Magic Pot of Jobs

We got a call this morning from a branch manager at one of our sister offices. We share several clients, including a particular firm for whom we’ve been trying to fill a high-level position for some time.

Our colleague calls to inform us that this client had asked her branch for a receptionist this morning. They immediately sent their most qualified, available talent- a woman who happens to be a Muslim and wears a hijab.

Shortly after the talent arrived, she was sent away from the client and back to our colleague’s office. The HR Director (with a Senior Professional in Human Resources certification, mind you) explained to our colleague that “Image is everything here, and we just can’t have her sitting at our front desk.”

As the Farkers say, “O RLY?”

Note that the talent was well-groomed, her clothes were clean and cared for, her demeanor was polite and friendly, and was in all ways appropriately professional for the position.

So none of our offices will be servicing this client. In addition to finding the talent an appropriate substitute assignment immediately, the branch manager for that office will be calling corporate to get some direction on the most appropriate way to tell this client to take a hike and never come back.

As I often say to my coworkers in such situations, it never surprises me that there are people in the world who think this way. It only surprises me that there are people who actually say it out loud. Especially people with advanced professional certifications in KNOWING BETTER THAN THAT.

I’m appalled, can you tell?

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Hiring Revolution is is dead on about slow-poke clients taking for-freaking-EVER to make a decision about a candidate. I don’t know why my clients think they can get away with this and still get the best talent. A year ago, there were plenty of high-quality tech professionals positively falling off trees and you could take your time to interview several before making a choice. Now, the person you want to hire likely already has a job, and if they’re actively seeking a new one, they’re likely to entertain multiple offers before making a decision.

Take, for example, the case of one of our clients. They’re a prestigious communications firm, and when they say “Jump,” we don’t say “How high?” We just start jumping and asking if it’s high enough, because we can so totally jump higher if needed. We like working with this client, because for the most part their expectations are reasonable and our talent like working there. Understand, in addition to being one of our most important clients, they’re also one of our favorite clients.

The Interactive practice of this agency came to us late last year with a job order for a senior developer with a rare (for DC) and unusual mix of skills. It has now been nearly a year since this job order has been open.

Yes, the skillset is rare, but being good at what we do, Stephanie and I found them the person they wanted to hire. Not once, but TWICE. And yet, they STILL have not made an offer. Why twice, you ask?

Because their process to extend a direct hire offer involves not just the interview with the immediate hiring manager, but a second round of interviews with HR and multiple managers from the studio the candidate will work in. As you might imagine, finding a 2-3 hour stretch in which four executives will all have half an hour free in an ad agency is a major feat. HR didn’t make it a priority to schedule this second round of interviews with either candidate, and as a result, more than a month would go by between the first interview and the second round (if it happened at all), and that was a month in which we would ask for answers for the candidate from the client, and none would be forthcoming.

Experienced recruiters already know the end of this story. Senior developers of this caliber do not stay on the job market for long, and in both cases, they took other jobs when they got tired of waiting around. As a result, the team lead who initially requested the search is still limping along without this developer (through no fault of his own- he’s actually quite responsive and was as helpless as we were to move the process forward), the company has lost out on two brilliant candidates, two candidates have lost valuable time waiting for word on this opportunity, and Stephanie and I have lost two excellent candidates, countless hours, and the fee we would have charged for the successful placement, despite having done the job requested of us TWICE.

I’m certainly a fan of a thorough and deliberative interview process- when the job market is such that you may only have one candidate to make a decision on, you want to be absolutely certain that it’s the right fit, and that you aren’t just taking the first thing being offered to you. At the same time, however, employers must still make it a top priority to conduct the interview process in an efficient fashion. Candidates are people who need to work- they may not be able to wait, and even if they can, they may not WANT to wait around for an offer from an employer who doesn’t demonstrate respect for their time.

Take heed, employers. It’s a war for talent, and he who hesitates loses the best candidates.

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You’ll find entry level jobs at CollegeRecruiter.com.

Props to Saiko Consulting for their SQLChallenge. It taps into the notion that most programmers have a competitive streak when it comes to their code.

Oh, and look, there are related jobs posted all over this daily coding challenge site.

Brilliant idea, Saiko. Any thoughts on whether it yields good candidates?

Interesting analysis from the May 28 Philadelphia Inquirer:

What Generation Y - people born after 1980 - wants to know is: How quickly will I take on new responsibilities? How meaningful will my work be immediately? I grew up in a digital world; why shouldn’t I be able to work from home? Most important, perhaps, they will be constantly questioning how long they should continue in their first, second, third or fourth jobs.

Read the full article

I don’t know what it is lately, but I’ve been getting a rash of calls for temporary help where the client only has the vaguest idea of what they need. The moment I start asking questions about the position, such as, “So what will this person be doing?” they start stammering and telling me they’ll have to firm up the requirements and get back to me next week.

I’ve got more clients than I can handle right now- don’t waste my time.

Further, what’s up with the client who pulled this same thing, put me off for two weeks, saying they were still working out ther requirements internally, and then posted the (temporary) job to an industry mailing list to which I subscribe? If you want to try to fill it without an agency first, just say so. You won’t hurt my feelings, and in fact I’ll be grateful that you chose not to waste my time in following up with you.

At the recommendation of one of the guys over at Recruiting.com I’ve been reading Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies by Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda. I’ve been finding it pretty interesting so far, though I haven’t gotten that deeply into it yet.

Something I noticed, however, as they were talking about their “itinerant experts” who work with staffing companies, was that there were several sort of offhanded digs directed at the markups charged by staffing companies, as though we somehow “hijack” people’s earnings.

To Barley & Kunda’s credit, they do address this question more fully later in the book and do begin to explain exactly what service the agency provides that justifies the markup. Now, realizing that I am biased, it seems to me that they don’t fully understand what it is that the markup pays for, and the comments from some of the workers interviewed for the book indicate that a lot of candidates don’t really understand it, either. That’s regrettable, because it causes a lot of distrust between candidates and recruiters, which isn’t in anyone’s best interests. So let me explain a little bit about markups and staffing generally in hopes of clarifying it.

A word about how pay/bill rates are figured. I generally determine what the pay rate is based approximately on what someone would get to do the same job as a regular full-time employee. Ideally, I’ll base it on what the client would pay per year for that job, but if the client doesn’t know, I’ll use whatever the approximate market salary would be. If it’s a $50,000 per year job, I divide $50,000 by the number of hours worked in a year, and that’s the hourly rate I offer the talent. From there, I have a standard markup that’s based on all the costs I have to cover, and I charge it to everyone. Only rarely do I deviate from it, and then only in special circumstances. It seems to me that if a talent working on a W-2 for me is making approximately the same amount of money that he or she would be making in a full-time position, I’m not “hijacking” anyone’s potential earnings with my markup.

I realize that there are plenty of agencies out there which place less of an emphasis on paying talent a fair rate. That’s generally because they compete with other agencies on price, and my particular company tries not to play that game. If my client gets rate-shock, I’m pretty confident about the value of both the talent as well as my own work, so while I can usually provide a few dollars of wiggle room, I don’t participate in “how low can you go” contests. After all, if I’m paying my talent fairly, there’s less chance of them getting offered significantly more money somewhere else since they’re already being paid well, and talent who feel like I’m taking good care of them aren’t just going to jump the first time someone offers them another $2 an hour. So if you think you’re working with an agency that doesn’t care about paying you fairly, I encourage you to shop around for another agency.

Now let me address the question of how I earn the markup I charge.

(more…)

Attention managers: Your employees are customers too. Take a lesson from this guy/

I received feedback on a help desk candidate yesterday that gave me pause. The corporate recruiter who had interviewed him had asked a series of technical questions, and she said he had gotten some of them wrong.

Now, I’ve heard about this before. What happens is, some HR person who probably doesn’t know anything about IT (and to be honest, most of them really don’t- it’s not their specialty, after all) sits down with a list of questions and answers they’ve printed out, and starts firing them at the candidate.

Words cannot adequately express what a poor way this is to evaluate an IT candidate.

What non-IT people fail to understand about the IT field is that the person who comes to fix your computer doesn’t have some stored list of problems and solutions in his head. The successful practice of IT support is essentially nothing more than understanding the fundamental principles of the systems you are supporting, and interpreting their behavior to determine what’s causing it.

In other words, you can’t reliably answer a question about how to fix a computer without having a computer in front of you.

Thus, a help desk tech who is attempting to fix your computer can be brilliant at her job while also being atrocious at answering questions about how to fix a computer in the artificially contrived environment of an interview. This is just like when my mom tells me that her iTunes has once again stopped being able to retrieve track names from the CDDB. I know enough about iTunes to know that it needs an Internet connection to do that, but I can’t figure out what the specific problem is on my mom’s computer without sitting down in front of it (or using a remote desktop client to access it), checking her iTunes settings, checking her connection settings, and finally checking her firewall’s list of allowed applications- I can’t ask her to do that herself because I don’t have her firewall application’s menu structure memorized. I just have to sit down and look at it and figure it out. That doesn’t make me incompetent- it just makes me a troubleshooter.

It’s unfair, and more than that, it’s fundamentally inaccurate, to try to evaluate an IT person’s skills without actually sitting him or her down in front of a test environment, because even the best IT support staff don’t have a series of memorized screenshots stored in their brains for instant recall whenever a question arises. You wouldn’t ask your mechanic to describe how to fix your car without looking at it, and you shouldn’t ask a tech to describe how to fix your computer that way, either.

I think this is about to become my new favorite blog: Ridiculous Job Postings .

Recruiting.com makes an excellent point today about what happens when corporations go nuts on the filtering and start blocking out huge swaths of blogs- employees feel more free to mouth off, and the company becomes unable to see what’s being said about them.

Scoble scoffs at employee blogging policies that are more specific than “Be Smart,” but frankly, Scoble has the luxury of working at Microsoft, most of whose employees by definition are internet-savvy folk who are well aware of the risks of blogging about one’s employer.

The problem, of course, is that the idea of employees having the ability to share their opinions in front of a worldwide audience is scary to corporate PR departments. It’s not that PR departments are venal or clueless, it’s that branding and PR have always been about controlling your message, and suddenly every one of your employees potentially worldwide exposure for whatever they want to say about your company. Yikes!

Microsoft has actually handled it in a pretty good way- they’ve gone so far as to build blogging tools into their developer network sites and encourage their employees to blog. They’ve taken the Transparency tack, and it’s serving them well, brand-wise. GM is another company that is trying to use blogging for its benefit.

The challenge for companies is to get over the fear that accompanies lack of control. The reward is that saying, “We are confident in the quality of what we do and in the way we treat our employees,” is a powerful message in itself. Concerned that a few disgruntled employees (and no matter how good you are, there will always be a few) can torpedo the whole thing? How about a CEO blog? How about a blog from your internal recruiting department? How better to have your company recognized as a leader in its field than by sharing information about industry trends and predictions on a corporate blog?