The
good old days…
I
remember the simpler, less expensive days…those days of yore. Back in the
middle nineties, an early stage in Internet Recruiting, I was very happy to be a
member of both Monster.Com (previously Online Career Center - OCC) and
Headhunter.Net.
With
Monster, I started out with a $1,900.00 annual membership fee and that grew to a
reasonable $2,900.00 per year at the end. I could handle that. We had full
access to the Monster resume board and unlimited job postings. We did make
placements using this service. Last summer I got a call from my Monster
representative…a very friendly, capable saleslady. She proceeded to tell me
that if I wanted to remain a client of theirs, they had a basic package for just
under $10,000 and if I wanted to retain the same level of service that I was
used to, the cost would be just under $20,000.00. I asked her justification for
tripling her charge to me for a lower level of service. She said that they ran
Super Bowl ads. I told her I had been a loyal customer for years. She said that
they ran Super Bowl ads. So much for Monster.Com.
In
my early experience with Headhunter, there were no fees at all. You could post
jobs or search for resumes at no charge. They began a VIP Membership several
years ago and for $1,500.00 you could have access to resume postings two weeks
prior to the non-paying customers. You also had unlimited job postings included.
A great service for a great price. I have had my VIP Membership now for several
years. We also made placements using this service. Other friendly VIP Members
had recently warned me that they had been getting calls from Headhunter
salespeople upon renewal with news of huge price increases. I had been waiting
for a call myself as my current membership expires soon. I received an email
from Headhunter announcing a new pricing structure. I contacted my
representative and found my worst fears realized. They will still have a VIP
Membership for $1,500.00 but will no longer include any job postings. For a
50-job pack, more than most people need (we do), they would charge me an
additional $750.00 per month. She explained this was a highly discounted price
as I was an existing customer and would be good for one year. The normal price,
which would be incurred in the second year of the new pricing structure, would
be in the neighborhood of $2,500.00 per month, not including the $1,500.00 for
resumes. I performed some quick mathematical calculations…
Current:
$1,500.00
First Year:
$1,500.00 + $9,000.00 ($750.00 x 12) =
$10,500.00
Second Year: $1,500.00
+ $30,000.00 ($2,500.00 x 12) = $31,500.00.
I
asked her…how could you justify such an increase? A seven-fold increase during
my first year. We are advertising a lot was her answer. I asked if I were
getting more resumes or more job postings for my huge increase. The answer was
no. I told her I had been a loyal customer for years. She explained that is why
I would not receive my twenty-one fold increase until my second year. I may
still take the resume membership but that is all the money they will see out of
me.
Yes,
I do have a point to all this. I truly believe that we are no longer the target
audience for these and other Internet services. They have now priced themselves
beyond the reach of most responsible small business owners. They have targeted
Corporate America, our clients. We were their bread and butter for years and now
have been abandoned. I have seen this coming for a long time and have prepared
myself. When we stopped using Monster, our resume production dropped drastically
but our placements didn’t. Monster was a double-edged sword. They were almost
too big. When you ran an ad on Monster, you did get results but often the wrong
type of results. That is fine when you are paying $2,900.00 but not good enough
when you are paying $10,000.00 to $20,000.00. We never missed them. Same thing
with Headhunter. A great service at $1,500.00 and maybe something more. But at
the prices they are talking about I could almost hire another recruiter. When we
stop running ads on Headhunter, our resume production will probably drop again
but I bet our placement don’t. In
my office and many other I know, expensive Internet services have been replaced
with other ways of using the Internet to generate candidate/resume leads.
Over
the last six months or so, Wade and I have written more and more about these
techniques. We have written several articles on AIRS training, and have written
other articles on books by Barbara Ling and Judy West. We have also written
about Internet services and tools to assist you. You might have even wondered
why all the articles on AIRS. The above is why. I don’t apologize for it. As
the Monsters and Headhunters continue to squeeze out the little guys and replace
us with the large corporate clients we will continue to out-perform our clients
in our ability to locate qualified candidates on the Internet. These articles
will continue…our emphasis will become less and less on the expensive pay
services and more and more on the vast amount of free resources on the Internet.
Will our clients cough up the big money and successfully hire people from
Monster and Headhunter? Of course they will…just like they hire people from
newspaper ads and job fairs. So what? Using products that Wade has written
about, Ariel Campaign and Address Grabber, you do your own research, sourcing,
recruiting, interviewing, qualifying, closing (just like in the old days) and
will be able to locate people they will never find on their own. I’ll step
down from the soapbox for now but I’d love to read comments from anyone
interested in giving me their thoughts on this major shift by the large Internet
services. How does this affect you? Does it affect you? Please take one minute
and email me at mark@berger-nowlin.com.
ANOTHER
DAY IN THE LIFE...
High
volume Internet recruiting is an emerging niche in the recruiting business and
many of the basic questions remain unanswered, such as:
·
How far should an Internet recruiter
take a candidate relationship before handing off to a traditional
recruiter?
·
How should an Internet recruiter hand
off a candidate to a traditional recruiter?
·
How should an Internet recruiter make
candidate data available to a traditional recruiter?
It
is one thing to do great research, employ “bleeding edge” techniques and
build a fantastic candidate database,
but at the end of the day the question remains – did you hire anybody?
As
many of you know, I’m on a contract assignment, leading a sourcing team for
one of the hottest Internet companies in industry today.
It is an exciting, fast moving juggernaut on a major hiring binge.
The assignment is particularly interesting in that it provides a great
platform to work on pioneering techniques in Internet recruiting.
I’ve been reflecting on the 1st quarter of this year with
mixed emotions about our results. On
the positive side, we have won many accolades for producing tons of great
candidates and timely information that has helped the business move forward.
On the negative side, we have not cracked the code on best practices on
some basic issues, such as those mentioned above. I’m certain that we
haven’t maximized the hiring we could have gotten from our efforts.
Some of what I do will be foreign to you, so the next paragraph is
intended to help you understand the business problem.
Let
me set the stage… If you, as an agency owner or manager, received an important
but difficult search assignment and paid me to provide leads for your
recruiters, imagine your excitement if I quickly produced resumes and interview
notes on candidates who met the skill, location and money requirements. They are
working at your client’s direct competitors…they were not looking when I
contacted them (no resumes on monster.com, no other interviews in process), but
did have an identifiable career wound and were interested in confidentially
learning more about your client’s opportunity.
Now try to imagine your reaction a week later at a team meeting if you
found out that none of the candidates were presented to the client!
When you asked why, your recruiters said they couldn’t find the right
matches on Monster.com, were distracted by other activities, etc.
You ask – “What about the pre-qualified leads you were provided
with?” You receive no answer… and your team avoids making eye
contact with you.
That
is what is going on too often right now in my world.
In checking around, I’ve discovered that the same thing is happening at
one of my client’s direct competitors, and is probably happening at other
large companies who are attempting to implement high-volume Internet recruiting
techniques. The good news for
readers of The Fordyce letter is that dropped balls like this create fee
opportunities. The bad news in the
circle of life is that Internet recruiting lessons remain unlearned and
eventually will impact agencies the same way if we don’t figure this out. The next paragraph
discusses the business problem and theories of how to move forward – I’d
really like your feedback on the next section, so give it some thought and write
Mark and me with your thoughts.
Let’s
review the current questions and how the thinking is evolving:
·
How
far should an Internet recruiter take a candidate relationship before handing
off to a traditional recruiter? – Up
until now, our team has handed off a resume and a complete pre-screening
interview covering skills, money, location, career wound, etc.
Not only is this time consuming, it
has often resulted in the recruiter not contacting the candidate.
My theory is that traditional recruiters don’t feel like they have a
feel for the candidate and proper candidate control if they don’t make the
initial phone call and discover the information personally.
I’m going to test this theory over the next couple of months by handing
off unscreened leads to the in-house recruiters.
Going forward, the data in a candidate hand-off to an in-house recruiter
will consist of forwarding the candidate’s email response expressing interest
(and the resume, if we have one) to the recruiter, who will be asked to make the
initial contact.
·
How
should an Internet recruiter hand-off a candidate to a traditional recruiter?
- Up until now, our team has handed-off candidates by email as soon as a
pre-screen is completed. My theory
is that recruiters are on the phone and monster.com, not paying attention to
their email inboxes. So if the
recruiters knew that all their sourcing leads would arrive in their email at a
specific time each day, they would be more likely to look at them. For the next few months we will test this theory by
distributing all the leads together in one email at the same time each day.
·
How
should an Internet recruiter make candidate data available to a traditional
recruiter? - Up until now, our team has
made data available by email. We
also provide a spreadsheet online that is available to each recruiter, by
recruiter territory, with all leads (qualified and unqualified) so recruiters
can proactively source if they choose to do so – most have not.
My theory is that our recruiters are not using a candidate tracking
system effectively and therefore get disorganized.
For the next few months we will test this theory by putting the leads
directly into the candidate tracking system (my client uses Personic), while
continuing to also distribute them by email.
The email messages will inform the recruiters that the data is also in
the candidate tracking system.
The
only other haunting comment from some of the traditional recruiters on the team
is that they feel threatened. When
asked to expand on that, the comments are that they think it is their job as
recruiters to source and don’t know how to react to having that done for them. These same recruiters often acknowledge that they don’t
have time to source and need help finding candidates for their open
requisitions. When I get into
one-on-one sessions and explain that we are just getting them a beachhead from
which they can get referrals, phone lists, etc., some try it out – others
choose not to. My approach to
this challenge is to work with the recruiters who don’t feel threatened, in
the belief that as they use Internet recruiting leads to outperform their
reluctant peers, others will get on board out of fear of being left behind.
Not everyone on the team feels this is the right approach.
Some believe that good leads are being wasted and want an “in your
face” accountability to be forced on the recruiters by management.
Management is cool-headed and wants to start having access to the data on
candidate referrals so they can ask questions and potentially assist recruiters
in re-ordering their priorities.
Mark
and I would like to hear your thoughts on all of this!
Please email us your opinion and any experiences you may have had in
tackling this kind of problem at your agency.
A
quick way to search all the Internet sites with links to a particular URL is
easy, especially when you use Snap.Com. Go to http://www.snap.com and in
the middle of the page, you will see another link to Power Search. Go to the
‘Power Search’ page. At the top of that page, click the ‘Search For’
drop down box and pick ‘Links to this URL’, then type in the URL of the site
you want to flip. You results will give you all of the indexed web pages on the
Internet with a link to that URL. To locate candidate leads or resumes, you
refine your search further by using the ‘More Search Terms’ boxes below. Try
searching the URL for an Engineering or Accounting association or maybe a
university (especially an alumni page) for resumes. You won’t be disappointed.
It
is my understanding that Monster may allow sharing of accounts. I personally
have spoken with a Monster representative about this who says it can be done. I
have also heard that other Monster representatives said no to this arrangement
and would not allow sharing unless it was shared by people working for the same
company. They have a package that would cost $3,500.00 per person for 5 people.
One person would have to collect the money from the other four, get user names
and passwords from those people and be responsible for opening the account. This
would be for resume access only. A fair price. I will keep you posted on the
developments.