it closest at 6 p.m.

Help new grads acclimate to the world of work by possibly offering flex time schedules, delivery services for dry cleaning, an on-site gym, etc. Whatever can make a new grad’s – or even a seasoned employee’s – life a little easier.

Looking for new college graduates or experienced professionals for your Washington DC construction, engineering or architecture firm? Then contact a RealStreet Staffing recruiter. We can source, check and place new or seasoned workers for your temporary and direct-hire needs. We look forward to hearing from you.

How big does a company have to be before it hires a full-time human resource manager?

According to Beth Sussman of Dovetail Human Resources, there really is no special number of workers that a company should have before hiring a full-time human resources manager. Instead, she says, what you need to look at are the conditions in the company and pay attention to certain triggers that will tell you when the time is right.

For example, are you having trouble finding the workers with the skills you need when you need them? Or are you having trouble merging new workers from an acquired company with your workforce? If you don’t have any human resource people, Sussman says, you might not have the kind of practices in place that you need to acquire, develop and hold onto the workers you need. You may need someone with the specific expertise in the process of mergers and how to combine workforces.

Another sign that you may need a human resources manager is when you see that your company is increasingly at risk from legal action for wrongful termination, harassment claims or pay inequality issues. If you see these kinds of issues coming up more often, it may be time to hire someone to make sure you have the best policies in place to handle these situations, Sussman says.

You may need to think about an HR person when you begin to find that your policies are becoming outdated, according to Sussman. You may have a pay and bonus plan that doesn’t fit the way your business is operating now, or a benefits plan that needs updating.

Also, have you noticed that you are spending more and more on outside firms – consultants, attorneys or other administrative services to handle human resource issues? It may be time to take a look at what you are spending on outsourced services and compare that to what your expenses would be if you hired some in-house people to handle the same issues. Comparing the costs and benefits of each approach may show you that you may actually be better off financially by going with in-house people.

Whether your human resources is 50 people large, or you only have 10 employees company wide, RealStreet Staffing can help your architecture, engineering or construction firm find the skilled professionals you need. Contact us today!

In today’s nonstop world of human resource management, you are bombarded with information, e-mail, text messages, voicemail and social media.

Many approaches to time management claim to show how you can accomplish all of the things you need to. But business strategist Peter Bregman says the idea that you can do it all is just a myth. Face reality, he says – there is just no way you can actually do all of the things you want to. We have our limitations, and there are only 24 hours in a day.

This might be disheartening, he says, but it can be uplifting as well, because once you acknowledge that you can’t do it all, you are better prepared to make the choices about what you can do. You can dump the unimportant things and focus on what’s most important.

But Bregman says there are two obstacles to doing this – figuring out what the important things are, and then actually taking action to get them done. Figuring out what’s important means going from reactive to proactive. Instead of just waiting to see what lands on your desk, think about what choices you need to make to get the results that you want the most. And that means that you will also need to make choices about what not to do.

To get to the actual doing part of things, Bregman says, we need tools. We need to know how to prioritize, get things on our calendar, and reduce the multi-tasking. So we first need to think about our time management issues – not getting to our most important work, not taking advantage of our talents and passions, getting distracted by little things, avoiding big projects.

Once you’ve figured out what your most intractable time management issues are, pick just one to take on, Bregman says. For example, you may struggle with prioritizing or it may be that you are a perfectionist. Whatever the case, pick one time management challenge you have, and then choose a strategy to solve the problem. If this works, move on to your next time management problem, and do the same thing. If it doesn’t work, try another time management technique.

If staffing is a priority with which you’d like help, call upon the recruiting experts at RealStreet Staffing. We can help your Washington, DC-area firm find top professionals in the construction, engineering and architecture sectors. Contact us today!

If you work in human resources, you know that even in this depressed economy, you have open positions that are hard to fill.

It’s no secret that these jobs are in technical areas, areas that demand a high degree of education and expertise – engineering, IT and healthcare. The fact is that for these areas of the labor market, demand is high, even though in other areas there are too many people chasing too few jobs.

A recent survey of more than 2,600 companies around the country showed that one-quarter of the businesses had jobs for which they could not find qualified people, according to Matt Ferguson, CEO of a job search firm. Ferguson says that their data shows that there is only one person looking for a job for every three open positions in a number of areas, including nurse practitioners and cloud developers.

If you are a human resources professional and/or recruiter, there are things you can do to help recruit the talent you need, Ferguson says.

One practice Ferguson recommends is to keep track of the positions that are hard to fill. If you are aware of the hard-to-fill positions, you can put a process of ongoing recruiting into place – networking with job hunters who are looking for jobs that may not be available now, but are likely to open up in the near future.

You also need to keep track of where the skilled workers are in your area. Find the cities that have the most people in the areas you are looking for and recruit there. Talent is not distributed evenly throughout all geographical areas. You have to go to where the supply is.

You also need to match the salary to the demand for the position. Don’t expect to hire someone in a hard-to-fill area at a bargain price. Make sure you are matching what your competition is offering.

You also can train workers yourself. If you are scouring the landscape for candidates, and you still cannot find anyone, your company should take on the task of training candidates in the skills that are needed. Many people have the basic level of skills that are needed to benefit from the training.

If you’re looking to fill hard-to-fill positions in construction, architecture or engineering in the Washington, DC area, give RealStreet Staffing a call. We look forward to hearing from you!

Although there may be issues involving discrimination, some companies still will not even consider hiring people who are unemployed. There is a bias against the unemployed because of the general assumption that during layoffs, it is usually those who are the least productive who go first.

But as Jim Stroud, a corporate recruiting expert notes, during this downturn, those assumptions may not hold as they did in the past. During the recession, companies went through several rounds of layoffs. Is it reasonable to assume, Stroud says, that even those people let go in the second or third round of layoffs were also underperformers? There are many good people out there, people who performed well for their companies, who nonetheless fell victim to the recession.

There are several good reasons for hiring someone who is unemployed, Stroud says.

The first is that it is unlikely they will leave anytime soon after being hired. After being without work, they won’t be particularly eager to risk losing employment. They may also help to increase retention among other workers because the previously unemployed person will be telling other employees about the problems he or she had while unemployed.

Hiring the unemployed will help your brand. Once it becomes known that you are willing to hire the unemployed, that you don’t discriminate and that you act fairly, it may help your company attract talent and maintain loyalty.

An unemployed person may bring new skills to the company. Many unemployed are using their time to go back to school to update their skills and knowledge, and they will bring this with them.

Bringing an unemployed person on board may help you build up your business networks. Looking for work, an unemployed person builds up his or her own network of contacts, and he or she will bring these contacts to your firm, people who may be potential new hires themselves or new customers.

And, finally, hiring an unemployed person may enable your company to take advantage of tax breaks for doing so. Under the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act, for example, for each qualified employee retained for at least 52 consecutive weeks, businesses will be eligible for a general business tax credit, often referred to as the “new hire retention credit,” of 6.2 percent of wages paid to the qualified employee over the 52-week period, up to a maximum credit of $1,000, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

RealStreet Staffing can help your Washington, DC-area engineering, construction, architecture company find great workers for your temporary, temp-to-hire or direct-hire assignments. Call us when you need skilled, reliable workers!

As you try to fill openings at your company with the most talented people possible, you are obviously working to come up with the best questions to ask job candidates. Naturally, applicants have questions of their own, some more probing than others. But it is to these more probing questions that your human resources department should have good answers if you want to compete for the best candidates.

Some of these questions applicants are more likely to ask than others, but all of them are the kinds of questions that human resources professionals should be asking themselves. Dealing with hard questions also will help your company clarify goals and values to help employees perform better.

Some things that applicants might be curious about are why employees like working for the company, what brought them to the company and what the work atmosphere is like.

Other questions might include the philosophy of the business and its strengths and weaknesses.

Other queries are more of the nuts-and-bolts type, such as what the day-to-day responsibilities of the open position are, how quickly the company wants to find someone for the job, and the next step in the interviewing process. Although perhaps not a common question, a candidate may ask how his or her skills compare with other applicants.

Candidates also might be interested to know what the company values the most in terms of what its employees contribute.

Other questions might include whether there is a career path at the company, chances of advancement and other opportunities the position might offer.

A candidate might want to know where most of the company’s senior management comes from – a particular area of the company or a variety of areas and he or she also may ask about any major problems facing the company or department.

An applicant might also ask about how the open position contributes to the bottom line.

RealStreet Staffing can help your Washington, DC-area engineering, construction, architecture company finds killed, reliable professionals. Contact us today.

Now that social media has gained a real prominence in our society and in the workplace, employers are using it more and more to check out job candidates.

Career counselors are telling those looking for jobs to be careful regarding what they put on their Facebook pages or what they tweet on Twitter because potential employers could be watching. Job applicants should only put information on their sites that will help their chances of finding employment.

But employers need to be savvy as well when perusing social media sites, to be aware of the conventions and customs that are in general use so that they don’t misinterpret things.

For example, a social media site is not a résumé, and should not be treated as one. If you are looking at a job applicant’s site, don’t be too worried about misspellings or grammar problems. Online slang has become common usage, phrases such as “lol” are tossed around a lot. People use shortcuts all the time, so it would be a mistake to look at it any other way than as casual, conversational writing.  Don’t take it as a sign of the candidate’s writing ability.

Other things to ignore are rude remarks. Again, looking at someone’s personal profile, you will see personal conversations, teasing and back-and-forth bantering that will likely have some coarse language. That doesn’t mean that the person will behave the same way in a professional setting.

Also, avoid personal photos. These really have nothing to do with the hiring process, and you don’t want them to affect your opinion. Other information not to take too seriously are remarks about job histories that a candidate might have on his or her Facebook site. Don’t regard these comments as anything definitive about the candidate’s qualifications – use the résumé for that.

Finally, federal law prohibits job discrimination based on race, religion, gender, national origin, and against people with disabilities. If you think this kind of information might affect your hiring decisions, it might be best to avoid looking at social media sites completely, since some of this information will be on the site.

RealStreet Staffing can help your Washington, DC-area engineering, construction, architecture company gear up for major projects — or gear down when the project is complete. Contact us when you need skilled, reliable employees!

If you want to increase the chances of having a successful relationship with your staffing firm, here are a few things to keep in mind when your company makes a request for contingent employees.

The first tip for making things go as smoothly as possible is to make sure you notify the staffing service as far in advance as you can as to when you will be making an order. This is even more important if you are going to be making several orders.

Make sure you get ongoing progress reports on how your orders are being filled and set a specific time when you will get the progress reports. Doing so will help you know if you will need to contact other services.

Find out if the staffing service also is filling requests for the same types of workers for other companies, and where your company stands on the list of orders to be filled.

You also should let the service know how much leeway your company has as far as what the skills you need in the temporary workers and how many hours a day or week they will be at on site.

If you are looking for a specific set of skills, you need to be clear about your requirements with the staffing firm, be very clear that you won’t  settle for anything less.

Make sure that you have frequent communications with the staffing firm’s managers, and get together on a routine basis with the your service’s representative to let him or her know how the firm is doing.

Check with other staffing companies to get an idea of the rates you will have to pay to be competitive and to avoid any unnecessary haggling.

Finally, try to create a welcoming atmosphere at your site for the temporary workers on assignment with you so that they will want to come back.

When you need reliable professionals skilled in the construction, engineering and architecture industries for your Washington, DC-area company, contact RealStreet Staffing. We can source, vet and place workers in temporary, temp-to-hire and direct hire assignments. We look forward to hearing from you.

One of the regulatory traps that businesses sometimes fall into when they use staffing services is the employment classification of contingent workers.

Many times a business that uses contingent workers from a staffing firm takes on certain responsibilities for the workers, responsibilities usually associated with “regular” employment.

By doing this, the company allows itself to be considered an employer, along with the staffing agency, opening itself to the liability that goes with being an employer.

There are some straightforward guidelines that will help a company avoid being considered an employer of the temporary workers.

The first one is something not to do – don’t repeat the same functions as the staffing agency. If you are going to do that, why hire the firm in the first place? Sometimes, businesses will take on the task of recruiting, selecting and interviewing potential temporary employees. This is what you are paying the staffing agency to do. If your business takes on those tasks, the prospective employee will think your business is the hiring organization. You might not be real keen on having the staffing agency do these things, but the firm’s thoroughness will surprise you. If you have doubts, ask the staffing service to show you how it tests and selects employees.

Also, if you have a large number of contingent workers at your company check with the staffing firm to see if it can have a representative stay at your company. Known as an “on-site” arrangement, this is the most effective way to handle administrative tasks,  and it also allows for better communication between you and your staffing firm. It also emphasizes to the temporary workers that the staffing agency is the employer.

Never take any disciplinary action directly against a contingent worker. Always go through the staffing agency. If you want to terminate the worker, you should discuss it and the reasons for it with the staffing agency, and the agency should then take the necessary action.

As part of this, you should be willing to share the worker’s performance shortcomings with the staffing agency. Then, if the worker is let go, the agency will be able to provide the worker with a specific reason, which will usually eliminate the possibility of charges of discrimination. Discrimination is sometimes alleged when a temporary worker is let go but no reason is given, which leads the person to believe something unethical is going on.

And finally, make sure your company policy clearly states that benefit plans are off limits to contingent workers.

RealStreet Staffing can help Washington Metro construction, engineering and architecture firms find terrific professionals for temporary or direct-hire assignments. Contact us today so that we may work with you to create a staffing plan that will help your business grow and prosper.

The makeup of the American workforce is undergoing a sea change, fueled in part by the current weak economy Companies and workers need to adapt.

According to Doug Berg, a workforce expert, the United States is in the middle of a big shift in the workforce, especially in the technology area. The way things have been done in the past just doesn’t apply any more, especially in the area of employee hiring.

If they are going to be successful, companies – including staffing agencies – and workers need to understand how the market for workers is playing out. Companies want quick access to workers who come in for just short periods. Preferences among workers are changing, as is innovation in technology.

The temporary staffing market is booming, growing from $60 billion a year to roughly $200 billion a year. This growth is also a marker of how the labor supply is shifting. The demand for contingent staffing is growing in all areas, while professional areas have been among the fastest growing. Creative, design and engineering consultants always have been in high demand.

The healthcare and legal areas also are showing big growth. Many businesses are moving toward contract and consulting work in the legal area because the big law firms are so expensive. So, instead of hiring a big name law firm, companies are trying to strengthen their own legal departments by hiring contractors.

The same thing is happening in the areas of accounting and finance. Companies are trying to use more contractors and consultants because the cost of these professionals is skyrocketing, driven in large part by government reporting regulations. One of the fringe benefits of this strategy is that a company can expand quickly when the need arises, and then shift resources as the need changes.

Berg predicts that the contingent workforce will only continue to grow. He uses information technology as an example. Companies that were 90 percent permanent workers and 10 percent contingent staffing are now closer to 60 percent full-time employees and 40 percent contract labor. Many of these are big companies, and the shift has allowed them to become more flexible.

If your Washington Metro firm is looking for flexible staffing solutions, give a shout out to RealStreet Staffing. We can provide you skilled and reliable engineering, architecture and construction professionals on a temporary, temp-to-hire or direct-hire basis. Contact us today!