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So far Danny has created 77 blog entries.
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Prepping Clients

Recruiters tend to think of “Prepping” in terms of prepping the candidates. In Danny’s jam packed Webcast entitled Sending Your Clients to Prep School, he proposed the “New Normal”… focusing on a heavy CLIENT prep and heavy candidate debrief. In prepping your clients, here are some questions Danny suggests you approach your clients with: Ask the client if they have a strategy for the interview. What are they trying to measure at this meeting? (Suggest the areas you know your candidate to be strong in.) Do they understand the current market realities regarding the dearth of talent and the choices our candidates have? Recommend the client use the “behavioral” style. (Suggest they forget the resume and say, ‘When in your career have you had to go through an IT conversion while growing?’) Once they get the questions they’ll ask, inform your candidate. Ask if the client is going to discuss money. (If they say no and then do it anyway, they want your candidate.) Who else will meet your candidate? What is their frame of reference? Influence in process? Let’s play “gotcha”…What questions about the candidate’s background give our client pause or are red flags? How will they expose them? Where have the others you’ve been interviewing impressed [...]

Great Opportunity or Death Trap?

Hi Danny, I have an Oil & Gas CEO who is doing a 500M startup, he’s looking at hiring an initial 20-30 employees and move forward from there. As a stand-alone recruiter like myself, what would you do right now knowing this, if the potential of losing business was there by not getting to all of these placements? (And of course I know I’ll only get a percentage of them anyway?) Would you partner with another search firm or something else? Quite frankly I do not have the capitol currently to hire several other recruiters right now, and (FYI) the O&G sector is absolutely on life support from a recruiter’s prospective. My Response: I have no doubt you could negotiate a deal where you get the 20-30 openings, and knowing, as you rightly surmise, that they won’t really fill them all through you, just fill as many as you can as fast as you can. But not in a start up?!! Death move. We do a lot of emerging technology companies work, and when they first start up, all juiced up on optimism and Angel or VC enhanced checkbooks, they will put serious pressure on you. They will want to see a high volume of resumes, and they [...]

Put Your Big Pants On

Hi Danny, I recently got into one of those situations with a long term client where I had presented the candidate a few months ago and he wasn't interested. He knew him from a previous project they had worked on, liked him, but decided to pass. Fast forward 4 months, I find out my candidate is now going to work for them! Things changed, someone left his organization, this guy was a good fit and he contacted him on his own. I called him regarding an active candidate we are in the process of interviewing and he is planning on making an offer. He brought up the other situation first and said he wasn't trying to be unfair, but since he had known the guy from before and they'd tried to get him on board in the past, he wanted to think about a compromise. There was never any discussion in the past that they were pursuing him, only that they knew him, but took a pass when I presented him. When circumstances changed he took the opportunity and did a back door on me. I don't want to give him the upper hand but they have been a client of mine for 18 yrs. Both of these [...]

The Market’s Hot But My Fees Are Not

Principles of Performance Pricing By: Danny Cahill Okay what gives? The market has never been hotter, baby boomers are dropping like flies, the stock market is at record levels, all our companies are hiring and hemorrhaging people and yet... Fee Cutting is at an All Time High!! Why don't the laws of supply and demand hold? Shouldn't the demand for our candidates make everyone fall over just to give us full fees? Uh, not so much. We as an industry are non vertebrae animals. We are so fragmented that the 15 desk, 10-year-old search firm with high integrity and quality methodologies is competing with the solo act in his/her rec room willing to work for a song. And then there is the internet, and its access to resumes, making our folks a commodity in the eyes of our clients. And of course many of us cut our fees for select clients, that is to say everyone, during the tough times, and thought we'd be able to convert our clients when things got better. As Mellencamp sings in his raspiest voice, "just like everything else, those old dreams kinda came and went." So have you had enough of working hard for less? Have you noticed you work harder and get more [...]