While working in-house as a headhunter (the real market-mapping and cold-call headhunting “headhunter”) I often got asked the question about the ethics of direct headhunting from competitors. When I was giving a talk on the value of in-house headhunting at the 2012 Fall ERE conference in Miami, someone in the audience actually asked me this very question, “Do you think it’s ethical to headhunt from competitors?” keep reading…

As an in-house recruiter or HR professional, have you ever been in a meeting with a recruitment supplier and been very impressed with their pitch and excited about the results that are going to follow, only to be completely let down by their performance? It won’t surprise you to read that you’re not the only one.

We all know that for every good recruiter who walks the earth, there are others who don’t quite make the grade. Many sell a value proposition that isn’t being followed up with action — recruiters who purport to headhunt and cold-call top people in the market, but actually only advertise their clients’ vacancies. As a client of these external recruiters you need to be in a position to make an accurate assessment of their worth — not just by what they tell you, but what they actually prove.

Many contingency-level recruitment firms haven’t evolved their value proposition as technology has evolved over the past 10 years. As in-house recruiters have been able to catch up with doing direct sourcing through job boards and social media, external suppliers should be getting more sophisticated in their approach to maintain a value proposition worthy of the fees that are charged — mapping out competitors, gathering referrals, building expertise and relationships in their chosen niche, for example. Too many contingency firms are still charging 15% to 25% for doing nothing more than advertising a poorly written or cut and pasted job spec, and it’s just not good enough.

So here are some questions to ask your suppliers next time you invite them in for an update or suppler appraisal. keep reading…

In recent years issues with the RPO model have been well documented. It’s not so much the model itself because the theory is sound, on paper. It’s the execution of the model and competition driving cost-saving promises which can’t be met unless corners are cut or high volumes of lesser-experienced RPO recruiters are hired to fulfill demand.

Whether it’s an RPO model or simply an in-house direct recruiter model, the same conundrum exists. keep reading…

It’s no secret to any of us that the appetite and shift to more direct sourcing is driven to a large extent by the focus on cost savings. Agency margins have been driven down to within an inch of their life over the years and so the next natural step was always going to be to “do it ourselves.” Internal recruiters have been around now for years, some under the guise of the RPO model.

Internal headhunters (I differentiate from internal “recruiters”),  taking time to do full market mapping and cold call headhunting, are still very rare though. Mapping out competitors and building market intelligence takes time, and time is of course expensive. Whereas an internal recruiter may work on upwards of 100 vacancies per year (the numbers hugely fluctuate from company to company influenced by seniority of role, etc.), an internal headhunter doing the full lifecycle process may work on as little as 15 to 20 searches per year.

There’s also the issue of skillset required to do both roles. It’s very different asking a recruiter to sift through 100 resumes received in an inbox from a job posting than it is to ask a headhunter to start with a blank sheet of paper and map out the firm’s top six competitors and cold-headhunt call everyone at those firms who may have a relevant skillset. In my time spent heading up an executive search function at J.P Morgan, I never once posted a job advertisement. My role was purely to headhunt top talent in the market.

An internal headhunter is of course a role that should be used only for particular vacancies. It may be the most senior roles, or for niche roles, where typical channels to market aren’t satisfying the requirement.

So how do you convince the budget holders to invest in an internal headhunter who costs more than a typical internal recruiter, but who works on far fewer roles? keep reading…

The recruitment marketplace has experienced a number of seismic shifts over the course of the last 15 years or so. Fifteen years ago, email was barely being used; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google didn’t exist (Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old!), and advertising for roles was done in print, not online; CVs were still largely being faxed or posted, and the only way to get good candidates in the market was to advertise, use an agency, or through internal referrals.

Now with the Internet, social media, and applicant tracking systems, organizations are no longer entirely reliant on recruitment firms to provide candidates and market intelligence. Of course there has been a shift toward corporate internal recruiters and RPO models in the past 10 years, but internal headhunters (which I differentiate from internal “recruiters”),  and real market-mapping and cold-call headhunting is still very rare. Why? Well, mapping out competitors and building market intelligence takes time and time are of course expensive. Whereas an internal recruiter may work on upward of 100 vacancies per year (the numbers hugely fluctuate from company to company influenced by seniority of role, etc.), an internal headhunter doing the full lifecycle process may work on as few as 15 to 20 searches per year.

There’s also the issue of the skillset required to do both roles. It’s very different asking a recruiter to sift through 100 resumes received in an inbox from a job posting than it is to ask a headhunter to start with a blank sheet of paper and map out the firm’s top six competitors and cold-headhunt call everyone at those firms who may have a relevant skillset. In my time spent heading up an executive search function at J.P Morgan, I never once posted a job advertisement. My role was purely to headhunt top talent in the market.

An internal headhunter is of course a role that should be used only for particular vacancies. It may be the most senior roles, or for niche roles, where typical channels to market aren’t satisfying the requirement.

So how do you convince the budget holders to invest in an internal headhunter who costs more than a typical internal recruiter, but who works on far fewer roles? keep reading…

Having worked with and trained many recruiters and owner/ managers all over the world, it is clear to me that almost universally, the first improvement that can be made is in actually measuring performance. It probably won’t surprise most people that with rare exception, in the recruitment industry globally appraisals are at best a “congratulations you’ve hit your target for the quarter, let’s increase by 10% next quarter and good luck,” and at worst non-existent.

Somewhere in the middle is an appraisal that only gets pulled out of the drawer when someone is not hitting their targets. Often called a “performance improvement plan,” or cynically a “you’ll be fired if you don’t achieve this” plan, it usually only monitors quantitative measures, and is rarely supported by adequate training. It could be argued that the managers and owners themselves need to go on a performance improvement plan at the same time to observe and improve upon their influence over their underperforming team member.

It surprises me further how managers expect their teams to perform when they themselves are too busy hitting their own revenue targets. There’s a clue in the title given to those responsible for a team of performers: manager. You have to manage their performance and every aspect of it. keep reading…