Clients requiring approved vendors to utilize bounty jobs

Hi Folks;
Happy New Year!
A large and steady client for over a decade is requiring its vendors to use the bounty portal.
As a seasoned recruiter I find no value in bounty and it takes out the human element and surtaxes my fee.
Has anyone had this experience and how did they remedy the situation?
Thank you!
Sal

Comment by Jim Canto on January 5, 2009 at 10:27am: Not sure you can remedy the situation. If I'm not mistaken.. Bounty enables the hiring authority to set their own fee. This speaks to the bottom line...and that is difficult to overcome. The remedy will be natural if the client does not get the result they need.

Comment by Salvatore Petrara, CPC on January 5, 2009 at 10:33am: Hi Jim;
Thank you for the reply...
I do have another client (a tad smaller mind you) requesting me to go through the bounty site yet I refused (loudly) and they finally allowed me to bypass that process. It was though for a very esoteric search.
Are organizations looking to this for a cheap (FREE) ATS/Vendor submittal program?

Comment by Slouch on January 5, 2009 at 10:36am: Hi Sal, I have not recruited in a while but I remember many years ago there was a company called PeopleClick that began getting some traction in companies. We were told we had to start using it to submit and track candidates. Of course the companies love it because they don't have to talk to recruiters anymore. We stopped recruiting for that company and they became a source.

Comment by Jerry Albright on January 5, 2009 at 10:41am: Hi Sal. Sorry to hear you've been BJ'ed.

Could it be that corporate America is absolutely sick and tired of having to field the calls from the army of hopeful recruiters out here? Maybe HR has decided to move the real battlefield to their office rather than leave things to the line management?

I'm getting the sense that - while some clients may wish to lower fees - another selling point is the screening that BJs does of the agencies. Though I don't know what kind of screening that would be as I understand the leadership there is not from the staffing world. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Comment by Salvatore Petrara, CPC on January 5, 2009 at 10:41am: Hi Slouch;
Yes I remember Peopleclick I used it for two large banking firms (NYC) in the late 90's and I agree it was not for a seasoned recruiter, just submit the resumes and never get feedback (positive or negative) re: resumes submitted.
Hard for these folks to become a source though, been in the trenches a long time and if I source them, I will get the slim ball reputation I have avoided for the past 15 yrs...
Things are changing out there...
Thx Slouch!

Comment by Slouch on January 5, 2009 at 10:48am: I see no difference between them saying you have to do business this way now which will greatly impact your ability to continue to drive benefit to them and them sending you notification that from now on your agreed upon fees are cut in half or less. I think both are good enough reasons that you can cancel your agreement and not honor the " I will not recruit from you for x amount of time following the last placement made."

Comment by Bennett Vivona on January 5, 2009 at 2:10pm: Bounty Jobs is a tool and not a replacement of marketing one on one whether its for your services or for a candidate. Build on your relationships that you have, it still a numbers game.

Comment by Pamela Goodwin on January 5, 2009 at 2:20pm: Interesting you should ask this today...I was on my local recruiters forum today (which has both agency recruiters and corporate recruiters)and this subject came up...I found the answer interesting and I copied it here so you can see it from a corporate perspective.
It went as follows:

We used Bounty Jobs at our company when we were hiring aggressively and it worked out great.

We were able to work with and evaluate a lot of recruiting agencies all at once in a very efficient manner. You get a lot of submittals for hard to find position that you are willing to pay a 20% fee for. I would not recomend offering a low ball fee as you will only get the bottom feeder agencies to work on your job. Instead I recomend making your criteria very sepcific to make it worth paying a 20% fee. I found several small niche agencies that gave my positions a lot of quality attention and effort to filling them with success.

On Bounty Jobs there is no way to tell which agencies are good and which are "resume spammers". I recomend you give everyone a chance and then you can easily disengage anyone that made submissions that clearly did not meet the requirements. Engaging everyone will result in you getting a lot of submittals are not qualfied as often it is hard to identify the perfect candidate just from a written candidate. To make the agency process work you really need explain the opening to them and answer their questions; and this also shows the agency you are serious. Now to do this with 20-40 agencies on Bounty Jobs (that was just the agencies focused on my niche) would take way too much time.

To address this and make it work, I put together a simple 15 minute webinar/power point presentation on our company and the open positions where I gave details on the openings and answered questions for all of the vendors. It took about 30 minutes to make the presentation and another 30 minutes to do it. Another tweak is to make your submittal criteria for Bounty Jobs Agencies very specific such as we only want senior software engineers from this list of 30 companies which completely eliminated the spam submittals. Then I set up job board agents for this same narrow criteria, this way I wasn't racing against the agencies to make sure they weren't just sending me somebody who just posted to Monster.com that day. The goal of using Bounty Jobs was to have the agencies find a "perfect" candidate from a direct competitor, someone that I could not have found on my own, and if they did that was a service we would gladly pay a 20% placement fee for.

If you are going to work with agencies then Bounty Jobs is a very good tool which I highly recomend from the corporate recruiting side.

Comment by Matt Decker on January 5, 2009 at 2:20pm: It's still a relationship business. If they love ya, this too shall pass.

Comment by Rich on January 5, 2009 at 2:21pm: I've tried Bounty and gave it a pretty fair effort. I've been a preferred recruiter with companies (97% of the fee instead of 75%) as well as going the standard route, and have submitted some very good candidates. Altogether about 45 candidates for 15 positions over a period of 8 months. I find Bounty Jobs to be a complete waste of time if you are a recruiter who intends to create a respectful working relationship with a hiring authority. Communication and feedback from the companies was, without exception, substandard and uninformative. Sometimes it was nonexistent. I would not recommend Bounty to recruiters who are serious about building a business.