28 Mar Feel the love

Finding a great recruiter isn’t easy, keeping them isn’t hard. It’s all about feeling the love.

Ask yourself this question; is yours a business that wants to hire people in the top 10% of their field, or as close to it as possible, or the bottom 10%? If you answered that with bottom 10%, your business won’t be around for too long and there’s a fair chance you’ve got rocks in your head.

We would all love to hire only the best of the best, yet that can be an elusive panacea that often ends with the hiring of average personnel, leading to average productivity and average financial results. The sauce of higher profits is in having only the best ingredients and a great recipe. Real growth (increased productivity and ascending profitability), is driven by hiring the best people available. Anything else leads to stagnation or the opposite effect, decline. So, what is the secret to hiring the best people? You must start with the best people, the best recruiter that money can buy. Not only will finding the best recruiter earn you more money, it will save you money too. How? you might ask.

There is a question that old seamen use when they are trying to bring people back to earth, as in when their heads are in the proverbial clouds; What’s the hardest thing about barbequing a whale? First, you have to catch the whale.

The reason that recruitment agencies exist is because recruitment is a whale of job. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t be there. You’ll hear people talk about it being easy; it’s not rocket science; anyone can do it. They are wrong. Those same people are usually fire fighting the problems caused by bad hires, spending fortunes on recruitment agencies and are generally generating all round negativity that can be as debilitating to their employers business as a recession.

Could you;
• Sift through 100+ resumes every day/weekly?
• Talk to dozens of different people every day, and hundreds per week?
• Maintain relations and engage with 20% of those people indefinitely until your company needs them?
• Be a super computer user and maintain meticulous records of every conversation you ever have, whilst ensuring that you comply with a myriad of employments laws, protocols, due diligence and common courtesy?
• Build and maintain extensive social media networks and online presence?
• Create recruitment marketing collateral that sells benefits and allows the negotiation of lower salaries?
• Coordinate interviews, offers, start dates etc. in two directions for the most important change in that person’s working life, managing dreams, goals, expectations and demands, day in and day out for the rest of your life?
• Tell the vast majority of those people that they have failed, potentially shattering their dream?
• Maintain cordial relations with stressed-out line managers/owners and/or HR people whilst ensuring you all meet the company’s strategic recruitment objectives?
• Do all of the above and more, as pleasantly as possible, maintaining a completely positive outward facing attitude?

Exceptional recruiters are a special breed, and generally they hold all of the best qualities you will want to see from each and every one of your top back office employees. They must be extremely well organised, they must be exceptional at face to face and remote communication, they must understand finance, they have to be thorough, diligent, have an eye for meticulous detail, technology savvy, know when to shut up, what questions to ask and what questions they can’t ask. They must be a guru in marketing a job to get people to apply, and then they must be utterly ruthless in rejecting people when necessary whilst being polite and welcoming and maintaining the company’s brand integrity. Most importantly they must be able to sell to the best of the best and negotiate the best deal for both their employer and potential employees.

If you’re an internal recruiter you must also do all this whilst dealing with the never ending stream of calls from every type of agency recruiter on earth trying to sell you their services. Yet the success or failure of every business often depends on the quality and calibre of their recruitment process. To get the best people, you must start with the best people. As Winston Churchill said; “I am easily satisfied with the very best”.

A well paid professional recruiter who loves what they do, can reduce your cost on every hire you make, reduce management downtime on wasted interviews and the like, reduce dependency on agencies, ultimately reducing your average cost per hire. Unless you are intentionally downsizing or scaling back, before you think about skimping on who does your recruitment, think about what it will cost you if you do? It’s a well proven fact that better recruiters bring about increased productivity across the board in the businesses that they work for, and it’s because they love their job. That is the secret to finding and keeping them. Finding a professional recruiter who loves what they do, and paying them to do it is a key to success; it will not only save you money, it will make you money and is undoubtedly one of the best investments a business will ever make.

Posted Posted by Glenn Smith at 1:04 am Feb. 1st, 2012