Why do you care what recruiting costs?
· If you are Human Resources: because you are viewed as an expense
item, and your professional fortunes will rise and fall by how well your boss
and others think you are controlling your costs.If you are not in Human Resources:
HR's wasting money cuts into your operating budget by shrinking the pie.
Recruiting efficiency, keeping the costs down, is your friend.
You use agencies or search firms and are going
to pay a fixed fee, contingency or retained.
Why do you care what the search really costs the
vendor?
· Because your level of service will, sadly, rise and fall based on
the amount of profit the vendor makes on your search. If the work associated
with finding the right candidate for you costs a lot, the vendor's margins drop
and the vendor's enthusiasm for you and your opening drops.
· We laugh at companies who brag that they beat a contingency firm's
fee down to 10% of salary. We know that that agency is sending all the good
candidates to clients who pay 25% of salary and the "thrifty" client
is getting the leftovers. The smart client pays what it will take to find the
right candidate.
You use an hourly service like Wentworth.
· With an hourly service, so long as the work is monitored and
managed, the cost reflects the difficulty of the search, not the fact that the
vendor has you over the barrel.
· If you are using an hourly service and you do not have mutually
agreed upon goals, productivity measurements and cost measurements, you are
setting yourself up for experiencing why contract recruiting has gotten a bad
name. As you might guess, we measure everything we can measure, including
progress against goals and cost, and report it with total transparency to our
clients.
You can control the real cost by making sure
that your hiring managers and your recruiters are good partners:
· Hiring managers want people who exist, not figments of their
imaginations.
· Hiring managers give the time and attention required to make sure
the recruiters understand what they really want.
· Hiring managers respond to recruiters cooperatively and quickly.
· Hiring managers don't change their minds mid-search about what
they want. A lot of hiring managers see their recruiters, vendor or employee, as
the enemy and, sadly recruiters have been known to feel that way about their
clients. The war, hidden, simmering or overt, drives the cost up.
What can hiring managers do? Insist that
recruiters who serve you are just simply excellent then become their partner.
And hold their feet to the fire. Good recruiters are OK with that.
What can HR do? Find out how the best recruiting
works and then deliver it. Don't do a survey. Not many hiring managers or HR
folks have seen great recruiting, so they have a hard time imagining it. Invent
something that meets your hiring managers' needs.
What can vendors do? This is a hard matter
because almost all vendors are in a business model that fails to reward the
behaviors hiring managers want (good service). Example: better service takes
more time, more time has a dollar value, more expense means lower margin, so a
recruiting vendor is financially incentivized (more margin) to spend the fewest
hours possible serving the client, thus delivering the lowest service.
Wentworth has the only business model we know of
that incentivizes pro-client behaviors and punishes anti-client behaviors. We
think the business model is key to our success. The result is that our single
position searches tend to cost 13-16% of salary and our volume recruiting cost
half of that or less.
If you are interested in how Wentworth can
deliver the service you have dreamed of at a reasonable cost, please call me at 310 732
2301.
Thanks so much,
John
