We interview thousands of people every year. And as I go through the candidate interview notes, certain themes emerge again and again. There are four factors that predict employee turnover and I’ve posted them over at The Washington Business Journal.

Even in Washington’s huge nonprofit and association market, where the use of search firms is prevalent, some organizations choose to engage search firms very rarely. We regularly work with people who have never engaged the services of an executive search firm before. So naturally people have questions about who pays (the employer always pays), when the fee is due (it depends on the search firm), how much the fee will be (it depends on the search firm), what services are delivered (it depends on the search firm) and what replacement guarantee is in place if the placement does not work out (it depend on the search firm).

Let’s start with fees. Search fees vary widely depending on the business model the firm uses.

Retained executive search firms typically charge 25 – 33% of the estimated total annual compensation a candidate is expected to receive in their first year in the position. (Many search firms include first year commissions and bonuses in the estimated total compensation figure, but not the cost of benefits.) Some portion of the fee is always due when the search commences, but the final fee is often dependent on what salary the candidate accepts. So if a search firm charges 30% of annual salary and places someone earning $100k, their search fee will be $30k. But if that same candidate negotiates for a starting salary of $110k, or a salary of $100k with a sign-on bonus of $10k, the search fee would rise to $33k.  Additionally, some firms charge back their expenses to the client, so the total fee can easily rise to 35% of total annual compensation. Staffing Advisors is a retained search firm, but instead of tying our fee to the candidate compensation, we prefer to charge a simple flat fee with no charge back for expenses. We set our fee in advance of the search based on the level of effort we anticipate, and our fees are typically 15% of less of total compensation. Like many retained search firms, Staffing Advisors handles executive searches in a wide variety of functional areas (and not just Accounting, or IT, or HR). Consistent with most retained search firms, we offer a replacement guarantee of a full year if a placement does not work out for any reason.

Contingency search firms do not guarantee to fill positions, but if they do, their fees are often between 20 and 25% of annual compensation. Contingency fees are usually due only after the candidate starts work, so if nobody is hired, no fee is due. Some contingency search firms are even willing to negotiate placement fees, but negotiating lower fees can sometimes result in a lower level of effort being spent on your search and a lower chance of filling it. Contingency based firms tend to specialize in one functional area (like accounting). If a placement does not work out, contingency search firms typically offer replacement guarantees from 30 days up to six months.

Some firms take a hybrid approach of requiring some portion of the fee in advance, and making the remainder contingent upon the placement. They key for you as the buyer is to understand which business model best suits your needs. For more insight into the differences between retained firms and contingency firms, read Contingency vs. Retained Search, Common Fallacies.

Most employers try to save time and money in one of two ways:

• They try to select job advertising venues that yield a relatively small number of resumes–niche job boards for example. In theory, only “insiders” know about the job board, so “outsiders” apply less frequently and there are fewer bad resumes to wade through. The rationale is that it is worth paying a bit more for a job board if you don’t have to review so many bad resumes.
• They post on inexpensive job boards like Craigslist because it’s inexpensive. (In fact, when we factored in all our internal costs, we found that Craigslist was our most expensive source of hire.)

The unrecognized, unstated underlying assumption in most hiring is this:

“I have limited time and a limited budget, so what can I get for $500 in ads and 5 hours of interviewing?”

But if your goal is to hire the best qualified person, you might ask a different question:

“I have limited resources. How can I organize the hiring process to make the maximum impact on my business results this year?”

You may decide that saving time on interviewing gives you more time to do other things. Or you may decide that putting in the effort to find someone extraordinary will make a far larger impact.

But you have to ask yourself the question.

If the first ten resumes you read are terrible, you feel a sense of dread coming over you. Without realizing it, you lower the bar, so if the 11th resume is even close to being qualified, you breathe a sigh of relief and eagerly move them to the “Yes” pile.

But if the first ten resumes you read look well-qualified, you raise the bar. You become very selective about who makes it into the “Yes” pile. You invent new criteria to help you winnow the field.

In both cases, that 11th resume is not being judged strictly on its own merits, it’s evaluated primarily by what came before it.

In the first case, all those unqualified resumes are corrosive to your selectivity. You get desperate and lower your standards. This happens with astonishing frequency in hiring.

In the second case, an abundance of apparently good choices leads to hyper-selectivity. You get picky on criteria unrelated to job performance just to save time interviewing. You become desperate to “weed out” some people that would have been perfectly fine otherwise. You rule out people without stopping to consider that you only have a resume and your assumptions … but none of the facts. In my experience, the best candidate rarely has the best resume, so being hyper-selective in resume review always causes you to overlook potentially great people.

So how do you prevent yourself from arbitrarily raising or lowering your standards?

You have to notice what is not in front of you. That stack of 100 resumes may or may not be representative of the available pool of people for your job. And each resume may or may not be representative of the true talents of each person.

Ask yourself two questions:

• Before you select candidates from the stack of 100 bad resumes, ask yourself, “Am I confident that this candidate pool represents the best people I could attract to this job?” 
• Before you rule out good people from the stack of great resumes, ask yourself, “Have I fairly considered everyone potentially qualified for the job, or have I ruled out people based on factors that may be irrelevant and assumptions that might be inaccurate?”

You may find that in both cases, you forged ahead, trying to “save time” in the interview sequence, instead of taking the necessary time to hire the best possible person for the job.

You want to avoid speaking with desperate people who have few career options. Instead, you prefer interviewing candidates with the kinds of skills that most employer would welcome, right?

You don’t want people who use their work computer  to conduct a job search. You want  someone more discreet, right?

Congratulations. You just described the kind of person who is probably using their mobile phone to be alerted to job opportunities. And if your recruiting process is not mobile-friendly, you have a 40% chance of never seeing their resume.

And CareerBuilder tracking shows that as many as 40% of those mobile visitors will abandon your application process when it is not mobile-friendly.

Indeed’s job search app highlights ads with “Apply From Your Phone” functionality, but CareerBuilder goes a step further– candidates can check a box and never see your ad in the first place.

And here is another nugget from the research:

“Companies who are mobile-optimized have a distinct advantage. A recent CareerBuilder survey found that, of the 20 percent of companies who have mobile-optimized career sites, one in five applications come through mobile devices.”

I shared these statistics with a client today. She asked a great question, “Shouldn’t the candidate show some initiative in the hiring process? Shouldn’t getting hired be difficult?” The answer is absolutely yes.

But the key is where you make it difficult.

Your hiring process should be rigorous. But the applying part needs to be easy. When you make applying difficult, you tend to end up with the most desperate candidates. The highly employable people, who have lots of options? They simply move on to someone else with a bigger “Welcome” sign out front.

Once you have a steady flow of highly qualified candidates coming your way, feel free to make things as difficult as you like, but don’t turn off the welcome sign until you do.

The good people at Knotice took the trouble to do a composite cross sampling of 500 million emails sent in the last 6 months of 2012. (I’m not entirely sure what all that means, but it sounds like a lot of work.)

Their findings?

41% of emails are opened on a mobile device. 

And further, if your recipient does not “…act right away, our data shows only about 2% will reopen that email on another device – whether on their desktop computer, smartphone, or tablet … This means that even if you created a compelling subject line and delivered the right offer, if it renders poorly on the device or if there isn’t a seamless optimization of the post-click experience, you have missed your window.”

It’s a mad, mad, mobile world we live in folks.

22% of fully-employed people are not open to new opportunities. 16% are not actively looking, but network with friends about jobs. 44% are open to considering jobs, but only when someone contacts them first (typically a recruiter).

Only 18% are applying to job postings.

OK, small employers. If you run ads, you can at least hope to get some good people in that 18% … right?

Well, as I mentioned in my last post on this topic, your job ads aren’t doing as much good as you thought they were. If you are not on Indeed, and if you are not mobile friendly, and if you are not easy to apply to, that 18% gets whittled down pretty fast. Your job ads are only giving you a tiny fraction of the 18% now.

These are just a couple of the slides from a presentation we have on this topic. Contact me if you want to know more.

And those recruiters will be wrong.

Ten times more job seekers start their job search on Google than anywhere else.  (Update: I have not been able to verify this statistic elsewhere, and it clearly uses global information, not just the United States.)

Where do small employers post their jobs? When I ask HR managers where they post their open jobs, they usually rattle off a list of job boards. But they almost never mention Indeed. Yet three recent studies found Indeed to be the number one external source of hire for employers in the US.  (Not coincidentally, all three surveys were from companies that provide Applicant Tracking Systems that integrate seamlessly with Indeed: iCims, SilkRoad and Newton Software.)

How did that happen?

It’s simple, comScore research shows that two out of three searches of any kind originate on Google. And Google job searches often lead job seekers to Indeed. See for yourself. Type your own title and location into the Google search bar and see what comes up. The first few jobs you will see are probably posted on Indeed. Consequently, Indeed has three times more unique visitors per month than CareerBuilder (80 million vs 24 million). (UPDATE: In January Indeed had 100 million visitors)

But the bigger threat to small employers long term is not Google upending the job boards, it’s mobile and social.

According to comScore, more than one out of every three minutes spent online is now spent “beyond the PC” on smart phones and tablets. Already 30% of Indeed’s total candidate visits are mobile. They encourage it. Both Indeed and CareerBuilder have mobile apps that let candidates apply to jobs from their phones with minimal effort … as long as the employer enabled the mobile-apply functionality. But very few small employers make their job ads and career sites mobile friendly … because many small employers don’t have a career site.

In a 2012 study by potentialpark, 77% of recent college grads expect to see a company career site and 94% go on to say that in addition to the career site, employers should present themselves on at least one social or professional platform. 61% expect employers to have a Facebook career page, and more than half expect a company page on LinkedIn. And if you disappoint them, they will be vocal about their job search experiences. 92 percent say they discuss their job search experience with others, both in-person and through social media.

So let’s sum this up. Only 4% of job seekers start their job search with a specific company in mind. So if your ads are not in the right place to be seen, you won’t be considered. And if somehow candidates do see your ad, 34% will not apply if your application process is too much of a hassle. And if they do apply, and don’t enjoy the experience, they just might leave a bad review about your company on Glassdoor or Indeed, scaring off everyone else who might consider working for you. (I called this trend, “The Amazonification of Recruiting” in a post on The HR Examiner.)

Employers, this is your wake up call. In the past 3 years, almost everything you took for granted about job advertising has changed.

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(To see more research on recruiting, visit my online library of articles.)

DISCLOSURE: This is not an endorsement of any vendor. I am not paid by anyone mentioned in this post. I am however, a client of Careerbuilder, iCims and Indeed.

So that means we need to help them find a way to interview innovators and distinguish the poseurs and pretenders from the Real Deal Innovators. The world is full of one-hit wonders who, like Forest Gump, happened to be present once at a successful time in history. Their false confidence and hubris will stand in the way of your innovation as surely as their inflated salary requirements will impoverish your new initiative.

As it turns out, it’s not that hard to separate the pretenders from the doers. I consider you the Real Deal if:

• You spend more time innovating and putting your ideas into practice than almost anyone in your peer group (which accelerates your expertise far beyond everyone in your field).  You have earned the respect of a few industry  insiders, but you are probably not famous or widely known. (This is widely misunderstood. Being famous is a reverse predictor … it takes time and effort to build fame. Time that could be better spent on innovation.)
• Unlike the famous people who speak at all the cool conferences, you have the tyranny of daily results driving your innovation. You measure yourself against hard metrics. You don’t come up with ideas and then spend time giving speeches about it. Trying to look smart. Leading to the inevitable decline of your actual skills as you progressively lose touch with reality and spend more time with sycophants.
• And you probably don’t work in a place where your ideas have to be approved by a committee. You don’t spend all day in meetings. And you certainly don’t spend all day reporting on your results instead of producing them

No, when you are the Real Deal, you spend the vast majority of your time in the trenches. You know that most ideas don’t survive contact with reality. But parts of them do. So you try things, fail, learn, refine, and improve. Constantly experimenting, and constantly challenged by the imperative of producing results. Genius physicist Neils Bohr said “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

It’s bloody hard to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. Creating the future is always uncomfortable and from day to day it usually feels like failing … until you look back from time to time and see how far you’ve come. (I am collecting a series of the most useful articles on this topic here: http://www.scoop.it/t/driving-innovation. Scott Berkun’s classic book The Myths of Innovation is also a must-read for innovators.)

So how do you interview an innovator?

• Listen for the daily grind of it.
• Listen for the experimentation, the risk, the failure and the grit and resilience to try again.
• Run from people who describe it as a big success with no moments of uncertainty.
• And then ask yourself, “Am I really ready to put up with a Real Deal Innovator?”