Signs of Recruiting Sclerosis
Zero % is the Target for Healthy Recruiting; What is Your Firm’s?
Through our informative recruiting approach, appearing in our blogs, recruiting tool tips and practiced in our retained search practices, we can reduce your recruiting sclerosis
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% of searches with no plan & funding jointly approved by C-team, CFO, HR & Hiring Manager
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% of openings that are on again; off again, disrupting searches & creating candidate fall-off
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Dependance on applications to job posting filling candidate funnel
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% of your firm's offers rejected by candidates
Informative Recruiting: What We Deliver
Your well-conceived team synergies breed a stream of well-deserved successes.
- 2 Vetted Qualified Candidate in Under 30 Days 100%
- Candidate Offer Acceptance 100%
- 90 Day Deliverables Achieved; 88.2 Days Avg from Launch to New Hire Start 100%
Our Search to Hire Process
Recognize Pains
Open positions become painful when you as the hiring manager recognize that every day the position is unfilled, important work is left undone, milestones are threatened, and their company’s market strength can be compromised.
We help you and your firm better recognize and quantify their economic pain. This has three favorable side effects:
1. The objectives and deliverables for the open position become more refined and their consequences are made more evident to stakeholders in the hiring process;
2. A greater sense of urgency for filling the position results in more enthusiasm in accelerating search to hire processes; and
3. You are more open to understanding and eradicating the source of your recruiting obstacles.
Diagnose Recruiting Issues
Resource constraints, broken or inefficient processes, conflicting department agendas, and miscommunication are typical root causes for ineffective recruiting. We dig into your current recruiting state, to locate and assist you in removing the obstacles to a rapid hire. The solutions can be as simple as getting candidate interviewer schedules promptly set up.
Other challenges include: absence of defined interviewer roles, lack of uniform candidate assessment measures, and repeated approval processes for preparing offers that add time but little or no value to preparing your job offers.
We want you to have recruitment processes that give your firm a strategic advantage over your competition, regardless of their size and market share.
Act to Promptly Fill Critical Open Positions
All talk & no action doesn’t render results. We share with you as our client our performance regularly, if not weekly, on a daily basis. We provide reports on progress made, listing targeted candidates by name, company affiliation, position, contact confirmation and status. We only present vetted candidates worthy of interview to you. If prospective candidates fall out of contention, we summarize why this is the case (e.g. desire total comp substantially over approved parameters; delighted with current position, with no negatives; absence of sufficient career growth in offered position).
We review with you in detail the results of all interviews and jointly agree where to proceed next with each candidate. We share information with candidates on their status, so there is no doubts whether they are in contention or not, which all candidates appreciate.
We believe honesty over indecision is always the best course.
When you–as a client of ours is ready to prepare an offer, we re-test (yet again) a candidate’s readiness to accept an offer at a given position, compensation level, role and deliverables, to expose any doubts, competing offers, earlier issues raised that remain unresolved, or absence of commitment. Our interest is that you construct an offer package only if it will be accepted.
Succeed in Hiring & Meeting Position Deliverables
You know that acquiring a highly suited candidate for one of your open positions is very satisfying. Seeing that your new hire is performing at or above the level expected is exhilarating!
Frequently Asked Questions
We’ve tried to anticipate the kind of questions you’d have regarding our informative recruiting search process, costs and results you will expect to receive.
You likely will have more questions, which are specific to your immediate, or future needs. Feel free to email us or call us at 925.833.8714 x1001 with any questions you may have. We trust you will have a better feel of how you might best proceed to filling your critical hire openings.
Best wishes to you in 2017!
What kind of clients do you work with?
High tech clients that have a serious, time-sensitive need to hire a candidate to perform a vital activity in their firm. These clients know that every day they don’t have their position filled is a day they individually, as a team and as a company suffer real economic losses.
It’s more than sweating bullets. It’s missing key product or service milestones that impact revenue & cash flow. It’s antagonizing and losing customers with core features that don’t work. It’s not having leadership bench strength to fill in an essential program, bridging a gap in what’s unknown in operating a business (e.g. Who shall we select to manage our pilot build? Where should we validate our product’s market potential? What methods shall we use to assess & mitigate business risk? When and how shall we approach investors?).
We serve hardware & software start-up companies with a handful of employees, up to large, iconic market leaders needing multiple architect, director and VP software development positions filled. Client size isn’t an issue; a client’s resolute commitment to seeing their technical position filled and our confidence in fielding quality candidates meeting their needs are the overriding two factors that plays into us accepting a client’s search.
How long does it take with your retained search to present two qualified candidates for our openings?
If we agree to take your search, in under 30 calendar days from search launch. Guaranteed.
How we succeed in accelerating first candidate presentations on critical hire positions is by initially investing over two hours with your hiring manager. We want to understand the the open position in detail: its objectives; why the position is vital to your firm; the kind of experience, knowledge & talents needed to succeed; the culture of the team, department and the firm’s management and employees.
Our informative recruiting approach in working with you and all members of your recruiting team, including HR is to help you understand & appreciate all the touch points a candidate will have with your firm, through to being hired. Each touch point can represent an opportunity or an obstacle to getting your selected candidate to value what you & your firm has to offer. We guide you through these touch points, offer suggestions for improvement and deliver your desired candidate to offer acceptance.
And that’s just for starters….
I'm shopping for a recruiter. How cheap is your retained search?
If you plan to solely base your decision to hire a recruiter on price, we are not your recruitment firm.
Why is this the case? If you have read pains from not having critical hires on board, your ROI on selecting us will easily be 10x.
If you won’t care to share with us YOUR COST OF NOT FILLING YOUR POSITION, we can never expect you to be a true partner.
Here are a few areas where our recruiting competitors fail:
a) not having the right person who will succeed in meeting your clearly defined short & mid-term objectives on time;
b) not having the candidate who is the right fit to complement you existing team, getting the synergy you need to leverage all your employee strengths;
c) hiring candidates who are not a good fit, who likely will be terminated, not fitting your culture, losing valuable time in delayed project releases;
d) not being able to have your CEO and their management team demonstrate to existing or prospective investors that they can successfully field a team of dedicated, talented employees who will willingly follow your leaders to hell and back to deliver the needed results you expect.
The strange thing is, our retained searches are many times fairly comparable, a little higher than a contingent search. Not in any way exorbitant, as you might have expected. Given that you are given guaranteed results of filling your position at only a fraction of your total cost of a delayed hire, why wouldn’t you elect to explore our retained search solution?
Why do you need a launch fee to initiate your retained search?
When we accept your search, we immediately commit resources to deliver you candidates matching your search criteria. We don’t go half-hearted into any search, or pin our hopes on one candidate we’ve recently contacted that looks like a perfect fit. If we feel we cannot successfully fulfill the search, we will politely decline your request. We value our commitment and expect you will appreciate and applaud the lengths that we go to deliver you candidates that will elevate the power of your business.
Contingency recruiters fail to make a commitment to your firm to source well-qualified candidates for your open positions. They receive nothing for their effort in presenting candidates to you, unless they are hired. If they can’t quickly present a candidate you deem suitable to receive an offer, which is accepted, the contingent recruiting firm receives no fee. Given their business model, they have no imperative or obligation to place significant resources to filling your position. After a while, typically in 30 to 45 days, their candidate funnel of applicants dry up.
Some firms like to play the field and engage multiple contingency recruiters. This only accentuates a short-term mentality among the recruiters engaged. They’ll throw immediately to you whatever candidates within their pool remotely match your requirements, hoping one or more may be considered. Then their funnel dries up. They know the odds of filling your search is low. There is no incentive to uncover passive candidates that takes additional resources, staff skills & time, cutting into their profits.
What’s important to you? Having no up front cash outflow to get a low yield search, or investing in 100% assurance your position will be filled by a well-qualified, vetted candidate who will complete your critical, time-sensitive objectives? It’s your call.
What is your success rate filling retained search positions?
100%
How are we different from other recruiting firms?
We provide retained searches for senior level hardware & software engineering positions, from individual contributor up to leadership positions–at the VP level. Generally, traditional retained search firms provide their services for senior management and executive-level openings, outside of engineering.
We offer multiple guarantees, giving you confidence that we can a) rapidly deliver qualified candidates worthy of interview meeting your requirements; and b) provide assurances we will replace the candidate, at no, or at a reduced rate, if our candidate hired does not work out within 90 days and six months from their start date.
We have a relentless approach in uncovering passive candidates, which we carefully vet before presenting them to you, searching among your competitors and industries that have employees matching your target candidate profile.
We’ve been successful sourcing and placing multiple candidates at well-known companies, like Clear-Com, Sephora, Varian Analytical Instruments and Walmart.com. We have also placed candidates in key roles within start-ups companies like Miasole, Skype and Wrightspeed.
How can I learn more if a retained search is right for my firm?
Give us a call at 702.623.0443 to arrange a free half-hour discussion with Minda Hannenberg, our co-founder & senior recruiter on how to determine of a retained search is right for your particular engineering openings. We’ve sourced & placed chemical, electrical, mechanical engineers and physicists within technically demanding positions. Our technical hires cover all levels of positions, including software architects, directors and vice presidents in product development, technical marketing and operations functional areas.
Testimonials
I worked with Minda on two critical director-level searches for the mobile organization at Sephora. In both cases, we were thrilled with the outcome.
Unlike most other recruiters, Minda strives to understand the ecosystem in which a candidate will work, as well as the problems and imperatives of the enterprise. Whereas most recruiters deliver resumes with bullet points that match job descriptions, with Minda you get candidates that are likely to be a good fit in skill, styles and business personality. This requires an investment of some time up front, but saves time in the long run.
For anyone looking for a good fit and and investment in quality staff, rather than just a warm body, I highly recommend Minda.
Minda is one of the best recruiters I have worked with. She invests substantial energy and time to [both] understand roles for which she is recruiting. as well as understand each candidate’s top touch points. Candidates would do well to pay attention to her insights on how to have a leg up on others vying for the same position. Many talk about the value of curated, personalized experiences. Well, Minda delivers an incredibly personal, customized hiring experience that provides the best fit for the candidate and the company! Great listener, great communicator. Keeps everyone apprised in real time. Strongly recommended.
Hanford ChoyI first met Minda in 2006. I was so impressed with the work she did for me that I made sure I worked with her at each subsequent company, hiring Mechanical Engineers, Electronics engineers and a thin film Electro-chemist from her.
When I need to hire an engineer Minda is the first and only recruiter I call. She’ll visit my company to see our equipment first hand and ask technical questions until she knows exactly what I want.
Instead of sending a lot of resumes which match some keywords, Minda will send me a smaller group that are an exact match and I make a quick hire from that “short list”.
I’d strongly recommend Minda to any firm needing to hire engineering or other technical staff.
Freidoon Rastegar