Small Employer Recruiting Challenges

As you might expect, LinkedIn does some research on job seeker behavior. And their findings are pretty interesting.

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.

Job Seekers Went Mobile, and Left Small Employers Standing Still

Where do you think most job seekers begin their search for a new job? Most recruiters will tell you that candidates start by searching on the big job boards like Monster, Dice and CareerBuilder.

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.

All Recruiting Tactics Eventually Crash and Burn

A client calls me and says, “For the past three years our administrative staffing was pretty easy. We’d just hire people to temp. If we liked them we’d hired them.” I asked him, “If that’s working for you, why change it now?” He told me, “Well, as the economy keeps improving, we’re getting a smaller and smaller number of great candidates that way. I just can’t count on it any more.”

That’s the problem with recruiting–once you latch on to something that works well for you, it eventually peters out. Nothing works forever.

• Hiring administrative staff on a “temp to Hire” basis works well during recessions, until the pool of talent who is willing to temp starts to dry up. At any given time, only a small percentage of the workforce is willing to temp, but in a city like Washington, that pool can include some really terrific people. When the economy heats up, many of the best temps get hired full-time. When the best people get hired more quickly, the average person in the temp pool becomes, well … more average. The stars are fewer and further between. So using temp to hire as a recruiting strategy becomes dramatically less productive.
• Over the past ten years I’ve seen several job boards work really well … until they simply stopped working. They did not succeed or fail all at once. Each one spiraled up, did well for a while, and then became nearly useless six months later.  (It’s a good reason to beware of annual contracts with job boards).
• An employee referral network can work really well … until it stops working. Only a handful of employees typically provide the majority of the referrals, and once their network of friends is tapped out, the referrals dry up.

It is said you cannot step into the same river twice–the river is always changing. In large metropolitan areas, the job market is the same way. You are no more able to predict what recruiting tactics will work for you than you are able to predict how much traffic you will see on your commute.

• Sometimes the law of supply and demand works for you, sometimes against you. You might run the same job ad on the same job board in January, March, June and October and receive a completely different number and quality of candidates.
• Sometimes your recruiting tactics have simply run their course. Maybe you advertised in print ads long after the best candidates went online, or maybe you advertised using online job boards when the best candidates went into social media. Or maybe you tried advertising on the latest, coolest, most modern thing, but you got there before the great candidates did.
• Or maybe you used the wrong tactic entirely. Maybe your ideal candidate is not going to respond to any kind of advertising, no matter where you put it.

But when your recruiting tactics are not working, you never really know why. So, all you can do is keep experimenting, keep trying new approaches, and keep monitoring your results, knowing that nothing good lasts forever.

Removing Bias (and Desperation) from Your Hiring Decisions

In a doomed attempt to save time, many hiring managers unwittingly make themselves both more desperate and more biased in their hiring decisions. When you prematurely narrow the number of candidates you are willing to interview, you set up the perfect storm for bias and desperation.  Here’s why.

The Washington DC metropolitan area has a great job market. As I said in The Washington Business Journal,  job seekers have the upper hand again. Mid-career professionals often receive multiple job offers and can afford to be choosy. This means that candidates who do well in their first interview with you often withdraw from consideration before you’ve even had time to schedule their second interview.

So, if you have not started your first round interviews with a field of at least six highly qualified candidates, you will probably find yourself coming down to the wire with only one viable candidate. That makes your hiring decision both simple and dangerously flawed. When you only have one person, your choice is either a) hire, or b) don’t hire. Really, the choice is a) continue doing two jobs, or b) get help from someone. So naturally most hiring managers a) decide to hire now, and b) live to regret it later.

A recent study suggests why you make better decisions by improving your frame of reference. Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet explains it this way:

“Our hunch is that the mechanism works something along the following lines: if you look at one pair of shoes, it’s hard to evaluate the quality of those shoes. You will be much more likely to go with stereotypes or heuristics or rules of thumb about shoes. But if you have several pairs of shoes available, you’re much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes.”

The Harvard study showed promising results in removing gender bias from hiring and promotion decisions, but the frame of reference principle applies equally well to other aspects of hiring, such as evaluating the competencies and cultural fit of the candidate.

Don’t set yourself up to make a bad decision. Do what it takes to assemble a robust slate of qualified candidates, you won’t regret it.

Why Your January Hiring Plan will Work … in April

It’s mid-December. If you want to hire people in January, but you have not yet finalized your job description and recruiting strategy, you will probably succeed … in April.

It’s nothing personal, I’m confident that you are above average in every way. It’s just that most employers underestimate the importance of December planning and overestimate their ability to make things happen in early January. When they say  ”I plan to hire in January”  they really mean they will “finalize their plans for hiring” in January. Big difference. Finishing the planning in December means you can actually start recruiting on January second. ”Finalizing your plans for hiring in January” means that  you will post your ads (or start your recruiting) in late January. Then stack up some resumes and begin the interviews in late February, and then, by the time references are checked and notice is given, maybe your new hire will start work in April. And with a bit of luck, they should begin to be productive about the time your summer vacation rolls around.

I know. You are different. That kind of delay is not your intent. But I’ve seen it every year for the 25 years I’ve been in the search business, so yeah, I’m pretty confident that I’m right about this.

You see, December is a wonderful time of year…to put off work until January. You can hear the sweet, sweet lure of procrastination it in every work conversation. “We’ll get on that right after the holidays” and “Let’s set a meeting to tackle that in early January.”  Right now, it feels like you are just delaying by a week or two … it’s no big deal, right?

Except recruiting does not work that way. Not in January. January is different from every other month of the year in recruiting. It is the only month you can get a significant competitive advantage over everyone else. If you do your planning in December, and start recruiting aggressively on January 2nd, you can make your job offers before you have any serious competition from other firms. But when you miss that window, everything takes longer. And the only way to get the January advantage is by finalizing your recruiting plans in December.

Think about it: Your ideal future employees are just like your current employees. Busy, hardworking, stressed-out and looking for a break. And they will take break over the holidays. On a long drive they will reflect on what they want from their careers. Over eggnog they will make New Years Resolutions to go find it. And they will be primed, refreshed, and ready to be recruited in very early January.

But you won’t be recruiting in early January–you’ll be in meetings. Meetings to hammer out the dull job description with HR, waiting for your boss to sign off on the hiring requisition, checking in with some other department who wanted to “get with you” to review how their restructuring that might affect this position, and oh yeah, the CFO had a quick question about how this hire will fit in your budget.

So you’ll start recruiting in February, right when everyone else is recruiting. When recruiting takes longer because it is one of the most competitive recruiting months of the year. Hey good luck with that.

For want of a December meeting the job spec was not done.
For want of a job spec the recruiting was not done.
For want of recruiting the new hire was not found.
For want of a new hire your goals were not met.
For want of results your summer vacation was ruined.
And all for the want of a December meeting.

How to Recruit When the Hiring Manager has Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget

I often hear recruiters complain about hiring managers with “unrealistic” expectations. I don’t hire those recruiters because I have no patience for that kind of complaining–it solves nothing. Recruiters are strategic advisors to, not victims of, the hiring manager. As recruiters our job is to advise managers of the cost of their choices, and their job is to decide how they would like to proceed. Whining and complaining has no place in that conversation.

When a hiring manager has really high standards there is often a business imperative for that need. Once we understand that need, their expectation suddenly seems reasonable. When a hiring manager insists on finding candidates with an uncommon set of attributes, their search will simply cost a bit more or take a bit longer. The manager’s request is not unreasonable–it is simply a trade-off. We tell the manager “This kind of skills can be found quickly and inexpensively, but that set of skills takes longer, costs more and is less predictable. Which approach would you prefer?”  The hiring manager simply has a choice. (Of course, it takes some market knowledge to be able to give this advice.)

Perhaps the most common recruiting trade-off is salary–the manager with “champagne tastes on a beer budget.” When they say “I need a superstar” but their salary budget is just average, or when they say “I want someone good” but their salary budget is below average … then what?

When it comes to salary trade-offs, I’ve learned that “showing” works far better than “telling.” When a manager’s expectations are not aligned with job market realities, I don’t spend much time telling them about salary surveys–it’s far more effective to show them candidates. They need to see what they get for their money. “Here is a superstar who is 20% above your target salary. And here is someone right within the target salary, but they lack this critical skill you wanted. And here is someone below the target salary, but you will need to invest a lot of your time to bring them up to speed.”  Even the most stubborn managers become reasonable when they can see candidates side-by-side. “Showing” gives them actionable information. Just talking about salary ranges never brings that level of clarity.

When a recruiter is complaining, it’s often because they allowed themselves to get boxed in to fighting against job market realities. Recruiters don’t define the job market–they navigate within it. If you consistently pay below the market rate, you’ll probably have high turnover. If you demand superstar performance levels, you’ll probably need to pay a premium rate. If you demand uncommon skills, your searches will require more time and effort. That’s just reality.

A recruiter’s job is to be the expert on job market realities. The hiring manager’s job is to drive business outcomes. When a recruiter defers to the hiring manager’s (often outdated) perception of the market, they cause the very problems that they later complain about.

For more on this topic, see:
Are you Hiring to Fit the Budget or Hiring to Fit the Job?

and

How Corporate Recruiting Budgets are Wasted

Is November a Good Time to be Recruiting?

We’re getting a lot of calls right now from potential new clients who have been recruiting on their own since the summertime. In past years, we got those calls in mid-September, then as the economy worsened, we got the calls in October. But this year, we’re getting them in November. It’s an economic barometer–I call it the “How long can you suffer until you ask for help?” indicator.

But in November, when people call, they often ask me a question. ”Is this a good time to be recruiting?” People are worried that they frittered away the great recruiting months of September and October.

Our ability to get the attention of great candidates varies depending on the time of year. (We can always find someone who is willing to talk with us.) So the real question is “How long will it take to put together a robust slate of highly qualified candidates?” And the holiday season adds some delays and complexities to that. It brings to mind a quote attributed to General Omar Bradley:

“Amateurs talk about strategy, dilettantes talk about tactics, and professionals talk about logistics”

So on to the logistics. On the 2011 calendar, there are 4 beautiful weeks of recruiting left–from November 14th to the 18th, and from November 28th through December 16th.  Outside of that, you will have a very difficult time attracting the attention of currently employed people.

So if you really want to get someone on board in early January, don’t dabble with just running ads and hoping for luck. This is the time to aggressively reach out, and to move quickly to interview anyone with potential. The recruiting window is closing fast.

But if something happens, and you end up frittering away the next few weeks, promise yourself that you will stop suffering this year. Make your plans in mid-December to be recruiting heavily in early January–which is the best time to recruit all year. At least then you can get someone started in mid-February.

Job Market Trends in Washington DC

I was recently interviewed by Joe Coombs, the Workplace Trends and Forecasting Specialist for SHRM.   We discussed the job market, supply and demand for labor … all my favorite topics.  Read the interview here.

Sharp Rise in Senior Staff Turnover Reported

CEO Update recently reported on a trend we’ve been talking about all year – the spike in executive turnover at associations and nonprofit organizations across the Washington metropolitan area.   They reported that the number of open positions posted with them is ”greater than 2008, 2007, 2006 or any other year we have tracked.”

Back in January we predicted that the local job market would be a big game of musical chairs this year, driven primarily by executive turnover. 

In August we observed that top candidates were on the move in larger numbers, and that we were seeing a spike in candidates who were receiving multiple job offers.   As you may recall, on the strength of that trend we declared the recession over  (at least as a retention tool) a full month before the economists made it official on September 20th.   (Then again, in their September announcement, they said the recession actually ended in June 2009 … so just give me 15 months and I’ll predict what happened today). 

No matter how you look at the data, this is certainly a good time to look for a job if you are an association or nonprofit executive.  Not looking?  Then now might be a really good time to update your executive succession plans and rethink your retention strategies, because your best people are getting calls.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards got it right.  You can’t always get what you want.  Especially in hiring.  Especially now.

Right now (in the DC job market) candidates are gaining the upper hand.    Want proof?  Look at the number of top performers who left your firm for another job.  Next look at the number of candidates you want to hire who have multiple competing job offers – that’s the best way to measure who has the upper hand in your industry.  

So if you are like most DC employers, here is what you can expect with this market shift:

• Your perfect candidates will turn down your job offer to take some other job more often than you’d prefer.  
• More first round candidates will surprise you and decide not to proceed into the second round interviews.  
• Your new hires might even call you before their start date and tell you they accepted a counteroffer from their current employer.

What to do about it?  Like most business risks, you can “buy insurance.” 

• You buy insurance when you start with a big candidate pool of 6 or more people. 
• You buy insurance when you keep the interview process moving quickly for all the candidates and don’t prematurely lock in on just one person.
• You buy insurance when you think long and hard about making a really competitive offer to the person you want. 
• You buy insurance when you stay in touch between making the job offer and when the new hire starts. 
• You buy insurance when you make sure they feel welcomed during their first few weeks.

No, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need .. but just in case, buy insurance.

The Job Market Is a Big Game of Musical Chairs

Robust economic growth and job creation is a wonderful thing, but 2010 is not very likely to look that way.   Yet I still firmly believe (and wrote in our job seeker blog) that 2010 looks good for job seekers in the Washington DC metropolitan area and probably in lots of other areas.  Why?

Churn.  Turnover.  The 2010 job market (for skilled professionals) is going to be one big, global game of musical chairs.

Let’s play it out:  One person (call him Adam) gets fed up and quits, or retires.  The second person (call him Bob), sees Adam’s job and says to himself “Hmmm, that sounds better than my terrible job” so he quits his job and takes Adam’s.  The third person (let’s call her Carol) says “Wow, that open job Bob used to hold (that made Bob miserable) is actually a big step up for me and I’d be happy to have it.”  And so on, Dave takes Carol’s job, Erin takes Dave’s job, Fred grabs Erin’s old job and so on.  Play this out and millions of people quit their current job to accept a new (to them anyway) position … but in reality no net new jobs were created.

This is a fantastic time for employers to trade up from lazy, disgruntled Adam to hard-working Bob, or from hard-working but dim-witted Bob, to witty and intelligent Carol, or from high-maintenance Carol to steady competent Dave.  In fact the resignation of every average (or misfit) employee is a gift to employers.   Over a year ago, I wrote about what a golden opportunity a recession provides employers.  You can trade in disgruntled mediocre performers and hire top performers.   Few employers took advantage of that opportunity in 2009, but with the turnover in 2010, everybody has a fresh, new opportunity to make trades.  The key to success, of course, is to use a better hiring process than the one you used when you hired average people in the first place.

Full disclosure here:  Churn is also a gift to executive search firms like ours, who are starting to see business increase, despite a lack of overall job creation.  In my more jaded moments, I acknowledge the harsh reality that search firms earn most of their fees from churn – to make a decent living in the search business we don’t need net new jobs created, we just everyone to change jobs.   (NOTE: I am, EMPHATICALLY, NOT talking about the people WE placed into jobs – we really want them to be happy and we NEVER recruit them away from where we placed them.  In fact we obsess over our long term retention rates).   We are also NOT talking about retention rates at our current clients, all through 2009 we were warning our clients about the looming turnover crisis and sharing information about how to retain their top performers.  In fact, we devoted half of our November newsletter to that very topic.

But … if you are not yet a client of ours  … we’d be delighted to show you a better hiring process, and help you trade-up when your average people quit … even though we’re kind of busy with all these new searches right now.

Are You Hiring to Fit the Budget or Hiring to Fit the Job?

If you work in a small firm, many of your new hires are one-of-a-kind.  They are your only HR person, or your only IT manager, or your only Development Officer.  So when it’s time to hire someone new, you are often unfamiliar with what to pay, or what the “going rate” is for those skills.  And there is nothing wrong with not knowing.  Not knowing is actually a good thing – you can be more open minded.

But sadly, many people are really uncomfortable with that uncertainty.   Perhaps they need to budget for a position, or justify it to their boss.  Perhaps they are the boss and they feel like they must dictate salary to control costs.  So in order to feel more certain, hiring managers turn to salary surveys, or worse, they ask a few other small firms what they are paying, or even worse they assume they can pay what their last employee earned in that position (like the one who failed, or the one who quit).  But worst of all are the people who ignore the reality of the job market entirely and say “I budgeted $60,000, so let’s get the best possible person we can for that amount.”

All of these are bad ideas.  OK, some of these are really bad ideas.  They all force you into hiring to fit the (arbitrarily determined) budget, instead of hiring the right people to fit the job, and then figuring out how to make the budget work.  Like the aspiring young snorkeler in the picture, hiring to fit the budget is a bass ackwards hiring practice.  Here’s why:

The purpose of a budget is to control costs.  High performing people are a great bargain, it’s the underperformers who are expensive.  When you limit your interviewing to consider only those people who fit your budget, who do you think you are most likely to exclude?  The high performers.  And who are you most likely to include?  The underperformers. Funny how that whole cost control thing can backfire on you.

Salary surveys tell you what some small sample size of average people in that job title get paid – as if everyone with the same title has precisely the skills you need…absurd.  The same problems occur when you ask around.  If all you ask is “What do you pay your IT Manager?”  the answer is always meaningless.  But it’s worse than meaningless, because you probably felt like you just learned something when in reality, you really did not.  

Admittedly, it’s no easy task to keep salaries equitable for your employees.  And overpaying new hires can be demoralizing to loyal current employees.  And yet, and yet, and yet…when you are hiring for a critical position and are not sure what to pay, you owe it to yourself go about it in this order:

• First, decide what skills and abilities you need to achieve the results you want to achieve.
• Second, go recruit people who have all those skills and abilities, who actually want to work at your firm.  
• Third, interview people across the spectrum of skills, experience and salary levels.  If you recruit a robust candidate pool, you will almost always find a “sweet spot” – a salary level where most of the good people tend to cluster.  If the best qualified people are clustered around $120 – 130k, but your salary budget is $115, you really owe it to yourself to understand this before proceeding.  When you ignore this market reality and hire the people who fit the budget instead of hiring people who fit the job you will end up spending far more on turnover than you save on budget.  Lower performers also consume more training and management time, and are less productive, hardly a bargain for your budget.  
• Fourth, having looked at people with a wide range of skills, decide what level of skill is worth paying for to achieve the business results you require.  
• Fifth, find the money to make them a job offer at a fair market rate.  Don’t lowball your job offers to fit budget – if you want to keep great people, pay fairly.
• Sixth, if in the search process you learned that the current market rate is higher than what you pay your other people, either bring their salaries up to market, or plan for more turnover.

Great people who drive business results are always worth what you pay them.

Hiring in Washington DC

New clients often ask me why recruiting great people in Washington DC remains stubbornly difficult.   One of my favorite job aggregator sites – Indeed - explains why in a very simple graphic that compares unemployed people relative to job postings.   (9/15/09 Note:  Indeed updated this chart recently).

Washington and Baltimore have 1 job posting for every unemployed person.  This is the best performance of any major city listed.  Other cities,  like New York have a ratio of 2 unemployed people for every job posting.  But poor Detroit comes in last with eighteen unemployed people for every job posting.  

The graphic illustrates that recruiting is essentially a local business.  Hiring difficulty varies widely from city to city.

By the way, it’s also a good reminder, that if you want to hire better people (at least in Washington), you have to write a better job ad.  Something I have been ranting talking about for quite some time.

Stop Thinking About the National Economy

Thinking about the national economy is, by and large, a waste of time (unless you are Ben Bernanke, or Tim Geithner, in which case, please stop reading this blog and get back to work!)

The Brookings Institute suggests we do not have some monolithic national economy, but instead really have an interconnected group of 366 metropolitan economies.   It makes sense, as this is exactly how staffing actually works.  At it’s core, staffing is a local business.  The labor pool, the jobs, the pay, what’s considered a good job, what’s considered a good commute – all this varies widely by region.  Ignore it at your peril.  The national unemployment rate is irrelevant in hiring.  Nurses might be in oversupply in one region and there might be a nursing shortage elsewhere.  Whether you are hiring  20 construction workers in Miami or 2 Mechanical Engineers in DC,  the local  economic situation matters more than the national numbers.  This is why we are seeing a talent migration to Washington DC, which has one of the strongest regional economies in the country.

Every day this week I talked to a local employer who had run ads to find candidates, but still had not found the ideal candidate for an open position.   A strong local economy like DC, can be really irritating if you thought hiring was going to be easy.

Why is the DC Job Market so Irritating?

Employers - here’s more bad news:  The DC job market is showing signs of returning to “normal.”  While hiring for some jobs is easier now, “normal” for DC means that employers will have an increasingly difficult time finding highly qualified people to fill every critical opening.   

The daily drumbeat of bad economic news that has pummeled us all since November is slowly letting up.   Government recovery plans are taking shape, and government money will soon be flowing (yea!)   Layoff notices are not coming quite so quickly.   And a once in a generation hiring opportunity is slowly beginning to slip away from you.  You are now missing one of the best chances to upgrade your workforce that you may ever experience.

I know hiring managers find this hiring difficulty both astonishing and really, really irritating.  They want to upgrade to better people, they really do, but most just don’t know how.   HR professionals (who are often short-staffed themselves) are hearing managers bitterly complain about their internal recruiting efforts:   

“Are you kidding me?  In the midst of the worst recession in twenty five years, we can’t find better candidates than this?”

“I can’t believe I have to pay a search fee in a recession?  Seriously.  Where are the good people?”

“Are you telling me that we received 300 resumes from our ad on Monster and only three are worth interviewing?”

So why didn’t this huge financial calamity, this Near Great Depression, this global fiasco make hiring easier for ALL of us here in DC? 

Well the recession did make hiring easier, if you were looking for people to work in Detroit.  Or if you were looking for construction workers, auto workers, or Wall Street types.  But you aren’t looking for those people, now are you?  No, you are looking for the same skills everyone else is, and those skills are still in relatively short supply, because very few firms in our area had big  layoffs of people with really hard-to-find skills.  (Circular logic, I know, but it’s still true.)

So what evil forces are conspiring against your recruiting efforts?   Why are you still missing out on this once-in-a-generation hiring opportunity? 

First, don’t confuse national unemployment rates with local unemployment rates.  We are deeply fortunate to work in the strongest job market in the country - our unemployment rates for most occupations never really spiked.  But to take it a step further, don’t confuse the macro unemployment rate with the number of highly qualified job seekers who have the skills you need to thrive in a recession.   It’s a darn shame that thousands of unemployed auto workers don’t make it easier for you to hire your next CFO, but they don’t.

 Second, “post and pray” job advertising does not work any better now than it did before - you just get 300 desperate unqualified people instead of 100 or 150.  Sure you get a few gems in there, but not as many as you would expect, given that everyone tells us this is the worst economy they have ever seen. 

But the biggest reason you are not seeing great people lining up to take your jobs, is you haven’t thought enough about who you want to hire yet.   When you post a job without first taking the time to think hard about it, everybody who reads your ad can tell right away.  And the person you want?  That hard charging, no excuses, high achieving, go-getter who gets results in a recession?  They are results oriented, so when they know you are not seriously thinking about your business, they do not even apply.

In the past few weeks I have had a dozen clients tell me the same thing, almost verbatim:  ”We’ve been trying to hire someone on our own for several months now, and with the economy so bad, I really expected we would have filled it, but all I’m doing is sifting through resumes and nobody jumps out at me – I just don’t have time for this and I can’t afford to leave this critical position unfilled any longer. 

Hey DC, welcome back to your “normal” irritatingly familiar ways.