Category Archives: Interview

This Is Only For the Advance Class

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As my friend Laurie Ruettimann pointed out last week, recruiting is easy and can be done by basically anyone, so just go hire some soldier to do it.   Laurie might not be that all far from the truth.  Recruiting isn’t brain surgery, it’s a process.  A process that is hated by the majority of human resource professionals around the world, which is why it is a $9 Billion dollar industry.  Not a hard skill, but many times, a really hard job to be successful at.  Old school recruiters like to believe recruiting is an Art form.  It’s not.  New school recruiters like to believe you can just source everyone you need off the internets. You can’t.

Recruiting is all about activity.  It’s a sales cycle.  The more contacts (phone calls, emails, handshakes, etc.) you make, the more candidates you will find.  The more candidates you find and get interested in your jobs.  The more jobs you will fill.  Not hard, right?  The problem is, ‘most’ recruiters look to do things that allows them not to make contacts!  They will buy every kind of technology imaginable to get people to call them.  They’ll do just about anything, besides picking up the phone and making that one call.

Want to be successful at Recruiting? Find people who are willing to make 100 calls per day and who love your company.  Go ahead, go find those people!  It might be a soldier, it might be your neighbor, it might a former crackhead, who knows!  The fact is, most people do not want to do this, even when you hire them and pay them to do just this!

So being a successful recruiter is basically easy.  You must find the sweet spot in the amount of activity you need to do each week that will get you the amount of contacts you need to get enough people for the jobs you want to fill.  Once you find that level, you need to maintain that level forever. Easy. I’m not kidding.  You don’t need fancy branding, and big ATS Systems and a bunch of processes.  You need people who will bang your internal resume database and job boards constantly, and faster than your competition.  That really isn’t that hard to do, because most shops don’t even do the basics well!

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

Do that which is written above and add just one thing.  Maintain a relationship with your companies Alumni.  There is this funny thing about human nature.  When we leave some place, we always want to know what’s going on back there!  If we move to a new city, we love updates from our old city.  When we run into past coworkers at the mall, we love updates on who is still there and who is running different departments, who got fired, who got promoted.  If we know this about human nature, why aren’t we giving it to our Alumni?

It doesn’t have to be constant, but is has to be consistent.

Do a quarterly Alumni update via email to everyone who has every worked for you. Even the crappy ones who you are glad they are gone !  Give them some juicy details about promotions. Let them know some new things you’re working on.  Let them know what jobs you’re trying to fill, and how they can refer people.  Do this every quarter for 2 years.  Want to be class valedictorian?  On a monthly basis call a handful of alumni and just have chat, build some relationships, check on where are they now.  As them if you mind if you share their story in the next Alumni News going out next quarter.  If you commit to do this for 24 months, you will start to see positions fill themselves.

This is advance course stuff, because 99% of companies aren’t doing this with their recruiting!

Pity Hires

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Some of the best business interactions I have each week are on the back channel with the gang over at Fistful of Talent.  It usually starts with one of our tribe asking the rest of us a question, and quickly spirals out of control.  Almost every time someone will say “this email string should be a blog post”.  Almost 100% it’s not, because the snark level is Defcon 1!  The concept of “Pity Hire” came from one of these recent interactions and I’ll give credit to the brilliant Paul Hebert (original FOT member and if you need an expert on rewards and recognition, and almost anything else, he’s your dude!).

The conversation actually started around “hiring pretty“, which I’m a huge fan of and have written about it several times.  It’s my belief that over hundreds of years, genetics has and will continue to build better hires.  Hires that are more attractive, taller, etc.  It’s just simple science and human behavior interacting.  I won’t go into detail here, you can read my previous post to get the background.  Let’s just say smart powerful rich men, get pick of women. They have kids. Better healthcare, nutrition, family wealth, access and education, lead to the cycle starting all over again. Eventually, pretty people are not just pretty, they are also smarter.  Looks at our business and political leaders for the most part – usually pretty people.

So, it’s not really that hard to then make the jump to the fact that all of us really like to hire pretty people.  Like it!  We actually love it!  Therein lies the problem.  There are only so many pretty hires to go around, and let’s face it, not all pretty people are genetically superior!  This gets us to Pity Hires.  A Pity Hire is a hire you make of someone out of shear pity for them.  They might not be so good looking, or smart, or they come from circumstances that are less than ideal.  So that you can identify and help stop this kind of hiring I wanted to list out the types of Pity Hires we tend to make:

Pity Hire Types —

Second Place Hire:  The second place pity hire is the hire you make when you someone doesn’t get hired initially because you actually had a really beautiful person to hire.  The second place hire was probably a better fit, but not as ascetically pleasing.  You find another lower level position, at lower pay, and offer that to them.  You feel bad, so you give them a lessor job.

Crappy Situation Hire: The crappy situation hire happens when you interview someone who is in, or has went through recently, a crappy situation. Newly divorced and the spouse left them for a younger, more beautiful person (happens to both males and females).  The boss from their old job, they were having an affair with, found a new younger, more attractive admin to sleep with.  Things like that – crappy situations.

Recent Breakup Hire: They were fired from their last job, when they were let go through a layoff where their past company was getting rid of the less attractive people.  You feel bad they had to go through those situations, so you hire them for your job.

No One Will Give Me My First Job Hire:  One of the most common Pity Hires is the entry level hire.  Many of us have given out this hire in our careers.  Entry level candidate, got some worthless degree in something like “Historical Urban Anthropology” and can’t figure out why no one will hire them!  They’re not good looking enough to get a job like a normal person, so you hire them.

 Pity hires aren’t necessarily bad hires.  It’s really a kind of HR charity.  We do them for friends kids, and favors for old co-workers.  They usually don’t work out well, but we can compartmentalize them for what they are, Pity Hires.  As I write this I’m wondering if we might have just come up on the next great Recruiting Metric for 2014!  Can you imagine going to your executive team — “Well, we lost 25 hires last year, but we aren’t counting 5 of those losses, they were Pity Hires!”

 

 

After The 4th Round Interview…

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I had a client recently that was undecided about a candidate after the 4th round interview.  They were thinking that maybe a fifth round would make the difference.  I told them that it wouldn’t.  In fact, it was a mistake to allow them to get to four.

Do you know what the fourth round interview says about your process?

It says that your process is broken.  No one needs four rounds of interviews to decide if a candidate is the right candidate for your organization.  A fifth round, or any number higher, is just adding insult to injury.

Here’s what anything beyond the third round interview says to your candidate:

 – “Hey, come work us, so we can totally frustrate you with our indecision culture.”

– “We need more interviews because we don’t have our shit together, but please don’t notice that.”

– “You are so mediocre we just can decide if we should pass on you, or hire you.”

– “I bet you can’t wait to come aboard and be a part of this process in the future!”

– “We like to where down candidates to see who ‘really’ wants out jobs!”

Organizations that can’t figure this out are always interviewing second tier talent.  Organizations that are talent attractors have determined that less is more.  Have a concise process. Move quick. We’ll get it right, more than we’ll get it wrong.  If we get it wrong, don’t take long to make the correction.

The reality is, is that 99% of your interviews should never need to go beyond three interviews.  It looks like this:

1st round – This is your pre-employment screening/assessments  and phone interview. Perfect placement for video screening tool (HireVue, WePow, etc.).

2nd round – Face-to-face with hiring manager and any other key stakeholders (i.e., people this person might support from other functions)

3rd round – if needed-  Face-to-face, phone, skype-type interview.  Executive sign off.  Really only needed if your line executive doesn’t have faith in the hiring manager.

More interviews after this point, yield negligible additional information, and actually might be a detriment to your hiring decision.  Why?  Here’s what happens happens after you talk about someone for so long, they turn into a piece of crap!  This is normal human and organizational behavior, by the way.  We start out talking about all the good qualities and experiences the person has, and how they can help us.  We then start searching for hickeys and, no matter what, we will find them!  Then we start talking about what’s wrong with the person and before you know it, that great candidate, becomes a piece of garbage and not good enough for your organization.

They’re not really garbage.  They’re still the really good person you initially interviewed.  We just let it go too long, and discovered they have opportunities and we don’t want to hire anyone with ‘opportunities’ we want perfect.  This is what happens after round three in almost every organization I’ve ever witnessed go to four, five, six, etc.   It might be the biggest misnomer by candidates who feel the longer you go in the interview process, the better the chance of an offer.  It’s untrue!  If you don’t get an offer after the third round, your percentages of getting an offer fall exponentially every round after!

 

The Life Cycle of a Hot Job Market

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In any market, even during really bad recessionary economic times, there are certain categories of jobs and skills that remain extremely hard to come by.  In one market it might be a certain kind of engineer, another time and place it might be nurses, or it might even be seemingly something as simple as truck drivers.  Many of us are now facing this market with various kinds of IT professionals (Developers, Analyst, etc.).   Through all of these gaps in inventory of skills something remains very common and predictable — the cycle that takes place.

Here’s what the cycle of a Hot Job market looks like for a certain ‘specialized’ need: (let’s use Bakers for our example, no one really ever would feel we would lack for Bakers, right!?)

1. Companies begin by hiring up to ‘full employment’ with in the market category.  Usually 3% unemployed Bakers would mean ‘full employment’, those last 3% no one really wants there the folks who don’t really want to work, have other problems (like substance abuse, harassers, etc.).

2. Companies begin taking ‘fliers’ at the bottom 3% that are on the market.  “Come guys, Billy is a good Baker and he says he won’t put Crack in the Cupcakes anymore!”

3. Companies begin to feel pain of not enough Bakers. Their overtime is going up, positions are taking longer to fill, product quality goes down a bit, etc.

4. Companies begin brainstorming on how to get more Bakers.  They add a Baker apprenticeship (we can build our own Bakers!), they add retention bonuses to ensure they keep their Bakers (Free cookies!) and they start coddling to all the Bakers needs (you need a new baking hat!? You got it!).

5. Bakers start to get calls about jobs.  Those jobs are paying much more than they ever imagined they would make, plus you get free cookies and cakes!

6. People start to hear stories about Bakers making six figures! Wait, I want some of that baking cake money!  I would love to bake cakes for a living!  How do I get me some of that baking cake money!?

7. Bakers start demanding things they never thought they could.  4am is too early for me to make the cupcakes, I only want to bake cupcakes after 6am. I don’t bake cupcakes on Sunday. I only work on wedding cakes, not birthday cakes, I’m a professional!

8.  More and more people start coming into the market to become bakers.  It’s the ‘hot’ field, the best and brightest want to be bakers. There are TV shows about Bakers. Bakers are cool.  Baking is ‘the’ profession to get into.  USA Today has Baking as the growth profession to be in the next 10 years. (USA Today announcing anything as ‘hot’ is the key that it’s probably on the backside of being hot)

9. Good and bad Bakers, alike, start to become arrogant.  This is the tipping point of a Hot Job Market — Arrogance.

10. Companies don’t like to be held ‘hostage’ by any certain skill set, so they ensure the market will get flooded with candidates.  The pain of not having enough talent has gotten bad enough to ensure companies will fund whatever it takes to get them out of this pain.

The Wall Street Journal announced recently that Silicon Valley has an arrogance problem.  Those IT professionals that all of us need and can’t do with out, are beginning to feel their market power.  Some of you might say, well this has been going on for 10 years, and you would be correct.  It has been a hot job market going on a decade and continues to be hot.  The arrogance isn’t even new for many.  But it is now becoming common place.

I have quick story.  In 2001 automotive designers in Detroit could have a different job every day if they wanted and they named the price they wanted to make. The market was on fire. Thousands of people start to flood the market.  Designing wasn’t easy, but you could get educated and start at the bottom and learn the skills it took to become a good designer.  It was ‘system’ based, meaning you had to learn certain computer systems to learn how to design, plus some other skills.  Today, designers are still making less than what they were 15 years ago.

Basic economics will tell us these ‘hot’ markets will eventually work themselves out.  The cycle is always the same.  The ending is always the same.  In the history of civilization there has never been a ‘hot’ job category that hasn’t, eventually, been figured out.

My Favorite HR Mistake

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I’ve made more mistakes in my HR career than I care to even remember – I could probably write a book!

It’s funny to think about your mistakes, because I think invariably every person takes those mistakes and tries to turn them into some type of “learning”.   It’s a classic interview question – so, Mr. Sackett, tell me about your biggest mistake in career and what did you learn from it?   I even have asked it myself when interviewing others.   Just once I want someone to answer: “well, besides coming to this lame interview, I’d have to say drinking my way through college, getting average grades, and having to take positions within HR probably is my biggest.  What I’ve learned is that all those kids in band, in high school, on the debate team, really were smarter than me, and my ability to be third team all-conference point guard, in hindsight, probably didn’t get me into the career I was hoping for.”

But it never happens – no one is really honest about their mistakes – because in making most mistakes you do something stupid – something so stupid, you’d would rather not share it with anyone.  So, we come up with answers like – “my biggest mistake was working to hard on a project with my last employer, and not getting others involved, and I’ve learned while you can get the project done and on time by yourself, you really need to include everyone.” Vomit. And somehow has HR pros we accept this answer and move onto the next question, almost like that question was just a test – a test to see if you were stupid enough to actually tell us, and brighten up our day!

But, I’ve got one – I do have a favorite and two friends of mind recently made me think about it.  My favorite HR mistake – Telling someone to go after a promotion and  more money, leaving a position they truly enjoyed.  When I started my career right out of college, I gave myself 12 years to become a Vice President.  Seemed like a logical goal at the time – but in hindsight seems obviously stupid now.  It took me 16 years, and only after I realized it no longer mattered did I reach that level.  My two friends both recently had opportunities to leave organizations and positions they really liked – I gave them both the same advice – you can’t even come close to measuring the value of truly liking the job you have – you just can’t.  So, answer me this one question: Do you love what you are doing, and who you are doing it for? If it’s yes, stay put.  It’s that simple, that was my learning.  I’ve left two positions in my life where I loved what I was doing, and loved the organizations – both to take promotional opportunities with other companies.  Both times I made the wrong decision. Tough mistake to make twice

I use to give out this advice to people – go ahead and leave – you’re going to have 10+ jobs in your life, might as well move up as fast as you can.  I don’t do that any longer – in fact I spend time now trying to talk people out of taking new jobs – which I know is ironic since at my core I’m a recruiter! I think we all hope we learn over time from our mistakes.  Once in a while I actually do!

Hiring Friendly

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This past week I was in Myrtle Beach, SC for speaking gig and got to spend some alone time with my wife.  It was my first trip ever to Myrtle Beach.  Here’s my assessment:

  • It’s hard to knock any place that is on the Ocean. Beautiful sand and water.
  • That being said…Myrtle Beach is Jersey Shore South – arcades, cheap beach crap stores and carnival food.  I was somewhat surprised there weren’t signs that said “Welcome to the Guido Vacation Capital of the World!”
  • Oh, and there’s a bunch of golf courses.
  • I saw more dolphins in one place than I’ve ever seen anywhere else.

Here’s the other thing they have – Chick fil a restaurants!  My close friends know this is a weakness I have.  Look I know they don’t like gays, and that upsets me.  It doesn’t upset me enough to stop eating their crack-like chicken sandwiches, but to prove my displeasure with their stance of the gay community, I refuse to purchase their waffle fries. So there!

The one thing Chick fil a does exceptionally well, besides chicken sandwiches, is hiring ridiculously friendly people.  No, you have no idea.  I’ve been to Chick fil a restaurants in countless states.  The one thing I can always count on is the fact that someone will take my order that seems way to happy to be working at a fast food restaurant.  I want to speak with Chick fil a’s HR team to find out what kind of screening they do to hire such friendly folks!

People need to stop concentrating on what Google is doing in HR and start looking into Chick fil a.  I can’t think of one other organization that does this so well, not even the folks at Disney.  If I had to guess Chick fil a probably has gone to only one screener type question:

Is this person ridiculously friendly and happy about life?

Who cares about skills! Just hire super friendly people and your customers will put up with almost anything.  It’s something we don’t want to admit in HR about selection, especially in service type industries, but friendliness might be the most important competency any hire needs to be successful.

If anyone has a contact at Chick fil a please let me know, I now want to know the truth.  How do they hire the nicest people ever?

Cool New HR Tech…that you might even be able to afford

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(I just returned from the 2013 HR Technology Conference where I got to see all the latest and greatest HR technology, and speak to some wickedly smart people.  So, for the next week or so, my plan is to share some of the products and insights I gained from this experience. So we are clear, no companies I write about have paid me to write about them. Enjoy…)

Here’s a run down from the HR Tech Conference Expo:

BambooHR: Tagged as your “1st HR system” or “we love you, if you use spreadsheets as your HR system” – Ben Peterson, the CEO, was by far the coolest and nicest and real CEO (and maybe person) I met all week at HR Tech.  They don’t like to use ‘HRIS’ because small and medium sized businesses and HR shops don’t even really know what that means.  BambooHR is an easy to use HR system and nicely designed, for a very, very cheap price.  Don’t let the price scare you off — cheap, in this case, doesn’t mean they try and a one-size and process fits all perspective down your throat – they’ll customize for you – and still be cheap!  If you are looking for your first HR system, or to up grade your old system, and you don’t look at these guys, you should be fired as an HR professional.

Blissbook: “Employee Handbooks to Smile About”.  I know, I know — Tim, you’re talking handbooks!?  Here’s the deal.  They have a super cheap, super cool UI (user interface — BTW, no one at HR Tech talks English, they only talk tech).  So, you can put your handbook online and add video, and hyperlinks and all kinds of stuff, and they make it really easy.  Don’t think PDF of your handbook on your careers site, it’s more than that.  Think of it as a cultural narrative of your organization having it’s own website.  One issue I see them having, the examples they show are really cool and hip.  So you think you can do the same thing, the problem is content isn’t easy to write to be cool and hip.  If you aren’t creative, neither will your Blissbook.

SumTotal: SumTotal is like BambooHR, if BambooHR was a gigantic enterprise total HR solution for your business.  Let’s be clear, SumTotal is a big company, like Oracle, ADP, SuccessFactors, etc. Big companies have the resources to do some really cool things, and Sum Total did that this year.  They added the industry’s first Context-Aware user experience. What’s Context-Aware?  You know when you go online to a store and look at a really nice pair of shoes you want, you put it in the cart, but last second you decide, I just can’t get these today.  We all do it.  Context-Aware marketing is the Ad a few days later on the side of another site you’re reading where those exact same shoes you were looking at pops up and now are 10% off!  How does this work in an HR system? Let’s say you have an employee who is not reaching their sales goal.  SumTotal’s new addition will recognize the employee is missing their goal, and without prompting or any HR or manager interaction at all recommend a training course for this person to take to better help them make their goals and maybe even a mentor in the company they should speak with who could help them become better at their job.  I don’t do this justice — trust me, it was super cool!

Work4Labs:  Work4 does Facebook recruiting, in an industry where no one has really figured it out yet (do you hear that Facebook?).  Work4 makes an solution that makes it really easy for companies to get their jobs posted on their company Facebook page and help them navigate, very easily, how to search for talent on Facebook’s Graph Search.  Also, they do this for a rather cheap price!  (Cheap meaning the cost of one or two headhunting fees, so you can see a very quick ROI)  Matthew Brown, Head of Product and co-Founder, might be 24 years old, which also helps let you know these guys get Facebook!

WePow: Formerly known as Wowser.  WePow is a video interviewing platform.  They’re really good at branding.  They gave out royal blue Converse Chuck Taylors at their booth and had pairs for all the big name pundits in our industry: Kris Dunn, Steve Boese, Gerry Chrispin, John Sumser, William Tincup, Laurie Ruettimann, etc.  Those kinds of things make a splash and get a good buzz going about their product.  Apparently, I’m not a big name in the industry, I didn’t get a pair of shoes (which is really the only reason they get mentioned here!).  Also, apparently, they are “like HireVue” when I asked their booth crew what they did.  Thanks HireVue for being so good at marketing you now have become the Kleenex of video interviewing.

YouEarnedIt:  New up and coming awards and recognition firm, designed around delivering a product that small and medium sized businesses can use.  Think Achievers, for smaller companies, and a lot less money.  Much more accessible for smaller companies because you aren’t forced to purchase their catalog of merchandise/awards which usually carry an industry standard 20% markup.  They do have that as well, but much more cost effective than the giants in the industry.

More next week – I’ve got two companies – one really well known and one hardly anyone knows doing some really cool things!

LeBron James Isn’t Good Enough For My Team

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Just putting together the roster for my annual Men’s City Rec Basketball team.  I’ve been pretty lucky in the past and have gotten some great players to come out and let me jump on their back to the championships.  As of right now here’s my roster for 2013-2014 season:

Current Starters (based on last years roster):

Point Guard: Craig Miller – Mid 30’s, 5’10”- still in ‘decent shape’ (this means he’s younger and faster than most of us).  He’s good for one wide open layup per quarter and one turnover.

Shooting Guard:  Don McCormick – 39, 6’0″ – He’s flat out money, I don’t think he’s missed a shot since 1998. Played DIII ball back in the early 90’s.  His job sometimes makes it so he can’t make games – we struggle in those games.

Small Forward: Marcus Jones – 47, 6’2″ – He’s our one black guy (we’d like more black guys, but it’s hard to find middle aged black guys in the suburbs who want to play with a bunch of white guys), he’s also the oldest guy we have.  Really never makes a mistake unless it’s a no look pass to one of us which we weren’t expecting.

Big Forward: James Brookes – 32, 5’11” – He’s not a basketball player, he’s a weight lifter.  Can’t shoot or dribble, but he’s good to hurt at least one opposing player each game, sometimes two.

Center: Mikey ‘Stretch’ McGee – 42, 6′ 5″ – He’s our tallest guy.  He likes to shoot the three.  Could have played D1, ended up going the CC route.  Currently he’s a UPS driver.

The Backups:

Point Guard: Me – 43, 5’7″- player/coach/manager – I get in if we are really up big or down big.  I’ve never seen a shot I didn’t like.  My philosophy: ‘Shoot till you get hot, then shoot to stay hot”

The 6 footers:  Ben, Jerry and Ken: All of these guys are 6 foot and basically play any position.  I lumped them together because they really are the same player. Solid, can do it all, just don’t make them run too many minutes at one time.

We are looking to add one more player to our roster this year.  We lost Billy.  He had to have his knee replaced and his real estate business was taking off again after the recession, so he’s out.  Here are the three candidates we have to replace:

1. Matt Smith – New guy in town.  He’s really in shape.  His wife is way hot.  He has a great basement man cave.  Seems like he would fit in with the guys really well.

2. Josh Moore – Another six footer.  He’s subbed for us in the past.  Likes to shoot (meaning he takes my shots).  The guys know him, but he rubs some guys the wrong way (mostly me, he takes my shots)

3. LeBron James – Yep! You read that correctly.  Let’s just say I have a connection.  Nothing in his contract to stop him from playing with us on Tuesday nights.  His schedule actually allows him to make 90% of our 12 game schedule.  We would own the league!

Seems like a really easy choice right!?  Wrong!  You see, I went to the guys to vote.  Knowing they would all laugh and Lebron would get his ‘Legion 124’ jersey shipped in the mail.  But to my surprise Matt Smith won the vote.  I couldn’t believe it, I had to find out why.  Across the board the guys came back with the following reasons why LeBron wouldn’t be a good fit for our team:  Wouldn’t find it a challenge, he would be bored, he was over qualified, he would end up quitting half way into the season, he wouldn’t take it seriously.

We had a shot a Lebron James for our team, and we didn’t take him.  Hard to believe, right?

It’s your reality.  Everyday you turn down great talent in your organization.  You turn down LeBron James because you’re scared.  We don’t say we’re scared.  We give ‘legitimate’ reasons like: “You’re over qualified” and “You wouldn’t find this position challenging”.  But we are just telling ourselves this, to make us feel better about making a terrible decision to turn away great talent.  ‘Being over qualified’ for a position is the single lamest reason to turn down talent that HR and Talent Acquisition has ever come up with.

The question is, would you turn down LeBron James if he wanted to join your team?

3 Ways To Make Contract Hiring Work For You

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I was in a meeting with an HR executive recently talking about some pain points they are having.  You see, in my business of staffing, you don’t get in the door unless someone in HR is unhappy with some kind of results in their hiring.  It’s the game.  You’re unhappy, I come in and tell you how I’ll make you happy.  This HR Pro was having a hard time finding engineering talent.  They did what a the majority of corporate recruiting departments do – they used a number of sourcing options, posting options, looked at hiring incentives, made sure they paid competitively, etc.  Not bad, hit all the basics.  After this failed, they went the direct-hire agency route.  Made some hires.  Some worked out.  Some didn’t.  Paid fees on all of them, since all made it past the guarantee.

So, how are you going to help me?

Fair question.  Really the only question she needed an answer to.

I dig in and find out that while the direct-hire agency route worked.  It left them feeling ‘unsatisfied’ because although they didn’t blame the staffing firm they were working with for the turnover, they couldn’t get over paying all those fees, and now have nothing to show for it.  The reality was, they have a tough environment, a challenging workplace culture, and some managers who aren’t the best managers.  This caused the turnover.  Still, they are left in the same place they started — ‘we still need engineers’.

Okay, now it’s my turn.

Me: “How about you try contract?’

Her: “We don’t use contract, we want to hire direct.”

Me: “Why?”

Her: somewhat stunned I asked this question and expected an answer — “Well, we need these people long term, not temporarily, and we want top talent and I don’t think hiring contractors would give us top talent.”

Here is HR executive’s dilemma: first, they need engineering talent; second, they turn over talent because of their environment; and third, they don’t want to pay fees.  Whether she wanted to hear it or not, Contracting was the answer to her problem.

Here was my conversation with her:

“You need to bring in Contract Engineers to fill these jobs.  We will find talented people, you will be amazed.  After 12 months, I’ll let you have them for no buy-out.  Thus, you’ll have no fees.  You have a bad environment with high turnover, you need us to find you engineers who can survive this environment and help you move forward all at once.  Contracting is great for this.  For many reasons people decide to contract.  Folks like you judge them for that, and consider them low talent.  I can give you a list of clients we are working with right now that will share stories with you about how wrong this is.  You will find great loyal talent when using contractors.”

“But it costs so much!”

“That is another misnomer! Let’s say your total hourly cost for an engineer is $60/hr, which includes pay, benefits, PTO, bonus, 401K match, taxes, etc.  I can get you that same level talent for $60/hr.  I can do that because I don’t pay all the fringes you pay, I pay the same taxes, and lower amounts of PTO.   Your cost on a 12 month contract hire is virtually the same as if you would have hired the person direct, plus if you fall in love with them, you pay nothing after 12 months.”

It’s not a sales pitch.  It’s just the facts when you work out the numbers.  She signed up.  I’ll let you know how it works out, but to be honest I already do.  We’ve been doing this for 33 years.  It will work out great, and she’ll solve her problem.

There are 3 concrete ways which Contract Hiring is a no-brainier:

1. High Turnover positions.

2. Short Term Projects – 3 months to 3 years – but basically we don’t nee the person on after that

3. Beginning or Ending of a location.  Need to grow quickly, or shutting down a location

There really isn’t any reason to be paying 20-35% fees (yes, I spoke to a company paying 35% the other day!) for direct hires.  The industry found a better way, HR Pros just struggle to change.  One other major factor that makes contract hiring work, is it seems to make companies more comfortable in taking some risks in hiring people they normally wouldn’t.  ‘What the heck, they’re on contract, if we don’t like them, we can replace them.” Every time I hear this, it makes me smile, because I know they’ll like the person!  But if contracting gives them that ‘freedom’ then I’m all for it!  I hate telling them they have the same freedom hiring direct!

 

 

 

Do You Have A Resume Commerical?

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Being that I run a recruiting agency, in the Technology space, I always find it funny to read and hear people talk about how ‘resumes are dead’.  It seems that if you talk to anyone who thinks they know and understand the IT industry, this is especially true.  CIO Magazine recently had an article: IT Hiring: Your Text Resume Is Soooo Last Century, which laminates on which type of resume is now the ‘in’ thing.  From the article:

“It’s no coincidence that LinkedIn recently began encouraging its users to amp up their profiles with videos, illustrations, photography and presentations. And Toronto startup Vizualize.me has attracted 200,000 users to its tool, still in beta, that turns text-based resumes into online infographics.

“People are open to new formats, new ways of presenting credentials,” says John Reed, senior executive director of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. “People are trying to figure out how to stand out in the crowd, how to bring life to their profile and experience, and they’re using social media tools to do that.”

Reed says that neither he nor his colleagues have seen a lot of applicants submitting videos yet. When they do, they function more like cover letters than resumes. “The videos are ‘let me introduce myself before you look at my resume,'” Reed explains. “The companies look at it and say, ‘That’s cool, that’s an interesting twist, that makes the candidate stand out.'”

So, are resumes dead?  I don’t think so.  Here’s what happens, as an industry heads toward ‘zero’ unemployment like the IT industry is heading, hiring managers, recruiters, HR, etc. become more open to anyway they can find talent.  This means you’ll run into many ‘candidates’ who are not really actively looking — those all powerful Passive Candidates — and don’t have a traditional resume.  Many of these folks will be open to talk to you, but really don’t want to take the time to put a resume together.  In a traditional recruitment process, 90% of Recruiters would walk away from these candidates – “Well, if you won’t put a resume together, then you must not want to really work here!”  This is why so many people hate recruiters and HR!  Because we say stupid stuff like that.

The best recruiters and HR Pros will find a way to get these candidates in the door without a ‘traditional’ resume.  As the article in CIO points out – video is one way to do this.  I’m a huge video fan, not necessarily as a resume replacement, but as a compliment to your resume.  Where HR, Recruiting, and/or a hiring manager might skip over your resume because of some illogical preconceived notion of what they think they want, many will see a short 90 second video introduction of a candidate and say “let’s get this person in for a face-to-face!”  That’s very powerful.  Whereas a passive candidate might not be willing to take an hour or two piecing together a traditional resume, most are willing to join a Google Hangout for a couple of minutes to introduce themselves and give some highlights.

It’s like a commercial in very modern day sense, and does what your resume might not be able to.  It’s not perfect.  Just like a resume, a short video might attract you to a candidate you ultimately find out is not a good fit for your position.  The video resume commercial does, though, give you one more short piece to the puzzle, and honestly still so few people are doing it, it will help set the candidate apart, and your HR/Recruiting shop apart from the competition.