There are many good reasons to reject Contingency Search in any form, but for today’s post, I’ll deal with only one reason.  Quantity vs Quality. In most cases, by no fault of their own, recruiters are forced to produce poor quality work or get left in the dust by other recruiters with a quicker trigger finger. The inherent weakness of Contingency Search lies in this conundrum: The more you endeavor to vet and qualify your candidates, the less likely you…

I've been writing about the marginalization of recruiters and thought I would put down the signs that you can use to evaluate whether or not you fall into that category of recruiter. Technology plays a significant role in the marginalization of recruiters, but it is not merely technology that forces many recruiters to the margins. Here are some clear signs for recruiters to take an honest look to see if they too are becoming marginalized.

7. The company makes you sign their…

How do you evaluate your recruiting business? What metrics are important to you? Are there any metrics which enable you to measure your effectiveness? I recently read a recruiting site discussion where the person initiating the discussion asked “which recruiting metric is most important to you?” I read through some of the answers which were predictable; Send Outs to Placements, Calls to Send Outs or Job Orders etc. I am convinced that the most important metric and the only one I care to…

I recently received a call from a $100mm medical device company wanting me to help them find a new Marketing Director. They told me that they were referred to me by a few executives within their company as “the recruiter of choice.” The first 30 minutes of the call was me asking questions to determine their ideal profile and how they envisioned attracting that caliber of talent to their company. I am quite familiar with their company and in the past have  recruited from them for some of my…

I believe that a constant in our society is that Talent drives innovation and execution. Talent is the key ingredient in all successful companies. Every successful venture has either a single talent or a group of talented people behind it. I don’t know many people who would argue this point.

My question is, “Why don’t more companies and HR types consider the talent of the prospective search consultant in their equation before they hire a search firm?…

A start-up Web Design Firm needed to hire a UX Designer for their rapidly expanding portfolio. After being reasonably impressed by an array of recruiters, they "authorized" one of the recruiter’s named Tom to find a talented programmer to add to their team. Tom is a solid citizen who does his best to perform well for his clients. With the job specifications fresh in hand, Tom quickly prepares his plan and begins scouring an array of tech job sites and crafts a few boolean searches and…

Here is an Irony for you: The Contingency Recruiting Industry has the Highest Turnover Rate of any industry. It is a well-kept secret because of the obvious implications. With an approximately 90% recruiter turnover within the first year, recruiting has to be one of the toughest things in the world to do, intellectually speaking. So, I’m not comparing it to the military or being a fireman or police officer, but in terms of the amount of disappointment that a person experiences at work. Many…

I frequently hear people say “the customer is always right.” That may be true in your line of work, but not in mine. In fact, many times I have to help my clients see what they seem to miss entirely. It is very often the case that my client fails to grasp the gravity of the situation. If I take the approach that my customer has all the right answers and I am merely here to feed their appetite for more candidates, then I am failing them as a search…

It’s one thing to convince a new client to abandon the old way of engaging a recruiting firm and embrace the best way to conduct a search by retaining a true search professional, and it is still another thing to get them to dispense with the old mindset of “interviewing” the potential candidates that a well executed search yields. Their "default" tactic is to have the standard “behavior based” interview questions and ease into increasingly complex follow up questions to really vet the…

After ruffling some feathers on this site yesterday with my post about what is wrong with Recruiters, I thought it apropos to post a counterpoint article about what is wrong with HR.  If a guy can't rant on about HR on a site like this, where can he rant?  

My typical client is a start-up or mid-sized company mainly because I am able to produce the best outcomes when I am free to…

The problem with recruiters is that most of them are focused on “closing the deal”and all else is just details. They will do anything necessary to simply make a placement and invoice their customer. They don’t have their customer’s best interests at heart. His only concern is getting paid and getting past the guarantee period!

Sad, but true for many, if not most recruiters. Oh sure, they “care” about the outcome. But not more than they care about submitting an…

We’ve all had this happen to us. Just when the process is purring along and our client has made their final candidate selection they go pull the “low-ball” offer! Despite ongoing consultation on what the offer should be, some of these clients still seem to get it wrong!

Even after being retained and after a challenging search and protracted interview process, the client decides that although they know that the candidate is currently making $185,000 salary, and they were prepared to go…