Are Recruiters Responsible For Retention?

Are recruiters responsible for retention? Many wonder aloud about the answer to this question, but I always arrive back at the same answer. No. Emphatically, no.* Recruiters have no real ability to ensure the retention efforts of their clients are being carried out. It's for this reason that recruiters should never, ever agree to refund fees. Read on.

I'm often presented with contracts or requests from potential clients for the inclusion of verbiage around the complete refunding of recruiting fees if a candidate leaves or is terminated within 90 or 120 days of employment. Each and every time I state that I do not give refunds. Never. Ever. This news is most often met with a bit of surprise until explained why. Post-explanation, it's business as usual and what was a seemingly big deal breaker for working together disappears like it never existed in the first place.

As I said before, retention is not the responsibility of recruiters. Retention begins where the recruiting road ends. Recruiters are third party service providers hired to deliver a product: a candidate. This candidate is screened by the client, interviewed by the client, poked, prodded, brain-teased and background-checked by the client before an offer is extended, accepted and a start date agreed upon.

Upon completion of the search, (technically the hired employee's first day on the job) the recruiter has completed the service they were hired to perform. The responsibility of ensuring a new employee receives a clean desk, work area, key cards, parking space, benefits orientation, proper meet-and-greet of internal staff and a 90-day road map lies with the company. This is a lion's share of the onboarding process, which is a vital part of retention.

If you ask a company when retention begins they will respond “with an employee's first day of employment”. If a recruiter gets a call 90 days after placing a candidate and the hiring company says the employee they provided a recruiting service for (not a retention service) is not working out and they don't need another and want a refund, what are you to do at that point? If this employee says after their first 90 days they have barely met any of the internal staff, have not been provided a permanent work area or computer, have not been reimbursed for moving or their boss has not made them feel welcome, is that the recruiter's fault? All of the aforementioned items are directly related to retention, not recruiting. These employees don't report to the recruiter. Recruiters have no ability to ensure proper retention is being carried out for new and existing staff.

As non-internal, non-staff, non-onsite service providers who were hired and paid to perform a specific function, recruiters have no ability to control how efficiently a company handles onboarding and retention. Thus, their recruiting service didn't fail the company. The company's retention strategy failed the employee.

Recruiting, especially at a senior and specialty technical level, is no easy task. It requires years of expertise and countless hours of research, cold calling, conversations, career counseling and trust building. That is why nine out of ten new recruiters fail within twelve months. How could all of that hard work be liable for a complete refund when the recruiter's role only extends so far? At some point a company has to take responsibility for the retention of their employees. This includes the ones recruiters are hired and paid to provide for them.

The next time a company says they want a refund if an employee doesn't work out at 90 or 120 days ask them who's responsibility is it to retain their employees and when does that responsibility typically begin. I guarantee they won't say at three months.

* If a candidate ends up not being the proper fit, always protect everyone’s best interests by offering a replacement policy.

Authenticity: A Pillar of Recruiting Success

Regrettably, it's been a while since my last post. My wife and I have been busy expecting the arrival of our our first child. She is due any day now. The culmination of the entire process has left me very emotionally introspective. My yin and yang are in perfect balance. Call it the Libra in me. Business is growing and the company is on pace for our strongest year on record. I've hired new staff, expanded our line of services and we continue to march on. I have especially enjoyed expanding the staff the last few months as it has allowed me to again be in the role of coach and mentor, spreading the gospel of the art and science of human capital.

The irony in my inspiration for this article and what I'm actually writing about eerily go hand in hand. You see, I've been accused of not writing enough in the past and I've always said that honest content can't be fabricated by necessity. If I was only worried about getting content out there I would not "believe" in the content I was writing. I wouldn't "feel" anything about the content and it wouldn't feel authentic to my readers. I always wait to be inspired before I take to covering a topic or writing an article. The same goes with recruiting. In recruiting you are dealing with people, emotional beings with thoughts and feelings. My customers don't get dog and pony shows from myself or my staff. There are no sales pitches involved in the company's training manuals. We humanize the recruitment process, because if it's not believable, enjoyable and beneficial what is the point in saying or doing it?

Early in my career I didn't understand the key component of emotion, personally as well as professionally. I was so focused on the "sale" and nothing else. It was never about the journey, it was about the destination. It was all about sealing the deal. Because of this focus I probably lost a lot of business. I was so focused on myself and winning or closing a deal that even though the things I said made business sense, I probably didn't seem authentic when I was presenting them.

I had the opportunity recently to talk to one of my recruiters about his ongoing conversations with a few potential clients and realized he was being too inwardly focused. I challenged him to think about who he was as a person, a husband, father, son and a loyal friend to many I'm sure. He looked at me and realized at that moment what I was getting at. I told him to be the same executive recruiter as he is person at home if his son came to him with a bloody knee, crying, and said dad help me. I told him that person should be the same person that picks up the phone everyday and get's to know company's hiring strategies and how he can help those companies get the critical hires they need in order to sustain their own success and growth. That same compassionate and caring father should also be the one giving strategic career advice to those who seek out his help. It's compelling, natural, believable and honest. In a word, it's authentic. 

Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of this. We morph into super focused work beings tasked by management to accomplish goals and gain instant gratification and financial success. We all have a job to do, but I've seen the power of human authenticity in our business. There is a different way to do it. I built a company around it and I emphasize it on a daily basis. It's one of the pillars of my success. In recruiting, we are in the business of people and people need to believe and trust in you. In order for them to believe they need to get the authentic you.

When it comes to working with myself and my staff, my customers know they are getting the real us. Brothers, husbands, fathers and weekend soccer coaches who are experts in executive recruiting, care deeply about doing the right thing and look forward to building up the trust of their customers while watching their business' grow and succeed. In a word, it's authentic.

How to Nail a Phone Interview

They say if you are not preparing to succeed you are preparing to fail. The same can be said during a job search and interview process. I've witnessed it countless times over the years. Most job seekers use a shotgun approach to their search, sending many resumes out at once and then waiting for the phone to ring. When the phone does ring they wait for the first phone interview and then the process begins. This is a vital mistake, as most phone interviews are carried out with careful strategy by the interviewer. Candidates just don't realize it until it's too late.

Last year the job market was extremely unforgiving. Today, not much has changed. Companies view our current times as a buyers market. They are more focused on vetting out candidates quickly than they are about needing to sell candidates in. It's not their fault, there are ten times the amount of candidates than jobs available.

Having success in an interview process depends heavily on control and predictability. There is no point during an interview process in which you have less of these critical things than during a phone interview. Phone interviews are approached by most job seekers too leisurely. Landing a phone interview is a huge success for a job seeker and most of the time this is the most crucial period of the interview process. Getting to this point should never be taken for granted. Little is known about the following things when approaching the point of a phone interview:

1. Company plans, structure and strategy
2. Interview process and time line to hire
3. Internal members that will be involved during the process
4. Questions that will be asked by the interviewers
5. Internal and external competition you are facing

Successfully landing the job requires knowledge of the above. On a phone interview you typically know none of the above. You are in the discovery phase of the interviewing process. You have been discovered by the employer and you have experience that is of initial value. The interviewer is now tasked with narrowing the candidate pipeline. This means you are now expendable. How you answer the questions that are about to come your way will determine whether you are vetted out.

The difficulty lies in making an impression with your interviewer (most likely a complete stranger) and compiling data from the five topics above in order to raise your interviewing IQ. If you landed an interview through a recruiter, ask your recruiter for everything they know about who you are interviewing with and helpful info to the topics above. If you landed an interview through a friend or referral, ask the person who referred you to fill you in. If you landed the interview through sheer luck, then get to Googling immediately. Use Linked In to find the person you will be phone interviewing with. Look at their connections. Any mutual contacts? Colleges? Organizations? Prior employment? Facebook them too. Sound crazy? Perhaps, but not everyone connects to LinkedIn as they do Facebook. Regardless of privacy restrictions you will be able to see if you have mutual friends.

Research and preparation prior to the phone interview can drastically increase your chances at breaking into the next round and landing the gig. The easiest way to achieve this is to prepare and gather intel. There are no better friends to have in your back pocket when trying to do this as Google, Facebook and Linked In. They are job search weapons, use them to your advantage.