Last week I blogged on the importance of “job order triage”. Great recruiters ruthlessly prioritise the briefs they work on, and put most effort into the highly fillable few.

Well, what about the candidates to invest time in?

Some recruiters take the view that as there is a talent shortage, every candidate needs equal help and focus.

Afraid not. Big mistake.

You need to discriminate when it comes to talent selection. Obviously not on the basis on creed, colour, ethnicity, or any other irrelevant, illegal or immoral prejudice.

No, you need to discriminate on the basis of the answer to one golden question.

Is this candidate placeable?

And a placeable candidate is one about whom you can answer YES to these two questions.

• If put in front of the right clients, will this candidate likely be offered a job?
• If offered a job on reasonable market terms, is this candidate likely to accept it?

There it is – the definition of a placeable candidate. Obvious huh?

Well not so obvious if you see the bumbling efforts of most recruiters when it comes to deciding who they spend their precious time on.

Common errors include working on the candidate with the most marketable skills (cool but what good is that if his salary expectations are 25% above market?). Or working on a candidate who deep down has no real intention of leaving where they are, but in fact have had a bad week and are just flirting with leaving. After you have done all the work to find them a job, their current employer will easily woo them back with money, or emotional blackmail, or both.

But a great recruiter knows all this before they ever start trying to find someone a job.

Placeable candidates. The ones you should discriminate towards when it comes to effort, typically have all or most of these characteristics:

• They have skills and experience currently in demand.
• Their salary expectations are reasonable and they present as an affordable option to a potential employer.
• They have legitimate and tested reasons for leaving where they are now. You have dug down and unearthed their true motivators to leave and you believe you can find them these things in a new role.
• You have pre-empted the possibility of a counter offer from their current employer.
• They interview well. Likeable, personable, communicative.
• The candidate buys into your “rules of engagement” where you explain how you and he will work together, and during the process they deliver on that commitment. (For example returning your calls, attending all interviews etc.
• The candidate agrees to allow you to exclusively handle their job search.

Remember this: Finding someone a job is only half the battle. Getting them to accept it is the other half.

So “discriminate” to your heart’s content. Work hard on candidates who will get a job offer if put in front of a client and will accept it once it comes.

In financial markets they talk about canny investors being “stock-pickers”, which refers to an ability to select ‘diamonds in the rough’; investments that will outperform over time.

Great recruiters are “talent-pickers”.

We would love to place every person who approaches us, or who we interview. But that is not going to happen.

In fact, spreading your talent activity too thin will dilute your ability to find people work. Candidate selection is key. Selecting the best ones will be an art, developing a relationship with them will be a skill that many of today’s transactional recruiters will find hard to adapt to.

We have to be nimble enough to understand the trends in clients’ needs and adjust our candidate activities to meet those needs. In fact, we need to predict impending client needs and source talent accordingly; ahead of time.

Then we need to assess which candidates are truly motivated to move. Finding someone a job is only half the battle. Getting them to accept it is the other half.

Winning clients is important, obviously. But as the market tightens, increasingly those recruiters who select committed, in-demand candidates to work with will emerge the winners.

For fresh recruitment insights, please subscribe to The Savage Truth

Running a great recruitment business is difficult. The competition, the compliance, the cash flow issues and most of all, the people complexity creates an ideal environment to screw up.

Here are 10 of my biggest blunders, some of which I have made several times. I offer them up as a guide on what NOT to do when running a recruitment company.

1. Focusing too heavily on consultant activity levels. Slavishly counting activities, measuring ratios, chastising shortfalls… at the expense of ensuring the quality of those activities was high and consistent. Lots of activity, done badly, will actually send your business backwards, and focusing on activity for activity sake can be tremendously demoralising for the team, and distracting for the leadership.
2. Focusing too little on activity levels of consultants.  This is the flip side of the same coin and it’s just as big a blunder.  Allowing consultants to “free wheel” appearing busy by doing lots of ‘stuff’ without ensuring clarity and focus about what their key activities must be. Letting consultants spend 90 minutes in an interview with a junior person because “they want to get it right” and agonising for hours over the wording on a resume are great examples. Quality is important, but you also have to churn through a lot of the key actions that drive making the match. It’s a management task to keep that on track.
3. Allowing consultants full autonomy over which clients and which jobs they choose to work on was a mistake. Most recruiters are somewhat “tarty” by inclination, trying to work with everyone on everything. Specialisation is key, working with clients who will partner with us is key, gaining exclusivity and working on fully qualified briefs is fundamental, as is working with people who pay our bills. Not prioritising our WIP has cost me plenty, time and time again.
4. Hiring potential consultants because they had a great academic background and fantastic careers in a previous job, which was not recruitment, but in a field we specialise in. I have learned that when hiring recruiters we need to focus more on intrinsic attributes that drive success in recruitment, such as competitiveness, empathy, resilience, listening skills, passion, integrity and work ethic.
5. Opening offices in remote places without strong, committed, proven, loyal local management. Everything depends on leadership and it gets more crucial with every kilometre the remote business is away from HQ.
6. Retaining mediocre people (who may be very nice people) in the hope they will miraculously become superstars despite mounting evidence that they will always be underperformers. This is a massive opportunity cost and I make this mistake even now.
7. Hiring managers and recruiters on massive base salaries on the back of “impressive” track records (which are often not what they seem) or promises of huge performance. I learned that you must always link high earning with high performance. The big money comes after the big delivery, not before.
8. Allowing managers of smallish teams (2 – 8 people) to evolve into non-billing managers. This is a massive mistake.  We need “player/managers,” people who bill, rain-make, business develop and also manage the team. I have allowed managers to become backroom crunchers of numbers and process managers, and that’s not where the value of a leader lies, nor can you secure any leverage out of that kind of role.
9. Assuming that a good recruiter will make a good manager. They are entirely different skill sets. Promoting your highest billing recruiter to Team Leader because she wants a “career” can destroy her progress, dismantle her billings, and disintegrate the team.
10. Listing my own company Recruitment Solutions in 1998. It was too small a business really to be floated. Profit of only $4M.  The IPO was a financial success, but it was not the right thing for the business. It cost a lot to be listed, we lost control to non-executive directors and you have to answer to shareholders and fund managers. Watching share price means you spend less time on the important things like customers and staff. I am immensity proud of Recruitment Solutions. It was stand out business and produced literally scores of people who now own their own successful business. But we should not have gone public.

Please subscribe to The Savage Truth for regular email updates, insights and fresh information.

I am writing this on a plane on my way back from a week visiting the Firebrand offices in Japan. It was a great week, and the business is tracking well, but as I had not been to Japan for a while, I spent my time meeting with virtually every recruiter, looking at activities and shining the light on efficiency and productivity shortfalls.

People often ask me about staffing in Japan, and how “different “ it must be to the rest of the recruiting world. Well of course Japan can be a perplexing place to an outsider, but 10 years of running a staffing business there has taught me that, at the very core, success in staffing in Japan depends on exactly the same skills, metrics and activities that drive success anywhere else.

As you would expect, across a team of many recruiters we have a blend of exceptionally high performers, some solid fee generators, and a handful who are struggling to meet targets and objectives. Just before I left Tokyo, I debriefed with the local Regional Director, and it became clear that once again we had been reminded that a few very clear basics are what drive success in this business, and we agreed to refocus everyone back on to these priorities.

I have blogged previously on my core belief in what drives recruiting success

Activity X Quality X Target Market

And certainly that formula holds true in Japan as much as anywhere else. However I found that under-performers in Japan were falling short in one or more of three specific key areas. As I jotted up my notes from the weeks work, I reflected that these ‘Three Commandments’ could well serve as a blueprint for staffing success, anywhere, anytime

. • Specialisation

Recruiters are easily seduced. A client wants help with a hire that’s outside our area of expertise and we jump right in. And then we find we don’t have the skills, knowledge, or connections to do a good job. We waste time, we get frustrated and we actually risk damaging our client relationship when actually we were trying to go “above and beyond”. And think of the opportunity cost working in areas we are unlikely to ever revisit. Successful recruiters are specialists. They know a niche and they work that niche. Specialisation is critical because it creates a perception that the recruiter is a recognised industry expert. This status appeals to both prospective clients and candidates. Furthermore, it gives recruiters instant credibility with passive candidates, which will be increasingly crucial. Don’t dabble. Don’t allow distractions. Go deep.

• Order qualification

This is just so critical. Most of us work a contingent business model. We only get paid if we fill the job. Yet so many recruiters try to fill every order that hits their desk. This is patently a mistake because all orders are not equal and nor are all clients. The most successful recruiters in our Japan business, as everywhere else, are brutal order qualifiers. Is the client serious about hiring? Is the order fillable? Are the hiring criteria reasonable? Salary appropriate?  Working exclusively on an assignment with each client is a Firebrand goal. It is in the clients interests, the candidate interests, and of course our interest too. Our recruiters in Japan who do work more orders exclusively, bill exponentially more

• Talent selection

In financial markets they talk about canny investors being “stock-pickers” which refers to an ability to select ‘diamonds in rough’, investments that will outperform over time. Great recruiters are “talent-pickers”. We would love to place every person who approaches us or who we interview. But that’s not going to happen. In fact spreading your talent activity too thin will dilute your ability to find people work. Candidate selection is key. Selecting the best ones will be an art, developing relationship with them will be a skill that many of today’s transactional recruiters will find hard to adapt to. We have to be nimble enough to understand the trends in clients needs and adjust our candidate activities to meet that need

There are many, many things that make for a successful recruiter, but the “Three Commandments” (which may as be almost as old as the original ten!) still hold true, and I am finding it’s those recruiters who are applying age old, proven strategies to their work, who are flourishing most in the recovery

***********************************************************************************************

For the good oil on recruitment stuff, please subscribe to The Savage Truth

As the market recovers, one of the first impacts on our industry will be a revival of the temp and contract market. Temp-to-perm will be huge. Employers will see increased work volumes as the economy recovers, but will “dip their toes” into the labour market at first, hiring flexible solutions initially. But then, as momentum is gained and confidence returns, they will start to hire permanently. But the first place they will go for their permanent hires will be to transition tried and tested contractors onto their permanent payrolls. The big issue for us in the staffing industry will be talent management. It’s important we strategise and behave as if we are thinking years ahead when it comes to talent – because candidates will become a short resource again very soon.

Invest not only in adding talent to your database, but also ensuring relationships are built with them and that your systems allow you to access them fast. Find a way to shift the consultants’ mindset from running job board ads after they have taken an order – to a fully integrated talent strategy where your company and your staff are interacting with candidates and potential candidates, in their communities, all the time.

It’s going to be a whole new talent world going forward. The other issue is to think hard about the type of talent companies will be hiring in the recovery. Your tactics need to be based around building a relationship with the 10% that will be in demand and able to be placed, so that as the market rises you will be ready with the right stock at the right time.

It’s not about lots of talent, it’s about the right talent.

Last year I conducted an RCSA seminar for over 500 Australian Recruiters in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The topic was “Riding the Recovery” and part of my session was on Social Media and how we need to build that technology into our talent sourcing strategies.

Well, I grabbed this opportunity to conduct a little mini-survey on the Twitter habits of attendees. It was totally unscientific and very impromptu, so take from this what you will, but I was somewhat surprised to find that only 5% of the attendees (by show of hands) in Sydney and Melbourne actually have a Twitter account at all. In Brisbane the percentage was also dismally low, but better than the rest at about 10%

I am not sure what I expected. The percentage is higher in my own company, but we still have many non Twitter users at Firebrand, so who am I to judge? But on the other hand, Australians are massive early-adopters of technology, and at the general level have swarmed into Social Media use. Why not recruiters?

I think this is going to have to change – and fast. We won’t be able to rely on job boards for candidates going forward. The cream of candidates, especially passive ones, will need to be sourced through an increasingly fragmented variety of channels. In my view Social Media will be one of those channels.

But for recruiters Twitter will be far more than a simple source of candidates to fill todays’ job order. More important than that is that smart use of Social Media is an opportunity to be perceived as an expert in your industry niche. Recruiters are going to need to use Twitter to foster relationships (and not to spam people by the way), build credibility, and actually interact with communities of people they might want to place in the future, or who are influencers in their area of interest. That will be increasingly powerful for those who get it right.

In my view it’s like this. Social media remains a TOOL – not a strategy – to reach people. There are still tons of people who will not be found on social networking sites. Recruiters don’t want to be seduced by Social Media and the hype surrounding it — but equally recruiters must acknowledge its’ role, and figure out how to work it into the talent acquisition mix

We are recovering from this downturn, and when we do, the talent shortage is going to be more severe than anything we experienced a year or two ago. Finding talent, connecting with those talent and building talent communities is going to be what separates the winners from the losers in the recruitment industry, in my opinion.

Sourcing talent will become far more fragmented in the future, and candidates will be accessed from an ever increasing variety of channels including social media, blogs, specialty sites, as well as user and special interest groups. Job boards will play a role, certainly, especially niche boards, but increasingly they will become less effective, particularly when it comes to connecting with the elusive passive candidates.

At Aquent we have taken what I believe is a bold but decisive decision to remove all job search or job board functions from our website, completely.

Aquent.com attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and many of our best talent are captured this way. But we are are entering a brave new world of talent management I think, and now we must focus on connectivity at a human level with our candidates.

Aquent.com now encourages job seekers to search directly for an Agent (our name for Consultant) who specialises in the area that the candidate is interested in. The candidate can now connect with a personalised Agent URL (PURL), and from there can connect with the Agent directly via phone, email or social network.

We believe it’s time for a fresh approach to candidate communication. Talent are tired of applying for jobs via a job board, and never hearing back or getting a “Dear John” standard response. Ironically, our research suggest recruiter websites are the very worst offenders in this regard.

Now Aquent is taking the concept of connectivity and visibility to a whole new level, embracing the social medial model as an intrinsic way of doing business.

Lack of personal interaction is doing our industry no favours. In fact I consider it one of our deepest flaws. Many recruiters use technology to avoid connecting personally with talent, when in fact the real advantage of technology is to get much closer to many more quality candidates.

On our agents’ profile, a job seeker will see the Agent’s face and their contact details. The job seeker will know what our Agent specialises in, and what they are passionate about. They can read our Agents’ testimonials from talent and clients, and then connect directly.

We want to turn the tables on the recruitment industry. Many recruiters go out of their way to make themselves uncontactable, hiding behind job reference numbers and generic email addresses.

All of this is just dumb business, because increasingly the recruiter who owns the talent market…will own the market!

Aquent’s processes are now transparent and gives total responsibility to our business – mature, specialised recruiters to satisfy talent enquiries. It puts the pressure on us to actually do what we say we do, and I love that.

Besides, the reality is that job boards don’t find people jobs. People find people jobs.

(Last year, Aquent won the 2009 WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development” in the “Employment” category. More information on this can be found here)