Magic Pot of Jobs

Some of you may remember the talent from a few weeks ago who was offered a job at an insultingly low salary by a company who dodged my calls, circumvented me, and told the talent that they were having trouble making payroll. I did eventually find him another assignment, but yesterday…

I got a call from the other office which works with that client to inform me that the person who had been responsible for most of my difficulty with that company was no longer there, and his replacement was willing to meet my talent’s salary expectations.

Long story short, the whole endeavor came to an abrupt halt when I reminded the new person that the talent was going to want to know if they were reliably making payroll before considering accepting a job with them.

Watch me shed tears over the loss of a client who doesn’t pay their bills and can barely manage to pay their own people.

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!”

True story: I get an email from one of my talent. He’s working at one of my very favorite clients, a model client who always treats both temporary staff and permanent staff with courtesy and friendliness. He’s doing a great job there, and I keep hearing about how much they like him, so with all that said, I can only assume the following incident was the result of a simple miscommunication.

On this particular day, my talent has a problem. You see, he arrived at work this morning to discover that the office where he had been sitting didn’t have any of his stuff in it, and he didn’t know why. He wandered around the office for some time, looking for someone in office services, until he was told that he had been moved from his office to a cubicle at the intersection of the two busiest hallways in the suite. He spends half his day writing, but now he’s listening to countless overheard conversations as people pass his desk. He tries to conduct phone calls with clients, only to discover that the ambient noise prevents the clients from hearing him properly.

Upon arriving at his new workspace, he began unpacking his things and discovered that one of them- a picture frame containing a photo of his girlfriend- had been broken.

Once I calmed him down a bit (he seemed a little frazzled from the whole experience; I would be too) I advised him to start using headphones to address the noise problem- he’s afraid it’s rude but I figure it’s more rude to not get your work done, no? And I emailed his supervisors to let them know that the headphones were my idea.

And now I’m going to get him a Red Swingline stapler.

Oh, my beloved MagicPotHeads, I have such a rant for you today.

The phone rings this morning, and I pick it up: “Thank you for calling [Major International Staffing Firm]. This is Tiffany, may I help you?”

“Hi this is [Angry Woman] from [Client with Spammy-sounding Name]. My rep was [Departed Coworker], and she told me I should be contacting [Current Coworker], but I’ve emailed him several times and I haven’t heard back. And I wasn’t going to use [MISF] anymore, because you clearly don’t want my business, but I thought I’d give you one more chance because maybe there was an error on your end about who my rep is.”

What I want to say: “Well, maybe we DON’T want your business.” What I actually say: “It’s very unlike [Current Coworker] to not respond promptly, are you sure you have the correct email address?”

We go round and round about this until my coworker returns to the office, and I let him deal with her. She was, of course, nasty to him for the whole conversation.

It turns out, she emailed him once. A week ago. And had never actually worked with us before, so none of us would have recognized her name.

There are some lessons here, boys and girls. First of all, email is not so reliable that you can trust it as the only method of communication with someone. We have an aggressive spam filter here that routinely eats legitimate emails, particularly from a client who has a common spam word in its name. No, we can’t control it, and no, we can’t just whitelist a whole domain from the field.

Secondly, why would you just assume that someone is ignoring you if you don’t get an answer to one email? The aforementioned spam filter issue could be causing the problem. You could have gotten the email address wrong. Your message could have just gotten buried in the literally hundreds of messages we receive per day.

Thirdly, why would you wait 6 business days to follow up with a phone call if your need is that urgent?

Fourth, is it really necessary to be a raging bitch? Do you think that’s going to make us want to work with you more? Guess what y’all, in this market, the individual client needs us a lot more than we need it most of the time. We can choose not to work with the assholes.

I went to a job fair yesterday. I hate job fairs. It cost $2100 for a small table in a crowded room, where the jobseekers had to stand in line outside to get in because, even with all those recruiters paying over two grand a pop to exhibit, they hadn’t bothered to rent a room of sufficient size. What a freakin’ racket.

Last year at the same event, my manager decided to take a little initiative and start talking to the people standing around outside. The organizers got angry and told her to stop, saying it wasn’t fair to the other people who had paid to be there. (Um, their lack of creativity is unfair to them?) For the record, once those attendees got inside, they sought my boss out to thank her for trying to help them. They were there to find jobs, and she was trying to give them jobs, until the organizers of the JOB FAIR stepped in. Whatev.

Anyway, here are just a couple of other scattered thoughts about job fairs-

• If you’re going to try to sell yourself to a roomful of people who might be interested in you as a potential employee, and you’re not in a creative field… maybe you don’t want to bring the purse with the blinged-out Playboy Bunny logo on it.
• I realize the black suit is the foundation of the Serious Professional Wardrobe, but is it really THAT much more popular than navy blue and pinstripes? (Full Disclosure: I own exactly one suit. It’s charcoal grey with pink pinstripes, and bows on the pockets. It is not a Serious Professional Suit, because I don’t want to work with people who expect a Serious Professional. Life is too short.)
• If you go to a job fair, bring a big tote bag. Job fair organizers are cheap and are likely to provide you with a substandard bag, but everyone there is going to have schwag and brochures and stuff. Also, bring something to put recruiters’ business cards into.
• Speaking of, why don’t more recruiters bring business cards to job fairs? You don’t have to give them to people you don’t want to talk to, but if you meet someone good, you want them to be able to find you again.
• If you’re charging $2100 per table at your job fair, maybe you want to make sure that the breakfast pastries you provide the recruiters (which are really important, by the way) aren’t so stale that the croissants make a THUNK! sound if you drop one on the table.
• I get total tchotchke envy at these things. The MISF used to have really cool and fun tchotchkes, but lately they’ve edged more toward boring stuff like Post-It cubes and calculators and stuff. So when I see another company with cool schwag, I try to arrange a schwag-exchange so I can come home with the cool stuff.

All in all, I talked to one person who I can likely put to work. She was the first person I talked to, and she got my hopes up, only to have them dashed on the rocks of people who either don’t do what I specialize in, or who are unemployed for a reason obvious to everyone but them. Sigh.

A colleague of mine from another branch who places mostly administrative people forwarded me a technical resume yesterday. I wasn’t that impressed with the resume for a number of reasons, but they weren’t necessarily dealbreakers, so I hadn’t made a decision about it yet.

The candidate called me today to follow up. I opened his resume and tried to get some detail out of him about it, figuring that lots of perfectly good tech people write terrible resumes, and maybe I had a diamond in the rough on my hands.

I didn’t. It was one of the most painful phone conversations I’ve had recently. But that’s not the reason for this post. What I want to know is…

…What do you do when the reason you don’t want to work with the person on the phone is that he’s dumb as bricks?

It’s been a hard week at the MISF, so my coworkers and I are feeling a little wrung-out, and it’s only Thursday. As a result, some pretty off the wall things have been overheard in our office…

——

“No, I don’t want to talk to him right now. I’m in a very important meeting with my chocolate graham cracker.”

——

“Geez, it’s like the Brotherhood of the Travelling CrankyPants around here. [Client] took them off and now [coworker] is wearing them.”

——

“They’ve only decided not to give us in the future what they weren’t giving us to begin with. So we haven’t lost anything but hope.”

——

pointing to the office teddy bear, sitting at a recently vacated desk “LOOK at him! He’s not even trying to LOOK busy anymore. Hey, Bear! MAKE SOME DAMN CALLS!”

I hesitated for a while to write this entry, because at least one of the clients in question has the link to this blog, and I didn’t want it to be weird, but… what the hell. (If you’re reading this, hi!)

There’s a confluence of factors at work at a couple of our clients, and we’re having trouble sorting out the extent to which these factors are related.

Factor 1: Our contacts at these clients have presented us with organizational charts showing the current makeup of their departments, the existing staff in those departments, and empty boxes for the positions which need to be filled. In one case, the empty boxes were even numbered in order of priority.

Factor 2: The client contacts who have brought us these charts are also, shall we say, rather attractive people. In one case, it’s a good thing he works with us so much, because I’ve had plenty of time to get over the staring. So unprofessional. And of course, being married now totally helps.

So, here’s the question- and it’s really just for theoretical purposes- would these clients be as hot without the org charts, or do the org charts positively influence our opinion of their overall level of attractiveness? If it’s the latter, exactly how much does it matter?

After all:

• Org charts are geeky, and we’re tech recruiters
• It’s good information design, which appeals to my not-so-inner geek
• It makes our job SO much easier, and being considerate is hot
• It gives us something to show our corporate overlords about how important these clients are

Or is it there a causal relationship the other way around? Do the attractive clients provide org charts to give the opposite-sex recruiters something ELSE to stare at?

I got a call from one of my talent the other day- he’s out on a help desk assignment, doing Tier 3/Jr. SysAdmin work with a client who has been a pain in my neck since they day they called me.

The client had offered him the position permanently. Not only had the client not informed me that an offer was about to be made, the client offered the talent fully $10,000 less than what he was willing to accept, and probably $15,000-$20,000 less than what the talent is actually worth. The salary is also unacceptably low for the geographic area- you just can’t live on the offered amount of money in the DC area.

The talent asked for my help in negotiating the offer, and of course I agreed. Because of our history with this client, my branch manager decided she would handle the negotiation (I’m in extreme tell-people-exactly-what-I-think-of-them mode today, which is dangerous). She called yesterday afternoon, and again this morning, and the client didn’t answer either time.

The talent called back this afternoon. All day, the client has been saying that MISF has been calling him, and asking what they want. My manager left the reason for her call in her voicemails, so I don’t know what’s up with that, but I theorize that he’s uptight about it because he was trying to convert the talent without our knowledge to avoid paying a fee. This would of course be a violation of the fee agreement he signed with us. Had he called us back, we could have been flexible on the fee, but he blew us off.

The talent further informed us that he had been inexplicably pulled into a meeting today, in which he learned that the client company is having trouble making payroll.

So let me get this straight- the client is dodging our calls because he knows we’ll charge a fee, and instead of just deciding that he can’t afford to bring someone on, he offers an insultingly low salary to the person in hopes that he’ll be desperate enough to take it, and that the talent will be grateful enough to get it that he won’t tell us and he’ll be able to violate our signed agreement.

Right.

So we of course assured the talent that we would be working diligently to find him a more suitable placement, and that in the meantime, the client’s impending insolvency does not affect our ability to pay him. He relaxed and said he would be turning down the position that was being offered.

If he had just called us when he intended to offer the job? We are able to (and have in the past) reduce our fee in order to get more money for the talent. But because he tried to be all sneaky, we called our corporate Credit department and mentioned to our regional collections rep that this particular client was having trouble making payroll. So as soon as the client goes overdue on their payments? Credit revocation.

Do not try to dodge me. I’m trying to make a living just like you, and if you try to rip me off, I don’t take kindly to it.

~~~~~~

You’ll find marketing jobs in Canada at HigherBracket.ca.

Here’s a quick tip:

When you’re calling a place of business and asking to speak to someone in particular, and the person answering the phone says, “…and where are you calling from?” it’s really just a polite way of saying, “Who are you and why does the person you’re calling want to talk to you?”

So the answer is NOT: “I’m calling from home.”