Fading Into the Darkness

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/