Employee recognition is for suckers

Take that title and put the word "not" at the end, and you will have some good advice.

We recently completed a report entitled "What's different about consistently profitable staffing firms?" As it turns out, one of the things that consistently profitable staffing firms do differently is to make internal employees a top priority. Who knew that would make a difference? Apparently not many.

I say that with some confidence because we recently asked staffing executives what priority they thought would most likely be correlated with consistent profitability--only 14% of executives correctly selected "training/developing internal employees." The other 86% selected priorities such as "recruiting quality candidates to place" (would seem valid, since that is the essence of the business), "reducing costs" or "growing revenue" (again, these too would seem valid, given basic math).

But no, it turns out that taking care of your internal employees is the thing most correlated with making money.

So, what exactly is involved in taking care of internal employees? To learn a bit about that, click through to another recently released report, on the employee practices of staffing firms who won top honors last year as "Best Staffing Firms to Work For." You'll find out what they do differently. 

Meanwhile, if you'd like to try for this year's "Best Staffing Firms to Work For" status, you have until October 31st to get nominated, which you can do here.