Finding Your Niche

It’s the most common advice in the employment business: Find a niche and stick with it. Whether you specialize in administrative functions, information technology, the sciences, engineering or general business, the single niche model of business has probably served you well. You have a proven screening process, your talent pool is wide and stratified, and you have a reputation in your market for providing excellent candidates for a specific need.

However, even as you read this, the ground is shifting beneath your feet. Today’s technological and societal changes are blurring the lines between the most common employment niches. Positions that were once clearly defined now require a wider variety of skills. Clients are demanding more from every employee. More flexibility. More capabilities. More willingness to take on tasks that don’t fit into a traditional job description. The supplier that is ready with a talent pool that can meet those needs will be very much in demand.

Take the case of the administrative assistant. Once a business functionary, tasked with simple yet critical tasks, the role of the administrative assistant has expanded greatly over the past decade. Today, administrative assistants are more than typists and filers. They prepare slide show presentations, monitor company websites and moderate blogs and forums. They edit and post videos and even engage in data mining. In short, their responsibilities are spreading into the realm of information technology. Whether your clients now realize it or not, the administrative assistant posting they recently sent you is already out of date. It’s up to you to educate your clients on the new skill sets available for their most common requests. And it’s up to you to prepare for the requests from your more savvy clients.

The Information Technology (IT) field is also seeing an expansion of roles. Where competencies were once measured by the adeptness of manipulating programming languages, now an IT professional is asked to provide creative and graphic skills. Where programming was once prized, now that same employee must demonstrate an understanding of human psychology as it relates to user friendliness and interactivity. Thus, a programmer with a good grasp of graphic design and marketing becomes a far greater asset to an organization. And the staffing agency that supplies such an employee raises its stature as well.

Other occupational niches that have shown an expansion or mixing with other niches include:
• Healthcare and information technology, as healthcare tools become more and more technologically advanced
• Marketing and quantitative mathematics, as data mining and other tools become more prevalent as a tool to 
  better focus communications
• Finance and psychology, as financial firms rediscover the human element in decision making and crowd thinking
• Security and management analysis, as an increased level of security within the government and businesses are
  leading to unwieldy departments
• Manual labor and computer skills, as unskilled labor increasingly relies upon the use of computers on every
  project

Now is the time for your agency to take a fresh look at your personnel requests, your candidate pool and the skills and responsibilities required in your niche. By redefining key roles, you will be better prepared to respond when a client makes a request that is at the edge of your niche. Conversely, by promoting your foresight as it pertains to these expanded skill sets, you can easily create a unique selling proposition for your firm. A new niche occupied only by your firm. And one that is even more valuable to your clients and within your marketplace.