Newsletter February 2021

Recruiters for the Copier Channel® for more than 30 years, Copier Careers® has been the only recruiting firm exclusively dedicated to connecting Copier Channel employers with experienced service technicians, copier sales representatives, sales managers, service & operations managers, controllers, support staff, and MPS/MNS experts. Start your month off right with Newsletter February 2021: Copier Channel news and career advice. Search copier jobs now.

IN THIS MONTH’S NEWSLETTER

The Top 5: Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Hiring Process
News from Canon
Sound Off: What is your #1 2021 goal?
Monthly Poll: How has COVID changed the hiring process?

SEARCH COPIER JOBS

The Top 5: Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Hiring Process

The hiring process can be an ordeal. It takes time and energy to find and screen potential candidates, set up interviews, run background checks, check references, work with non-competes, counter any counter offers, and deal with all the other roadblocks between you and your next big hire.

So it’s all the more devastating when you go through all that only to have the candidate choose someone else. In this particularly challenging time, our recruiters are seeing a few patterns behind these unsuccessful hires. Watch yourself for these very common examples of hiring self-sabotage.

1. You don’t have a plan. The hiring process involves juggling a lot of unknowns. It’s vital to eliminate the unknowns on your end so you have the bandwidth to deal with the surprises outside your control. Why are you looking to hire? Are you filling an existing role or creating a new one? What qualifications do you require? Who do they need to work with well and who has the final say on hiring or passing on them? How will you determine their qualifications? How are you planning to compensate them? You need to have answers to these questions, whether they’re specific or simply outline a range of acceptable options.
2. You’re inflexible. So you have a plan – great! But when you’re working with people, your plans may have to change. If you get a solid candidate who doesn’t perfectly meet your requirements, consider whether a bit of training could raise them to your standards. Remember that candidates are not frozen in time – you’re not just hiring who they are now but the potential they show for the future. You may also need to adjust to external factors. When the pandemic hit, employers had to pivot to remote interviews, prioritize candidates who could work independently, and jump on top candidates displaced by the disruption.
3. You’re undercompensating. Copier Channel compensation is something of a passion for us. While 2020, unfortunately, made it impossible to publish our more rigorous salary surveys, we’ve been observing some concerning trends. Technicians with transferable skills are leaving the industry for full IT positions and the main attraction is better compensation. Similarly, sales reps can easily change industries and we’re seeing them make the jump, often to medical/pharmaceutical sales. We’ve been sounding the alarm about the industry’s increasingly small candidate pool for years. If employers don’t step up in compensation, benefits, and other attractive perks, they risk reaching a critical point with zero candidates. You’re not just competing against industry employers but adjacent industries as well.
4. You’re too slow. Because the candidate market is so tight right now, you need to be nimble to keep up. That means responding to applications ASAP and getting a screening call or interview on the calendar right away. Especially in this time of social distancing, there is no excuse for dallying in setting up an interview. Right now, you need to operate under the assumption that this candidate is talking to several other companies and is further along in the hiring process for at least one of them. So you need to keep up that momentum and stay in touch for every step. This is why it’s so vital to streamline your plan before you start – because if you’re stuck waiting on a higher-up to get around to interviewing your candidate, they’ve already accepted another offer.
5. You’re hesitating. Congrats! You’ve gone through the whole hiring process and have a candidate you like. But suddenly, you’re hesitant to pull the trigger. Hiring is inherently risky and making a bad hire can be a costly mistake. In this volatile environment, is now really the time to take a risk? These concerns are understandable but if you wait to address them until this key moment… That candidate – the one you spent a week or more meeting, assessing, and vetting – they’re gone. And all that time and effort was for nothing. This is why you have to start this process with intention. Don’t let your fear of an unknown future blind you to what you do know right now: you need to make a hire. We wish you had the time to be extra-sure about your candidates but in this market, you just don’t.

In the market for a new job? Our job board features hundreds of copier jobs with top employers, updated daily. Search jobs now.

Canon Hit With Data Breach Lawsuit

Former and current Canon employees are bringing a class action lawsuit against the company for the data breach incident from August 2020. According to The National Law Review, the plaintiffs “allege that Canon was negligent in protecting employee data and violated state trade practice laws by failing to guard against such an attack. The plaintiffs further allege that Canon failed to notify the affected individuals in a timely manner.”

In early August, Canon confirmed they had suffered a ransomware attack that occurred between July 20 and August 6th. Bleeping Computer reported the likely culprit to be MAZE, a now supposedly shuttered ransomware group specializing in double extortion. In mid-August, it became clear Canon had not paid the ransom as MAZE began releasing 5% of data allegedly stolen from Canon. The published files did not appear to contain more sensitive or personal data.

It wasn’t until November that Canon admitted the seriousness of this data breach and alerted those affected. According to Security Week, the compromised files contained information belonging to current and former employees (along with their beneficiaries and dependents) from 2005 to 2020. This information includes names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, government ID numbers, electronic signatures, and more.

Canon notified their former and current employees in a letter, offering a free one-year membership to Experian’s® IdentityWorks℠ credit monitoring service. After their year is up, Canon’s former and current employees will presumably need to shell out at least $99.99/year themselves to deal with the long-term effects of this breach.

For this reason, the lawsuit seeks to “recover damages and other relief” including reimbursement and continued funding for “out-of-pocket costs” such as credit monitoring subscriptions. They also seek other measures such as improved data security and annual security auditing “to mitigate future harms that are certain to occur in light of the scope of this breach.”

Sound Off

Last month we looked back on 2020, so this month we wanted to look forward. We were curious to hear what your top 2021 goals might be. We had a solid turnout of 12,531 votes this month!

The overwhelming answer was to get vaccinated this year, taking 64% of the vote. After that 23% said they wanted to get a new certification or skill. 6% are working to find a job, while another 4% hope to retire. 2% are gunning for a promotion this year while 1% are looking to change their job entirely. And the remaining 14 votes came from folks who want to become their own boss.

POLL QUESTION: