Marketing Headhunter

Text exchange between me and a candidate ...

TOM:  Interesting interview.  Seems like companies really don't know what they want.

HARRY:  That's why I am in no danger of being replaced by the Internet.

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ECOMMERCE CANDIDATES: "Why it pays to ask me what's in the recruiting pipeline."

Lots of times the best ecommerce candidate doesn't get the job.  There are probably a hundred reasons why this is so, but this post only covers one:  The client decides to engage a contingency recruiter only after the search has been open for several months.

A good recruiter is like the fire department: You never want to call them, but they're there if you need them.  Recruiters are expensive.  I get that.  And lots of contingency recruiters suck.  I get that too.  The old joke in my industry is that "being the best contingency recruiter is like being the tallest midget."  Politically incorrect, but true.

Still, truly great contingency recruiters are out there, and they can make a whale of a difference to a client's business if there's an element of mutual trust and respect.  But very often it takes a client several months of trying to close an ecommerce search on their own before they get to that point mentally.

"The difference between salad and garbage is timing ..."

What happens if you are an ecommerce jobseeker and you apply for a certain job before I'm awarded the search?  Well, sadly, you are now my competitor.  Yep.  Even if I know you are highly qualified for the job, I cannot represent you on the deal.  You've already applied, and according to the client's fee agreement, the client is not going to pay me to manage your candidacy.

Which sucks, because I'm sure I would have improved your chances greatly by mapping your initial resume to the job description, giving you advice on the client's hot buttons, helping you understand the hiring committee's political agenda, and covering you up with company and market research to help you nail your interviews.

There's lots of creative stuff I can do to help you get the job -- but through no fault of your own, you applied for the role and now I'm duty bound to help my current candidates beat you in the search.

Neither of us could have predicted that the client would reach out to me in frustration even though your resume is sitting right ... under ... their ... nose.

If only.

I hate this for both of us, because you may in fact be highly qualified for the job, but the client didn't know enough about you to appreciate your background.  You are a diamond in the rough, and in the rough you shall stay.  This does not make me a heartless bastard:  Ninety percent of the time my client won't tell me which candidates have applied for the role, and even when they do I am professionally obligated to help my current candidates get the job.

What can you do about this?

Nothing really, other than try not to shotgun your resume around the industry.  Beyond that, you can keep in touch with your industry's best recruiters and see what they have in the pipeline.  Certainly I'll tell you if you ask, but most contingency recruiters will say that I'm insane for doing this.  Why?  Because average recruiters are afraid that you will go around them if they tell you who the client is.  Wimps.

I have never operated like that.

If you're a highly qualified candidate, I may mention that "I heard Company X is looking for a VP of Ecommerce, and their VP of HR reached out to me about possibly handling the search.  Let's wait a week to see if I get the deal.  If I don't, then I'll call the VP of HR and recommend you for the job.  If I do get the search, then I'd love to manage your candidacy."  I might even provide some judicious commentary about Company X, its lines of business, who else may have applied, and so on.

This positions me to the candidate as a valuable source of intel, and demonstrates to them the value of waiting to see if I land the search.

Again, I know of very few recruiters who operate like this, even though I have never been screwed by an A-player when I've taken this tact.  There's absolutely nothing unethical about this strategy, and I've found that only second-rate (ie, insecure) candidates go around me.

Later, these B-players are easily dispatched by my heavily-armed A-players when I do get the search -- or even when I don't get the search, and I introduce these loyal A-players to the company's VP of HR as a courtesy to everyone.

Either way, I win.  Because in contingency recruiting, there's a lot to be said for karma.

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JOB SEARCH TIP: "Bail Early in the Recruiting Process"

ATLANTA, GA - At EcommerceRecruiter.com, we specialize in contingency-based ecommerce searches, meaning we only get paid when we close a deal.  Typically, we don't do retained work.  Nor do most recruiters.

Recruiting's fiercely competitive: InfoUSA's rentable list of executive search firms contains 7,686 records.  That number's not gospel, but it should give you an idea of how many players there are.  And there are zero barriers to entry.  All you need to be a recruiter is five fingers, a phone, and the gift of gab.

Most recruiters are generalists.

I'm not being uncharitable when I say that most contingency recruiters are generalists, and they tend to follow the money into the hottest industries.  Sometimes it's logistics.  Sometimes it's finance.  Or information technology.  It could be anything.  Whatever the economy dictates.

Today, Indeed.com lists 16,905 ecommerce jobs -- versus 217,000 accounting jobs.  Accounting, btw, has been around since the 1600s.  Ecommerce has been around since 1995.  Ecommerce is a very hot field, and it will only get hotter as the forces of mobile, local search, social media, and international trade combine.

Naturally, contingency recruiters are absolutely flooding into the ecommerce space.

But here's the thing: An ecommerce recruiter needs two things to appeal to the best candidates:  Ecommerce expertise, and a great flow of ecommerce jobs.  The best recruiters do a great job of aggregating both the SUPPLY and DEMAND of talent.  We make a market.  It's simple, but not easy.  It takes excellent candidates to attract world-class clients, and vice versa.  It's a chicken-and-egg deal.

Against this backdrop, it's safe to say that "one off" recruiters are usually desperate to close whatever deal they're working on, and asking a one-off recruiter if you should take the job is like asking a barber if you need a haircut.  Seriously.  They usually have only one ecommerce search and whatever candidates they can scare up on LinkedIn.  Again, I'm not being uncharitable.  This "specialist-versus-generalist" dynamic is common in all service industries.  Look it up.

By contrast, EcommerceRecruiter.com was contacted by [many] dozens of companies in 2010 and we took slightly more than half of the deals that were presented to us.  And our candidate database contains +45,000 resumes, most with cell phone numbers.  Ecommerce is all we do.

Why am I telling you this?

Because if you're a candidate and I'm repping you on a deal, I absolutely do not care (from a personal, financial standpoint) whether or not you accept my client's offer of employment.  Sure, I care a lot on behalf of my client.  After all, it's my job to help them land the talent they want.

But if you don't take the job, I've usually got at least one very good backup candidate to show my client ... and several other job opportunities to show you.  Most of the time, I'll close my client's search regardless of whether you take the job.  And very often, I'll place you in another job.  So, I'm indifferent.

But that doesn't mean you should be.

A while back, a candidate of mine got an offer from a client.  It was a great offer by a great company for a great candidate; and one that the candidate haggled over, too.  For a week!  The client jumped through hoops to get this guy.  The money, the role, and the title were all sweetened to land this candidate.  The client bent over backwards, and in the end the candidate decided that "the role really wasn't for him."

Negotiations that last longer than a few days usually don't end well.

I wasn't mad.  I'll close the search soon.  But it sure was unfair to my client.  The whole candidacy was like a big budget movie with a plot that went nowhere.

Candidates, please don't do this!

Sharply define what it is you want in your next career opportunity and be prepared to pounce when it's offered to you.  It's okay to window shop with the recruiter.  And it's alright to tire-kick with client phone screens.  But for heaven's sake, don't be so wishy-washy about your career that you drag a client through several rounds of in-person interviews at their expense.  At a minimum, this is a lousy way to allocate your valuable vacation days.

Certainly, I'll provide you with as much career counseling as I can, but remember that I'm not going to try to convince you to take the job.  Ever.  If you think a potential job is not going to be right for you, it's always best to bail early in the process.

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Introducing FRAM: Spam from social media friends.

ATLANTA - My company has done business with Linkedin for several years.  Happily, I might add.  I started using Linkedin in 2004 -- even before I really understood how to use it, while most of my recruiter friends insisted that I was insane for using it at all.

But I used it anyway, sensing that Linkedin would someday amount to something.  I'm so smart.

Obviously, Linkedin has since become a major force in the recruiting industry, and it has the ability to completely transform and disrupt the executive search business in the coming years.  Big time.

Looking back, every time my firm had an opportunity to subscribe to a Linkedin service, we usually went "limit up" on it – meaning, we bought as much of it as we could at the time.  And we were rarely disappointed with our returns on these investments.

So last year, when Linkedin approached us about subscribing to their Recruiter tool, we signed the deal. Except that the deal Linkedin pushed us to sign was not a typical one-year deal such as we see from CareerBuilder and  Monster.  No, Linkedin wanted us to do a three-year minimum on Linkedin Recruiter.

Three years is a lifetime to a paranoid recruiter.

And Linkedin wasn't giving Recruiter away, that's for sure.  In fact it was pretty expensive, but it gave us a substantial inventory of InMails -- AKA, the ability for us to communicate directly with anyone in Linkedin's database without going through a string of intermediaries, whether we had a personal relationship with the ultimate recipient or not.  So if Barack Obama is on Linkedin and I want to send him an InMail, I can, immediately, confidentially, and without asking three intermediaries to pass my note along.  Done.

Slick concept, especially for lazy recruiters.  Who needs to cold call when you can just press a button?  I'm so smart.

You can get a sense for InMail pricing on this grid.

Now then.  Traditionally, my attitude has been that Linkedin is much more than a standard candidate database.  Aspects of it more closely resemble online communities.  Duh: It's social.  In fact, my own Linkedin group, EcommerceJobs.com, has nearly 5000 members and is now the seventh-largest e-commerce group on Linkedin.  So Linkedin is of real, serious strategic importance to my firm.

But lately, I wonder if we made the right call by buying thousands of InMails.

The problem boils down to what it is known among direct marketers as List Fatigue, a concept that refers to prospect list that is so over-mailed that the prospects on the list no longer respond to any marketer, no matter how qualified or relevant the marketer may be.  It's a simple signal-to-noise problem.

Tonight I spent 45 minutes going through my Linkedin e-mail inbox.  What I found was appalling.  Most of the correspondence was spam, outright.  Totally impersonal and irrelevant to me, yet because I "knew" many of the senders through social media, I felt compelled in some cases to acknowledge their outreach.

Introducing FRAM: Spam from social media friends.

It was like spam, but much worse.  It often came with a weird sense of obligation.  For example, one of my (4,190) first-degree connections asked me to write a short recommendation about him before passing along his bio to a hiring manager in an industry that's totally unrelated to my own (ecommerce).  Sure, I could have been a dick and archived his InMail, but I'm in the karma business.  Plus I'm not a dick.

Several InMails were from PR flacks advising me of some new development with their software clients.  Many InMails were from social media experts inviting me to attend a webinar.  And so on.

All told, I had 47 InMails, and less than 5 contained REAL opportunities.

And immediately, I was overcome with the fear that people must feel the exactly same way about MY InMails -- all of which cost me nearly ten bucks a pop to send.  I'm not in the business of annoying people, and I don't think anyone should be.  Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not "over" Linkedin, and I don't think it has jumped the shark.  But there's something about Linkedin that reminds me of that Yogi Berra quote about his favorite restaurant being "so popular that no one goes there anymore."  I can see that comment applying to Linkedin at some point down the road.

How far down the road I can't say, although I'm about to enter year 2 of my three year deal.  Which means that I'm obligated to "Fram" Linkedin members for at least another two years, or watch thousands of dollars worth of InMails expire, unused.

Which is probably what I'll do.

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