In each new issue of The Fordyce Letter I like to include feedback from the subscribers and the community at large about what they are seeing in their day-to-day lives. I would appreciate your feedback on the following topic, and will be using it for an upcoming article in the June issue of The [...]
Is the economy affecting your business?
May 1st, 2008
“When I need a heart by-pass, rest assured that I won’t select my surgeon on the basis of what he charges.” That’s what an ailing executive recently opined when he was informed by his doctor about his arterial blockage problems. Why then are corporate executives so tightfisted when dealing with what is so commonly thought of as [...]
Wouldn’t it be great if employers automatically sent you all their job openings with a complete definition of exactly the type of person they wanted to hire . . . with no quibbling about fees? Wouldn’t it be great if all you had to do to attract the right candidates would be to post the aforementioned [...]
After every recession, the power pendulum swings away from the employer and towards the candidate. Employees who have endured less than ideal working conditions during these economic downturns expect their employers to reward them when things turn around. When they don’t, they polish up their resumes and usually find a more than willing target audience. Those [...]
Reader Steve Portman wrote, “I keep reading in The Fordyce Letter and hearing from my colleagues that business is rebounding. Our assignment flow is increasing every day but our revenues have remained basically the same. Deals get off the ground but seem to go nowhere.? When I look into why the deals soured, I constantly [...]
July is my usual time to jump in the trenches and I know many of you look forward to my trials, tribulation, successes and failures. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, I will have to postpone this activity for a month or two so, stay tuned. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got [...]
As best we can determine, approximately 35-40% of our readership is comprised of solo practitioners. About 90% of them work from their homes with the other 10% working from executive suite setups or small offices. Most made the decision to go solo after spending several years working for a more traditional multi-consultant firm. The average [...]
Tomato, tomahto; potato, potahto. Does one taste better than the other . . . or are we just victims of semantics? A similar debate rages over the pecking order in the recruiting (or is it search?) business . . . with both sides (contingency v. retained) arguing over which way is the best to locate talent. As [...]
With growing frequency, companies are telling recruiters that they will not honor our referrals because “they already exist in our Monster.com account (or some similar job board).” With millions of often worthless resumes residing on Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder, it’s a bit like saying, “We found that candidate’s name in the phone book after [...]
When should you consider terminating a new consultant? That’s what a number of readers have asked lately, especially since they started re-staffing their offices a few months ago. It depends upon a number of factors. In an office specializing in local clerical and/or administrative support placements, the time should be significantly shorter than in an office [...]
FORDYCE FORUM Dear TFL: I had a situation when a Vice President interviewed one of my candidates. He left his company and went to another, and took my candidate’s information with him. He hired my candidate at his new company. He pointed out that my agreement was with his former employer, and not [...]
The information you are about to read is a compilation of the results from almost 1,600 firms who responded to our survey representing over 4,000 revenue-producing consultants. This is a larger number of respondents than last year. The recruiting profession, at least according to this polled group, attests to the fact that our business is definitely [...]
If a consultant had Cash In of $214,357.08 (Ave. fee of $17,863.09 X 12 months) and they were paid the average commission rate of 41.38%, their earnings for the year would be $88,700.95. That’s $10,096 more than the average consultant earnings for 2003, the previous year’s survey results. That’s with only one placement per month [...]
One of the pleasures of editing a newsletter is the communication I have with our readers. Agree or disagree, I learn as much from these interactions as I hope you learn from The Fordyce Letter. Having been in this business since 1959, I’ve seen a lot of changes, made a lot of friends and had [...]
Dear TFL:In your Sept issue you talked about Fee Schedules.I work on a 25% contingency fee schedule with a 30-day replacement guarantee. I am losing some business because our fees are too high. I want to give them an alternative. Say, a flat fee at 23% or a 23% engagement fee. We are getting [...]
I just heard one of the dumbest things ever from a long time practitioner who has very successfully worked in a very specialized niche for over two decades. This reader’s major client (several very high level searches every year for over a decade with this Fortune 50 company), recommended his firm to one of their outside [...]
Thank God the election is finally over. Two years of agonizing nonsense is finally in the past. Now, of course, we’ll have to endure the continual speculation for the 2008 election. Hoo boy! The day after the election the stock market soared, oil prices dropped and, according to our readers, the hiring market improved significantly. Will [...]
This may sound like a keen grasp of the obvious but, unfortunately, it is far from apparent for too many in our business. The only thing you have to sell is your time! Expertise enters in but that too is time-sensitive. Your job, therefore, is to optimize the time you spend, focusing on those targets [...]
Last month, we presented a number of alternative ways to charge for services rendered to search/placement clients. Here are several more ways to earn dollars from client companies. Although every company’s needs are different, it appears that almost all employers are susceptible prospects for the right presentation to outsource all or a part of the hiring [...]
Well, I survived another year in the trenches under the auspices of my sponsor firm, a two-man generalist operation working almost exclusively in Missouri and the Midwestern states which surround our state. For twenty years, they have worked the small to mid-sized company market at the VP levels. They normally deal with the CEO/President/Owner of [...]
As this issue goes to press, I have started my two weeks in the trenches, an annual event that keeps me in the loop about what is really happening in the search and placement world. My target group is CEOs of small companies. My purpose this year is to get retained (or partially retained) search [...]
I am frequently asked how to go about developing a long-term strategic plan for firms in our business, usually because some banker wants some assurances before coughing up some loan money or because some practitioner thinks they can really predict what will happen in their future and can plan accordingly. Pro formas, 1, 3 & [...]
The statistics of our 19th Annual Earnings Survey are in with some surprising results. The survey was Emailed to about 3,500 readers who were picked at random from our current reader database. As of this writing, we received usable information from 1,100 firms. The increased response was due to the Emailing’s ability to allow participants [...]
How consistently do you market your services? Do you even have a marketing plan? Or are you like most search professionals who rely on a combination of word-of-mouth and occasional selling and networking when time permits? Great marketing doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The secret is to get the right message to the right [...]
I. I will do more for my productive consultants and less for those who are just taking up space II. I pledge to set optimistic, but realistic, goals for my firm and my consultants. III. I promise to stop listening to economic doom and gloomers and other assorted naysayers. IV. I will [...]
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