Recruiting Resources

When Placements Fall Through – Ask More Questions!

by Terri Piersma

In today’s world, business keeps moving faster and faster. Staying current with technology is a challenge in and of itself. So, who has time to analyze the past?

Kimberley Chesney, Chair of NPA’s Board of Directors, believes reviewing placements that fall through would benefit independent recruiters. In a recent communication to the recruiters in our global recruiting network, Kimberley shared “when you go back to the start of the placement (way back to when you received the job order) and take it all apart, you find things that could have been done better.”

When a placement falls through, three areas to consider analyzing include the following:

1.         Client
Did you ask the client tough questions from the moment you received the job order as well as throughout the placement process? Or, because you have worked with that client before, did you make assumptions that this situation was just like the prior ones? For example, Kimberley suggested asking your client “what has changed since we first started talking about this position . . . in the department, in the company, with your business?”

2.         Candidate
Again, did you ask the candidate tough questions throughout the placement process?  Kimberley suggested asking the candidate – “If we get to an offer stage with my client, what does that offer have to look like – salary, bonus, vacation, start date, non-competes, relocation, etc.?” Being surprised by a candidate may mean you didn’t ask enough tough questions of that candidate.

3.         Overview
Step back and consider what happened from beginning to end. Were you distracted with other business and excluded steps you typically include?  Were there any red flags you chose to ignore?  Did you assume everything would fall into place and, therefore, didn’t “close” the client and candidate throughout the process to uncover any red flags?

As an independent recruiter, what questions do you ask yourself when you review an unsuccessful  placement? What additional questions will you ask your client and candidate the next time?

Image:  FreeDigitalPhotos.net


What is the Difference Between Corporate and Independent Recruiters?

by Veronica Blatt

Depending on whom you talk to and their experience as corporate or independent recruiters, you will probably get a different answer to this question. The truth is there are tons of differences between the corporate and independent recruiting world. Below are some of the key differences that set these two professions farther apart than you might think.

Independent recruiters must build relationships with both clients and candidates in order to maintain their business. Their livelihood (and paycheck) depend upon their ability to market and sell themselves and their firm. On the flip-side, corporate recruiters have a steady paycheck from week to week and are assigned positions they must fill. They don’t typically have to develop new business accounts. Corporate recruiters may be more specialized since they only have to know about ONE company’s culture, products, or services. Third-party recruiters are more likely to have broad knowledge of companies, industries, and product lines as well as the functional roles for which they recruit talent.

Sourcing for independent recruiters and corporate recruiters can be quite different. Independent recruiters use selling techniques to connect with passive candidates who are not interested in leaving their current position. The independent recruiter must gain the trust of the candidate through a cold-call and a carefully tailored sales message. For the most part, corporate recruiters don’t use cold calling skills to recruit passive candidates. They may hire an independent recruiter to work for them, or use job boards and post advertisements to find candidates.

Independent recruiters need to be business savvy as for the most part, they will end up running their own business one day. The skills needed to run their own desk as well as manage other recruiters and the back-end of a business may be equally, if not more important than the skills required to successfully place candidates. Corporate recruiters may do much more than recruit. If they are functioning in an HR role, they may also be responsible for insurance, benefits, company policies, disputes and complaints, etc.

Having an independent recruiter or corporate recruiter skill set doesn’t make you any more or less successful. However, it’s important to note that there are definite differences between the two.

What are your thoughts about the differences between independent recruiters and corporate recruiters? Does a corporate background provide recruiters with the experience necessary to be successful in independent recruiting?


Candidate Mindset is an Important Recruiting Resource

by Veronica Blatt

Today’s post is courtesy of guest blogger Cameron Gausby, owner of KNG Technical Inc., a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the areas of research and development for biotechnology, engineering, and other specialized areas in high tech manufacturing. Cameron is currently a member of the NPA Board of Directors.

Over the years, candidates have asked me how they can better perform in their interviews and what I can advise that will give them an edge. I like to think I provide good coaching on the standards of how to handle the salary question, best present their strengths, weaknesses, motivation to move, etc. I consider interview preparation and coaching a valuable recruiting resource that helps close more deals.

Last year, however, a candidate who is a former professional athlete asked me what his mindset should be prior and during the interview. I had never been asked this before, but given his background in competitive sports, it was clear he knew that mindset was equally as important to his overall interview performance as how he answered specific questions. I hadn’t previously considered how the candidate’s mindset could also be a valuable recruiting resource.

After thinking about the idea of the candidate’s mindset, and the more I thought about the job description he was interviewing for, the more I understood my client’s problem (job description). Job descriptions are opportunities yes, but they are also transparent problems that need to be solved. The candidates being interviewed are potential solutions for that problem. But how many actually go in to the interview with the mindset, “I’m the solution to your problem and here is why.” No one understands the problem better than the hiring manager who put that problem to paper (right?), so it stands to reason the hiring manager should recognize the solution the moment it presents itself.

So in order for your candidates to have an edge on the competition, they need to demonstrate – better than their competition – that they are, without a doubt, “the solution.” Sounds easy enough until you ask yourself, the hiring manager, and the candidates what they deem to be the most important criteria for the job. I have found that nine times out of ten they are not aligned. If you, the candidate, and the hiring manager don’t understand what the problem is (in order of importance) there will be doubts about whether your candidate is the solution.

To eliminate this doubt and give your candidate a legitimate edge you need to:

  • Understand what the most important aspect of the problem is with all parties (job description),
  • Know for certain your candidate is the solution for that problem, and
  • Have relevant examples to back up their answers in the interview to prove it.

In this case, the problem (job description) was 1.5 pages long, yet for him to really be successful he needed just 3 critical skills. We have found this seems to be the case no matter what the industry or length of the job description. In this case, he was the only non-degreed candidate which made him the underdog on paper. Since he truly understood the problem and presented himself as the solution to the key areas, his focus and relevant examples came across far better than those who were presenting themselves based on their personal strengths and accomplishments.

It’s also important to note that because some hiring managers spend less than 5% of their time annually conducting interviews, they may not know what kinds of questions will really dig into whether a candidate is the solution. By practicing this exercise, the candidate will be better positioned to ask questions that will spark further dialogue about how he/she can solve the problem. Once the candidate and hiring manager are engaged in a problem-solving discussion, the candidate is in a position to help his/her own cause, and ultimately yours as well.

Knowing you’re the solution is one thing. Knowing exactly why you are the solution and presenting yourself accordingly is the mindset your candidates should have prior to and during the interview. Mindset coaching is a recruiting resource that will give your candidates a legitimate edge.


7 Questions to Help Independent Recruiters Take Better Job Orders

by Dave Nerz

It is a tough market for independent recruiters, right? The work you do to fill an open position is 2 to 3 times more than what was necessary before the recession. Clients are slow to move and seem to change their minds about what they want, require and expect with each candidate that you expose them to.

So, are you taking good job orders?

  • Is the client being asked to think their requirements through? Or are you doing mind reading?
  • Is there agreement about what the client asks for? Is it written down and confirmed in writing?

Maybe you have a recruitment process; feel free to share your recruiting process via comments to this blog. If you don’t have a formal process, it may be because you have an informal process that has been working…good for you. Does it ever fail you? Maybe you don’t want to “waste the client’s time” when you know what they mean and you have candidates ready to go or can tap into a recruiter networking group to support you with a quick turn on candidates. As a frequent hiring manager at one point in my career, I can tell you my requirements changed from hire to hire, even with repetitive fills. Sometime you just need different skill sets to work with your team chemistry. Maybe a special skill is required to work a special project or with a specific client. I would not assume anything, as the cost of making that assumption is a waste of your time and the time of your recruiter networking group. Independent recruiters who work on a contingency basis only get paid for the time invested that makes a match. Are you really interested in taking on additional risk?

What if you created a simple form that collected some basic information about the job and then asked 7 straightforward questions of the hiring manager?

Basics: Company, Location of the Job, Job Title, etc

Question 1:  Money

  • Base Salary Range…more for exceptional candidates?
  • Bonus…how realistic is a bonus? Based on what?
  • Commission or other compensation available?
  • Benefits…fit to the market…better/same/worse?

Question 2:  Process

  • Who is available to interview?  Three reserved dates  _________, __________, __________.
  • What is the date you want this hire to start?

Question 3:  Required Skills and Background

Must haves:

  • bullet 
  • bullet 
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Question 4:  Not required but would make a candidate a standout. Dig deep here…get 3 good things!

  • bullet 
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Question 5:  Why would the candidate choose to leave a good employer and take this position?

  • bullet 
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These better be good…career path, company equity, flexible hours, high quality co-workers, etc.

Question 6:  The key duties of this job

  • bullet 
  • bullet   
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Question 7:  What will this candidate accomplish in the first 3 to 6 months if they are off to a great start?

  • bullet 
  • bullet   
  • bullet   

Sign it, and ask the hiring manager to sign it, too. Now I can sleep. I hope you will sleep better and make more placements. I know that doing this will separate you from the crowd of independent recruiters that don’t take the time to do this. It is a good investment and it brands you as a quality recruiter.


Tips for Improving the Candidate Experience

by Veronica Blatt

A few weeks ago I was getting ready to leave for the Fordyce Forum 2012 and wrote about how to prepare for such an event. This week, my post will focus more on some of the great content I retained while I was there – especially from Greg Doersching, Owner, The Griffin Search Group. He is such a dynamic speaker and not only kept me interested in what he was saying the entire presentation, but also gave me some great information that I thought I should pass on to our readers. The “meat” of his presentation was very detailed and descriptive but for our purposes, I’ll just summarize some of key things.

The first thing Greg talked about was the 5 prime motivators for candidates. Keep these in mind when you think about how you want to present the position to a candidate.

1. Quality of life at and outside of work
2. Major responsibilities and challenges of the position
3. Career growth and marketability
4. Geography
5. Money

Also, a great piece of advice he gave the audience was that you NEVER want to call your best candidates first. Give yourself several calls to get the presentation down correctly before you pitch the position to them.

Another significant thing he mentioned has to do with client details that are kept from the candidate. As a millennial that was in the job market not so long ago, I would have been very skeptical if a recruiter called me and wouldn’t tell me the name of the client. In Greg’s words “we are so paranoid, that we lose business trying to protect business.”

One of the last things he said is that it’s important to close a candidate conversation with either “fact based selling” or “story-telling.” Fact based selling uses numbers to present a thought, and story-telling gives a candidate before and after pictures or success stories. You want to allow your candidate to create a visual of what he/she could be a part of.

Have you ever heard Greg speak? What are your thoughts on these topics?


5 Reasons Recruiters Send More Than 3-4 Candidates to Hiring Managers

by Terri Piersma

See No EvilToday, I read a post by Lou Adler on ere.net called Stop Doing Searches Over and Make Twice as Many Placements. In the post, Lou describes the situation where independent recruiters find themselves doing searches over again. He believes this is a problem and if it can be solved, hiring managers would need to see no more than 3-4 candidates per job opening.

The post continues by proposing that the situation of doing searches over most likely results from one or more of the following problems:

  1. The recruiter or the hiring manager doesn’t understand real job needs.
  2. The recruiter isn’t very good at screening candidates.
  3. Good candidates opt out for one reason or another.
  4. The hiring manager isn’t too good at assessing competency.
  5. The hiring manager is afraid to make a mistake.

So, what does an independent recruiter do after the problems are identified? I found it interesting that Lou Adler suggested an action that involved both the recruiter and the hiring manager – an online workshop. The workshop is called Hiring Manager and Recruiter Partnership Online Workshop and is actually a two-part workshop. The first online session will be held July 24. The second one will be held July 31.

I recommend you consider at least reading Lou Adler’s post, Stop Doing Searches Over and Make Twice as Many Placements. If you, as an independent recruiter, are able to convince a hiring manager of the severity of the “doing searches over” problem regardless of the cause or causes of the problem, then you have successfully influenced the hiring manager. However, I don’t see this happening if your relationship isn’t viewed as a partnership with a common goal.

Is there a hiring manager with whom you would like to share this post?

 

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net


Independent Recruiters Can Increase Revenue with Temp and Contracting

by Veronica Blatt

Today’s guest blogger is Judy Collins from TFI Resources, an NPA Alliance Partner. TFI Resources is a multi-state payroll service providing a full range of services to recruiters in the temporary, contract, and permanent placement industry by providing employer of record service, payroll funding, and payroll processing. Many independent recruiters utilize TFI to expand their business to include temporary and contract placements while mid-size and large staffing firms use TFI to serve as employer of record for temporary and contract placements in states where they are not registered or licensed to do business.

Don’t miss out on a consistent recruiting revenue stream.

According to Barb Bruno, staffing trends show an increase in temp and contract placements. The new federal healthcare reform will impact your business. Many employers will prefer to add temporary and contract positions before hiring additional permanent staff. Baby boomers that are retiring will come back for a temporary assignment or a short term project. By adding temp and contract alternatives to an existing business model, independent recruiters can create a full service option for their existing clients. You can give them an option on how you can help them satisfy their staffing needs. With so much competition, it is all about providing the right option.

An average markup rate for a temp or contract position is usually 50% of the pay rate. This can also depend on your niche market. You can choose to have a lower mark up for a large client or a client that will give you multiple assignments. You can also go higher for those hard-to-fill priority positions. Be sure to include a buy-out clause after 90-120 days. When calculating your conversion fee only look at your profit margin, do not include your total billings. The total invoice amounts include what you are spending on payroll, taxes and insurance. If you outsource your back office, also take out your payroll funding and payroll processing fees. Include language in your placement agreements that the conversion fee will be calculated off of profit for the term of the assignment if your client chooses to hire your candidate within one year of the last day worked.

Temp and contract placements can help keep clients happy while increasing an independent recruiter’s bottom line.


Ten Terrific Mobile Recruiting Resources

by Veronica Blatt

I’ve written before about how important it is for independent recruiters to knowledgeable about mobile recruiting technology. If I sound like an alarmist, good! Too many recruitment websites are badly outdated in terms of technology and functionality. Independent recruiters simply cannot afford to fall any further behind in the mobile recruiting game.

Here is a list of ten mobile recruiting resources, in no particular order:

Are you ready for the mobile recruiting revolution? What’s your favorite mobile recruiting resource?

Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net


The World Needs More Independent Recruiters

by Veronica Blatt

business-cardToday’s guest blogger is Martin Snyder, Main Sequence Technology. Founded in 1998, Main Sequence Technology creates talent acquisition technology solutions wherever and however organizations are built. PCRecruiter is the solution of choice for thousands of third party recruitment, corporate, and outsourced staffing teams across economic models and around the world. PCRecruiter provides comprehensive CRM and ATS functionality converged into database, voice, and email interfaces to empower recruiters to do what they do best with accessible, cost effective technology. Main Sequence is proud to serve the NPA organization and our many individual NPA affiliated customers. To learn more, please visit www.pcrecruiter.net.

As a guest blogger, I wanted to bring one of my old saws along. I have posted versions of it elsewhere, so if you have seen it, at least you don’t have to hear me expound (at length) about it over a root beer.

It goes something like this: The World Needs More Independent Recruiters.

More recruiters doing more recruiting could bring some measure of unemployment relief, but importantly, more recruiting may actually increase real economic development. To convince the world of that proposition, the world needs a better understanding of who independent recruiters are, and how they create value.

Easier said than done. Recruiting is deceptively simple to explain, yet complex in the execution, with widely varying performance styles and backgrounds among highly successful recruiters. Even many otherwise savvy business professionals have little understanding of what recruiters actually do.

In January 2012, a blog entry was published on Recruiter.com that generated thousands of tweets and Likes. The post starts with the story of Twenty Heartbeats. In an ancient country, a rich man wants a painting of a beloved horse. He takes the horse to an artist, and pays much gold in advance. The artist looks the horse over, and then goes off to paint. After years go by, the horse is old, and the rich man is angry by the lack of production of the painting. He confronts the artist, who whereupon paints the horse in a few brush strokes (twenty heartbeats of work), and the painting is incredibly brilliant and lifelike in every way. Enraged by this display, the rich man turns his back on the artist, but as he is leaving the artist’s home, the man sees the thousands of studies, scraps, and nearly complete paintings of the horse that the artist made in preparation to be able to create the stellar work in just twenty heartbeats.

The metaphor, of course, directly applies to recruiting; while it looks easy enough to persuade a person to move from one job to another, in the real world, it actually takes years of study, market expertise, and an intangible knack to reliably make it happen. Owners of independent recruiting firms understand that if a person does not have the knack, hard work and training are best invested in others. Recruiters are salespeople. High stakes salespeople.

A house is a pile of sticks, a car a hunk of metal and plastic. A job is identity, security, ambition, and social position. HR people are constantly talking about “fit” and “culture” when they talk about recruiting and staffing. It seems that the act of moving between tribes is a process choreographed around deeper evolutionary and cultural roots to comfort both the newcomer and the tribe that there is a fit; a mutual desire that can be reasonably counted on.

People who wish to learn about and understand cultural phenomena reflecting the knowledge and meanings guiding the life of a cultural group are called ethnographers (from Greek ethnos = folk/people and grapho = to write).

Superior recruiters are often superior ethnographers, able to understand and manipulate the knowledge and meanings that create the culture of organizations – both sources of and targets for candidate talent. Superior recruiters are market makers of Social Capital. Social capital refers to connections within and between social networks, which helps explain why social media has had an explosive impact on the profession. As a sociological concept, the prevalent view is that the greater the stock of social capital, the higher the likelihood of positive economic outcomes for any given group.

To be sure, independent recruiters are capable of creating jobs where no job actually exists according to many models. According to The Establishment Level Behavior of Vacancies and Hiring (NBER Working Paper No. 16265), in most models of search, matching, and hiring in the labor market, employers post vacancies to attract job seekers. Many establishments with zero reported vacancies at month’s end do hire new employees the following month. Establishments reporting zero vacancies at month’s end account for 42% of all hires the following month. Only about half of that gap can be explained with current econometric models, implying that many hires are not mediated through vacancies.

Independent recruiters know exactly how many of these hires are made: an organization was presented with the opportunity to bring on a particular person with a given set of attributes, and a latent or new role was created, formalized, or activated as a response to that presentation.

That presentation is very often the work of a professional recruiter.

Coincident with the rise of social media in recruiting, the subspecialty of Sourcing has become recognized. Recently, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), for the first time ever, recognized a standard for HR (Cost per Hire), which identified sourcing activities as a distinct component of staffing operations occurring prior to the job application.

Sourcing and Recruiting are often synonyms in practice.

By whatever name and in whatever environment, recruiting is a basic economic activity. Recruiting takes place everywhere that organizations are built. Effective recruiting means understanding cultures and effective management of social capital. Applying recruiting skills more formally in economic development efforts, taking a market-based approach to working with unemployed candidates, and identifying and developing the sales talent inherently required for superior recruiting results are ways to enhance economic results for individuals and organizations. In my opinion, it is undeniable that the world needs more recruiters and greater understanding of what recruiters really do.

For those anticipating purely technological solutions, it may come as a surprise, but in matters of high-impact social situations, computerized browsing does not evade encounters, it merely prepares them under the best auspices. The same implacable laws will be in force as soon as the persons involved are in contact.

In the arena of the implacable rules of moving between tribes, recruiters are looking like irreplaceable players. It’s my old saw that the world needs more of ‘em.

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Are resumes still a valid recruiting resource?

by Veronica Blatt

image of woman preparing for a job interviewThere are beginning to be more conversations about whether resumes (or CVs, in other parts of the world), are still a necessary recruiting resource. It’s not a new argument. After all, certain types of professionals (visual arts, graphic designers, etc.) have always relied on a portfolio of works instead of a traditional resume. And the idea of being ‘paperless’ has been a much-hyped goal for at least 20 years.

But it feels different to me this time. And I think we might, actually, be at the beginning of the decline of the traditional paper resume.

What’s different?

Well, for one thing, this time around, the conversation isn’t just limited to new media or high-tech Silicon Valley candidates. Some companies are starting to experiment with more ‘traditional’ kinds of roles. Employers are realizing more and more, that a candidate’s ability to ‘fit’ the corporate culture is often just as important, if not more so, than their ability to do the job. It’s tough to get a sense of ‘fit’ from a sterile, one-dimensional resume.

For another, it’s no secret that employers are making “social media research” part of their screening process. While it may be true that such efforts are often a tool to reduce the candidate pool, there are some amazingly great things about candidates that are online. In addition to a LinkedIn profile, there are blogs, digital portfolios, slide decks, and content curation sites like Scoop.it and even, perhaps, Pinterest, that can show a more complete picture of the candidate as a person. It’s early days, and most candidates probably aren’t doing these things (or doing them well), but those who are probably have a competitive advantage.

As for independent recruiters, for whom the resume has long been the ‘gold standard’ by which candidates are measured, The Ladders reports that the average recruiter spends just six seconds (!!) per resume during the initial screening process. Six seconds? It’s tough for me to believe that anyone can make an accurate assessment about anything other than cursory keywords in six seconds. That’s the best recruiting resource to assess a candidate’s potential?

Finally, I believe that the staggering proliferation of mobile devices may very likely cause the death of the resume as we know it. Not this year, maybe not in five years, but I think it’s coming. Candidates are using smart phones for everything. They aren’t storing a resume on their phone. It’s not something they can access easily in a mobile environment. There are now recruiting firms and other services offering suggestions on how to make mobile-friendly resumes. Independent recruiters and employers are increasingly mobile, too, with their own smart phones and (to a lesser degree) tablets. How does that six seconds thing work for you when you’re trying to read resumes on your iPhone? Hiring managers and HR professionals are reviewing resumes on mobile devices when they are away from the office, and the traditional format simply does not translate well to the small screen.

I don’t think the revolution is upon us yet. Resumes are a deeply entrenched part of the recruiting process. It will take time before many traditional employers will be ready to let go and embrace a different (still undefined) alternative.

Are resumes still a prime recruiting resource in your recruitment agency? What do you hear from clients?

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