Let’s rant a bit. This is sort of related to Neil’s theme from last week. I think I understand WHY this happens but it is just so dumb and counter-productive. It seems like any time it gets harder to make placements that people in our industry make it even harder on themselves.

I keep getting inquiries, some even from colleagues, asking me if I want to “supplement my income” by offering my clients something other than what they are already paying me to do. This is SO counter-productive in SO many ways. We all need to be BETTER recruiters right now. We do not need to try to sell something we do not know. It makes us look stupid to our clients and it keeps us from doing what we know best. If you want to leave the business then DO…but go do ALL of whatever else you do.

This “noise” all reminds me of times in the summer when I am working under the garden tractor…it is very hot outside…sweat running in my eyes…one arm way under there where the blades are…trying to get a nut threaded onto a bolt (a surgeon would call me a butcher and a butcher would laugh at me…not very dextrous to begin with) and right when I need the MOST concentration I can feel a mosquito landing on my forehead and a fly buzzing in my ear.

C’mon people…As Dr. Phil might say… Go take on the headset…

Neil and I like to argue about the sex of the number of angels we agree are on the head of a pin. Which is to say we agree about a lot of things and at least one of us enjoys debating the rest. Today, there is no debate in my rant. The best thing I have seen here or in the magazine in a while (except Pinnacle Perspectives, of course ) is his 7 laws post below.  Huge thanks for the content,for the reminders and for saving me time here. I have such an odd market that we’re actually buried in work. (That it is taking forever to get start dates due to the political transition is for another post).

JUST to keep my contrarian streak alive I’ll say that ONLY the 7th rule does not apply to us. It is probably valid in most niches and I have no argument with the concept. Finding and talking to our purple squirrels is THE challenge in this niche. I think it is why we can probably get contingency business (that we don’t do sourcing for at all) without even making phone calls. So to turn even my quibble into agreement with Neil. We know what OUR hard part is and we work at improving it.

Neil, Thanks again…this post is mostly to help the 3 or 4 people who have my RSS feed find Neil’s post if they have not already.

I know not everyone may read this on Friday but I like to have a bit of fun on Fridays because I love them almost as much as Mondays. I have enjoyed working with David,Todd and Elaine so far and I don’t expect that to change.  Since ere.net took over The Fordyce Letter I don’t think anyone has changed a single word of any post or article I have written. So readers and editors need to accept this with the lightness intended…which is not to say I don’t mean it.

The article about recruiters associated with the ‘sister site’ struck me as funny in a couple ways. First, I am sure my friend Tom, who is certain to comment on this, will redefine the overall relationship from sister to something more sinister. It took me a good chunk of my 23 years in the business to arrive at a point where I can admit that I know a few …call them ‘non third party recruiters’… I admire. It also took a while to develop a preference for working with hiring managers and the staffing function together as opposed to “HMs Only!!”. I still can’t keep up with everything about our own industry that I’d like. I’d love to know if some machine has kept visit statistics for my ‘sister site’. I cannot honestly say whether we have laid eyes on each other. There may have been a few times in the past when regular visitors to each site have had relationships that would be inappropriate for brother and sister.

Finally, to state my comment on Elaine’s post about Todd’s list of unemployed recruiters on my sister’s site a bit differently…

Just what the heck IS an unemployed recruiter?

Former, sure but unemployed is impossible here.

The proposition below in italics has apparently been sent to many people.

I guess in some sense, I might perpetuate the potential problem I am going to point out but I think a posting on this board will not be as damaging as sending this to totally random people on LinkedIn. I don’t even have a problem with the concept as long as it is discussed privately among people who might do it after some qualification is done. But to send this to random people one does not know does something much worse than the fairly inconsequential “cry of desperation” it sends about our industry.

What this does is invite every single person who ends up discussing a fee agreement with a recruiter to tell the recruiter he knows how much “fluff” is built into our fee structure if we can afford to give away 25% for not very much value.

I already take crap from about half the recruiting world for offering a 1k finder’s fee to people who originate a candidate I eventually place.

This guy (I do know it is a guy) is probably some franchise owner who can’t get his people to call or to get placements out of their calls and probably does not appreciate the value of a placement.  I guess I can stop now…this was a week ago. He is probably gone now anyway…

I’d like to invite you to partner with my company. If you are able to direct new business to my staffing company, I will pay you 25% of the total business generated for one year. Our average fees per hire are about $20,000.

The referral can involve you personally making an introduction to the client or you could simply let us know that a company is working with outside recruiters to fulfill their hiring needs. In any case, we would pay you a consulting fee of 25% of all the revenue generated from that account for one year. In ’07, we generated $460,000 from our biggest client, your take for simply pointing us in the right direction would have been $115,000.

** ANY INDUSTRY WORKS, OUR CLIENTS RANGE FROM LARGE COSMETICS COMPANIES TO HIGH TECH SOFTWARE.

Hey! I need to hear from you. We need some questions for future Pinnacle Perspectives columns. I could not think of any problems to discuss for my scheduled Friday rant so maybe they are all solved. Frank has the recession covered and he is certainly drawing comments on that.

I noted in another entry that our niche has challenges, but the recession is not one of them. It IS a problem for most in our business, and with no intent to “go political” at all, I just do not see how printing up money that does not exist is going to stimulate anything except debate.

Speaking of debate… I won’t get into a public one with Frank here, but I will say that I hope his “drooling” over the recession was intended more tongue-in-cheek than commenters seem to be reading it.

My list of stuff I wish I had not written is long and legendary. If that was one of mine it’d probably be on that list. I got as close as I wanted when I called the recession irrelevant.

Now…go out there and cause some problems for us to comment on!!

Just a quick out-of-cycle update. I love getting TFL in my email as much as I did when it came in the mail 20 years ago. Not because my name is in it now (that doesn’t hurt), but because it still is the best place to see both new stuff on our business AND things we need to review. I still scan it as soon as I get it and then read it with a high-lighter later.

Today’s scan was fun because I wrote the Pinnacle Perspectives column so long ago (1 month in ADHD time is like 7 years normal person time) that the responses all seemed very fresh to me and (sorry for saying so) I even liked my comments this time…BUT I am thinking about having a contest if anyone can tell me why I picked George Carlin as the writer’s name and then never explained it. I have a theory but I just don’t remember… And please… I hope no one says that I make them feel about me the way I felt about George before he died.  When I was a kid he made me laugh and think. Toward the end of his run he mostly made me feel sad for him and his bitterness. I am trying to work out a Benjamin Button trajectory on that for myself.

Maybe it was George’s line about asking the Father if God was so powerful can he make a rock so big he can’t lift it?  Not sure. Are we search practitioners creating problems we can’t solve in our handling of these ‘Who owns what?’ questions?

An email discussion with Elaine prompted my blog item this week. Last’s week’s thread ended up having some fun discussion.

Elaine: Do you think search firms are posting ads for jobs that don’t exist so that when the economy turns around, they have a pool of resumes to search among? 

Dave: If anyone is doing that they are doing nothing more than learning an expensive lesson. That would be just plain stupid. That said, I am sure someone IS doing that somewhere. My guess is that bigger companies in search or staffing or any field are more likely to do that than smaller ones and some probably do it all the time and not just in times like this.  I firmly believe that experienced recruiters from companies in the industry average 1 to 5 person sized companies are not doing this because they are too busy trying to make a placement happen.

Elaine: Is this really the case or are job hunters just assuming ads are bogus because they aren’t getting called for interviews? If these do exist, how can job hunters tell them apart from ads for positions available right now? Does it pay for job hunters to apply anyway?

Dave: I had not heard that job hunters were assuming job postings are bogus. That’s probably the knee-jerk reaction anyone would have if they didn’t get called. Back when I had some experience with postings and responses around 1999 to 2001 I found the vast majority of respondents to be stunningly unqualified for the positions they applied for. I don’t even use boards anymore but I talk with people who do and it seems like nothing has changed.

I’d guess most jobs are real when they are posted but consider this. 

If, say, IBM needs a Java software engineer and they post the need on their website and they give it also to the, oh, maybe 100 people on their ‘approved vendor list’ who also then turn around and rewrite it a bit and post it on their own site and aggregators like indeed.com and boards like Top Echelon it now looks like there are a couple hundred software jobs. So even if an actual Java software engineer replies to only 20 of them and hears nothing because of all the noise and dilution he thinks it is fake…Then consider that it is probably being mostly responded to by some COBOL veteran who wants to work for IBM so he can LEARN Java.

To tell you the truth Elaine, I hope this never changes. It is just job security for those of us who do what we are paid to do.

As for the part about whether it pays to apply anyway…I just can’t think of any response to that that I would want to see and claim 5 years from now. I’ll put it this way…as useless as I think it is, I’d probably do it myself if I were in their shoes. I’d just treat it the same as I do when I pray for that 7 to make my inside straight. (i.e. ain’t gonna happen and I have no right to ask).

I was thinking about the time I put into a couple ning-things when they came out and several others that I didn’t even join and I happened across a suggestion by one of the founders of one of the networks that ‘friends’ be limited to 150. Then some guy said that was way too few and this is what resulted. For sure, these things do no harm but I’d sure like to hear more about what value they are providing.

The comment:

“150 would be too limiting” is exactly what’s wrong with the world. Anyone treating even 150 people (in their own field) like friends can’t be billing much…but then…’billing’ might be a term many do not have to worry about. Maybe those 100 base-players Google is letting go. How can people be RECRUITING if they are interacting with that many others who are also supposed to be doing something other than interacting with each other (RECRUITING maybe)?

God help me, I LOVE recruitingblogs and fordycenetwork is ok too but most of the time spent there is in handling random requests from strangers who want to be my “friend” and never contact me again if I accept.

I consider Jason a friend because I have met him and we sometimes have interesting things to discuss. Dennis Smith is another guy I actually met and enjoyed talking with. Animal, I hardly know, but he puts out a lot of value for free. I guess, if I try to find SOME value in all this I can point to meeting Dennis on rb.com …but wait.. that came from Dennis commenting on a Bill Vick video who then told me about Animal and I met Jason at a Pinnacle meeting.

There HAS to be value in these networks somewhere…If there weren’t then former phonebook brokers wouldn’t steal them. I guess value for me is to give me something to complain about (but then, I can complain about 80% of everything. I like them. I am glad they are here but I need some help with the value. At least I got a blog post out of it…but wait. This came from a comment on Animal’s site

Well, since I am all happy and have nothing in the recruiting world to complain about today, I’ll take a moment to abuse my privilege of having access to at least a few eyeballs now and then. I’d like to invite anyone within, say, a 3-hour drive or a short flight like Chicago to come to the Annual Conference of www.tennesseerecruitersassociation.com on January 23rd. Details are on the site with a link for registration.

Sure, this is an ad. Yes,we’d love to sell a few more seats but that’s not why I put this here. It is here because the two  Charles Wadlow seminars I attended back around the turn of the century gave me a few philosophies and techniques that changed how I do business. There are a few trainers (VERY FEW) who combine entertainment and content well enough to make me go see them whenever I can. We can’t have them EVERY year so I sought out Charles and convinced him to stop making placements for one day so he could share his methods with our membership.

Charles has not been on the road, because unless you are one of the ‘very few’ I mentioned, there’s a lot more money in headhunting than there is in training.

Finally,  and somewhat sadly, we have some extra seats because I am hearing some instances of the old paradox… “We can’t afford to train ourselves to be good enough to survive.”

P.S. Attendees will get 10% off a Fordyce Letter subscription!

Disingenuous refers to someone who gives a false impression of sincerity or simplicity. Also lacking candor, or giving a false appearance of frankness.

This Friday’s rant is more of a seasonal one. I had to think a bit to relate it specifically to recruiting. Now that I think about it, everyone is guilty of this crime, when perpetrated on me, has been in or close to, our industry. I mean, my clients have not done this.

Before I make my big complaint, I’ll say that I think the recruiting equivalent is having that probable, single, solitary conversation with someone who has presented him/herself as a candidate and ending it with something like, “I’ll call you as soon as I see a good position” instead of “We’ll probably never talk again. I wish it were otherwise, but I’d rather we both be pleasantly surprised than leave you anticipating something that won’t happen.”

Ok, finally, I get to the point. What defines the idea of disingenuous for me is the idea of spreading your Holiday Cheer as thin as the gold leaf in Goldwasser by telling me you are giving a gift IN MY NAME to INSERT WORTHY CAUSE. Please, by all means, give to the cause. I respond to anyone I know who asks for a donation for something but I don’t turn around and say I  did it for someone else. (Don’t start! I said anyone I know).  Many people probably do this without even thinking about it but it is just pure BS! Maybe an exception would be an actual park bench with an engraved plaque or possibly donating a couple million so they’ll name the mess hall at Cahill College after me.

I think my point is made. I need to go back to the phones and close a deal in your honor.

Happy Holidays…really! All of ‘em.