Career Development Partners » Recruiter Services

Checking References – Part I

admin — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:53:26 +0000

The Challenge
In the last two HIRING LINES we discussed giving references. In theses next two or three we will address getting references on potential employees. This issue is a sensitive one and prospective employers have to be increasingly careful in checking them. Most ex-employees are so afraid of litigation on the part of the ex-employee/candidate, for anything they might say that may be negative, they, may avoid giving any information at all. This in itself can be damaging. Most will agree that we are in a sad state of business conditions when employers cannot get or give truthful, honest information about prospective employees. But, nonetheless, our litigious society has forced us as employers to be more careful and do more intense due diligence to protect ourselves. Since negative opinions of an employee’s value must be avoided by ex-employers, potential employers must resort to careful evaluations of facts presented in personal interviews. Most of us approach references as information to round out the interviewing. Our approach in checking references should be to give us a better idea of the person we are hiring. References can sometimes totally eliminate a candidate but most of the time they should be used to give us a clearer picture of what we are trying to hire. Most of us acknowledge there are no perfect candidates. Reference checking should give us a better picture of a candidate …warts and all. Here are some practical concepts and actions that can be taken to insure quality reference checking.

RECOGNIZE that reference checking can be treacherous, dubious, questionable, etc. Mere recognition of the fact that checking references isn’t as effective as it used to be gives one an advantage. Just knowing that the fear of litigation by saying the wrong thing is in the mind and heart of whomever gives a reference, forces a prospective employer to understand better both what he hears and doesn’t hear. Being aware of the care that references must be given forces a prospective employer to only rely on them to a limited extent.

Interview Factually
Along with other things, an employer should interview candidates knowing that facts can be verified; feelings, “chemistry, ” etc., can’t. Here is another reason to give a patterned interview (as discussed in another HIRING LINE). “Chemistry,” compatibility, etc., make the real difference in hiring someone, but documental questions of fact are verifiable. Exact starting and ending dates of employment, starting and ending titles, exact number of people supervised, exact duties and responsibilities, exact figures of budgetary responsibilities, etc., can all possibly be verified by a previous employer. It’s hard for people to lie about facts. Either a person’s title was controller or it wasn’t. A sales person either hit 110% of quota or 50% of quota. These are factual questions that should be asked and verified. The more factual questions and information can be, the better off an interviewer is. Asking a previous employer if a candidate was a good employee can too easily get a non-answer response. Asking a previous employer a question like: “Our candidate states that he was 97% of quota when he left, is this correct?” Illicits a black and white clear cut yes or no. Getting factual information in the interviewing process gives an employer facts to verify.

Credit Reports
This is an excellent way to see if a person has their personal house in order. Most of us would agree that we handle our business affairs no differently than our personal affairs. As one expert put it: “the executive with a messy garage will have a hard time straightening up the corporation”. Serious credit problems will usually indicate serious personal problems. Serious personal problems will usually indicate serious professional problems. Direct personal references have to be careful in what they say. Credit reports, however, are factual. You must however, GET PERMISSION FROM A CANDIDATE to check his credit. There are forms available that a candidate must sign giving you permission for his credit to be checked. BE CAREFUL! There are some states that limit how a credit check can be used and who can perform one. Get legal advise before instigating such a practice! Membership in a credit bureau will facilitate such credit reports. Credit reports will usually tell you how a prospective employee will handle the company’s money, …no differently than his own. Having said all this, however, we encourage employers to use the results of a credit report with prudence. The level of job, function, etc., will dictate how much of an impact a credit report should have on the decision to hire someone. Extenuating circumstances like long term unemployment or long term illness of a family member will sometimes negatively impact a person’s credit when normally they would have no difficulties.

Driving Record & Arrest Record
There are service bureaus that provide during, arrest and credit records on any individual. With a candidates permission this information ought to be a must. What you do with the information you get is up to you. Remember that no one “runs” their business life any differently than they “run” their business life.

Tony Beshara is owner and president of Babich & Associates. Beshara has been in business since 1973, and he alone averages $2.5 – $4 million per year in billings. If you have any questions about this article, please call (214) 823-9999.

How to Get 94% of Your Offers Accepted

admin — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:52:21 +0000

Only 50%
Few Managers keep count, but did you ever think of all the time we waste in “court ‘in” a candidate and in the final stages of offering him or her a job have the offer turned down. We have wasted our time, have cost our company even more money because in most cases the job is going unfilled and someone else has had to do the job as well as having in most cases to start all over.

Increasing the odds of offer acceptance saves time money and effort.

Reality is that, on average, only 50%, of professional job offers made without the use of a professional recruiter or placement firm are accepted. Ninety four percent of the offers Babich and Associates get for their candidates are accepted. The reasons for this drastic difference are simple, but very significant.

First of all a good experienced recruiting firm and we emphasize experienced, has just that. …EXPERIENCE. This experience causes us to know how to keep the hiring process on track. Our advantage is since we have been here since 1952, we have just plain interviewed more candidates than most any company ever did. Each of us averages physically interviewing and screening four candidates a day. We work with hundreds of current search opportunities at any one time and, over the years, have filled and worked with thousands of positions.

Perspective
We have experienced so much, our PERSPECTIVE is just better and deeper than any average tenured manager. This perspective and experience gives us a significant advantage in finding qualified candidates. Our data base provides a quick assess to thousands of candidates at any one time. Our experience allows us to quickly identify not only quality candidates but allows us to qualify the job opportunity in relation to those candidates. The fact is that the function of screening. Interviewing, and hiring is an infrequent occurrence at most firms. It is the essence of our business. Practice makes perfect. Since we do it every day we know how to do it better. Since we know how to put into the right perspective both candidates and opportunities and since our volume of each is so great we rarely have one of the offers our candidate receive turned down. There is no success like success. We know how to find the right candidates for the right job. ..and get them to take it. Most businesses simply can’t have this perspective. Most searches, without the use of a recruiter, take 3 to 4 times longer than they should. Attention to the search and hiring process just elongates because it gets lost in the priorities of other aspects of business. Although it is a very important part of a managers duties. It normally just doesn’t get the attention it needs to simply because there is no one helping. I.e., pushing the process along. Without the use of a professional placement person the communications between candidate and prospective employer usually diminishes over the long period of time between interview and hiring. Benign neglect takes it’s toll and because there has been so little communication, the “warm” emotional feelings have grown cold and the candidate assumes all the negatives he can and turns the job down.

Listening Objectively
A good experienced placement professional not only keeps the lines of communication open, but he hears all of the issues necessary to keep the deal alive. He expresses the needs and concerns for both parties in an open unthreatened manner. We add an objective perspective to the whole process. Since we hear and see all of the aspects of the particular process from all of the parties, we keep the communication going when they would normally be misunderstood or be cut off. This is because the hiring process IS our highest priority. Like a lawyer who has to know law better than those he practices for, we have to know search and hiring better than our clients.

The experienced placement professional keeps the relationship between candidate and employer from becoming adversarial. Because hiring and finding a job is such a risky emotionally stressful function for candidates and employers, we see situations that would fall apart simply because of fear, stress, risk, misunderstanding, miscommunication, assumption, poor interviewing techniques, poor listening techniques, and, of course, human error. Not only do we keep most of these mistakes from happening, but we know how to salvage it when it does happen.

Results
In short, 94% of the offers that are extended thru the use of our service are accepted because our EXPERIENCE and PERSPECTIVE allows us to get the right type of candidate for the right type of position. We keep the process on track by keeping the lines of communication open. We cut the normal interviewing, hiring process time in more than half. We make sure that both candidate and employer expose each other to their best and essential business sides. We make sure the process is good for everyone. By giving to others what they want, we get what we want.

Economics of Paying or Not Paying a Recruiting Fee (To Pay or Not to Pay)

admin — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:51:43 +0000

No company should pay a recruiting fee needlessly. It would be ridiculous for a company to pay for any service it didn’t need. Any company that paid recruiting fees, or any service fee for that matter, when they didn’t need to wouldn’t be around as a company very long for anyone to do business with.

So often, we hear that firms don’t want to pay a fee. We understand. None of us likes paying a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant… unless they do for us what we can’t. You see, we CAN do our own legal work, our own medical work, and our own auditing and reporting. We don’t because we are in other businesses, providing goods and services. We don’t have the TIME to go to law school, medical, or accounting school, so we pay for the expertise of someone else in these areas.

A recruiting fee is no different. Companies can do their own recruiting i.e., researching the market for qualified candidates, soliciting of these qualified candidates, interviewing and hiring. They can do this without a professional recruiter or a fee. Most companies, however, never calculate the economics of the TIME involved and LOST in the recruiting of qualified candidates. The major reason for this is that the process is underestimated time wise. Most people perceive that when they need to fill a position (without a recruiter), they will run an ad, talk to friends, interview a few candidates, and then hire one. They estimate it to take a period of 2 or 3 weeks until it happens. They never consider that the first offer may be rejected and they will have to start all over.

Time is Money
In reality, without the use of a recruiter, it takes an average of 10 to 11 weeks to identify a qualified candidate to fill a search, even before an offer is made. Without the use of a recruiter approximately, 50% of the initial offers made are rejected, and the search has to start all over. Since so much time has elapsed from the beginning of the search, most of the other qualified candidates are either gone or are no longer interested. So the search really does start all over… from scratch!

A recent study by an experienced expert in the recruiting profession has statistically documented that a $60,000 executive spends $12,355 of his company’s money to locate a qualified candidate at a $40,000 level (without the use of a recruiter). That’s just to locate the candidate. Since 50% of those types of initial offers are rejected, this figure may even be higher, possibly double. It takes approximately 67.8 hours to review 200 resumes resulting from an ad, prescreen 100 resumes, pre-qualify 30 resumes after deleting 70, delete 15 of the ones left and complete reference checks on those. A $60,000 manager has a net worth of $144 per hour to his firm. The 67.9 hours at a net worth of $144 comes to $9763. This is an initial investment even before interviewing any candidates.

If five candidates are being considered, another eighteen hours will be spent in interviewing, eliminating and re-interviewing the finalists. The total investment so far, then is $12,355 PLUS the cost of the ad. Since without the use of a recruiter, 59% of all initial offers are rejected, there is still a high probability that one would have to start, if not all over, at least at “square” two.

Over the last two years, it has taken us an average of 17 days to successfully complete a search with a hire. It comes as a surprise, but the average time to successfully hire a candidate without a recruiter is around 77 days. Now in most cases, someone has to do the work of the person not hired yet. A $40,000 professional is worth $96 an hour to his or her company. Someone has to do the work of the person not there. That extra 60 days it takes to find a successful candidate (without a recruiter) COSTS money ($768 to be exact). So now we have $12,355 plus the cost of advertising, plus $768 per day that “someone” has to cover the work (that is another $46,080).

The recruitment fee for a $40,000 executive at Babich & Associates is $12,000. Not only is this a sizable savings, but also the probability of the initial offer being accepted is twice as great.

The Real Savings
In addition to all of the savings, a recruiter saves money on down time. Over the past 2 years, the average search through Babich & Associates took 2-1/2 weeks to complete. By using a recruiter, the initial time devoted to running ads or collecting resumes was eliminated since we constantly work current candidates. Approximately 94% of the offers made thru a recruiter are accepted (we discuss the reasons for this in another issue of Hiring Line) and there is little risk of the search having to start over. If things go wrong, i.e., the primary candidate takes another job, the position specifications change slightly, etc., the professional recruiter is in a much better position to react quickly and the time of the “start over” process is shortened drastically.

The economics of paying or not paying a recruiting fee are clear. If a firm can keep from paying a fee, while getting the same quality of candidates in an efficient timely fashion and successfully hire one, they should not consider the use of a recruiter. However, it is a rare instance that a successful search cannot be more efficient in TIME, MONEY and EFFORT by the paying of a fee to an experienced recruiting firm.