Warning: evangelical rant ahead:
In my recent post about the woes of entrepreneurs and the recruiting mistakes they've made, I can't help but take the time here to state--for the record--that I wish business owners and entrepreneurs would pay a little more attention to the reality that BAD RECRUITING = BAD BUSINESS. PERIOD.
Earlier today, I met with a successful local company doing incredible things with the exploding "sell it on ebay" marketplace. I wasn't really there to sell them on using my service, but they concluded the 60-second meeting with a broken-record response:
We are hiring, but we don't want to pay your fees (not that they asked if I have any fees to begin with, but I digress...). We have billboards and newspaper ads and postings, and frankly we get so many hundreds of resumes I think your candidates would just get lost anyway...
Honestly, I don't care if a company uses my recruiting agency or not. But I do care that companies understand that hiring is not something you can blindly do and expect reasonable results--let a lone great ones.
Mark my words...
"Finding the right people" is incredibly different than "getting a lot of resumes". Yet sadly, we (business people in-general) confuse the two rather frequently. Outsorced recruiting is simply a service designed to minimize the risk and maximize the potential of your success in recruiting--especially when you, as the busy office manager I met with today, have arguably better things to do with your time. It's a horrible inefficiency that I see duplicated over and over again in companies every day: People who aren't experts at recruiting spend thousands, even tens-of-thousands of dollars (in both salary and used company resources as well as the opportunity cost of more-productive work they could be doing) trying to recruit experts to do a job they may or may not fully understand.
Like I said once before in Econ 101 - It’s Not The Job Ad, Stupid, "The value behind the ad is the people it connects–the recruiter and the candidate. If an ad will not adequately connect good candidates and the people willing to hire them, it is useless."
In short, they're often losing money by saving money. As I've said before:
I don’t think I want to know how many piles of resumes these executives and their staff are going through in order to save some cash. The unintended consequences surely include headache, frustration, stress, and eventually, losing productivity to the point that the money being saved is being lost somewhere else.
Again, I don't care if you use my firm to help with your recruiting. But before you do it on your own, please fully count the cost, both credits and debits!
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