Kinsa Group Blog

These days, competition for positions in the food and beverage industry is fierce.  With a greater number of candidates vying for fewer openings, you may find yourself having to say “No” more often.  Needless to say, writing rejection letters can be an unpleasant and stressful part of the hiring process.

But even when you can’t offer a job applicant the position, you can still end the interview process on a positive note.  Here are some quick tips for writing candidate rejection letters in a constructive way, to build good will with candidates and position your company as an employer of choice:

• Send out the rejection letter promptly.  If you’re certain you will not be hiring the individual, let him know that he was not selected as soon as possible.  Even when the news is bad, your timely follow-up will convey a high level of professionalism.
• Always use formal company letterhead for a rejection letter and never handwrite it.
• Address your candidate by name.  Further customize the letter with the position for which he applied, as well as a supportive comment about the applicant’s qualifications, experience or enthusiasm.  Although a rejection letter is basically a form letter, your candidate shouldn’t feel as though it is.
• Be direct, but gracious.  Make it clear that there were other candidates more qualified for the job, but do so in a respectful way.
• When appropriate, encourage further action.  If the candidate is a good culture fit, and may be qualified for other openings with your company, say so.  Encourage him to stay in touch and apply again.
• Always end on a positive note.  Thank the candidate for applying and interviewing.  Wish him good luck in his career development.  Remember, this may be the final impression this individual has of your company – make sure it’s a favorable one.
• Close the letter formally with “Sincerely,” or “Best wishes,” and sign your name.

Don’t want to write rejection letters? 

Call Kinsa national food and beverage industry recruiters with your professional placement needs.  We’ll handle every step of the process – from recruiting to assessment and initial interviews - and only present you with the most qualified candidates.  If you decide not to hire an individual we refer, just let us know and we’ll take care of the rest.

Keeping your résumé current is important to your continued career development.  But unless you’re actively looking for a job, the daily demands of life, home and work can easily push this updating process down on your priority list.  If you haven’t reviewed your résumé in over a year, here are just a few good reasons why you should take a fresh look at it:

• Even if you’re currently employed, you never know when an attractive job opening may present itself.  A current résumé can help you capitalize on an unexpected opportunity – before someone else has the chance.
• Over time, your important achievements and contributions may be forgotten.  Regular updating ensures that critical, measurable accomplishments are accurately recorded.
• In many cases, your résumé creates a first and lasting impression on a potential employer.  Make sure it’s a good one.  By periodically reviewing and honing your résumé, you can create a more powerful marketing tool that accurately and favorably represents you as a professional.

Use these tips to make your résumé update simple and comprehensive:

1. Review personal information (address, e-mail, LinkedIn URL, etc.) to ensure everything is up-to-date.
2. Review your oldest job.  If it’s no longer relevant, and you have at least 10 years of documented work history without it, remove it.
3. Update your responsibilities and accomplishments.  Consider the following:  special projects; new expertise developed or job responsibilities awarded; knowledge or skills enhancement from special training or professional development; awards or other recognition; challenges you faced and solutions developed; measurable results you helped achieved (e.g., eliminating process inefficiencies, increasing productivity or sales, improving staffing or operational performance, etc.).
4. Revist your objective statement.  If it is not in line with your current career aspirations, rewrite it.  The statement can be general, but should show some direction toward the field in which you want to work.
5. Reevaluate your references.  Verify that these individuals still work where you have noted and that contact information for each is correct.  If you have developed new contacts who can attest to your recent achievements or heightened responsibility, consider replacing them with outdated references.
6. Update your résumé format.  Check online sample résumés to see if yours looks outdated and revise accordingly.  Additionally, you should create an electronic version of your résumé if you don’t already have one.
7. Proofread everything.  Sloppy spelling, grammar and punctuation may take you out of the running immediately.  If you’re not proficient in proofreading, ask a trusted friend or associate to help.

Looking for a better career opportunity in the food & beverage industry?  Give us a call.  The Kinsa Group has a wide variety of food & beverage industry career opportunities – from food science to plant operations to executive management.

This fall, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) will jointly publish new Dietary Guidelines for Americans.  The guidelines are revised every five years by a panel of scientific experts and serve as the basis for federal food and nutrition programs.  Additionally, they are considered “authoritative advice” for Americans on dietary habits that will promote good health and reduce the risk of major chronic diseases.

So what will the guidelines likely recommend?

• Reduced salt consumption.  Linked to hypertension, heart disease and other health problems, salt has become a primary governmental target in recent years.  Although most major food companies have already substantially lowered sodium in their product lines, the question is still at the back of my mind - will the feds begin to actually ration this ingredient?
• Reduced use of sweeteners.  Ingredients like high fructose corn syrup have been linked to now-epidemic obesity in our population.  Our government is waging war on these sweeteners.  In 2009, President Obama alluded to soda taxes as one way to battle obesity – essentially making soda the “new tobacco.”  California and Washington already have huge “sin taxes” on soft drinks.  And even though over half of Americans oppose them, several other states have put these taxes on the legislative table.  What’s next?
• New label regulations and advertising bans.  The people have spoken, and they want change.  In a recent survey by Food Minds, 86% of respondents were in favor of the overhaul on food and front-of-label packaging that lists calories and beneficial nutrients.  Nearly three quarters of respondents support government-sponsored educational program to help Americans understand the difference between “good” foods and ” bad” foods.  Additionally, over half of the respondents would support the government banning of advertising “unhealthy” foods to children.

Bottom line, our government is attempting to play an increasingly larger role in determining what we put in our bodies.  Individual choice and responsibility are under fire.  And, unfortunately, the food industry – despite best efforts to provide safe, nutritious food at affordable prices – is under tremendous pressure to do even more.

Kinsa Group can help you prepare for the changes coming to the food & beverage industry.  As recruiters specializing in the food & beverage industry, we can provide quick access to the top Research and Development specialists your organization needs.

The Kinsa Group–a leading recruiting firm for the food and beverage industry–currently has a variety of outstanding job opportunities, including the following position:

Director of Quality – Beverage Industry

An exciting key quality leadership role within a global beverage company representing well-known retail beverage brands.  This established organization is enjoying record breaking sales and is looking for a top performer to continue their growth.  The position resides in the New Jersey/New York City area.

Job responsibilities:

Develop and lead strategy for US, Canada, and South America region to ensure all facilities and products meet corporate QA standards.  Provide direction, oversight, auditing, and support to various locations and product types within region.

Ideal candidates will possess the following skills:

• BS degree in Food Science or related area
• 10+ years of experience within the food industry in a technical/quality role.
• Experience in the beverage industry.  Coffee and/or tea background highly preferred.
• Knowledge of relevant regulations and regulatory framework within the Americas.
• Strong auditing experience.
• Experience developing and maintaining quality systems.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Sensory skills.
• Ability to travel 40-50%.

Discover more about this Beverage Industry Director of Quality Job including salary range.

And to search our comprehensive list of Food and Beverage Industry Jobs please visit www.Kinsa.com.

An effective mentoring program provides a wide range of business benefits:

• Facilitated onboarding.  Mentoring speeds up the process of bringing on new hires as well as redeploying existing employees into new lines of work.
• Increased employee satisfaction and retention.  Research has shown that employees who participate in mentoring programs have higher job satisfaction and reduced turnover.
• Improved employee productivity.  When employees are mentored, they can get answers to common problems quickly – without wasting time on rediscovering or re-inventing solutions.
• Effective career growth / succession planning.  Mentoring programs help employees reach their full career potential, grooming them to fill key roles as part of an organization’s succession plan.
• Knowledge management and retention.  Mentoring promotes effective knowledge sharing, to reduce the risk of losing critical skills and knowledge when employees leave.

Obviously, mentors can play an important role in ensuring your company’s continued success.  But while identifying a budding protégé may be straightforward, identifying a potential mentor can be more complex.  Whether that person is you, one of your managers, or an outside expert, a mentor should possess the following professional and personal attributes:

1. Senior-level business experience.  To provide guidance, the expert should have several years experience working in senior corporate positions.  At a minimum, the expert should be a professional peer to the protégé.
2. Interpersonal and political “know-how.”  The expert ought to be proficient in handling all sorts of complex interpersonal dynamics within the context of office politics.  To be an effective trainer, the expert must be able to help the protégé navigate the tricky political waters of his organization.
3. Integrity and confidentiality.  Professional development involves discussing high-level, strategic, off-the-record information, as well as sensitive personal issues.  Honesty and discretion are essential when broaching these confidential topics.
4. Organizational and personal insight.  The expert must have an in-depth understanding of the company’s objectives, needs and hierarchy.  Equally, he must also appreciate the protégé’s strengths, weaknesses and goals.  To achieve professional development goals, the trainer must align both the company’s and the protégé’s interests.
5. Flexibility and ingenuity.  When egos, ambitions and agendas collide, sparks fly.  What works for an organization one day may be thrown out the window the next.  An expert trainer must be able to shift gears, develop solutions on the fly, throw out tactics that prove ineffective and come up with new ones – fast.  He must be comfortable dealing with uncertainty to navigate a corporate environment rife with change.

Need a promising protégé?  Looking for your next mentor? Contact us today.  As a national food and beverage industry recruiter, Kinsa can provide the talented individuals – from R&D directors to food service sales managers to process engineers - your organization needs.

An offer that might have been $100,000 a few years ago is now coming in at $85,000 or $90,000… what do you do?

I recently read an article at marketwatch.com that described what we Recruiters at Kinsa Group have been witnessing.  With companies more worried about margins and profitability these days, many hiring managers are offering salaries lower than what workers previously received.  The question is: How low should job seekers go when it comes to accepting an offer?

If you are a job seeker in this situation with a low salary offer, consider other types of compensation to make up the difference—benefits, paid time off, professional training, reduced work week, health insurance, bonus structure, expectations for next salary increase, tuition reimbursement, relocation expense reimbursement, and promotional opportunity.

Job seekers who receive what they believe to be a low offer should compare that offer to what they can get elsewhere in the current market for their skills, rather than what they could have received in years past.  Then it’s up to the individual to decide whether or not to walk away from an offer if it’s currently competitive. 

Don’t misjudge your value in the market because the longer a worker remains jobless, the harder it is to impress an employer and get that next offer.

Job seekers should feel free to negotiate with a potential employer regarding their offer.  Often times that employer has gotten attached to you as a candidate and realizes that starting their search for another new hire could be a long and painful process.

It’s hard to believe that some of these actions would occur, but we’ve seen it happen in 2010!

Keep the door wide open for offers, remember…

DO NOT:

•  Hug the interviewer
• Wear jeans to the interview
• Feel badly if you are overdressed compared to the interviewer
• Answer (or play with) your mobile phone while in the interview
• Discuss your opinion on politics or religion with the interviewer (no matter how ancient)
• Yawn in front of the interviewer
• Ask the interviewer if you can work from home (if the job was not presented to you as a home office job)
• Chew gum during the interview
• Tell jokes during the interview
• Smoke during or before the interview
• Say anything negative about former colleagues, supervisors, or employers
• Bring up or discuss personal issues or family problems.
• Ask about salary, vacation, or other benefits until after the offer
• Act as though you would take any job or are desperate for employment.
• Forget to contact Kinsa Group and/or the new employer if you decide not to show up for your first day on the job

The time and costs associated with recruiting, screening, interviewing, evaluating and hiring employees are significant.  So why do it on your own?  A recruitment services firm can provide quick and cost-effective access to the talented professionals you need:

• Position Specification and Search Strategy Development.  Before starting a search, a professional recruitment firm will help you precisely define what type of individual you are looking for (skills, experience, traits, etc.), and identify the most expedient and cost-effective ways to find that candidate.  A quicker, more targeted search improves hiring success while reducing the cost of vacancy in the position.
• Recruiting.  A recruitment firm executes a comprehensive search strategy on your behalf, including advertising, database searches, cold-calls to target companies, social networking and generating referrals.  A recruitment firm with industry specialization, such as Kinsa Group, can leverage its experience, industry contacts and recruiting economies of scale to produce results faster.
• Assessing and Evaluating.  By working with a search firm, you save your HR department the time and expense associated with screening résumés, arranging and conducting initial interviews, and checking candidate references.  This frees your internal staff to focus on other key priorities.
• Guarantees.  To help ensure hiring success, many recruiting firms offer placement guarantees.
• Outsourcing.  Some recruiting firms, such as Kinsa Group, can act as your company’s internal recruitment function for a portion or all of your jobs – handling the entire recruiting / hiring process from job profiling through the on-boarding of the new hire, including staff, technology, method and reporting.   Known as Recruitment Process Outsourcing, this service improves your company’s time to hire, increases the quality of the candidate pool, provides verifiable metrics, reduces cost and improves governmental compliance.  RPO changes fixed investment costs into variable costs that can vary with fluctuation in recruitment activity.

Kinsa Group – A Better Way to Hire Food and Beverage Industry Professionals

Hiring on your own can be an expensive, time-consuming and frustrating process – so don’t do it alone.  Contact Kinsa today.  Using our unique recruiting process, our dynamic staff of skilled recruiting professionals will make your next hire a success.

Have you ever noticed that some people always seem to end up climbing the career ladder faster than everyone else?  While it could be because Mom or Dad is the boss, more than likely it’s because they work hard and follow these five tips:

• Always display a positive attitude.
  Your attitude can be a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you have a negative attitude, 9 times out of 10 you will fail.  But, if you bring a positive attitude and display confidence, strength, and determination, you WILL be successful.
• Stay educated.
  The best way to ensure success is to stay one step ahead. Research your industry. Know what’s happening and what the experts say will happen. Look for trends. When you find them, start to train yourself in these areas. Knowledge is power.
• Create a personal elevator pitch.
  First impressions mean a lot.  If you only had 30 seconds to convince someone you were a hard-worker and a leader, what would you say and do?  Plan this ahead of time; you never know when it will be needed.
• Learn to network.
  Unfortunately sometimes it’s not what you know, but who you know (at least to begin with).  Learn to network. You can even network within your own company. Invite co-workers to lunch. Take the time to walk by someone’s office to say hello. And actively seek out opportunities to network outside of work by joining organizations, groups, etc.  You start by seeking out your local chamber of commerce to learn of upcoming events.
• Be open to new opportunities.
  Read trade publications. Listen to people in your network.  When a new opportunity presents itself, don’t sit back and wait.  Take the initiative to inquire more–and don’t be shy!

And speaking of new opportunities, if you’re in the market for a new job or just curious about what is out there, please call us today.  As national recruiters specializing in the food & beverage industry, Kinsa Group offers a variety of excellent career opportunities.

Because of their drive to achieve personal career goals, high performers are unafraid to take risks – this includes leaving your company for a competitor’s.  So how do you keep your best and brightest working for you? 

Use these insights to motivate your high performers and maximize their job satisfaction:

• They need opportunities to learn and grow.  Ironically, the more high performers are able to grow professionally within your organization (and therefore become more marketable), the more likely they are to stay with you.  Your company must meet their need to remain highly marketable.
• They need recognition.  Although fueled by their own need to achieve personal career goals, you must give them recognition due.  When appropriate, let them shine.  Stroke their egos, but only when merited.
• They need continual career development.  Recruit senior employees to mentor high performers, helping them to set goals, develop their careers and take on tasks beyond those designated in their job descriptions.  Mentors should use their status and influence to help these protégés gain entry to groups and experiences that would be career enhancing.
• They need their individual goals to align with their company’s.  As an employer of these talented individuals, you must match their skills and interests with their responsibilities.
• They value additional non-compensation benefits.  Wellness programs that promote the general health of employees (e.g., exercise and nutrition programs, health screenings, etc.) are an important factor in a high performer’s decision to remain in his current position.  Additionally, work / life balance programs (e.g., casual dress days, educational seminars, flex hours, job sharing, etc.) increase their overall job satisfaction.

A final note.  One of the biggest reasons employees don’t return to former employers is because they’re embarrassed to think about how to approach coming back.  So if a high performer leaves your company for another, let him know that the door is open for his return, in case he realizes that the proverbial grass isn’t greener on the other side. 

The Kinsa Group specializes in recruiting and assessing high performing professionals for the food and beverage processing industry.  Visit our website to learn more.