The Investigative Recruiter

Don't Like Your Severance Package? Boss-nap the Exec Who Laid You Off. Seriously !?!

OK. So our economic world may be tilted upside-down these days. But, thankfully, a recent European boss-napping trend has yet to spread to these United States. I noticed a fascinating bit of employer-worker news on Lori Dorn's blog stunning in its bizarreness.  It goes like this:

Laid off from your job without decent severance? Don't get mad, get your boss .. .I mean, go get your boss and hold him hostage against his will (but don't hurt him) as a bargaining chip for better severance.

A Sony executive was boss-napped in France, and it appears he's not the only one.

Competitive Compensation: What to Do When Comp Falls Short

Scenario: Your opening’s compensation package is not attracting the candidates you need.


You and your search firm are excited to begin the search for a critically important member of your team. You believe that in the current economic environment, there must be a lot of recently downsized candidates that you can snap up.  Yet, it turns out the candidates that you want expect more in compensation than what your company is prepared to offer.  Still, whenever you try to broach the salary shortfall with those that control your corporate purse strings, they continue to insist the compensation is competitive – as if wishing could make it so.  As a result, the hiring manager is growing increasingly dissatisfied.  He suspects that you and your search firm are not trying hard enough, when that could not be further from the truth.

The problem may be fairly commonplace, but your search firm could have taken simple steps to prevent it. At the start of every search engagement, a search firm must:

• Proactively be on the lookout for threats to the success of a search.  For instance, the firm should make certain the salary, title, and scope are competitive in comparison to similar roles elsewhere.

• Gather market intelligence to document the threat, conduct analysis of the data, and recommend solutions to resolve the threat.
  

• Prepare a report for the hiring manager that can be used to make a business case for necessary changes in salary, title, or scope.
  

• In the event the company chooses not to address the threat, the document demonstrates that your team kept everyone fully informed.
  

Search firms often waste months for candidates that simply do not exist. As they do, the firms may whine about issues with compensation, title, scope, or shortages of talent when they should be much more proactive. They should bullet-proof every engagement by providing critical market intelligence to their clients – empowering them to address threats before they cause a search to fail.

(For more tips, whitepapers, and articles, visit www.thegoodsearchllc.com)

Too Many Resumes: Too Little Time

Scenario: What to do if you are drowning in resumes and still can’t find the candidate you need.

They say you should be thrilled.  The unemployment rate is so high that it is raining resumes.  Your candidate must be in there, somewhere.  Only thing is that you’re going blind from scanning resumes for the elusive, one-in-a-thousand, qualified candidate.  As you do, you wonder whether this is what you went to college to do – repetitive, apparently useless sifting through CVs.  With each successive resume, you casually wonder why candidates don’t read the job requirements.  Then you wonder whether they can read.  Oh yes, and then there are the resumes that don't seem particularly truthful.

No recruiting organization should rely on job postings to fill its openings.  To do so leaves you powerless to do anything, but hope and pray, that the right candidate applies.   Instead of drowning in resumes, try the following:

 

• Focus your time and resources on what’s most important: ushering interested, qualified candidates through to hire.

• Take a simple, proactive approach. Instead of waiting for the right candidate to apply, conduct research to identify the best people for the job.

• Systematically call and email prospects to convert them to viable candidates.

• If your sourcing team has trouble converting IDs to candidates, as is often the case, outsource candidate identification and development to a trusted search partner.

• Off-load applicant resumes to search partners to review and screen.

In the end, it pays to take a strategic approach to the recruitment of passive candidates.  Done the right way, you can deliver the winning candidate in the space of just a couple of weeks.  Done the wrong way, you can call endless lists of candidates to no avail.  That is why, in most cases, it is essential to forge a strategic recruitment relationship with a search partner that takes an investigative approach to find the shortest path to the best candidates.  Remember, even in this economy, the best ones remain elusive and rarely appear as applicants at your front door.

(To learn more about our practice, visit http://www.thegoodsearchllc.com)

Talent Acquisition in the New Economy: Less is More

Scenario: Key members of your corporate recruiting team just got cut and you still have openings to fill.

The flood of applicants caused by the economic downturn is making it harder, not easier, for employers to find the right candidate because there are more candidates than ever before and the vast majority of them are wrong for the job.   If you wait to see whether the right candidate applies, you may be waiting forever. If you wait for contingency firms to deliver the candidate, they may not even be actively working on filling your job. And if you wait for a retained search firm to fill it, you are simply paying too much for too little in return.

Doing more with less is the key to surviving the economic downturn.  In fact, if you can demonstrate improved results with fewer resources, you can advance your career in corporate talent acquisition. However, to do so, you must become more efficient and stop wasting time on processes that shuffle resumes better than they produce viable candidates.

You must:

• Audit the time spent on your recruitment resources and eliminate the time-wasters, such as job boards that deliver more unqualified candidates than good.

• Review your recruiting spend and eliminate underutilized resources as well as those that haven’t shown a solid ROI.

• Expect more from your search firms. If they don’t offer you a pay-as-you go model or hand over the candidate research at the end of every engagement, walk away.

In this environment, the fastest, most effective way to a hire is one that is the most direct and proactive:  identify potential candidates and then simply recruit them.  However, internal sourcing teams often have trouble converting IDs into viable candidates.  A better choice is having an external firm identify, profile, screen, and qualify candidates and hand over a slate to the internal team for in-depth interviews.  That approach enables corporate recruiters to concentrate on what matters most: the hiring manager and the potential hires.

The Good Search. Copyright 2009.
http://www.thegoodsearchllc.com

When Retained Firms Come Up Short

You’ve engaged a top retained search firm for a high profile C-Level executive search.  You willingly pay a retained of upwards of $150,000 in good faith. The retained firm has conducted numerous searches that are practically identical to yours.  Better yet, this particular firm specializes in your industry and the senior partner handling your search hails from that same vertical – even golfs regularly with industry’s VIPs.  However, the moment the firm starts presenting executives you become concerned.  The candidates aren’t just a little off.  They’re so far off you wonder why they were presented in the first place.  Well, you are not alone.  On average, 40% of retained engagements fail to complete, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in retained search fees.  While that level of waste clearly is unacceptable in today’s economic environment, it remains the norm.

Problems with the retained search model include:

• Senior partners focus on securing new business, not on execution
• Junior associates do most of the actual recruiting
• Their research is often amateurish, missing star candidates
• Specialization in your industry does more harm than good:  they cannot recruit from important target companies that were clients
• Golfing with candidates does nothing: no top candidate would ever accept an opportunity just because a retained partner said so
• You never really know what they’re doing for all that money: they provide little transparency
• They never hand over all the research at the end of the engagement, even though your retainer paid for it

Retained firms can’t help it.  The model is flawed.  It is based on the illusion that the more you pay the more you get.  The truth is retained search is expensive: you always pay an average of 30-33% of total compensation, even when they don’t deliver the candidate you need.  And when they come up short, you pay even more in wasted time, lost productivity, and lost revenue.  The solution is easy. Invest in a pay-as-you-go model, one that can save you money at the same time it consistently delivers quality candidates. You’re free to stop at any time. But you won’t want to because will have found a better way.

Contingency Plan: When Contingency Firms Aren't Finding You the Candidates You Need

The promise of contingency is extraordinarily enticing: you don’t have to pay unless the firm delivers the winning candidate.  But there’s a reason our parents taught us that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” The contingency search model is flawed, and as a result, it frequently comes up short, failing to fill critical openings.  While you focus on the benefit of not having to pay them to do the search, you may overlook contingency’s tremendous cost. You always pay a steep price, regardless as to whether a placement is made.

The opportunity costs of the contingency model include:

• Failure to include passive candidates who are not actively seeking work, eliminating more than 90-percent of the candidate pool
• Failure to document what steps, if any, the firm has taken on your behalf, providing zero accountability
• Failure to commit to working on filling your opening.  Contingency firms are free to walk away and often do
• Failure to help you identify and resolve issues that get in the way of filling difficult openings
• Failure to leverage investigative research to uncover star candidates others miss
• Failure to deliver the value-add of all the research:  they rarely do research
• Failure to fill the role

Contingency firms offer unnecessary redundancy. They primarily focus on the same active candidates on the same job boards that your recruiters likely frequent.  Moreover, because contingency firms frequently abandon searches without telling their clients, you may be under the mistaken impression that they are feverishly working on filling the search when the exact opposite is true.  As a result, the opportunity cost can be enormous. A critical position that languishes unfilled can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue and productivity.  Clearly, it is time to come  up with a new contingency plan, one that doesn’t include the word “contingency”.

The Anatomy of Buzz Revisted - Emanuel Rosen's update

Recruiters who are good, really good at what they do must be masters of buzz. It is the reason I wrote about Emanuel Rosen's first book, The Anatomy of Buzz, and why I think his second tome -- with more than one hundred new interviews with thought leaders, marketing executives, researchers, and consumers -- is worth a read.
The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited details the many reasons why simple "word of mouth" is never enough to grow your recruiting practice. You need to get more positive word of mouth than is typical for someone in your position . . . and since word of mouth fades over time, you need to employ triggers to keep your supporters talking up your brand, whether you work in recruiting on the employer side or the search firm side.

Game Face: Putting Your Best Photo Forward

Increasingly candidates and recruiters are creating profiles on social networks online. And, increasingly, those profiles include photos.  Have you seen the photos that people are putting online? Some look like mugshots taken in a police line up. Others look like they were taking after a full night of partying (can you spell h-a-n-g-o-v-e-r?) And then there's the artsy crowd, those that want to add a bit of mystery to their Internet personae by taking a photo of only part of their face. Finally, the vast majority of profiles are do-it-yourself jobs, snapshots taken at arms length as they strike a pose for themselves.  The photo shoots resemble the one parodied in The MySpace Movie:

Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, for a long time my own web profile featured a snapshot that I took with the camera built into my daughter's MacBook.  As you can see, the resolution is off because I didn't know how to convert the image to the appropriate format and size. Also, while the snapshot is me, it weirdly doesn't resemble me because I don't really sit or smile that way.  

Later, as I was updating my firms website, I finally broke down to do it right. I contacted an amazing professional photographer Ken Regan that I knew from my days as a television journalist and had him do the photos.   Compare do-it-yourself with the work of a professional. Night and day.

My realization? We are each our own brand. In the world of the social networking, a simple profile photo speak volumes about who we are. We need to ask ourselves whether its comments are on message.

Recruiting Like a Retriever

Labradors are retrievers, as are recruiters. So I find it helpful to meditate on the secrets bred into Frankie, not the least of which is passion. Frankie loves life, loves people,and loves snow, treating our backyard as his personal gi-normous snow cone. The economy may be cooling, but then again, for the Frankies of the world, it represents a delicious opportunity . . . .

Recruiting With Dogs: Franklin Delano McLovin'

I enjoy the luxury of working from home, as does everyone who works for The Good Search. It crossed my mind today that I know there are a lot of recruiters out there who work alongside their pets. I've got four who keep me company -- two cats and two dogs, including Frankie, who barks like the Hound of the Baskervilles when anyone approaches the house.  When he goes into barking conniptions while I'm on the phone, it often serves as an ice-breaker. (For really important calls, you'll find me hermetically sealed within the confines of my soundproof office.)

A year ago, he resembled the puppy in Marley & Me, the movie that's just now coming out. Today he's 110 pounds of love .  . . 

Wuf!