Recruiting Myths: Good People Don’t Look for Jobs in a Recession

One of the many reasons I like to blog is to gleefully disagree with conventional wisdom.  I don’t know if “good people don’t look for jobs during a recession” qualifies yet as conventional wisdom, but it does meet my four criteria:  It’s widely repeated, simplistic, unexamined, and outdated.  Therefore you can gain a serious competitive advantage by challenging it.    

In every recession, a few search professionals advance the argument that “top talent does not look for jobs during economic downturns” (so presumably employers need to hire those same search firms to find the “A players”).   The concept is that in a bad market good people with good jobs become risk averse and hunker down – you practically have to dynamite them out of their chairs - and only a silver tongued headhunter with uncommon skill can recruit them away.   The theory is that good people will rarely answer ads, and mediocre recruiters (or what Josh Letourneau hilariously calls  “Big-Box Publicly Traded Candidate-Grinders”) will never be effective.  As with most conventional wisdom, this is all partly true (naturally it’s the part that’s not true that I think about).

Quite a few blog posts have been written about wooing passive candiates in a recession (Look here and here). I’ve heard variations of this argument from people I really respect in the industry (all vaguely implying that “active” candidates are somehow inferior to people who are not looking).     Finally, the cherry on top of the conventional wisdom sundae -  is the advice that you have to a pay a huge salary premium to get someone to “take a risk” on a new job – see “How Much Cash Does it Take to Steal a Passive Candidate?.   Perhaps I’ll revisit the whole “passive candiates are better than active candidates” myth in a future post, but probably not.  It definitely meets my 4 criteria for conventional wisdom – but Ronald Katz already did a brilliant job of eviscerating it in his post “What’s So Great About Passive Candidates.”  (For balance, be sure to read the comments -  the people who disagreed with him also made some decent points).

Ok, so why am I convinced that great people look for jobs in a recession?  Well mainly, because we’re talking to them every day.  Lots of them.  They are migrating to DC in droves.  (Full disclosure, we first have to weed out lots of people I would not classify as spectacular).  

So what have we learned from talking to all these top performers?  I find they share many similar characteristics; they have marketable skills, they have business acumen; they have a strong goal orientation and a powerful desire to win.  They work very hard, and when they realize they can no longer win in their current job, they start to look around (they don’t stay and get bitter and passive aggressive).   In other words, the people with the best business acumen are also the fastest to diagnose “iceberg.”  They know it’s hopeless and head for the life rafts.  

I would argue that most top performers who are currently in very secure positions with strong companies  are probably impervious to any recruiting approach right now . . . unless you can offer them even more challenge, career growth and financial stability.  If you cannot offer that, I bet very few are actually worth the salary premiums discussed above.  (Not to worry, plenty of great people are “up for grabs” who will not lay flame to your salary budget).

 The recruiting mythmakers are right about one thing.  Top performers are risk averse, but they are not “change averse” – and this is a crucial difference.   They already know and understand the risks of staying with their current employer -  you just need to be less risky.   I suggest that the way to woo them is not with money (live by that sword die by that sword).  Rather, you need to have a real career opportunity to offer them, and you also need to break out of the interview protocol box.  You must have a very candid conversation about the risks of joining your organization.   Lay it out with brutal candor.  “Here is what is difficult, here is what we know how to do, here is what we need you to do, here are the constraints and here are the resources you will have at your command.”    It’s wildly unconventional, but when you do that, you dramatically lower both your risk and theirs simultaneously.  (If you do this correctly, you also won’t have to pay a big salary premium because the job seeker will perceive you as less risky.) 

So what has really changed that made this old chestnut of conventional wisdom so hopelessly obsolete?   The ease of “keeping an eye on the job market.”  It is really almost effortless.   Here are just a few examples:

• Job Board Aggregators: In a couple of minutes the savvy market watcher can set up a customized email job alert on Indeed.  Then they can go right back to work, trying to help their current Titanic company with the iceberg problem.   Every day Indeed will send them job postings gleaned from thousands of corporate sites and job boards, helpfully sent right to their gmail inbox.  They can peruse the opportunities at their leisure, applying only to the ones they find most appealing .  Easy.
• Job Boards are smarter:  If you have ever applied to even one job through Careerbuilder, you already know.  They will email you other suggested jobs that are similar.  The job seeker doesn’t have to actually do anything, the jobs just appear. Easier.
• Everything else on the web:  If you go almost anywhere on the web, LinkedIn for example, you have at least a few jobs sitting right there on your home page.  The is the easiest of all. You don’t have to open the Sunday paper, log in to Monsterboard or anything else.  During the course of your day, you will see opportunities by the dozens.  One click of a mouse and you are off to the races . . . you are now an “active” job seeker.

So, if the myth is not true but you are somehow not seeing great candidates, I would suggest that you might want to look at five factors you actually can control.  

• First, do you have something compelling to say when you reach them? 
• Second, does your recruiting process treat them well? 
• Third, do you know exactly what your performance expectations are? 
• Fourth, does your interview process differentiate who the top people are? 
• Fifth, can you hire them quickly before someone else does?  

Naturally, we can help you with any and all of the above.