Kennedy Conference "Takeaway" thoughts... What is the COST of UNFILLED POSITIONS?

One of the speakers today is head of worldwide recruiting for an international company that makes sports apparel and shoes... based in WA...

His talk included a MAJOR takeaway that external and internal recruiters alike would be advised to remember.

The cost of NOT FILLING the position, may be WAY MORE than the cost of using their internal or external recruiters.

Especially in leadership and sales positions, there is a time / revenue / bottom line cost to unfilled positions that may be in the hundreds of thousands or maybe millions, depending on the position.

YOU should be asking YOUR CLIENTS... What is the financial impact of NOT filling this position asap? If they don't immediately know this answer, help them to figure it out...

The bigger it is, the more likely it will be critical and URGENT.

And we all know. URGENT job orders are the only ones worth our time and attention.

Are you doing this in your client pitches?

Michael

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Comment by David Perry on May 15, 2008 at 11:16am: Agreed. But what tools or methedology is best suited to showing them the cost of inaction?

Comment by Michael Saulnier on May 15, 2008 at 2:54pm: Well, the speaker indicated this was a metric they were tracking themselves...

So, the first thing to ask is... what is the financial cost to you, if you don't fill this position in two weeks.

If they know the answer to that, and say 200k a month... you have a very urgent client requirement... if the DON'T know the answer...

You can help them calculate. It's MUCH stronger if they do the calculations, because they will believe their own numbers.

Simply, you can ask what is the revenue or profit goal for this position... what impact does the position make...

For example, if they have 10 sales territories, and 2 of them are un-filled, and each is responsible for 60 million annual revenue, and 6 million profit, then each month could be as much as 500k...

Let's assume though that they're only concerned with the GROWTH that each territory would make if a "top performer" was there... and that is say, 1% a month... so in this example, that's at least 5k a month, and if it takes 6 months to find and on-board a new person, that's 30k minimum... and for two positions it's 60k. And that doesn't include revenue lost to competitors during this time period or the impact on other sales people's activities who would have the attempt to cover the territory.

The point he was trying to make is that the more money that's lost by not having the person on board, the more motivated the clients are to fill it... so it's very important to ask the question.

You can also use this if they're slow moving in their process... time delays = $'s lost.

Michael