Give me a hand!: the argument for business partners

Why business partners? Well…“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” – Harry Truman

Self-sufficiency can be a virtue – but it can also be a danger to your (business) health. It pains me to say this, as I have always preferred to do it myself, rather than farm it out, no matter if it was when I ran a company with hundreds of employees, or when it was just me. I admit it’s an arrogant attitude, and only sometimes justified. But I plead guilty and beg forgiveness, being surrounded on all sides by self-made men and women, and having been inculcated in individualism by my U.S. upbringing.

But what does this have to do with job boards and recruiting sites, you ask? Well…no company is good at everything. You may have a wonderful niche board with tight ties to your community, happy clients, and healthy revenue. But this does not necessarily qualify you to provide top-tier resume parsing, for example, or statistically valid salary information across multiple job titles and locations. Perhaps you could – but do you really want to? Or do you want to focus on what you do best?

That’s where what I call ‘suppliers‘ come in – business partners that can step in to work with you and help you act like a specialist even when you aren’t. Their services run the gamut from resume writing to job aggregation, from salary data to resume parsing, and more. In fact, not too long after I started consulting I realized that I needed some help in keeping track of everyone that was out there – and that’s why I created my Software and Suppliers pages. Let’s look at the range of services available:

• Job board software
• Resume parsing
• AdWord campaign management
• Online job fairs
• PPC services
• Pay per applicant ad campaigns
• Social screening platforms
• OFCCP compliance assistance
• Salary and labor data
• Candidate assessment
• Semantic matching
• Job ad writing tools and training
• Resume writing services
• Video interviewing
• Candidate voice assessment

And that’s not even a complete list!

I encourage you to take a hard look at your own audience and think about what you do well – and what you don‘t. What you offer – and what you should offer. Then poke through the Suppliers page and see if perhaps there are a few good business partners waiting for you. (And if you’re going to TAtech or JobG8, you’ll have a chance to meet with some of them face to face).

In the meantime, I will try to be a little less self-sufficient – maybe I should find someone to write this blog!

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