Talent Planning, Chef Style

In the movie Chef, Chef Carl Casper is a talented but hot-headed chef who threatens to leave restaurant-owner Riva high and dry on one of the most important nights of the year. Riva is calm as he thinks he has a competent sous chef and line cook who can step into the void. While Riva is by no means an ideal manager (it's never good when one of your key employees regularly sleeps in his car) common kitchen hierarchy, known as brigade de cuisine, means that there are always a couple of understudies who can help out if a key contributor leaves.

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Even if you do not employ temperamental chefs, it's smart have have a talent management strategy in place. Over the last six years, the baby boomers have started to retire. According to a US survey released earlier this year, 21% of employees plan to change jobs in 2014. Employers should be prepared to rehire almost a quarter of their workforce this year just to preserve the status quo (those in growth mode will have even greater hiring needs.)

Many employers are reactive when it comes to staffing: they do not think about hiring until someone quits or a skills deficiency causes a problem (these are the clients who call me asking if I can have someone hired within a couple of hours.) As a recruiter, I love the challenge but the trouble with this approach is that you are starting out behind the eight ball -- the cubicle is empty, the skills deficiency is obvious, the client has nobody to call -- and you need to fill the role as quickly as possible. You don't have the luxury to think about who the best hire would be and so simply try to hire someone who most closely represents the last person who filled that position. Each new hire represents an opportunity to make organizational change and having a talent plan in place can help you optimize the recruiting process.

We asked Jen Lawrence of Process Design Consultants about the key components of a talent management strategy and turn the blog over to her…

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Hello there. Thanks for this opportunity to share my views on strategic hiring. While it is often a huge inconvenience and expense when an employee quits or retires, it is also a wonderful opportunity. Every time a position becomes available, you have the opportunity to rethink the role. The natural reaction to a resignation is to find an exact replacement as quickly as possible so you don't disrupt the status quo. In some commodity-like roles (think outbound telemarketers who follow a tight script) hiring a immediate replacement is exactly what you want to do. In more senior positions, however, chances are you want to disrupt the status quo as each new hire represents the opportunity to more closely match your talent pool to your company's current and future goals.

For example, when a company is in start-up mode it might need lots of employees with a strong lead generation capability whereas when the company matures it might need to add people who can manage the order pipeline and mine existing relationships. A company that once had an engineering competency might have morphed into one with strength in technology and therefore might need to shift the hiring profile to reflect the company's new direction. Perhaps a company is expanding into a new geographic market and needs people who speak other languages. Or your vertical manager might need less of a focus on oil and gas and more on alternative sources of energy. If you don't have a talent plan in place that aligns people with your overall strategy, you might miss out on an opportunity to move your organization closer to its vision through your hiring practice.

I'll keep with the Chef theme to illustrate my point. Think of your company as a cake and your people as the ingredients that make the cake a success or a failure. A good cake is the result of mixing together the right ingredients in the correct amounts and then baking it at the right temperature. You don't just randomly start throwing sugar and butter and eggs into the oven: you need some sort of plan.

First, you need an overall vision for your cake. Is this cake for a bachelor party or a five year-old girl's princess-themed birthday party? Each requires a very different kind of cake. How many people does this cake need to feed? In this case, our vision is that we want to bake a cake that will dazzle a group of 15 princess-crazy party-goers.You want to see the face of the birthday girl light up as you carry the cake to the table. What is the vision for your company? Are you a luxury hotel chain where the care and comfort of your guests is your focus? Are you a company that brings the latest technology to the masses? Who are you? What do you bring to your customers? Why do your employees get out of bed in the morning?

Once you have a vision, you need to figure out a strategy that will bring that vision to life. If you want to dazzle pre-school princesses, look is probably more important than taste. You might do some market research to discover that sweet and sugary is popular among the Dora set. You are going to need a big fancy cake, preferably with a lot of glitter. Subtle flourless chocolate cakes need not apply. What strategy is going to bring your corporate vision to life? Are you the low-cost provider or do you provide white glove service with a smile? If you are the low cost provider, you need to manage your margins and your volume. How are you going to do that?

Now that you have a general idea of the type of cake you require, you need to make some concrete plans. You research "fancy princess cakes" on Pinterest and decide on the pink glitter castle cake. Perhaps there are detailed instructions for decorating the cake but no recipe for the cake itself. You know that you will need a stable base for the heavy fondant icing and glitter. You ask around and get a recipe that has worked for other people's castle cakes. You now know what ingredients you need. Once you have a clearly defined vision and strategy and start to think about action planning, you are ready to think about the skill sets you need to make your vision come to life. These are your ingredients: you need someone who is great at managing an international supply chain; you need someone who is excellent at negotiating vendor terms; or you need the best concierge in Paris to look after your guests' needs.

Now you can source the ingredients to make your cake. How full is your pantry? If you have been minding the kitchen you should have the basics in place. Hopefully your have an oven and some bowls and a spoon. Perhaps there is some flour around. And some butter. If you are new to baking or things have changed (perhaps you used to avoid sweets entirely) you may need to bring in a lot of new resources. In the leadership and development world, we call this a talent audit. What skills do you have? What skills do you still need? Who can you train? Who must you hire?

Perhaps your pantry is full and you only need vanilla extract. If you have vanilla beans and vodka on hand, you can make your own (think of this as employee development) Otherwise, you will need to go outside to source the vanilla extract. What type of vanilla extract do you need? How important is this vanilla extract to the success of your cake? Do you need the organic, hand-blended variety in the fancy glass bottle or is the generic label variety alright? (And as an aside, if you need the organic, hand-blended variety in the fancy glass bottle, you might want to hire a recruiter like Nancy to help you with that!) What is your budget? Does your local store have stock on hand? Are you willing to bring in the vanilla extract from another town? Your needs will dictate the sourcing strategy. Generic vanilla -- such as the type required for our sugar-soaked princess cake -- can be found quite easily. The fancy stuff requires a trip to a speciality store. A line manager should work with a recruiter (internal or third party) to draw up a list of specific skill requirements for the new role. It's tempting to simply use the existing job description but if you want to maximize this hiring opportunity it makes sense to think about exactly what skills you need today and in the future.

So there you have it. That's talent planning. It's looking at where you want to go as an organization and figure out how your people are going to take you there. You need to train and develop the people you have and add in new talent whenever you need to. When you break it down into smaller steps, building a great organization through people is, well, a piece of cake...


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Happy hunting!

Nancy

The Recruiter's Guide to Fishing

One of the questions I often get asked by clients who are contemplating using my recruitment research services is "wouldn't it be better just to place an ad?"

Certainly, there are recruiters who believe that the best way to find candidates is to place an ad in a print  publication or online. If you are looking to find a large quantity of candidates, placing an ad can yield results. Think of it as dropping a large shrimp net in the ocean: chances are you will get a big haul.

The trouble is that you won't just catch what you were seeking. Did you know that when shrimp trawlers drop their nets, on average they catch 5.7 kilos of non-shrimp (known as bycatch) for every kilo of shrimp?  Bycatch consists of other kinds of fish, birds, dolphins, tires, old shoes… A big part of shrimp fishing is sorting through the haul. It's an expensive and time-consuming process.

Dude, where's my shrimp?

Placing an ad yields similar results. It used to be that in order to apply to a job, you had buy a newspaper, cut out the ad, pull out your typewriter, type a letter, type a resume, find a stapler, find an envelope, type the address, buy a stamp, and go to the post office. You would only go through this process if you thought you had a good chance of getting the job. Now, all one has to do to reply to a job ad is hit "send." Because it's so easy to apply to jobs, people looking for a job tend to take the throw-the-spaghetti-against-the-wall approach and fire off hundreds of resumes to see if anything sticks. Recruiters will often use ad placement as a Gee Whiz tool, since they can brag to their clients about having 3000 people apply for a job. The thing is, you aren't looking for 3000 people. You are looking for one. And unless the main skill requirement you have is the ability to sport a hair net and ask, "Would you like fries with that?" you are after a pretty specific person. The extra 2999 applicants make the process of finding the one candidate who can best fill the role much more complicated.

I prefer to see recruiting like fly fishing: a targeted and specific craft. I meet with my client to find out what kind of fish they are after. Let's say they are looking for a Creative Director for their agency. As it turns out, Creative Directors are not so different from trout. I will start by studying them in their natural habitat: what schools did they attend, what companies employ them, what LinkedIn groups do they frequent, what conferences do they attend? I will go to a high vantage point and dive deep to figure out what is going on in the surrounding environment: who is hiring, who is firing, what trends are impacting the field? I can find out what people are being paid and let a client know if their compensation system is competitive. I will uncover the best fishing grounds: those hidden private gems that one can only discover through word-of-mouth. With the industry information I find, I will help the client craft a strategy to attract the very best candidates. Just as some trout respond best to a Royal Wuff fly and others to a Parachute Adams, candidates like to be approached differently. Sometimes it makes sense to reach out to people through LinkedIn. Others want to be tracked down at the office. Others can be tracked down through an industry association. Sometimes placing a very targeted ad might be part of the broader strategy, but it will only be part of the approach and will be written to appeal only to candidates with a very specific skill set. Less is often more.

I will also help a client position the pitch. From my research, I might discover that Creative Directors are a generally happy bunch: they are well-treated, well-paid, and always have the option of freelance work should they tire of their current role. I might have to offer a very tasty looking fly to draw them to the surface to contemplate changing jobs. I will place the fly with accuracy and when a good candidate surfaces, I'll be ready. I know how to recognize the "take" and will raise the rod tip and set the hook.

Once I've landed the candidate  - they are interested in meeting with the client and finding out more about the job - I won't toss them in a net with the tires and old shoes. Because I am dealing with a focused group of candidates, I can give them individualized, velvet-glove treatment that reflects well on my client. Nothing is worse than telling a great candidate you will  get back to them in a few months - if at all - because you are reading through a stack of irrelevant job applications. If you have a take-a-number approach to recruiting, it makes people feel like you not very discerning or don't know what you want. If someone is going to leave the security of their current job to join your firm, they want to believe that you  know what you are doing. You want a candidate's first impression of you to be positive as it helps when you decide to make them an offer. It's hard to convince someone in a good job that you will treat them well if their initial impression was negative.

There is a place for targeted advertising -letting hidden candidates know that you are looking for someone like them - but the days of casting a wide net are over. A client's time is too valuable to sort through the thousands of resumes that a broad ad will generate. It's far better to have a well-crafted, focused approach to finding your ideal candidate.

Happy hunting!

Nancy

The Tough Search: Please Don't Shoot the Messenger

In an old episode of Roseanne that seems to run permanently on late-night TV, Roseanne has taken a job helping out at a hair salon. She observes a client showing Iris, her hairdresser, a photo of a model in a fashion magazine:

Customer: Now, Iris, I love what you did last week, but can you make me look like that?  

Roseanne: Oh, I'm sure you can, Iris. I'll go get the wand.

As a recruiter, there are days when I could really use a magic wand too. Clients often come to me when initial efforts to find a candidate for a particular role fail. Often, through research and networking, I am able to find that needle in a haystack candidate they could not unearth though casual networking or a newspaper ad. But sometimes, I gather market intelligence that tells me that the ideal candidate for the role simply does not exist.

And clients hate that.

In an ideal world, wand or no wand, we could all have magazine-worthy hair. In an ideal world, each job search would yield 3 or 4 candidates with perfect resumes, sparkling personalities, a proper motivation for leaving their current jobs, and a strong desire to work for less than the going market rate; we could simply pick the one whose interview outfit best matches the office decor.

The research I do for my clients paints a realistic picture of the current market. It provides valuable information about the industry and competitors that, beyond the job search, can be used as general market intelligence (who's hiring, who's firing, salary info etc.) For some positions, there is a large pool of candidates with the necessary skills and experience. If a competitor has recently downsized, there may be lots of excellent people looking for a new job. In this case, where I add value is finding the people who are the best fit for a client's corporate culture. In highly specialized positions where there is a small pool of candidates, it is sometimes hard to find anyone who wants to change jobs. If a job contains any perceived risk factors (lower salary, high turnover, extensive travel, industry instability), finding good candidates becomes even harder. If I can present a shortlist of one or two people with 90% of the requirements, that may be the best the market has to offer. As a recruiter, I'm simply the messenger: please refrain from shooting me!

I know quite early in the search process if there are lots of candidates or very few. If the market is telling me that there are very few people out there who can fill this role, I will feed that information back to my client. At this point, we have a few options:

Revise the job spec: The more flexibility a client has, the more candidates I can bring to the table. Is a particular degree a must or a need? Is 20 years of experience necessary or is 10 years fine? Can any specific skills be added through training once the candidate is hired? Great managerial abilities can sometimes trump specific technical expertise: can someone outside the field fill the role?

Change the job level: Sometimes, there are few people with the desired skill set at the job level on offer. If a client can consider increasing the job level or salary, that can widen the talent pool. Other times, there are not many senior people available (especially in firms where senior people have golden handcuffs tying them to a particular firm) but a very talented, slightly more junior person could stretch into the role.

Look at relocating someone. Sometimes the perfect person is in another geographic market but would be willing to move. If a client will consider paying relocation costs, that could broaden the pool of candidates.

As a recruiter, my commitment is to find the best, available candidates for a position. While the ideal candidate is not always available, my commitment is to work with my clients until we can find someone who can effectively fill the role. If, as the messenger, I'm not afraid of being shot, I can work much more effectively and spend more time finding the best people for the job.

Onboarding the new hire

After a long search, you've finally hired the ideal candidate for the job. Today is her first day of work. What she experiences will have a major impact on her future with your company. As the commercial says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Most companies know to show a new employee the location of the washroom and coffee machine. Often the hiring manager will take the new hire to lunch. The new employee typically gets a binder from HR outlining all of the company's policies and procedures to minimize the potential for lawsuits. And sometimes there is a formal new employee orientation session where all new hires are put in a room and given fairly generic information about a company's culture.

These sessions tend to be fascinating...

Most people are nervous on their first day of work. Often, they've resigned from a job that - while not as intriguing as yours - offered some positives. Just as it's easy to see the old high school boyfriend who has turned up on Facebook through rose-coloured glasses, it's easy for a new hire to remember how great her last job was - and have regrets about yours - if you don't make the onboarding process more engaging.

In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink explores the key factors that motivate employees: autonomy, mastery and purpose. In other words, we all need to "direct our own lives, learn and create new things, and do better by ourselves and our world."


Autonomy: New employees want assurance that they and their ideas matter and are important to the company. This gives them the sense that they will have some control in their new environment. It's hard to send out this message if the onboarding process focuses on generic training sessions and binders filled with policy. Let people know that they were hired because you need them. And that you cannot wait to see what they can contribute. Let them know that while the company has a great culture, you are eager to see how they shape things too. Everyone likes to feel valued.

Mastery: People hate feeling incompetent. When you do not know where the bathroom is, it's hard to feel confident about anything. The first weeks on the job can be highly demotivating since it's so hard to feel a sense of mastery. You hired the candidate for their skills and expertise. Let them use them right away so they gain an immediate sense of competence in their new environment. Tap into the new hire's greatest strengths. You know that thing he talked about loving to do in the interview? Make sure he does a lot of that as soon as he starts work.

Purpose: Everyone wants to feel part of something bigger. That's why people get satisfaction from work. It's up to you to make the connection between what this new hire can do and the goals of the organization. A new employee orientation session that focuses on the company's mission, vision and goals is time well spent if you link those elements to the skills and experience of the new hire. (Hey Mr. X, here at Corporation Z, we pride ourselves on being the number one seller of widgets in the world. It's a pleasure to know that we have just hired the number one sales guy on the eastern seabord in sprockets. You'll be a fabulous fit here! Now let's talk about what we are hoping to accomplish together...)

Making an employee feel valued, competent and part of something great will go a long way toward making that person feel he has made a great career move. The quicker an employee feels this way, they faster she will be able to contribute to your organization. Which, of course, was the whole point of the hire.

Happy hunting!

Nancy

Build a better reference check

As an employer, once you've found your dream candidate and have extended him or her an offer, there is one final step: the reference check. This is usually a rubber stamp but occasionally there is an ugly surprise, so it's always a good idea to be thorough. Here are some ways to make the process more effective:

1. Read between the lines. People are litigious. Some days it's hard to order a sandwich without getting sued. Many former employers are reluctant to give anything but a glowing reference even if it is undeserved. When you are talking to someone's reference, listen to hear if they are being enthusiastic. If I asked you to describe your favourite friend right now, I bet you'd say some pretty nice things. Your voice would be warm and you'd err on the side of giving out too much praise. If on the other hand, I asked you about your weird cousin Ned, you might not say anything bad, but you'd hardly sound enthusiastic. Many firms, not wanting to say anything negative but also not wanting to lie, use what I affectionately like to call Weasel Talk. A great example of Weasel Talk when describing someone lazy is "You'd be lucky to get him to work for you." Clever, huh? Ask questions, ask them to clarify. If they keep using exactly the same phrase, you can be sure it was prepared by a team of lawyers. Proceed with caution.

2. Ask the hard questions. Ask about your candidate's weaknesses. Because of the whole fear factor expressed in point one, you may not get much information but sometimes people will surprise you. At a firm for which I worked when I was just starting out, one candidate - who looked like a winner on paper and in person - was described by his best reference as being "a few cards short of a full deck." The client pushed forward and hired this particular fellow, so sure that the reference must have somehow got it wrong, and the results were as expected: he was a few cards short of a full deck and eventually had to be let go. Sometimes people are shockingly honest. But if you don't ask, they'll never have a chance to tell you.

3. Dot you i's and cross your t's. Call the university and verify the listed degrees. Call the listed professional associations and make sure you are dealing with a member in good standing. One accounting candidate, whose resume made the rounds years ago, completely fabricated his accounting credentials. His former employers had no idea as they simply relied on the previous employers to have done their due diligence. This fellow had worked his way into quite a senior position before he was discovered. If you run into road blocks due to privacy laws, then insist your candidate show you proof of degrees and designations. It feels like busy work but can save you a lot of hassle down the road.

4. Network a little. Anytime you are given a new contact name, it's an opportunity to make a new connection. Often the candidate in question worked in a similar field before and the reference will have knowledge about your industry. Be friendly and see if you can find out at bit about their company and corporate culture. Gather a little market intelligence. Ask the reference about their career path: perhaps they might be interested in working for your firm one day too. I'm not saying to go into headhunting mode or act like you are trying to find a new best friend but a little soft networking rarely goes amiss. The more collegial the reference feels towards you, the more likely they are to give you some honest information about the candidate too.

Happy hunting!

Nancy

Recruiting Lessons from Moneyball

One of my favourite movies about recruiting is Moneyball (the book, by the always awesome Michael Lewis, is amazing too.)

Moneyball is the story of Brad Pitt's Billy Beane, the real-life General Manager of the Oakland A's, who had to rebuild his ball club on a shoestring budget after losing his star players. To help him, he hires Jonah Hill's Peter Brand, the Ivy League economics whiz kid who figured out how to analyze the club's needs and the skills of potential players in order to build an inexpensive winning team. As a research-based recruiter, my clients are Billy Beane: trying to hire a winning team on a budget that is never as large as they'd like. I'm Peter Brand: dissecting the market to find them a team that works.

In Moneyball, before Peter came along with his methodical approach to recruiting, the ball club had all sorts of interesting ways of assessing who might be a good fit for their team (you'll note that Beane was not part of these discussions:)

Grady Fuson: Artie, who do you like?
Scout Artie: I like Perez. He's got a classy swing, it's a real clean stroke.
Scout Barry: He can't hit the curve ball.
Scout Artie: Yeah, there's some work to be done, I'll admit that.
Scout Barry: Yeah, there is.
Scout Artie: But he's noticeable.
Matt Keough: And an ugly girlfriend.
Scout Barry: What does that mean?
Matt Keough: Ugly girl friend means no confidence.
Scout Barry: Okay.
John Poloni: Oh, now, you guys are full of it, Artie's right. This guy's got an attitude and an attitude is good. I mean it's the kind of guy who walks into a room his d*** has already been there for two minutes.
Scout Pote: He passes the eye candy test. He's got the looks, he's great at playing the part. He just needs to get some playing time.
Matt Keough: I'm just saying his girlfriend is a six at best.

Yikes!

I'm not saying this is how most firms hire (thank heavens!) Yet, sometime even firms with a great recruiting process get hung up on certain notions. When you work for a company, you get very immersed in that company's culture and like hires like. But when "like" is not easy to find, that's where a recruiter can be very helpful in expanding your idea of "fit." Yes, in an ideal world, every candidate attended Harvard, needs 2 hours of sleep, has no personal life yet is a fabulously fun person, believes in giving 110% at work, is never sick, is so handsome and charming that people line up to buy your product or service simply to bask in his or her glory, has direct competitor experience, is loyal to a fault (except when it comes to leaving your competitor and bringing all of that amazing knowledge to your firm) and only wants to be paid minimum wage. It's easy to form an opinion about who the ideal candidate might be (often we see a slightly better version of the person who just vacated the position.) And even though we come up with a job description that breaks things down into skill sets and experiences, we often have that ideal candidate in mind. As Moneyball shows, this can be short-sighted. Peter explains:

People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. 

When you hire someone, you are buying a set of skills. You are not buying someone who looks good in a suit or attended the right schools or has a firm handshake. These are nice to haves (and in some roles, essential to have - which is why building out a good job description is key) but they are not necessarily what makes a winning team. Sometimes the person who you might have overlooked in a pile of resumes is your next star player. That's where the Peters and recruiters of the world can be helpful:

Billy, this is Chad Bradford. He's a relief pitcher. He is one of the most undervalued players in baseball. His defect is that he throws funny. Nobody in the big leagues cares about him because he looks funny. This guy could be not just the best pitcher in our bullpen, but one of the most effective relief pitchers in all of baseball. This guy should cost $3 million a year. We can get him for $237,000.

With enough money to throw around, anyone can hire A-Rod. His talents are obvious. You don't need us. Where recruiters can come in handy is finding those diamonds in the rough like Chad Bradford. Players who can help your team win.

Happy hunting!

Nancy

How to Recruit Your Recruiter

So let's say that you work in HR and you've been charged with filling a hard-to-fill position. Perhaps the ideal candidate needs an obscure skill set and your advertising campaign has yielded few candidates. Now you are considering hiring a recruiter to help you but have no idea where to start. What can you do?

Easy: Hire me. I'm the best. The end.

Short blog post, huh?

Seriously, the first thing you need to do is figure out what kind of a recruiter you wish to hire. In a previous post, I explained the difference between contingency and retainer-based and research-based search firms. Regardless of the type of firm you pick, there are a few things you might wish to keep in mind when interviewing potential recruiters:

Who will be doing the work? Large firms often have sales people, who sell the search work, and people who execute the searches. Not only do you want to know the skill set of the person who will be conducting the work, but you also want to know if you like them. Remember, if a search was easy, you would not need to hire us. You will likely get to know your recruiter quite well over the weeks or months of the search and it's important that you like and trust them.

How will they represent you in the market? While recruiters can do their initial screening without revealing the name of your company, eventually candidates will come to learn who you are. It's a small world out there and an overly aggressive recruiter can sully your reputation in the marketplace. Ask the recruiter how they find candidates. Understand their methods. Make sure you are comfortable with what they will be doing on your behalf.

Do they think outside the box? When looking for candidates, it's rare to find someone who 100% fits the bill. If I am looking for a branding specialist for a consumer goods company and the branding specialists in competitor firms are are happily employed, I need to know where else to look. A good recruiter understands business, so they know where to find the needed skill set when the obvious places do not yield good results. Creativity is key.

Are they charming? Ultimately, recruiting is a sales job. If your recruiter sounds like a sleepy, disgruntled chain-smoking telephone operator from the 1940s, they may not be able to convince an ideal candidate to consider the position you are trying to fill.

Are they persistant? Good people are not always easy to find. A good recruiter has to chase down leads. You want to know that your recruiter has stick-to-it-iveness.

Do you like them? While it's nice to think that you'll give your recruiter a job mandate and then not hear from them until they present someone to hire, this is not the case. There is a lot of back and forth, as everyone figures out who could best fill the position. If you can't stand the recruiter, it will be a long, torturous process. A sense of humour helps a lot too.

It's a tall order, isn't it. The shortcut is to simply hire me. I'm the best. The end.

Happy hunting!

Nancy

Advice for Clients: Improving the odds

One of the best parts of my job is when we find a great employee for one of our clients. It's kind of like being at the wedding of two people you set up on a blind date. It's all good. What's even better, however, is when the client calls us a few years later to inform us that the employee we placed has been promoted and the role needs to be filled once again. This is like being at the 10 year anniversary of the couple you set up. While finding the best job candidates on the market is what we do, clients can play a big role in helping us find the very best person for the position over the long term by doing four key things:

1) Make the job spec as representative of the job as possible. It can be tempting for clients to give us the ad or job spec from the last time they filled the position, but it is much better to rewrite the job spec every time one commences a search. Rarely does a job stay the same from year to year. Not only does the technology change (mimeographing skills are not as critical these days) but so does the way one does business. When you hire someone new, it's an opportunity to rethink the role. Take the time to make any changes before you make a hire. There is nothing more frustrating for a candidate than to feel like they were subject to the old bait and switch.

2) Be honest if you've been trying to fill the role for a while. If you have been looking for someone to fill the role for six months with no success, please let us know. There is nothing worse than calling someone with a new opportunity only to have them say "oh, are they still looking for that?" Some positions are very unique and tough to fill and that is why you are hiring us, but we will amend the script we use when pitching the job to prospective candidates if we have this information. As we talk to people, we will also find out why the role has been hard to fill. Perhaps you are paying below market rates, perhaps there has been some reputational damage (see below), perhaps the job's location is an issue. Once we have this market intelligence, we can often tweak the role to make it more attractive to candidates. Then when we call back our prospect list, we can tell them the great news!

3) Be honest if the job is hard to fill. Perhaps your CEO has just done the perp walk on national TV. Perhaps the person to whom the role reports is nicknamed Chainsaw or Neutron or Queen of Mean. Perhaps your last quarter was dismal. We are used to filling hard-to-fill positions, but again, information is helpful. If I know that I'm swimming upstream, I can be prepared to address the concerns a savvy candidate will have. There are candidates out there who love a challenge as long as they know everyone is being upfront.

4) Be open-minded. Rarely do candidates have the exact experience called for in a job spec (and if they do, they are often wanting more money that you are prepared to offer.) While we do our best to find candidates who are as close to your wish list as possible, it's really good to have a clear sense of what qualifications the candidate needs to have and what they'd ideally have. Unless there are regulatory requirements calling for someone to have a particular educational or professional background, this is often an area where flexibility can be shown. Instead of outlining the number of years experience you require, it can be helpful to focus on what kind of experiences you need them to have (if you are growing your team, you might want someone with proven mentoring experience; if you are experiencing pressure to cut costs, you may want someone who has had to downsize their group.) The more specific you can be about the needs of the role, the more flexibility you can show on the wants. With a wider pool of candidates, you are much more likely to find someone who can do the job and fits  your corporate culture, making for a successful long-term hire.

Happy hunting!

The Re:Search Process (or why you cannot find the perfect hire in 24 hours)

I wish I had a nickel for every time a brand new client asked me if I could find them an ideal employee by the end of the week: "Can't you just pull someone off LinkedIn?" they ask.

In a word? No.

Believe me, I would love to find you a perfect hire by the end of the week. The faster I find you candidates, the faster I close the search, the faster I get paid, and the better the boat I can buy.

Did I mention I race sailboats in my spare time? Believe me, I like to move fast too!

The reality is, finding an ideal person to work in your company is a little like finding a life partner. Now, I could go online and find you a life partner in the next 30 seconds. 

But I'm guessing you would not like the result.

/image courtesy artur84/

The quality of your employees is essential to the success of your company. Not only do you need them to have the skills to do the job, but you need them to be a good fit for your organization. LinkedIn is a great tool but sadly it lacks the "Find the Perfect Employee" app (believe me, I've looked.)

Finding the right person takes time. On average, finding the best potential employees for your company takes four to six weeks. Good candidates tend to be busy people who enjoy their work. We do active headhunting, discovering who the best players in the industry are and talking to them about why they might be happier contributing their talents to you.

In addition to finding better candidates, the time we take to thoroughly research the market can give you valuable information about what is happening in your industry. The market data we gather gives you an assurance that you are hiring the best possible candidate on the market at the time. Some firms will offer to work with you on a contingency basis, firing resumes your way until you find someone who is good enough to hire. With our approach, we present you with the people we feel are the very best potential employees for you. It's true, you won't see resumes as quickly as your might with some other recruiting firms, but you won't have to spend valuable time meeting unsuitable candidates. And you won't always wonder if there was perhaps someone better out there if only you'd been more thorough. 

Good recruiting takes time and to shorten the process means you short-change yourself. Why just hire, when you can hire the best?