A cell can be basically defined as a functional unit of all the living organisms. And there is this particular cell or grouping of cells in every individual. "Eve Ensler" the author of Vagina Monologues calls it "The Girl Cell". It is in men as well as in women. This particular group of a cell is central to the evolution of our species and is in the continuation of the human race. At some point in the history, the group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world, understood the suppression, oppression, undermining, destroying of this particular cell thus began the process of killing of the girl cell.

And that's been called patriarchy.

Now guess how the world ends up raising boys. To be a boy is to not to be a girl, to be a man is to not to be a girl, to be a woman is to not to be a girl, to be powerful is to not to be a girl, to be strong is to not to be a girl, to be a leader is to not be a girl. The irony, of course, is that denying girl, suppressing girl, refusing girl has led us here where we have come to live in a world with the most extreme form of violence, terrific poverty, mass rapes which is completely out of control only because we have suppressed our girl cells.

I invite you to value the girl cell within you and embrace your inner girl, Value the part that cries, value the part that's emotional, value the part that is vulnerable. That's where our future lies.

The world is free-
Traps the women in the idea that they are free;
It's a mental captivity.
The lands of free;
Knows how to program us into same circles
of shame
of inequality
of suppression
of disappointment
The smiles of love adorn
Yet Regret, Remorse and Shame.
Alone in the washroom with bright tiles around,
Experiencing the cruelty of blood for the first time
The stain it left both on clothes and heart
The base of women’s biology
Feeling the deception of the body against the soul
And the intense pain, humiliation, and disgrace within
Yet welcoming the sense of womanhood
In the miserable state of losing the cherished girlishness
Wishing the blend of happiness and prosperity deep within.
The mental agony at times
When people limit your beliefs,
Only because you are a girl..!!
Pleasant dreams turned to the shattered hopes,
And the dear dreams in the state of approval from the loved ones
Yet withholding all the power and strength,
Fighting for the battle of life and future
You are who you are unique and awesome.
Within the world like a warzone,
Women are made the warrior to win
With the right wisdom to choose the Warfield and
With the whip of peace and love, you are
Warrior to wrestle well
Who washes away the violence,
Wounds of the past, And
Worries of other women.
Withholding the will within
What a wonder-working warrior You are...!!
Worthy of millions of wows.

As per BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics), in May 2017 report, 3.8 percent of workers were contingent. There is no doubt that this number is going to increase in the upcoming years. Are you planning to hire contingent labor?

Managing contingent workforce is a challenging task, therefore, it is always suggested to connect with an MSP. Managed Service Providers (MSP) are the experts who handle the entire process of placing a contract employee. They manage talent acquisition, screening, onboarding, compliance and offboard of the contract employees. An MSP could be your best partner in success if you choose the best one. Much before selecting an MSP (Managed Service Provider), you need to consider some factors to ensure that you are selecting a partner that you can rely on completely to achieve your staffing goals.

You should start by understanding your requirements first. You need to know how many contingent employees you want and associated cost. Having all your numbers related to contingent labor will help you in selecting the right MSP. Here are the factors that you need to consider while connecting with an MSP: Once you are ready with your expectations from the MSP, these are the checklist for evaluating the selected MSPs

Wouldn’t be great if you connect with a staffing agency or MSP having expertise in filling the positions of your industry verticals? Yes, therefore, you need to ensure that MSP has the required industry specialization.

When it comes to managing contingent labor, a quick turnaround is one of the most important factors. You want to fill vacant positions or get the job done in time. Therefore, you need to evaluate this factor. How can you check how fast MSP can fulfill your job order? You can ask them to share their job order fulfillment rate. Moreover, you can check some testimonials as well to verify the facts.

Transparency in the process is a vital determinant of success. Therefore, an MSP should be transparency in the entire process of managing contingent labor. You should have access to all relevant reports and data, screening process, validation, billing accuracy, compliance, etc.

If you are looking for a quality MSP, you wish to have the one that ensures agency follows all compliance and lawsuits related to the contingent workforce. Therefore, you need to evaluate the potential MSP on these compliance factors: Contract and audit compliance, Legally compliant and overall risk mitigation.

An MSP should have the right talent pool so that whenever you share your requirement, the agency can offer you the option. The ultimate objective of connecting with an MSP is getting the right talent at the right time. An agency having a pool of the right talent would be the best choice.

Not only finding the right talent should be your top priority but also keeping the contingent labor costs low. Therefore, you need to ensure that MSP helps you to manage your contingent labor costs.

The reason we are discussing these factors is the availability of several staffing agencies in the market. Not all but surely a few of them would match your criteria. It is not only having the right talent at the right time but building a long-term relationship.

Saxon Global, headquartered in Irving, has a reputation to consistently bridge the gap between the right job and the right talent. We provide a truly integrated onshore and offshore recruiting model that increases the volume and quality of candidates. With 3 India locations and 2 U.S. locations, we are recruiting around the clock to meet your needs. Our decades of experience catering to finding the right candidates for your IT and engineering needs.

Recently, we had the opportunity to bring together technology leaders from DFW that had over 150 years of collective experience in the technology space. A healthy discussion on their daily challenges and the strategies they’ve tried over the years took place, and several valid points were made. The discussion was led and moderated by Michael Mirau, Former CIO of Interstate Batteries and one of the leading Gazelle coaches in Dallas.

As we continued to discuss our people problems, the key issues that emerged were expected. We all struggle finding and keeping the right talent, building healthy pipelines of talent, and maintaining the ability to ramp-up quickly. These struggles are the downstream challenges of leaders. While communication with the Board of Directors, getting their buy-in for new technology initiatives, and procurement seemed to be the upstream people issues.

In the current market, where every job opening only has 0.7 qualified resources available, organizations are competing for talent. Mike shared the easiest ways to be successful at finding and keeping the best talent in today’s market by following 4 simple rules. First, organizations should be hyper-disciplined in defining a job scorecard for each role. This promotes clarity and diffuses confusion, right from the beginning. Second, maintaining documented processes inside the organization will bring consistency and stability to employees and outside parties. Third, training & onboarding employees should be top priority. Giving employees tangible and definitive proof that the organization wants them to advance can go a long way in building trust. Fourth and final, creating a culture that fosters and recognizes giving & receiving feedback at all levels of an organization brings transparency and drives innovation.

As a staffing partner looking to help these technology leaders, Saxon is re-committing to perfecting our processes:

A)     Vetting candidates – Making sure that consultants who are being submitted have the right skill set for the Job, have experience in similar industry or technologies, value addition that they can bring into the project.

B)    Understanding the client’s business – Majority of staffing vendors operate without understanding the business of the client. It always pays off to learn about the nature of client's industry, business process & models

C)    Understanding competencies – Keywords of technologies are important to filter but one needs to go in depth and look for extensive experience in skill sets desired for the job.

D)    Alignment – How many times do we ask the hiring manager about their culture & values. It is extremely important that the consultants who we send over align to client's organizational ecosystem

E)    Process – Hiring process is unique to every organization and it becomes important for staffing partners to have good understand of it. This will also help them to educate consultants in terms of timelines and stages of interviewing.

Social psychology has helped us understand social norms based on how individuals think, feel, behave and interact. These three variables can be measured in human interaction and help us understand and predict how certain individuals may react to one’s actions. Social psychology examines these variables to bridge the gap between psychology and sociology. In 1945, we started to see a shift in the study of sociology and psychology to macro variables, which focuses more on individuals' actions and thought processes.

The reciprocity rule is a social psychology term which describes the social norm of how we interact when receiving a positive action or response. In most situations, when you communicate positive action with another individual, that individual will then respond with another positive action. The importance of this rule in a professional business setting really starts to set in when you are in a sales environment. It is believed that the survival of humans has been based our ability to grow cohesively by sharing goods and services. The notion of repaying someone with a gift has been embedded into our culture and is arguably a basic human instinct. There are many different ways in which you can utilize the reciprocity rule to help ensure positive client interaction, and grow a relationship. As we have seen, a simple thank you email after a meeting can drastically influence interaction with a particular client. Some other practices which have been proven as effective are dropping off a small gift 1-2 days after client interaction. This can be something simple like a gift card for a coffee shop. One of the best ways you can utilize this rule is by stopping by to drop off breakfast to a prospect. I have heard countless success stories using this simple technique – who doesn’t love free food?

The higher number of positive responses communicated to an individual will almost always yield higher positive responses back. This is due to a feeling of indebtedness which is triggered by a positive interaction, which can be initiated by either party. Taking these actions will help keep you fresh in a client's mind, and sets you apart from the rest of the competition. This will in turn lead to more sales opportunities, higher closing rates, and increased client interactions.

Saxon Global has shown tremendous growth since its start in 2007. The company was founded by Gopi Kandukuri as a technical staffing and business intelligence consulting firm. Starting with an office in North Texas, Saxon quickly expanded to add an off-shore team in India. Gopi was able to build an outstanding recruitment team, and the staffing division aggressively grew. The off-shore team focused on supporting large system integrators and Tier 1 staffing firms; while the on-shore team worked to build a fast-moving model that was able to source the right technical candidates effectively.

For ten years, this model has been successful. In 2018, we are reaching for even bigger goals and looking to shake-up the IT staffing, recruiting, and consulting industry. Backed by disciplined and highly-trained teams, Saxon Global has set its sights on the rest of the United States. We will continue to provide a great value for our clients that are challenged to scale past their own recruiting capability.

2017 Growth and Shift

For the 3rd consecutive year, Saxon Global’s revenue has exceeded the national growth rate average by double digits. Finishing 2017 at an all-time high, our revenue is on track to keep growing at an accelerated rate in 2018. In 2017, the Dallas team focused on building relationships with direct customers and training their new team members on the best practices of IT recruiting. Our internal headcount has tripled in our Dallas office and Saxon has added over forty new faces to the teams in India. We’ve filled up our office space in Dallas with veterans of the IT staffing world and quick-learning new comers to the industry.

2018 Headcount Growth Goals

To stay on track for our 2018 growth goal, Saxon is building solid teams that will serve as the foundation for the growth to come. The Dallas office is expanding to a team of 30 account managers and recruiters by the end of the year, and the off-shore team will reach 150 team members. This gives us a platform to service our local market with an exceptional amount of customer service while utilizing the scalable power of the off-shore team.

2018 Culture and Milestones

The Dallas team is forming a culture continuous learning. Whether it’s our time spent at weekly skilled sales training or our monthly Lunch N’ Learn technology seminars, we are always pushing ourselves to evolve. Culture is important in any business, but at Saxon Global it is an essential cornerstone to servicing our clients. We only hire team members that amplify the ideas of our core values: accountability, customers first, teamwork, simplifying, playing bold, and having fun.

2017 was an exceptional year of growth at Saxon Global, but 2018 is looking even brighter. We’re excited to continue this journey of growth and success with all of our clients, present and future.

What is Greener Than Grass?

One of the great privileges of working for Saxon Global is the amount of effort the leadership puts into training all levels of staff. One of the most difficult parts of working for Saxon is being, by far, the least technically savvy person in the room.

I have the immense pleasure of being the most green employee in the entire office. Part of the extensive training involves bringing in actual consultants to share details about their trade and focus in the IT world. A few weeks ago, we hosted the immensely talented Rabea Buksik as gave us a thorough lesson on Scrum Framework and the benefits of the practice. Rabea, a certified Scrum master and former TK20 employee, was quick to a joke but still incredibly insightful.

The meeting started with Rabea asking who all was familiar with Scrum Framework and how technical she could be with explanations. As luck would have it, everyone has at least three years of applicable experience and had a thorough understanding of Scrum so we could skip the basics. Everyone, of course, except for myself. This wouldn’t be a tremendous problem because Scrum is relatively intuitive; it is a framework (NOT a methodology) for sustaining and producing complex products. In short, Scrum allows for open and flexible communication during projects.

What is Scrum?

I am by no means an expert, but the training by Rabea left me infinitely more knowledgeable about the process. Scrum can be mistaken for a methodology, but the true purpose is more relaxed than that. Methodology suggests a particular set of principles, tools, and practices will be used for a project while a framework implies autonomy and personal license. Scrum does not dictate what tools will be used; it acts as a catalyst for improved communication and teamwork.

Scrum is broken up into 2-4 week “sprints”, but maintains daily meetings to monitor progress and hold the team accountable. The process has a couple of different players:

• Product Owner – Liaison between business stakeholders and development team. Sets “goals” with user stories in the form of product backlogs.
• Development Team – Does bulk of the coding or development of the “goals” set by the product owner
• Scrum Master – Facilitator for the Development Team, but not to be mistaken for a lead. More than anything, the Scrum Master is a servant leader and assists wherever possible. Runs the Daily Scrum.

All of these players come together to create an environment that is more flexible and much quicker than old school waterfall methodologies. The sprints have the following (ideal) structure:

Product backlog à Sprint planning à Sprint backlog à Sprint! à Ship product

The teams work independently for this 2-4 week sprint, but the Scrum Master will lead out on a “Daily Scrum” every morning in which the entire team to discuss impediments, user story progress, and general work context. There is a serious focus on everyone standing during the Daily Scrum so time is not wasted and people get through their talking points quickly.

The end product within Scrum can fall under many different spectrums, but all Scrum projects have a focus on speed and transparency. Ultimately when a consultant works in Scrum framework they have experience in a fast-paced, teamwork centric environment and everything else is a variable.

I have a ton to learn about the implications of Scrum, but Rabea has given me adequate knowledge to have confidence when discussing the framework with potential consultants, and that means the training is incredibly effective.

Alex R. – First Year Recruiter at Saxon Global

The Meetups we see in the Dallas area are impressively insightful and they are providing real value to those who attend. Tonight’s session we ventured to was called “Building Bots in AWS”. The format was an half hour discussion about how to study for Amazon Web Services certifications then followed with an hour of guided instruction on how to build a Chat Bot using Lambda in AWS. From groups of engineers studying for AWS certifications, Agile enthusiasts debating Agile frameworks, and Product Managers discussing the evolution of their roles, we have seen how Meetups drive collaboration across organizations.

The intelligence level at these Meetups is quite impressive. The audiences range from entry level CS graduates to 35 year tech veterans. You can find all of them participating as a think tank focusing on a trending topic for a few hours straight. The solutions that are thrown out and the recent best practices give different organizations new ideas and validation for tech trends they are mauling over for their own adoption. Here are three values that we have seen from shadowing the smart people at these Meetups.

1. Best Practices

As you are leading new initiatives for your organization, it can be difficult to build your case for adopting tools and processes that are new on the market. Executive and business stakeholders buy in may take a little more convincing than you just saying it’s a good idea. By attending these meetings you are able to witness how other tech focused teams are putting new technologies to work. Even better, you have an avenue to ask them live questions about the adoption and pit falls of the technologies. We see teams bring examples of how they prototyped and ruled new tech in or out for their organizations to these Meetups consistently.

2. Team Building

As teams learn together, they bond. However paying for high end training that is relevant can be expensive. These Meetups provide a great venue for you and your team to explore new topics for free. It could be ideal to take the team out for tacos then head over to the MeetUp and sit together.

3. Recruiting Opportunity

As we mentioned earlier, these rooms are full of smart engineers that going to events to educate themselves. What a great avenue to meet new potential employees for your team. If you have open positions, you usually can ask the Meetup moderator to let you post an open position on their forum or stand up during the meeting and announce your role. Come early or stay late, you will be able to strike up conversations with likeminded tech folks that you could see hiring.

Most of your successful hires are going come through your current team. However it’s not top of mind for your team to tell you about who they know to hire. Let’s explore some techniques to drive new hires from your current employees.

Hire the References

As you meet strong candidates during your interview process make sure to ask for their references. Even if the references were peers on the team, you need those names in your candidate funnel. We see that the references as the next step on the food chain and not a just a check box in the process of identifying talent in a competitive market. You will need to practice transitioning your reference check to prospecting call. This is usually accomplished by flipping the call from a conversation about the candidate to asking the reference about their current role. Here are simple lead ins to the conversation:

“I appreciate you sharing so much about Michael’s time working with you at ExcelNet. This will help us make a final decision. I am curious, what type of role are in you in now? Do you enjoy it? Would you change anything about the position?” As you guide this call, you could find some data points about the candidate

Broadcast Your Jobs Internally and Often

How often does your team get a full breakdown of all positions that are open within your company? Your team might be responsible for running testing and operations, but they probably worked with very talented Full Stack Engineers at their last company. We seem to forget that just telling your team about the opening isn’t going to spread the word to enough folks. How to fix this? Simple. Start emailing out the open positions list every week to your entire organization. Spread the word during your stand ups, town halls, and newsletters. Also, pass the word through your chat tools like Slack or HipChat. However, get the message out of your silo! The teams that are focusing on other projects might have the one away connection that is your next hire.

Pay Big Bucks for Referrals

The cost of third party recruiting can become over whelming. You can dedicate a part of that recruiting budget to create an effective referral program internally. This is a best practice that some of the largest and forward thinking companies take advantage of and it works. Paying your employees $1,000 bonuses for recommending great candidates that get hired can save tens of thousands from the recruiting budget. Companies such Capital One pay $2,500 referral bonuses to employees that recommend hires for the IT organization. In order to pull this off, you need have the team aware of the program and a tool to track the referrals correctly (internal web portal, Sharepoint, or Google Sheet will suffice). Partner with your HR department to correctly set up how these referrals are introduced and guided through the interview process. Also see if they can set a unique code or referral tag that can placed with the candidates profile if they apply online to positions.