Ask yourself a question: how many people do you talk to for each role you work on? how long does it take you to identify your ‘long list’ for every search? Then how long does it take to funnel that long list down to your short list? By the time you get to your best candidates for a position, you’re heavily invested from a time perspective.

So you put your notes together and send the resume out to your client. Your client comes back and says, ‘no, they just dont have enough experience of …………’. That’s wonderful. All that work and not even a first interview yet. If you go through the process as mentioned above, resumes you submit have been submitted for a reason. i.e. YOU, the specialist, time-saving, business-understanding recruiter believe they are a good fit for the company. Should you sit there and take that rejection on behalf of your candidate? NO – not if you know the brief and have pre-qualified your candidates effectively. You’ve got to be prepared to push back on your client and fight your candidate’s corner (otherwise, you’re wasting your time as a recruiter). Admittedly, the first resume might be a benchmark which helps you refine what you are looking for, but from then on, ALL of your candidates should be interviewed. Otherwise, you’re really not differentiating yourself from the competition out there.

Think of it this way. I want to buy a car. I’ve got the money, but I’m specific about a number of things such as colour and options – and i have a pretty long list of ‘nice to haves’. The sales guy and I get on pretty well. He’s not pushy, but he’s asking a lot of questions. eventually, he takes me to a car with everything apart from the rear DVD package. Why do i need that? well, my kids, who sit in the back once a week, might want to watch it. But then, do i really go on long enough journeys with them where I’m going to need it? err…..probably not. The car has everything else I am looking for and the salesperson says it’s probably as close as we’ll get to what I’m looking for. REMEMBER, this analogy is to get a TEST DRIVE, not buy the car. Buying the car would be a placement. a test drive would be the equivalent of an interview. I don’t know about you, but I’d take the test drive.

Go back to your client and find out exactly why – what do they mean by not enough experience? then push back with a ‘i respect your comments/concerns, but i would not be doing my job if I didn’t counter them. I’m by no means trying to force you to talk to this individual, but these are the reason why I believe you should. I’ve spoken to around (however many) people so far and this individual stands as a clear favourite for the position, and these are the reasons why’ Then go into it. Keep pushing. Now remember, you’ll only push back if you believe in your candidate’s ‘matchability’. If you don’t believe in that, perhaps you shouldn’t have submitted the resume in the first place…..

so stop wasting your precious time and become an extension of your client’s hiring program. Too many recruiters don’t differentiate by accepting the initial resume feedback. It is NOT your job to send across candidates who don’t get interviewed. We’re talking about a $25k fee here. You’ve got to be good enough to earn it.

We’ve just lost a client, who decided to go with the in-house approach (although i think they spun us that line to soften the blow). Real shame, but in light of the fact we had 4 offers rejected in 3 months, I must admit, I’m keen to focus our time elsewhere. that’s right, 4 offers. disastrous really. $65k in lost revenue, but what’s the point of working with a client who just won’t adjust their approach given the changing market conditions and who remain unresponsive to valuable feedback we have provided them with in order to make their process more effective? Yet another tale of a company’s own view of themselves as an employer skewing their ability to hire the best. Word on the street is that they get through a lot of recruiters and as a result, prospective candidates are contacted by multiple recruiters over a period of time – think of it what you may, but IT ULTIMATELY DILUTES AND PUTS A NEGATIVE SPIN ON THE COMPANY’S MESSAGE TO THE CANDIDATE MARKET. Maybe my approach of trying to educate clients is too direct, I’ll have to think about adjusting it, but isnt that what we are supposed to do as professionals; work with everyone in our sphere to maximise efficiencies, discuss improvement ideas and implement relevant changes? After all, our clients provide our income, so why would we want to jeopardize that by offering poor service and irrelevent advice?

On the flip side, more committed business is coming out of a number of clients. We’re currently working on 3 times as many committed clients than we were this time last year (and no, that doesn’t mean we’re working with 3!!!).

Off to Vegas in a couple of weeks for the ISC West show. We have a number of clients in the space and I’m really looking forward to getting out there and walking the ailes and networking. I’ve heard there’s not much else to do in Vegas…..

I’ve noticed a bit of a psychological change in candidates recently. When headhunting directly, everyone seems to be interested in finding out more – there’s more uncertainty our there right now than there was about a year ago, which is a surprise - last year, candidates feared being found out by their employer that they were looking elsewhere – it was a good reason to be let go. It now feels like candidates’ confidence index is rising and they know their skills could be more valued elsewhere and when they move, they feel a huge sense of relief, vindication and in some instances, utter revenge!

As recruiters, we focus on finding the best for our clients. Something that does alarm me is when you see organizations large and small, hire people with limited or no experience in their space because the candidate knew someone, who knew someone – why do they do this? invariably, the individual takes longer to get up to speed (if they ever do) and the company loses traction, time and money invested in that individual. If someone is kept for 6 months just plodding along, that cost is as much as using a specialized recruiter to make a skilled and proven hire and eventually, they are back where they started. What’s the aversion to paying fees to a specialist recruiter? do so many companies really believe they are helping their business by hiring this way? it’s frightening stuff. Admittedly, the client is free to do what they want, but is that approach really helping their business? I’m sure some of these ‘limited knowledge workers’ do work out, but I’m confident they are the exception, not the rule.

Just filled a senior level product management position that took 9 months from start to finish. Just closed another deal that started 3 weeks ago. I’m seeing a lot more of the latter cycles now than I was 3 months ago. Usually, you attribute this to a rebound in the economy with companies realizing that to hit the numbers, they need to re-plug some of the holes they dug by releasing people earlier this year.

What I’m seeing more of are companies expanding or replacing and looking to get people on board before the Christmas season so they can get a feel for the company, the people they’ll be working with and technology they’re going to be involved in – they can then hit 2010 running.

Already, the days of huge volumes of quality candidate availability are leaving us. The majority of candidates released earlier this year have either now found new positions or have been through the interview rounds with the companies out there and so far, have not been selected.

2010 will continue to be a battle to attract those passive A players. While in-house talent acquisition teams will be able to find candidates, their coverage will be limited as they spend their time working on one client to sell to prospective candidates. Recruiters on the other hand work across a far broader range, giving us access to a much wider net of prospective candidates – let your prospects know this!

Also, have conversations with clients about Q1 headcount planning. With a new year comes new quotas, reviews and employee ‘changes of heart’ – new year and all that. This leads to open positions early in the year, denting the run rate requird for target achievement. Every month you have a $1.5m quota position open, you run the risk of having a $125k deficit in the required target.  Encourage clients to plan ahead with your help, as soon as they pull the trigger, you’re already there with a pipeline of candidates. Clients in Technology hiring sales people will subsequently need to add technical pre-sales, project managers and marketeers. Make sure your cross-selling to those reference points to generate more positions with the same client. When you have placed 5 people in different teams for a client, the relationship should continue to improve exponentially, providing you with a run-rate of business for 2010.

72% of respondants suggested that they were investing less in using 3rd party recruiters this year. 72%! That is a HUGE number and I really want to find out why. My thoughts are:

1. (recruiters) are too expensive (typically 25% – 30% of base salary charged)

2. quality of candidates identified is poor (limited pre-qualification)

3. continued or new investment in an internal team

4. purchase of social media memberships (corporate solution for linkedin for example)

5. just dont need them because hiring needs are limited

I’ll run a poll on this and come back to you – other ideas for the list welcomed.

Naturally, as a recruiter, I’m biased on my thinkiing as to why companies should utilize the network access we have to candidates. What I believe many companies are failing to do is to embrace selected, vetted and specialized recruiters as business partners, providing better guarantees on hires and preferred rates, which (specifically in response to my previous post), come in at well under the cost of having people do it in-house for them, while reducing additional costs such as employee cost and time-management burdens.

While the service of a well experienced and networked recruiter can never be under-estimated, we’re still under the same umbrella of ‘only being as good as our last placement’. Higher levels of client committment generate higher levels of recruiter responsibility and accountability. Clients! Test us to support you, but commit to us when we do!

I spent about 2 hours with the owners of the business and we talked mostly about their business, their plans and where we could possibly fit into the equation. As you may already have ascertained, for me, recruitment is all about offering a fair price for work carried out while maintaining high levels of quality. Social networking (in the main) is a free resource, internal recruiters are taking away our market share with cost and continuity benefits and companies are focused on reducing costs. Notwithstanding the fact that most companies/decision makers still receive multiple recruiting calls daily, I proposed a solution which would keep me happy from a commitment perspective, while providing the client with cost savings and a substantial upside.

I’ll report back when I have some news.

Now we all know this happens. Managing to audit your candidate trail is a tough task with everything else we have to do on a daily basis – but it goes back to my point on a previous post that in most cases, our service is free until a hire is made. We’d invested a huge amount of time (and therefore money) ourselves into the project and here we are with a legal situation.

I spoke to the owner of the organization, who’s approach initially was defensive - ‘we know the candidate personally’ was something that was mentioned. heard that before? If that’s the case, why was that individual not contacted directly before we were instructed to get involved? It’s not our fault you’ve not exhausted all avenues before resorting to using a recruitment firm is it?

Anyway, we handled the scenario diplomatically and have agreed on a client visit in the next 3 weeks to meet face-to-face and discuss requirements over the coming 6 months, with the aim of agreeing a deal which benefits both sides, from both a commitment and financial perspective.

Moral of the story? While it is easier to play the tough guy and gloat over how good your legal position looks, consider the benefits you can reap by being ethical, courteous and honest regarding what you would like to get from being accommodating. Remember, it’s very tough to win new business and in a situation like this, if both parties can benefit from the resolution AND MOVE FORWARD in the relationship, then it’ a win-win.

No doubt some of your are thinking ’once a cheater, always a cheater’. You have to go with your gut on moving a situation like this forward and at the time, my gut told me to follow my instincts. Meeting set up for early September, so I will report back then.

Going back to the audit point. You probably have 6 or 12 month ‘candidate ownership’ umbrellas over submitted candidates. What’s the point in having this if you don’t follow up? If you’ve invested time interviewing and working with candidates to the point where you have submitted their resumes to a client, I’d recommend you contact them (build a rolling list) every 8-10 weeks to ensure you don’t get blind-sided.

Anyway, back to business – more requirements coming in an some very cheap favours made to prospects earlier thie year ow starting to pay dividends – we’re working with 4 new clients, seeing committment levels rise from them and also a little bit more urgency – which for us recruiters is a bit of a holy grail!

From a recruitment perspective, it doesn’t necessarily mean all distributors are doing well, but stories like this do give us positive talking points. Make a point of asking how the prospect’s business is going – are they seeing the environment improving? are they beating their numbers? (even if they are revised). is the revenue coming from new business clients, existing clients, or partners? If business is not going too well, ask what they are doing to improve their situation – what partnerships do they have in place? what new routes to market are they exploring? are they comfortable sitting on a declining revenue base or are they going to do something about it? A recruiter is not just responsible for finding people. Our responsibility is to build commercial relationships. If you specialise in a market, you should be using that when dealing with clients – give them examples of what you are hearing in the market – is that something they would be able to do?

The days of just finding people will soon be extinct. There’s going to be a major shift in the recruiting world soon…….

Here’s the example: We identify a new client. agree terms. are cleared to work on an ‘urgent’ position. go out and find candidates. submit our best one. 2 WEEKS LATER (having told headhunted candidates the role is urgent), we receive feedback and the candidate is interviewed. End result it that as a first match, it’s pretty good, but unfortunately not strong enough. We get an email from the client with feedback on the interview and in the email, it states (amended for anonymity, but I’m sure you’ll get the drift of it).

“At this point I’d like to put a hold on our dealings. As communicated previously (err….when was that?), we have a number of organizational issues that require focus and attention. I will contact you during the week of July 6th to let you know whether or not we are interested in looking at further candidates from Iapetus.” (I bolded those words for emphasis!).

What the hell does that mean? obviously that the role isn’t as important or urgent as we were informed (although the 2 week delay helped us work that one out). That you’re considering NOT using us after July 6th? Surprisingly, we can’t seem to get this individual to call us and do what you are supposed to do when building a recruitment relationship, which is EDUCATE and LEARN ABOUT EACH OTHER. Also, OK, we’ll talk in 2 weeks – that’s two weeks we could spend sourcing more candiates if you’d at least commit to us so that when we do re-connect, we’d be ready to go – with that in mind, it’s a dead opportunity for me.

You know what though? we really enjoy doing what we do because it’s self-fulfilling charity work and I have no need for money as you mere mortals do…………..

How about hearing “I’m sorry to have wasted your time and set false expectations. I’m also sorry that I can’t confirm that when I am ready to work on this urgent position, I’ll be calling you to help us (even though you’ve done some good work so far for free anyway, and have only submitted 1 resume, resulting in 1 interview – other recruiters would have swamped me with everyone on their books). In the meantime, thank you for the time you have spent on needlessly sourcing prospective candidates. Here’s a check for $250.00 fo setting up that first interview (you thought I’d forgotten that?!)“

Look, this is one case out of many that do actually progress and end in placements, but it is the way in which these organizations disgard our work and more importantly, disrespect our time. We’re all trying to make a living. I’ve learned from this though, as has one of my consultants.  We have to qualify every prospect very heavily, but in doing so, can come across as being too aggressive and needing too much on that first call, pushing the prospect away. That’s a chance we’ll just have to take……

Happy Hunting!