“If you have that kind of dedication to meeting people, networking, discovering new talent, you’re going to be a very successful company.”
Erich Radlmann is the Managing Partner at Spherion. Spherion is a leading recruiting and staffing provider, specializing in temporary and direct hire placement of administrative, clerical, customer service, light industrial and professional job candidates.
Determine what your team needs.
Erich: “Get on the same page. The analogy I like to use is like a baseball team. So, if you’re sitting down, the general managers are sitting down, and trying to figure out what they need. They have a really good third baseman. Are they going to try and go out and get another really good third baseman, or are they going to try to lift up the levels of those other positions that they need?”
Erich: “So, first sit down as a team and figure out what are we good at and what do we need? Are we missing a really good salesperson? Are we missing a really good inside salesperson, or a designer, or perhaps a developer? You’ve got to figure those things out.”
Spend more time interviewing and recruiting.
Erich: “When we’re meeting with companies and they’re saying they’re having a hard time finding people, one of the first questions we ask is, ‘well, how much time are you spending doing recruiting? How much time are you involved with interviewing candidates?’ Usually it’s less than 5% of their time. I mean, if anything, you’re lucky if they’re doing it an hour a week.”
Erich: “Typically, companies are looking once somebody gives their two weeks’ notice. Sally gives her two weeks’ notice, and now here we go. We’ve got to start looking for somebody. What we recommend to companies is always be hiring. Always be looking for that next person.”
Erich: “If you have that kind of dedication to meeting people, networking, discovering new talent, you’re going to be able to be a very successful company.”
Assessments.
Erich: “First of all, you’re going to try to decide what those assessments are when you meet as a team. What is the process going to be from beginning to end? So, the assessments can be soft skills assessments, like personality traits, conscientiousness, reasoning, listening. Or it could be hard skills. Do they know how to use pivot tables or Excel? Do they know how to do C++ programming? These are some of the hard skills that we can test for. Then on top of that, you get an actual freelance assignment from a company before you’re going to start.”
Erich: “We recommend that companies pay something for this to do the work, because you don’t want them resenting you as a company. You want them speaking well of you afterwards.”
Erich: “Sometimes if it’s a developer, it might be a coding exercise that you do overnight. If it’s an office admin that has to do a lot of Excel work, it might be an Excel spreadsheet that they have to create and export to Microsoft Access to do some queries on. Depending on the skill set that you need, that’s going to be what your project’s going to be.”
Multiple people should interview the candidate.
Erich: “You want to make sure there’s at least a couple of people that are going to meet that person, if not three. If your company is a five-person company and you work tightly together, probably all five people should at least have a 30-second conversation with that person Let’s just say it’s a mid-level manager position. You’re probably going to want to have the most senior person on that team interview that person.”
Erich: “You don’t want to create animosity between that senior member and that manager. Then the next level manager, and probably a lateral manager as well. I would say most organizations are probably going to want to have three interviews. In this market, try to have all three of those interviews in one day. Don’t expect this person to come back two or three times for multiple interviews. Just get it done at one time.”
Partner with a recruiting firm.
Erich: “It comes down to the time. We talked about it earlier; people just aren’t spending the time doing the actual recruiting and the feet on the street recruiting that needs to get done. Our company, between the three offices, we see 90 candidates a week in our offices.”
Erich: “If you had to replicate that in your office, just the amount of time that it takes is difficult. Plus we’re going to have a recruiting process. We’re going to keep you honest into your recruiting process and make sure that it’s consistent across all of your hires, which is something that becomes very valuable.”
Erich: “The problem is the cost of a bad hire. That’s really what we’re talking about here. When you make a bad hire, the estimates are all over the place. Let’s just say you make a bad hire and they last a month. Typically, the actual cost to the business could be 50% of the cost of that salary. I’ve heard estimates that could be, for a sales person, that could be 100% of the compensation for a year. So making a bad hire is really the thing we’re all trying to avoid.”
