View by Topic
View by Author
View by Date
|
Thursday, July 16, 2009
|
|
EdgeLink Amazing Race!
On Friday EdgeLink conducted its annual “half yearly” offsite meeting which gives us an opportunity to discuss our progress as a company half-way through the year. We take this time to discuss financials, accomplishments, challenges, as well as important company initiatives to focus on for the remainder of 2009.
After the meeting we had a team building event that was unlike any other we’ve had before. We decided to hire someone to organize an “EdgeLink Amazing Race” day to emulate to popular TV reality show. This competition included breaking up into teams of 3 or 4 and then racing to each marked point before your opponents do. Once you arrived at your next point your team would be required to perform a specific challenge in order to receive the clue for your next location. These challenges ranged from riding a pedicab through an obstacle course, eating a humongous glazed donut from Voodoo donuts, walking through the Keller Fountain, riding the OHSU tram, finding a random dog to jump through a “hoola hoop”, and many others. The finish line was at the Waterfront Park on the Willamette, and we followed that with happy hour at Paddy’s Irish Bar on 1st street. Here are a few pictures to highlight an incredible day!
 Labels: About EdgeLink, Jeff Miller, July 2009
|
 |
|
Posted by EdgeLink at 4:02 PM | 0 comment(s)
|
  |
|
|
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Hiring in a Recession Is Easy, Right? Wrong!
|
You know that we like the bright side of every situation at EdgeLink. In fact, we pride ourselves on making opportunities out of every challenge. But when clients ask us if the recession has made recruitment easier, we don’t dress up reality. Hiring top talent today is even harder than it was before the downturn began.
It’s counterintuitive but true. The growing numbers of job seekers have certainly resulted in a deluge of resumes across the desks of hiring managers everywhere. Quantity is up. The quality of candidates applying, on the other hand, has not skyrocketed because employers are holding tightly to their best performers and top innovators. Whether you have 30 resumes or 300, your ratio of qualified, sought-after candidates versus unqualified candidates remains the same as it was a year ago.
Should the fact that those towering resume piles (or bursting inboxes) only contain a few outstanding hires prevent your business from raising hiring standards? Absolutely not. Downturns are as much about opportunity as they are about challenge. They offer opportunities to advance far beyond the competition, opportunities to surpass customer expectations and opportunities distinguish your business from those paralyzed by recession fear through innovation and market leadership.
A business staffed with skillful, bright, committed and hardworking team members is one that can take advantage of the opportunities the recession presents and continue to build upon them well into the recovery. So we at EdgeLink enthusiastically encourage you to raise the recruiting bar and use the following tips to modify your recruiting strategy in order to find and hire the best of the best.
EdgeLink’s Recession Recruitment Strategy Tips
— Adjust your Clock. Be prepared for a longer hiring cycle. Remind yourself and business leaders that a great hire is a much sounder bottom-line investment than a mediocre hire that can fill the job but not fulfill high expectations.
— Be Finicky and Fast. If the cover letter is submitted and is weak or the resume has holes that give you certain pause, move on. Committing to finding the best hires means being willing to letting go of the average ones right away.
— Increase Interviewing. Even with the industry resources and state-of-the-art resume analysis tools we use at EdgeLink to identify talent, we are dramatically increasing our candidate interview numbers. Our interview rates have more than tripled since first quarter of 2008.
More interviewing is essential today because a greater numbers of applicant resumes will line up with your required profile in terms of skills and experience. Only a smart, efficient interviewing process will allow you to identify cream of the crop professionals who have the essential soft skills (communications, professionalism, team orientation, etc.) and character traits (intellectual curiosity, passion, drive) your business is seeking. To increase interviewing efficiency, EdgeLink suggests:
— Using short, pre-screening phone interviews to eliminate any problem candidates. If resources and time are short, work with a third-party recruitment partner like EdgeLink that has the technology, team and track record to quickly and successfully identify the very best candidates.
— Developing and using one standard, simple questionnaire for each position. Ensuring standardization of the questioning will make comparisons easier.
— Setting strict time limits and letting the candidate know why—the applicant pool is very big. By limiting the time to make an impression, you heighten the importance of each question and challenge the candidate to rise to the occasion.
— Integrate passive recruitment efforts. The best candidates in the marketplace are in jobs right now—succeeding at other companies. If you want to employ the best of the best, your recruitment strategy will need to include passive candidate recruitment, which requires networking and some headhunting on behalf of your recruitment team.
— Build a Bench. Even if you are not hiring right now, it’s a great moment to build a bench of enthusiastic potential hires you can turn to when a position opens up. Continue general recruitment efforts and keep an eye out for outstanding professionals at networking and industry events. Be sure to include your recruiters and recruiting partners in all bench-building efforts and make sure they are updated to essential changes, such as evolving technology platforms. The better informed your recruiting team is the better your hiring results will be.
As always, recruitment is an important challenge. However, in these tough economic and job market times, it’s a very good one to have.Labels: About EdgeLink, Jeff Miller
|
|
|
Posted by EdgeLink at 3:45 PM | 1 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
We're #3!!!
|
Oregon Business Magazine’s annual awards ceremony for the “100 Best Companies” was held on Tuesday, February 26th.  We are very pleased to announce that EdgeLink received the honor of being #3 best small company in Oregon to work for! Thank you to all the outstanding talent who make EdgeLink a great place to work and to all our clients who make this venture so rewarding! Labels: About EdgeLink, Jeff Miller
|
|
|
Posted by EdgeLink at 1:14 PM | 1 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
Monday, January 21, 2008
EdgeLink 2008 Kick-Off
|
Last week we held our annual kickoff meeting at Big Al’s in Vancouver, WA and it was unlike any bowling alley we’ve experienced. Check it out at http://www.ilovebigals.com/ It has everything you could ever want in entertainment, such as bowling, billiards, an arcade. Flat panel TV’s are everywhere; it's a great sports venue. The first half of our day was spent discussing our past year of success as well as our vision/goals for 2008. This was also a great day of team building (see pictures) as we played EdgeLink style “Family Feud.” Later we dressed up into costumes and competed in the bowling lanes. Prizes were given to best overall theme, as well as individual and team scores!  
When push comes to shove I guess you can say we are a bunch of crazy individuals! Here’s to a successful 2008! Labels: About EdgeLink, Mark Schacter
|
|
|
Posted by EdgeLink at 11:53 AM | 0 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Friday, June 02, 2006
EdgeLink Open House a Huge Success
|
EdgeLink held its first open house/client appreciation 
event on June 1. Attending the soirée were about 90 of our closest client/friends from the Portland Metro area. Delicious food, drink and of course great conversation was had by all. 
In the fun department, attendees had their pick of helping to solve a group “word link” puzzle, or participating in an underlying word association game, which made a fantastic ice-breaker.
Door prizes included gift certificates to great Portland places including 
OMSI, Stumptown Coffee, Powell's Books, Portland Beavers, McMenamins, Clark Lewis, and the Portland Rose Festival. A huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone who showed up. Maybe we should make this an annual event!?
Cheers!Labels: About EdgeLink, Mark Schacter
|
|
|
Posted by EdgeLink at 2:52 PM | 2 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
Friday, January 27, 2006
FUN AT WORK!
|
Are you kidding me? When was the last time you had fun at work? Fun in the workplace seems to be a requirement here at Edgelink. Not only do we work hard, we play hard too. We set our goals on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. When we achieve those goals we are rewarded with a FUN day! We strongly believe this promotes teamwork, a drive to be the best in our field, and an overall positive work environment. 
Our most recent fun day, which took place on January 13th, 2006 (that's Friday the 13th), for example, the Edgelink team ventured outside of the office for our yearly goal setting meeting and then when the clock struck noon, we put on our bowling shoes. Wait, not only did we put on our bowling shoes, we (being the highly competitive lot that we are) made every aspect of the rest of the day a contest. Starting out, we split into three teams. Each team then created a team name and complimented that with “fabulous” costumes.
To take the bowling competition up a notch or two, we added the challenge of bowling each frame in a different fashion. What I mean by that is; one frame was granny style, another time we pushed the bowling ball with our feet and so on. I am sure that you get the picture. Oh, you should see the pictures!
 
We had contests for the best form, best score, best style and best team score. My team was the winner of the highest score, so I have to say, “Go Team!”
  
All in all, healthy competition is always fun, especially when it is done the EDGELINK way! How does your company celebrate success?Labels: About EdgeLink, Juli Waterman, Recruiting Recommendations
|
|
|
Posted by EdgeLink at 11:26 AM | 1 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
Friday, April 01, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
|
