Hiring Tug of War
The poet William Blake wrote, “Without contraries, there is no progression.” This quote rings very true to my day-to-day work-life, as the job market shifts from the last decade’s client driven position, to a candidate-centric environment.
The job market is a very different place than it was 10 years ago, when the bottom fell out of the housing market and Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers disintegrated; ushering in the highest unemployment rates seen in a couple of generations. That era was a very dark time in the world of recruiting, when only the best and the strongest recruiters survived.
When the eventual recovery set in a few years later, finding a workable “hot” job was still very difficult. As the laws of supply and demand would dictate, this allowed companies to be extremely choosy in the candidates they chose to interview, the recruiters they chose to work with, and with their contractual terms for agencies.
The situation is very different in 2017. The job market is roaring at, or close to, full structural employment. The BLS reported in April that the unemployment rate for candidates with professional degrees is 1.6%. The pendulum has swung to the other side, and I find that companies are struggling with some of the realities of this shift.
Getting back to the quote I started this blog post off with…it’s important to keep in mind that a hiring manager’s and a recruiter’s objectives are unified: we both want to find the right candidate for the company’s open position. The terrain on which a recruiter does this has changed. And because of this, so has the client’s.
In this climate, any recruiter with tenure and experience has a plethora of “fillable” jobs they can work on. A good recruiter’s primary energy must be spent on sourcing top passive talent. There is a tremendous amount of intellectual energy, along with resources and research, involved in sourcing a passive candidate. If a recruiter is to survive and make it in this market, they have to focus first and foremost on the candidate’s needs, and tailor which client they present them to. They must present candidates only to the companies that are most likely to partner in the work of “wooing” a candidate into the open position. They must only present candidates to clients that offer competitive pay and favorable terms for the recruiting agency.
If your company’s open positions are going unfilled, you have to ask yourself some hard questions:
- Is your company realistic about this shift in the market? (If it’s not, we should definitely talk, as I may be able to place you in a more realistic, progressive, and competitive firm!).
- Are your job offers competitive?
- Are you being too rigid in needing a potential candidate’s experience to match every bullet point on the job spec?
- Are you using and properly incentivizing the best recruiting agency for the job?
- Are you using an agency with a proven track record of success, one that employs highly trained recruiters with considerable tenure and experience?
If your answer to any of these is no, reach out to Hobson today, and let us help you get the best talent into your open positions!