How to Find Employees - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #4 OUT RECRUIT YOUR COMPETITORS

#4: Out Recruit your Competitors

Companies get very frustrated when they cannot find people because there is a labor shortage of a particular skill.  The frustration is not necessary.  The solution to that problem is to become labor market competitive and then recruit more effectively than your competitors do.  It's a simple solution that is very do-able.

You might focus on the cost of becoming competitive.  We can help you do the calculations, but the cost of the work not getting done is often greater than the cost of paying competitively.

Pay is not the only issue.  The quality of work life, the technology, the management, the environment, all have been shown again and again by research to be stronger drivers of both attraction and retention than money.  But asking someone to work for a lot less than they are getting at their current employer probably will not be a winning strategy.  Once you pay "table stakes", more money delivers a diminishing return and you can often win the labor market competition with the non-monetary elements.

A lot of recruiting is not done well so just having a clear, warm and compelling recruiter goes a long way.  Research in fact exists that says you increase your chances of having your offers accepted if your candidate likes your recruiter.

Your recruiter also needs to understand what will attract your candidates.  Selling them something they don't care about does not work very well.  The vast body of attraction/retention research, including that done at Wentworth, gives you a clue as to what candidates want from their jobs, but asking candidates what's important to them is the best strategy, assuming that the company offers what the candidate wants.  If not, one backs away.  There is no deal to be made.

Here's a story to illustrate my point.  Years ago, we worked for a utility, recruiting information systems professionals.  IBM had just released a new database product.  This organization had upgraded their computer systems and had installed this database but was struggling to find employees who knew how to work on it.

We analyzed the situation and realized that they offered a very special combination of characteristics.  They were a utility, very stable and nearly 100% certain to be around for a long time.  At the same time, they were at the leading edge of computer technology.  We put the word out and attracted and hired just enough people who knew this new database to put one, as a teacher, in each major work group.  Then we changed our branding of the job, offering the stability of a utility and training in the new database.  We filled 51 jobs in the first year for about 10% of salary, approximately a third of what the utility had paid a contingency firm for the one hire they had achieved in the six months before they brought us in.

Other big organizations wanted the same people we were hiring, but we out recruited our client's labor market competitors.

There is more to good recruiting, of course, and the specific prescription for out-recruiting your competition will vary job by job.  Give me a call if you'd like to chat about how to do it in your situation.  I'm at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John

How to Find Employees - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #3 THE MORALITY OF STEALING

#3: The Morality of Stealing

I remember when I first got a corporate HR job I was told that we could not direct source candidates. "It's against the rules!" people said. What rules, I wondered. And whose rules?

It turned out there were no rules. The rules were a myth made up by recruiters who were too shy or embarrassed (or lazy) to call candidates or sources of candidates. But there are still a lot of people today who feel direct sourcing is immoral.

Since I have earned my living by either doing or managing this poaching, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it.

My conclusion: it's a rough and tumble world. You either compete or you don't.

It's actually a little more complicated than that.

• I think it's mandatory to tell the truth. Lying about a job or a company is just unacceptable to me and to our consultants.

• I think it's important to value personal relationships more than recruiting, so we do not, for instance, approach employees of former clients within a very long contractually prohibited period...which usually means forever. Nor do we recruit from friends.

• It's also very important to pay attention to the law which can frown severely on inducing someone to break their employment contract while also committing a fraudulent act.

So we do not solicit candidates directly. We ask for referrals. If they offer up themselves, we ask if they are contractually bound to their employer. If so, we back off. If not, we proceed with that person.

It's important, I think, to focus on the candidate's ability to say no. The only people who move to a new job are people who are not happy with their jobs. They either were already looking for a job, thinking about looking or were presented with an opportunity that, after interviewing and thinking about it, seemed like a better fit than their current job.

But here's the big point, to me: capitalism is competitive and that competition extends to recruiting employees.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can find people you cannot find, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John

John Wentworth | President | 310 732 2301 | johnwentworth@wentco.com
The Wentworth Company, Inc. / Wentworth Recruiting | www.wentco.com

How to Find Employees - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #2 WHERE ARE THEY?

#2: Where are they?

A very useful way of figuring out where to look for candidates is represented by the "Spider Diagram" below.

Candidates are in certain networks, look at certain websites, read certain e-magazines and blogs, belong to certain associations, etc.

A recruiter can find candidates by accessing the places candidates visit. In our last post, we talked about discovering the organization of a professional community. This is how you do that.

I remember one of the very first searches I did as a vendor. The job was a manager of voice and data, analog and digital.

I had friends who were back-room technical voice and data network experts, most of whom managed positions like the one I wanted to fill. I wrote down ten names on a yellow pad (that's how long ago it was!) and started calling. I never got to the end of the list because the first people I called gave me so much help, including successful referrals.

(A former employee and I, on a long winter drive across Michigan, figured out that you should be able to find anyone with two phone calls. The first call just needs to be to the right person.)

My friends explained how voice and data networks worked and how both digital and analog technologies fit into the picture (this was in the 1980's and digital technology was new to telecommunications networks). They told me which companies were advanced and which were not. They told me the names of people who were in the professional networks and who knew a lot of potential candidates and the names of professional organizations whose leadership was knowledgeable of the membership.

In more current times, those same individuals would have told me about websites, blogs, etc. also.

Also in more current times, if I do not have the "starter" friends, I can find people to talk with on LinkedIn. All of this work provides an education as to how this community was organized, who the experts were, who the vendors are and where to find the user groups or other professional associations.

The next step, of course, is the hard work. We have, on occasion, looked at as many as 2500 individuals to find a very strong pool of candidates with a rare combination of qualifications.

This work helps us find the seam of gold: qualified, interested and affordable candidates...and the job gets filled.

Because we figured out where the candidates are.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can find people you cannot find, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John