Job Seekers typically see things from the perspective of their career, and that is understandable, but recruiting is not about careers. It’s about building great companies or making companies better. Great careers and great career moves are a by-product.

In a lot of cases we feed the misconception. “Find your ideal job at XYZ Company”. Everyone’s skills are needed somewhere. The key for a candidate is to find the place where their skills and abilities are needed to make an…

Candidates are getting competing offers regularly these days.  That happens when you have a tight candidate market.  There aren’t enough good candidates out there to fill all of the needs for good hires.

While money isn’t the only factor that a candidate with competing offers will consider, it’s a big one.  The opportunity to do great work, challenge, culture, work environment, the mission of the business or division and how you are going about it…..all of these things matter.  Great…

All kinds of goofy things happen in interviews.  Crazy questions.  Bluster.  Fluffed up claims of accomplishments and skills……etc.

It’s a good idea to put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes.  Ask yourself what they want.  What the interviewer wants is to hire someone who will do the job they need to fill really well.  To make an impact on the company and to make the company better, more profitable.  If you can’t do that the interview is pointless.  If you can do that, you just need…

Originally posted in June of 2014.  

I saw a post the other day about how Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffet among others have been quoted saying the most important thing to their success is hiring great people.

Sometimes recruiters get so wrapped up in recruiting that they lose sight of how important our work is. Nothing is more important to the success of a company.

Todd…

Ghosting has become quite a thing throughout the recruiting world.  Going completely silent (non-responsive) when one decides to go in another direction, loses focus, or doesn’t know what to say at the moment is not confined to the dating world anymore.

There have been hiring managers that have done this for quite some time and now candidates are regularly ghosting as well.  Regardless of the situation, it’s a bad look.…

Originally posted in August of 2017.

In baseball, wins above replacement is a statistic measuring how many wins a player would get you instead of having an average AAA minor league player in that slot.

What is the value of a new hire over average to the bottom line of the business?  Or the loss of a good current employee versus the average in their spot?

Worth considering.

Todd…

Opportunity cost is huge in recruiting.  It’s important in all walks of life, but even more so in recruiting.

Wasted time on a search that is impossible or nearly impossible.  Wasted time on a candidate that doesn’t work out or interviews for a job that you aren’t going to get.  You don’t get that time back and we all know that there is a search that will fill, and a candidate that will fill the role, and a right job for everyone.  Wasted time is time not spent on the one that works. …

Recruiting is frustrating.  For everyone.  Candidates, hiring managers, internal recruiters, external recruiters, and anyone else involved.

Not getting the job you want, not knowing if you’ll get the job you want, not getting the candidate that you want and need etc…..  The frustration is unavoidable.  They key is to avoid the stress that comes from the frustration so you can focus on what’s in front of you, the process, not the individual results that you can’t control.

If you…

Originally posted in September of 2017.  

Want to build a great team?  Many consultants will suggest that you should model successful companies.

That’s a great strategy.  Find a company, division, or operation that you truly admire.  But build it with better parts.  Recruit talent in every spot that you can that is better than the model and you’ll build a truly great operation.

Todd…

It’s a candidate market right now in many industries. More and more candidates have multiple offers and strong counter offers to stay where they are.

This adds another significant challenge on already difficult searches. Overall growth does this. When there is more business for everyone in an industry, everyone has to ramp up to some degree to take advantage of it. This squeezes the candidate pool and has created a very challenging recruiting market for…

The good thing about starting from scratch is the clean slate.  You can take a good look at what you are trying to accomplish and then recruit for the people that can get it done.  The potential for success is much greater that way.  Filling holes, recruiting on the run, trying to satisfy a shortcoming on the team……these things do not promote an all out attack on what you are trying to accomplish.

But if your recruiting process for filling those needs is starting from scratch, the…

…expands reach by leaps and bounds.  No matter how you recruit, you have to network.  Network off of your database of contacts.  Network off of new contacts.  Network, network, network.

Somebody that you have access to in the industry that you are recruiting for knows someone who is open to considering your opportunity.  Ask.  Network. Enlist the help of your contacts and you’ll expand reach and fill important needs.…

It’s not a secret and it isn’t hard to figure out, but many recruiters have no clue.

Hiring managers don’t want to read a lot.

They don’t want to sit around listening to your sales pitch.

They can’t stand the idea of weeding through resumes of mediocre candidates.

They have no interest in interviewing candidates that can’t be the one they will hire (whether that is because of a lack of qualifications, desire for too much money, or skeletons in the closet that will…

Incredibly, we’ve seen a couple of situations lately where a new hire walked off of the job after or even during the first day.

One of the hiring managers asked, “who does that?”  The answer, of course, is someone that you don’t want to employ.  Walking off the job without having a conversation with your supervisor says a lot.

Character matters and it’s impossible to hide from.

Todd…

Building a great team is not easy.  There are no shortcuts.  Recruiting plans tend to be more fly by the seat of your pants in nature.  I need this, get it for me now.

A great recruiting plan focuses on continuously finding the best talent you can for all of the roles you need to fill.  If you can’t be patient on a given role, you may have to settle.  But overall, the effort needs to be sustained and resilient.  Top talent doesn’t always move easily and doesn’t always move now. …

One adage in baseball is that you never have enough arms.  What it means is that pitching is important and good pitching is always at risk.  One of your pitchers might get injured, or might flake out.  A minor hitch may cause one of them to lose the strike zone.  A situation can come up where you just need a slightly different skill set, and then you realize that you need that skill set regularly.

Same thing in recruiting.  If you’ve built a great team and they are performing…

We like to use the term passive candidate. We don’t want to hire someone who is looking for a job, we want passive candidates.

But it’s not an either or thing. A truly passive candidate isn’t taking your call. They aren’t open to a change. At some point, things may change for that candidate and they become open to at least talking, possibly considering a change.

What you want is a partially passive candidate or a mostly passive candidate.

Someone who is good and doesn’t…

You know the guy who is always joking around, even while working? What about the one that is always serious, focused, no time for additional conversation? He’s too this. She’s too that. They don’t fit the company culture. Unless they do.

Your company culture is your culture and successful teams don’t all have the same culture. Talented people in the wrong culture won’t thrive. Not like they will in the right culture. If you’re building a great business, the candidate pool is limited…

Millennials are now the largest generation in the work force and they are largely underpaid. That says a lot.

Hiring younger, less experienced, workers to replace more experienced, more expensive, workers is nothing new. It’s a business decision that in a lot of cases makes the most sense. The numbers will tell if accomplishing nearly as much with a much lower salary will improve the bottom line. And, of course, the less expensive employee may improve to the point where they are…

You check references to see what you can find out about a candidate that you are seriously considering. How hard do they work? Are they reliable? Skills, Character, History. What does their overall brand say about them?

If there are problems or red flags you are more likely to pass. If the brand is strong, a positive compelling story, you are more likely to hire.

The story is the same from the…