Category Archives: Recruiting

How Recruiters Will Break Up the SEC Dominance

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NCAA Football fanatics love recruiting signing day!  That one day, each year, when you get to find out how good your team will be in 2-3 years.  For the past 5 plus years the SEC Conference has been dominating college football’s signing day (as well has the National Championship games!).  2013’s Signing Day was no different.  Of the top 300 college football recruits – 41% signed on to play football at a SEC school! (see chart below)

2013 Signing Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There really isn’t much difference in recruiting a college athlete than there is in recruiting talent to your organization.  The SEC dominance in football recruiting, is similar to the dominance that Google has over Yahoo or Facebook.  The dominance that Gap might have over similar retailers, etc.   If you are being dominated in recruiting by your competition there are some things you can do, and there are some things that will happen naturally to help return balance to the universe.  Here’s how I think Big Ten, Pac12, ACC, etc. conference will break up the SEC’s dominance in college football recruiting, and how you can do the same with your organization:

1. Stars want to shine – Great you go offered to go to Alabama, along with 20 other 5 star recruits – it all becomes relative.  Recruiters, in non-SEC schools, must sell the ‘opportunity’ for these kids to star right away at their schools.  A 5 star kid at Alabama might be a backup for 2-3 years. While at another school they could start as a freshman.  Not every recruit will buy into this – but many will.  Sell opportunity.

2. The NFL Dream – It says something about you when you’re the 9th best player on your team to NFL scouts.  The 9th best NFL player at Alabama might be much better than the best player at Michigan State – the best player at Michigan State is getting more publicity and more NFL scout action than the 9th best player at Bama.  The difference might only be 3-5 rounds in the NFL – but that’s huge!   Sell the NFL dream that 99% of D1 football recruits have.

3. Stop selling “Michigan Man” – 2nd tier conferences and schools sell this concept of being the right ‘kind’ of person for a school – University of Michigan calls it ‘The Michigan Man’ – we only want kids who are Michigan men, blah, blah, blah.  Really!? Well then, I only want to recruit ‘Alabama Men’ because they seem a quite a bit better!  If you a recruiter is selling this concept of culture to top level recruits – it might make you feel really good about yourself – but it doesn’t ring true for great talent.  Nick Saban doesn’t sell ‘Alabama Men’ – he sells championships.  Sell winning, sell being number one in your industry.  People love playing/working for a winner.

4. Set Up Shop – Eventually you are going to see Big Ten recruiters actually living, buying a house, etc. full time in SEC territory if they truly want to compete for talent in those areas on a regular basis.  Having a local presence, establishing local relationships with high school coaches, etc.  says a ton to a player and his family.  Flying in once every few months, when Johnny Alabama is there every week, says something completely different.  Works the same for your organization – want Silicon Valley talent to come to Tulsa – you better get some feet on the ground!

5.  Start Early – You know there are very little recruiting rules in place for kids under the 9th grade!  A ‘donor’ for your school could fly in a 8th grader, buy him a sweatsuit and take him to his suite to watch your game – all legal, if under 9th grade.  Can you image the impression that makes on a young kid?!  Now you might not know if the kid will actually project out to be great – but you get enough interested at a very young age and you begin to get talent you never got before. Long-tail recruiting.  This is why campus recruiting is so important to many organizations for talent – you need both a long and short term recruiting strategy to fill your pipeline.

There’s one other thing that will eventually work against the SEC recruiting which seems to happen at all great organizations – laziness.  Success doesn’t always breed more success – many times in breeds complacency. The might be the biggest risk of all.  The more success they have in recruiting and the more championships they win – the more other recruiters from outside conferences are going to be working harder to get ‘their’ talent.  Their great success might be their biggest risk!

 

To Be Honest, We Hate Analytics

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Don’t kid yourself – you hate analytics.  It wouldn’t be politically correct to say that you hate analytics, so you won’t.  That’s why I’m here.

You hate analytics because using them in your organization increases accountability.

Increased accountability = Increased stress.

Increased stress = Increased job dissatisfaction.

Increased job dissatisfaction = Increased Turnover.

You see the cycle, right?

So, who likes Analytics?  Bosses. Why?  Because they like having increased accountability on you.  It makes them feel all strategic and shit.   When analytics are used against you like a weapon – they suck.  Too many organizations are analytics as a weapon to judge your performance.  Leadership justifies this because ultimately they are held accountable to the ultimate analytic – the bottom line.  So, they feel you should be held accountable to.  We would like analytics better if they weren’t used to bash us over the head.  If they were used to help make us better, to help us improve, to help us understand.

Harvard Business Review had a great post on this subject: The Real Reason Organizations Resist Analytics by Michael Schrage

The evolving marriage of big data to analytics increasingly leads to a phenomenon I’d describe as “accountability creep” — the technocratic counterpart to military “mission creep.” The more data organizations gather from more sources and algorithmically analyze, the more individuals, managers and executives become accountable for any unpleasant surprises and/or inefficiencies that emerge.

For example, an Asia-based supply chain manager can discover that the remarkably inexpensive subassembly he’s successfully procured typically leads to the most complex, time-consuming and expensive in-field repairs. Of course, engineering design and test should be held accountable, but more sophisticated data-driven analytics makes the cost-driven, compliance-oriented supply chain employee culpable, as well.

This helps explain why, when working with organizations implementing big data initiatives and/or analytics, I’ve observed the most serious obstacles tend to have less to do with real quantitative or technical competence than perceived professional vulnerability. The more managements learn about what analytics might mean, the more they fear that the business benefits may be overshadowed by the risk of weakness, dysfunction and incompetence exposed.

I recall a very technical business acronym I was taught in my Master’s program called: CYA.  Be very careful with your big data initiatives because many turn into CYA projects.  If I can show these analytics – it will show why this major issue doesn’t have anything to do with my department, but everything to do with another department.  Days To Fill reports are filled with CYA.  “It’s the hiring managers not getting back to us in a timely matter to set up interviews – this is why are Days to Fill is so high.”

Accountability sucks – when it is happening to you.  It’s great when you’re holding someone to it. Big Data might be the biggest weapon you have in your tool box – be very careful who you point it at.

 

HR – It’s You or it’s Me

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I love ‘end of days’ type posts and articles.  The end of Job Boards!  The end of HR!  Here’s another one great one over at ERE by Dr. John Sullivan called: The End of Sourcing Is Near…, which talks about how eventually (in John’s opinion) most sourcing information will be readily available to almost everyone.  This makes really the only thing left to do in recruiting is to sell the candidate on your job and your organization.  Sullivan explains the importance of this very critical step in recruiting – the sell:

“Recruiting leaders should begin focusing on these selling aspects because, as previously stated, “finding” is becoming so easy, and there is little push for change in candidate assessment because most recruiters and hiring managers are comfortable with the existing process of assessing candidates through interviews.

Once you realize that the selling aspect of recruiting is almost universally under researched, underfunded, and it is almost always executed in an unscripted manner, you’ll see that it’s ripe for significant improvement and change. If you review the recruiting literature you will find very little written about the science of selling and the importance of using data-driven selling approaches within the recruiting function. The pressure is increasing on recruiting leaders to make a decision to shift resources away from sourcing by recruiters and toward the remaining big challenge: selling.”

Like most ‘end of days’ type posts, Sullivan’s end of sourcing post is probably a little over the top, but he makes a great point.  HR Pros don’t recruit well for one simple fact – HR Pros didn’t get into HR to sell – they got into HR to do HRy things like: build processes, improve processes, administer people practices within an organization, training, problem solving, etc.   They didn’t go – “Oh boy! I can’t wait to get into the Fortune 500 HR shop so I can sell our company like a a life insurance salesman trying to make quota!”

That’s where I come in.  I don’t hire HR pros to work in recruiting.  I don’t sell the recruiting position as an HR position.  I don’t go over to Michigan State’s HR program and speak to students about ‘getting their start’ in HR by coming to work for me.  99% of those folks, while great people, would fail in my environment.  They want to be in HR – Recruiting is not HR.  There in lies the problem for most HR shops.   Most HR folks – probably 70-80% – have to do some ‘recruiting’ in their organizations.  They don’t have a recruiting department or a sourcing group to do all the heavy lifting.  Most HR Managers, if they’re lucky, have a full time recruiter, but this still means, when it’s busy, they still have to recruit.

That’s why so many HR pros engage recruiting agencies.  We offer a skill set they don’t, necessarily, have on their staff.  We sell.  We sell the crap out of a position and your company.  We can make an average company look like the Best Place to Work and a really bad company look like the next big opportunity.  No power steering – No problem – manual steering builds up great arm muscles!  Want tinted windows?  Yeah, we can get those installed.  Recruiting is selling.  In fact, Recruiting is double selling.  You sell the candidate on the position, then you sell the hiring manager on the candidate.  Good recruiters can work in any industry – because selling skills are transferable to any product or service.

So – do you want your HR Pros to sell, or do you want me to sell?  By the way – I don’t hire HR Pros, I hire closers.

Let my company do some selling for you – let’s connect: sackett.tim@HRU-Tech.com; 517-908-3156 or @TimSackett.

 

How Does HR Think?

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I’m not sure how HR thinks.  I know how I think, and from what people tell me, I don’t think like a ‘normal’ HR person.  One thing I really like, though, is to see how other pros think.  I learn a lot from how maybe an engineer addresses an issue versus say how a Designer would address the same issue.  I like to take aspects of how other professionals think and incorporate those thought processes into how I think about HR.  I think this helps me solve HR issues in ways that the business can grasp onto better.

I found a cool article recently on how Designers think.  Here are some of the ways Designers think:

– “Design is not about solving problems.  It’s about making people happy. And there are always so many personalities and ideas to consider. So you’re trying to simplify it to its fundamental structure.” 

– “You have to understand when the timing is right for dialogue, and when its time to move the limits. Designers arrive at a company to move its limits.”

– “Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”

– “Unoriginal, ugly and cheap. Revolutionary, gorgeous and luxurious. These do not have to be contradictions.”

– “The idea of innovation as a structured process has been taken to the extreme, where it is no longer a really useful or robust concept. You’ve got to go about letting people take sensible risks.”

– “…Pain is temporary. Suck is forever.”

In HR, I tend to believe that most HR pros don’t believe they work in a creative function.  In reality what you create in HR speaks volumes about the culture you’re shaping in your work environment.  If HR lacks creativity – your work environment is going to lack creativity.  The rule setters need to show the organization that from time to time, we need to break the rules to get us to the next level.  Sensibly, but rule breaking nonetheless.  Breaking the rules is like ‘kryptonite’ to HR Pros.  It goes against our very being.  Most HR Pros pride themselves on being ‘the one’ part of the organization that actually follows the rules. “If we don’t do it, Tim, who will?”

I don’t know.  What I know is I like how designers think.  It seems like a thought process that opens my mind and gets me thinking about how I can make things better.  It’s a thought process that challenges me to rethink what I’m doing and why.  That seems like a good thing. I don’t want to suck.  I hear suck is forever.

 

 

I’ll Retire When I’m Dead

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In case you missed it last week, America’s CEOs want to change the social security eligibility age from 65 to 70.  Of course this isn’t shocking and this argument has been building for decades as a possible solution to the social security funding problem as so many baby boomers start to collect.  From Bloomberg:

Raising the Medicare age to 70, from today’s 65, would keep the oldest workers, who generally have the greatest health costs, on private insurance for an additional five years. The shift would hit states that cover more low-income seniors through Medicaid, and it would raise premiums for younger people who buy health insurance through state exchanges, as more people with higher health costs enter the risk pool.

This would save Medicare money—a good thing for taxpayers. But it would effectively increase health costs for the country overall, including employers. “For many seniors, their costs will go up. For employers in the aggregate, their costs will go up,” says Juliette Cubanski, associate director for Medicare policy at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s because Medicare pays doctors less for their services than private insurers do…

Workers might not relish spending those extra years on the job to keep their health insurance. But it’s the cost of living longer, as Gary Loveman, Business Roundtable member and chief executive officer of Caesars Entertainment (CZR), illustrated with a personal anecdote at a press conference:

“My father, who was an employee of AT&T (T) for more than 40 years, retired at age 61 and lived to be 95. He was a 34-year recipient of Social Security benefits—something that near his death, he noted to me with great pride that he had been on both [AT&T’s] payroll and the federal government’s payroll for much longer than anyone could possibly have anticipated. That’s, of course, generally speaking, good news,” Loveman said. “But it’s a problem the country simply can’t afford over a sustained period of time.”

I’ve witnessed this personally.  I have a grandparent who spent 30 years with good old General Motors – retired at the ripe old age of 51 and collected pension and eventually social security benefits for more years than they actually paid into the system.  That is why our ‘traditional’ way of retirement in America is broke.  The system was not created to have people collect social security for 15-20-25+ years.  When it was created, social security was a plan that the founders probably figured individuals would be on for 10 years or less.  While I don’t want to have to work until I’m 70 – for me and most Americans this is a foregone conclusion.

The new reality we face is 70 years old today, is not 70 years old of 20-30 years ago.  My Dad turned 70 this past year and still works in professional job and really doesn’t want to retire.  He’s reached a point in his career where he knows just about everything in his business and he has 30+ years of great relationships to leverage, and he has no fear about getting ‘fired’ – he’s 70!  Work can now be fun.

I have friends who still talk about wanting to retire at 55 and I tend to just shake my head and let them have their dream.  They really have no idea the amount of money it will take to live from 55 to 90 or so.  You’re talking millions of dollars in retirement investments – not 1 million – multiple millions to live another 30+ years.  I’m realistic.  I figure I’ll get to retire the day after I die.  At least I hope I get to.

Job Description Killers

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You know what position I would love to apply for!?  Jr. Human Resource Manager – said no one ever!

I hate spending 3 seconds on Job Descriptions – because JD’s just scream “Personnel Department” but I have to just take a few minutes to help out some of my HR brothers and sisters.  Recently, I came across a classic JD mistake when someone had posted an opening and then broadcasted it out to the world for a “Jr. Industrial Engineer”.  I almost cried.

Really!  No, Really!  “Jr.”  You actually took time, typed out the actual title and then thought to yourself – “Oh yeah! There’s an Industrial Engineer out there just waiting to become a ‘Jr. Industrial Engineer’!”  Don’t tell me you didn’t – because that’s exactly what it says.  “But Tim, you don’t understand – we’ve always called our less experienced Industrial Engineers, Junior, so we can differentiate them from our ‘Industrial Engineers’ and our ‘Sr. Industrial Engineers’.  What do you want us to to do, call them: Industrial Engineer I, Industrial Engineer II and Industrial Engineer III?”

No – I don’t want you to do that either.

Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to title this position as “Lesser Paid Industrial Engineer” – you’ll get the same quality of responses!

You know how to solve this – but why you won’t – just have one pay band for “Industrial Engineer” – from $38K to $100K.  Pay the individuals within that band appropriately for their years of experience and education.  This is why you won’t do it.  Your ‘Sr.’ Compensation Manager knows you aren’t capable of handling this level of responsibility and within 24 months your entire Industrial Engineering staff would all be making $100K – Jr’s, Middles and Sr’s!

And please don’t make me explain how idiotic it looks when you list out your little number system on your post as well (Accountant I, Accountant II, etc.). Because you know there just might be an Accountant out there going – “Some day I just might be an Accountant II!” If SHRM actually did anything, I wish they would just go around to HR Pros who do this crap and visit their work place and personally cut up their PHR or SPHR certificates in front of them – like a maxed out credit card that gets flagged in the check out line.  That would be awesome!

All this does is make it look like you took a time machine in from a 1970 Personnel Department.

But, seriously, if you know of any Sr. Associate HR Manager III positions please let me know.

3 Ways Contract Staffing Fails

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Contract technical staffing is what I do for a living – so I know exactly where it falls down.  I spend every day trying to talk people into why they should use contract staffing and why it makes sense.  In 13 years of being in this business, I’ve never had anyone ask me why it doesn’t work.  That might be kind of odd.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve talked to hundreds of corporate HR and Recruiting Pros who HATE contract staffing – but 99% don’t know why they hate it.  Most believe they hate contract staffing because it’s taking their job away.  Nothing makes me smile more than to hear a really good HR Pro say “if I hire your company ‘they’ll’ have no reason to keep me around”.  It makes me smile because I know they have no idea about what we do – and I can probably convince them to use our services!

To be honest, though, there are some reasons when contract staffing fails.  If you deal with contract staffing firms, you might find that shocking to hear, because we are trained from birth not to ever say anything negative about our service.  ‘Everyone’ can use us for any recruiting need you might have!  Well, no not really.  Let me give you 3 Ways Contract Staffing Fails:

1. To Attract your competitions talent when you are equal or trailing in market compensation.  I always like to say there is no one I can’t recruit.  Given enough time and money – I could get President Obama to quit the Presidency.  But if you think a contract staffing firm is going to get your competitions best developer to leave their direct job for a contract job, for the same money or less – you’re crazy.

2. When you fall in love with the talent.  Every once in a while I a client who gets upset.  They bring on a high priced contractor, that person does great work, and the client falls in love and wants to hire them.  The problem is many contractors are contractors because they like moving from project to project.  They like you, they just don’t like-like you.  Contract staffing works really well when it’s a win-win. We have a project, you nail project – we both got what we wanted.  It fails when one party falls in love, and the other doesn’t feel the same!

3. When You Think I’m Magical. Recruiting is recruiting.  I don’t have a magical stable of candidates waiting to come to work for you. Well, I might have one or two, but not a stable. When you tell me you need something – I, usually, have to go out and find the right talent, fit, etc.  Just like you would, if you were looking to hire a direct position.  I’m not magic, I’m just good at finding technical talent.  There’s a difference.

I get why some new clients get put off by contract staffing.  I call you, tell you how amazing we are and how good we are at what we do and then you expect I’m going to have 5 perfectly screened ready to work Controls Engineers in your inbox the next morning – when you’ve been searching for 6 months and don’t have one.  Expectations are a huge issue we all face in recruiting – no matter what kind of recruiting we do.  I have to manage my clients expectations, just like you have to manage your hiring managers expectations.  Contract staffing works really well when you find a partner that makes sure your expectations and their deliverables all line up.

Want to discuss?  Contact me: sackett.tim@HRU-TECH.com, 517-908-3156 or send me a tweet @TimSackett.   I promise to under promise and over deliver.

Ex-employers, Please Send Gifts!

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Dear Applebees,

I use to work for you in Human Resources.  It was a great 3 1/2 years, I loved working for you.  I was surrounded by the most talented group of Human Resource, Operations and Training professionals I’ve ever been around.  I tell this story often, but you know when you go into a large business meeting with like 20-40 people all sitting in a large square or circle of tables?  And you look around and you instantly see a couple of slugs, people who shouldn’t even be working for the company, let alone be in this meeting.  The first time I traveled to Applebee’s headquarters for a large operations meetings and I walked into the entire group of HR professionals that the Applebee’s leadership team had assembled, I looked around the room and couldn’t find one of those people!  Then it hit me – I’m that person – I’m the slug!  It was the coolest feeling to be challenged like that – to be surrounded by talented, caring people all working to make a company great.

I’ve moved on to bigger roles and a bunch of new experiences, but I still share so many things I learned while I was with you to those HR Pros I’m connected to.  I still talk so highly of the brand and the people that make your brand what it is today.  You’ve got some really great people still working for you, even after that crappy pancake place bought you.  You’ve lost some great ones as well – I could point out a number and where they are currently working and what their numbers are – who knows, they might want to come back.  You knows, maybe I want to come back.

Tell you what.  Why don’t you send me something. Just a little something to remind me of what I’m missing – a gift card, a free appetizer coupon, a carside to go Frisbee – you could even have someone drop off lunch to my office — grilled chicken oriental roll-up .  You see, I might want to come back, but no one has ever asked.  No letters, no phone calls, no tweets or Facebook messages.  I know I left you and that probably didn’t feel very good, but I think we can all be adults about this.  I had some growing up to do, I needed to see if those fries on the other side of the street really were hotter.   You can’t blame a guy for that.

So, who knows, we were so close once – and there’s nothing to say we can’t be close again,

Tim

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Just in case you are very lost at this point – check this out from Yahoo! Also, Marissa Mayer if you want to send me stuff, I’ll even think about coming over to Yahoo! Who knows – I like gifts!

In case you’re still lost: some of the best recruits you’ll ever get, are people who’ve already worked for you and were good, but you’ve never asked them to come back.

 

The A+ Player Employee

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I know a ton of HR/Talent Pros are sick of hearing employees broken down into A, B and C players.  It seems played out and dated.  But I like it.  I’m simple and the ABC player scenario is easy for me to describe, in very quick manner, how someone is performing.  I’ll give you, though, there are problems.  Once you have your “A” players, how do you tell which is the best one?  Can’t a “C” player be close to moving up to “B”, but another “C” be close to getting terminated?  The problem is, ABC doesn’t accurately enough describe individuals, it just describes groups of employees – a range of performance at any given snapshot in time.

I was having a conversation about this the other day with a peer and was describing a person’s performance who worked for me – an “A” player.  As I was describing this person, I said, “but you know what, they are better than an “A” player – they’re an “A+” player”!   Oh, boy, here we go.  What the heck is an A+ player?!

Traits of your A+ Players:

– All the talent and performance of your traditional “A” player, but with:

A.  Work like they’re a “B” player hungry to get to “A” status

B.  Lack the ego some “A” players tend to catch upon gaining “A” status

C.   Don’t believe they’ve reached “A” status, even when they have.

A+ players are special.  As soon as you read the traits you had an individual come immediately to mind.  That person who is a great performer, but also someone you wish all of your employees would emulate.  A person who is a joy to work with, and gets things done.  Maybe not the best at any single task – but the person you want to do every task.  A+ players aren’t culture changers, they are the culture.  Not everyone has an A+ player, and I don’t believe you can create one.  You usually have to hire them – and they ascend to A+ level very quickly.

When people tell me they only hire “A” players I tend to judge them as not having any idea about HR/Recruiting/Life.  You don’t hire “A” players.  You hire talent you believe is capable of becoming an “A” player within your organization.   Because they were an “A” player at another organization, has very little impact on their performance level within your organization – unless you somehow magically cloned their previous environment, leadership and resources and put them back into that same place.  It’s true that past performance is predictive of future performance – but only when you put that talent into a very similar circumstance.

That’s why it’s really hard to find A+ players, because you don’t even know when you hire someone if they will reach that level.  You might have a feeling – like – “oh boy, we’ve got someone special coming in”, but you don’t know, until you know.  All I really know is when you have one, do what you have to keep them around, because you’ll never know if you’ll get another one.

 

Sales Pitch Tuesday – The Test Drive

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You know what car dealers know that they’ll never tell you?  They know that if they can get you to test drive a car, there’s a great chance they can talk you into buying a car.  That’s why you see all of these test drive special offers!  Come on in for a test drive and you’ll automatically get 2 free tickets to a Piston’s game. The best ones are the ones when it’s for a charity or non-profit school organization – “we’ll donate $20 per test drive this Saturday to the little league!”  They know that we are stupid and we are addicted to new car smell – get enough folks to come in and test drive, and they’ll be moving some cars that day!

Hiring really isn’t to awful different.

In my business, contract staffing, I know that if I can get you to hire some on contract, engineers or IT professionals – you’re going to eventually want to hire them.  You’re basically test driving talent!  The one rejection I get the most from corporate HR/Talent Pros is that we don’t want “contract” we want to hire direct.  So, I ask the most obvious question – why?   And I’ll get a range of answers that mainly stay around the theme of: “we want someone ‘permanently’ to come and work here”.

Here’s what I know about hiring.

1. No matter what hiring/screening/interviewing process that you have – you’re going to make some really bad hiring decisions.

2. Once you hire someone ‘direct’ – it’s highly unlikely you will be quick to terminate that person. (2 reasons for this: A. As a HR Pro you don’t want to admit that your process failed;  B.Your hiring managers are bad at performance management and it takes them forever to get to a point to fire.)

3. You’ll fire a contractor without a 2nd thought. (HR Pros are great – because the exact things they would never fire a ‘direct’ employee over – they’ll ‘can’ a contractor over in a heartbeat! “Yeah, Tim, Johnny keeps wearing Capri pants, he doesn’t fit in here, we want to end the contract.”)

I always tease my clients that contract staffing a little like ‘Crack’ – once you start, you don’t want to stop.  Here’s why you need to try crack contract staffing:

1. You hire faster.  (You still screen, but you don’t have to get all HR crazy with it!  Hiring managers love this because you get people in fast, determine if they are a good organizational fit and Bam – it works.  I can’t tell you how many times on the corporate side we took months to make the ‘right’ decision, only to have the person come in and find out they really weren’t that great of a personality fit with the hiring manager.  Such a complete waste of time and resources.)

2. Ultimately, when you decide to hire direct – you’re hiring a completely known talent.  There are no surprises.  You’ve test driven your candidate for an extended period!

3. You might find out you don’t need someone on direct.  I can’t tell you how many times a year a client comes to us saying they need someone, ultimately for a direct position, but 6-9 months into it they’ll lose a project, or have another resource internally come available.  99% of HR/Talent Pros have no idea what percentage of their workforce should be contingent – with many ‘truly’ believing that percentage should be zero!  If the recession has taught us anything, it’s we need to have at least a little flexibility to our workforce.  Our European HR counterparts get this much more than we do.

Want to know more?  Want us to find you some contract Tech Pros? Want me to come take you to lunch to discuss? (I’ll buy)  Want to tell me I’m an idiot?  Contact me directly at: sackett.tim@hru-tech.com; 517-908-3156 or @TimSackett on the Twitters!