Executive Recruitment- its Problems and Solutions

Workplace Age Discrimination - Why Older Workers Cannot Get Work and What We Can Do To Stop It

Iit’s time to open peoples’ eyes to the discriminatory practices in recruitment and to propose some solutions. With a struggling economy, the pension age requirements increasing by another 2 years and the difficulty of experienced, older workers to find work in these tough times, isn’t it time we did something?

After all, do you really want to see your once proud executive golfing mates pulling the extra hours down at Video Ezy or sucking up more tax payer funded money while on the dole…All because they were deemed too experienced or too old to even get an interview???

Want to make a difference? Been discriminated against? Have your say, don’t allow them to get away with it. Post a comment below–but before you do, read our Manual (”Practical Employment Steps for Older Workers”). It is essential that you read the first few pages before you comment - you don’t want to damage your career.  To download your copy, go to:

https://rcpt.yousendit.com/699870544/cf44e963c93115b1c2113fefcaddd3ae

and you can download the PDF file from YouSendIt. Hope you find it useful. One quick comment: my firm is not a recruitment agency, we don’t find jobs for people, we only advise companies–so don’t wast your time sending me your resume! Cheers, Toby

The Problem of Age Discrimination

About thirty years ago the western world passed laws to stop discrimination in recruitment against older workers, migrants, women, etc. Advertisers are not allowed to put age or gender preferences on ads. They can‘t even do it in a long-winded way by saying, ‘we are seeking a graduate with three or four years of experience’.

“So what” you may ask…That’s a good thing isn’t it?

Well, the short answer is not really… The reason is that a lot of people spend a lot of time and trouble replying…believing falsely that they have a chance. Their age is guessed (often wrongly) and they are tossed on the reject pile. And the employer has to waste 10 minutes going through the rejection process.

So now we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds. Discrimination and a huge waste of time and resources. We just drove the problem underground, we kept it hidden by attacking the symptom (the advertisement) and not the problem (ignorance and fear).

We fail to confront the ignorant and shine a light on their recruitment stupidity. They get away with it. Today, tomorrow ….

This should worry all of us.

So what do we do? Well, I’m glad you asked….

The Solution

No more direct government intervention. Didn’t work before, won’t work again. But we don’t need this problem swept under the carpet…We need to bring it to light! I have been to about 20 HR conferences around the world that purported to address this issue. Ultimately just hot air.

So that been said, lets:

1) Recognise and accept the overwhelming evidence that there is a problem and that no one will stand up and admit it!

2) Accept that our discrimination policy doesn’t work and that it is being completely ignored where it really matters - at the pointy end of the hiring process. We need the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission to accept and address this problem

3) We need a Carrot first: A new certification as an “Equal Opportunity Employer”. If it is believed by people it will attract a huge amount of talent to a company that is truly equal – not just in what its HR policy manual says! The Commission will need a modest budget to promote the names of the certified firms, and shame those who have refused. Start with the big employers to get the biggest impact quickly.

4) The Stick: If businesses want to be certified they need to agree to be randomly audited and to make available all online and hard copy job applications. And then justify their reasons for rejecting any older applicants. Without such a stick, nothing will change.

4) We need the Government to provide a small amount of funding for qualified Recruitment Inspectors to visit companies at random and view their applications and reasons for rejection. Recruiters who have been in the trenches. Who know where to look for the buried applications and the feeble excuses.

Enough talk, enough sanctimonious waffle from employers,

Cheers, Toby

Lead Generation for Small Business Using Internet Marketing

Abacus has recently entered a new business - creating marketing systems for small to medium sized professional businesses. We’ve called it lead creation.

The journey towards lead creation started in 2005 when two crucial developments began to change the way I did business.

Firstly, Abacus started working with lots of young people. I wanted a labour force made up of people who were great at working with the web and software, and so young people were naturally my focus. So much of modern marketing is technology, and its what young people they grew up with and what they know. We hired enthusiastic work-experience students and interns (aged from fifteen to twenty-five) and mentored, managed and trained them into highly skilled and professional workers. To date we have helped a large number of them find great jobs.

To start with we gave them specific, narrow jobs and gave them full responsibility to implement. Week by week their skills improved through on the job learning and mentoring. As we’ve trained and worked alongside our interns, and discovered what they’re really great at, we’ve been able to outsource them to our clients.

Through the use of interns in our own business and in the implementation of the lead creation system, we have been able to afford to drastically drop our charge-out rates. This makes our service, which implements a complete marketing system, a low-cost and high-return option for small professional businesses.

The second development was that I began learning the skills of direct marketing, and in particular, marketing for SME’s in professional services. I trained under some of the best direct marketers both in Australia and internationally, learning about what small business could do to gain more clients.

These two factors came together in 2008 to create a first in Australia: lead creation. This is the only company nationwide that offers a fully implemented and automated marketing system for small business at an affordable price in tough times.

Sounding grand? It’s not really, it’s quite simple. Getting leads just requires a lot of detailed work that takes time, which is what our interns do. Our service takes the hassle out of gaining more clients. If you would like to comment on our marketing approach, go to our new blog www.smallbusinessleads.com.au.

If you’re trying to improve your marketing, you’ll find thousands tell you what to do, hundreds tell you how to do it; but there’s only one that does it all for you - www.leadcreation.com.au.

Executive Recruitment - a Twelve Proposition Manifesto for Change

Why the 3R Manifesto? It stands for Recruitment+Retention+Profit

Preamble to the Manifesto ….

* Yes, there are minor exceptions to each of the 12 Propositions
* Yes, we could have expressed each more tactfully and qualified them with more words (as I sometimes have in my books and media interviews)
* But extra words just remove the spotlight from the significant problems of the self-serving executive recruitment industry. Direct and blunt is harder to ignore

The 12 Propositions:

1. That people who are paid on commission focus on money, and executive recruiters are paid on commission. A commission sales person is not an advisor or consultant. How your suppliers are remunerated matters if you want uncompromised advice to achieve your goals.

2. That virtually all executive recruitment ‘consultants’ are paid by commissions. Even executive recruiters who are paid a base ‘salary’ – that’s because their performance is only judged by the revenue they produce, the ’salary’ is just an advance on their commission cheque. They remain commission sales people.

3. That executive recruitment has a huge staff turnover (ironic given their role) because recruiters who can’t generate sales don’t survive. Turnover matters as employers need advice to hire well – but many in the executive recruitment industry are inexperienced with no time to learn skills.

4. That executive recruiters have the ability to improve the perceived quality of their product and can unethically profit from it. It simply involves not revealing something negative about ‘their’ candidate, something they can later deny knowing about. Clearly large commissions payable the day the candidate starts work severely aggravates this problem.

5. That the executive recruitment industry is remunerated by a candidate joining an employer so it’s what they focus on. Their earnings are unaffected by how long the employee stays.

6. That the guarantees provided by the recruitment industry are virtually worthless. Their fee was paid, now they have to replace for free. In a world where there are thousands of executive recruiters and many thousands of potential clients, lip service is often paid to the hard task of replacement.

7. That large, expensive advertisements in the front of newspapers primarily benefit the executive recruitment firms. The money trail always reveals the truth: Some big executive recruitment firms pay substantial cash incentives to staff for selling ads. It’s not altruism but clever commercial logic that disregards the needs of their clients who pay for their PR.

8. That the majority of career advice is delivered by those who the public believe are the experts - executive recruiters. But they are people with an agenda. Whose advice is often tainted by blatant self interest (big dollars if the person takes their client’s job) and often by ignorance and inexperience (high staff turnover). The cost to people’s wealth and happiness is colossal.

9. That the anti-discrimination laws passed more than 20 years ago made discrimination on age and gender worse. The laws drove the problem underground – it was removed from advertisements, so ‘undesirables’ were encouraged to apply but then they were quietly and discreetly weeded out. So now we have both discrimination and a huge waste of time for both employers and applicants.

10. That there are only small pockets of skills scarcity. Six powerful groups, only one being executive recruitment, continuously promote a Skills Crisis for their own self interest. However, there is scarcity if you continue to follow most other employers and do what has failed in the past – insanity says Einstein.

11. That there are major untapped and ignored pools of executive and professional talent which are often discussed in the media. However, just knowing they exist and paying lip service to hiring from them will not get an employer the best from any pool: it requires focus and changes to your processes.

12. That virtually any employer, small or large, can find star employees if they follow some simple processes and ‘think different’.

The Goals of the Executive Recruitment Manifesto

* For the majority of executive recruitment firms to become ethical professionals who work in partnership with their clients and be rewarded for services rendered and retention

* For people to manage their careers and find rewarding employment with less hindrance from ignorance, greed, prejudice and poor information flows

* For good employers to learn of executive recruitment firms that follow a different model – one based on retention, professional salaries and ethics.

The Methodology to Achieve the Goals of the Executive Recruitment Manifesto

* Bringing the secretive and self serving executive recruitment industry practices into the bright light of day

* Promoting the internet as the best method of matching people to jobs – and clearing transaction driven executive recruitment agencies and newspapers out of the way

Providing the information and resources that employers and employees need to make good, informed decisions

Executive Recruitment - the Nightmare that Good Intentions Caused

About thirty years ago the western world passed laws to stop discrimination in executive recruitment against older workers, migrants, women, etc. Advertisers are not allowed to put age or gender preferences on ads. They can‘t even do it in a long-winded way by saying, ‘we are seeking a graduate with three or four years of experience’.

So, many people go to a lot of trouble replying, believing they have a chance. Their age is guessed (often wrongly) and they are tossed on the reject pile. Or the employer has to waste 30 minutes going through the rejection process.

What’s wrong with this? We’ve ended up with the worst of all worlds. Discrimination and a huge waste of time and resources.

We just drove the problem underground, we kept it hidden by attacking the symptom (the advertisement) and not the problem (ignorance and fear).

We fail to confront the ignorant and shine a light on their recruitment stupidity. They get away with it. Today, tomorrow ….

This should worry all of us,

Cheers, Toby

Executive Recruitment - A Story About Market Failure

Imagine a giant fruit and veg market supplying a major city. One that works really badly. Totally sucks.

This market only opens at night and there are no lights to guide the thousands trying to find what they need. It has many hundreds of separate halls, each selling only a few things – some only sell root vegetables, others just stone fruit. And maybe 10 have apples.

Now, you’re trying to find small green cooking apples. One hall, somewhere, has these.

Each of the hundreds of halls is completely separate from all the others and when you go to one, the wholesalers only tell you about what they have to sell.

The people stumbling around in the dark have no idea what they’ll find in each sealed hall until they open the door and walk inside – what a waste of time.

Who owns these ‘halls’ in perhaps the most important market place in any country, the jobs market? Three types exist:

1. Executive Recruitment agencies, there are thousands and each has a few jobs and a few candidates for sale – usually not exclusive to just their agency.
2. The many different newspapers with job ads in particular industries or sectors.
3. Finally, lots of job boards and many community sites that host jobs.

Total chaos.

There is a better market place and it’s here today – one that is brightly lit, fast and user friendly. It’s job boards – monster.com and seek.com.au. They will work if we stop sabotaging them with the thousands of other ‘halls’ that just get in the way.

Without all the clutter of newspaper ads and too many executive recruiters, you will find the ‘green apple suppliers’ in a few seconds: and then start the real job – spending time finding the best at a good price.

200 Australians have it in their power to make it happen now: the senior people in HR. Maybe a thousand in the United States and the UK, but still a small number of people. Forward this article to them, start making a difference.

Worth it? You do the maths – millions are in the wrong jobs and companies are screaming for skills.

Cheers, Toby

Executive Recruitment: a Huge Mess and Why Fixing it Could be so Simple

If someone had an insight to make our economy significantly more productive. And our people a lot happier. And would cost nothing and could happen virtually immediately, of course he would be listened to.

Not.

Instead it’s ‘business as usual’. While one of our most important market places, the market that drives the entire economy, the market for jobs, is a mess.

Continue Reading…

Financial Services Recruitment: Rubbish surveys of CEOs

The questions people ask in surveys and what they really want to know are 2 different things.

For example, Financial Services CEOs are regularly asked:

“Are you suffering from a talent shortage? Do you have a skills crisis?”

The answers are overwhelmingly yes (even after the meltdown of late 2008). This concerns me because in a previous Rant I argued strongly that there was no scarcity of talent. That there were hundreds of thousands of skilled people looking for work or for more work. In other countries such as the States and the UK these skilled work seekers number in their millions.

So who’s wrong?

Well the Question Behind that Question, what the Financial Services CEOs were really being asked, was:

“Can you find the resources you need to profitably achieve your business goals?”

Unspoken and unasked it was what the surveys were really trying to find out. And if a big majority answer “Yes” as they have for years, then there’s yet another ‘Talent Crisis’ story in the media.

But asking “Are you suffering from a talent shortage?” has two QBQs:

1. “What is your definition of talent?”
2. “Do you actively recruit from the pools of talented people who are desperate for work? For example older workers, university students, Mums, migrants and expatriates?”

Now if you define talent as Full time; younger than 40; and ‘People Like Us’ ….

Then good luck! You have a talent crisis. That won’t go away.

It’s surprising how many companies follow this narrow definition of talent while paying lip service to being more flexible. Their HR policies say what should be done – but for diverse reasons the people that matter, those making the hiring decisions, ignore them.

Now I’m a simple soul. I see hundreds of thousands of people who are seeking work, better work or just more work. And they are desperate and often bewildered - why can’t they get jobs they know they can do when there is supposed to be a skills crisis?

It was only when I learnt of the QBQ concept that I finally saw a simple way to explain the disconnect between the Financial Services CEO surveys and the reality of abundant talent.

Now financial services recruiting in these huge under-employed pools requires more than paying lip service to equal opportunity laws. It requires CEOs to address the real question and understand the real problem – HR cannot do it alone.

It requires new skills and focus.

Abacus has had those skills and focus for years,

Cheers, Toby

HR Resources and Specialists

Here are some useful links when you are seeking HR professionals:

Continue Reading…

Executive Recruiters with a Difference

My blog is very critical of some of the practices in the recruitment industry. You won’t be surprised to hear that if you’ve read some of the posts.

However, we are critical for a reason:

To highlight that there are a group of recruiters, including my company Abacus, who are different.

Who provide a client focused and professional service.

Here are some of those firms. Of course, you will need to conduct your own due diligence before deciding to work with them.

Continue Reading…

Finance Recruitment - Why Giant Recruitment Ads DON’T Work

The sales pitch for giant Cane Toad Ads comes down to one word: Browsers.

The salesmen masquerading as your finance recruitment consultant then attempt to convince you that newspapers will deliver them. Which brings us to the ‘browser’ sales pitch:

I learnt this pitch 19 years ago when I worked at a giant finance recruiter with hundreds of finance recruitment ‘consultants’: it was drummed into us at the weekly sales meetings. We were made to practice it on each other and in front of the mirror. You had better believe that this pitch is the foundation stone of Australia’s major finance recruitment firms.

The pitch is simple, plausible and seemingly valid: people read the front of the newspaper, and their eye is caught by an advertisement so they become interested in it and apply. They are argued to be better applicants because they are more likely to be happy in their current job and therefore likely to be good at what they do. And of course, would not see jobs where active job seekers go to look - online or in classifieds.

Who could argue with something so self-evident??

No surprises that I’ll have a go. There are 3 counter arguments that rubbish the whole sales pitch:

Firstly one that came to me at 4.30 a.m. on a recent Cold August Night, the hour when all good ideas roam in a fevered brain. In the 3 years since I wrote a version of this Rant in my book, Get Great People, I had thought there were only 2 main counter arguments. This final one is the Big Momma - the last and very large nail in what is now virtually a metal coffin:

That we have moved to a world of Free Agents and the Internet. Where people manage and assess their careers constantly (even if usually not particularly well!). A world where people under 40 (Gen x and Gen Y) consider themselves independent of their employers, even if they enjoy their jobs. That they have a life outside work, or in more extreme cases, that they have a life, and work is just a small component of that. Something that many of us Boomers have also come to believe and live our lives by.

In this world, the Free Agents browse 10 or 20 or a 100 websites a week (even I, a geriatric, am on at least 20 different sites every week). And one of the sites they go to is MyCareer, Seek or Monster. Just for a look. To keep in touch. Because you never know. And what about all those niche finance job boards attached to professional finance forum sites: LOTS of browsers on those. And what about the snowballing LinkedIn and Facebook and all the other social networking sites. Full of browsers. Full of finance recruiters.

And because it is so easy to apply for jobs with just a few clicks they are more likely to make an enquiry than that browser reading the paper in a cafe or their garden.

Now, if the price was about the same, the ad salesman just might have a point. But we are talking chalk and cheese on cost. Not in the same ball park. A hundred dollars versus many thousands.

So, you tell me:

Who are the browsers? Where are the browsers? And, in particular, where do the browsers go, who in this ageist world, are the most sought after by employers? Reckon there are way more of these valuable young applicants on the job boards and social network sites than there are reading the Early General News in the Saturday papers.

Maybe the ad salesman is looking a bit like a seller of dodgy cars - even before we get to the other two reasons ….

Secondly, we read the Saturday pages ‘eyes up’.

If there were only 2 or 3 finance job ads on a page, and they were designed to attract the eye, no problem attracting eyeballs. That’s the argument of all advertising agencies and media sales people and it’s completely valid.

With finance recruitment, all the ads are in a block at the bottom of the page. Or, even worse, they are on a whole page by themselves when you get towards the back! Great for browsers!

I can remember the incredible hubris one Friday when I was at a Mega Finance Recruitment Firm and we had sold a whole broadsheet page of ads - it was all us! We were so proud! We were the champions! But hey, didn’t we forget something: what sort of insane browser browses a whole page of finance ads!? Maybe a desperate job seeker?

The ads are all the same size and all look pretty much the same - even better they are now in color so stand out like the proverbial dog ba.ls. They are also conveniently located in the bottom half of the paper - so handy for folding the broadsheet in half as I lie in my deckchair on Saturday morning!

So after 30 years of such ads, those browsers know where the ads are - they know to keep their eyes focused on the top of the page. That is where they find what they are looking for: something interesting to read.

I don’t have any major research to quote, but I have talked to a lot of people - it is quite common to read the Saturday papers ‘eyes up’. Don’t you?

Thirdly, the Saturday papers are now conveniently divided into sections.

The sections help readers find the bits they want to read. And in what order they want to read. And of course it helps in selling ads to particular demographics (now there’s a thought: finance recruiters could place ads in sections that attract who they are trying to employ?!)

With the sections, many of us have developed very idiosyncratic ways of reading. Take how I read the Saturday SMH (apologies for those who don’t live in Sydney):

I start with the front page; quick glance at the back page for some scurrilous gossip; Mike Carlton and Peter Fitzsimons for a laugh; rugby news; the rest of News Review; Spectrum; and sometimes the Good Weekend. And finally, if I get through all that, I turn to the news bits where the finance recruitment ads are - pages 2 to about 20 - and religiously keep my eyes up. But most weekends I don’t get to it.

Again, no research on readership that I can quote, just an informal survey of finance professionals; but it is common practice to read selectively. Of course the newspapers do lots of market research, which lead them to create sections in the first place.

So, three strong reasons that rubbish the browser sales pitch - just tell the advertising salesman masquerading as a finance recruitment consultant to go and spin his B.S. to someone else.