Recruiter News  >  November 2006: Volume 3, Issue 11

Creating the Job Match

The presentation of your candidates to your hiring manager clients is a very important part of the recruiting process. You can’t afford to do searches over again. That’s why you must make sure that everyone on the interviewing teams agrees to the performance profile and that they conduct a thorough interview. If the presentation you make is formal, accurate, and professional you’ll minimize the number of candidates the team will need to see. This way the best person gets the job, not the person who makes the best presentation. Here are the four things you need to do to demonstrate to the hiring manager and the interviewing team that the person you’re presenting is a great fit for the job.

Great resume – make sure the resume is professional with no errors, inconsistencies, or gaps. Cover all of the key issues with your client beforehand and highlight these. Instruct the candidate to redo the resume to incorporate any of the changes you suggest. The resume is an important document. It’s important that recruiters insure this is as good as possible. If you’re just moving paper about, you’re really just administrating a recruiting process, not impacting it.

Formal assessment – even if you just conduct a phone screen, you should document your results. As a minimum conduct a short of work history and obtain a quick summary of the candidate’s most significant accomplishments. Take good notes. These should describe the actual results achieved, examples to prove key traits, and an assessment of critical job related factors. It’s best to summarize your evaluation of critical traits (e.g., motivation, ability, team skills, cultural fit, trend of growth) using a formal assessment template (go to the Recruiters’ Corner at www.adlerconcepts.com to download a copy of our evaluation form you can use). (continued...)

Question

Hi Danny, I am a solo practitioner and started my firm in January. I am happy to say that I am off to a fairly good start and feel I am ready to bring on a staff. With that, I have a few questions and would appreciate your assistance. In your experience, do you believe in hiring candidates at the entry level (coming right out of college) or have you found it more successful to go with a candidate with more business experience? Also, this would be my first hire and I would like for this person to have responsibilities over business development and candidate recruitment rather than being only responsible for candidate recruitment. Do you have a preference or any insights on which organizational strategy has been more successful for your firm or firms you have come into contact with? Thank you very much for your help!

Response

Congrats on your early success, and I admire your decision to begin to grow your business.

Now you have to make the critical decision on what kind of growth. If you were trying to strictly maximize cash, the model that works best is the "rainmaker" model. You are the rainmaker, you get the clients, you qualify and close the candidates. Your "assistant" (whatever her/his title) will do the 31% of a recruiter's day that is not closing or "skill set" dependent. (planning, research, references, scheduling, name sourcing, and even initial recruiting calls. I have seen recruiters with seven figure W2's with this model, usually with two such "assistants", depending on niche requirements.)

But if you want to grow your business to a point where it is not dependent on your production, and your risk is diversified, and you are beginning to plant the seeds of an exit strategy, you should hire and train recruiters who run a full desk, generally in your niche or one that relates closely to it. This is how I built my firm and it allowed me to start my training business while still running my search firm. So maybe I'm partial to this model. I'm equally biased toward the hiring of college kids, because they:

Click on Miss J's photo to email your recruitment questions and problems to her!

‘Tis the season to eat turkey, tra lala la la la

Miss J is busy this week defrosting the ostrich (turkey gets so boring year after year don’t you find?) This year Miss J is embracing the global thing birdwise. Only problem with a bird this size is going to be the plucking - Miss J envisages a real problem balancing the ostrich on her lap! But fear not she has roped Soames the faithful family retainer into a cunning plan although it sounds quite dangerous and requires Soames to hang from the rafters counter balancing the turkey as Miss J de-plumes the voluptuous bird. Soames, totally unconvinced that this plan will work has made alternative plans that feature Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bottle of the Chateau Wallmort (2006, such a good year for grape). But being the professional that she is, Miss J has left Soames dangling above the Aga and takes a moment to sit quietly reading from her mail bag. Oblivious to the yelps of a slightly singed Soames she plucks a letter from the depths:…

Dear Miss J,
Client relationship building akin to dating, I like that concept! I loved your column last month but had some questions about the next step!

Let me get this right, I have qualified that this person is going be the RIGHT one and I am ready for that first date? Because I have qualified this visit I know that I am meeting with a decision maker and a person that uses my services. So all in all, a good use of my time. This will be so much more different than how it could have been, as on previous first dates. You know the ones, you sit quietly across from your ‘date’ staring at his comb over and contemplating the laws of physics applied to keeping the impressive sweep of hair in exactly the right place. Meanwhile he goes on and on and on about the differences between the steam and electric automotive. The only time you get to open your mouth is to let out a snore or to gulp air and chug wine alternatively all the time thinking “How did I get it so wrong”.

Now how about the meeting with the ideal client, where the client completely takes over and I feel pinned against the wall? I know what you are going to say ‘You need to get the client to talk and learn about themselves’. Agreed but surely I need to ask the odd question or two before being escorted out the door don’t I? How do I get the most out of a meeting, get all the information I want and still get that second date?

Mute from Munster, IN

Dear Loveless of Louisville, KY:
Well, Mute from Munster, IN,

You are right, we do need to listen to the client but hopefully as they answering our well thought out and researched questions. One way to make sure that we have structure and come away with the information that is going to help you offer exactly the right solution to the client is to prepare and send an agenda. Tut, tut, I can hear my reader’s voices as I make this suggestion “I would never tell my client what to do”. Well just you carry on doing what you do and let me and Mute discuss the merits of agendas.

How many awful dates have you been on? How many winking, food dribbling, train spotting nerds could have been avoided with just a few more qualifying questions? When deciding on dates or client visits it is better to qualify out than in. A two-hour drive to see a prospect that might have a requirement in 2 months is probably not the best use of your time. Admittedly, if that job was going to be a $250k VP of Business Development and a 20% fee of course you would. So ask as many qualifying questions as you can to be ahead of the game. It could as well be a $20 tech support job with a client that has no plans for growth and has not taken anyone on in 2 years – is this your dream client?   (continued…)