Staff and Train Inc. – Staffing Industry Talent Scouts
David Fogg
(954) 974-6952
David@staffandtrain.com
2012 Kick off article covering what to expect in regards to finding quality people to hire into manager, sales and recruiter roles.
Sales People? Most staffing companies prefer to hire experienced sales people from their own specialty such as IT, A&F or Administrative before going outside to other niches in staffing, or bring people in from outside of staffing and training them from scratch. When it comes to hiring laterally such as IT staffing sales to another IT staffing sales position here are the barriers: First, nobody that is any good will simply quit their job and switch over to work for your company until they feel very comfortable with the manager or executive they would work for. This means your managers or executives must become very good at talent scouting and luring sales reps from other staffing companies to switch teams, and this entails investing time and effort into relationship building, or old fashioned talent scouting. The problem is most managers and executives do not do this, because they either do not have the time or are too temp staffing minded and used to dealing with unemployed candidates who came in off job board ads. To clarify, I have worked with executives in staffing who would take sales reps from other staffig firms to lunch, meet them for coffee, for a beer after work and invest time into building a relationship because they knew this was necessary to lure certain people into switching companies to work for them. Other executives I have worked with treat the process the same as if the sales reps were unemployed and looking for a job. They put no effort into “selling” the candidate or building relationships because in their mind the candidates should be “looking” for a new job.
( The staffing companies and/or executives who become the best at relationship building and talent scouting are who will succeed at recruiting the better staffing professionals to work for them )
Some reasons why good staffing sales reps would switch companies laterally are a much better comp plan and higher salary, which is rare to see because all staffing companies tend to pay within a similar range. Or they are tired of being overly micro managed and dislike their upline manager. It could be they lack good recruiting support and feel like they cannot sell because the recruiters cannot effectively support the customers. Maybe they are with a small company with no growth opportunity and can be recruited to a larger company.
Regardless what the reasons are, it is very stressful to quit a job, walk away from clients and commissions - leave friendly co-workers behind, and fly under a non-compete to switch companies into a pure lateral position.
Here is a realistic example: There might be 100 IT staffing sales reps in a city where only 20 are top notch, 80 are marginal. Of the 20 who are the best, maybe 3 to 4 are unhappy enough to consider being recruited into a lateral position at another company. Among the 3 to 4 the timing has to be perfect such as no significant commission being owed to them.
If you want to hire experienced people into a pure lateral position the truth is sometimes this is possible in a City, and other times there will be nobody at other staffing companies whom you would want, that can be recruited over to your company when you want or need this to happen.
Although I am using IT staffing for examples, this applies to all niches in staffing.
So the lesson to learn is to plan for it to be very difficult to recruit experienced staffing professionals laterally, that it will require relationship building before such people will consider making a move to your company, and that it will not always be possible to recruit proven experienced staffing sales people and you should have a plan B or plan C type contingency back up strategy. Examples are considering sales people from other niches in staffing and cross-training them or recruiting sales people from other industries and training them to sell staffing services from scratch.
It's not a bad idea to implement plan A, and B & C at the same time. Example: Search for a fully qualified staffing professional who can be recruited into a lateral job, while also looking for people from other niches in staffing that can be cross-trained or advertising to draw in sales applicants from other industries that must be trained from scratch. The reason I suggest this is if you conduct a search and come up empty handed, that might take 3 months. If you then switch to plan B and C it might take 3 more months before the right person shows up leaving your empty spot open for 6 months.
I also want to clarify something: It is not impossible to recruit good people in staffing laterally. But doing so does require a talent scouting process where you or your managers invest time into building relationships with people whom you are interested in over at your competition. Building such relationships obviously takes time. The other barrier is most staffing companies offer rather average compensation plans that are mostly similar to each other. If you are limited to a relatively normal compensation plan then you are not offering a job that is any better than the people you want to hire already have. So the reasons why they would switch over to your company are not about money, culture and being unhappy with their upline Leadership would be the reason. The problem I see is most of the time when staffing companies want to hire it is an ASAP situation where the owner or manager does not have time to invest into a relationship/talent scouting process. They want to put butts into chairs, so to speak.
Most staffing companies are opening up to hiring sales people from outside of staffing and cross training them to sell staffing services. Examples are college grads with 1 to 6 years of various sales experience. The problem is in the sales category the unemployment rate is very low and fewer people search for sales related jobs than seen in admin, accounting or IT. The responses from job board ads for basic sales applicants are poor. You can post the same job to brand name job boards every two weeks for 1, 2, even 3 months just to produce a few people who are a good match to be trained as staffing sales reps. I suppose the lesson to learn is that it’s becoming very difficult and taking a long time to recruit and hire staffing sales people be they experienced or from outside of staffing where they must be trained. Another lesson to learn is to plan ahead and design your hiring plans based on such facts as the right people for sales careers in staffing are difficult to find and do not usually surface quickly when you need to hire.
Non-Competes? Everyone in staffing has them but they do not prevent people from leaving one staffing company to work for another as this happens all the time even with non-competes. We have recruited and placed over 200 people in staffing during the past 8 years and only 3 times have non-competes become serious issues.
( NOTE: Because of the problems I identified above, we developed two solutions. First, with certain staffing companies we provide the managers access to our internal database and lists of contacts so they can see who works at other staffing firms in their city and ask us to step in and cold call specific people, inviting them to accept casual introductions to the executive or manager. Example: You can access our database, see who works for your competition in a City, tell us names of those you are interested in, we then chase the individuals down by cold calling them at work and act as your talent scout luring such people to accept introductions to you. This way we are helping you to improve your own internal talent scouting ability by setting up casual introductions. Second, we developed Staffing University which is a 60 page written pre-training program that comes with 7 videos. We can find and pre-train sales people coming from outside of staffing and convert them into having the equivalent of one year experience prior to their first day at your company. This is obviously a solution when it becomes clear hiring the perfect experienced staffing sales rep in a city is impossible for whatever the reasons.)
VMS Recruiter: If a person is being hired to support large VMS type customers where there is little personal relationship with hiring managers because the VMS acts as a barrier, recruiting is all about submitting as many resumes into the system as possible. This is not a process focused on quality. It is all based on who advertises the most, the fastest, the best, searches internal resume database faster etc. It is a throw as much paper against the wall to see what sticks scenario. Experienced recruiters who are used to a quality process and are money motivated will avoid such jobs, or not last in them. The reality is staffing companies will be forced to hire and train people for such roles as opposed to recruiting experienced recruiters from other staffing companies into this type of recruiting position.
VMS Recruiter where sales can and does build relationships with internal hiring managers? This changes the story because the sales rep can help obtain answers to questions and feedback on candidates, all of which are important to any good recruiter.
Admin/IT/A&F recruiters: If most of the job orders are temp, I think recruiting gets blown up out of proportion. Example: You cannot recruit employed people out of their jobs to take temp or contract jobs. When it comes to temp or contract jobs the only types of people who will consider them are either out of work and looking for a job where temp is better than no job, or they are consultants/contractors who prefer the contractor type of career and lifestyle. So recruiting in temp is all about advertising and searching resume databases and outbound marketing to promote job orders to these types of people, and then screening any incoming applicants. Temp recruiters are not cold call head hunting where they get deeply involved in intense interviews and compensation negotiations. If a company has a very good training program that can teach IT and A&F lingo, and a step by step recruiting process, I think hiring from outside of staffing and training people is a viable option verses trying to recruit experienced recruiters from a direct competitor, especially in an established office. However, if the office is not established the first recruiter hired should be very experienced and that means doing what is necessary to attract them from a competitor.
A point I want to make is in temp or contract staffing smart people can be trained to become good recruiters relatively quickly if they have the right personality and are given a solid step by step recruiting process to follow, training on your specialty lingo and a good mentor.
Branch Managers? This is a tough call because some models are designed around small offices where the managers never manage many people, and others would like to see offices grow large where a manager must evolve their skills from the beginning as the sales person, to becoming more of a manager. Many people are not designed to be good at both sales and managing others.
A problem with the branch manager concept is when they are expected to be the primary sales person to essentially cover their own cost, they are really building a business from scratch where their revenues are what funds the hiring of others. I was once a branch manager in a similar situation where I was pressured to sell, but also participate on conference calls, produce reports and somehow find the time to recruit hire, train and mentor a team. Most of the time this model causes the branch manager to fail because they juggle too much. I believe the root cause of the problem is when a company wants to hire someone that produces enough sales revenue to fund the growth of the office as opposed to investing enough money up front to launch an office properly.
I suppose it all boils down to the plan. If the plan is for the office to remain relatively small, than hiring a selling manager + a recruiter and growing slowly works. But if the plan is to grow a larger office, maybe branch into different specialties, that requires more up-front investment because it is a bigger picture model that requires a bigger picture approach and a different type of person to lead such an effort.
However, I do want to make a point. The Regional Manager or local Owner plays a huge role in the success of the local offices. Why? If we apply the 80/20 rule 80% of all branch managers are average, only 20% top producers. If the Owner or Regional Manager is very motivating (like a Tony Robbins of staffing ) they can travel to the various offices and get the people pumped and excited essentially filling the gap where a branch manager may lack such charisma and motivational management skills.
You see, micro-management only works so much to obtain results out of people. Motiving people and getting them excited is the only way to generate long term good results as people rising up and produce because they are excited, not because they are pressured. Yet few branch managers have this motivational skill because they are closer to a regular corporate numbers cruncher type of personality. So if the managers lack the capability to get their people pumped and excited, the owner or regional manager has to be capable of filling this void.
It’s also not a bad idea to implement a management and leadership training program that can help groom a person into having such skills.
When I conduct a search and call staffing professionals, many tell me they are being contacted multiple times each week either by head hunters or internal recruiters at larger staffing companies. The head hunters cold call, and the internal recruiters send messages on Linked as opposed to cold calling. Either way, it is important to understand almost every staffing company is hiring and this trend will continue, which puts pressure on the people in the talent pool. This also means you must look at everything about your company from compensation to managers, to office appearance. Everything will play a role in how competitive you can be at attracting talented staffing professionals to work for your company, and retain them so they are not recruited away from your company.
Wishing you a successful 2012
Dave Fogg