Abstract
At present, placement agencies play a critical role in assisting those seeking for employment opportunities either for the first time or for those who want to advance their career. The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list came out at the beginning of the year. It is important for our placement firm to establish a good working relationship with these companies so that we can succeed in business. Most of these companies have announced several positions that need to be filled in the near future. These companies are particularly good places where the graduates from Saint Leo University can seek for employment opportunities.
More so, our employment agency can greatly benefit if it can establish an exclusive relationship with some of them, such as SAS, Edward Jones, and Google. This is because these companies have maintained an organizational culture that ensures that the employees are satisfied at their place of work. In these companies, employees are treated with all the respect they deserve without humiliating them unnecessarily.
Introduction
Currently, employment agencies play a crucial role in assisting those seeking for employment opportunities for the first time or those who want to advance their career. Employment or placement agencies are corporations that find jobs for individuals or individuals for jobs by providing an orientation of finding the jobs and creating a pool of screened candidates.
They achieve this through constant advertising and referrals from satisfied candidates and potential employers. In most cases, the person looking for employment pays the placement fees.
However, in other instances, the employer caters for the expenses based on the acceptance of the job seeker. The employment agencies serve various clients, ranging from first-time job seekers to those in the executive level. Generally, the agencies would screen out for the best candidates to fill the vacant positions, whereas the employer makes the final decision on which candidates to recruit.
The FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For List came out this year in mid-January. It is interesting that most of these companies have numerous job openings and are looking forward to hire more employees soon. Nearly all firms strive to be named in the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For list.
This is because when they have job openings, they receive twice as many applications as firms that are not found on the list. In addition, they enjoy remarkable employee turnover levels which are less than half those of their main competitors in the market. In short, satisfied employees fuel corporate profits as individuals love to work in places where they are treated well.
In a study, researchers compared the organizational performance of Fortune’s 100-Best list with two sets of other corporations, a matched group and the broad market of publicly traded firms over a six-year period (Cascio & Boudreau, 2008, p.126).
They discovered that organization-level employee attitudes of the Fortune 100-Best were both highly positive and stable over time and that they had better Return on Assets and market-to-book value of equity than those of a matched comparison group. That research ascertained the significant association that exists between employee attitudes and organization-level performance.
Using various profitability indicators, which indicate the level to which the publicly traded 100-Best companies constantly outperformed the major stock indices from 1998 to 2003, the above figure illustrates that the Fortune 100-Best companies have better financial performance. Since individuals like to work for corporations that are financially successful, such employees will inevitably portray positive attitudes. Therefore, the analysis of the Fortune 100-Best list is essential for the success of an employment agency.
Importance of establishing a working relationship
Establishing a working relationship with the companies on the Fortune 100-Best list is important for enabling an employment agency to achieve its objectives. This is because it will make it easier for the agency to connect a job seeker with his or her prospective employer.
A working relationship with the companies would ensure that team spirit is upheld as all the parties would strive to work as a composite whole in meeting the requirements of one another. Ultimately, they would share knowledge concerning the best-qualified candidates to consider for positions, grow together, and co-operate with one another, thereby benefitting each other in the long run.
Currently, finding trustworthy employees is not easy, but the process can be made less taxing by seeking the assistance of a reputable employment agency. Employers have recognized the crucial responsibility that placement firms play in offering them with competent and highly trained workers. This crucial role can only be achieved when there is a good working relationship between the employers and the recruitment firms.
Job seekers ought to be cautious not to depend on every placement firm that they come across. Background checking on every prospective placement firm is important in establishing the ones that have a good working relationship with the successful companies listed by the Fortune magazine. Undertaking this is also beneficial in knowing the reputation of the agency since illegal employment and deployment to abusive employers are among the concerns that have been raised concerning some agencies.
As much as it is possible, job seekers should deal with agencies that have established trust, reputation, and confidentiality with employers. Placement firms ought to be experts in staffing. They should have the capability of corresponding experienced people to the most suitable employers.
This can only be achieved through development of a good working relationship. Thus, it is also essential for the placement firms to be easily reached through any means that is appropriate. Few people are able to find the best placement firms. Job seekers should always strive to undertake a comprehensive investigation on the employment companies available. On the other hand, through establishing a connection with prospective employers, the company should be able to give a list of job openings to the frustrated job seekers.
After finding a reputable agency, getting a reliable job should not be a daunting task. In the current work environment, some companies, as portrayed by the yearly Fortune 100-Best companies, have started to offer some benefits to their employees. These services are also useful since people are being advised to go for sustainable employment opportunities. The employment agencies always have the advantage of knowing the availability of these opportunities.
It is important to note that during adjustment stages in the economy, the effective functioning of the placement firms may be affected. This may make them unable to find employment opportunities to their clients. The strength or weakness in the growth of the economy of a country is not exclusive to the employment agencies.
This implies that if a job seeker is not receiving positive feedbacks, then he or she can consider using the services of a placement firm. This would widen his or her job-hunt and increase the chances of landing on a job. However, for the placement firms to achieve this, they have to develop good working relationship with the successful Fortune 100-Best companies.
Reputable placement firms usually have the professional contacts with companies that a job seeker may not be in a position to have. They assist one to professionally market his or her resume and offer preparatory services for someone going for a new job.
In addition, they provide increased exposure to job seekers since in most cases prospective employers are more impressed when recruiters introduce the candidates to them. Placement firms also play the crucial role of helping the new and inexperienced candidate negotiate a very reasonable and appropriate salary from the prospective employer whom they have developed a good working relationship with.
So, when the placement firms have developed a good working relationship with the successful companies, the process of finding suitable applicants for open positions would be more quickly, proficient, and cost-effective.
Employers always find it beneficial to focus on their core business requirements while leave the process of hiring new employees to the placement firms which have earned their trust. This trust will enable an employment agency to relate the experience of the job seeker to the requirements of the employer. Since the placement firms would be endowed with the responsibility of conducting employee searching, this can help them do their job better.
This is because they will be able to have a direct personal attention to the requirements, capabilities, and potential weaknesses of the candidates. In an instance when the placement firm has identified the weakness of the candidate, it can seek to correct that weakness by teaching the candidate how to fine-tune his or her interviewing skills, offering to edit resume and cover letter, and even facilitating personality or career tests when a candidate is not sure about his or her next career step.
Employment opportunities at Fortune 100-Best companies
The global business magazine, Fortune, picks the one hundred best companies, which are at least seven years old and have over one thousand U.S. employees, after going through a rigorous process.
The magazine collaborates with the Great Place to Work Institute to undertake the task of surveying employees in over three hundred companies on a yearly basis. Random samples of workers from every company are asked to take the survey, which asks questions appertaining to their attitudes about their management trustworthiness, job satisfaction, and comradeship at the place of work.
The results of the survey form sixty-six percent of the score of the participating company. The rest of the company’s rating is derived from its responses to the Great Place to Work Institute’s Culture Audit. This audit has detailed questions intended to evaluate the pay and benefit programs offered by the company. In addition, it also has a series of open-ended questions pertaining to recruitment, communication, and diversity within the environment of the company.
Figure 2: FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For (Fortune, 2010).
All the companies listed on this year’s Fortune 100-Best Companies to Work For list are potential employers for the Saint Leo’s graduates that our employment agency assist to find jobs. As pointed out in the earlier sections of this paper, these companies treat their employees fairly and, more so, they have numerous job openings that they require to be filled in the near future.
According to Fortune Deputy Managing Editor Hank Gilman, “All 100 companies on our list are currently hiring, many of them aggressively, leading to more than 96,000 open job positions expected in the next year” (SAS Institute, 2010, para.2).
For the companies to have been listed in the Fortune 100-Best list, they demonstrated competitive advantage, above-average management, and market leadership characteristics. Generally, the companies demonstrated competitive advantage attributes by providing superior services or products in the market, having strong brand names, and maintaining price leadership in the market.
Unquestionably, the companies had above-average management attributes as demonstrated by the satisfaction level of their employees. Since these companies would like to maintain their success story, they would inevitably recruit graduates from the Saint Leo University, which is known for producing competent candidates to the job market.
Establishing an exclusive relationship
Out of these companies, however, our employment agency should seek to establish an exclusive relationship with some of them. The first one is SAS, which moved from its previous number twenty position to the current position of one in the current coveted list.
The company was recognized because of its excellent employee benefits, such as high quality childcare facilitates and adequate coverage for sick employees, work-life balance, flexibility, and support to its employees. The company has appeared in the list thirteen times, seven times in top ten and five times in top five.
Fortune Deputy Managing Editor Hank Gilman said, “The most important considerations for this year’s list were hiring and the ways in which companies are helping their employees weather the recession” (SAS Institute, 2010, para.2). As many organizations around the world responded to the global recession by sacrificing employees and benefits to reduce costs in 2009, SAS took the opposite stance. The company had no layoffs and it maintained its employees’ benefits.
The company has been rewarded by having employee loyalty and overall success in the production of software that is used by many companies throughout the world in meeting their various requirements. If SAS can maintain its innovative culture, which is based on developing trust between the employees and the company, during tough economic period, then it is more likely to meet the expected when there will be increased economic growth.
The company provides about ninety-seven percent of Fortune 100-Best companies with business analytics software and services. The private software company, which has a surprisingly low turnover of 2%, has over eight thousand and over thirty-one thousand customer sites worldwide. It employs over five thousand individuals. Out of these, around half of the loyal employees are working at its corporate headquarter in Cary, North Carolina.
The second company that our employment agency should establish an exclusive relationship with is Edward Jones, which was number two on the prestigious list. Among the large-sized companies, it got the number one position. The company has appeared in the list since it was established in 1998, eight times in the top ten position, twice in the number one position, and twice in the number two position.
This shows that the company has maintained consistency in providing its employees with a good working environment. When naming the firm in the list, the Fortune editors said, “The investment adviser weathered the recession without closing one of its 12,615 offices or laying off a single employee. Salaries were frozen, but profit sharing continued” (Edward Jones, 2010, para. 4).
Edward Jones organizational culture ‘screams integrity’ in working with the individual investors. It has developed a profit sharing plan as well as considerable amount of employee ownership program. The program ensures that about twenty-five percent of the staff has partnership stakes within the company. It has a plausible management structure in which the company’s managers relate freely with the employees.
Moreover, the firm spends a considerable amount of resources on training its employees. It spends three percent of payroll and approximately one hundred and nine hours per employee on a yearly basis.
Despite the hard times that the financial-services industry has experienced in the previous years, Edward Jones managed to stay focused for the long-term. This was possible because the firm recognized that it is a partnership and made some difficult decisions to cut on expenses. However, the company respected its employees and did not send any of them away even in the trying times.
Every branch office of the firm has a single financial advisor and a single branch office administrator who work directly with nearly seven million of the company’s customers so as to understand their personal financial objectives. At present, the company has over six hundred vacant positions throughout the United States with the most candidates required to fill positions as financial advisors and branch office administrators.
The third company is Google, which was ranked at number four in the prestigious list. For the past three years, the company has appeared among the top five best companies because of its innovative benefits to its employees and flexibility.
Moreover, the company has given its employees the rare opportunity of pursuing ideas that challenge the status quo. As the company is still growing, it is making every effort to preserve the best elements of its culture that earned it the exciting recognition. Striving to cultivate employee satisfaction, Google shares certain characteristics with the most flourishing companies in the planet today.
Since the company recognizes that every employee is essential for its success, it offers individually tailored compensation packages as well as opportunity to earn other financial bonuses. The company has offices all over the world and despite this; the employees thrive in small, focused teams under high-energy environments. At present, the search engine king has more than one thousand job openings.
In conclusion, it is apparent that establishing a working relationship with all the companies in the Fortune 100-Best companies is integral for the success of our employment agency. A good working relationship would make it easier for a job seeker to connect with his or her potential employer and the employer would be hooked up to the best applicants to fill the open positions.
It is important to note that all the companies in the prestigious list are potential employers for the Saint Leo’s graduates since all of them have announced several job openings. However, out of these companies, our employment agency should seek to develop exclusive relationship with SAS, Edward Jones, and Google because of their commendable record of accomplishment.
Reference List
Cascio, W. F. & Boudreau, J. W. (2008). Investing in people: financial impact of human resource initiatives. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: FT Press.
Edward Jones (2010). Edward Jones Ranks No. 2 on FORTUNE Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For 2010” List. Web.
Fortune (2010). 100 Best Companies to Work For. CNNMoney. Web.
Great Place to Work Institute (2010). Better financial performance. Web.
SAS Institute (2010). SAS ranks No. 1 on FORTUNE ‘Best Companies to Work For’ list in America. Web.