What’s wrong with “Finder’s Fees”?

NOTHING!  I think a bit less of candidates who ask me for them but I volunteer them all the time. Something along the lines of “We’ll hunt you down and send you a finder’s fee of X ,or 1/2 X if it is a split if we ever place someone you introduced us to even 5 years later. “We are trying to get to know the best people and ,while this is not much, we want to honor the time or trouble you went to to look us up”. Sometimes there is a bit more explanation involved. We have been doing this for around 15 years. It’s a well-known program in our market and it’s fun. It is also a simple matter to track origins of candidates these days.

I have nothing against other recruiters and trainers who don’t do it but calling those who do this “amateurs” is crap. Stop it.

Salary Surveys : a quick morning rant…

I have ZERO interest in picking on the guy who sent me this so I am not mentioning who it was. That he sent it is completely innocent but when I saw it I thought about how looking at these things has never helped me one iota to make a placement. Ever. I don’t place people in batches of 4500 and I could not care less what a bunch of people think about their pay. It does not even matter if the stuff is accurate or not. The only thing that ever matters is the one offer recipient’s current salary and what he wants to move. I am sure there are people who use these things but I don’t see any value for a Fordyce Reader to care. Have I missed something? C’mon…let’s stir up some stuff…  Though, even though I question the statistics I do like reading about what WE supposedly make…

Our new survey asked 4,500 workers how content they are with the money they’re making and whether they’re considering jobhunting for better pay and benefits.
Key findings include:
• Unsettled by salary – the majority feel underpaid and unhappy
• On the Move – 47% plan to move jobs for increased pay this year
• Modest ambitions – dialogue between managers and employees could improve staff retention
• Money or perks? – great benefits can supplement a lower salary

Is it time for a word of caution on this Millennial fad?

I don’t remember all the details about the X’ers…probably because those details turned out not to matter as much as we all were told. Sure, there’s a group of people who have many things in common while growing up. Will all the new modes of communication play a part in how they interact with each other and everyone else? Absolutely. I hope it might matter that all people,no matter when they are born will use these new modes of communication with everyone else in accordance with the number of brain cells they have. I don’t think any of the people who are instructing us on how ‘shockingly different’ these millenials are have suggested that they have any different distribution of brain cells than any other generation. Maybe we should focus on the tools and not the people so much. The tools ARE different…but it was not the Millennials who figured out how to make it so we could choose ‘Why talk live to this guy when I can text him?’ I hope someone digs this out a couple years from now and either pokes me for how blind I was or points out the Millennial ‘label’ didn’t turn out to mean a whole lot. I also hope a few people poke me now because I think it’ll be fun to post the pokes in a couple years.

The best case I have seen for having a blog

Ok, Below I am just pasting in the response to the xtreme.tv Question of the Week on how blogging can help a recruiter. This response and the others can be seen on recruitingblogs.com.

 

Joshua Letourneau just nailed this one, Bill. His 10 item list is reason enough to have a blog without overstating the case for blogs being more directly responsible for making placements. I really love the fact that he makes a great case for blogging while not even mentioning the hugely popular but, in my opinion, highly over-rated “flypaper” theory of blogging justification. I am not knocking Jennifer Porter’s response when I make this next analogy because I know what she described happens sometimes…but her result is just like what I heard in Las Vegas at the Fordyce Forum last week…There is always someone very visibly winning some kind of jackpot while other people are throwing away their money in the slot machines. On the other hand, Joshua is more like the many poker players who understand the game is about math and not luck and that if they follow the ‘rules’ they’ll regularly win enough to stay ahead with the occasional jackpot or tourney win being a happy accident. This is such a great perspective on blogging I am putting it on MY blog J