So let me tell you some of the reasons why recruiters should purchase our products and what they get behind the scenes by using LatPro. (There are many reasons why job seekers also use LatPro, which when you think about it, is another reason our traffic is high and recruiters should use us as well).

Interested companies and recruiters can expect to speak with a professional sales person from LatPro, one who will answer their questions as well as ask questions to make the right recommendations based on the client’s needs and budget. Of course we have a general pricing summary, but we make sure that any potential client knows that we will work with them on a customized product solution for them specifically, no matter how far it diverges from the standard packages.

Part of the initial back-and-forth conversation will let the potential client know that LatPro has other products besides job postings and a resume database to help complement their diversity recruiting efforts. Companies can also advertise their career center with banners or fixed-position logos on the LatPro homepage or job search page. They can also send targeted email messages based on education, geography and many other criteria. LatPro is the producer of 9 diversity job fairs in 2008 which will give companies the ability to meet many potential candidates face-to-face as well as brand themselves as a diversity employer.

When you do post jobs with LatPro, your job is not only posted on our site but with the entire LatPro Network. Your jobs will go to sites such as DiversityJobs.com and many professional association sites like NSHP, NAHN and SHPE to name a few. This gives your job advertisements increased exposure to targeted candidates as well as recognition on the partner sites.

Every job you post on LatPro is reviewed manually for quality assurance. We will make sure that it is posted in the most effective way to bring quality results, and we will make recommendations on how to make it more attractive to job seekers—which may be adding more functions or better keywords or more information about your company. That is only one function of our customer support team. In a proactive way, they will help you with resume searching tips as well, showing you the best way to search, create folders and approach a search of the LatPro database.

When you do a search in the LatPro database, you have the ability to be completely OFCCP compliant if that rule applies to your company. When the rule was issued, LatPro decided it was very important to have an in-house customized solution to meet those guidelines.

Both recruiters and candidates also come to LatPro for our original content. LatPro’s staff writes its own articles as well as having exclusive contributors publish pieces on our site. We have started a Diversity Profiles series with some of the top companies in the country and have a long list of companies that are interested in participating (please let me know if you’d like to be considered for an interview after reviewing some of the prior ones).

LatPro publishes 3 double opt-in newsletters for Human Resource Professionals and job seekers. These provide news and information for their specific groups.

So sure. We want you to buy our products, post your jobs, send us your logos and banners. We’d love to host you at one of the job fairs this year as well. But I thought you should know all the other reasons you should use us. We are about our products but we are also all about service, and I hope it doesn’t sound overused or forced, but we are about happy customers.

So I talked with Carolina first and with Eric afterwards and as I am not sure what path I want to take in the future -if I want to work independently or for another company-, I offered a transitional period of three months so they could find someone else to replace me and/or we could re-assign with calm part of my tasks to some other members of the team.

That period is coming to an end so even when my plans are to take at least a couple of sabbatical months, I decided to polish my resume and get it out there into some other job boards, just in case…

Of course I already have accounts in a good number of job boards because I am always doing benchmarking for LatPro, but in some of them I had a profile without a resume (CareerBuilder) in other cases I had the resume but not public (Monster).

Following my own advice -I always recommend jobseekers to use one or two of the general job boards and one or two niche board like us- I decided to get my resume in CareerBuilder. Mamma mia…, WHAT a mistake!

First, I had to enter it twice, by some reason the first time wasn’t saved. Then right after I hit “save” I got an ad, an interstitial, so I have to click on the “no thanks”. Ten seconds later I got an email through CB that was one of those general blasts from companies no matter what your resume looks like.

As they have an option where you can choose to stop a specific company/recruiter from seeing your resume or sending you emails, I clicked on “block recruiter” promptly. Next day, same email. I blocked it again. Next day, same email, I blocked it again and I contact their support team asking how I was getting those emails if I had blocked the recruiter not once but 3 times…. And guess what? I never got an answer!

This is just half of my bad experience with Careerbuilder, but after some more blasts offering jobs that had NOTHING to do with my profile I decided that enough is enough and I made my resume private with them. Not good enough. When I receive their job agents, if I click on any job listed there, I got a pop under…. So I think I may kill my account there. I am not desperate looking for a job, and I find the whole experience so awful, that is not worth my time.

Monster on the other hand, is not SO bad. Still, I have an interstitial each time I login, what once again means losing my time clicking for the 10th time in “no thanks” (no thanks, guys, I have said it like 20 times already, I am not interested in a University of Phoenix degree, give me a break!) and the quality of jobs there goes from pretty decent jobs to things that seem more spam and/or scams than real jobs. HotJobs also has a lot “work from home” and fishy offers, but at least does not bother you with interstitials or popunders.

Comparing this experience with LatPro, where you will never find an interstitial, where we do not have a “block a recruiter” because we know that if the recruiter grabbed the email there is little we can do but where we have an opt out option so people get out of blasts, where each company posting has to fulfill some quality assurance levels, where there are no fishy “work from home opportunities” and where customer support answers in 24 hours… I love our product more than ever!

Of course LatPro targets professionals, and that makes us different from Monster and Careerbuilder, so it makes sense that they may not care in being more picky with the job offer they published as we are, but there is no excuse for their disrespect for the jobseeker when it comes to the search experience.

I guess that if you are extremely desperate for a job, you may not care how many times you have to click in a “no thanks” page to get to see jobs, nor do you mind getting offers that have nothing to do with your profile or 20 pop unders open after seeing the same amount of jobs. And I do understand that job boards are not charities and they need profits, but if Careerbuilder wants to live just from advertising, I will be looking for a job somewhere else.

Why don’t I talk about any direct competition of LatPro? Because there is none. I tried another job board that supposedly targets Hispanic professionals and I got once and again the same jobs through their agent and they also seem to be more about advertising than anything else.

So, so far I will stick with searching at LatPro, Monster, HotJobs and networking of course. Did I tell you? I loved LatPro as a product before I started working here, I have seen it improving by developing more tools and services during my 5 years here, and I may be leaving but I still love the product. Is simply one of the best if you want to search for good jobs and you want an answer each time you have a question!

We always prepare our individual goals a few days ahead of time, so I’m putting together my list of recommendations. Then, at the actual meeting, we can spend our time in face-to-face conversation and brainstorming (which is really good considering we are spread out over many offices) to see what is really the best final path for the quarter. So far for me, I want to hire some sales people, I want to implement some new products and I want a CRM that is robust and well-supported by the provider. In addition, I’m going to make a movie (no, it’s not what you’re thinking; stay tuned for a later post for details on that). We will be working with NSHP on the 2009 schedule of diversity job fairs. We will surely continue the series of Corporate Diversity Profiles highlighting companies that value diversity in the workplace and their strategies. Now, I stay out of the techie stuff, but I’m betting there will be some upgrades in that arena too. Any input from our recruiting clients and jobseekers is appreciated. Seriously, if you have something to request, now’s the time to tell me for it to be considered.

LatPro started having quarterly meetings about two years ago, and they have been very valuable in tracking our progress and growth. We have been very aggressive in setting challenging goals, almost to the point of making things too difficult to accomplish. We have learned to function more as a team, however, realizing what needs to get done earlier on in the quarter because several others are relying on you to get some of their tasks done.

Does your company have quarterly (or regular) meetings to set an agenda and discuss strategy? What have you done or what are some tips that have made things more productive?

LatPro has a few direct competitors in the Hispanic jobs and diversity job board niche. And a handful more in the general diversity job board niche. Some of the big boards have also tried to expand into the diversity realm, usually with little success, but we do make note nonetheless.

So where do we watch our competition? Their newsletters are a great start to finding out what is new with the company, what new products or upgrades they are offering, and any changes to expect. We also are very involved with sites like ERE, LinkedIn and many recruiting blogs, where members openly share remarks that often mention our competition or industry in general. Google Alerts provides a daily update of any new articles that mention those competitors that make the news, issue press releases or are mentioned online. We are on many third-party emailing lists that are used by our competition, so that is helpful as well. The competition websites often give insights as to new designs, new partners and other information.

Also, very importantly, my sales team is on the front line with recruiters and HR professionals that are also being approached by the competition. These clients often tell us things that warrant further research. Like when 3 or 4 clients in a one-month stretch a few years ago told us that CareerBuilder sales representatives were making the absolutely false claim that they cross-post all their jobs to LatPro, so there was no need to use us directly. That followed up by a stunning introduction at a SHRM annual event—a CareerBuilder staff member coming to our booth, shaking my hand and saying it was great to finally meet their partner (us-LatPro) face-to-face.

But there are strategies that are certainly off limits, from our perspective. I don’t think pretending you are a legitimate potential client and calling to get price lists and product information is a fair way to gather data. Also, signing up as a recruiter, doing a trial, that type of thing is out. I have been with this company for over 5 years, and both of those spying techniques have been used on us too many times to count, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. But, whatever, it’s flattering to be copied and we have nothing really to hide. When your direct competitors stalk you and peer around other exhibits at the trade shows to see what you’re doing and how busy you are, it’s kind’ve cool.

Since there are so many directions this information comes from, we’ve approached research a few different ways. We’ve tried to assign specific competitors to certain LatPro staff members to gather all data about them. We’ve also tried to have one area of research assigned to a particular person, e.g. competitor newsletters, across our top ten competitors. Neither has been exactly what we wanted, as some data always slipped through the cracks. Most recently, every person in the company that finds out any data about a particular competitor, whether it be a media mention or whatever, reports that data to a central repository segmented by company. That way, everyone in the company has access and responsibility for knowing what’s going on out there.

Basically, you can learn from the competition and it’s good to know what’s going on with them. But really the idea is to take the good and use it, in addition to learning from their mistakes. Then make yourself stand out with your competitive advantages, being unique and offering the best quality products and services available. And back it up with excellent customer service.

So we do watch the competition and know they are there. But we don’t go crazy with what they are doing, rather focusing on improving our own business.

Do you watch your competitors? Where? How much?

We recently hosted our 5th diversity job fair of the year in Atlanta last Tuesday, June 10 and if I were to describe it in one phrase it would without a doubt be “a warm welcome.”

Being based in south Florida, we usually travel to the cities 2 days prior to each of our events, so we arrived in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon and immediately realized the temperature was close to 100 degrees during our entire stay. Despite the warm, sticky weather, this was not enough to melt our anxiousness to get this show underway. All preparations seemed to be just right, everything was in place and a possible afternoon thunderstorm advisory was the only element of concern for our job fair.

I had visited Atlanta at least 3 times per year since 2001 as my brother lived there, and have had the opportunity to meet some great people throughout my visits. Most of which, were in the engineering field, proud Georgia Tech and University of Georgia alumni. Also, it seems that many of the people that live in Atlanta have moved there seeking better employment opportunities, and they seem to call it home shortly after. Atlanta is home to very large companies such as Home Depot, Georgia Pacific, Coca Cola, and many more – all of which also lean towards engineering, supply chain management, logistics, and more…so I was definitely expecting a large engineering crowd.

We had great companies recruiting on site, including Newell-Rubbermaid, Praxair, GE Infrastructure, and Michelin, just to name a few. After observing and talking to a large amount of the 685+ candidates that came to our show seeking multicultural jobs, I realized that yes, we did seem to attract a large engineering crowd…but we also saw a large finance, marketing, sales, customer service, IT, healthcare and education group that proceeded to interview with employers in their fields, such as CDC, Wachovia, Aflac and more.

A warm day dissipated the rain threat, and overall it was a great event. We saw a diverse candidate pool interact with a good mix of companies, which is what our job fairs are all about: Connecting high quality, diverse and bilingual candidate talent with top diversity employers offering bilingual jobs. After a short summer break (maybe avoiding heat exhaustion and preparing for hurricane season), we look forward to our next event and number six on our 2008 calendar: Washington DC.

Prior to my arrival in Atlanta, I had imagined what the experience would be like, and pictured sitting here today writing about how hectic the day in Atlanta had been, how we spent most of our time putting out fires and bending over backward to make demanding exhibitors happy.

I am delighted to say that due to the hard work and organization of the NSHP and LatPro teams, my preconceptions of what the day would be like couldn’t have been farther from the truth! Saini and Ricardo from NSHP had been on-site since Sunday working out all the little details so the event would run like a well oiled machine. The rest of the LatPro sales team had been hard at work for months selling booth space to companies looking to fill bilingual jobs, and we were nearly at capacity.

Bright and early on the morning of the diversity job fair I made one more round of calls to our TV and Radio contacts in Atlanta. By 7:30 we had traveled across town and arrived at the venue, the Cobb Galleria Centre. The event staff had already set up the tables at the event so we just had to put finishing touches on the LatPro and NSHP booths before greeting the recruiters as they entered the venue.

Setup went seamlessly, and soon we were surround with colorful exhibits each offering a wealth of diversity employment opportunities. Once setup was complete, there were still a few minutes before the doors opened to jobseekers, which afforded me the opportunity to speak with some of the recruiters about how their companies value diversity in the workplace, and I was able to secure several companies for upcoming articles on LatPro.com.

Soon the chit-chat had to come to an end as the doors officially opened, and the large group of individuals seeking bilingual employment came through registration and began visiting the exhibits and speaking with the recruiters and organizations that were present.

The rest of the day seemed like a blur, but a very pleasant blur! None of my preconceived notions were actualized. The event ran so smoothly and recruiters and jobseekers alike commented on how organized, efficient, and valuable the event was. I had a great opportunity to get to speak with nearly all of the exhibitors throughout the day, and they were all very pleased with the quality and quantity of candidates in attendance. The only slightly negative thing I heard from an exhibitor was “I wished I had realized what a strong turnout there would be. We ran out of promotional items half way through the day!” To her, that may have been a negative thing that she felt ill-prepared, but to us that means the event was a resounding success!

Before I knew it, 2:30 had rolled around and for the first time all day, the steady stream of jobseekers gradually started to slow down. It certainly did not become a ghost-town however, and at precisely 3:00, there were still candidates standing in lines to speak with some of the companies present.

At the end of the day we had 685 resumes from job seekers who attended the event. We had also participated in several interviews with local radio and television stations about the event, and in addition to Ricardo, several of the jobseekers got an opportunity to appear on television describing their experience as well.

It was a long day, but not a stressful one. The event was a testament to the preparedness and extensive preparation that the NSHP and Latpro diversity job fair teams. I had a fantastic experience, and learned a lot about what participating candidates, organizations, and recruiters are looking for at hispanic job fairs. Taking part in this experience first-hand will certainly give me a leg up in promoting our upcoming Washington, DC diversity job fair on August 21st.

This past weekend, every step I took there was someone who wanted to kill some business for their company.

Friday I returned a car to Enterprise Rent-A-Car. I calculated that I’d need to put $6 in the tank to cover the 36 miles I had driven while my car was being repaired at the adjoining dealership. I further reasoned that since my VW Passat gets 25 mpg on the same route that I drove then the smaller VW Jetta would surely get the same mileage. At $4 per gallon and 24 mpg estimate, my $6 is spot on. However, when I got to the point of turn-in, the guy said that the gas gauge was an eighth of a tank short even after my $6 fill-up and that I owed $14. I gave him the basic math lesson above, and he lowered the rate to $8, but I still complained. His rationale was that gas gauges are exact (he said I was exactly an eighth of a tank short). But everyone knows that gas gauges are just estimates—I mean when I squeezed every drop possible into the Passat this morning, it still didn’t register on Full and the line certainly doesn’t move completely smoothly all the way down. He also suggested that I was idling and not getting the gas mileage I was estimating. I could’ve let the car run all night in the driveway and got better gas mileage than what he was charging for. Anyway, I paid the $8 and told him I’d never use them again.

Despite the gas argument, I still had a good night sleep on Friday night. And it’s a good thing… on Saturday morning it all started again. I went to Home Depot at around 9am. Now personally I think they should restock all the shelves on non-business hours so people can shop in those aisles when they are open. Even if they restocked when they first opened, they should’ve been done by 9am and certainly weren’t restocking a second time at that time of day. But every time I go to Home Depot, I get blocked in one place or another by some police tape that says the aisle is temporarily closed and there is some forklift moving around in there. This particular time, I started down the open aisle only to be turned around by a couple of guys and locked out of it because they were about to work. Seeing that there were only 50 or so people in the whole store, you’d think they’d have waited 3 minutes or helped me make it 1 minute to pick up some air conditioning filters, but no—five or ten minutes one guy told me—I didn’t stick around to get them. Last time I was there, the whole nursery was practically on lockdown around lunchtime on a Saturday (that’s prime gardening time here in Florida) while a crane-like machine and several forklifts drove in some trees and pallets of mulch. Not very good for business.

Finally on Sunday, I dialed DirecTV to add an additional receiver for a new television. I am already a customer of theirs, but had to go through 85 menus to finally speak with someone. My order was almost complete, I was put on hold, then I got disconnected. Since THE verifying information the representative took to identify me was my phone number, I was certain that a call back was seconds away. After 30 minutes and no call, I repeated, and 85 menu choices later I was on with someone new. I asked why no call back and she told me they don’t do that, that they are an inbound center only, and that there were not even any notes in my account as if my first call never existed. I told her that was a terrible business model and not good for their company. I mean I was begging to give them my money and they weren’t going to take it! Anyway, I did make that purchase, but others may not be so inclined to call back.

My point to this whole post is that customer service matters, and bad customer service will destroy your business. In my opinion, the LatPro customer service department is a competive advantage that our company has over much of our competition. But, if my customer service or sales department ever acts like these companies did, or reminds you of my problems from this post, please call or email me right away. I will do what I can to answer your questions or make sure someone does. And certainly if you want to spend money, let me know.  I’d be happy to oblige you and your company. We will do our best to customize a proposal that meets your needs and budget.

So I guess we’ll just dust off the old letterhead and brochures and business cards and be right back in business. It makes Otavio crazy to save outdated stuff but this time it’ll really come in handy. Oh wait! A lot has changed since then with our marketing materials, positions of people in the company, our logo, and surely our phone numbers, so what remains of the old stuff is still garbage. Maybe we’ll even throw it away this time and not move it again.

So we have a lot to do. A bunch of things are already done—obviously we found the place, signed a lease for the space and got the place painted and carpeted (low-VOC paint of course).

Here’s a to-do list of things I can think of off the top of my head. I am sure that I missed some, so let me know if you’ve moved and there was something missing from this list that would have been ideal to remember beforehand.

• Before we can pack up the office and have the movers come and take the stuff, we need to make sure the new office is business friendly. We need to move our phone, fax, computer and data systems, which entails some coordination with several third-party providers. We need to make sure that the new office is wired to meet our needs and that our computer system is safely situated in a cool area.

• We need new letterhead, business cards and marketing materials with the correct address.

• We need to examine our websites for every inch of space that mentions our old address.

• We need to alert all of our clients that have outstanding invoices, or who regularly purchase products, that we are moving and how to reach us via mail. So an update to our accounting and billing systems is necessary.

• Same goes for the vendors we use—we want them to know how to reach us as well. It will be a very bad day in Florida when the coffee guy can’t find us.

• Then it’s time to install the video and other security measures.

• New updates to our insurance, payroll, and other business certificates that we need to operate.

• Now to go out to the internet and see how many places LatPro is listed with our old address. We are in hundreds of directories, so that should be a long process to find them, request the changes and verify that all was completed properly.

Help me out—what crucial items will make this move go smoothly?

And to get the ball rolling on telling everyone, our new address, effective August 1, 2008 will be:

LatPro
8751 W Broward Blvd, Suite 506
Plantation, FL 33324

As for Google, this year we submitted 300 H-1B applications, and we’re sorry to report that 90 hopefuls were denied. The yearly H-1B lottery continues to affect our employees and our business, which is why we continue to urge the U.S. government to increase the artificially low cap on these visas.

We realize that many people have strong views on the topic of immigration. Some commenters on our recent post on H-1Bs criticized Google for not hiring more Americans. Although we’re committed to hiring outstanding American candidates, Google hires employees based on skills and qualifications, not on nationality.

The irony of our policy is mind boggling — ‘bienvenido’ if you are a laborer that can survive the hike across the desert, but ‘adios’ if you are a highly skilled technology worker… it seems to me that the United States has really lost its way on many fronts. We are long overdue for a change in leadership.

We invest a lot of resources screening every company trying to use our services and we do it in many stages, when they register, they purchase a product, and while they are using our product.

For example, when they register, we check their company information in many ways to make sure they are a real company legitimately trying to hire Hispanic or bilingual professionals. We check their address, name, website, registrations, comments on the web about them, etc. Even big legitimate companies that want to purchase our database are sometimes declined because we care about the reason why they will contact our candidates (a real full time position versus an opportunity to do Primerica multilevel kind of thing).

If a company passed the approval to use our services and purchases a product, e.g. a job posting, we not only check the credit card payment source ( e.g. a credit card form the same country versus something coming from Rumania), we also make sure the posting is of value to our job seekers. We would not publish “multilevel marketing offers”, “work from home and make million dollars” kind of opportunities. In those cases, we block their access and refund the money. If the job is legitimate, we check that it has enough information for the candidate; it should show information about a specific position not a general request for resumes, etc.

Wait, it doesn’t end there. We also monitor how are they using the product. If they are using our resume database, we monitor how many people are they contacting, time spent reviewing each resume, etc..

We also protect recruiters and employers. We ask useful information to job seekers to make sure recruiters can get a hold of those candidates who match their search, the resumes are real resumes, not spam, resumes are classified in different matching criteria versus the job posting, etc.

All these quality filters add to our cost of doing business, starting with declining clients up to ending relations after we think they have not come for a legitimate purpose of hiring a candidates for a real position. We are proud of taking good care of both our candidates and recruiters. We can certify that “Our website is junk free”. In my next comment, I will list some funny cases… just to see the fun part of maintaining high quality at all costs J