The Purple Squirrel

They call him the Purple Squirrel, a job candidate who can swoop down from the heavens and do the job of three employees without breaking the company bank.

HR recruiters know all too well about this elusive creature; in fact, they’re the ones who came up with the nickname. The term refers to that rare job candidate who exactly matches a company’s needs. More and more, that criteria has meant searching for a Jack of all trades – someone who can run the spectrum of the business end of a project or need to creating the actual infrastructure to meet those needs.

According to an October article “New Job Skills Required in the Huffington Post, this recession-based trend allows companies to increase productivity by hiring one person to do the job of multiple people across various skills.

“There are lots of requests for purple squirrels nowadays,” said Joe Yesulaitis, chief executive of Aavalar Consulting, an IT staffing firm.

Technological companies too are looking for that Six Million Dollar bionic man who can jump through fire, leap over tall structures, but still not cost the ticket price.

One reason is that tech companies are increasingly combining business analyst and systems analyst positions. Suppose a company wants a new software application. A business analyst would seek the least expensive approach and then propose the technical requirements. Separately, a systems analyst would build the technology. But now, employers want “those two skill sets in one human being,” said Harry Griendling, chief executive of DoubleStar Inc., a staffing firm outside Philadelphia.

A two-for-one deal is also ideal for many companies that may not have the time or the resources to train a new candidate externally or internally. More and more, companies are not willing to settle for anything less, so they’d rather leave a spot vacant than fill it with someone they don’t want.

Another potential fear for companies is that the ideal candidate might just not stick around long enough in a job and quickly move on to greener, nuttier pastures.

There is also a deeper parallel trend, however, that is taking place in terms of finding the right source for technological jobs today, states the article America’s economy.

…the National Academy of Science report, “Is America Falling off a Flat Earth?” points out that science, technology and math education of the American workforce has been in steep decline for decades, as students now choose careers in business, law or media over the high tech jobs that were so attractive in the post-Sputnik 60’s and 70’s

Companies such as Smartsourcing Global help fill this hole by their very ability to take on multiple roles for a client, without taking up permanent cubicle space or a parking spot. By taking on a business-driven approach and the notion that cost-infrastructure-end use must go hand in hand, Smartsourcing Global guides its clients through a steady qualitative process.

Smartsourcing Global was founded on a single, guiding philosophy: That all businesses have a core competency, and that they will prosper the most when they dedicated their internal resources to that core competency, and partner with other companies who can provide the services to support that.

“We believe that a business should shed everything but its core competency, because all the support services that can drain the resources of a company can be supplied by businesses that already provide those things as their core competencies,” states Smartsourcing Global president Smita Yedekar.

This philosophy presents a win-win situation for companies that frankly just don’t have time to go a-hunting.