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Are Headhunters Like Scott Boras?

If you are as avid a Boston sports fan as I am, you may be aware of Scott Boras. He’s the guy who tends to get the highest priced contracts for star players. These players tend to become mercenaries – moving to the team who will pay the highest price and considering little else.

Boras has represented athletes who have left the Red Sox for the Yankees (Johnny Damon, Jacoby Ellsbury, Stephen Drew), teased the Red Sox with star players who signed with the Yankees (Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira), and pushed up the price on catcher Jason Varitek. He currently represents Red Sox Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley, Jr. I believe these two talented young players will leave the team or will want a huge salary. In a typical agreement, the agent gets 5%, so it is in his best interest to get the highest price. If you were a team owner, would you want Scott Boras to represent your players? I don’t think so.

My point is that headhunters (aka independent recruiters) are a lot like Scott Boras: they are incentivized to get the highest salary possible when placing a candidate, and poach that person soon after to place him in another company. If the employee doesn’t leave, he may ask for more money. This leads to a mercenary mentality rather than one of a loyal, long-term employee. Why would a company allow this? Why would a company want to pay 20-35% of a year’s salary for a mercenary unless it was a desperate situation?

There are three acceptable reasons to use headhunters:

  1. You need the person immediately (zero schedule flexibility), your recruiting engine is not currently running, and you are OK potentially sacrificing long-term retention.
  2. You’re looking for a needle-in-the-haystack skill set – truly rare to find.
  3. Unemployment (i.e. available talent) is at historical lows. For example:  50 year lowest unemployment rate in the US was 3.4%.
  4. (Any combination of these make hiring harder and are also are acceptable.)

Professional sports teams experience these reasons, but for a small business, using a headhunter rarely makes sense. Other than the reasons above, headhunters are used because of ignorance, laziness or very short term thinking. I’m sure that some people will disagree with me, but if you have a solid hiring process, you don’t need to use headhunters. Posting a job listing in the right places will find a talent pool. When a business hires from this pool, it negotiates directly with the candidate, and works to develop and retain the employee thereafter. I’d be hard pressed to invest heavily in a candidate that came through a headhunter.

If you can’t do it all in house, get help with the time consuming tasks, such as crafting an effective job posting, culling resumes, and filtering candidates. Once a candidate comes in for an interview, the company needs to own the process and have the direct relationship. This reduces the amount of leverage for the candidate, allowing the company to steer to a favorable result.

A successful hiring process such as the Perfect Hire Blueprint can be executed by a company of any size to find A-players. Yes, finding the right person takes time, energy, passion and coordination, but the ROI is worth it. Your work team can go from good to great by getting the right players on the bus.

While a Major League Baseball team will always have to worry about annual, seasonal turnover of top talent on a fixed 25-person team, companies do not live in such extreme conditions to warrant paying an agent for a mercenary with the desired skills.

Improving Performance by Understanding Behavior

Having the right employees can either make or break a small business.

Industry research reports show that a bad hire can cost a company up to 3X the employee’s salary. For a small business, this is at least $8000 before the problem is corrected, and I know of one case where the bad hire put a ~$2M business out of business in less than 12 months.

Assessing the prospective employee before hiring can save more than just money. If an owner/manager has a spotty record of hiring, employees lose respect for the leader. This can impact the work, the clients, and start a negative attitude that is hard to reverse–ultimately leading to retention issues. Remember: ‘A’ players attract other ‘A’ players, and ‘B’ players attract ‘C’ players. ‘A’ players can spot other ‘A’ players, and want to work with them. Does your company have ‘A’ players?

Hire Differently

Our “Perfect Hire Blueprint” process dramatically increases the chance of a good hire. 90+% of people hired with this process are still productive in their jobs 1 year after being hired.  That is a dramatic increase over the norm.  It all starts with a benchmark.

You will notice that we never talk about recruiting. We are not recruiters — we help with the selection of great employees.

Two quotes to remember:

Most companies hire based on experience and skill, but they fire based on attitude or behavior.

Employees come to companies and leave managers.

How to Post a Great Job Ad

In order to make a good hire, you first need to attract great candidates. Writing a highly targeted ad using the right keywords and phrases will attract more qualified candidates and make the hiring process much smoother.

What separates good ads from average ads is how they are written: the ad should be written to “speak to” your ideal candidate. When the right person reads the ad, he should think, “That is my ideal job.” If he thinks that, he is more likely to apply, and also more likely to do any prequalification activities that you require.

You Talkin’ to ME?

Your ad should start with WHY. Why should the person work for your company in this position? The WHY is the motivator. The WHY is the reason your company in business – not the thing your company does. The job ad needs to speak to the ideal target candidate, and you may have only one chance to catch her attention. Studies have shown that what the company stands for is as important as the job itself.

If you’ve determined what skills and motivators an ideal candidate would need in order to be successful, this will tell you what kind of person you are looking for to fill a certain position. Would the person be better suited to the position if he were task oriented or people oriented? Does he love the details, or is he faster paced? Does he value a high return of investment, or does the job require more social awareness? Even within a company culture, each role within a company will have specific requirements, and the person in the role may need to be motivated differently than the others. What motivates a salesperson might not be the same as what motivates a customer service representative.

For instance, if you are hiring a bookkeeper or controller, you need to attract someone who is detail oriented and who likes to deal with financial matters. The ad might use words like Careful, Cautious, Quality, and a phrase like I get it right. The ideal candidate will be able to relate to these words and phrases easily, as they will be inherent to his personality.

Our experience is that when you write a highly targeted ad, fewer people apply – but more of them are a better fit. This not only saves you time in culling resumes, but also provides a qualified candidate pool.

We recently helped a company hire an inside salesperson. You might think that this would be a typical sales profile, but the Job Profile indicated that we should be hiring a more introverted, process oriented person who will keep making calls and follow a script. The role required that the person not take shortcuts, and also enter the details of all interactions into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This role was atypical from an outside salesperson because of the attention to detail and strict direction following required. This is why the Job Profile is crucial to the hiring process.

How Do I Write the Ad?

The ad is a marketing piece. Do not confuse the ad with the job description.
Using the information from the Multi-respondent Job Report (click here for a sample report), meet with owners, management, and employees currently in the position to write an ad for the open position. Make sure to reference behavioral qualities from the Job Report.

The ad is meant to attract the candidates that you want and exclude those who do not meet your requirements. Don’t set out the minimum criteria that anyone can meet. The ad should be clear about what a successful candidate looks like. For instance, the phrases fast-paced, risk taker, customer facing, and relationship building would not attract someone who wants to be behind the scenes in support, but a true salesperson may identify with these qualifiers and be attracted to the position.

A successful ad:

  • Has a simple, clear, compelling headline:
    • Accounts Payable Specialist – flexible hours & career advancement
    • Health Coach – help our members make positive changes
    • Inside Sales – great work/life balance
  • Starts with WHY – paints an exciting vision:
    • Why is your company in business?
    • Why should the candidate want to work for your company?
    • Use phrases such as: “You’ll help people…” and “We’ll enable…because you…”
  • Challenges the candidate:
    • Gets at the underlying motivations
  • Shares the vital requirements and key performance indicators of the job profile:
    • Job description and qualifications
    • Great candidates should be drawn to the job because it just feels right

Great candidates should be drawn to the job because it just feels right
Use the information from the Job Report to attract the right personality. Write TO the person you are looking to attract for the position. Tell them exactly what the job is, and speak directly to the perfect fit. You’ll attract quality candidates, and heighten your chances of making the perfect hire.