1. Get comfortable: Your workspace matters. Having the right setup where you spend most of your time every day is important. If you need a standing desk or monitor arms to help you feel more comfortable, make a case to your boss. If your office is always cold, bring a blanket from home. Focus on what’s fixable and will make you more comfortable.
2. Do one thing at a time: Multitasking is a sure way to increase stress. Focusing on one task at a time can not only help reduce your mental stress, it can make you more effective and productive, lowering your stress further as you see your to-do list shorten.
3. Curate your playlists: Whether it’s music for the drive home or a playlist to keep you energized at work, music has the power to reduce stress and increase focus.
4. Avoid conflict: No one wants to deal with drama at the workplace. Keep everything professional and stress-free by avoiding gossip, not engaging in political or religious discussions, and keeping relationships friendly, professional, and platonic.
5. Stay organized: Disorganization increases stress. Having a place for everything – from paperwork to in-progress projects – can increase your mental and emotional energy by not having to track things down. Keeping your work computer, desk, and file cabinets organized and clean can help save your sanity at work.
6. Take breaks: It’s okay to step away from your desk or take a walk after a meeting. Getting some fresh air or taking a water break can keep stress levels low and improve mindfulness.
7. Focus on clear communication: If you need to ask a question for clarification, ask. If you are unclear on expectations, get more information. People’s stress can increase when communication is absent or unclear, so make sure you get as much information on projects and expectations as possible.

Work stress can happen, but it doesn’t have to be a day-to-day struggle. Mindfully managing your stress at the office can help you enjoy your days more and increase the quality of your work output and work relationships.

If you’re looking for a change because your job seems to be high stress with no end in sight, get in touch today. We can help you find a position that might help you gain a little more peace of mind.

The post 7 Ways to reduce Your Stress at Work appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

1. Give Employees a Voice

An annual review shouldn’t be the only time employees can voice concerns or ask questions. Implementing a system of feedback – whether it’s a semi-regular email survey, an intranet comment portal, or other method – can help employees feel more connected and like their voice matters.

2. Hire a Good Fit

It can be discouraging to work with a negative personality, a show-off, or a constant complainer. While you want to make sure you’re hiring a diverse team to help complement each other’s strengths, you also want to make sure you’re hiring team members who can get along well with others and not alienate or discourage current hires.

3. Offer Incentives

While compensation isn’t everything, offering incentives for good performance are a great way to encourage and reward employees. Whether it’s a gift card to your employee of the month, a cruise giveaway to the highest-performing employee, a referral bonus for a good recommendation to HR, or a month of front-row parking, explore different ways to make employees feel valued.

4. Give Clear Direction and Communication

Employees want to feel connected to the bigger picture, not just be production drones. When kicking off a project or offering feedback, give as much context as to how it fits into the goals of the overall business.

5. Provide the Right Environment

While you don’t have to offer a fully stocked bar to keep employees engaged, your workspace and associated perks do matter. Consider adding a quiet room for meditation to reduce stress, on-site yoga classes, or standing desks to increase productivity and focus. Find out how your employees like to work, what matters to them, and implement what you can to grow a more positive workplace.

Looking to fill roles in your company? Contact us today to find the motivated matches to your open IT positions.

The post 5 Ways to Keep Your Employees Motivated appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

Bad behavior is always at the top of the list of killer project behaviors. It could be poor communication, passive-aggressive behavior or an unwillingness to accept change. Whatever it is, project managers need to be equipped to handle any type of situation, including bad behavior from team members. Start with consulting with your human resource department on what employee tools you have available, such as an employee handbook, documentation and even disciplinary action.

Poor project timelines happen when project managers are not realistic about tasks as well as not adding contingency time to projects. Unexpected surprises happen. It’s the project managers job to anticipate this with backup vendors, staffing, equipment, etc.

Ignoring Problems. It’s never the problem that kills a project. It’s how the problem is handled that is the killer. Don’t put issues and red flags off until later. Instead, work through each problem as it arises. This will keep the team moving ahead and keep your project on time. You’re likely to learn valuable insight along the way when addressing problems head on.

Miscommunications – or no communication – it doesn’t matter who it’s between: you and your team, or you and your boss. Frequent communication in a variety of forms is critical. With today’s project management software such as Trello, JIRA, etc., there is no reason not to have everyone working on the same page.

Don’t over promise if you can’t deliver. Never promise deliverables without checking with your team. It’s better to turn down a project or delay the start until you have time to gather and review all the facts.

By being able to identify these common project killers, you’ll be able to anticipate issues and avoid potential pitfalls.

Move Your Projects Forward

As your company starts planning for its upcoming projects, reach out to OSI to consult on the best workforce solution for your project. Whether it is permanent, short- or long-term contract work or anything in between, Open Systems will streamline the hiring process, allowing your company to work on its growth. Give us a call today.

The post 5 Hard-to-Spot IT Project Killers appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

Luckily that allows us to see some truly interesting resumes, some of which should never have seen the light of day. Here are five things to avoid on your IT resume.

Seriously? That’s your email?

Information technology professionals are smart people. But it always surprises me when I see what should be a private email address being used for career-search purposes. Seriously, keep the 6packabs@gmail.com address restricted to personal endeavors.

An even more terrifying email example is when candidates use their employers email address. For so many reasons – that cannot fit in this article – it’s an immediate ‘no.’

Dates. Yes, you need them.

Not including employment start and end dates, certification dates and educational time frames is a serious warning sign the candidate is either hiding something or not organized. Either way, they are an immediate ‘no.’

TMI! Too Much Information

It’s okay to add a short section about personal interests or accomplishments. However, it is not okay to share too much personal information. Employers really don’t want to know your age, your relationship status, health issues, what your pet’s names are, or your personal goal to bike across the country.

Acronym Insanity

The tech industry loves acronyms and jargon. It’s a secret language designed to efficiently and accurately communicate to technology peers. A resume loaded with acronyms and tech jargon shows the candidate’s limited communication abilities. And those applicant tracking readers can’t read the resumes either.

Mistakes, errors and bad formatting

Imagine a coder submitting a resume with spelling errors. Or user interface specialist sending a resume with bad formatting. Errors are inexcusable. IT professionals have an exact role where everything needs to be error free to seamlessly work. Even one error on a resume is a reason to disqualify the candidate.

Wake up and stop the nightmares!

Avoid the resume nightmare. If you are an IT professional seeking your next career move, reach out to the team at OSI. Our experienced recruiters will review your resume, interviewing skills and help you showcase your best self. Contact the IT recruiters at OSI today!

The post 5 Resumes Killers That IT Professionals Should Avoid appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

Technical Recruiting Experience

OSI has over 20 years of experience providing information technology staffing solutions and services to mid to large-size companies throughout the United States. With a focused specialty in recruiting top talent in information technology and engineering disciplines, OSI can find you the experienced technical talent that is ready to take their next career step.

OSI Return on Investment

For employers that partner with OSI for engineering, information technology or military/veteran staffing services we can provide you with the talent your organization needs to:

• Shorten your search
• Increase operational efficiency
• Meet project deadlines
• Take on new challenges and prepare for growth
• Maximize your bottom line
• Staff augmentation for upgrades, deployment, and migrations

Technical Screening

OSI’s technical recruiting experts are experienced in technical screening, candidate sourcing, and behavioral interviewing techniques. With OSI, there is a proven, 5-Step Recruitment Process that is used to find top talent faster. OSI recruiters focus on providing candidates who match your technical requirements and fit seamlessly into your company culture.

For more than two decades, OSI has been a staffing leader for developing and employing the latest technology and hiring and recruitment methodologies.

OSI’s Breadth of Services

At OSI, we are more than a technical staffing agency. We provide workforce solutions powered by MSP and VMS offerings. Our expertise, developed over 20 years of experience in talent and workforce management, enables us to provide custom MSP/VMS workforce solutions.

OSI – Delivers the Best Technical Talent

At OSI, we transform the way your organization operates by quickly acquiring the talent your business needs. Our experienced recruiters have years of experience and a vast network of active candidates, we find motivated and experienced technical talent in:

• Engineers (Military and Non-Military)
• IT Professionals
• Technicians
• Scientific Professionals

Connect with OSI Today, For Better Recruitment Tomorrow!

When OSI manages your technical recruitment, you can focus on the business needs that help your company grow. Are you ready to learn how OSI can help your company hire better talent faster? Then reach out to one of our experienced recruiters.

The post Why Open Systems is the Right Choice For Your Hiring Needs appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

At Open Systems (OSI), our company differentiator is our recruiting methodology and efficient process. With over 20 years experience in recruiting, our senior recruiting advisors are integrated members of the industries they place in.

We help our clients get top talent faster through our proven process, here’s why clients and candidates win when partnering with us.

OSI Certified 5-Step Recruitment Process

With OSI as your technical recruiting agency, we have a proven method of finding top talent faster, we will only present to your organization 100 percent vetted candidates.
Our candidate validation includes:

1. Skill evaluation
2. Reference checks
3. Right to represent
4. Negotiated salary rate
5. Social profile verification

A Human Approach With a Technical Twist

We continually recruit top talent in the fields of information technology, engineering, and technical/technician. Our electrical, IT and technical recruiters are integrated and involved in these fields and the industries that demand top talent.

OSI also uses multiple solutions based on technology, job boards, and artificial intelligence to reach a wide range of candidates in various career levels and industries. Here are a few of the technologies we employ:

1. Resume Parsing
2. Cognitive Computing
3. Artificial  Intelligence (AI)
4. Social Recruiting
5. Handshake (aka Human Intelligence)

Partners for Growth

With OSI as your company’s technical recruiting agency, you will be able to quickly scale your business operations to meet hiring demands, whether it be for staff augmentation, contingent workers or hard to find, permanent placement for top talent.

When OSI manages your recruitment, you can focus on the business needs that help your company grow. We focus on specific areas and industries to ensure each of our clients receives expert advice.

Are you ready to learn how OSI can help your company hire better talent faster? Then reach out to one of our experienced recruiters.

The post How Open Systems Will Help Hire Better Talent Faster appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

The fear of making a bad hire keeps most managers up at night. A bad hire is emotionally draining, costly and can affect employee morale. Here are a few ways to alleviate the stress of hiring within your organization.

1. Partner up With a Staffing Agency

We are in one of the tightest job markets of modern times. If your company is seeking IT or engineering candidates, the job market is even more scarce; qualified IT and engineering candidates know this and are vetting their options and comparing their opportunities.

By aligning with a professional recruiter you can expedite your recruiting process. At Open Systems (OSI), our recruiting process assures that you will be interviewing only qualified candidates that meet your salary range and fit into your company culture.

2. Check Them Out

Reference checks are not an outdated process. Upon request OSI check references, along with social media profile verification. This process will help prevent those candidates that stretch the truth from infiltrating your company.

A properly conducted reference check takes experience, it’s a combination of detective work and psychologist. You want more than just verification of dates and job titles, you want to ensure the experience on their resume produced real, actionable results.

3. Skill Evaluation

Technical recruiting is a specialized niche in the staffing industry. When performing a skills assessment for professionals in information technology (IT) or engineering it critical their experience matches your company’s needs.

There are many ways to conduct a skill evaluation, some companies are using online testing, while other companies have the hiring manager design a project/task to complete. Online test taking is not reliable and having your in-house team develop and evaluate a skills test is time-consuming.

There is a better approach, a professional technical recruiter can develop, conduct and assess the skills assessment for you. For example, at OSI, this is part of our 5 Step OSI Recruiting Process.

Stress Free Hiring

By using a proven recruiting process model, you take the stress and guesswork out of the hiring process. This scientific method allows for repeatable results for finding top talent at your company.

Moving Forward

Luckily, you don’t have to invent a recruiting process on your own. OSI has developed a certified process for recruiting engineering, IT and technical candidates that produce top level, qualified candidates.

Learn more about OSI’s  5 Step Recruiting Process and how it can benefit your company.

The post 3 Ways to Alleviate the Stress of Hiring appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

Continuous Engineering Recruitment

One of the main differences of using an engineering recruitment agency compared to using your company’s internal human resources or corporate recruiters is professional engineering recruiters like Open Systems are continually identifying and cultivating new engineering career talent.

Our engineer recruiters are an integrated part of professional, industry and trade organizations where we meet talent at all career levels for all types of engineers, such as electrical, applications, software, network, civil and manufacturing.

For internal human resources or corporate recruiters, the recruitment process doesn’t begin until positions and budgets are approved. This is a significant disadvantage because it delays the candidate identification process by several weeks.

Recruiters are Ready When You Are

By already having a qualified and varied applicant database, engineering recruiters can quickly move to the qualifying stage of matching engineer candidates to your company’s specific job description in just a matter of days.

Internal hiring processes typically take two months or longer for high-demand fields like engineering. Often, by the time the interview process is ready to start, the candidates have been placed elsewhere. In a competitive career like engineering, immediacy is critical.

Efficiency in Hiring Engineering Candidate

Professional engineering staffing firms like Open Systems have proven recruitment processes that ensure the most efficient use of your hiring manager’s time. Here’s an example of Open Systems’ recruiting process.

This five-step best practice recruiting process all happens BEFORE each candidate is submitted for requisition:

• Skill evaluation
• Reference checks
• Right to represent from the candidate
• Negotiate rate
• Social profile verification

Moving Forward

Recruiting and hiring for technical positions, like engineering, can be a challenging task, especially in today’s competitive job market. One of the best strategies is to align your company with professional recruiters that are an integral part of the engineering profession.

At Open Systems, our senior engineering recruiters are involved participants in the engineering communities. Contact our engineering recruiters today!

The post Why Use a Staffing Agency for Engineering Hires? appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

IT Outsourcing: Common Mistakes You Need to Know

Outsourcing the Wrong Services, Instead of the Right Ones

Before an organization seeks out an IT provider to outsource a portion of its environment or services, they should complete an internal assessment to determine if the areas defined for outsourcing are appropriate. Will outsourcing this service really improve the performance or create a better user experience?

The New Latest, Greatest Service Offering May Not Be the Best Solution

If an organization makes their outsourcing decisions based on the latest and greatest and not what is best for the organization, the results that are achieved may not align with what the organization actually needs. Thus, it is best to avoid the lure of the newest, greatest technology. Instead, choose a technology suite and provider that suits your organization.

Musical Chairs: Not Addressing Foundational Problems, Just Changing Players

When organizations start to experience problems with their outsourcing agreements, many decide to simply change providers. While this can seem like a simple solution to the problem it usually doesn’t change much other than the address on invoices. Before companies switch providers, they should do an honest intake of the issues that they are experiencing and examine if a change in provider would actually resolve them. In the majority of cases, the issues and problems are foundational. Thus, these issues are best addressed internally and in cooperation with the current service provider.

Not Properly Evaluating the Level of Service

A business must ensure that the outsource provider is capable of providing the level of service required to support their organization. This includes being able to serve all office locations as well as being able to respond within the required time. If a provider is not capable of providing the appropriate level of service issues can occur. For example, the loss of productivity can be detrimental.  Ensure that there are target service level agreements (SLAs) in place. These SLAs guarantee that the provider is contractually bound to protect against this productivity loss.

Moving Forward

Utilizing IT outsourcing can be a considerable advantage to a business. However, there are several common mistakes that can occur when implementing IT outsourcing. Though, with proper planning and execution, common outsourcing mistakes can be prevented. The best way to ensure proper planning and implementation is to turn to a proven solutions provider. At Open Systems, we help large and small businesses as they implement business solutions to drive results. Contact us today to learn more!

The post Common Mistakes To Avoid When Utilizing IT Outsourcing appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

The Top Signs It’s Time for A Change

 You Have More Bad Days than Good Days

If you’re having more bad days than good days, then it may be time for a change. There are many times when a professional becomes dissatisfied with their position or job responsibilities. When this occurs, most of the time the only resolution is moving on. Before moving on, however, make a list of what really makes you unhappy with your current situation. What would improve your mood and career satisfaction? By performing this intake, you will ensure that your next job will improve your happiness and will not just be a temporary placebo of being ‘something new.’

You Aren’t Being Promoted 

While the sting of being passed over for a promotion hurts, it may be a sign that you need a change. Whether the reason is based on skills or personal relationships, it is best to accept that this situation probably won’t improve and now is the time to find something new. If your skills are at the heart of the issue, participate in some training and possibly earn certifications to get your skills up-to-date. With updated skills in hand, it’s time to get your resume out and start finding a new role where the slate is clean.

A Robot May Soon Be Filling Your Chair

With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), many companies are automating some positions. Roles in cloud and platform technologies are especially vulnerable. For professionals who find themselves competing with AI, it may be time to invest in some new training. It is also best to do a little research and discover new roles that are in-line with your past experience and which have a bright future ahead without too many robots in the competition pool!

Moving Forward

A professional’s career is a long and varied road. At times, there are signs that a big move could increase personal happiness and professional growth. When the times comes to make your next big move, contact the experts at Open Systems. At Open Systems, we place tech professionals in all stages of their careers. Contact us today to learn more!

The post When is the Right Time to Make a Career Move? appeared first on Open Systems Inc..