Many Hiring Managers and Hiring Executives that I hear from are not pleased with the recruiting services they are receiving from internal and external recruiters. This is the primary reason that Hiring Authorities tend not to respect working with recruiters. Hiring Managers get calls from many different recruiters, usually adding up to way too many calls. Most of the Hiring Authorities remember taking the time to describe their needs while a recruiter on the other end of the phone reassures the Hiring Authorities that their company “is different” and the recruiter will be able fill this position. When that does not happen, many recruiters just fade into the darkness. Many of my Clients, both Managers and Executives, that I explain the following to are surprised, but finally understand why.
The misunderstanding by Hiring Authorities with Contingency Recruiting is that recruiters are getting paid. The truth is, recruiters will get paid nothing unless they find the right candidate and get the candidate interviewed and hired. I started my career with a firm that only did Contingency searches. There, we were only paid if we filled the position. With no guarantees that we were going to make any money, added to that, the failure rate of Contingency searches, all of us had to play a numbers game. In this situation, we had to write as many job orders with as many clients as we could, filling the database full of resumes. First, we were all looking for “low hanging fruit”, which were searches we could match up with candidates easily. After completing the “quick-to-fill” searches, we moved on to the more time consuming searches. At this point, many recruiters will search an interoffice peg board or “bull pen” to find other candidates or searches to match up with theirs. And many times, recruiters were willing to take a long shot with a certain candidate that didn’t really meet the needs of the job order. At this point, both the recruiter and client feel a sense of frustration, and the recruiter simply fades away, realizing that this search would require too much time for percentage gained and may cause them to miss out on money elsewhere.
When I was thinking about getting back into the agency business, I looked at a lot of different firms. When I first heard about Hygun and their “Retained Services” business line, I was intrigued. As I sat down and got an appreciation of the operation, I really understood the logic and jumped on board. At Hygun we do work under Contingency contracts on a case by case basis. We use the Contingency to introduce “Opportunity Hires” to the market. These are people that we have known for a long time and trust us to represent them quietly and confidentially in the marketplace. We also use Contingency contracts to work on searches with potential new clients that we are introducing to our services so we can develop a long term retained relationship. Finally, there are those clients that for one reason or another can not work under a retained contract. These must be exceptional orders to work on if we are going to assign recruiters to them (serious, sense of urgency, realistic expectations, reasonable interview process and track record of success). There also must be an availability of staff from our Retainers. As a Senior member of Hygun Group, I have people that I pay “billable hours” that work for me. If we have the availability, we can work Contingency searches. Our goal however is to maximize that billability, just like any of our clients. My recruit staff, and myself, devote man hours to “Direct Recruiting.” We will search out the people in the market that fit the search and we approach them directly. If they are not looking for employment, they are “Passive” Candidates, which our clients like to see because they are usually not in the market. With a Retained partnership, we are allowed to share all the information with the candidate about the Client, which is another huge advantage in retained recruiting. This allows us to provide a quality of candidate and a level of success that our clients have not seen before. Retained service provides an assigned and focused professional service that is like any other (Doctors, Lawyers, Agents, Consultants, etc) in that if you want the best service, you have to hire it. This also ensures that our relationships with our clients do not “fade away into the darkness”.
Ryan Goodman
Sr. Account Executive
http://www.hygun.com/
Monday, September 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Way Back WHEN-esday
It was suggested that once a month I write an article about "way by when" and call it Way Back When-esday. As I thought about the title of the blog, it made perfect sense. The questions my younger recruiting colleagues keep asking is 'why'. Why do employers not understand that engineering candidates do not grow on trees and there will be another one better to interview tomorrow? Why don't they feel the need to move more quickly on certain candidates? Why do employers perceive Baby Boomers as over-qualified, and moreover, what are their perceptions of the X, Y & Me generations? Hiring authorities are not wrong to think this way because so much has changed since they themselves first graduated with their Engineering degrees and had their first interviews. These changes include the Dot Com world, EOE rules, the Internet, the standard work week, the mobile worker, telecommuting, the global market, profit margins and multipliers, wages, bonuses and on and on.
So, here we go. In the early days of my recruiting experience, I felt like a crusader finding the "Perfect" Candidate for "My" Clients. Well, time has passed and I realized that there is neither a "Perfect" Candidate nor are the Clients solely "Mine". You see, in the beginning recruiters believed that candidates never really lied about their experiences, but "stretched" the truth. After all, not everyone is perfect. Learning fast, one of my greatest quotes in training is "the best lie ever told is the one that lies closest to the truth." Not only were we surprised at the misdirected fact, but down right shocked to believe, as the statistics began to show, that resumes were a mere 44% embellished, if not just down right made up.
Clients have always USED recruiters, many recruiters, on a contingency basis, storing and stock-piling resumes until they themselves are glazed over with a term we call "Candidate Drunk." We believed that hiring authorities felt that if they didn't review and interview several hundred (my embellishment) candidates then they could not justify the hiring of the Golden Child to their bosses, who they themselves were glazed over with interviewing Senior candidates. Oh yes, contingency fee, defined by Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, as a noun, is "a fee for services paid upon successful completions of the services and usually calculated as a percentage of the gain realized for the client." Way back when, recruiters were paid a flat rate, "finder's fee", for rounding up resumes and sometimes the actual candidates. They were not really recruiting them for a special opportunity or next step in their career. So, resume factories sprang up everywhere. And in 1987, Canon came out with "the first plain-paper Fax Machine" which brought on more efficient and affordable technology to aid in reducing verbal conversations. No more talking about a candidate's personal or professional history, or their wants and needs for the future of their career. And with the introduction of e-mail, conversations that used to be conducted by the phone or in person, are now being executed via e-mail, Blackberry or text. Recruiters were being paid to fill data banks for human resources and then told to get out of the way and let the interviewing talents of the hiring authorities prevail, giving recruiters very little involvement, if any at all, in the hiring process. Without the recruiter to prepare the candidate, the interview style (i.e., negative, soft, hard, group grope, etc.), most often would result in the candidate appearing as a deer caught in headlights or left with the feeling of being ambushed by the hiring authorities.
You see, back in the day we had a lot of Engineers and Scientists to go around. Ph.D.'s were in fact "Piled High and Deep." Jobs were few and employed engineers were grateful to have one. Annual wages were low and I mean low. Tim Colebatch says in an article he wrote in 2004 that, "The money level of our wages has increased sharply over time. It was only in 1973 that the average male earning first topped $100 a week - female earnings were excluded until 1980 - and when the bureau started collecting data in 1941, the average male was paid just over ?5 ($10) a week."
Back in the day, if a candidate gave thought to making a change, hiring authorities had one basic question, "Why are you looking?" This gave the impression that something was wrong with the candidate. Ironically this question has lived to repeat itself, for a whole different reason (more on this later). The decline of graduating engineers over the last two decades in specific sciences and the turn towards big money lure of the IT engineering world, has shocked a lot of us and cost us additional graduating engineers that were needed for the up and coming building of the Infrastructure World. It was also a shock and a blessing when we ran into the Dot Com crash, as more engineers with wrong engineering degrees filled the job market and were not the right fit to fill the rise of the Infrastructure growth of the late 90's and early 2000. However, it seemed to add a little more argument to having sons and daughters go into traditional engineering coarse work.
In closing, through my Way Back When-esday posts, I want to get into the whys from our eyes. In the mean time you should read some. Try reading a cool little article by Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek Magazine published on May 12, 2008 titled "Rise of the Rest". This article should help you sleep better hearing that it isn't all bad, but also hopefully optimistic.
But remember, things have changed:
So, here we go. In the early days of my recruiting experience, I felt like a crusader finding the "Perfect" Candidate for "My" Clients. Well, time has passed and I realized that there is neither a "Perfect" Candidate nor are the Clients solely "Mine". You see, in the beginning recruiters believed that candidates never really lied about their experiences, but "stretched" the truth. After all, not everyone is perfect. Learning fast, one of my greatest quotes in training is "the best lie ever told is the one that lies closest to the truth." Not only were we surprised at the misdirected fact, but down right shocked to believe, as the statistics began to show, that resumes were a mere 44% embellished, if not just down right made up.
Clients have always USED recruiters, many recruiters, on a contingency basis, storing and stock-piling resumes until they themselves are glazed over with a term we call "Candidate Drunk." We believed that hiring authorities felt that if they didn't review and interview several hundred (my embellishment) candidates then they could not justify the hiring of the Golden Child to their bosses, who they themselves were glazed over with interviewing Senior candidates. Oh yes, contingency fee, defined by Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, as a noun, is "a fee for services paid upon successful completions of the services and usually calculated as a percentage of the gain realized for the client." Way back when, recruiters were paid a flat rate, "finder's fee", for rounding up resumes and sometimes the actual candidates. They were not really recruiting them for a special opportunity or next step in their career. So, resume factories sprang up everywhere. And in 1987, Canon came out with "the first plain-paper Fax Machine" which brought on more efficient and affordable technology to aid in reducing verbal conversations. No more talking about a candidate's personal or professional history, or their wants and needs for the future of their career. And with the introduction of e-mail, conversations that used to be conducted by the phone or in person, are now being executed via e-mail, Blackberry or text. Recruiters were being paid to fill data banks for human resources and then told to get out of the way and let the interviewing talents of the hiring authorities prevail, giving recruiters very little involvement, if any at all, in the hiring process. Without the recruiter to prepare the candidate, the interview style (i.e., negative, soft, hard, group grope, etc.), most often would result in the candidate appearing as a deer caught in headlights or left with the feeling of being ambushed by the hiring authorities.
You see, back in the day we had a lot of Engineers and Scientists to go around. Ph.D.'s were in fact "Piled High and Deep." Jobs were few and employed engineers were grateful to have one. Annual wages were low and I mean low. Tim Colebatch says in an article he wrote in 2004 that, "The money level of our wages has increased sharply over time. It was only in 1973 that the average male earning first topped $100 a week - female earnings were excluded until 1980 - and when the bureau started collecting data in 1941, the average male was paid just over ?5 ($10) a week."
Back in the day, if a candidate gave thought to making a change, hiring authorities had one basic question, "Why are you looking?" This gave the impression that something was wrong with the candidate. Ironically this question has lived to repeat itself, for a whole different reason (more on this later). The decline of graduating engineers over the last two decades in specific sciences and the turn towards big money lure of the IT engineering world, has shocked a lot of us and cost us additional graduating engineers that were needed for the up and coming building of the Infrastructure World. It was also a shock and a blessing when we ran into the Dot Com crash, as more engineers with wrong engineering degrees filled the job market and were not the right fit to fill the rise of the Infrastructure growth of the late 90's and early 2000. However, it seemed to add a little more argument to having sons and daughters go into traditional engineering coarse work.
In closing, through my Way Back When-esday posts, I want to get into the whys from our eyes. In the mean time you should read some. Try reading a cool little article by Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek Magazine published on May 12, 2008 titled "Rise of the Rest". This article should help you sleep better hearing that it isn't all bad, but also hopefully optimistic.
But remember, things have changed:
- You need a good Doctor to keep you healthy
- You need a good Accountant to keep you wealthy
- And an excellent Recruiter to keep you moving on a good career path,
- ...and a good career opportunity provided by some of the best engineering people and companies I know, My Clients.
Over the coming weeks and months, my team and I plan to address the why's this post includes, in much greater depth. However, if something in particular has caught your eye and you want to know more now, leave us a comment and we will cover that first. I profess that I don't know everything, but after a few decades of actually talking to people on both sides of the interviewing trail, I can at least give you my opinion.
See you next When-esday!
Daniel Hydrick, CEO
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