People Will Always Pay a Premium for Quality

If you are familiar with ,ExecuNet then it will come as no surprise for you to know that we collect trend information in the executive career management arena.

One of these collection channels we call the Recruiter's Confidence Index. The RCI is a monthly survey of the recruiting community and includes both retained and contingency firms.

The core of the index is focused on their feeling about the market over the next 3-6 months. If you are interested in the latest you can click here.

In doing the survey however, we often will ask some other questions based on trends that we have either read or hear about on a day to day basis.

Recently, we wanted to check and see what the executive recruiting community folks were feeling were their "top business challenges" at this point in time vs. several months ago when the answer was a resounding "what business!"

Among other things, I was struck by the fact that doom and gloom on the nightly newscasts and the front pages notwithstanding, the #1 issue came back as: finding qualified candidates.

To explain: I was struck that this was the top concern not because this is a new issue. Finding top tier talent (what's the buzz word these days - "A" players?) has always been a major challenge, and remains so. [Hence the title of this post] No, what got my attention was not what was on top of the list, but what wasn't even in the top three - specifically the hunt for new business.

This isn't to say that firms that specialize in the sectors that have really been hard hit (Financial Services, Credit, Construction,and Housing) aren't still feeling it big time, for many are, but as a whole, at least based on what people were telling us in the last couple of months, the sky may still be very cloudy and producing occasional severe storms; nonetheless, they are starting to see some light on the far horizon.

And in case you were wondering, #2 was covered by the phrase "client and business issues" (whatever that may mean) and #3 was "relocation." Certainly one can tie the latter to the housing market, and it would also make selling a candidate tougher for sure, but the fact that recruiters' phones were starting to ring (if not off the hook but still ringing) was a good sign.

What are you hearing?

Recruiting & Technology In Today's Market

Bill Vick is a name that is known to almost anyone who is involved in the world of recruiting. He has been a pioneer in any number of ways with the creation of XtremeRecuiting.tv being the most recent.

One of his recent interviews was with our Vice President and Executive Editor Lauryn Franzoni. Knowing the degree to which ExecuNet is in the somewhat unique position as a resource to both executive leaders as well as recruiting firms, he wanted to talk with Lauryn about the impact of technology on both.

While I have a bias to be sure, I found it to be a very interesting dialogue. I hope you do too.

Success on a Shoestring

Even with electronic media that does everything but pump you full of information intravenously at night I just can't seem to keep up with everything that either interests me or which while it may not interest me so much is nonetheless stuff that I feel I should be paying attention to anyway.

All of which is the only excuse I could think of for posting something the impetus of which was driven by the special issue of BusinessWeek that came out the last week of August.

As I am sure we all immediately recall this special issue was the one with the cover headline: Trouble at the Office? and the picture of Rainn Wilson on the cover. Why it took BW this long to realize that there is indeed "trouble at the office" I have no idea, but I was glad to see that at least it was starting to show up on their radar.

Being in the business we are at ExecuNet and are talking with both recruiters and senior level executives on a daily if not hourly basis as we do, the fact that there are "issues" in the workplace comes as no surprise, and while there are any number of keywords that could be thrown out to try and capture the essence of the challenge, at the moment, the two that come to my mind were: recruitment and retention.

The habitual cry we hear all the time is the "war for talent" is getting worse not better (the economy notwithstanding) and keeping my "A" players feels like a losing battle.

Given that as a business we find ourselves very much in the middle of this discussion, I read each article on this topic in this particular issue. I read them with great interest and great hope. When finished I found myself still interested but not particularly hopeful. I was looking for answers and instead found lots of wringing of hands and articles reporting on but not suggesting a whole lot of "to dos" regarding things of which I was all too painfully aware before I had read word one.

I should also say at this juncture that if I had access to the universal solvent to fix these ills, I would have shared it long ago. Unfortunately my approach to life is too simplistic to conjure up such stuff, however, so as much as I wish it were the case, I don't have any silver bullets to offer up. That said, however, there was one article in the issue that I thought at least expressed what struck me as pretty cogent advice in trying to overcome the core issues.

The article was entitled Success on a Shoestring authored by Richard Clark, the CEO of APTARE, a company in Campbell, California and in a tad more than 800 words, Mr. Clarke said two things that I tacked up on the bulletin board above my desk.

1. Establish the DNA of your company and then hire people that fit into that DNA., and

2. Because we are a small business, we cannot afford to lose time, energy, or capital on hiring and rehiring.

Magic? Certainly not. Revolutionary? Hardly. Critical to keep you on the right path? You betcha!

Oxymoron #36 Passive Candidate

I am a sucker for "bumper stickers" like the one that I recently saw for the holidays that said "It's a Jingle Out There." Okay, if you didn't like that one, how about "Ho. Greetings from the Society for the Prevention of Redundancy." Okay, I'll move on, just don't throw anything.

The site where I find these is called Internet Bumper Stickers and there are several categories on the site one of which is Oxymorans and there you will find stickers like Oxymoron #3: "Microsoft Works" or #7: "Government Accountability." Okay, I'll move on from these too, but before I do, I want to try and add what I have arbitrarily labeled Oxymoron #36: Passive Candidate.

What energized me to lobby for this addition? My friend Pete Weddle, as he has on a number of other occasions, prompted me to start pounding away on my keyboard. Pete recently published an article in one of his newsletters which he called Why Recruit Passives? In it, Pete makes, as he always does, a number of very cogent arguments about why "passives" are better than "actives." One of the points he made was this:

... Are active job seekers also qualified? Of course. But passive prospects are passive largely because they are already employed and, therefore, presumably making an acceptable or better contribution to their employers. Data collected by the Yahoo! survey tend to support this view. It found that the average experience level of passive prospects was 18.4 years, with over half reporting more than 20 years in the workplace. The average for active job seekers, in contrast, was 14.9 years of experience, with slightly more than a third reporting more than 20 years on-the-job. In addition, if pay is a measure of a person's perceived value to an enterprise, then passive job seekers are viewed as significantly greater contributors. The average annual salary for passive prospects is $66,100, while the average for active job seekers is over 10% lower at $54,583.

Okay, I admit I have not gone back and looked at the Yahoo survey that Pete has referenced, so maybe it defines some of this stuff in more detail, but at least based on what I read in all this, I just don't buy it.

I don't buy the exerience level as much of a criteria for a number of reasons, not the least of which is just because someone has "hung in there" for 20 years or so doesn't mean they aren't "active." I know an awful lot of folks with 20 years in same gig who may not be "actively" looking but that doesn't mean that they are happy campers (we have lots of data from our own surveys that says they aren't) or that they aren't staying where they are because they are afraid on a lot of levels.

There is an old saying that there are two things that cause people to act; one is inspiration and the other is desperation. Point being just because they aren't out there pounding the pavement doesn't mean they wouldn't like to be "active" and certainly doesn't mean that they would be a better or more productive employee than someone who is "active" be they driven by either inspiration of desperation.

I also don't quite get the compensation as a criteria etiher. Compensation is, as we all know, dictated by any number of veriables, such as industry, geography, seniority (and I am not talking about bargaining unit seniority), etc.

That there has been and continues to be a strong bias in this country against people who are "at liberty" as they used to say back in the day versus someone who is "...presumably making an acceptable or better contribution to their employers" is hardly a military secret.

I would submit that at this stage of the downsizing game in our country that there are at least as many folks out there working like hell to find meaningful employment who are every bit as capable if not more so at making "acceptable or better contributions to their employees" as those who are still "presumably" still doing so.

I just don't think there is such a thing as a "passive candidate" in the sense that someone who is currently employed is the definition of 'passive' and someone who isn't employed is the definition of "active."

As far as those who are working being passive or active is concerned, I think that depends on how things went at the office on any given day.