Missing in Action

No, this isn’t a war zone, but it can seem like a battlefield sometimes. This has happened to all of us, I am sure. You recruit a great candidate; you can’t place him or her right away so you stash the person in the database for a future assignment. The perfect job opens up . . . you make a call . . . number disconnected. You send an email . . . undeliverable. What can you do? Thankfully, you can develop a “missing person” process for your office. It’s easy and only takes a few minutes. Just follow these steps to try and find your candidate.

First try www.WhitePages.com. It is just like the telephone company white pages, so unless your candidate has an unlisted number or uses his cell as his main phone, you might have some luck here.

If not, try the search engines www.Google.com, www.Yahoo.com, and www.Live.com. You put your candidate’s name in quotes and hit the search button. See if there is any updated information for you.

Also try the meta-search engines, including www.Dogpile.com and www.Mamma.com. Yes, these will search the big three, but also a number of other, lesser-known engines. Also use quote marks here for the name. Worth a shot.

If that doesn’t work, you can try the social and business networks www.LinkedIn.com, www.Spoke.com, www.MySpace.com, and www.FaceBook.com. These sites often have information the search engines don’t come up with. If your candidate is a professional, he may be in one of the first two. Quote marks are not necessary.

Zabasearch.com is a public records search site. If your candidate owns a home, she is probably in here. Zabasearch often returns many results, so it is often helpful to put a location in here as well.

ZoomInfo has a free component that lets you search for a name. Just go to their website, www.zoominfo.com, and type in the name without quotes.

One more shot. If you know the college from which the person graduated, you can always try searching the institution website. For example: www.harvard.edu, alumni “john e. doe.” You would use one of the search engines for this one.

In closing, we can only do the best we can do. But at least do that. Even using the above-mentioned methodology, the search often ends in failure, but at least we can now sleep nights knowing we did everything we could.

AIRS SourcePoint CE

Remember SearchStation? Then came Oxygen. Now there is AIRS SourcePoint CE, a fairly new best-in-class service by the people at AIRS. The problem is that it handles so many different sourcing functions for you, it is difficult to determine just what class it is in. I was offered the opportunity to “test drive” this service for The Fordyce Letter subscribers and jumped at the chance.

It is hard to know where to start this review, so I will try to start at the beginning and simply offer an overview of the service.

This is the very first recruitment industry vendor that I can think of that has offered an “all-in-one” sourcing/recruiting solution. One complaint I always hear from recruiters across the country is their need to deal with multiple vendors when trying to tap the wealth of information on the Internet. Often, one has to have one vendor for names generation, another for résumé generation, and yet another for competitive intelligence. All with separate monthly fees and log-in information.

With SourcePoint, you get all that in one, fairly intuitive interface. Plus, since it is a module-based service, you pay only for the services you need and can use. With the various modules available, you can search the AIRS proprietary database of passive candidate names and résumés, you can use the search engines to search across the Internet for results, you can search the built-in CRM and/or your own ATS, you can search (either in simple or advanced formats) your membership-based résumé banks, you can search the social and business networks, and you can search the newsgroups for names.

The beauty of using this one interface to search all the components just mentioned is that all your results are compiled into one queue that can be imported into the AIRS CRM, or exported to a number of different formats. With the competing products, all your results from the different products are islands of data that you have to deal with separately. Plus, with this product you can manage this data with the CRM and also email any or all of the results directly from the program using customized email messages that can be saved.

I have listed some of the features and what they do below. For the most part, your searches are broken down into two categories: résumés and people (names).

Résumés

DeepWeb Search for R̩sum̩s РThis search feature searches the AIRS proprietary database of passive candidate r̩sum̩s for keywords.

TotalView Search РThis feature is used to search the built-in CRM, external r̩sum̩ databases, and your applicant tracking system.

R̩sum̩ Bank Search РThis feature searches Web-based r̩sum̩ databases. For most you are required to enter your user name and password, although there are some you can enable without that information.

Precision Search РThis is also used to search the membership-based r̩sum̩ databases, but it taps the features of the individual services for a more advanced search process.

People

PeopleSearch – This feature searches the AIRS database of over 33 million names.

DeepWeb Search for People – It uses the search engines to search across the Web for names of individuals related to your keywords or even a company.

Social Network Search – It uses the search engines to search for public information contained in the social networks, including ZoomInfo and LinkedIn.

NewsGroup Search – This feature allows you to search millions of newsgroup discussions. These discussions often contain the names and email addresses of potential passive candidates.

Of course, we can do all these searches manually, but it would take hours and hours of our precious time, and this product can do it all in just a matter of minutes.

They also have a directory search feature. There are directories for companies, colleges, and organizations (associations). These directories contain specific names of entities where you can search for keywords or browse by industry or state. You can also search for profiles, when available.

Another key component is their spreadsheet import feature. It is incredibly powerful, allowing you to import data into all fields of your CRM and set status in others. As a result, you can upload a list of conference attendees and mark the source field automatically.

As I have touched on earlier in this article, this service is not just about a bunch of résumés and names. The data management tools they offer pull it all together for you. Their CRM (contact relationship manager) I have mentioned a couple of times is a built-in candidate database that lets you save your results to it for further study or contact. From there, you can select names to send emails to from any number of customized messages. From that point, you can track the activity of your email recipients to see who is acting on your email (opening, clicking internal links, and other activity).

Other features I would like to at least mention are your ability to set up Agents, allowing you to set up recurring searches to run automatically; prebuilt reporting for further ease of data management; and the ability to export any results to your ATS or Excel. I forgot to mention before that they also offer a Quick Search feature for quickly coming up with a name or other contact information. The product also offers integration with the H3.com referral engine, which takes online networking and paid referrals to the next level.

I want to thank Chris Forman, CEO of AIRS, for his help with this article. Anyone seeking that killer all-in-one application should definitely take a closer look. Anyone who would like more information about this or any other AIRS product or service can visit their website at www.airsdirectory.com.

2007 Résumé Sourcing Survey
By Jim Stroud

Jim Stroud, Internet recruiting ranter and raver and one we have all been hearing about more and more, has published his 2007 Résumé Sourcing Survey. This is a report with some surprising information about sourcing résumés on the Internet. In this report you can learn about:

- The most popular formats for general résumés
- The most popular formats for technical résumés
- The top 10 industries by résumés sourced on MSN Live
- The top 10 industries by résumés sourced on Google
- The top 10 industries by résumés sourced on Yahoo
- Popular top-level domains for résumés
- Popular industry keywords mentioned on résumés
- Quantity of résumés found on search engines
- Most popular ways to spell “CV”
- Most popular ways to spell “Résumé”
- The most overlooked file types for general résumés

This information can be invaluable for any one of us who uses the Internet to source résumés. The report can be downloaded for FREE at http://jimstroud. com/2007/02/25.

Also, Jim has an award-winning recruiting blog that anyone can sign up for, also for free. Check it out at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JimStroud20?a=MaAl51YD.

TIP
Nanpa.com

Many times when we are searching for résumés on the Internet in a specific geographic region, we use area codes as keywords. For example, if I were searching for résumés in the St. Louis area, part of my search string might be (missouri OR MO) (314 OR 636) plus other résumé words and keywords. When I started in recruiting I could almost name the area code for every area, as there just weren’t that many. Nowadays, that task is impossible. There is a site for NANPA, which is the North American Numbering Plan Administration, where you can go and look up the area codes for anywhere you like. It is simply www.nanpa.com. Keep this address in your favorites and use it whenever you need to.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

Here are some more legal questions that I am frequently asked by recruiting and staffing professionals. The answers are by necessity brief and simplified, and should by no means be taken as a substitute for thorough legal advice. Maybe, however, they will give you an idea as to when you need to go further in consulting an attorney.

Q. I don’t have clients sign my fee schedule, but the schedule contains a provision that the client accepts its terms by interviewing someone I refer. That’s as good as a signed contract, isn’t it?

A. No, it isn’t. You still have to prove that the client orally agreed to the provision that it will accept your terms in this fashion. The client will no doubt say something like “I never got the fee schedule” or “I told him I had to run this by legal” or “I never read the thing, so how could I agree to it [a client has no duty to read what you send him]?” While having a mutually signed agreement is not a guarantee of success, it is always, always, better to get the contract signed by the client.

Q. I’m in temporary staffing, and I have a provision on my time card that explains that I am owed a fee if my client hires the candidate. Since my client signs the time card, this should be clearly enforceable, right?

A. Not necessarily. Many time cards are signed by a foreman or another direct supervisor of the temp. At least one court case has held that such an individual only had the authority to certify as to the hours worked, the ostensible primary purpose of the time card, and did not have apparent authority to agree to the other provisions commonly inserted on a time card, such as a conversion fee. If you think the possible lack of authority on the part of the person signing the contract may be a problem, you may wish to have a master agreement with the client to deal with issues other than verification of hours worked.

Q. I am in IT staffing. Most of my assigned employees are skilled computer professionals. I pay them hourly, but all of them earn at least $27.63 an hour. Therefore, I don’t have to pay them time and a half for overtime, right?

A. It is very possible you have to pay them overtime. It is true that by paying skilled computer professionals at least $27.63 an hour, you are not required, under federal law, to pay the overtime premium, but you may be required to do so under state law. Although Congress has amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to exempt computer professionals making at least $27.63 an hour, very few states have followed suit. In those states, IT staffing firms are presented with the much more difficult, and unclear, question of whether these professionals are exempt administrative employees.

Q. I know it’s a violation of the NAPS Code of Ethics for me to recruit a placed candidate unless the candidate requests my assistance. I just saw my placed candidate’s résumé on one of the job boards. Is that the same as the candidate’s requesting assistance?

A. No, it is not, and it would be a violation of the NAPS Code of Ethics for you to recruit the candidate. The NAPS Ethics Committee considered this issue a few years ago and decided that the candidate must “directly” request the recruiter’s assistance if the recruiter is to have the ethical right to place the candidate.

Q. My client is requiring that all employees be able to speak English, and that they speak only English on the job. Is that OK?

A. The requirement that the employees speak English is probably lawful if the employer can demonstrate that it is necessary to speak English to communicate with supervisors and other employees. However, rules that would prohibit employees from speaking to each other in languages other than English are impermissible, unless the restriction is confined to areas where customers are.

Q. I have a great candidate, but one small problem. The candidate has signed an agreement with his soon-to-be-former employer that he will not compete with them within a certain area for a certain period of time. I’ve discussed this with other recruiters, and we all know these things are unenforceable, right?

A. With the exception of a couple of states that prohibit enforcement of non-competes by statute, it is impossible to make a broad generalization. The enforceability of these agreements can vary greatly not only from state to state, but also from judge to judge within a state, and the issue is always very dependent on the facts of the particular case. If your candidate mentions that he has one of these agreements, you should make certain that he discusses it with your client. Otherwise, either the former employer or the client, or both, could make sure you are a party to any ensuing litigation.

Q. Here’s one that should give you a laugh. I had a staffing client that I was billing $5,000 a week. They stopped paying me, and I fired them. Shortly thereafter, they filed a petition under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Act. Now, I get a letter from the trustee in bankruptcy that not only fails to mention the $15,000 they owe me, but insists that I return $50,000 that they previously paid me. Can they really do that?

A. I’m not laughing, and neither should you be. The general rule is that when a company goes into bankruptcy, any payment it has made to creditors within the 90 days prior to the filing must be returned. This prevents a failing company from picking and choosing which debts it will pay. However, there is an exception for payments made in the ordinary course of business. If the company had been paying you regularly, with relative promptness, you might beat back the trustee’s attempt to recover the payments. On the other hand, if payments were significantly delayed and sporadic, in varying amounts, it looks like you may have a real problem. If you find yourself in that situation, keep in mind that you frequently will be able to negotiate a payment schedule and/or a reduced payment amount.

Q. I pay commissions to my recruiters, but for various reasons, different recruiters are paid at different rates. Sometimes it’s just because I pay each one the least I think I can get away with. If this ever gets out, I’m afraid the lower-paid recruiters will quit. Therefore, I have a rule that any employee who discusses his or her compensation with any other employee is subject to immediate termination. OK?

A. No, not OK. First of all, any employer who believes that its employees do not discuss their compensation with each other is living in a dream world. More importantly, a rule prohibiting employees from discussing wages with each other violates the National Labor Relations Act. This is the statute that allows employees, including non-unionized employees, to bargain collectively. The logic is that they can’t very well bargain collectively if they don’t know how much each other is getting paid.

Q. My candidate left during the guarantee period. I have a replacement guarantee, but the client promoted the replacement from within. Now, the client wants a refund. Do I owe it?

A. I can’t tell without looking at your contract. The situation you describe is one of the most frequent sources of disputes between recruiters and their clients because too many contracts just trumpet a “replacement guarantee” without specifying what that means. You may wish to consider a provision that states specifically that your obligation is met if the client replaces the candidate from any source. Alternatively, you may wish to choose to state that your sole obligation under the guarantee is to submit X number of candidates who meet the specifications in the job order.

Q. My client has given me a contract that states I will not place any of its employees during the term of the contract and for one year thereafter. I guess that’s fair enough, right?

A. Is it? First of all, both you and the employer are referring to this company as a “client.” What kind of “client” is this? They don’t have to hire any of your candidates. They don’t have to interview anyone you send them. They don’t even have to return any of your telephone calls or emails. The chances are that they’ll never pay you a dime. If I have too many “clients” like that, I’m out of business, and so are you. Ideally, I’d like you to limit your responsibilities to compliance with the NAPS Code of Ethics – you will not recruit placed candidates, nor will you recruit their employees at the location you placed them, for one year following your most recent placement. If you have to do more than that, OK, but try very hard to date your restrictions from the date of your last placement, so you at least know you’re making these promises to a real “client.” Be very careful of a restriction like this that dates from the day the contract is terminated. In your business, contracts, like old soldiers, just fade away. Have you ever formally terminated one?

If you have any questions about any of the above, or just want to vent your frustrations, feel free to contact Bob Style, NAPS Counsel, at rpstyle@sprynet.com.

“Don’t mix business with pleasure.” Ever heard it? I did, and I almost lived my life by it.

Then one day, early in my career, I was reading a wonderful book by John Byrne called The Headhunters. Byrne was interviewing the top headhunters in the world, including Gerard Roche, one of the most successful executive recruiters of the 20th century and senior chairman of Heidrick & Struggles.

They asked Gerry if he knew why he was so successful. He said he wasn’t sure why, but perhaps it was because he never worked, yet he was always working. What did he mean by that? He said that he didn’t separate business from pleasure. “My friends are my clients and my clients are my friends.”

Instantly I changed my philosophy. After all, my only reason to stick by that other philosophy, “Don’t mix business with pleasure,” was that it sounded catchy. I wondered how much money it had cost me.

Now, 20 years later, having borrowed one philosophy from the legendary Gerard Roche, I can say that my friends are my clients and my clients are my friends. I take them to Warriors games, Giants games, I take them to lunch, dinner, concerts, church, everything. I do everything with my clients I might do with a friend. They are my friends. Did you know that Aristotle Onassis had no casual relationships? He came to America with $63 in his pocket and became one of the richest men in the world. Besides, studies show that most people would rather do business with someone they know.

I like to adopt philosophies that will serve me. Philosophy comes from two Greek words (love of knowledge/wisdom). Always try to learn as much as you can and stay flexible in your philosophy and adopt the philosophies you like. The great modern-day business philosopher Jim Rohn says, “You don’t have to be original; you just have to be good.”

I know you are open to adopting new philosophies and love knowledge or you would not be a TFL subscriber, which I myself have been during my 20 years in the recruiting business. I am, like you, always looking for new ideas. This love of knowledge puts us in the top 10% if we stay flexible in our philosophy.

The Buddhist monks say that knowledge should be like water, free flowing. They never say, “This is my belief . . .” They say, “This is my current belief . . .”

Examine all your ways of thinking and remember that you’re never too old to learn and never too young to teach. And it’s never too late to adopt a new philosophy.

Here’s another philosophy I like: “If it is to be, it is up to me!” – William Shakespeare

Joe Pelayo is a true “self-made” man. He began in the recruiting business in 1986 at the ripe old age of 17, when he says he “found every way to fail in the recruiting business.” After finding success with two recruiting firms, he started his own in 1990. As CEO of Joseph Michaels, Inc., Joe works an active desk recruiting CFOs and related financial and accounting executives. He is a longtime member of the Pinnacle Society, an organization of the top 75 recruiters in the United States.

Joe is also author of the new book Work Your Network!, which has received excellent reviews from Les Brown, Brian Tracy, and industry leaders, speakers, and trainers including Terry Petra, Bill Radin, Paul Hawkinson, and others. He writes a monthly newsletter, The Network, sent to 50,000 executives and is the author of several motivational DVD training programs, including the soon-to-be-released training system 21 Ways to Increase Your Billings!

Joe is past president of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, a group of million-dollar-business owners under age 40. Joe is available for speaking and training and can be reached through his website www.jpspeaking.com or contact him via email at Joe@jpspeaking.com.

Want to become a better recruiter and put yourself on a faster personal growth curve? Try these performance-based (SM) Hiring techniques and you’ll start seeing results fast. Once you experience the impact of using a performance-based approach, you’ll be able to confidently say to any top candidate, “Would you be open to explore a situation if it was clearly superior to what you’re doing today?” And 90% of the time, the candidate’s response will be yes.

Taking the assignment: To ensure that you don’t exclude the best people from consideration, convert job descriptions into career opportunities. We call these “performance profiles.” Preparing these will instantly create a partner relationship with your clients and allow you to become a true career consultant for your candidates. The next time you take an assignment, ask your client these two questions: 1) What are the two or three things that a person taking this job needs to do to be considered successful during the first year? 2) Why would a top person want this job? At the end of the meeting, ask your client if he would see a person who could do the work described even if the person had fewer of the skills or less experience than what was listed in the job description. This will get your client to start thinking about performance rather than experience or skills.

Active candidate sourcing: You can find great, active people if you know the secrets of maximizing the effectiveness of job boards, aggregators, job posting management systems, Web analytics, and your applicant tracking system. How to tell if you’re even in the game? Try this: Assume you’re a top candidate who is only going to use Google to find a job. Put in the generic title of the job, the core skills, the word jobs, and the location. Did your job show up on the first page? If not, figure out what search terms a person would have to use to find your job within five minutes. This will give you some clues on how to redesign your ad strategy driven by the need to find your jobs quickly.

Passive candidate sourcing: My mantra is that with a phone and ZoomInfo or a list developed by Shally Steckerl, you can find three to four top people for any assignment within two days. Start tracking these metrics now: number of cold calls per day, percentage of returned calls, number of people open to considering your opportunity, and number of good referrals per call. Now, track the same metrics for these referrals. What you’ll discover is that working the referred list is three to five times more productive than working the cold list. So the secret to passive candidate recruiting is getting good referrals.

Using the interview to assess competency and create opportunity: Assessing candidate competency is only one of many competing objectives of an interview. In my mind, there are a few that are even more important. One is to enable the recruiter to identify areas of job stretch to the candidate while the interview is being conducted. You need to have prepared a performance profile before the interview and also be able to conduct a performance-based interview. Together, these two techniques allow you to conduct this type of career-gap analysis in real time. Not only will you gain instant respect from the candidate, but more importantly, you’ll be able to recruit the candidate on the basis of opportunity rather than compensation. Try this as a starter: Ask your top candidates if they would be open to exploring a career opportunity if it offered 20% to 25% job stretch and job growth even if the compensation increase was modest. You’ll discover that most will say yes. Then you’ve got to prove it. But proving it is why you must be great at interviewing to be a great recruiter.

Using the interview to defend your candidate against managers who make dumb decisions: Another important purpose of the interview is to prevent good candidates from being excluded from consideration by those who conduct superficial or biased interviews. If you’ve ever lost a good person because someone on the interviewing team was unprepared, emotional, or a weak interviewer, you know how devastating this can be. Equally as bad is having great candidates not even be considered because they didn’t have the right skills, experience, or academic background. Good interviewing skills can minimize these types of non-hires.

Knowing the job and conducting an in-depth, performance-based interview provides the recruiter with the evidence needed to overcome these types of bad decisions. Here’s a test to prove this concept. First, ask your hiring manager client what it would take for him to see and hire a candidate from you if the person had half the experience listed on the job description. He’ll probably say, “Demonstrated proof the person has done exceptional work doing similar things required on the job.” Then, ask the manager to describe some of these typical projects. Now, use the interview to get the proof you need that your candidate has done exceptional work in these areas. This test also demonstrates a core secret of great recruiting: By getting the hiring manager to switch the hiring decision to performance objectives rather than skills, you can cut your send-outs per hire in half.

Advanced recruiting and negotiating offers: Handling objections, overcoming concerns, dealing with counteroffers, and candidates saying no are part of the daily grind of every top recruiter. Start keeping track of why your candidates say no or opt out of the process, whether it’s at the beginning, in mid-stage, or after an offer is extended. Bunch these into groups and put a graph together from most common to least common. (FYI, this is called a “Pareto analysis.”) The top two or three of the most common concerns probably represent more than 50% of all the problems. So if you eliminate these, you’ll be 50% more productive. For now, just write down what you normally do when you hear these problems, and the outcome. You’ll need a well-developed, clever counter every time a candidate raises one of these concerns. The second and better approach: Anticipate the counter in your pitch or presentation before it gets brought up.

Keeping the deal closed and tracking your performance improvement: The fight for top talent is intense, so expect a counteroffer or a competitive offer. How you keep deals closed is part of being a good recruiter. Getting hiring managers involved in this stage is vital, as well as some serious handholding and visualization exercises. Keeping deals closed at the end actually starts at the beginning by converting boring job descriptions into compelling career opportunities. Collectively, this is how good recruiters earn big bucks.

Lou Adler (lou@adlerconcepts.com) is the president of The Adler Group (www.adlerconcepts.com), a training and consulting firm helping companies hire more top talent by implementing performance-based hiring. His Amazon bestseller Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 1997, 2002, with a third edition coming out Spring 2007) started the performance-based hiring and selection movement. This was followed up with the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio tape program “Power Hiring: How to Find, Assess, Hire and Keep Great Talent” (1998). Adler is a veteran recruiter and founder of CJA Executive Search.

Referral benefits for you

Referrals are, by far, the best way to find top talent and separate yourself from the weaker recruiters who simply troll the job boards. Your ability to tap your network for referrals gives you impressive credibility when selling your services. This also increases your confidence in the value that you can provide.

Referrals create instant trust with the referred candidate and therefore shrink the process of having to sell yourself. Referred candidates tend to be more open with recruiters and less evasive. Referrals are also highly targeted as they come from direct communication with someone in the field.

Benefits for the person who refers

Do people really benefit from referring candidates to you? The answer is yes, in some small ways they do. First off, they feel good by being able to help connect people whom they respect. It tells them that they are a person “in the know.” Finally, they will likely get better treatment from you if they refer quality people to you.

Benefits to the referred candidate

Talking about your career with a stranger can be an intimidating process. When the candidate realizes that you have been referred to them by a trusted friend or coworker, they feel safer. Their anxiety drops and they open up about what they really want in their next move. Being referred also saves them time in evaluating different recruiters to work with.

Plant referral seeds

The key to getting referrals is to make their acquisition into a daily process in your office. You can plant referral seeds in many subtle ways. For instance, you can add a signature line to your email such as:

P.S. I grow my client list through quality referrals from people like you. Do you know anyone who could benefit from my services?

Another example of an easy method for getting referrals is to send a card to thank your clients just for being a client. Send it out of the blue, for no apparent reason. When people feel appreciated, they are more likely to refer.

Seven-point referral request method

1. Make it part of your agenda; plan to ask on a specific call.

2. Remind the person how you met: “We’ve been working together for two months. How did you first hear about me?” This reinforces referral value if they themselves were referred to you.

3. Ask a value-seeking question: “What has been the benefit of working with me?”

4. Ask for help and advice: “I’m glad that you’ve gotten value. Can I ask for your help and advice on something?”

5. Ask for the referral: “Who do you know who may appreciate the same type of relationship?”

6. Help them by getting specific: “I believe you know several programmers from Oracle . . .”

7. Move from lead to referral: “Would you mind sending Tom an email before I give him a call?”

Gary Stauble is the principal consultant for The Recruiting Lab, a coaching company that assists firm owners and solo recruiters in generating more profit in less time. Gary offers a FREE special report, “The Search Process Checklist: A 17-Step Recruiting Tool,” on his website. Get your copy now at www.therecruitinglab.com.

Every manager understands the importance of hiring really great staff, but few are trained how to do it. They know that to prosper, they must hire the best person for the role, not just the best of the bunch. To always hire the best, hiring managers need to appeal to the REAL REASONS why Top Performers make a career move. Getting inside the heads of The Best will enable you to create a winning value proposition in each recruitment campaign.

Top Performers do not typically peruse job boards, nor do they reply to the majority of existing job advertisements.
Top Performers do not want another job where they use their existing skills, experience, and knowledge.
Top Performers are not necessarily great interviewees.
Top Performers are not motivated solely by their remuneration package (and if they are, you’ve got the wrong person for the job – even in sales).

Top Performers:
- are open to a strategic career move that enhances their future success
- take longer to make a decision, weighing the pros and cons of a new career move
- hear about an opportunity through their network of associates and referral programs
- want to be challenged with a new project or responsibility
- instinctively work in their area of strength or natural ability
- always have multiple job offers

To find, attract, and hire Top Performers, you must first get inside their heads and understand their key motivators. Writing a job description that lists all the learned skills and education does not entice a Top Performer. Describing the remuneration perks does not entice a Top Performer. Top Performers want something to sink their teeth into. They love being challenged and growing personally as well as professionally.

If you base your recruitment search strategy on what motivates Top Performers, you will have eliminated many of your problems in attracting Top Performers to your team.

Terri Roulette McCartney is an internationally recognized sales expert and trainer who shares her knowledge with people committed to personal and professional growth. She has delivered over 4,000 corporate sales presentations in the staffing/recruitment and education industries, selling over $1 million per annum by focusing on value creation. Visit her website at http://www.sellingadifference.com for TONS OF FREE SALES RESOURCES! ©2007 Terri Roulette McCartney & Selling A Difference, Inc.

After 22 years in recruiting and staffing, I am energized by what I see ahead for our industry. The future is both exciting and distinctly different from where we have been in recent years. I feel there will be room for all kinds of services, offered by professionals who provide the traditional employment agency service – those who headhunt and represent only employed candidates, and those who choose to expand toward more of an organizational-development approach to their clients’ talent needs.

What I have read, heard, and observed from The Wall Street Journal to CNN to CEOs suggests that a top strategic initiative of many companies is hiring not only new talent, but the right talent.

Given the diminishing available talent pool in this country, and the compelling message about the lower-cost skilled labor and processes of offshore providers, I anticipate that employers will put their money into hiring people and creating positions that leverage opportunities to innovate, compete, and achieve corporate objectives. In my experience, as a result of this talent “shortage,” clients are demanding more, not less, and are unwavering in their desire to attract and hire “difference makers.” The days of “if they breathe, they’re hired” are over, and won’t soon return. If a company is in desperate need of a body, they won’t have to pay large placement or staffing fees; they can settle for a body from a $1,000-per-hire offshore recruiter. For that matter, if the job can be done remotely, what would prevent them from hiring someone who lives in Asia or India and is willing to do the job for a whole lot less than the rest of the world? I believe that recruiters who learn to master the organizational-development aspects of their customers’ talent needs, and who practice a holistic recruiting and hiring methodology, will not only boost their reputation but will also increase their marketability, credibility, bandwidth, and income.

In every industry, things change. The innovators and early adapters ride the wave and are agile enough to deal with the ebb and flow, while the old-schoolers often get left behind.

Industries that have gone by the wayside or have been replaced with faster, more efficient, and, in many cases, higher-quality services and products include textiles, software development, and telecom. Someone else, somewhere else, can do it better, faster, and cheaper. It is a deep concern of mine that as an industry, we must band together to raise the bar on what we expect from ourselves. Otherwise, there will be no value proposition differentiating us from the many alternatives that provide similar services. To some extent, we already compete with our clients’ internal HR departments, and their established hiring systems, processes, assessments, and instruments.

Additionally, many of us are fighting price battles against over-promising, under-delivering low-cost providers. If we intend to stay out of the Wal-Mart game, something’s got to improve.

The branding expert who aided me in creating Alliance’s value proposition persuaded me to redefine my company as an HR consulting firm specializing in the acquisition and assessment of top talent. It took some time, but now when I look at my business and client list, I see the difference this has made in my business. Our clients continue to call us because candidates who pass our assessments will pass theirs. We have even developed benchmarks for entire departments, so that we have influence over the fit of that department and have the access to “replicate” the fit over and over again. We do this by first knowing how to attract the right person, then by knowing what traits they need to have walking in the door to be a natural fit. The beauty of this type of differentiator is that no other resource can accommodate our clients’ needs as efficiently or as effectively as we can.

The assessments we utilize evaluate everything from a candidate’s motivations, values, and behaviors to their communication style, personality traits, and organizational abilities.

In today’s competitive talent market, with candidates demanding top salaries, companies have the right to know what they are getting, as well as the right to expect a return on investment with each hire. As the specifications get tougher and tougher to meet, I continue to position myself as an organizational-development consultant. My aim is to partner with my client companies in creating the specifications for whom the person needs to be, what they have to accomplish, and how they will interact in the company, rather than to be another recruiter chasing the “perfect” résumé.

There are many choices available in assessments. I recommend that you start by familiarizing yourself with the categories of assessment that exist in the marketplace. Some are hiring tools that focus only on one dimension of a person’s ability, such as mental acuity, while others focus on a person’s motivation, communication style, or personality traits. It is imperative that you choose the right assessment for your service delivery and for your customers’ specific needs. I strongly recommend interviewing your clients and finding out what they want, as well as what would leverage your placement and consultancy power with them. You may find that what is most important to your customer is to utilize a management-oriented assessment tool that enables them to better communicate with and mentor their newly hired employees.

You may find that what they really need is a formalized comprehensive assessment that encompasses all 10 dimensions of personality to aid in the candidate-evaluation phase of the hiring process. You may find that your clients really need people of a certain mental capacity because their business process is rapidly advancing, requiring someone with very strong conceptual-reasoning skills. The bottom line is that every business has different needs. Knowing and understanding your clients’ assessment needs helps you choose the right assessment wisely.

Validation is a key factor. If you offer one single assessment tool, you really need to have evidence that it has passed a validation process, and that the assessment you are choosing to market has broad application and appeal. Some assessment companies state in their marketing material that their offerings are not to be used as a hiring tool, while other assessment tools fail the 4/5th rule. The 4/5th rule is a mandate that states if 4/5ths of a protected class cannot pass the assessment, then that assessment is most likely a discriminatory assessment. Another form of validation is benchmarking. When an assessment is given to over 100 top performers in a specific role, the benchmark validation is the average sum of the results in each category. Another form of validation is a measure on the assessment that indicates the amount of times candidates distorted their answers. When a candidate distorts on the assessment, the validity of that assessment is greatly diminished.

Partnership is another aspect of picking the right assessment to represent. Consider carefully how the assessment company views your business specifically and our industry in general. Do they see you or our industry as their competition? Do they consider you a high-level strategic partner, upon whom they are counting to leverage and grow their market share? Over the past eight years I have taken, sold, represented, and administered over 22 different assessments. Each company has its own specialty and its own philosophy.

Some love our industry, some hate our industry; some are waiting for our demise so they can swoop down and chomp on our clients’ staffing budgets. Some refer to our business in “less than professional” terms, and others categorize us as they would a used-car salesman. I caution you to take your time and partner with someone who respects what you have built and the livelihood you intend to maintain. Find out about their training and certification courses, research their programs, and discern how they will integrate with your current business practices. Selling an assessment you know nothing about and using it to determine a candidate’s ability is akin to walking around with a loaded gun without reading the instructions or getting fully trained in its use. I strongly encourage you, if you choose to offer an assessment as an element of your business, to choose wisely. Be prepared to answer tough questions and to sit in the hot seat when a candidate that the CEO wants to hire has many red flags and he or she wants your advice on how to proceed.

Commitment is another key element in the decision to utilize assessments in your business. Are you prepared to get certified and operate a unit of your company that specializes in assessments? You will need to have someone on staff who can learn these assessments, understand the validation process, and is conversant in the results they provide. I am not suggesting that you will need someone full-time initially. If you are a big producer, sitting on the phone reviewing assessment after assessment with your client will eventually get boring, or get in the way of your selling. I personally review key candidate assessments with my clients when the role is significant, or when I have been hired specifically for the purpose of evaluating the top three on the short list, or if I am being paid as an assessment consultant.

The other element to consider is the training and development of your recruitment team. If you are selling and marketing assessments and they are being fully integrated into your business offerings, the people searching for, assessing, and representing the talent must be knowledgeable so they can make educated business recommendations. As an alternative, you can simply offer your clients another tool and pay a price to have a third party do the analysis. This way you don’t have to get wrapped up in training and developing your team to interpret and integrate the assessment with your existing business systems. You can buy assessments on an as-needed basis. You will merely need to have a high degree of confidence in a person whom you select to aid you in interpreting the assessment.

Determining your pricing model is an important step in your process of using assessments in the placement process. Are you offering this service as a “value add,” or as an additional fee for service? I do both. In some cases, we charge a slightly higher fee for our placement services, or a retainer, and all the assessments are included. In other cases, the employer purchases a group of assessments from Alliance and then we are available to interpret those assessments as they are administered.

My goal in offering assessments is to distinguish myself as a prominent talent-assessment firm first and a recruitment company second. This type of messaging frequently gets me the search assignment that previously might have gone to someone else. Additionally, this differentiated offering affords me the opportunity to be perceived as a single-source consultant, and as a true partner. I often find myself explaining to a client why I am not presenting a candidate who looks really great on paper. This leads to instant credibility.

My advice to you in choosing to assess or not assess is to first hire a coach or an advisor who is not trying to persuade you to buy their assessment. Using an unbiased third party will enable you to make the right decision for you and your company.

Secondly, take your time and conduct due diligence. There are scores of people every day who jump in, pay the fees, sign up, take a Web-based seminar, and are off and running, only to find out that they are running in the wrong direction. Assessments should not get in the way of your business; they are a tool to aid in your business. If you are not fully attuned to how you will use them, and how much value or revenue they will generate, then hold off until you are clear.

Third, get yourself training, and learn to interpret all levels of these assessments. Knowledge is power, and lack thereof is a ding to your credibility.

Many client companies are familiar with and utilize some sort of assessment tool or assessment methodology in their hiring process. Several of these companies are partnering with assessment consultants in their hiring and leaving us out of the final decision-making process. These companies are confiding in and taking advice from a “different” third party, who does not necessarily have the depth or breadth of understanding of our clients’ business and personnel needs that we have. In conclusion, I recommend partnering with an assessment company that you trust. The sooner you expand your ability to serve your clients in a more holistic manner, the sooner you will gain the ability to leverage yourself as the key consultant in all of your clients’ hiring decisions.

Margaret Graziano, CPC, CTS, and mother of three, has been a top producer in the staffing and recruiting industry for the past 20 years and has owned her own firm since 1991. She prides herself on client retention, and making the right hires. She has earned over $5 million in personal “desk production” income and has placed over 2,000 candidates in direct-hire positions. With the competitive business world and the war on talent in full force, Margaret’s company, Alliance HR Network, has ventured into new realms of talent acquisition, organizational development, and human capital consulting services, thus diversifying Alliance’s revenue streams and gaining new and exciting talent acquisition and assessment consulting opportunities. Margaret’s email is mgraziano@alliancehrnetwork.com, and her phone number is (847) 690-0077. The strategic planning forms are listed under a Strategic Planning Downloads section at www.alliancehrnetwork.com/ employers/industry_training.asp.

Q. I’m an owner of a successful staffing firm and I’ve been in business for eight years. I’ve participated in your free teleconference calls for several months, and although I agree with your advice, there is no time for me to change anything. Every time you say, “If you are your business, you don’t have a business” I cringe. I am still the top producer in my firm, and no one else is even close to my production. How can I maintain my production and turn this into a business? If you were me, what first steps would you take? Leslie S, Cincinnati

A. I hesitate to give you the exact first steps to take because I don’t have access to your P&L or your vision. This is advice I would give to any owner who is the top producer of his or her own business. “You need to replace yourself” if your exit plan is to eventually sell your business. When you individually produce most of the revenues of your company, you greatly diminish the value of your firm.

The most important decision any owner makes is who you surround yourself with in your business. I once heard a speaker refer to this as “who is on your bus and in what seat!” You are in business to make a profit.

You asked one question that I want to address: “How can I maintain my production and turn this into a business?” Often, when you begin to grow your business, your personal production does suffer. You are split between hiring, training, mentoring, managing, producing, and owning.

These would be my first 10 steps:

1. Write down your vision for your company. Why are you in business? What do you want your business to achieve? What is your exit plan? If you don’t have an exit plan, you are making wrong decisions today.

2. Develop a systematic hiring process.

3. Review your P&L and put anyone not making you money on “probation,” giving them specific goals they must achieve. Identify your top talents and “best use of your time.” Now delegate everything else to other people in your office.

4. Hire only individuals with sales experience and a track record of “high achievement.”

5. Close your open-door policy between 9 and 11:30 a.m. to complete the majority of your outgoing calls.

6. Have someone else handle your training. Of course, I would advise you to invest in my Top Producer Tutor, which is an 80-day online course that does take training off your plate. But whether it’s my training or someone else’s, training is not the best use of your time.

7. Start your new hires out working only the recruiting side of the placement process. Let them help you fill the hottest orders in-house so you can view them as an asset quickly. Then have them “earn” their way into the marketing side of your process.

8. When you have a proven producer, start to share some of your clients with this person. You may want to work only the “client side” of the business as you start to replace yourself.

9. Set one hour per week aside to work on your business. Stand back and look at your business as if you were a consultant hired to give advice.

10. Make sure everyone who works for you is very focused on booking send-outs. Also have them all focus on the number of sales vs. the production numbers.

Q. My owner lets us read The Fordyce Letter, and I hope he reads my question to you. I’m only working the candidate side of the business. I surface great candidates, and the other recruiters in my office work with the clients. They screen out some of my best candidates. Without working the client side, I have no control over the process, and my owner doesn’t want me working the client side. How can I change his mind?
Alan D, Santa Fe, NM

A. Many owners start out new recruiters on the candidate side of the business. If you surface top talent for the experienced recruiters in your firm, who have established relationships with their clients, you have a better chance of production.

There is a shortage of top talent, and the recruiters working the client side of the business are under great pressure to surface candidates. There have to be solid reasons why your candidates are being screened out. I would ask the senior recruiters to let you know what you “missed.” One other tip: Include at least one reference check when you submit a résumé to a senior recruiter.

When you are new, the senior recruiters are not confident about your abilities to match. When you include reference checks, it verifies the credentials and experience of your candidates and also shows that you went beyond what was expected when you attached reference checks.

When you were hired, your owner outlined your job responsibilities to you, which were focused on recruiting. Once you become proficient at recruiting, approach your owner and ask if you can work the client side of the business.

Q. We are having a problem with collections with some of my best clients. How do you handle this without ruining the relationship you have established for years? Ed B, Los Angeles

A. I would approach my hiring authority and ask for their assistance in solving this issue. Thank them for their business and ask them who you should speak with to resolve the AR issue. Let them know that their company is a top priority in your firm and you want it to stay that way. However, your recruiters are compensated on cash in and prefer to work for clients where they know they will get paid.

You might also want to “double your guarantee” if they pay within 10 days. We have clients who want us to invoice them the day the placement is closed vs. start date, so they can begin to process our invoice. I’ve also found that when I send my invoices in large fancier envelopes (I use bright bubblelopes), they seem to get more attention. Also remember to send a thank-you note when you are paid to both your client with a critique form and to the individual who processed your invoices.

Barb Bruno, CPC, CTS, is one of the leading international speakers for the recruiting profession today. Sign up for Barb’s FREE NO BS Newsletter and receive notices on the two FREE teleconferences she conducts each month – one for owners, one for recruiters. Go to www.staffingandrecruiting.com/newsletter.

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