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Contract Employee's Newsletter
Helping Contract Professionals
Manage Their Careers
Vol. 3, No. 2
January 10, 2003
Edited by James R. Ziegler
A Companion to:
The Contract
Employee's Handbook
www.cehandbook.com
Sponsored by:
P.A.C.E. - Professional
Association for Contract Employment
www.pacepros.com
About The Contract Employee's Newsletter
The Contract Employee's Newsletter is a free online publication
for technical and professional contractors containing news, commentary,
tips, links to useful resources, nuggets of wisdom submitted by
readers, and anything else that seems appropriate at the time. The
CENewsletter is published bi-weekly or whenever issues warrant and
time allows. The subscriber list is confidential and will not be
disclosed outside this organization.
In This Issue
Read recent
issues of The Contract Employee's Newsletter.
Featured Topic
Use The
P.A.C.E. ProTrac Agency Conversion Calculator To Qualify For
1% Referral Rebates
In Vol. 3, No. 1 I demonstrated how the P.A.C.E.
ProTrac Agency Conversion Calculator proves that you can give
yourself a raise and great benefits even if you are
currently employed by an agency and getting little or no benefits.
All you have to do is convert to an employee of P.A.C.E., and then
have P.A.C.E. subcontract through your original agency.
Essentially, every agency contractor in the United States
can give themselves a raise and great benefits immediately,
by simply switching to P.A.C.E. You don't have to wait until your
next gig in order to make the switch. You can do it NOW.
The client still contracts directly with the agency. The agency
breaks even in the deal, and you receive higher total compensation
and far better benefits than if you had stayed with your original
agency.
As far as the client is concerned nothing has changed. But you
come out ahead, the more so the more you take advantage of P.A.C.E.'s
great benefits.
Tell your Friends and Colleagues, and earn
a 1% referral rebate for every one that converts to P.A.C.E.
It's so simple. If you successfully refer just two Contract Professionals
to P.A.C.E. the net cost for all that P.A.C.E. does drops from 5%
to 3% of collected revenues. Refer five Contract Professionals and
P.A.C.E. becomes virtually FREE.
Spread the word.
E-mail the link for this newsletter to your fellow agency contractors,
and show them how the P.A.C.E.
ProTrac Agency Conversion Calculator works. Tell them how P.A.C.E.
gives Contract Professionals:
- All the freedom and financial advantages of self-employment,
- All the security and continuity of corporate employment, and
- The best benefits package available to ANY employee in ANY
company in the USA.
Hard to believe? The P.A.C.E.
ProTrac Agency Conversion Calculator proves it.
Submit your Online
Application today, and have your contractor friends and colleagues
submit one also. Make sure they enter your name in
the box under Referral Information where it says "Full Name
of Person Who Referred You".
P.A.C.E. is the calculated difference!
Return to Table of Contents.
From The Trenches
Recruiter Competence, Or Lack There Of
The following observation was sent in by Scott A.
There is one interesting trend that I have noticed over the past
ten years. Recruiters for job shops have been getting progressively
worse over the years. An illustrative example is a call that I
received. The recruiter stated that she had a job for me at NASA
and asked if I was an aerospace engineer. I asked her if she had
even looked at my resume. She said that she had not. I stated
to her that I was an electrical engineer and was not qualified
to do aerospace engineering. She replied by asking in a somewhat
disappointed tone of voice. She asked if I wanted her to submit
me anyway. I stated that I did not. She then asked me why.
Twice this week I have received e-mail submittals from a different
recruiter that were intended for their client with billing rates
and resumes attached. I do not see how the industry will survive
when job shops allow idiots, who do not even know what their customer
wants, to run the show. (Or ruin it?) I feel that our industry
is at a crossroads.
[Editor's Note: The world is full of Bimbos and Bozos,
and many of them seem to have gravitated toward third-party recruiting
firms. However, there is a sea change in the making in which cash-strapped
companies are adopting direct sourcing solutions, and eliminating
expensive, do-nothing staffing vendors and vendor management services
(onsite gatekeepers) as a matter of company policy.
At long last, we are seeing companies beginning to take the
acquisition and management of their contingent workforce out of
the hands of greedy staffing vendors and bring it back inside the
corporation where it belongs.]
Return to Table of Contents.
Marketing Tips
The Highest Paying Job You Will Ever Have
Make This Your Mantra:
“I am willing to conduct my job search with the same
skill, persistence and creativity that I bring to my job.”
-- JobSmart
In other words, your full-time job when you are not working on
a contract assignment is locating your next contract assignment.
"Full-time" means working on marketing-related activities
to promote your consulting services at least eight hours a day,
Monday through Friday, and then some.
Your self-marketing activities represent non-billable work
that is every bit as important as the billable work that you perform
when you are actively engaged on a contract assignment. In business
terms, your "Self-marketing Department" represents a cost
center within your consulting business. This is one reason why
experienced and savvy Contract Professionals charge more per hour
for their time. In order to break even with a salaried, fully benefited,
full-time employee they have to charge enough to cover their downtime
between contract assignments when they are working full-time "off
the clock" marketing their consulting services to prospective
clients.
But is self-marketing really a cost center? Or is it a profit
center with deferred earnings?
It is easy to spam the job boards and wait for the recruiting firms
to call you with a dream job. Well, dream on! Recruiting
firms take at least 35% off the top, of which 15% is payroll expenses
and the remainder (20% or more) is profit. If you locate your own
gig and bill the same amount as an agency, you get to keep the 20%
(or more) that would have gone to the recruiting firm. If you bill
$100 per hour that’s an extra $20 per hour of pure profit
for you. If the gig lasts six months (1000 hours), that translates
into an extra $20,000 or more for you.
Now, let’s say it takes four, forty-hour weeks to land a gig
on your own. $20,000 divided by 160 hours is $125 per hour. That
would be a pretty good billing rate.
What if it only takes two weeks to land a contract assignment on
your own? That equates to $250 per hour.
What if it only takes two weeks to land a gig, and the gig lasts
one year? Your marketing efforts will have paid you $500 per hour!
Doing your own marketing pays far better than using a recruiting
firm. In fact, marketing your own consulting services could
be the highest paying job you will ever have.
Return to Table of Contents
Contract Employee's
Glossary
Terminology For Contract Professionals
More terms from Appendix
B: Glossary of Terms for Contract Professionals of The
Contract Employee's Handbook.
Job board
A job board, also called a job bank, is a website that lists job
openings and contract positions. Usually companies or agencies pay
a fee to the owner of a job board in order to post their open positions
there. Also called a job bank.
Job boards fall into four general categories:
- Independent job boards: Independent job boards are not
directly involved in the hiring process. Job hunters contact the
listing parties directly. Listing parties may be companies (end
users) or agencies (middlemen). Contractor-friendly job boards
let you filter out agency listings, or at least they identify
agency listings so that you can avoid wasting your time talking
to expensive, third-party recruiters.
- Company job boards: Company job boards are company career
pages on the Internet. Here you will find job openings that companies
post on their own web pages. Independent job boards often point
to company job boards where you can view all jobs posted by a
particular company.
- Exchanges: An exchange is an online job matching site.
Exchanges are places where companies post jobs and candidates
post resumes. Some exchanges specialize in contract positions.
Some exchanges operate as auctions where contractors may bid on
jobs (better for companies) or companies may bid for contractors
(better for contractors). A few exchanges charge to post your
resume. Most exchanges have some form of automated job matching
and notification service. Contractor-friendly exchanges exclude
agency listings.
- Agency job boards: Agency job boards are like company
job boards, except that all the postings are for jobs where the
agency owns the contract if the company or another agency hires
you as a contractor. Avoid agency job boards.
Job security
Job security is an urban myth. The myth of job security owes its
origin to the common misconception among employees that they are
somehow entitled to keep their employment with a given company in
perpetuity. In fact, there is no job security. Employment with a
given company is not an entitlement, and the right to continued
employment is a myth. Another urban myth is that of job loyalty.
Job loyalty arises from the misconception among many employees that
if they show loyalty to their employer, their employer will reciprocate
with loyalty toward the employee. As Dan Pink points out in his
enlightened book Free Agent Nation, conventional wisdom dictates
that workers trade loyalty for security, when, in fact, a more realistic
assessment shows that workers instead trade talent for opportunity.
Jurisdiction
Jurisdiction refers to the geographical area over which a court
or government body has the power and right to exercise authority.
As with governing law, jurisdiction may be controlled by a clause
in the contract, or by other factors such as where the parties live
or where the contract is carried out.
Return to Table of Contents.
P.A.C.E. News
P.A.C.E. ProTect with Compliance SecurityTM
Produces Huge Savings For Companies That Use Contract Professionals
Companies now require an entirely new hiring and compliance
process for temporary and contract workers in order to keep up with
the way HR-XML transactions are speeding the right people, at the
right time, into companies' existing applicant tracking systems
("ATS").
These systems are becoming so powerful and accurate
in their search and match capabilities that the need to step outside
of the electronic gateway to find people is greatly diminished.
P.A.C.E ProTect with ComplianceSecurityTM
is a revolutionary online service that simply bolts on to a company's
existing ATS or HR management system so that Human Resources and
hiring managers can complete the hiring of contract professionals
the same way they found them... electronically!
P.A.C.E. ProTect with Compliance SecurityTM
helps companies bring the control and management of their contingent
workforce back inside the corporation where it belongs, and realize
HUGE savings in the process.
P.A.C.E. ProTect with Compliance SecurityTM:
- Facilitates the direct sourcing of contract professionals (NO
staffing agencies!) for HUGE savings.
- Fully automates 1099 compliance testing and background checking.
- Delivers the nation's first and only Digital Division of
Employment for the contingent workforce.
- Delivers the first and only complete solution for managing all
of the risks associated with a company's contingent workforce.
Not just tax risks!
- Is plug and play compatible with companies' existing ATS and
HRMS systems.
- Offers the best employer of record solution for virtually every
contingent workforce scenario, including Independent Contractors,
Agency Contractors, Converted Employees, and Contract-To-Hire.
- Requires virtually no change management. Project managers continue
to operate the way they are most comfortable, while letting Compliance
SecurityTM do all the work.
P.A.C.E. ProTect with Compliance SecurityTM
renders ordinary staffing vendors and vendor management systems
just plain obsolete. It's just one more way that P.AC.E.
facilitates the direct connection of Contract Professionals and
the companies that use their consulting services.
Return to Table of Contents.
The Contract Employee's
Project
The Contract Employee's Project is the larger context under which
the following interrelated vehicles operate to promote and defend
the interests of Contract Professionals:
Copyright and
Publication Info
Copyright (c) 2003, James R. Ziegler. All rights reserved.
You may copy or forward this free publication provided it is left
intact with all links and this notice unchanged. Any unauthorized
duplication, including republication in part or in full for commercial
use, is an infringement of copyright.
Published by:
P.A.C.E. - Professional Association for Contract Employment
1355 Willow Way, Suite 244
Concord, CA 94520
USA
http://www.pacepros.com/
Editor:
James R. Ziegler, Ph.D.
Executive Director
P.A.C.E. -- Professional Association for Contract Employment
(925) 680-0200
CEnewsletters@pacepros.com
Return to Table of Contents.
Disclaimer
The Contract Employee's Newsletter is designed to provide information
in regard to the subject matter covered. Use is granted with the
understanding that the publisher and authors are not engaged in
rendering legal or financial advice. If expert assistance is required
you should seek the services of a competent professional.
The purpose of this information is to educate and entertain. The
publisher and contributors shall have neither liability nor responsibility
to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused,
or alleged to be caused, directly or indirectly, by the information
contained in this Newsletter or by information contained in any
web site or resource referenced by citation or hypertext link within
the pages of this Newsletter.
Return to Table of Contents.
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Return to Table of Contents.
Sign-off
I hope you have found the information in this newsletter to be
interesting, informative, and provocative. I encourage you to share
the CENewsletter with your friends, colleagues, coworkers, clients,
and agency recruiters.
Why clients? Because you need every ally you can get. Why agency
recruiters? Because they need to know the jig is up.
Wishing you success in your contracting career,
James R. Ziegler, Ph.D.
Executive Director
P.A.C.E. -- Professional Association for Contract Employment
Return to Table of Contents.
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