Florida Land Title Association, Buzzing in Orlando and Loving a Parade

Last week, Amy Tiery from Workway San Diego received stellar recognition from our call center client, Phoneware. Amy Santos, Matt Bolding and Amanda Card of Phoneware generously took the time to mention appreciation of Workway's "high quantity AND high quality of candidates" as presented by Amy and further stated, "Your recruiting is helping us to ensure the success of our campaign and your efforts are truly recognized and appreciated." Way to go, Amy, job well done!

Linda Schwartz reports that Orlando buzzes with orders from several new clients as well as many candidate submissions in the works, perm placements on the horizon and Kevin Kintzele wants to help raise awareness about new title insurance legislation while increasing membership of the Florida Land Title Association (FLTA).

This week's associate shout out comes from Connie Roberson in the Richardson, Texas office. Connie would like to give a shout out to David Arnold! David professionally represents Workway, prides himself on performance and pleasantly accepts last minute assignments. "Just yesterday Connie called him at 8am, and he was at the job site nine . He is still on that assignment today. In the past we had a candidate not show up work, and he filled in at the last minute. Connie is always able to depend on David and our Dallas Metro division feels lucky to have him!

The VMS division is looking forward to lots of new assignments beginning this week after submitting many candidates from light industrial to highly technical, Orange County is placing escrow people and Vegas is recruiting for five IT direct hire positions to place in a totally cool and fun internet company who puts on parades!

I hope you all had a fabulous weekend and best wishes for a fantastic third month!

RFP Anyone?

This week Kasey Wilson and I went to a seminar hosted be the San Diego Contracting Opportunities Center, which is a dedicated Center to helping businesses learn how they can do business with government agencies.

What Kasey and I have learned over our tenure in staffing is that researching, submitting, and securing an RFP can be confusing, and time consuming with mounds of paperwork to fill out and requirements to meet.

This seminar compounded all of the information that would typically take 2-3 months to gather and put it into a 35 page workbook. That is what I call valuable information; we just saved ourselves 3 months of research- Whew! What I found overwhelming was all of the acronyms that are associated with government contracting: SDB, DBE, WBE, SDVOSD, IFB, PSC, FAR, CCR, PRCA, just to name a few- anyone confused yet??

We quickly learned that COTR was the most important acronym: Contracting Officer Technical Representative, sounds like a fancy title, but all we needed to know was that the COTR was the “head honcho,” and the person that decides which company will be awarded the contract.

What I found amazing, was the amount of money that is spent every year in contracts: The Federal Government spent 527 Billion in Fiscal Year 2008, The State of California spent 9 Billion and the County of San Diego spent 650 million.

The other thing I found valuable was learning that any contract below 25K -125K (depending on the government agency) are NEVER advertised on a website; they simply get 3 quotes from 3 different companies and award the contract.

So how do we find about these contracts? Answer: COTR!

Sounds like we will have to become friendly with this illusive person, and since Kasey is sometimes referred to as our “Professional Stalker” in San Diego, I imagine she will have them out to lunch in no time!

The Federal Budget allotted 23% of their spending to be spent specifically on Small and Disadvantaged businesses, that’s a 121 Billion Dollar pie. So how can we get a piece of that pie? Hopefully with our new skills in RFP’s!! We will be hunting for them on websites, registering with different government agencies and honing our knowledge in the process.

Yes, working with the government can be complex, tedious and time consuming, but understanding the process, gathering information, and gaining insight makes this process easier and less daunting.

Happy RFP’ing!!!!

San Gabriel Escrow Association, Super Star and Sliced Bread

Escrow Association, Super Star and Sliced Bread

Maria Cosenza notes that there was an impressive attendance at the Escrow Association of San Gabriel valley meeting last week where RESPA guidelines were discussed and the new zero tolerance for inaccurate good faith estimates is causing lengthy delays in closings. Maria also gladly reports that she is optimistic about RFP requests received and she looks forward to the Minority Business Opportunity Conference which she will attend this week.

Associate shout out this week goes to Glendale branch's Susan Sawyer. A "true super star," Susan has surpassed our expectations for over three years and is always "ready to work." Thank you, Susan, for playing an important role on the Workway team!

Stephanie in Ft. Lauderdale is presenting bilingual Realtors for a large home auction project, Linda in Orlando is busy negotiating direct hire placements and Workway is thrilled about our new partnership with a very large mortgage company.

Deon in Vegas is enjoying an increase in placements as well as direct hire orders, San Diego continues to work on staffing call center campaigns, the Mesa office is talking to potential debt management clients and Donna in Richardson told us about Jigsaw.com.

In the words of Kristine Caguin from corporate, "We are adjusting quite nicely here at the new location and enjoying the many eatery options available. Maria and Kristin started a power walk lunch session which I "should" join if I want to continue enjoying these options. I found Seth Godin's Sliced Bread Youtube http://bit.ly/15qxq video both entertaining and informative and think personalizing Workway's website by adding pictures was a great idea." Kristine was also happy about the extra Sprinkles cupcakes left over from my daughter's birthday party.

Linda Schwartz likes WW's online chat and a new central FL candidate thought it was awesome to "talk" to our website and has already been submitted to our client for an open position, Tricia Byrd's internet recruiting efforts led her to a fantastic potential call center client connection and Shawn had a "solid" week in SoCal with two new clients in escrow and default services and eight new associates placed on assignment.

Thank you all and have a great week!