Recruiting.com

Everyone loves a bargain, but when hiring talented professionals it can sometimes come back to bite you as you continue to grow your staff. We recently worked with a client that has experienced just such a problem and the fix is hard to swallow. The client has (with our help) found some very talented professional as they moved from a three to a ten person team. Originally they weren’t able to offer top dollar salaries, but because of the strong growth and current technology they’re jobs were competitive in the market. Unfortunately as growth has waned and project work has slowed they’ve found that some of the candidates they are interested in now are above their typical range. Since they’re having trouble finding what they want in part because of the internal equity they established over the last few years they now find themselves with some hard decisions to make. The most significant are:

Since the beginning of the year we’ve been barraged with forecasts and articles predicting anywhere from relatively short-term to a prolonged and a very severe recession in 2008. The experts almost all concur (even Fed Chief Ben Bernanke recently said as much) that the present day Mortgage Crisis is almost certainly going to drag the once robust US economy into a recession that could last as long as two years. The Conference Board just released April’s Consumer Confidence figures and they’re presently at a 30 year low. Heck, other than our President I don’t think there’s a single public figure not willing to go on the record and state that we’re headed for a recession. Yet, curiously there’s been little evidence of a slowdown in the I.T. employment marketplace.

We’ve all seen it. Summertime is over and you head back to school and inevitably there is a new girl on that first day. Of course, everyone suddenly wants to date her and is falling all over themselves to do so. Why? It could be any number of reasons, but the real answer is that’s she’s new. That’s it, but in our society, as we all know, new is better. Ok maybe not everyone believes this, but that doesn’t stop every IT professional from pulling the high school equivalent when a new company comes to town.

As an owner and manager of an IT recruiting company we are constantly talking to candidates and clients alike about the advances of technology and how it can impact our industry or potentially help us run our business better. Over twenty plus years I’ve gone from a 100% paper environment to an almost paperless existence and seen the rise of the fax machine, PC’s, the Web, company websites, job boards, social networks and many different software tools developed specifically to assist our industry.

As a Professional Recruiter for the last 25 years I’ve spent much of my time preparing candidates to successfully interview and secure a career opportunity. We cover it all; How to prepare mentally, How to prepare physically (standing up on a telephone interview, etc.) How to ask insightful questions to uncover the true client need and most importantly, how to ensure you communicate at a highly effective level (truly understand what they’re asking and they understand precisely what you’re saying). With that in mind it could be said I’m an “expert” in the art of interviewing. That said it makes it even harder to admit I myself fell into some of the most common interview traps when I was recently interviewed for an article, "IT Labor Shortage or Not, Gaps Remain" in Baseline Magazine.

Not to toot our own horn (OK maybe a little bit) but a short while ago we wrote a blog about the IT Labor shortage, and it drummed up some interest from various sources which eventually led to Dice writing another article and interviewing one of our own (Dan Martineau) on the topic.

Most recruiters by nature aren’t trying to offend people as they go about the job of recruiting candidates for their client customers. However our quest to find the perfect person leads us to find many more really talented “close but no cigar” candidates that after showcasing our opportunity to and gaining their sincere interest we must now let them know that they just aren’t a good fit (insert reason here).

Communication: \kə-myü-nə-kā-shən\ - a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system

I think that we’ve all heard how email communications are a poor substitute for speaking on the phone, and that most of us believe that since the aspect of understanding someone’s emotions or sense of humor is just so tough.

We recently commented on how information, through the various media outlets, can be reused and unfortunately create more misinformation in the process. However, I wanted to step back into the guts of that article to discuss one of the key points on relocation and compensation.

I’m sorry, but in working a recent recruiting effort for a mid-level developer I’ve run across a string of applicants that while their age indicates adulthood, their career actions precludes them from inclusion.

The Information Age can be such a wonderful thing. Well, most of the time anyway. With information shared, referenced and linked so quickly via the internet, sometimes the effect can be less than desirable. Whether it’s a major media outlet or a small web site, things slip through the cracks. Other times, the errors are even bigger.

Some people love them (count me in) and some hate them, but analogies are what assist many people in getting their point across where otherwise it would have fallen on deaf ears.

So it was funny for me to read in the Brazen Careerist the other day as Penelope Trunk was making several very valid points about how people should invest in their careers and make decisions that will help them along the way, and to see her use a rather interesting analogy (that of Ashley Dupre – call girl to Eliot Spitzer). As you may imagine several of her reader took umbrage to the reference and somehow lost the nugget of knowledge she was passing along (oops!).

According to a recently released Duke University/ CFO Magazine survey, 54% of CFO’s believe we are already in a recession. While that number fluctuates from one survey to another the trend has been moving steadily to those CFO’s, Economists, Business leaders, etc… increasingly believing we’ve already entered a recession.

The goal of an interview isn’t just to get the job as some people might believe. The goal of an interview is to obtain a sufficient understanding of the company, the job (i.e., is this a job I even want?), as well as to provide your potential employer with an understanding of your skills relative to their needs (i.e., is this a good fit for my skills?).

People look at taking a counter offer in many different ways. Some think it’s unethical and/or unprofessional and of course it can be both, but it also can be neither.

Let’s take the scenario of a high profile college coach who isn’t quite on the hot seat, but isn’t able to lock down a raise and a contract extension. Said coach, who may be worried about his job security, interviews with another school, gets an offer, but then turns it down after his current school offers more money and a contract extension.

As a part-time blogger I was intrigued by a recent article in the Business Journal about the death of the corporate blog. It seems that many of the blogs started by high-level executives have grown more dormant than the planning committee for Rudy Guliani’s inaugural ball.

Prime beef that is! What I mean by prime beef is those individuals whose talents and skills exceed the average person in the market, and quite frankly companies are finding them in short supply. Not because they don’t exist, but because a lot of companies aren’t prepared to pay the higher price for the level of talent they desire, and as we all know in a supply and demand world if you can’t pay the market price for the goods then you need to look at different goods. Can you say Grade A?

There’s much said and written about a shortage of I.T. talent by many parties and for many different reasons. The RPO’s (Recruiting Process Outsourcers) are in the business of selling their service to companies who don’t believe they have the talent on staff or amount of talent necessary to recruit for all their needs (see Hyrian). The Technology industry itself complains almost daily about the difficulty in recruiting and hiring the talent they require and the need to increase the number of H1B visa’s allowed each year. Consulting companies proselytizing to the media "that 10 Million jobs will remain unfilled by the end of the decade." And of course Professional Recruiters are heard delivering their sermons to anyone that will listen that with the dearth of talent companies have but no choice to employ their services to retain the talent they must have. I won’t say these folks have a conflict of interest but they all certainly benefit if conventional thinking is that there’s a shortage of talent.

We all know that at every recruiting industry meeting there is either a round table discussion about how to become a “big biller” or a “big biller” giving the speak about what it takes to make the big bucks. Now while I’m certain there are a lot of little things that they do that make them successful, but in my twenty years in the business, far and away the most repeated comment at these meetings is about being choosy (i.e. good decision making, having business acumen, etc.) about your projects and not running the fool’s errand. (Fool’s errand: A fruitless mission or undertaking.)

There are those rare moments in life and sometimes in business where everything becomes crystal clear. Where you ask yourself how you could have ever thought any different. How could you have missed the sheer simplicity of it. I, I’m happy to say, have just experienced a similar epiphany where it all became clear.

One of our biggest pet peeves in the Placement industry is companies that don’t understand the power of perception and the effect perception has on:

1. Whether candidates accept or reject their employment offers.

We’ve all heard and understand how the process of dating equates nicely to the interview process. Hell, someone even wrote a book about it. As a recruiter I’ve used the dating process as an analogy for the interview and offer process with candidates for over twenty years. Mostly because it works so well to help candidates understand the emotions that they are going through and deal with them more effectively so they won’t interfere with their decision making process. However, in working with a new client company, I used the same analogy, but with a twist, to give the HR recruiter that I’m dealing with a better understanding of what information I needed from them and why.

Everyone seems to have their own take on how manage their career. Some people prefer to hunker down in their cube and avoid conflict, while others seem intent on schmoozing with everyone in the office. However, no matter what you’re personal strategy, (here’s some tips for navigating office politics) If you work with other people, then your success is impacted to some degree by your ability to deal with those people and one of the most important things that you can do is to manage up.

Recruiters are great (can you tell I’m a recruiter). Seriously though when companies need people, people that they can’t find or find fast enough companies call their trusty recruiter, and expect that they will fill the need quickly. Of course sometimes it works just that way…other times…not so much. The question that needs to be asked is why did it fail?

Over the last few weeks we’ve been assaulted by a barrage of media outlets spewing the same thing. RECESSION… Whether it’s the nightly news, NPR or the Wall Street Journal, the “R” word has been on everyone’s lips. And why not? A recession affects us all whether it affects us directly (loss of a job) or indirectly (belt-tightening measures like low or no annual increase) in the face of rising costs. So the better question to ponder isn’t whether or even when (for you pessimists out there) it’s what can I and should I be doing to ensure I’m able act/ react to what happen. Here’s my list of things you should be doing now to prepare for what may be inevitable: