Category Archives: Blah

How To Pay A Headhunting Fee in 15 Easy Steps

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I hear statements like this all the time: ‘Ugh, I don’t want to pay a headhunting fee!’ I know this is because corporate HR folks think that it’s really hard to do, but I’m hear to show you that it isn’t hard!  In fact, in 15 easy steps, I’ll show you how you can do this all the time!

Here are the 15 Easy Steps in Paying a Headhunting Fee:

1. Post all of your jobs and wait for applications/resumes to come into your email and/or ATS.

2. Weed out as many candidates as possible for stuff that doesn’t really matter, like: too many jobs, not enough time at a job, going to the ‘wrong’ school or not high enough GPA, working for a company that was too big or too small, making a grammatical error on the resume, not living in the ‘right’ area, etc.

3. Email the few candidates you have left with a message about their interest level and make them fill out stuff like applications and questionnaires to be considered for the next step.

4. Wait for email replies.

5. Send the 2 that reply as your ‘best candidates’ onto the hiring manager. 7 others reply after, ignore these, they weren’t quick enough to be the ‘best’ candidates.

6. Don’t follow up with the hiring manager on the two candidates you sent.  If she is interested, she’ll get back to you.

7. Don’t respond to candidates following up looking for feedback on next steps, you want to keep the power position in this arrangement.

8. Send another email to hiring manager after two weeks looking for feedback on original candidates you sent.  Hiring manager won’t like the two, wants more candidates.  You go out and see who else has posted for the position in the past week (forget about those other 7 who first applied, they are old by now).  Send 5 additional emails to the new candidates. 1 replies. Send to hiring manager.

9. Let Hiring Managers return calls go to voice mail, you know they just want to complain about the quality and lack of candidates. Call her back end of business tomorrow. She’s already gone for the day.

10. Hiring manager comes to your office. Crap. They caught you. You tell the manager you’ve been working non-stop on their opening, the three candidates are the best you can come up with.

11. Hiring manager goes back to their office. I call your hiring manager.  She tells me she can’t get any good candidates.

12. Hiring Manager sets up their own interviews.  Three days later, if not sooner, I send your hiring manager 5 candidates all capable of doing the job.  I call your hiring manager to highlight two of the candidates who I feel would be the best fit for your organization.

13. Hiring manager picks a favorite from the great interviews they just had.  I’ve pre-closed both on an offer, so I’m what they call in the business, a ‘sure-thing’.

14. Hiring manager calls you and tells you they found a candidate through an outside source.

15. You process my invoice.

See, it’s really not that hard to pay a headhunting fee, in fact, you practically don’t have to do much of anything!   Just keep doing what you’re doing.

 

Employee Narcissism At All-Time High

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Do you feel that our fixation on employee feedback is perpetuating our narcissistic society?

It’s a question I thought of recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.  On one hand, I truly believe we have a major issue with narcissism in our society that is getting worse, not better.  I also believe giving feedback to employees, on the work they do, is very valuable and needed to have a strong workforce.

So what gives?

We are told Annual Employee Evaluations are broken and not enough.

We are told you must give feedback to your employees frequently throughout the year.

We are also told that we have multiple generations that have gotten ‘hooked’ on feedback, like a junky is ‘hooked’ on crack.  You get up and you put up a selfie waiting for your ‘followers’ to comment, to ‘like’, to give you a fix.  You get to work, one more selfie – just a quick hit.  Out to lunch, with my bestie, just one hit before I return to the office.  Okay, it’s late afternoon, I’m going to need a little more to make it until 5pm, hello bathroom selfie, you’re my savior. Look at me! I’m home, bottle of wine selfie should at least get me through the evening.

Is it a stretch to compare the desire for social feedback to our desire for work feedback?

Here’s what I know.  The more feedback you get, the more feedback you desire.  If that is the case, is your new constant feedback evaluations at work creating a monster that you’ll never be able to satisfy?  I feel like by solving one problem (lack of feedback), HR is helping to cause, or at least sustain, a bigger problem we are facing with an employee culture that is becoming overwhelmingly narcissistic.

Maybe the bigger question should be, what are we going to do with rampant narcissism that is running amok in our organizations?  Have you created Anti-Narcissism training yet in your organization?  If so, what does that entail? I’m thinking it must have some sort of aversion therapy elements (post a selfie and you get a shock from you desk chair!). Or maybe a little  public shaming, which doesn’t seem to work on Narcissist, they actually like it – ‘oh look, someone is talking about me!’

I’m not sure what I dislike more in HR – employees who spent all of their time trying not get noticed, or employees who spend all of their time trying to get noticed!

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile in tedious reality…

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Much of what we do in HR and Recruiting is tedious, never ending work.  Same stuff, same day, same month, year after year.  Welcome to the show, kid.

It doesn’t make the occupation tedious.

Sometimes I think we feel this need that we have to be doing something exciting all the time.  To feel this need to be challenged.  To change the world.  Unfortunately, that isn’t reality of any job.  Everyone has some level of monotony in their daily jobs.  Brain surgeons and Rocket scientists have monotony. It might not seem like it to you, but to them it’s the same old thing, day in, and day out.

I hear this a lot from people when we are talking shop about recruiting.  How do you do it each day, just doing the same thing? And this, coming from a Compensation Pro or a Benefit Analyst!

The very cool, non-tedious part of being in recruiting is that each and every day, people surprise you.  Sometimes in some really negative ways, but also many times in some very positive ways.  I’m always shocked at how people are willing to help me, by just asking.  First time contacts, don’t know me from Adam, willing to go out of their way.  What does that say about the human condition?  I think it says deep down, if given the free choice, we would rather help someone else, than to not help them.  Most people don’t think about that, when they think about recruiting.

Every day, while you’re ‘doing’ the same thing in Recruiting and in HR, people become our non-tedious reality.  I’ve heard for decades people say: “You’re good with people, you should go into HR!” Or have that be the reason why they did go into HR in the first place. But I think it’s more than being a  ‘good people person’.  It’s having a desire to delve into the human condition!  In HR we get involved into the motivations of why employees do this or that.  In recruiting we get involved into the motivations of why a person might want to leave their current job, etc.  In a way, so many people in these roles become a strange kind of untrained therapists.

Maybe that’s the key to dealing with our tedious reality.  We’ve become workplace psychotherapist for those we connect with on a daily basis.  I don’t even know what that says about us?

Oh well, back to life.

 

Blah, blah, blah…

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