job fit, team fit, boss fit, company fit, skill fit, blah blah
Via my Technorati cosmos, I found Isabont’s blog, at which Simon describes a recent conversation with a recruiter about trying to match career changers and people whose qualifications are otherwise not exactly what the client has in mind to available openings.
Meanwhile, over at Hiring Revolution, Amy is writing about agency clients who need to rethink their insistence on candidates with agency experience.
I run into this issue on a regular basis. The client frequently has a long list of things they think they need in order to hire a candidate (and most of them are ad agencies or PR firms), but what they fail to notice is that ALL the agencies in town are growing, which means they’re ALL looking for people with agency experience, so the number of positions requiring agency experience are growing, but as long as they continue to insist on hiring only agency people, the pool of people with that experience isn’t going to get any bigger.
Meanwhile, I’m a voice, shouting in the desert about this, and some of my clients know me well enough to trust my judgment on that, but most of them are obstinate and continue to insist on that agency background. And I run into the issue that Simon describes- I either present candidates that make my clients question whether I’ve even read their job description, or I don’t present candidates at all. And then they wonder why I’m not sending them candidates, and I have to tell them that it’s because they aren’t listening to me when I tell them that there are no more agency people. The agency people are all working, and their employers are clinging to them like cold death. Even my clients who are accustomed to being barraged with candidates simply because of their reputations for doing the cool work are finding themselves scraping for people. So clients are going to have to get used to considering candidates with non-ideal backgrounds, or they’re going to have a lot of unfilled seats.
It doesn’t help that when I ask my clients whose work they like, they might name four firms, and three of them will be my clients who I can’t recruit from. In that sense, I suppose I’m a victim of my own success, since I work with almost all the cool kids.
But we’ve been beating our heads off this particular wall for days now in my office- the people we want are working, they aren’t reading postings, they aren’t going to networking events, they’re just out living their lives and not paying attention to the job market. So how do we find them? Direct recruiting, one by one, works, but isn’t that efficient. So how do we get to know these people?
I’ll tell you what, I’m about a minute from walking up and down K Street with a sandwich board that says, “Work with the web? Hate your job? Talk to me!”
October 9th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Nice to hear this frustration from someone other than just jobhunters. Maybe a fee scale that charges clients more for finding experienced agency people than for finding career changers might help. After all the clients are paying more for salary with those specifications. It would make an interesting business problem determining how much more the market will bear for the difference. I was in engineering and I am doing my part by letting anyone I meet know that there is no market in engineering, or in any profession where all the ads say 5-10 years experience. That is what all alumni should do when they can’t find a job in their chosen profession.
Good luck finding candidates. Perhaps you might advise some of the jobhunters how they might start competing firms and drum up future business that way.
Finally you might also look at nonlocal candidates. Relocation can be a problem, but if considered carefully, it could increase the size of your candidate pool. Maybe advertising in trade magazines might also help.