We’ve been in the workforce for a – um – few years now. As graduation day approaches for thousands of college seniors we started thinking about what we wish we’d known on that long-ago day we donned our own caps and gowns.

Below are some things we wish we’d known “back then.”

1. We’d understand that our need to keep learning didn’t end the day we received our diplomas. Instead, we should have realized we would always need to keep learning. Whether new skills, an additional degree, or even just learning more about our mentors, colleagues and supervisors, we would always keep our “learning caps” on and understand that every experience is a learning experience.
2. We’d seek out mentors in our organizations. Whether our employers offered formal mentoring programs or not, we’d seek out individuals we admired for their knowledge, savvy and all-around acumen. We would never forget the importance of building a great career network.
3. We’d rarely eat lunch alone. What we mean by that is that we’d seek out individuals in all departments of our employer as well as professionals outside our organization and ask them to lunch at least once a week. Taking our cues from tip Number 2, we’d realize the importance of building a network.
4. We’d use our college’s career center more often. Career centers are almost always open to alumni to use for networking, researching and so on. We’d contact the employees there for advice, use our alma maters’ alumni career network more thoroughly and also be available to current students/new alumni as career resources.
5.  We’d watch our budget. In fact, we’d create an actual budget that included not only living expenses and funds to pay off our student loans, but we’d also put aside some monies – no matter how little – for the future (retirement and long-term goals such as purchasing a home, etc.).
6. Finally, when we found ourselves between jobs, we’d sign up with San Francisco staffing services such as Bayside Solutions. We’d understand that employment services could help us find work quickly and that even temporary gigs could turn into regular employment.

So, be smarter than we were and contact us today!

f you are in human resources, and you want to give your employees a voice, to really let them know that their opinions matter, there are several things you can do, according to business analyst Sherry Benjamins.

One is to have gatherings similar to town hall meetings where employees can communicate with each other and give their opinions to company leaders. One company followed up on these town halls by creating a website where employees could access the company’s business strategy and give their input.

Employees also need to be kept informed, especially during a downturn. They need to know what is happening and how the business intends to confront it. Without this, information is replaced by rumor.

Another way to emphasize employee involvement is by setting goals each quarter with employee input. They don’t have to be huge goals.

Recognition programs are also important to show workers that they are valued. Managers should be educated on how to recognize employees. Also, investing in employee training shows that they are valued within the company.

Another small way to show appreciation to employees is with a simple, handwritten  thank you note. It may seem a bit old fashioned today, but this seemingly minor courtesy can go a long way toward making employees feel valued.

Also, employees should be given the chance to tackle problems that face the business. This could be done by setting up teams with workers from different departments. You could post the problem to be solved on the company Intranet and then ask for volunteers. The team’s solutions could be advertised at a company-wide meeting. And if the team comes up with a good solution to the problem and is supported with solid analysis, it should be implemented.

Another way to show that you value your employees is by looking after their health and wellness. You can do this by setting up a wellness committee made up of volunteer employees. They can research healthcare plans that address wellness issues and even set up wellness activities.

Another way of showing how important your employees are to the company is by keeping them up to date on career opportunities at the firm. The company can provide information on career paths at the business, and an online job posting network. The company can offer career coaching to employees using mentors.

Want some more tips on how motivate regular as well as temporary employees? Contact Bayside Solutions. We’ve been recruiting great workers for some of San Francisco’s best employers since 2001 so you may count on the fact that we know a thing or two about employee motivation. Contact us today!

If you plan to look for work next year, you will have a lot of company. A recent survey of almost 31,000 American workers found that about two thirds of workers are planning to look for a new job next year, about 62 percent. A full 66 percent of workers in the 19 to 30 age range have indicated they plan to look for work in the coming year.

The survey interviewed workers worldwide. In the United States, about one third of all workers use social media for job information and job searches, according to the survey. Across the globe, more than 40 percent of all workers use social media for job hunting. And in the Asia Pacific region, almost 60 percent use social media for job searches.

The worker survey is done every year. In this year’s poll, almost 170,000 people in 30 countries took part. More than 31,000 of those were United States workers.

In a recent Gallup poll has reaffirmed what most people already know – despite an improving economy, employees are not all that happy at work.

The lackluster figures come from the Well-Being Index that Gallup puts together. There are six different categories that go into the index: life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities.

The index is now at 66 out of 100. And, of all the categories, work environment has fallen the most since the poll began. It now stands at 47, the lowest score of any of the categories.

The poll provides more support for what many already know, that with the downturn in the economy, workers are more concerned about their jobs, about their economic security, and being asked to do more with less at work, and, as a result, job satisfaction has taken a big hit.

While the job satisfaction news certainly isn’t good, it does show that there are opportunities for businesses who want to recruit good people. When the economy is booming, and employees are happy, it’s hard for a business to stand out among its competitors as a good place to work. But in a down economy, having a corporate culture that puts employees first makes the business a lot easier to get noticed, and makes it a lot easier for that business to attract talented workers who are looking for a  good work environment.

If you’re on the hunt for great workers for temporary or direct-hire assignments at your San Francisco-area company, contact Bayside Solutions. We’ve been sourcing, vetting and placing great workers for hundreds of companies since 2001 and we look forward to being of service for many years to come. Contact us today!

When looking for a job, you can work smart, work hard – or both! Here’s how to conduct a “smart” job search.

1.  Know where you want to go. Don’t go looking for “anything.” Instead, sit and have a talk with yourself and decide, based on your skills, background and goals, what kind of job you want and what kind of company you want to work for (large, small, government, start-up, etc.). Recruiters will toss into the “round file” the resumes of people who are looking for “a company/position where my skills will put to good use.” Be specific!
2. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Recruiters today are looking for specialists, especially in the tech arena. Look for jobs in which you have considerable experience (if you want to change careers, it can be done, but you’ll have to work hard to showing a hiring manager how your skills translate to his or her open position). Show a recruiter/hiring manager how you stand out from others with your background and skills.
3. Use social media to your advantage, or else the recruiter will use it for his. Recruiters today almost always check out your Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter feeds. Make sure yours present you in the best, most professional light. In fact, craft your social media presence to showcase your skills and background.
4. Always have an answer for why you left your previous position. This is especially important if you’ve had three jobs in four years, for example. There should be a compelling, legitimate reason for leaving a job, such as taking a position with more responsibility, the company shut down, leaving employment to take care of a sick relative, even taking a year to explore the world (be sure to show how your year-long journey has made you an even more attractive prospect to the hiring manager – you took classes in Joomla in Britain, you learned a French, etc.).
5.  Present yourself in interviews and in networking situations as professional. Craft the “30-second elevator speech” that succinctly yet thoroughly explains the skills and assets you bring to an employer.
6. Bring your resume to Bayside Solutions. We’re the Bay Area’s top staffing firm for IT and other technical professionals, offering you many temporary, temp-to-hire and direct-hire assignments with some of San Francisco’s top firms. Contact us today!

Most IT professionals didn’t have to worry about finding work during the recession. And if follow these 7 tips, you’ll never be without a job, no matter what the future holds.

1) Know your business

You may be your organization’s most talented developer or dedicated systems administrator. But if you don’t know what the business is selling or what service it’s providing, you’re not indispensable. Don’t look at things from strictly an IT perspective, but make sure you understand how your job relates to the business world around you.

2) Watch the bottom line

Your job isn’t just about systems, software or machines. It’s about helping your organization use technology to trim costs and increase efficiency. IT professionals need to focus on areas that either drive down costs, such as virtualization, cloud computing and converged networking, or on areas that help to generate revenue, such as social media, mobile marketing and SEO.

3) Get your head in the cloud

With so many traditional IT functions moving to the cloud, your company may no longer need you to flip switches, connect cables, or troubleshoot machines. But they’ll still need someone who can tell them what services are available, which ones are worth looking at and which ones they should avoid. And they’ll require people with expertise in managing a catalog of cloud services, handling subscribers, brokering agreements with cloud providers and intervening when problems arise.

4) Broaden your horizons

Besides maintaining mastery of your own tech domain, expand your skill set to include other areas of expertise. If a crisis arises in one of those areas—and the person responsible for handling it isn’t available—you may be able to step in and save the day. Plus, an employee who has more than one area of expertise is more valuable when a department is downsizing.

5) Be a translator.

Want to facilitate communication between IT and the business side, as well as earn a little goodwill in the process? Teach your co-workers to speak geek. Start a series of casual teaching sessions where you bring less savvy coworkers up to speed about the latest in tech. You can become the go-to guy for upper management when they need something technical explained.

6) Deal with data.

If your business users aren’t drowning in information now, they will be soon. Taming the data deluge will make you invaluable to any organization. IT people who can make sense of business data, safely store it, categorize it, retrieve it, and especially analyze it are highly valuable.

7) Make a name for yourself. The more people who know and rely on you—especially outside your department or organization—the harder it is to fire you. Look for projects and opportunities that cut across departments, because this builds your internal network — thus making you more valuable to the company.

And if you’re ready to practice those habits in a new and exciting position in the Bay Area, contact Bayside Solutions today!

For many employees, compliance training is a necessary evil, something that you just need to grit your teeth over and get through. And for the most part, that attitude carries over into outcomes – compliance programs generally are not very effective when it comes to time, money and results.

Businesses spend a lot of money on these programs. In 2010, for example, companies spent more than $170 billion on worker training and development programs, about 10 percent of which was for compliance training.

So, given that compliance training as it currently is organized could use a shot in the arm, what can be done to improve it?

The first thing to look at is the content. Does the material covered apply to real situations, real responsibilities and risks that people actually face on the job, rather than just a general overview of abstract concepts and generalities?

If workers need to learn straightforward facts and figures as part of the training, the information should be made available in written form, whether online or as a hard copy. There also should be some way for the workers to confirm that they have received the information, as well as follow up to the initial learning, with periodic reminders. Workers also should be able to ask questions and get answers. Doing this will help employees to better absorb the information, because it will make the training more of an ongoing enterprise rather than just a one-time data dump.

Any individual training session should revolve around only a few key themes or ideas, rather than introducing a laundry list of items. Also, the classes should give the workers the opportunity to put the learning into practice, through some type of simulation or role playing, for example, so that they can put their knowledge to use, further helping them absorb the information.

Also, the learning should receive reinforcement with follow-up notices, where key ideas are repeated and emphasized, so that the learning becomes a continual process. These reminders will help to prevent employees from falling back into old habits.

Bayside Solutions has been helping Bay Area companies find great temporary, temp-to-hire and direct-hire employees since 2001 and we look forward helping your firm in 2012 and beyond. Contact us today!

Human resource professionals who work to reduce employee turnover know that an employee’s manager is a key piece of the retention puzzle. Although keeping employees at a company ultimately involves more than just one person or incentive, managers have a big effect on whether workers stay or go.

It has been said that employees quit their bosses, not their jobs, and that quote has a lot of truth to it. Despite the rough economy, many workers are still leaving their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are no statistics on exactly why these people left their jobs, but Richard Finnegan of the Retention Institute suspects that bad managers had more than a little to do with it. The relationship that a manager creates with his workers is the prime factor in whether a worker will leave or stay, Finnegan says. Moreover, the people leaving were probably some of the best workers in the companies they left, Finnegan says. A recent survey has shown that 25 percent of top workers were looking for work last year, compared to just 15 percent in 2005.

Finnegan says that when companies have problems with retention, they usually go to their human resources department to develop some new policy or incentive to help tackle the problem. But these kinds of things are of little help when, instead, the companies should be getting their managers involved in the process.

To keep employees, there are no magic bullets, no simple solutions, according to human resource professionals. It takes an effort by many different people, and changing the culture of the organization. For example, at one retirement community, there was a problem retaining nursing staff. So, the human resources director, Jane Holda, conducted interviews to find out what factors were contributing to the turnover.

Then, the organization began a training program that focused on building trust among its managers and directors. The managers were held accountable for building trust with their workers, and this activity was incorporated into their performance review, Holda says. In addition, managers were asked to evaluate their own ethics and integrity, while workers were asked about managers’ approachability, how interested they were in employees’ problems, and whether they followed up on inquiries.

When you’re looking for reliable and skilled professionals for your Bay Area company, look no further than Bayside Solutions. We can source temporary and direct-hire workers for your assignment needs. We look forward to hearing from you!

The focus on social media has been for companies to send their message to the outside, attracting new talent or generating publicity. But in a development important for human resource departments, it turns out that companies increasingly are turning to social media in-house as a way to connect employees and tap the energy and creativity of the company workforce, according to David Ferris of Workforce Management.

One example of this has been at the giant grocery store chain SuperValue, which has about 135,000 employees spread over 44 states. Because it is such a huge organization, connecting people had become a problem, Ferris says. So the company set up a social media platform called Yammer which was used internally. It is helping the company boost sales, according to SuperValue officials. The company uses Yammer to set up working groups. These groups might consist of managers from similar departments, like liquor or deli, or managers whose stores serve similar markets, such as college towns.

A recent survey of Fortune 500 companies showed that almost three-fourths of them are planning to put more emphasis on social media.

But social media experts say to avoid problems with this technology, don’t put the cart before the horse; that is, don’t get so caught up in the kind of technology you are going to use and forget about the purpose you want your social media to serve. The technology doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you want to use it for. The first thing you need to do, they say, is set up goals for what you want to accomplish, and to make those goals as specific as possible – with specific problems and specific people.

Too often, what happens is that companies set up the social media without any overall purpose in mind. Workers then tend to post randomly and no real conversation really develops. Managers use it simply to issue orders. As a result it proves useless, leading management to abandon the entire idea.

But used effectively, social media can become a real change agent, as shown by SuperValue, generating good ideas from workers, Ferris says. It can also help to attract younger workers to the company, build loyalty among employees and promote a strong company culture.

If your San Francisco-area company needs skilled and reliable technology workers, contact a recruiter at Bayside Solutions. We can source, vet and place workers for your temporary, temp-to-hire and direct-hire needs. We look forward to hearing from you!

If you have a big HR project to do, don’t try and reinvent the wheel. That’s the message from Tim Sackett, a human resources specialist.

You need to take advantage of the work that has already been done, and then apply it to your particular goals and needs, he says. Usually, what gets in the way of adapting someone else’s plan is simple human nature – our pride is hurt if we cannot take ownership of any initiative. Sackett says get rid of that attitude, it’s inefficient. Don’t worry about pride, worry about the task at hand.

Usually, whatever human resources project you have in mind has already been done by a larger company, one with more resources to use. In fact, the other company probably already has designed it, tried it out, and reworked it until it got what it liked, Sackett says.

What Sackett says is the smart thing to do is to take advantage of the hard work others have already done that will help your company. He gives four steps for doing this, from the magazine Fast Company.

First, stop thinking that because a competitor has done it, you cannot. The important thing to consider is whether the plan works or not. Will it help your customers? What you need to do is take the plan and make it your own, tweak it and adapt it to your particular situation. But don’t try to go and make something brand new, from the ground up. It takes a great deal of time and resources to invent something completely new, and why do that when you already have a template at hand?

Also, you need to keep your long-range goals in mind. Make it clear to everyone in human resources where you want to take the department with the project, what your ultimate goal is, what you want to achieve.

Then, reach out to people who have done the kind of thing you would like to do. You may not be able to go to a direct competitor, but at non-competitors they will most likely be more than happy to talk to you about what they did and how they did it, what worked and what didn’t. It gives you the added advantage of being able to present to your leadership something you know has been tried and has worked.

Drawing up and implementing a human resource project is not easy, don’t make it harder than it has to be, Sackett says.

When your San Francisco-area company needs reliable top professionals contact Bayside Solutions. We can source, vet and place professionals for your short- and long-term temporary assignments, as well as find you great people for your direct-hire needs. Contact us today!

A recent survey of interest to human resource departments has found that employees are not getting on board with all of the healthcare investments being made by businesses.

The survey found that businesses are putting a lot of resources into helping their employees enhance their health, in areas such as health benefits, health programs in the workplace, and using other healthcare resources outside the company. But despite all of these efforts by the companies, employees have not taken the time or effort to learn about or get involved in the programs.

The study was done by the Midwest Business Group on Health. Midwest worked with five client companies employing more than 250,000 workers over a five-year period to compile the information.

The Midwest Business Group on Health (MBGH) is a non-profit, Chicago-based business coalition made up mostly of human resources and health benefits professionals  from more than 100 large, self-insured public and private employers. The coalition represents about three million people and more than $3 billion in healthcare benefits annually

To help companies get their workers more involved in their health, Midwest made a number of recommendations. It recommended that companies look at their corporate culture when putting healthcare programs in place at work so that these programs fit in with the culture at the company. Midwest also recommended that companies make efforts to improve their communication about healthcare not only with workers, but with the workers’ dependents and family members. Midwest also said companies need to offer more incentives as well to motivate workers to improve their health.

Also, Midwest recommended that companies make resources available to workers so that they can compare different health plans and actually see what their healthcare is costing them.

Midwest also recommended that companies develop initiatives to springboard off of clinical screening programs, such as tests for cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, and other conditions, to use the screenings to motivate employees to make lifestyles changes.

Midwest also suggested that companies provide resources to help employees deal with setbacks and stress on the job and at home.

If you’re looking for great employees for either short-term temporary or long-term assignments at your San Francisco-area company, contact Bayside Solutions. We have a large pool of skilled professionals ready, willing and very able to help your company thrive. Contact us today!