Have you been receiving 15, 20, or even 25 calls a day from recruiters? Including several from different members of the same recruiting firm? If you have, I’ll bet you are tired of them and are just about ready to unload on the next recruiter that calls. Some of you may have already unloaded! Here’s my take on why this is happening and what you might think about doing to reduce the level of these calls.
Aggressive Staffing Firm Management:
The primary reason for the level of calls is the recession and the recruiting firm’s approach to making it through tough times. When the economy sucks, companies take action to reduce expense and struggle through the down period. One of the first areas to cut is contract and temporary services; followed by hiring freezes; mandatory shutdowns; and lay-offs. Oh, and of course, shutting down the use of third party recruiters – - staffing firms. All staffing firms are hit by recessions. Big executive search firms, temp agencies, specialized staffing firms and even boutique firms, like Kula, take a revenue hit. During this recession our industry has taken a 40% to 50% hit. That’s almost jump out the window bad. To counter lower sales, staffing firm management steps up sales efforts.
Nervous Recruiters Following Orders:
What do staffing firms do to counter the downturn? They try to take market share from competing firms by lowering prices and making more sales calls than their competition. This is right out of the recruiting management handbook: If you have been making 50 sales calls a day, go to 100 or 150 calls a day. And, by the way, the quaint idea about building relationships by proving your value goes out the window. I know that several firms in the bay area have instructed their recruiters to call anyone and everyone and don’t worry about someone else in the firm calling them. Coverage is King; worry about relationships later. Recruiters hate this management policy. But, they are measured daily on the number of calls made, connections, leads and orders written. If they don’t “hit the numbers” they are gone. So, if there are 200 to 300 accounting and finance recruiters in the bay area and each needs to make 100 sales calls a day, that’s about 125,000 calls a week. If you have ever worked in accounting, or can spell it, you will be called multiple times by recruiters. It doesn’t matter if you just told them last week that you have no openings, you will be called today and tomorrow to see if anything has changed. The good news: the recession has bottomed out and the calls will decrease when openings increase. But feel free to unload on the “management” of the firms for wasting your time by calling you day after day. Good recruiters hate bugging people and making calls just to make calls. Here’s my direct number: 408-717-4282. Please call and let me have it, if my recruiters are wasting your time.
Job Opening Postings:
Posting job openings on Craigslist, job boards, social networking sites, and your company’s website is the equivalent of chumming for fish. You will be guaranteed a ton of calls from recruiters. Probably more recruiter calls than candidates responding to those postings! The older the posting the more calls you will get. Old postings tell recruiters that your internal resources (referrals, in-house recruiters, and H.R. folks) have not been able to produce great candidates for you. In the current market, H.R. is busy saving money by doing all recruiting “in-house”. Since unemployment is high, the thinking is that it should be easy to find people for your openings. But, in the finance and accounting area, there is still a shortage of qualified, talented people. We make too few CPA’s in
We recently spoke with a finance V.P. who has been looking for a tax manager for five months using internal resources (H.R.) and hasn’t seen even one resume. In the meantime, one of the Big 4 firms is billing $500 an hour to get the work done. That’s about five times the burdened rate for a regular fulltime tax manager. Saving that $30,000 search fee works out to be about 75 hours of Big 4 consulting fees. Paying a third party fee would have already saved this company about $150,000 versus outsourcing the tax manager job for the past five months. Since almost all recruiting firms have discounted their fees (the other way to take away market share), it might only cost $20,000 to have the opening filled in sixty days, versus still being open after five months. I’m just sayin’.
Recommendation:
Here’s my recommendation for eliminating unwanted recruiter calls: If H.R. wants to try to fill the opening first, great. Give them a few weeks to produce viable candidates, and, if they don’t perform, insist they use a recruiting firm to help fill the position. And, take down those “stale” job postings. Then check with your managers to find a few recruiting firms that are experts in your area of need. Good recruiters are used to competing with in-house H.R. and one or two other firms. We even thrive when we have a couple of other firms to compete against. But, believe me; no recruiting firm does much targeted recruiting when a client uses four, five, or six firms. More is less productive for clients. Give us H.R., plus one or two other firms to compete against and we will work our tails off for you, and, while the recession lasts, at a discounted fee.
Final Comments:
I think the recession is just about over. We have seen our orders increase, and are seeing a sense of urgency to hire that wasn’t there a few months ago. I’m predicting that hiring will begin to increase in the second half of 2009, and will be back to “normal” by mid-2010. To be positioned to help our current and future clients meet their hiring needs, Kula has added several new recruiters to our team. Many of our new folks joined us from competing firms to return to a client-focused, long-term relationship building style. I cannot promise that we will not be calling you, but I do promise that you will not receive a bunch of calls from us, or from several of us. We are committed to respecting your time; keeping our word; performing above expectations; and providing our services at an exceptional value.