According
To Danny
Danny Cahill…I
know everyone has heard of Danny, one of the most well-known and popular (per
NAPS) trainers in our industry since 1990. When I got a call recently telling me
of a web-based service offered by his company I knew immediately I wanted to
share this with the Fordyce readers. AccordingToDanny.com is a subscription
service offering more training information and materials than I believe I have
ever seen at one site. I spent some time on the site one weekend and wanted to
report my findings.
This web site
offers four services and only one of them is members only. One area for both
members and non-members is Webcasts, which contains both live and on-demand
meetings. These are training sessions held over the Internet using browser
sharing technology. You simply log onto a website with a user name and password
and join the session. Webcasts on counter-offers and closing are a couple that I
noticed. These sessions can be attended by anyone, although members do get a
pricing discount. Also, the price is per computer, not attendee, so you can pay
for one session then have any number of people sit around the PC for the
session.
Want a live
session? Go to Danny LIVE! Where Danny offers in-person, scheduled retreats at
various locations and also offers private in-house training sessions and
customized one-on-one mentoring services.
Let’s not
forget the retail Store. Anyone can purchase a wide variety of training
materials on-line in this area. Books, CD’s, videos, and DVDs are available.
There are materials from Bill Radin on this site as well.
In the members
only area there is actually a bit too much information to cover in this article
but I will do the best I can.
Sound
Bites - This is an area where you can listen to prepared rebuttals for many
different recruiter situations over your PC speakers. Listen to rebuttals on
client management, marketing, and recruiting, including a great script on
candidate debriefing.
Training
Library - Another area filled with documents to help you make placements. Topics
include planning, marketing, objections, job orders, recruiting, end game, and
retained searches. You can read them online or print them off for reference.
Buzzwords
– An exhaustive alphabetical listing of day-to-day buzzwords used in our
business as it pertains to specialized niche industries. These are words you
need to know and use. Included also is a buzzword of the day. Do you know “bancassurance”?
Document
Registry – A listing of commonly used documents in our industry. Why
“reinvent the wheel” or pay expensive attorney fees when you can download
these as part of your membership? This area contains examples of offer letters,
fee agreements, split agreements, retainer agreements, confidentiality
agreement, and many more.
Download
the documents and contracts of top billers.
Another
area of interest is an entire section for Managers/Owners only. Do you know how
to put together a sales contest? Proper fee collection methods? Legal issues
pertaining to employment? Internal fee policies? And too many more to list here.
There
is also an “Ask Danny” section, a nice touch. Any member can post a question
to the master and get a response. You can also view all of the questions and
answers from other members at any time. There are questions and answers on
closing, fees, ethics, non-competes, objections, jobs orders and a multitude of
other categories.
Also
included in the Members Only area is the “Industry Voices” section. Are you
interested in the thoughts and comments of our industry’s big billers? Check
out interviews with members of the exclusive Pinnacle Society. In this section
you can also locate listings of industry trainers for any of your specific
needs.
Another
nice touch is Danny’s built-in numbers tracking system. Everyday, members can
enter their numbers for marketing/recruiting calls, presentations, job orders,
sendouts, placements, and billings and the site will automatically keep a log of
your activity and send you a report on a regular basis. I learned long ago that
if you do not track your activity numbers then you have no idea what to do when
things are not going your way.
Anyone
interested in any of Danny Cahill’s comprehensive training should visit this
site. He offers is all here. Live…Internet…Books/CDs/DVDs. Something for
everyone. The cost for the members-only portion of this site is just under $90
per month per user. I want to thank Bob Roggeveen, Director of Operations for
AccordingToDanny, LLC, for his assistance with this article. Anyone who would
like a free site walkthrough with Bob can contact him via voice at 203-439-0267
or via email at bob@accordingtodanny.com.
SGA
Executive Tracker
This month I
was happy to have the opportunity to review a fairly new (1/05) web-based
recruiting and research tool, SGA Executivetracker,
by Sheila Greco Associates. Over the years I have reviewed several similar
services, among them Zoom (nee Eliyon), SearchExpo, and TechNames to name a few
but I truly liked the simplicity of this site, as well as how well the
information is laid out for the user. SGA is similar to the competition in that
is offers subscription-based access to a proprietary database of companies and
contacts. It differs, however, in that their database of contacts are not simply
culled from the Internet but offers information culled from their 16
years of research.
This
interface is very easy to navigate and returns results very quickly. At present
they state they have over 4200 companies in their database, which currently focuses on the largest US-based companies.
Each company has an impressive listing of contacts, starting with the top
executive and going lower echelon from there.
When you first
log in you are given an interface offering you to start an industry drilldown
(for recruiting purposes). The industry list includes Finance/Insurance/Real
Estate; Retail Trade; Agriculture/Forestry/Fishing; Wholesale Trade;
Construction; Services; Mining; Manufacturing; and
Transportation/Gas/Communication/Electric/Sanitary Services.
For the
purposes of this review I chose to click on the link to Retail Trade. This give
me a page with a number of sic codes with associated sub-industries to the
retail market. Randomly, I clicked on SIC 53 – General Merchandise Stores and
was presented with a list of 59 companies classified in that SIC category
including 7-11, Big Lots, Costco and many others. Clicking on the Big Lots entry
I am presented with the description and contact information for that company. I
also note they have a number of other SIC classifications if I need to expand my
original search. Their website is also listed. A nice touch is a listing of
their competitors at the bottom of the page. There is an icon on the page,
“View SGA Contacts”. If I click on that button I see 77 Big Lots contacts,
starting with Steve Fishman, Chairman and CEO and going down the list to Jay
Caudhill, Mgr., Merchandise
Planning Analysis. From this page, all
contacts have a job title, a department and a telephone number associated with
them. Also from this page you can drill down one step further. Clicking on the
icon next to Donald Mierzwa, the Executive VP of Store Operation, I see a
biography for this person. I clicked on several of these individual contact
pages and noted some have more information than others, which would be common
for this type of service.
The above is the
most straightforward use of this service but by no means the only way to use it.
They have a couple of other search components. One is the Company Search. Simply
type in the name of any company and you will get the main company like we did
with Big Lots above. If you do not know how to spell the name of the company you
are looking for you can also look up a company alphabetically from their Alpha
Index.
You can also
perform a Contact Search using parameters for Job Function, Company Name, Last
Name, Industry, and State and you can also search using more than one of these
limiters. I typed in Human Resources and found 4677 HR contact in the database,
probably too many to start with. To pare the list down I added an industry,
Accident and Health Insurance, and was presented a much more manageable contact
list of 25 people. I could have also added any search parameter that I listed
above to zero in on the next call I wanted to make.
I
need to mention all the contacts in the database are telephone verified by the
SGA staff. There is also a great feedback tool whereas you can request a company
be added to the database, report errors and missing data, and request custom
research or contact with a staff member. Pricing for this service runs $4995 per
year for a single license and $5995 per year for two seats, with further discounted pricing available at
multiple user levels.
Anyone in the
market for an excellent on-line passive candidate sourcing tool should
definitely check this service out. I want to thank Anne Scofield. Business
Development Associate with Sheila Greco Associates for her help with this article. Anne can
be reached via email at ascofield@sheilagreco.com
or via voice at 518-843-4611 ext. 234. You can also visit the Sheila Greco
website at www.sheilagreco.com.
MedJobsNow.com
This is an FYI
from an email that may be of interest to any healthcare recruiters.
MedJobsNow.com is a site catering to “Top Healthcare Candidates” per their
email. I took a look at their website, www.medjobsnow.com
and couldn’t locate any information on statistics or pricing but for anyone
that recruits this type of individual it may be worth you while to investigate
this site a bit further.
Net-Temps
Press Release
Advanced
Resume Search Capabilities for Recruiters
I
recently received this press release from the people at Net-Temps, the venerable
online job boards and resume database company. From their email:
North
Chelmsford, Mass., September 01, 2005 -
Net-Temps, the leading online job board for staffing companies, announced today
it has implemented more advanced search features for its resume search database.
Recruiters now have the ability to toggle between the Net-Temps resume bank, the
extensive archived resume bank and resumes stored in the recruiter’s Candidate
Manager. In addition, stronger Boolean keyword search functionality has been
incorporated to produce more refined, precise search results. Lastly, the entire
search processing time has been dramatically reduced so that results appear much
faster than previously. Recruiters still have the ability to use the Quick
Search and Power Search options.
Tip
MS/Outlook
– Rules Wizard
Spam definitely
takes a lot of the fun and productivity gains out of emailing for most of us. It
remains a major problem and time waster for us all. Spam blockers do help but
are not at all fool proof. I recently started using an MS/Outlook tool called
the Rules Wizard, and wanted to share my experience with you as it has helped me
cut down on the arduous task of deleting unwanted emails. Part of the problem is
that many spam blockers block email addresses. You may have noticed these days
the spammers don’t use one email address any longer. I might get four emails
with the same subject line but they are from four different email addresses.
Other times, I might get six emails with different subject lines and different
email addresses but the same message. These are ways the spammers try and beat
the system.
I have received
spam for mortgage applications, diet wonders, movie rentals, discount
medications, bigger this for males, bigger that for females, singles/dating, you
know what dysfunction, surveys, health plans, subscriptions, web hosting,
business strategies, vocational schools, training/seminars, and too many more to
even mention…and that is all just in the last 30 minutes.
The Rules Wizard is easy to use. In the version of Outlook I use you simply to the Tools menu item and select Rules Wizard. A dialog box pops up that is fairly self-explanatory. The open box contains all the rules you have entered. Yours will be blank if this is your first use. Click on new and you will see you are able to create rules for incoming mailed based on at least a dozen types of criteria. This program is not at all limited to spam relief but as far as it relates to spam you are easily able to filter out emails with words or phrases contained in either the subject line or the body of the email. I first created a new Outlook folder (File/Folder/New Folder) called “Junk” and have created rules that automatically rout all new messages meeting my keyword criteria to this new folder. It has removed over 600 unwanted emails in the last two weeks alone. That has saved me a lot of time deleting these emails. Alas, it is not foolproof either as it has removed at least a few valid messages that I have had to move back into my inbox. So, if you use this tool do check your Junk folder regularly to make sure nothing made it in there is error.