Category Archives: Technical Recruiting

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.

Yahoo’s Mayer Fails At Performance Management, Again

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It hit the news wire last week Yahoo’s embattled CEO, Marissa Mayer, is set to fire 500 lower performing employees.  Sounds all well and good, right?!  It’s about time!  The HR blogging community as a whole kills managers and executives for not moving fast enough on getting rid of under performing employees.  Mayer is finally doing it! Well, not so fast…

From Business Insider:

“The reviews were part of Mayer’s plans to trim the Yahoo workforce “very surgically, very carefully,” according to a source close to the company.

Now, Swisher reports, Mayer is planning to let go any employees who were rated “misses” or “occasionally misses” at least twice during the past five quarters.

Swisher says as many as 500 employees could eventually be effected. She says that some Yahoo employees are already being let go.

Yahoo has many thousands more employees than many industry experts believes it needs to have.”

Here’s what will happen in reality.
Anytime you ‘decide’ to make cuts based on a large group is rated, as Yahoo is doing above, you’ll always end up with rater error.  Hiring managers are going to know what’s going on.  “Oh, so if I rate Timmy “occasionally misses” on completing projects on time, you’re going to make me fire him? No problem, Timmy “never” misses, now.”  What you’ve done is completely take out your managers ability to develop talent through your performance management process.  You’ve decided to use your performance management process as a weapon.  This will not end well.
When you begin down this path, you end up in a death spiral corporately.  You’ve handcuffed your managers’ ability to manage their teams. “Well, I can’t deliver effective performance messages because you’ll just fire the person. So now, everyone is ‘completely’ average or above!”  Even when their not.  You’ve taken away your ability as an organization to get better internally, and driven home the message “You either be a rock star or we will hire a rock star from the outside”.  No longer can you ‘work’ to get better in our environment.  Most people do not want to work in that type of environment.
How should Yahoo handle this issue?
First and foremost you can’t have a ‘black and white’ cut off.  This doesn’t work anywhere!  What is an employee had two “occasionally misses” three quarters ago, but since has been great.  Under your plan, they’re gone anyway.  Does that really make sense?  Ultimately you need to let your individual leaders make these decisions and hold them accountable to the budget.  This is real world stuff, the budget is desperately important in Yahoo’s case.  Leaders get paid the big bucks to make tough decisions.  Make them, make those decisions.  If they can’t, or won’t, you know who really needs to be replaced.
I get it, Yahoo is in a really bad position.  They need to get leaner and they are attempting to do this by letting the weak performers ago first.  I actually admire that.  Way to many companies just layoff based on seniority and end up cutting great talent and keeping bad talent.  This is better, but I think they could have made it even more effective with a little more leadership influence to the decision making process.

Is LinkedIn’s Recruiter Certification A Scam?

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At LinkedIn’s (LI) annual Talent Connect Conference last week they announced the addition of a certification program for recruiters.  I love the idea!  Much like SHRM has their PHR, SPHR and GPHR certifications, no real recruiting certification has taken hold.  A number of organizations have tried, the most successful probably being American Staffing Association’s Certified Staffing Professional and AIRS Internet Recruiter certification (CPC through NAPS for my Agency friends), but all seem woefully incomplete and none have really ever gained traction as ‘the’ certification to have if you’re a true recruiting professional.  That’s why LinkedIn’s announcement intrigued me.  LI has the brand recognition and money to really own this space if they decided to.

Unfortunately, I think the new LinkedIn Recruiter Certification is going to cause confusion in the corporate and agency recruiting ranks.

Here’s why it’s probably is worthless:

1. LI’s Recruiter Certification has very little to do with actual recruiting and everything to do with how well you know how to use LI’s Recruiter product.

2. If you get ‘certified’ from LI you get to add a ‘badge’ saying you’re a ‘Certified LI Recruiter‘, which is cool enough, but I think that title is easily used to give a false impression of what it really means.  “Oh, you’re a ‘certified recruiter’ that is really impressive!” Instead of the reality ‘Oh, you’re a ‘certified LI recruiter’ which means you know how to use one recruiting tool really well.

3. LI is charging people to get ‘certified’ on a product they are paying for.  Does this seem odd to anyone? Anyone?  Let me see if I get this right.  I pay around $8K per seat annually, and you make me pay another $199 every two years to show you I know how to use the system I’m paying for. Yes. Okay, I thought so.  Can you now punch me in the face?

4. Most of the content you get tested on to gain certification, from LI’s on certification program book, seems to be process oriented.  Do you know how to post a job? Do you know how to search? Do you know how to effectively use InMail? Is this the kind of ‘certified’ knowledge we need for the recruiting profession?  Can you do the process of recruiting?

Here’s why it’s going to be wildly successful:

1. LI gives you a certification badge.  Recruiters are extremely hungry for validation.  We see our HR brothers and sisters with PHR and SPHR, dammit, we want something at the end our name too!

2. LI knows that Talent Acquisition leaders will easily pay a ‘little’ extra to ensure their people are using and understand their big spend (LI Recruiter).

3. People like being a part of a tribe. LI has a special invite only group for LI Certified Recruiters.  Want to make something popular? Make it exclusive!

4. Many HR Leaders don’t get ‘recruiting’ so they will believe this is hugely important and teaching their recruiting team how to really recruit.  It’s not, but no one really looks into the details for $199.

It does really open up a broader conversation about why no one has really been able to create a recruiter certification program that is widely respected and used.  It might be that recruiting, like sales, is hard to train and even harder to come up with concrete components around what makes a recruiter really good at recruiting.  There are so many opinions on that subject and ways to do the job effectively.

Does being a Certified LinkedIn Recruiter make you a better recruiter? No. Will it make people think you are? Yes.

Is it a scam?  Well, it definitely seems a little ‘scam-ish’.  I won’t say it’s a complete scam because they are very up front at what they are delivering for your money. Does LI really need the extra $199 per recruiter? Sure! Every company needs incremental revenue, LI is not different, they’re aren’t a non-profit. God bless them for coming up with a great idea on getting another $199 per recruiter out of your organization.

Here’s my question: Would you pay $199 to become ADP certified? What about Oracle? Halogen?  SuccessFactors?  That’s what this is.  Your HR vendor partner charging you to become a certified expert on their system.  This isn’t transferable.  You can’t leave your company who uses LI and go to a new company who uses Monster and say “Well, I’m a ‘Certified Recruiter’.  You’re not.  You’re just certified on one system. By the way, your two years is up, please send another check.

 

 

 

 

Recruiting Is Worthless

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Paul DeBettignies a while ago had an article over at ERE – Where Have All the Recruiters Gone – which gave me the idea for this post.  In Paul’s post he wonders why recruiters are networking face-to-face anymore. I think many of us in the recruiting field who have been in the field pre-internet, probably wonder this and many more things as we look at how the industry has totally transformed over the past 20 years.  A person today can get into recruiting, sit at a desk, have great internet skills, marginal phone skills and make a decent living.  They probably won’t be a great recruiter – they probably won’t make great money – but they’ll survive – they’ll be average or slightly above.  It’s why the recruiting function in most organizations gets a bad rap!  In corporate circles I’ve heard it called “worthless” many times – and for some this is their reality.

Recruiting is Worthless, if…

…you’re a hiring manager and you never have face-to-face conversations with your recruiter when you have an opening, and when you don’t have an opening.

…you’re recruiters believe it isn’t there job to find talent, talent will find them.

…your organization believes it’s the recruiting departments job to find talent.  It’s not, it’s the hiring managers job to ensure they have the talent they need for their department, recruiting is the tool that will help them.  This “ownership responsibility” is very important for organizational success in ensuring you have the talent you need.

…your recruiting department acts like they are HR – they aren’t – they are sales and marketing.  Too many Recruiters, in corporate settings, don’t want to recruit, they want to be HR – which makes them worthless as recruiters.

…if your recruiters have more incoming calls then outgoing calls.

…if your recruiters believe their job begins Monday thru Friday at 8am and ends at 5pm. The best talent is working during those times and most likely won’t talk to you while they are at work.  That’s not a slam on you or your company – they are great employees, it’s what we expect from a great employee.

…your senior leadership team feels they have to use an “executive search” company to fill their higher level openings, because our recruiting department “can’t handle it”.

…if they are victims – “it’s not my job”, “we can’t do that because…”, “marketing won’t allow us to do…”, “our policy won’t allow us…” etc.

…if they just send hiring managers resumes of candidates that have come to them, without first determining if the person is a fit for the organization and a fit for the hiring managers position – before sending them on.

…they haven’t developed the organizational influence enough to change a hiring managers, hiring decision.

Recruiting is worthless if in the end they have failed to show the value of their service back to the organization.

Recruiting is the one department in the organization, besides sales, that truly has the ability to show ROI back to the organization, yet so few of us take advantage of the opportunity we have!  There is nothing more important, and have a bigger competitive advantage, than our organizations talent – and oh by the way – THAT IS US! We control that.  Recruiting isn’t worthless, unless you make it worthless.

Dice Open Web Review

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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…)

Let me start with a little background.  My company does IT and Engineering contract placement (that’s really high-end temporaries for those who don’t know what I’m talking about) and contingent technical staffing.  We were a paying Dice.com costumer for many, many years until 2010.  In 2010 I stopped paying Dice because they were not delivering the talent we needed.

Fast forward to SHRM National 2013 in Chicago.  Dice sponsors the Bloggers Lounge at some big conferences, as they did for SHRM and HR Tech this year.  As part of that sponsorship Dice gets to pimp it’s new products to a captive audience — that’s business, you want a free soda and wifi, you get to hear about our new stuff.  This was when I was first introduced to Dice’s new Open Web product.  Being in recruitment for 20 years, I was a bit skeptical.  You know, job board trying to hang onto last little bit of hope by launching something new which is probably just a new way to searching their database, type of thing.

I was wrong!

The product demo seemed similar to products like TalentBin, but also was seemed much more far reaching.  I don’t recruit in Silicon Valley, I recruit in Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Dallas, I need a product that can find talent everywhere.  This is what I found with Open Web.  In fact, what we found was it finds way more than just IT talent!   Dice’s Open Web product builds profiles of potential candidates from over 50 different sites. The expected sites like: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. To the unexpected sites like: Github, Quora, StackOverFlow, About.Me, Google Profiles, Gravatar, Instagram, etc.  It takes all this data from all these sites and makes unique resume style profiles of candidates that didn’t apply to Dice. With each profile is a number of ways to contact the candidate based on where the candidate was found (might be email, might be twitter, etc.)  If Open Web finds a Dice candidate resume it will also link that resume within Open Web as well.

Basically, Open Web is a finder of passive candidates. Thousands of passive candidates! Candidates we could not have previously found in our Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn subscriptions.   All in one place, with a ton of information you don’t normally get on a resume.

While we found a completely new pool of talent, we also found some hiccups!  Contacting someone from a major job board site like LinkedIn, people expect to get contacted about jobs.  Open Web, for the most part, is uncovering socially active, passive job searching candidates.  You have to be ready to sell them fast and different than folks you find at CareerBuilder and LinkedIn.  With a passive candidate you have a small window to make an impression, before you get thrown to the side.  It’s real recruiting!  Not many recruiters, today, are use to ‘real’ recruiting.  The cool part of Open Web is that with all the data you get in the profile, you can easily come up with something to help you make that impression.

Being a former Dice customer, I asked Dice to let me try out Open Web in a live environment on real searches in my own shop.  It has worked just like the demo. Also, we found it works on much more than just IT, in fact, finding both engineering and some skilled trades types for orders we had with an automotive client.  It’s building from searches on the whole web, not just a certain geographic area.  Of course because of the sites it searches, you’ll find more IT profiles than some others.  If you have done so check out Dice’s Open Web product, it’s going to be a big hit!

 

Introduce Yourself in 90 Seconds

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First let me tell you this is not a paid post or endorsement.  Second, I’ve found something really cool for Free! HR and Talent Acquisition folks love FREE!

I found a company called ZipIntro.com and basically what they do is give anyone a really simple platform to make introductory videos for free.  Check out the one I did on the link below:

http://zipintro.com/v/timsackett/intro

As you can see it’s pretty bare bones, and that’s what is great about it.  As a recruiter I don’t need bells and whistles, I need simple and easy, and this is as easy as product as I’ve found for candidates to begin using video as part of their resume submission.  If I can use this, it’s almost completely idiot proof!

Here’s what I know after working in HR and Talent Acquisition for 20 years:

1. It’s tough to get hiring managers to move on the candidates you’ve presented to them.

2. Many times by the time they do get around to looking at them, the best ones are gone.

3. A quick video intro of a candidate gets hiring managers to react.

Why?

Here’s something about hiring managers they don’t want you to know.  They actually trust that you can find talent for them that will be close to what they need!  So, going through each resume and giving you feedback seems like a waste of time.  Watching 3 videos that are all 90 seconds in length and telling you which ones they want to interview — well, that’s really easy!

I have a classic real-life example of when I working with an executive on trying to fill one of his direct report positions.  I presented resumes of pre-screened candidates of over 20 individuals over a period of months.  Each time I would force myself into his office and get feedback.  Always the final answer was “No”.  I almost gave up when I decided to do one more thing.  I had my best three candidates come into the HR office and I set up a video camera (yeah, this was way before all the cool apps and sites now – VHS baby!).   We went live, I asked each the same three questions, and we let it roll.  Each video was less than five minutes.  I asked the executive for 15 minutes to present three ‘new’ candidates.  I didn’t take any resumes.  He watched the videos and decided to interview all three live.  One of those three eventually got the job.  All three had previously been turned down when looking only at their resume and my feedback.  Video is very persuasive!

What else is useful about ZipIntro?  Well, you can use it to intro yourself!  Think about what happens when you send out those 50 emails per day to potential candidates.  Usually, none of those 50 people have any idea who you are.  All they have is an email telling them you’re interested in them.  But who are you!?  Having a ZipIntro url in your email signature gives them the ability to ‘check’ you out very quickly, and allows you to send a compelling message to potential candidates.  You can be professional, you can be creative, you can be funny.  It’s up to you.

Like I said — ZipIntro isn’t paying me for this, I just wanted to share a free and very easy tool that might help you get a job, and/or land some candidates. Enjoy.

 

5 Ways for Recruiters to Engage Talent minus the Stalking!

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Let’s face it, it’s easy to say you’re going to build talent pools filled with passive candidates—but it’s hard to actually do. And it’s even harder once you’ve built a talent pool in your area of need to figure out what to do next.  You know how to recruit, but what do you say to a talent pool filled with passive candidates who aren’t ready or willing to buy in to the positions you’re selling?

 Never fear, Fistful of Talent (with an assist from our friends at Jobvite) is here. We thought about the pain described above and created our October webinar entitled “5 Easy Ways For Recruiters to Engage Talent Pools – Without Looking Like Complete Stalkers” to help solve the problem.  Join us on October 3, 2013 at 1pm EST and we’ll hit you with the following:

 ·         A simple definition of what a talent pool is, how you organize it in your ATS, and how to manage the concept of “opt-in” to the people you include in that talent pool.  The definition of who gets included and “opt-in” is important, because you’re gong to broadcast a bit over time– which will feel different (in a good way) to candidates included in the talent pool.

·         A checklist of information you already have access to in your company that those passive talent pool candidates would love to hear about.  It’s a checklist!  All you have to do is go find the info we list and you’re golden.

·         Data on best practices in thinking like a marketer (do you use email, LinkedIn, snail mail, text, etc.) to engage your talent pool – without looking like a stalker.

·         Grand Finale, we’ll deliver the top 5 ways to engage talent pools – and for each engagement method, we’ll list what the communication looks like, where to find the information and why doing it the way we recommend is the best practice.

Special Bonus: we’re even going to give you a monthly calendar of what to do and when to do it related to our list of 5 ways for you to engage your talent pool. It couldn’t be simpler than that.

 It’s time to make the talent pools you’ve built in your ATS actually like you and your company.  Join us on for October 3, 2013 at 1pm EST, “5 Easy Ways For Recruiters to Engage Talent Pools – Without Looking Like Complete Stalkers” and we’ll show you how.

Even Kanye Uses Staffing Firms!

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Kanye West is starting up a clothing line and apparently needs some additional staff to get the line off the ground.  How do I know? The staffing firm he is using posted the openings on LinkedIn!  Yep, the kind of personal branding is using a firm to find his next CFO and VP of Production.  From Bloomberg:

“Two ads appeared on the site over a week ago by Decision Toolbox, a staffing firm in Irvine, Calif., that are looking for people to be chief financial officer and vice president for production at what is vaguely called the “Kanye West clothing project.” “[U]nlike those in which celebrities merely lend their name to a label, this venture will have the star power of Mr. West’s artistic vision at the heart and soul of it,” the ads say, although they neglect to mention that sometimes that vision is just a white T-shirt.

When asked if the posts were real, Decision Toolbox said that they were and that the person behind the new Kanye line was Richard Dent III, the former chief operating officer of Victoria Secret’s (LTD) PINK line who since 2012 has been the chief executive of custom menswear company Astor & Black. Dent did not reply to e-mails asking him to explain the new venture, so it’s unclear if Astor & Black is producing the line for Kanye or if the rapper is creating it himself and has just put Dent in charge.”

Here’s the thing – Decision Toolbox is your average, everyday staffing provider.  I’m sure they would say they’re special, but the reality is they do a little RPO, a little contingent and probably some contract work.  Besides Kanye’s VP and CFO positions, they are also looking for a Machinists and Automotive Service Manager.  Sound specialized to you!?

My first reaction — I’m a little surprised on how such a huge celebrity didn’t get roped into an expensive retained boutique firm!  My next reaction — I want to meet the person at DT who pulled in Kanye as a client!  There’s a story there, and I’m 100% sure it isn’t because they have the best customer service!

This does uncover a couple of issues, though, within the staffing industry:

1. If you can recruit, you can recruit.  Staffing providers sell the fact they specialize, but the reality is, you can either find talent or you can’t.  Given, you might get talent faster with someone who spends more time in a certain industry or classification of jobs, but good recruiters will get you people regardless.

2. Retained searching is the biggest waste of time and money ever created by the staffing industry, but it’s good work if you can get it!

3. If your ‘special’ staffing firm you just hired puts your CFO and VP positions on LinkedIn as their strategy to get you the top talent in any industry, you made the wrong choice of staffing companies!

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!