A.R. Mazzotta - Connecticut Employment Specialists

Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information coming at you each day?

With the barrage of data pouring in from newspapers, TV, the internet, social media, RSS feeds, e-mails, voicemails and good-old-fashioned face-to-face meetings, finding the critical information you need amidst all the “white noise” can be exhausting.

Take the BLS Monthly Employment Situation, for example.  It contains monthly employment estimates for over 1,000 industries from its Current Employment Statistics program.  However, the changes in these overall employment levels tend to be delayed in the monthly labor reports – making it a lagging indicator of economic trends.

Sound like a lot of white noise?

Not entirely.  Temporary help employment numbers, which are part of the monthly BLS report, are generally considered to be a coincident indicator for overall employment.  This means that changes in temporary help employment tend to forecast subsequent changes in overall employment and coincide with changes in economic activity.  Why?  Many companies use temporary staffing as a means to quickly adjust their operations to meet fluctuating demands for their products and services.

Here’s how to get current data for temporary help services in the BLS report:

1. Go to the BLS Current Employment Statistics home page.
2. Then select either the HTML or PDF version of the “Employment Situation Summary.”
3. Data for temporary help services can be found in Table B-1 (page 30 of the report’s PDF version).

Effectively manage the economy’s highs and lows with A.R. Mazzotta Employment Specialists.
Our full spectrum of staffing services for Connecticut employers can help you run lean – while providing on-demand access to the talent you need to meet surges in demand.

These days, with a greater number of candidates vying for the same openings in your company, you may find yourself having to say “No” more often.  Needless to say, writing rejection letters can be an unpleasant and stressful part of the hiring process.

But even when you can’t offer a job applicant the position, it is important to end the interview process on a positive note.  Here are some quick tips for writing candidate rejection letters in a constructive way, to build good will with candidates and position your company as an employer of choice:

• Send out the rejection letter promptly.  If you’re certain you will not be hiring the individual, let him know that he was not selected as soon as possible.  Even when the news is bad, your timely follow-up will convey a high level of professionalism.
• Always use formal company letterhead for a rejection letter and never handwrite it.
• Address your candidate by name.  Further customize the letter with the position for which he applied, as well as a supportive comment about the applicant’s qualifications, experience or enthusiasm.  Although a rejection letter is basically a form letter, your candidate shouldn’t feel as though it is.
• Be direct, but gracious.  Make it clear that there were other candidates more qualified for the job, but do so in a respectful way.
• When appropriate, encourage further action.  If the candidate is a good culture fit, and may be qualified for other openings with your company, say so.  Encourage him to stay in touch and apply again.
• Always end on a positive note.  Thank the candidate for applying and interviewing.  Wish him good luck in his career development.  Remember, this may be the final impression this individual has of your company – make sure it’s a favorable one.
• Close the letter formally with “Sincerely,” or “Best wishes,” and sign your name.

Don’t want to write rejection letters?

Call A.R. Mazzotta Employment Specialists, a leading Connecticut staffing firm, with your direct placement needs.  We’ll handle every step of the process – from recruiting to testing and initial interviews – and only present you with the most qualified candidates.  If you decide not to hire an individual we refer, just let us know and we’ll take care of the rest.

Learn more about the benefits of A.R. Mazzotta’s direct placement services.

An effective mentoring program provides a wide range of business benefits:

• Facilitated onboarding. Mentoring speeds up the process of bringing on new hires as well as redeploying existing employees into new lines of work.
• Increased employee satisfaction and retention. Research has shown that employees who participate in mentoring programs have higher job satisfaction and reduced turnover.
• Improved employee productivity. When employees are mentored, they can get answers to common problems quickly – without wasting time on rediscovering or re-inventing solutions.
• Effective career growth / succession planning. Mentoring programs help employees reach their full career potential, grooming them to fill key roles as part of an organization’s succession plan.
• Knowledge management and retention. Mentoring promotes effective knowledge sharing, to reduce the risk of losing critical skills and knowledge when employees leave.

Obviously, mentors can play an important role in ensuring your company’s continued success.  But while identifying a budding protégé may be straightforward, identifying a potential mentor can be more complex.  Whether that person is you, one of your managers, or an outside expert, a mentor should possess the following professional and personal attributes:

1. Senior-level business experience. To provide guidance, the expert should have several years experience working in senior corporate positions.  At a minimum, the expert should be a professional peer to the protégé.
2. Interpersonal and political “know-how.” The expert ought to be proficient in handling all sorts of complex interpersonal dynamics within the context of office politics.  To be an effective trainer, the expert must be able to help the protégé navigate the tricky political waters of his organization.
3. Integrity and confidentiality. Professional development involves discussing high-level, strategic, off-the-record information, as well as sensitive personal issues.  Honesty and discretion are essential when broaching these confidential topics.
4. Organizational and personal insight. The expert must have an in-depth understanding of the company’s objectives, needs and hierarchy.  Equally, he must also appreciate the protégé’s strengths, weaknesses and goals.  To achieve professional development goals, the trainer must align both the company’s and the protégé’s interests.
5. Flexibility and ingenuity. When egos, ambitions and agendas collide, sparks fly.  What works for an organization one day may be thrown out the window the next.  An expert trainer must be able to shift gears, develop solutions on the fly, throw out tactics that prove ineffective and come up with new ones – fast.  He must be comfortable dealing with uncertainty to navigate a corporate environment rife with change.

A.R. Mazzotta Professional Development and Coaching Services
As a premier Connecticut employment agency, A.R. Mazzotta offers a variety of HR resources – including coaching for executives, key staff and work teams – to assist your company through the entire employee cycle.  Contact us today to learn more.

What’s the single most important variable in the success (or failure) of your business?

Your staff.

Steven Berchem, Certified Staffing Professional and Vice President of the American Staffing Association, posted a great article on the ASA website which addresses the ways today’s businesses are using staffing to gain real competitive advantage. 

Here are a few of the article’s salient points:

• As agility becomes more essential to success, smart companies are rejecting traditional hiring models and taking bold approaches to staffing.  They are moving away from lengthy hiring processes and no longer see the wisdom of filling every position with a permanent employee.
• These changes in key business practices have led companies to use more temporary and contract employees in diverse and highly skilled professions, including: accountants, attorneys, chief executives, doctors, graphic designers, IT professionals and even pilots.
• Today’s staffing employees are motivated, satisfied and educated.  In a survey conducted by the ASA, nine out of 10 staffing employees said they would recommend temporary or contract work to a friend or relative.  And while it may come as a surprise, staffing employees are actually better educated than the overall workforce, with 74% having at least some college education (compared to 62% of the traditional workforce).
• Staffing firms provide the only means of accessing some of America’s best talent.  In fact, the majority of staffing employees either use temporary or contract work as their sole means of finding a “permanent” job, or they simply prefer their current work arrangement over traditional employment.

To read or download the full article, click here.

Maximize the Value of Your Human Resources with A. R. Mazzotta

If you’d like to maximize the value of your staff as a source of competitive advantage for your company, contact A.R. Mazzotta today.  We can show you how to use staffing to become more agile, efficient and profitable.  Together, we can develop a smart staffing plan that will enable your organization to compete – and win.

When used strategically, temporary staffing can improve productivity, increase capacity to handle spikes in workload, and provide access to specialized skill sets – all without increasing your fixed expenses.

To help ensure your temporary staff is as efficient and productive as possible, be sure to follow these five key steps:

Step #1: Determine the type of person you need and define required skills.
Meet with managers and those who will be working with the temporary employee to determine which skills are ideal for the position you are trying to fill.  Examine top performers you already have on staff to determine what skills have made them successful.  And finally, work closely with your staffing agency and provide as much detail as possible.

Step #2: Work with an experienced staffing agency.
Find an agency that has experience in your industry.  Not only will an experienced staffing agency know where to look to find the right person, but they will also be able to help you determine things like an appropriate pay rate for a particular position.

Step #3: Provide a solid orientation and training program.
Include information such as working hours, breaks and lunch schedules, any safety regulations or company rules, and contact information for direct supervisors.  You may also want to assign a core staff member or supervisor to help orient the temporary employee.  Also, find out what type of training and orientation your staffing agency can provide.  Good staffing agencies will offer guidance on how to best bring temporary employees up-to-speed so they can hit the ground running – and they may even conduct initial training and orientation for you.

Step #4: Communicate clearly and openly.
Make sure your temporary employees understand what’s expected from them.  Encourage employees to ask questions and make sure they know to whom they should direct those questions.

Step #5: Check in regularly.
Be sure to take a minute or two at several points throughout the first day to check in and gauge progress.  Set specific days/times you plan to check in throughout the week to answer any questions and monitor progress.

Bringing a temporary employee on board at your company can offer a host of benefits – as long as that employee is managed properly.  And from our experience, hard-working and properly managed temporary employees often become leading candidates for full-time openings.

If you’re interested in hiring temporary employees or just want to learn more about how temporary staff can help your company, contact A.R. Mazzotta today.  As a local, full service staffing agency serving Connecticut employers for over 40 years, we can deliver the flexible staff you need without increasing your permanent workforce.

Most of us today are conditioned to look for the best possible price.  In most cases, this makes good economic sense.  But when it comes to staffing services, the company offering the lowest prices isn’t necessarily going to deliver the best value.

Here are a few good reasons why shopping around for the lowest-priced temporary employees might not be the wisest use of your staffing dollars:

• To offer you the lowest price, a staffing service may be forced to cut back on the quality and amount of service they provide.  They may not be able to afford the same depth of recruiting and screening.  As a result, they may have more difficulty finding the right candidates for your specific needs.
• Because of simple supply and demand, the staffing agencies that offer better wages to their temporary employees will most likely get the more talented, skilled, reliable and experienced applicants.  Any staffing firm can find a “warm body” to fill your position.  But finding a quality employee that truly fits your organization may be too crucial to risk – especially for what may boil down to a few cents per hour.
• Not getting the right person for the job can have very costly ramifications.  For example, a temporary employee who is less than qualified for the position can cause the following unforeseen expenses:
  - additional time (money) up front to adequately orient and train the temporary
  - increased supervision for a less qualified temporary
  - mistakes and reworks – the time, money and materials involved in re-doing the work of a less qualified temporary
  - poor productivity – the amount of work a sub-par employee fails to complete (compared to a qualified individual)

The bottom line is, many things in business aren’t worth risking.  The quality of your human capital is definitely one of them.

A.R. Mazzotta Employment Specialists:  the Best Staffing Value for Connecticut Employers
When it comes to the quality of A.R. Mazzotta’s candidates, you get what you pay for – skilled, reliable, hard-working and experienced people who truly fit your needs.  Rest assured, we will always deliver the best value for your staffing dollar.

After an extremely difficult year for the domestic and international economies, business leaders worldwide are looking for signs of growth.  The staffing industry is a good place to start.

Why?  According to the American Staffing Association, the staffing industry has long been considered both a coincident economic indicator and a leading employment indicator.  In other words, changes in the staffing industry occur at the same time as changes in the overall economy; changes in staffing industry employment occur before changes in overall employment.

But new ASA research (statistical analyses of 36 years of government data) has further refined the relationship between the staffing industry and the economy as a whole:

• Temporary help employment is a strong coincident economic indicator when the economy is emerging from a recession.  This suggests that a sustained upturn in temporary help would signal the end of the current recession.
• Staffing industry employment is a strong leading indicator for total nonfarm employment by about three months when the economy is emerging from a recession.

Bottom line, the results suggest that a sustained upturn in temporary and contract staffing employment would signal the end of the current recession.  Additionally, total nonfarm employment would begin to grow about three months later.

Want to learn more?
Visit the American Staffing Association’s website to view and download reference documents that detail this research.  To learn more about the services and benefits A.R. Mazzotta offers, please visit our website.

As a manager, you know that empowered employees:

• have the authority, and take the initiative, to make sound business decisions;
• are energetic, passionate and committed to doing a great job;
• are creative and innovative problem solvers;
• continually strive to improve quality, productivity and morale;

all because they feel personally rewarded for doing so.

But while the benefits of empowerment are clear, the steps to creating an empowered workplace may not be.  Use these quick tips to get your business started on the right path:

1. Understand what empowerment really is.  Empowerment isn’t something you do to people.  It’s an environment you create by giving employees goals, information, feedback, training and positive reinforcement.
2. Identify an opportunity for empowerment.  Start small.  Create a work team by selecting a few key employees who have the right skills, knowledge and resources to complete a small test project.  This project should be challenging enough to allow your staff to grow and take on additional responsibilities.
3. Set clear expectations.  Let your employees know what to do and how to do it.  Factors to consider include:  deadlines, channels for sharing information, methods for delegating authority, and ways to check progress / measure success.
4. Provide decision-making guidelines.  Provide clear instructions for when and how to make good decisions.  Explain when it’s okay to the take initiative and when employees should check with team members first.
5. Encourage open communication.  Information sharing is a critical component of an empowered workplace.  Create an atmosphere in which employees feel comfortable expressing concerns and sharing new ideas.
6. Establish accountability.  Provide the advice, perspective and guidance your team needs, but require them to create and manage their own solutions.  If mistakes are made, do not step in and fix them – use them as opportunities for employees to learn.
7. Let go.  Tough as it may be, don’t micromanage.  Once you’ve established clear expectations and guidelines for the project, it’s time to take your hands off the wheel.
8. Provide positive reinforcement.  For empowerment to permanently take hold in your organization, your employees have to want to do it.  So celebrate the successes (however small) your employees have while working on the test project.  Provide the feedback they need to feel respected and valued in their efforts.
9. Review results, then take it to the next level.  Once the project is complete, assemble your team for a debriefing.  How did the group do?  What worked?  What didn’t?  Use the lessons learned to develop a more comprehensive plan for getting your whole company on the road to empowerment.

An Empowered Workplace Starts with Great People

A.R. Mazzotta Employment Specialists can deliver the talented office, professional, technical and industrial staff you need to create an empowered workplace.

Complaints.  Conflicts.  Crises.

As managers, we all have days when we want to just close the office doors and shut ourselves off from our employees.  But as tempting as it may sound, adopting a “do not disturb” management style comes at a price.  Over time, isolating yourself from your staff can lead to disconnected and resentful employees, lowered productivity and a toxic corporate culture.

Fortunately, you can easily avoid management pitfalls like these by staying approachable.  Use the following quick tips to keep your team happy, motivated and working for you:

• Leave your door open.  A manager who does most of his or her work behind closed doors can leave employees feeling alienated and cut-off.  So whenever possible, try to keep your office door wide open whenever possible.  While it may increase potential distractions, an open door also sends the clear – and essential – message that you’re there for your staff when they need you.
• Chat up your staff.  Create an environment where workers feel you take an interest in them beyond the work they do.  A simple “Good morning, how was your weekend?” will make employees feel like you care.  If they believe you care, they’ll regard you with more respect and perform better for you.
• Set your employees up for success.  As much as possible, give staff members sufficient lead-time to complete projects or tasks.  Ensure that all assignments are explained carefully.  Specify what needs to be done, by whom and within what time frame.  Make yourself available for guidance when needed, and answer employees’ questions in a way that will help them accomplish the goals you have set for them.
• Don’t punish the messenger.  It’s easy for employees to share good news with you.  But to succeed as a manager, you need to know the good, as well as the bad and the ugly.  Make sure your staff members know that they can come to you with potential problems or suggestions on how to improve their processes.  Show them you realize that because they’re the ones on the front lines, doing the day-to-day work, their perspective and insights are invaluable.

Our Door is Always Open

Do you have a staffing question or concern?  Contact us today.  At A. R. Mazzotta, you can always approach us for the expert staffing advice and information you need.

Have you ever paid attention to car manufacturers’ ads?  They show you models that are loaded with extras and then entice you with prices that seem too good to be true – and they usually are.  Because what those numbers in bold print don’t include are all the fees, taxes and options that can literally double your true costs.

It’s the same with hiring.  While you may be tempted to estimate your cost-per-hire based solely on advertising expenses, this figure is only a small part of your true costs.  For a more accurate appraisal, consider the following factors:

HR Time

• Developing job descriptions
• Preparing and placing / posting ads
• Reviewing résumés
• Telephone screening candidates
• HR interviewing
• Conducting assessments and skills testing
• Performing drug tests and reference checks
• Processing paperwork

Other Costs

• Cost of advertising (classifieds, job boards, other online posting)
• Legal costs
• Management interview time
• Opportunity costs (time HR and hiring managers could be spending on other productive activities)
• Costs of vacancy in the position
• Costs of a bad hire (all the costs involved with replacing a new hire who doesn’t work out)

The Value of Recruiting Services
When it comes to direct hires, staffing firms offer tremendous advantages to employers.  The staffing service assumes the vast majority of the hiring costs and only charges a fee when and if you hire a candidate they provide.  Direct placement services provide the following benefits:

• Fixed costs of hiring
• Minimal disruption to the organization and no loss of focus
• Dedicated, experienced recruiting specialists who can accurately identify the best candidates
• Ability to directly recruit top candidates (even those who work for your competitors)
• Access to the staffing firm’s extensive candidate database, as well as regional and national recruiting networks
• Satisfaction guarantees

A.R. Mazzotta Employment Specialists – A Better Way to Hire
Hiring on your own can be an expensive, time-consuming and frustrating process.  So why do it on your own?  Contact A.R. Mazzotta today.  Our dedicated recruitment specialists will make your next hire a success – guaranteed.