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Last week The Economist had an article in their Print Magazine that was titled, “You’re hired – next year“. I found to it be a lot of window dressing and likely written to attract eyeballs more than provide real value. However, there were a couple of things in the article that were worth noting:
“According to a survey carried out by Watson Wyatt, a consulting firm, three-quarters of American companies have implemented a hiring freeze.”
“The hiring of freelancers and consultants has become more common, allowing companies to avoid spending on employee benefits and delay hiring decisions until the economy picks up.”
“When they do take on new employees, companies are taking longer to make an offer, knowing that they no longer have to move fast to prevent competitors from stealing their prospective hires.”
The first data point, while it likely won’t surprise you, is still very shocking. There are nearly 5 million unemployed Americans right now and 75% of companies aren’t allowing new hires. This combination does make me wonder what Ben Bernanke was smiling about today…
The second data point, again, won’t come as any surprise at all. The reason I pulled out for the purpose of this blog is to emphasize the guidance that I’ve shared with a number of colleagues. If you’ve got needs right now for work that can be done by freelancers, it’s very possible to get $1 worth of work for $.25 these days. It’s not because Freelancers are lowering their rates. Rather, I’ve found that it’s because hiring a graphic artist (as an example) for a 10 hour project is much easier to do these days and, if you hire a Freelancer who doesn’t have anything else to do, there’s a very high likelihood that they’ll put 15 or 20 hours into the project simply to fill up their day and occupy themselves.
Lastly, the third quote that I called out of the Article is another example of just how clueless the media is about the labor market these days. It’s absolutely true that if you’re competing for a perpetually lazy clock-puncher who is guaranteed to bring no value to your organization and poison your culture, you can take as long as you want to hire them without fear of competition. But if you’re looking for top talent, even in this marketplace, you’re going to have to fight. A real life example: one of our clients needed to hire a Service Delivery expert in the NYC area while the S&P was at its absolute low earlier this year. The prospective employee they really wanted had been on the market for 3 days because the company he was with had shut down when it ran out of funding. By the time they “won” the chance to add him to their team he had 3 other offers.
I love analogies and I’ll end with this to drive home my point and also show my love of baseball: there are never scalpers selling tickets for more than face value outside of the stadium in Kansas City in September. Conversely, good luck getting a single seat at Fenway during the same period of time for anything less than twice the price printed on the ticket.
Tags: A-Players, ben bernanke, freelancers, hire better, hiring, proactive recruiting, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, watson wyatt
Recruiting vs Absorbing: Know the Difference?
I continue to hear from Recruiters, Journalists and even Business owners that now is a great time to pick up talent because of how high the unemployment rate is. I’ve written in the past about how I think that now is a great time to be RECRUITING as well but not because of the growing number of the unemployed. I’m not going to re-hash that here. Instead, this post is going to focus on what Jack Daly considers the difference between Recruiting and Absorbing.
I’d like to start by sharing that I live in Austin, TX (yes, it is as cool as you’ve heard). In this town we’re proud of live music, barbeque and, probably above all, Longhorn Football. Mack Brown is the Head Coach (aka the CEO) of the team.
Right now, spring practices are done and the coaching team is spending all of their time figuring out (1) what’s our depth chart for the fall (2) who are the top High School Sophomores at each position in Texas and the US and (3) how are we going to convince young men from around the country to pay us $300+ to come to our camp so that they can be seen by our coaches when every other school in the country wants them to do the same?
The reason I brought up point #3 is because it’s not unlike the current marketplace for Businesses looking to land top talent. How? Hundreds of young men will descend upon Austin in the coming weeks and happily throw down their $300 camp fee. While the coaching staff has a responsibility to treat every camper fairly by providing them with a safe place to stay, healthy food and some nominal feedback about how to improve, it’s the 8-10 players that they personally invited in for the camp that they are focusing their attention on. Every once in a while a young man who shows up and was unheralded impresses the coaches and gets a shot scholarship but it’s rare.
I hope you’re seeing the direct parallel between the people who are applying for jobs at your company as opposed to the people who you have to fight to get.
With that in mind, let’s go back to Mack Brown’s role in this recruiting process. Because he has the advantage of knowing who the top 10 Prep Quarterbacks or Linebackers are by subscribing to the industry publications that track this data, he can carefully place phone calls to these young men to get them excited about the program.
Focus because here’s the crux of the blog post: After Mack Brown gets off the phone with a young man who he’d like to see as his starting quarterback in 2011, do you think he sends that 16 year old a copy of a job description for what a Quarterback does?
Let’s bring it all back to your business: here are the 5 questions you have to ask YOURSELF when recruiting and then share with your “top recruits”:
1. Why come to work here?
2. What are we (as a company) doing to ensure that our team is successful?
3. How can you (our prized recruit) be sure that the reputation of our company is exceptional?
4. Where is our greatest opportunity for growth in the marketplace?
5. What are the most compelling reasons to join the team here?
If you’ve read the book Who you would know that these are also part of the 5 F’s (Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun and Fit). By asking yourself these questions as the CEO or Hiring Manager you’re attempting to proactively answer a lot of these concerns that a recruit would have.
If you’d like to pick up a great book for the weekend and learn how college football is answering each of these questions, check out Meat Market: Inside the smash mouth world of College Football Recruiting by Bruce Feldman.
Bonus food for thought: if Mack Brown needed a starting quarterback in 2011 and he didn’t start thinking about it until 2 weeks before the season started, would he start placing ads on CraigsList with the hopes someone would apply that he could hire?
Tags: 5 F's, A-Player, A-Players, Austin, bruce feldman, Fame, Family, Fit, Fortune, Fun, geoff smart, hiring manager, jack daly, longhorn football, mack brown, proactive recruiting, recruit don't absorb, recruiting versus absorbing, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, who the book
Now IS the time to be Recruiting but not for the reasons you would think
There’s a link circulating out in cyberspace about a Podcast in which Steve Mullen is interviewing Brad Smart, the author of Topgrading. The focus of the interview is all around Hiring in a Weak Economy.
I had a great conversation with a friend of mine just the other day around this exact topic. We were specifically discussing the fact that the Press obviously doesn’t understand what is going on and they’re printing the same things about recruiting as they are about investing in the stock market and buying real estate: that there are huge advantages to being a contrarian.
As someone who runs a consulting company that focuses on recruiting for a living as well as having some stock holdings and a small real estate portfolio: I couldn’t agree more.
But being a contrarian is tough. And in this market, recruiting in a traditional manner is absolutely NOT the prudent thing to do. Prior to the unemployment rate being where it is, we had a member of our team who did nothing but research the very best places for us to be posting every position that we work on. The results were always solid because we could get 300-500+ applicants no matter what the role was. While direct applicants usually make up between 60-80% of the total pool of people we consider for a role, they rarely comprise more than 1 of the 3 finalists we end up with. Today, even if you’ve got no posting strategy at all, you can get well over 500 applicants for nearly everything. It may come as a surprise to many, that even with an exponential increase in direct applicants, this pool of pool of candidates still only represent about 1/3 of the total finalists for any position. Why? Even with over 10% unemployment in states like California, nearly 90% of the people in the state are still employed.
However, I’ll still contend that now is the best time in recent history to recruit. My reasoning isn’t scientific. Rather, it’s based on our own internal survey of how things are going. Our justification: there are very few people who are currently employed turning down phone calls. In fact, they’re returning calls at a higher rate than we’ve ever seen before! Lots of things could be causing it but we feel that there are a couple that are most prevalent:
- Their companies aren’t communicating about their direction.
- Management has reacted to market conditions and eliminated performance based pay.
- Salespeople have had quotas increased but compensation decreased.
Starting tomorrow we’ll launch a new search for a Vice President of Sales with a target compensation of around $250,000. Care to guess how many websites we’ll post it on? ZERO. We know that the right person for this job has a great career right now. We’re going to need to RECRUIT them away.
It is tougher than posting for the job and watching the resumes come flowing in from hundreds of people? Absolutely.
Is it fair to our clients to have us spend hours sorting through (potentially) thousands of resumes instead of targeting the 75-100 companies who we think have the person we’re most interested in? I think Dr. Smart would agree with me – in an economy like this, the best return on investment is to recruit, not post and hope.
Tags: A-Player, Brad Smart, caps on commission, contrarian, decreased compensation, earning caps, endgame PR, hiring in a weak economy, increased quota, job applications, performance-based pay, posting jobs, recruit don't absorb, startup bizcast, steve mullen, Topgrading, unemployment, vice president of sales
Working at Hire Better: It’s the toughest job you’ll ever love
Recently we’ve had the number of people who want to work with Hire Better really jump. Not surprising, considering every company who has made it known that they’re growing and adding staff is being bombarded with applicants.
That being said, we’re having to eliminate a lot more people from the process earlier than ever before. It’s compelling enough to share with the public. Here’s why:
1. Traditional recruiters don’t “get it”. We’re working hard, every day, to change the mindset of companies. Put simply: they (companies in America) don’t trust headhunters. We’ve introduced transparency and accountability in two ways:
(a) The Talent Vault – where every single person we talk to, and every conversation we have with them, is tracked. No other firm in America (or even internal recruiters) will show this.
(b) We account for our time based on every 6 minutes we work. Our clients know what we’re doing, every minute of the day.
When we’ve made attempts to hire team members from traditional Staffing or Recruiting firms, they wash out in a week because they don’t like being held accountable. They use statements like, “I feel like I’m under a microscope” or “This model makes me think that no one believes what I’m doing” when in reality, it’s the opposite. Because we’re willing to share everything we do to the level that we do, our clients have told us it’s the reason they come back again and again.
2. As most people know, our entire team (absent myself) is comprised of Work at Home Moms. I happen to be a Work from Home Dad. It’s not to suggest that we only hire women, we just have yet to find another Dad who’s willing to admit that he’s a WAHD. We get a lot of guys who apply because they were previously recruiters and they’re intrigued by the idea of working out of their homes but they haven’t accepted the dual responsibility of Daddy-hood and a career. While we’ve flirted with the idea of hiring full-time people, it simply doesn’t work with our model. If you’re applying for a job with our company and you’re hoping it can replace your current full-time job, please save your time and effort. It’s simply not what we’re looking for.
Bonus: if you’re a Work at Home Dad, please send me a twitter directly: @HireBetterCEO. We’d love to have you on the team.
3. Balance in the lives of our employees is critical. When we’re interviewing someone who tells us that they’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done – even work 80 hours a week, it shows us that they won’t fit in. We work hard, but we’re like sprinters. We work hard for short periods of time and then spend time with our families. When we really focus for 2 hours at a time, good things happen! We’re believers that the hours from 25-80 each week aren’t nearly as effective as 1-24.
4. We don’t use industry jargon like “jobs”, “reqs” or “desks”. We’re a team. Everyone on our team has a role. And we never, ever, try to get someone hired just so that we can collect a fee. We don’t measure speed to hire or cost per hire. We measure the quality of the hire over the life of their employment and the satisfaction of each client and hiring manager. Note to those who are interviewing with us: don’t regale us with stories in your interview telling us how proud you were that you handled 50 open positions yourself and filled them all in a month. We won’t be impressed.
Bottom line: we’re growing, but we’re picky. If you’re interested in being on our team as an interviewer, qualifier, researcher or administrator, email Jen Globig today and tell her that you’d like to help us change the world.
Tags: apply for a job, contingent recruiter, cost per hire, desk, growing, headhunters, i don't trust headhunters, job application, jobs, new positions, quality of work, recruiter, recruiters, reqs, requisitions, RPO, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, wahd, wahm, we're hiring, work 2 hours, work at home dad, work at home mom, work from home dad, work from home mom, working 80 hours a week, working part time