Resourcing Circle launches advertising campaign

Resourcing Circle has just finalised the latest versions of its online banner and newsletter adverts. In both adverts we aim to communicate the key facts about Resourcing Circle that:

• Resourcing Circle enables organisations to create talent pools of contractors
• Organisations can use Resourcing Circle to track the performance of their contractors
• Recruiters and Resourcing Managers can sign up to Resourcing Circle for free.

Both of these adverts will begin being shown on the Onrec website and newsletter from today.

You can see the adverts below. Let us know what you think.

Banner advert

Newsletter advert

Resourcing Circle Enhancements Make it Easier to Build a Talent Pool of Temporary Staff and Contractors

Resourcing Circle has launched an enhanced version of their software which enables companies to build internal talent pools of reviewed contractors and temporary staff. Resourcing Circle automates the process of capturing reviews of contractor performance, storing up-to-date contractor CVs and sharing this information throughout an organisation.

The enhancements to the Resourcing Circle software (http://www.resourcingcircle.com) are designed to enable companies to make better use of the data held in their contractor talent pool and to allow them to increase the number of contractors included in their pool.

One of the key enhancements provides Recruiters and Resourcing Managers with reporting on the contractors which are being used throughout their organisation. This reporting makes it easy to get information on the numbers of contractors working in different parts of an organisation, to track how they’re performing and to identify which recruitment agencies provide the best performing contractors. Resourcing Circle’s Founder and Chief Executive Errol Forbes said: “When we spoke to Resourcing Managers they said that having information on how a specific contractor performed is great. However, they often had difficulty knowing how many contractors were working for their organisation, which departments they were working in or what their average contractor performance levels were like. This is why we decided to add a reporting dashboard which brings this information together in one place.”

The software enhancements also make it easier for Resourcing Managers to manage international contractor resource pools. In total the software now includes regional data for 33 countries. This enables Recruiters, Resourcing Managers and contractors based anywhere from Hong Kong to Edinburgh to New York can make full use of the software.

To help Recruiters and Resourcing Managers understand how they can benefit from the Resourcing Circle software, a demo video has been added to the Resourcing Circle website. Also, Recruiters and Resourcing Managers can sign-up to the free basic version of the software by visiting the Recruiter Sign-up page on the Resourcing Circle website, http://www.resourcingcircle.com/neworganisation.

About Resourcing Circle
The Resourcing Circle online software enables companies to build internal talent pools of reviewed contractors and temps. This saves money on recruitment agency fees & improves the quality of contractors hired. To find out more visit the Resourcing Circle website or the Resourcing Circle blog – http://blog.resourcingcircle.com or follow Resourcing Circle on Twitter – @Rescircle.

Resourcing Circle adds enhanced contractor reporting functionality

Resourcing Circle has just released a software update which provides Recruiters and Resourcing Managers with enhanced reporting on their usage of contractors and temporary staff. The reporting functionality is combined into a contractor reporting dashboard which provides a graphical overview of contractor usage and performance together with the ability to drill down into more detailed information.

Resourcing Circle Founder & CEO Errol Forbes said: “The introduction of the reporting dashboard is in response to comments from Resourcing Managers saying that they had difficulty getting accurate information on the number of contractors within their organisation and on how those contractors were being used”. The reporting dashboard is designed to assist companies in moving to a situation where they have a centralised contractor hub which provides easy access to all of their key information about contractor usage.

Information that Resourcing Managers are able to access via Resourcing Circle’s contractor reporting dashboard includes:

• A historic and forward-looking overview of the contractor assignments within their organisation
• An overview of the performance ratings allocated to their contractors
• Rankings of their recruitment agencies based on the performance ratings of the contractors that they provided
• Detailed information (e.g. cost, ratings, duration, etc) about the assignments carried out within a particular time period or for a specific part of the business.

The introduction of the contractor reporting dashboard is a significant step towards Resourcing Circle’s goal of helping companies effectively and efficiently manage their contractor workforce.

If you would like to know more about Resourcing Circle then please visit the Resourcing Circle website – www.resourcingcircle.com.

Opportunities created by Agency Workers Regulations

The Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) are scheduled to come into effect in Q4 2011. The majority of Recruiters and HR Managers are aware that the regulations will require temporary workers to be treated similarly to permanent employees (although most aren’t aware of the details). Indeed, there has been significant media coverage about the likely negative impact of AWR.

However, as with most change, the introduction of AWR is likely to also present organisations with opportunities, as well as challenges. The key is likely to be whether organisations are able to identify these opportunities and are prepared to make the changes necessary to benefit from them.

One area of potential opportunity is likely to come from the core fact that AWR forces organisations to equalise the basic working and employment conditions offered to their permanent and temporary workforce. The negative consequences of these additional obligations have been heavily documented – increased pay bill, additional admin, the need to pay bonuses to temps. However, on the positive side, this could present an opportunity for organisations to include temporary workers in the workforce management systems and processes that were previously reserved for their permanent employees (e.g. performance management, pre-employment screening, performance related pay, etc). As it has done with permanent staff, the use of these systems and processes with temporary workers could generate real benefits in both in terms of workforce quality and cost.

In the past, temporary workers were often intentionally excluded from the systems and processes used by permanent staff for fear of inadvertently giving them employment rights. However, as under AWR temporary workers will now automatically obtain many of these rights, organisations have an opportunity to look again at which workforce management systems and processes could be usefully rolled out to their temporary workers. The key step is that organisations will need to start thinking about AWR as a potential source of opportunity rather than just as a problem which needs to be overcome.

Post written by Errol Forbes who works for the Contractor Talent Bank Software Company, Resourcing Circle.

The Resourcing Circle demo video

We’ve created a demo video which provides Recruiters (and contractors) with an overview of how the Resourcing Circle tool works and the benefits of using the software. The video shows how reviews and assignments are entered, the information which is visible to contractors and how Resourcing Circle enables Recruiters to search their talent pool to find contractors who meet their resourcing needs.

The video runs for less than 4 minutes, so why not watch it now and see how you can benefit?

Will Recruiters benefit from the growth of Quora?

Recently there has been a lot of press about Quora and its potential use as a place for Job Seekers to showcase their knowledge and for Recruiters to find talent. For Recruiters a major advantage of Quora is that users’ responses to an individual’s answers and questions can provide a good indication of a candidate’s reputation and authority within a particular subject area.

Quora’s user base is currently small (but growing rapidly). Therefore, I think that the key question is; how will the site deal with growth? – Both in terms of user numbers and topics covered. Quora’s main attractions are 1) it currently has answers to some very interesting questions and 2) the credibility of the people who have been providing answers. This has given the site a significant amount of authority within some circles – particularly within the tech and start-up scene.

Growth and increased topic coverage could make the site more useful to the average user. However, the downside is that there is likely to be a reduction in the quality of the answers provided (and probably in the quality of questions asked). Therefore, depending on how Quora grows, two potential paths are for the site to become a widely used information source like Wikipedia or a magnet for spam and self-promotion like many LinkedIn discussion groups. Given the large amount of funding the site has already received – $11m at last count – it’s going to be interesting to watch which path Quora goes down and, depending how it works out, Recruiters just might have another potential source of candidate information.

Post written by Errol Forbes who works for the Contractor Talent Bank Software Company, Resourcing Circle.

Why large companies need a central contractor hub

Most big companies use a large number of contractors and temporary staff. For example, at any point in time, a typical FTSE 100 company can easily be using a 1,000 plus contractors. These contractors are usually spread out across a variety of business units, performing a wide range of roles and often located in different countries.

The spread and variety of companies’ contractor usage means that often companies will not have accurate information on their contractor workforce. The causes of this lack of information are varied and can include departments using different IT systems, non-aligned contracting processes or differing recruitment strategies. The end result is that companies often don’t have basic information about their business, such as how many contractors or temps are working for them. In general, a lack of contractor related information leads to three different types of business problem.

• Lack of workforce planning information: Not having baseline data on your company’s contractor and temp population results in management lacking the information necessary to plan for the future (How can you plan your journey when you don’t know where you’re starting from?). This means that any workforce changes which the company attempts are less likely to succeed.
• Not obtaining best value: Not having a central store of information on contract and temporary assignments usually results in the business not getting value for money from its workforce expenditure. Recruitment agencies may be charging differing rates for the same type of contract resource and the business won’t be benefiting from the economics of scale available from sharing knowledge and workload.
• No contractor quality controls: If an organisation does not have a central database recording how contractors perform during assignments, then there is nothing to stop contractors, performing poorly while working for one department, being “let go”, and then being rehired by a different department within the same company. Similarly, without a central performance database, companies can’t benefit from systemically reusing contractors who perform well.

In relation to these issues the key question is how can companies obtain accurate timely information on their usage of contractors and temporary staff?

One answer is to implement a central contractor hub which is used across departments and holds key information about contractor assignments, performance and skills. This is the service that the Resourcing Circle software tool (www.resourcingcircle.com) is designed to provide. The specific benefits of using Resourcing Circle are:

• Resourcing Circle provides easy to use processes for capturing information on contractor assignments and on their skills and performance. This provides companies with the information they need to manage their contractor and temporary staff workforce.
• The Resourcing Circle software is designed to be able to work within organisations that use a range of different IT systems and resourcing processes. This enables the software to be quickly rolled out with a minimum of disruption.
• One potential obstacle to the introduction of a central contractor hub is resistance from Resourcing Managers within the business units. Resourcing Circle helps to overcome this by providing the individual business units with useful functionality such as the ability to search the company wide resource pool to find highly rated contractors. This enables business unit Resourcing Managers to buy into and benefit from the roll out the Resourcing Circle software.
• As Resourcing Circle is an internet based tool it enables contractors to access and update their skills information even after they’ve finished working for your organisation. This means that companies can continue to have access to up to date versions of contractors’ CVs even years after they’ve finished working for their organisation.

If you would like to know more about the Resourcing Circle software please visit www.resourcingcircle.com.

How Resourcing Circle can save companies over £100k

Most organisations use recruitment agencies when engaging contractors. Typically agencies charge a mark-up of around 15% when a company uses them to find and engage a contractor. For a contractor on £400 per day this works out as the agency receiving £60 per day in gross margin. Most recruitment agencies offer a lower mark up of around 4% if the client company does the work of finding the contractor and the agency is only responsible for managing the contractual and payment relation between the end user organisation and the contractor.

This different between the 15% mark-up charged if the agency finds the contractor and the 4% mark-up charged if the end user organisation finds the contractor means that for a typical contract a company can save £44 per day by sourcing the contractor themselves. Over the life of a 6 month contract this works out to a saving of £5,500.

The total saving achieved by an organisation will depend on how many contractors they source directly. However, we estimate that, by using Resourcing Circle to identify high performing contractors that they’ve used previously, a company which engages 200 contractors per year could source 20 of these directly and save £110,000.

The financial savings possible are even greater when we factor in the reduced time needed to onboard a contractor who has previously for your organisation. Also, in addition to the financial benefits, by using Resourcing Circle companies can reuse the best contractors and avoid rehiring those who perform poorly. This will enable companies to achieve higher quality while also controlling costs.

If you’d like to know more about the Resourcing Circle software please visit – www.resourcingcircle.com.

How Resourcing Circle was born

I decided to develop the Resourcing Circle software after spending 4 years working as a contractor. During this time I realised that companies had no structured way to record the performance of their contractors and temps. This resulted in contractors who were on hundreds of pounds per day performing poorly, being “let go”, and then being rehired by a different department in the same organisation. Also, I saw that organisations were unable to tap into the pool of talented people that they had used previously. This meant that they would often spend money on recruitment agency fees to hire new, untested individuals, because they were unaware of proven experienced contractors who had worked for other parts of their organisation.

My thinking was that it must be possible to build an online tool that would firstly allow companies to capture and use reviews about their contractors and secondly would enable them to remain in contact with, and reuse, contractors that they’d used previously.  After over a year of market research, legal investigation, design work and software development this led to Resourcing Circle being born.

Resourcing Circle free recruiter package

Resourcing Circle has launched a package which enables recruiters to use the Resourcing Circle software for free.  The free package includes the full Resourcing Circle functionality and does not have a time limit or expiry date. Therefore, its ideal for smaller organisations who want a simple, cost effective way manage their contractors, temporary workers and freelancers.  The only restrictions that apply are limits on the number of assignments and recruiter accounts that an organisation can create. Therefore, the free package is also useful for larger organisations who want to try the Resourcing Circle software before signing up to the full unlimited package.

Visit the Pricing page on the Resourcing Circle website to find out – www.resourcingcircle.com/pricing