June 2001 Column
AN EXPERIMENT FOR YOU
received a call this month from
a small agency – 3 offices. The manager
said that he was looking for ideas because their “Research Department” of
Internet recruiters wasn’t effective in finding hard to find candidates. Upon examination, I learned that the
“researchers” (and I use the term loosely), were junior recruiters using job
boards like headhunter.net and monster.com to find candidates. I explained that
professional researchers don’t even use career sites in most cases and that
senior researchers working in a well-defined process can cover off on almost
any search assignment in 1 to 3 business days.
The call from the frustrated agency manager made me wonder how much
billing is being missed on our reader’s desks by not applying some structure
and discipline to the sourcing aspect of the business. My esteemed co-author, Mark Berger and I
frequently speak at state and local chapters of NAPS, and we almost always open
our talk by telling our audiences that sourcing is just a small part of the
overall job of working a desk. I admit,
it is an important part, and the body of knowledge is rapidly changing due to
the Internet, but it is still just one part of the effort to earn a fee. Mark and I so badly want to help you
increase your billings by sharing our knowledge. That’s why we speak and write.
I’ve spent the last couple of years developing processes to efficiently
find people with specific skills, in specific locations and, equally important,
how to deliver the research to recruiters in a way that will be acted upon to
produce hires. As I mulled this over
for the last few days, a question popped into my mind… Could the lessons
learned and the processes developed significantly increase the billing of an
already successful agency?
Here is a simple example of the
theory: Suppose a recruiter spends
their day in the following way:
By cutting the time to source from
3 hours to 1 hour, the day might look like this:
In theory, the billing increase
come not only from having more time to market, it also comes from having a
higher caliber, more exclusive candidate who is not looking for a job (isn’t on
the job boards your clients use).
Unproven theories are not worth
the paper they are written on so, in order to prove the theory, I’m asking
Mark, who runs a very successful agency, let me source for his entire agency
for 30 to 45 days at no charge (not including expenses). Mark and I will keep track of the results
and report them for our readers. If the
experiment is successful (i.e., if Berger-Nowlin’s billings go up in proportion
to the extra time available for marketing calls) we will expand the experiment
to validate our numbers with a few select agencies and share our findings with
you.
My Headhunter.net membership had
come up for renewal. I have been a member of this organization almost from the
beginning. That was “Internet Recruiting” back then. When I first
started with them everything was free. The resume bank was free and job order
postings were free. Then they implemented the VIP membership where you got 10
days or so head start on the non-payers. Then everyone had to pay the as they
eliminated free access altogether. Then
they split up resume searching and job order posting into two separate services
for two separate charges. Then the pricing increases kicked in. The most I ever
paid for a year’s worth of resume searching was $1500.00. That was the original
price when they first implemented VIP. I checked their website and noticed
their one-year resume bank membership has gone up to $5,000.00. I am
afraid to ask what it costs to post an ad there. I
got the usual notices but decided to pass. I actually quit running ads there a
couple of years ago so this was just about the resume database. I didn’t even
call for a quote. We made our share of placements from Headhunter. On a dollar
out versus dollar in basis Headhunter probably looks good. But what is harder
to calculate is how much time we wasted…positively wasted…contacting,
interviewing, processing, preparing, briefing, debriefing and closing all these
candidates that were already working with numerous competitors and all had
other interviews going. Sometimes by the time we reached someone, they had
already been submitted to our client sites and other times had submitted
themselves to our client direct. A quick check of the St. Louis job postings,
of course, had many ads from my local client base, lessening my usefulness to
these clients for certain services.
What do we do about that?
Recognize change and be ready for it. I have noticed a big change in the IT/MIS
marketplace. That is my specialty in my day job but I am sure there are similar
situations in other recruiting areas. In past years we have made dozens of
placements for help desk, networking and systems administration types of
personnel. Lately, we make hardly any. Why? Not because there are fewer job
openings for that type of person. If anything, there are more. It is because
our clients, those companies we used to place these people with, are now able
to go out on the Internet, run an ad and get 100+ resumes. Why would they want
to pay me thousands of dollars? How does it give me an edge to spend my
Internet budget dollars on Headhunter when my clients belong to the same
service? It doesn’t. It pays me to spend that budget money on gaining skills to
give me an edge over my client’s internal recruiters. It may also pay to farm
out the more difficult assignments to experts at times. As a professional
recruiter charging anywhere between $8000.00 and $20,000.00+ fee I need, and
frankly, am expected to locate candidates that are not available on Headhunter.
How I do this my clients don’t care but yes, I do use the Internet for a lot of
these assignments, going after the passive candidate marketplace before that
too get overly crowded. I am able to get candidates that are only working with
me, that have not sent their resumes to Headhunter, that may not even be
specifically seeking other employment, whose resumes are not even up to date. I
get resumes that my clients can’t get on their own, just like in the old days.
And just like in the old days, they pay me fees for these candidates.
Headhunter.net and the Internet in general may make for easy pickings for some
job categories but some other will remain as difficult as ever.
My business partner, Geoffrey, and
I recently interviewed a recruiter candidate for our consulting/placement firm.
Good image, articulate, experienced, knew the lingo, but then came the
deal-killer. She commented that she couldn’t live without Monster and that all
of her candidates came from Monster or other Internet resources. We dropped
her. My partner is less tolerant of Internet-only recruiters than I am. He
still wishes the whole thing would just go away. It won’t, of course, but
again…use it for what it is, not what you want it to be. Figure out what it can
be and not what it should be. This poor girl will probably do great for a while
but next recession she’ll be out on her ear. As these big services become more
and more popular with our clients, fewer and fewer of our client’s employees
will put their resumes out for everyone to see. Why would you post your resume
on Monster or Headhunter if you knew your employer was searching for candidates
on these services? You wouldn’t.
OK, I’ll stop, but for your sake I
hope you get my drift.
AIRS has recently launched one of
the largest collections of Job Boards on the Web. They claim over 3,000 job
boards in one place, organized into targets including industry specific,
geographic location, college students, executives and more. Find those little
known boards right in your backyard. Maybe in your own industry. Please note
the title of this column…”Internet Recruiting”. For good reason too as that is
what we normally write about. I also use the Internet for marketing as well. I
regularly use the Internet to locate job order leads that we follow up with by
telephone. Here is a great place to start. My favorite part…it’s all free,
compliments of airs. Check it out
at: http://www.airsdirectory.com/jobboards/.
Wade Haught will participate as a
panelist at the AIRS Leadership Summit in Dallas on May 18th. For Summit details, click the following URL:
http://www.airsdirectory.com/careertools/training_menu/summits/
Tip of the month
This one is too simple. Part of the draw of the Internet, to recruiters and many other marketers in general, is that people do tend to congregate one place or another. Might be a company, a virtual community, a college alumni group, a user group, or an association. What this means is that when you find a good candidate on the Internet, chances are that other qualified candidates may be nearby. You can do this in many ways but one is to simply type your candidates email address into the search box on any major search engine and hit the search button. You will get a list of Internet pages that contain this email address. Simply peruse these one by one until you find email addresses of other candidates with similar skills. Doesn’t work every time but you should probably try it every time.