New Tools For Job Seekers and Recruiters

Transcript

You’re listening to the Hire Calling Podcast, your source for all things hiring, staffing, and recruiting.

In today’s episode, I’m going to share information about a set of tools and resources available to help anyone who’s looking for a job, needing to hire, or just wants to learn more about the staffing industry. And best of all, it’s all free. Let’s go.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for listening to episode eight of the Hire Calling Podcast. My name is Pete Newsome, and on today’s episode, I’m going to introduce some tools that are available for anyone who’s involved in staffing or hiring.

I realize that I haven’t yet taken the time to explain in detail what the purpose of the Hire Calling Podcast really is. It’s simply to educate, inform, and share the knowledge and information that I’ve gained over the last 15 years as president and owner of a staffing company, and all my experience and knowledge gained up until then involved in the industry, because we encounter, on a regular basis, confusion and misinformation that comes from a lack of the right perspective or insight into a situation, and that applies to both candidates working with recruiters, as well as recruiters working with the clients who they support.

It really is, on the surface, a pretty straightforward relationship on each side, but it’s also a very intimate relationship when it’s done right, and in order for that to be a successful one on either side,  it has to involve trust, and it has to involve a high degree of comfort which I’ve often found to be lacking in in our industry as a whole. So, in doing the Hire Calling podcast, I want to share as much as I can to just take the mystery out of any scenario. And like I said earlier, just educate and inform.
So with that in mind, today, I’m going to introduce the five new tools that we’ve added to the 4 Corner Resources website, they can all be found under the Resources tab.

We’re excited to offer these because we think they fill a gap in the market, and our hope is that they’re going to help a wide number of folks out there who who benefit from from having this information available and easily accessible for free. Two of the tools are aimed, or very general in nature. Well, one is really intended to be used for anyone who’s, who needs to hire and then the other two are really specific to candidates and job seekers.

The first one is what we call our glossary of terms.

It’s a compilation of all of words and phrases that we use on a daily basis, and at times have to remind ourselves not to take for granted that everyone else understands what these words are as well. If you are a regular part of the staffing industry, of course, these things are going to seem like second nature. But if you’re a job seeker who hopefully isn’t too frequently on the market, or someone who hasn’t previously used a third party for hiring, these may be new to you. And they include phrases like bill rate, and what a 1099 Contractor is, what remote work is, and that’s that’s something that most of you of course will be familiar with, that sort of speaks for itself. But we we don’t want to take things for granted. We really want to be as unassuming as we possibly can, in what we share.

So, along the way with the with the higher calling podcast, we of course will end up Talking about all of these things, but we thought it makes sense to have a library available with just one or two clicks away that anyone can use. So that is our glossary of terms. And it can be found under the Resources tab, as can all of these tools. It’s also worth mentioning that in addition to defining each term, where possible, we’ve added links to articles and additional information that may add to help further explain and put in into perspective how these these terms and phrases are use.

The next tool I’ll talk about is what we call our vendor review section.

It includes information from different companies that provide products and services for the staffing industry for freelancers, whether it’s related to job postings, payroll, candidate assessments and background checks, and video interviews. We wanted to just put all of that information in one place. What we don’t do there is offer our own personal opinions on the quality of these vendors. We don’t rate them ourselves. But we make available the sources where anyone can see who these vendors are and then go to external sources who rate these organizations as their main source of business. From 4 Corner’s perspective, all we wanted to do is really just put a brief explanation, create a hub on where all of these, these different vendors can be found. And then where we can briefly explain how their pricing works. And so that is our vendor, HR vendor reviews and recruiting vendor section.

Those are two general areas that we think can benefit really anyone on on either side, if some could also benefit competitive recruiters. And we’re happy to share information with those folks too. And we think that that is perfectly fine. So if you’re listening out there, please take advantage of what we’ve put together.

But we also know that candidates in particular, can benefit from having some tools that are at their disposal, and one of the big ones that we see, which we’re really, really excited to present and is our resume builder.

We have created a template, actually multiple templates, that are really as simple to use as we could possibly make it, which allows anyone to go to our website, click on the resume builder under the resource tab (which I keep repeating so whoever’s listening has no trouble finding it), and  build their own resume in just a couple of minutes. As professional recruiters, all day, every day we encounter individuals who struggle mightily with with how to build a good resume, we see crazy formatting and it just serves no one well, and delays the recruiting and ultimately the hiring process. And at some level could even get in the way of a candidate getting a job if they just can’t produce a resume that’s clean and in a format that is easily used. So the resume builder solves all of that. And we’re just really proud and excited to present it. We hope whoever is listening will will click on it and take it for a spin even if you’re not on the job market.

You may want to keep the resume handy for various reasons – even I’m asked for resumes at times produce from a bio standpoint if someone wants to know my background. We see this is as universally beneficial for all. And as with everything I’m talking about today, out of the gate, we’re excited about the tools and we feel good about their quality. We welcome feedback we want to improve, make them better add to the glossary, add features to the resume builder, if anyone has suggestions, so please email us at at hirecalling@4cornerrewsources.com and I’ll mention that again at the end. But we would we’d love that feedback. So for candidates out there or anyone who has a need for a resume build your resume feature is available and live right now.

The next tool for candidates is one that also comes up a lot – our salary calculator.

On the last podcast I talked about the different kinds of staffing that people would commonly work with the recruiter for and when we talk about contract staffing in particular for folks who’ve never done a contract before work declined attract before, there’s always a topic of how the hourly rate that’s generally paid in that arrangement translates to an annual salary. And over the years, our recruiters have had a little cheat sheet hanging that shows you know what a $20 hourly rate equates to on an annual salary, so they could answer very quickly. Well, we’ve put that tool on our website, and that’s called salary calculator. In just a couple of seconds, you can punch in either an hourly rate, and see how it translates to an annual salary or do the opposite of that and take your salary and see what the comparative amount would be on an hourly basis.

Finally,  we have our job description builder.

We’re excited about about those tools for candidates, and we also realize that we can it would be  remiss if we did not have a tool for those who need to hire as well, and it really was born from our original intention in need that we knew of to create a resume builder. But in doing so, it occurred to us that a job description builder would be equally valuable to a different audience, of course, but as recruiters, and any recruiter out there who who’s listening, I am confident would agree, we see a lot of bad job descriptions. No one likes to write job descriptions. I’ve yet to meet someone who does, myself included. It’s it can be a painful thing. And the bigger the company, often there’s a greater need for some sort of HR terms that need to be in there that sometimes have no relevance to the actual work that’s going to be done. Oftentimes, we see job descriptions that are just recycled because again, it’s just it’s just not a fun thing to do from scratch. But it can be now we’ve taken any guesswork off the table, we’ve taken any any challenges and difficulty of doing that off the table. So we’ve tried to create a job description builder that will just lay it out for anyone who needs to do it in the simplest possible fashion. And as I keep saying, while it’s a first pass, while one that we think is  high quality, we know that it can be improved. But we want the feedback from actual users, that we’re going to not be able to think of everything up front all the different considerations that go into individuals who have their own specific needs and creating job descriptions. We really shot down the middle with this, but we welcome that feedback. I’ll repeat the email address again, it’s hirecalling@4cornerresources.com.

Please let us know what you think about these tools, let us know, let me know in particular, I’m not the only one who reads it, but I certainly read any messages we get through that email. What other suggestions you’d like to see either on the four corner resource com website, what tools and resources we could share, as well as what topics you’d like to see me talking about on the podcast itself. We are open to suggestions and really welcome as much feedback as possible. And today’s episode is going to be brief. I don’t want to keep rambling but I will ask before ending to please review, review the podcast and rate it. We would love that and thank you for listening and I look forward to speaking to you again very soon.