Thanks For Wasting My Time (Part 3)

Last week we wrote about how often clients really aren’t sure what they want. Even if they have a job description it may not go beyond outlining broad areas of responsibility, basic qualifications and a compensation range. This week we’ll look at those clients who know what they want (or eventually figure it out), but aren’t willing to pay for it.

The Number One reason why clients are not willing to pay for what they want is that they cannot make it work within their existing compensation structure. Called “salary compression”, it boils down to this…it creates a lot of problems if a company brings in people from outside and pays them more than they pay their existing employees. Even if the company creates a new job level and title to justify the difference, employees soon figure out that the new hire is basically doing the same job they are doing and getting paid a lot more to do it. But isn’t compensation information confidential? How would they know? People talk. They will find out. They always find out.

So if the client cannot “afford” to hire the talent they really need without upsetting their current employees; what do they do? They call the “headhunter genie” who can surely find A+ talent for B- compensation. That’s why our fees are so outrageous, isn’t it?(No, actually our fees are what they are for a variety of reasons. Come to think of it, that’s a great subject...think I’ll write about it when I finish this series).

The reality is that there is no free lunch, there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny and Elvis is way dead. A headhunter may well find you A+ talent for something less than A+ compensation, but likely it won’t be much less and don’t expect more than one or two candidates. Compensation tends to find its competitive equilibrium. Unrealistic expectations with regard to compensation, whether the client’s or the candidate’s, is always a red flag for headhunters. When it is clear that the client is unwilling to step up to the required level of compensation, we only have two options: walk away from the search assignment or convince the client to lower their expectations.

The second reason that some clients are not willing to pay for what they want is that they are just cheap. Add patience along with tough negotiating skills and you are in for a long, painful search assignment. Some companies just operate that way, especially in the transportation and logistics markets. It’s a thin margin business where companies are fighting for fractions of pennies. A company cannot afford to overpay for anything and they are always shopping for the best deal. I get that and I’m ok with working under those conditions, up to a point. If the client is way too cheap and way too picky, it's just not worth it.

As noted above, our fees also play a factor. Most companies hate to use a search firm. They think our fees are too high and they should be able to find people without using us. So when they do resort to using us, they try to rationalize it by either going low on compensation or high on candidate requirements. Many times, after we’ve worked a search for weeks trying to find that perfect candidate at the right price, the client will hire someone on their own or promote from within. The person they end up hiring will meet few of the requirements we were given. But the client did not have to pay a fee.

Buying talent on the cheap is not a good long-term strategy. I understand the “salary compression” issue. Some of our clients are in low-cost markets or markets where there is a large supply of talent. They have been able to build a high-performing organization while maintaining a very conservative approach to compensation. If they have to go outside and hire, it’s tough. Usually we end up striking a balance between job requirements and compensation. Ultimately we may have to find a candidate who has other reasons for wanting to join that company in that location. It’s not always all about the money.

But if a company is consistently hiring on the cheap relative to their competition, watch out. These tend to be the ultimate time-wasters and search firms do neither themselves nor their candidates any favors by working with such companies.

Next time we’ll look at perhaps the mother of all time wasters…too many people involved in the hiring process.

Thanks For Wasting My Time (Part 2)

Now we get to the biggie when it comes to delays and indecision in the search process…The Client (aka The Employer, The Company, The Hiring Authority.) If you want to know where job searches go to die, just follow some companies through their interview and hiring process. What you will see are missed interviews, rescheduled interviews, changing job requirements, low-ball salary offers and poor communication within the organization and with the candidate/search firm. You will likely see a lot more, but when you boil it all down the problems are related to three major issues:

_The Client does not really know what they want.
_The Client is not willing to pay for what they want.
_The Client has too many people involved in the process.


Each of these issues has multiple “issues” of their own, but we see common themes across many different organizations.

So why would a Client not really know what they want? First it’s worth noting that many clients know exactly what they want and are consistent throughout the search process. Headhunters enjoy working for these clients and give them priority. But a significant number of clients either don’t know what they want or change their minds as the search progresses. Headhunters can be slow learners at times, but eventually they figure out who these clients are and work with them accordingly.

And then there are job descriptions. The client will say that if you are a capable search firm, their job description contains all you should need to know about the position. Unfortunately, most job descriptions are too general, too “HR-ish” and too “buzz-worded”. Best case they may provide a first level filter for sifting through candidates. When it gets down to interviewing and making critical decisions, the Client may still not really know what they need from the position. So they hire the candidate “everyone felt good about”. Which often means they end up hiring a great candidate but for the wrong job.

So for the search firm; dealing with a Client who does not know what they want becomes a process of Q&A, investigation and what-if’s. If we are fortunate enough to be dealing with the ultimate hiring authority and decision-maker, we may be successful. But if we are dealing with HR or a hiring authority that really doesn’t have much authority and is not THE decision-maker, the odds of success go down considerably. And the time investment necessarily goes up. We end up playing show and tell with a variety of candidates; and usually not the highest quality, under-the-radar candidates who tend to resist being “demo-ed” for poorly defined job opportunities. If we take on this type of search, we can only hope that we are not facing either of the other two hurdles.


Next week we’ll take on “The Client is not willing to pay for what they want”.

Thanks For Wasting My Time

“You can't always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes…well, you might find,
You get what you need.”
-The Rolling Stones


Back in late May I wrote about the problems we are having with delays and indecision in the search process. After taking a break to write about WWOOF, I am now back on task.
As noted back in May, we are having “issues” with candidates as well as clients. So this week, I am focusing on the candidate side.

I think there are four major factors which are making it difficult for candidates to make a decision regarding a job change these days:

_Job Security
_Relocation
_Compensation & Benefits
_Ennui

We work primarily with mid-career professionals. These are folks who have been around the industry for at least ten years and in many cases twenty+ years. They have been through the good times and the bad times. They know that the grass is not always greener on the other side. Job security is important to them. They have either had a bad experience with a job change or know someone who has. So even though they may be unhappy in their current situation, the fear of making a job change will keep them from pulling the trigger.

However, their fear doesn’t keep them from “kicking the tires” on new job opportunities. And with the easy access to information via company websites, job boards and social networks, we are seeing more of these “tire kickers” testing the water via search firms. It’s a low risk way for them to test the market and “just see what’s out there.” Many of them will even pursue an opportunity, interview and go all the way to an offer before finally deciding that they are better off staying put. Thanks for wasting my time. The challenge for the search firm is figuring out up front how motivated the candidate is to actually make a job change and what are they really looking for.

Relocation is obviously a huge issue. Most of our placements involve moving, so we have a lot of relocation wounds and battle scars. It’s always been an issue, but the collapse of the housing market has elevated it to an insurmountable hurdle for many candidates. The trap for recruiters is that a lot of candidates don’t want to admit it until they have an offer in hand. The recruiter really needs to go through a “relocation reality check” early on in the process. If the candidate is financially upside down on their house, his or her spouse has an established career that would be disturbed by relocation, the kids are in great schools and at “that critical point” of social, educational and extra-curricular activity involvement and development; it is highly unlikely that any job offer will be compelling enough to get that family to move.

But, if the candidate is unhappy enough (or perhaps even unemployed), they will pursue an opportunity. The family may even say, “Yes, we will move if it’s the right thing to do,” all the while lighting candles and keeping their fingers crossed that they will not have to make that decision. But then, after much time and many interviews, an offer finally comes down. And when faced with the decision for real, they just can’t do it.
Thanks for wasting my time.

Pay and benefits have always been an issue and even more so these days. First of all, companies are under the misconception that there are so many unemployed and/or under-employed, qualified candidates on the market that they don’t need to make strong offers.
There are many other issues involving “low offers” which I will address in the next blog about the client’s role in delaying and/or de-railing the placement process. But for a variety of reasons, too often we are forced to present less than stellar offers to candidates. Add that to the candidate’s concerns about job security and barriers to relocation, and it makes it easy for the candidate to “just say no”. Thanks for wasting my time.

And then there is “Ennui”. (I always wanted to use that word in my blog.) It’s French for having a sense of boredom, listlessness or dissatisfaction. And I think it plays a significant role in the difficulty candidates seem to have in making a job change decision.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell, there are a lot of candidates who are unhappy in their career. But it’s not about their company; it’s about the career they have chosen. What they really want is a different career path, but they have so many years invested in logistics that they can’t afford to get completely out of the industry. Thus we see the sales person who wants to “move to the other side of the desk” and become a “supply chain manager” on the “shipper side”. Or the operations person, who is burned out on the grind and thinks they would make a great sales person (play golf, enjoy long leisurely lunches, drink a lot and work from a home office…come to think of it, that sounds a lot like headhunting…but I digress.)

My point is that unhappy candidates who want to make a significant career change are not good candidates for a search firm. Clients engage us to find candidates who have certain qualifications and accomplishments to fill a specific need within their organization. We are headhunters, not life coaches. I don’t mind giving advice to a candidate, but I do mind spending hours interviewing, evaluating, prepping for and debriefing from client interviews, convincing the client that this is the “right candidate, negotiating a great offer; finally getting to first and goal on the one yard line, only to have the candidate tell me that he really doesn’t want to play the game anymore. He wants to do something different; a job that is more rewarding, more fulfilling. Isn’t that special? Thanks for wasting my time.

Next week, I’ll write about how clients waste my time (unless I find something more interesting to write about…).

WWOOF

I took a few days off last week and traveled to the “Outback” of Far West Texas. It’s a region that includes Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park and has been the location for some of my favorite movies, most notably Giant and Fandango. I’ve been there before and should know better than to go after May 1 or before October 1, as the region is also part of what is known as the Chihuahuan Desert, except it’s not in Chihuahua (yet).

I could write about a lot of stuff related to the trip and to the region and may do so in the future. But, this week I think I’ll limit it to one subject…Wwoofing. I guess I’m just out of touch. I had no clue about Wwoofing. But, if you go far enough off of “the grid” you run across such things. First, you need to understand that those who visit Far West Texas are very different from those who live there. Those who visit are tourists who leave their money and wonder how anyone could live there year-round. Those who live there take the money and wonder why anyone would go there for vacation. And most of those who live there only use first names. This is either because they are so stoned they’ve forgotten their last names or they are in the federal witness protection program.

At any rate, a number of these desert inhabitants are in effect old hippies. Some are life-time hippies and some are retired folks who finally got to be hippies (they prefer survivalists) when they no longer needed real jobs to support themselves. And some are Wwoofers. Wwoofers are the new generation of hippie/hiker/hobos who roam from place to place exchanging organic farm labor for room and board. WWOOF is the acronym for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. As noted on their website www.wwoofusa.org:

“WWOOF farms offer a variety of educational opportunities, including growing vegetables, keeping bees, building straw bale houses, working with animals, making wine, and much more…..One-half day of volunteer help is traded for food and accommodation, with no money exchanged. This is not paid work on farms, it is an exchange of education and culture…Any farm, community, or garden project that is willing to host and accommodate volunteers can participate in our program. “

So if you are willing to join this grassroots organization, you too can become a Wwoofer or a Wwoofee. Wwoofing in Far West Texas can’t be easy. I don’t think the Mexican drug cartels support free market capitalism, so I suppose these folks are growing legal herbs and vegetables, raising goats and trying to grow grapes. Lord knows how they get enough water. But based on what I saw, what they do find is not wasted on baths and showers.

I actually had a conversation with a Wwoofer. This guy was in his early 30’s, originally from Berkeley CA (of course) and Hispanic. He was working his way to Costa Rica. In addition to Wwoofing he also had a part-time job at one of the local high-end restaurants. (Which meant that he actually did take a bath now and then. And yes, there are high-end restaurants in the “Outback”. Champagne, caviar and calf-fries.). The next leg of his journey was going due south into Mexico. He had reservations at a friend’s WWOOF farm/hostel/commune located somewhere near Durango. He already had three burros lined up and he was going to take the overland route. I said something about “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” and “no stinking badges” and he nodded and grinned replying “Blazing Saddles…cool”. I just said, “Yeah that too.”

Burros? Seriously? I asked if he was concerned about the drug cartels and other banditos he might encounter along the way. He said no worries; they could tell he didn’t have anything worth stealing. I noted that three burros elevated him to middle class status in that part of Mexico and even if they didn’t value the burros they might just shoot him for being stupid. He laughed and replied that it was something he had always wanted to do. He had been drifting around the States for almost a decade and was ready for a new adventure.

I don’t know if this guy was legit or not. He may be some local who grew up in Presidio and has never been farther away from home than Fort Stockton, but this had the makings of a great story. He said he was keeping a diary. If all went well, he would settle down in Costa Rica and open an organic vegetarian restaurant. I wished him well and urged him to “dream big and think franchising”.

My wife concluded that this guy was just a hustler, probably a switch-hitting male prostitute and that all this Wwoofing talk was bullshit. (Even after I looked up the WWOOF website, she still holds tight to the belief that he was trying to hustle or sell something other than key lime pie.) Maybe she is right, but I hope he makes it to Durango with his three burros and his diary and eventually gets to live out his dream in Costa Rica. I can’t wait to read the book.

____ or Get Off The Pot

“You don't make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you're-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don't know what's going to happen.”
Michael Bloomberg




The good news is that we are working a lot of searches these days. The bad news is that a lot of these searches seem to go on forever. I’ve been in the headhunting business for over 10 years and spent 25 years in the transportation industry. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen it take longer for people to make a decision when it comes to extending or accepting a job offer. It’s crazy.

I met with the owner of a company a few weeks ago. Most of his management team was in the meeting. The owner was excited about filling this key position and was raring to go. He asked me how quickly we could move on it. I told him that we would have a least two highly qualified candidates within a week. Based on the job specs, I knew that I had at least three or four candidates (probably more) who were ready to make a move and would be interested in this opportunity.

I also looked the owner in the eye and then glanced around at his management team and said, “As long as you folks respond to our candidate submissions, interview them or tell me why you won’t, we can complete this search in a matter of weeks, not months. But what we’re seeing is that most organizations are taking 2 or 3 weeks just to schedule the first phone interviews and if there are multiple candidates involved, we burn 4 to 6 weeks just getting to the point where there is an in-person interview.”

Well, you can guess the rest of the story…although we submitted two dead-on point candidates within 48 hours; we will be three weeks along before the first telephone interviews occur. The owner has handed the process off to a couple of his key people and I’m sure that he will call me in a week or two wanting to know what’s going on, why haven’t we found someone yet. This call will be after his people have thrown me under the bus. I’ll end up sending the owner date-stamped copies of our candidate submissions, his people will get pissed at me and then go about picking the candidates apart in such away that the owner will ultimately conclude that they need to find another search firm. (We know that’s how it works, because sometimes we are “the other search firm”. Anytime a company comes to us bitching about another firm and we know that firm to be competent and capable, big red flags go up. The problem is nearly always the client, not the search firm.)

And we are seeing almost as many delays and stop-starts on the candidate side. It’s not unusual to submit candidates who say they are motivated to make a job change, only to have them bail out before the first interview. And certainly, we are seeing candidates turn down offers or even worse accept offers then later change their minds.

While I agree with Mayor Bloomberg, quoted above, that uncertainty has a lot to do with the struggle to make decisions, I think there are other more fundamental issues here. Some are specific to the transportation and logistics market while others are in play regardless of the industry segment. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about the delays and difficulties we are seeing with clients and candidates, how they impact the search process and ultimately what it means to their relationship with the search firm.

Study This

The headline reads: “This Is Not a Joke. Government Issues a Study of a Study About Studies.”

It gets worse. This does not involve the EPA or Education or Welfare or even the Treasury. It’s the freakin’ Pentagon and the story goes like this:

“The Pentagon was inundated with so many studies in 2010 that it commissioned a study to determine how much it cost to produce all those studies.
Now the Government Accountability Office has reviewed the Pentagon’s study and concluded in a report this week that it’s a flop.
The study of a study of studies began in 2010 when Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that his department was “awash in taskings for reports and studies.” He wanted to know how much they cost.
Two years later, the Pentagon review is still continuing, which prompted Congress to ask the GAO to look over the Pentagon’s shoulder. What they found lacked military precision.
The GAO found only nine studies that had been scrutinized by the Pentagon review, but the military was unable to “readily retrieve documentation” for six of the reports.
The Department of Defense’s “approach is not fully consistent with relevant cost estimating best practices and cost accounting standards,” the GAO concluded. In fact, they often did not include items like manpower, the report found.
The Pentagon “partially concurs” with the GAO’s report.
The cost of the study of the study of the studies was not available from the GAO.”

This is crazy. But it has to be true, because you just can’t make up stuff like this. I have concluded that our entire government and all of its agencies are in effect run by consultants who think they have an unlimited budget. In this case, Defense Secretary Gates knew there were a lot of reports and studies being done by his department. But instead of addressing the problem, he wanted to study it. And the first step in studying it was to find out how much it was costing. Either Gates wanted to make a case for reducing the volume of reports and studies or he wanted to justify increasing his budget to cover the cost of reports and studies. Or maybe Gates was just fed up and wanted to make a point before handing the keys over to Leon Panetta and leaving the building. Given that he was a Republican and a holdover from the Bush administration, my guess is that the Obama administration really did have him buried in requests for more and more information. That’s not a slam on Obama, it’s just the way politics work and it’s what happens when a new party takes over. There’s no telling how much money is spent on the information gathering process when there is a change in the White House.

When it was all said and done, the study of the study of the studies was inconclusive. We got very little out of it other than the DOD doesn’t know how to study a study of studies. We also got another example of what’s wrong with too much government having too much money AND being overly politicized. The barrage of information requests that hit Secretary Gates was all about a new administration wanting to not just cover all the bases, but to also cover their ass (CYA) and, if in the process, something turns up that might embarrass the prior administration and the other party, all the better.

In business, we also see the CYA project in operation when a new leadership team takes over an organization. I hear it all the time from newly placed executives. “You would not believe what these guys were doing”. “I don’t know how they stayed in business.” “It’s going to take a lot longer to fix this mess than I expected.” … and on it goes.
But where business differs from politics, is that the CYA/Blame The Other guy effort is just a sideshow, not the main event. When it’s all said and done, business leaders know that they must produce even after resetting expectations and making sure everyone knows what a screwed up mess they inherited. When business leaders continue to put all their energy into playing CYA/Blame The Other Guy, they soon become “the other guy”. They don’t stick around long. Ultimately, shareholders demand results, not excuses.

Citizens also demand results from their government. The problem is that we can’t agree on what those results should look like. In business, there may be some disagreement about strategy and financial objectives, but there is usually agreement about the general concepts of profitability and return on investment. The same cannot be said of our fellow Americans’ expectations of their government. To make matters worse, we essentially have only two flavors of government to choose from which further polarizes the nation.
And those “two flavors” are for the most part bought and paid for by special interests groups. Is this a great country or what?

So we end up in three camps (D’s, R’s and I’s) with two choices (D or R). Every two years we stir the full pot in the House and parts of the pot in the Senate. Every four years we stir the big Presidential pot along with all of the other pots. The politicians continue to play the CYA/Blame The Other Guy game and prepare for the next election. As long as we cannot agree on what we want from government, this is the game that will define the winners and losers in politics. There is no “hope” for “change” unless we change the game.

To Read The Resume or Not To Read The Resume

Recently this little nugget found its way to my inbox:


Job recruitment website The Ladders conducted a formal survey of job recruiters using eye-tracking technology to figure out what matters most on your resume. Over the course of ten weeks, actual job recruiters' eye movements were measured as they looked through resumes and online profiles, creating visual heat maps. This allowed researchers to determine how long recruiters spent studying which aspects of resumes, and just as importantly, what content was largely ignored.
A key finding of the study: Recruiters spend nearly 80% of their time focusing on six different areas of a resume. These most-important aspects are:
• your name
• current title/company
• previous title/company
• current position start and end dates
• previous position start and end dates
• education
On average, recruiters spent six seconds sizing up these aspects to make the initial decision on whether to trash your resume or consider you for the position. The study also found that visual features such as pictures, graphs, and ads (on employment-related sites like LinkedIn) are distracting, eating up precious time and reducing the recruiter's decision-making ability.


Assuming I’ve had an adequate amount of caffeine, I can read six items such as these in six seconds. (Or maybe they meant six seconds per item, I can definitely do that…even without caffeine). However, I choose not to read resumes in this fashion. As a headhunter, which is sort of like a “job recruiter” only better, I have a real quick draw when it comes to shooting resumes. I don’t need to look at these six items or any six items to tell if I’m interested. I specialize in recruiting experienced management and executive level talent for transportation, logistics and supply chain management organizations. If you aren’t an experienced manager or executive in transportation, logistics or supply chain management, I don’t need to know your name, where you went to school or anything else. That may seem rude and insensitive, but that’s just the way it is. I look at your current title/company. 99% of the time, that tells me whether or not I want to read more. If it does not, then I look at your previous title and company. If the light does not come on for me at that point, then we’re done.

Thankfully, most of the resumes I receive are from experienced managers and executives who work in transportation, logistics or supply chain management. And after my quick glance to confirm that fact, I tend to spend a lot more than a few seconds reading a resume. The first thing I focus on is work history and the frequency of job changes. If there have been a lot of job changes, I want to know why. We frequently ask candidates to fill out a questionnaire that addresses issues which are generally not covered on the resume. Job changes and the reasons for those changes are a key part of that questionnaire.

The second thing I look at is “career progression”. Whether within the same organization or as the candidate has changed companies, the key question is: Are they moving up, moving down or just moving sideways? And progression is not just job titles. A VP in a small operation may be the equivalent of an Operations Manager in a much larger operation. Experienced headhunters who specialize in particular industries recognize and appreciate the differences between companies and how those differences translate into job titles.

The third thing I look for are responsibilities and accomplishments. I want to know the size and scope of your responsibilities and the more these are expressed in measurables the better. How much revenue, how many direct reports, what size budget, how many locations, etc etc ? Then more importantly, what did you accomplish, what were the results? Grew revenue, lowered costs, improved service, reduced accidents and increased profitability. Positive results will motivate me to interview you. But, be prepared…I will ask HOW you did it. Don’t make up stuff just to load your resume. Headhunters and hiring authorities will want to get “behind” the numbers. They better be real and they better be yours.

So work history, career progression and responsibilities/accomplishments are the big three for me in determining if I should invest time interviewing a candidate. If someone appears to be a dead-on match for an existing job opening, I will likely talk to them even if their resume is “weak” in one or more of these key areas. But regardless of matches with existing openings, if I get a candidate who has a stable work history, a solid record of career progression, has held positions with significant management and/or executive responsibilities and has achieved meaningful business results in those positions, we are going to have a conversation.