All right everybody, the 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space. Maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com. All the solutions today. All today is the solutions. This week’s topic, episode 99. Man, we are so close to that triple-digit milestone. Let’s rebuild recruiting the smart way.
All the solutions today.
It’s what we’re calling this. It’s what we’re going with. Now, I think this show is timely. So we’ve seen, And this show might be a commercial very soon. Things have picked up- yeah, might. Will be a commercial soon. Things have picked up pretty significantly in the recruiting space. Every other firm and people I know work internally, maybe might depend on industries, but like our August and September were our two best months in the last two years.
Might. Might.
And October, it’s not finished yet, but it’s looking like it’s going to be damn close. So we’re looking at just a fantastic three month stretch. Not only that, but our volume hiring solutions, which is what we’re going to talk about today, spiked pretty significantly. So we landed 16 of these kind of custom solution volume engagements in the last five months since like May 1st. Now for context, 2023 was a terrible year for recruiting. Pretty much everyone in recruiting knew that. We did five all year that year.
So in just 16, last like five months. More and more companies are starting to hire in mass. So we want to kind of get back and kind of talk about some of these things.
Yeah. And before, they’re hiring in mass and they’re using depleted talent teams from the, you know, the, what happened in 2023. was a way it, Those groups were affected far more negatively than any other group within the corporate setting. So we bring all this up, not- we’re going to peak. I want to brag a little bit, but I don’t want to peacock.
Yes.
To bring the last two years and all of this stuff back full circle. The mistake that organizations make, and it’s cyclical. It’s kind of over and over again, is ramping up these internal recruiting teams, or conversely onboarding an army of contingent recruiting firms for short to medium term hiring binges with really no regard to…
what their strategic or sustained hiring needs really are.
Yeah. By short to medium term figure like one to four quarters under a year, you know, staffing up for a new product launch or a project or a big sales push building out a sales team with really no idea of what the true like long-term sustained head growth- headcount growth really is going to be. Jeff and I, like we’re going to, we want to discuss quickly just some of the issues with the traditional methods, the most common ways before we kind of talk about what we do solution wise. So first,
Jeff, if you want to kinda talk about this from the internal side.
Yeah. So when we say internal, we’re talking about a solution and it’s, you know, the standard term out there is contract recruiting. So you interview a few contract recruiters, you pick one, you negotiate an hourly rate and onboard them with minimal systems. Here you go. Take a step back. That first
part of it, you spend this time and money onboarding and training contract recruiters. So you’re paying to have the person simply learn workflows. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. I’m just stating it as a fact. But beyond that, there’s three critical factors that I think or issues that you have to consider. Number one, there’s process and there’s relationships that are built
at the human level between the hiring managers and that individual person, that contract recruiter. So there’s muscle memory here of working on a specific requisition and learnings from that process that when that contract recruiter offboards, it all kind of goes out the window. So if you don’t have the right safeguards in place to capture what’s happening in those conversations and in those processes,
the next person to service that hiring manager, it’s all going to feel like it’s starting from square one. And that hiring manager is just not going to have a high level of service or continuity through their searches. Number two, contract recruiters are not incentivized to end contracts early. Like this is the big red, you know, blinking light. Folks are billing hourly and will capitalize on that. It’s human nature. So there’s an opportunity to make money.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
It’s a built in conflict of interest between the organization and the resource. So, hiring quickly isn’t top of mind if you look at it from a purely commercial standpoint for that resource. Number three, in most cases, not all, we all have good networks. But in most cases, the resource is unknown to the company at least, or doesn’t have a proven track record that you can verify yourself. You’re really just taking the person’s word for it, more or less.
And it’s risky to swing that sort of cost. You’re spending a good amount of money before you actually find out that you might have a rotten egg.
Yeah, Now that’s one side of the spectrum, hiring a contractor recruiter. The other side, which is one of my least favorite topics is contingent recruiting. Now, I’ve said a bunch of times, contingent recruiting is the dumbest business model in the history of business models. This is obviously on the agency side, if doing free work with zero commitment is just bad business, literally no other service industry does this. Marketing agencies would never do this. Software development firms would never do this. Accounting firms never do this.
it’s a…
Maybe ambulance chasing lawyers is the only thing that’s similar, which is not a great comparison. Yeah. But when I talk, So when I talk about this, it sounds, it can sound very self-serving, you know, very agency centric, But I want to make sure we kind of talk about why contingent recruiting is bad for organizations internally. And it’s a bad model for them. First off, you have to recognize you get everyone’s worst effort. There is zero disincentive for recruiting firm to say yes to whatever you throw their way
Yeah, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel at that point.
because they can bail as soon as it gets a little bit hard and leave you in the lurch. If you actually need positions filled, I mean, this is a transactional, the definition of a transactional relationship that’s really antithetical about building real partnerships and solutions to get the job done.
I think a main point here is companies will always say, “Well I get to try you before I buy you”. And it’s like, sure. But to your point, you’re not buying the full firepower. You’re just, you’re getting the free ad version of the app.
Yeah, the freeware. Secondly, it typically goes hand in hand with like multiple firms competing with each other. So it might sound great, but when you have a bunch of non-committed firms, half-assing searches, no real SLAs, muddying up your messaging in the market, there’s nothing worse than a candidate hearing the same pitch from five different recruiters at five different firms for your company. It just signals to that person, the person you’re trying to hire that like,
you don’t have a strategic bone in your body. You’re not actually, you don’t really care. You’re not then invested in how you go about hiring people.
Newsflash, all five of those people are pitching it differently, by the way. So it sounds like garbage.
Yeah. Yeah. And lastly, it’s expensive. I’m the first one to admit. I mean this, how much like a cost to hire people. It’s like the reason why it’s so expensive is because you’re not just paying for that search. You’re paying for every other search that firm worked on that they didn’t fill. They have to like make up with the fact they’re taking on uncommitted business by increasing the rates. So when you work with- anytime you’re working with committed partners, you can be more cost effective in your hiring, which is the opposite of kind of what we’re talking about here.
So all this kind of raises the question, what do you guys, what do we do that’s different? And I hate being salesy, but 99 episodes in, maybe it’s actually time to talk about what we’re doing that’s so different from the norm. Not only, now we’re not the only firm that’s innovative with delivery, but I do think we’re in the minority. And I think the best way to explain it is like, Jeff, just explain your background, you specifically and why you joined Hirewell
Yeah. I hold the unique distinction of being- I’m the only current team member and probably the only team member ever. Maybe we’ll find another anomaly someday. I was a candidate. So Mike Ehlers, shout out to Big Mike, got me a job back in 2010. I was a candidate at Hirewell, generated a fee for the organization.
I was also a client then because I ascended to a TA director role and now I’m a full-time team member of Hirewell. I bring it up only because I knew you and Matt and Mark, the forefathers of Hirewell knew what you were doing a long time ago. So when I ran my own recruiting function at the corporate level, I set up my teams lean. I actually, my team looked like what I think a modern recruiting team should look like now.
I always had enough work for those individuals to like demonstrate value add and take to the suits like, hey, we’re working, we’re doing things, we’re providing value for the organization. But I always leveraged outside resources strategically when I needed it, Hirewell being one of them. Speaking to agencies at scale is a complete and utter dumpster fire as a buyer. I I was one of them. them It’s awful.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Any other TA leaders out there, I hope you’re shaking your heads up and down right now. You hear that same crusty ass pitch over and over and over again. We can find you a contract recruiter or you can buy search for 25 to 30% of starting base salary and they’ll try and pitch a retainer. And generally speaking, I would argue if you’re going to do search, do retain search, but you can do contingent search as well. It gets into this giant rab race
So you’ve got two ridiculous bookends and those are your options. Is there an election joke here?
Yeah. Yeah, I prepared an election joke. We can call this better options. There’s either the build recruiting back better plan or the make recruiting great again plan, depending on which side of the political cesspool you happen to be sitting on.
Jeff Smith [10:51.15]
Please don’t dump on us, everybody. So my annoyance, my frustration, my disappointment there was that there was seemingly all this creative space between those two options. And none of the providers either A, knew how to get in there and get their hands dirty or B, had a willingness or want to get in there because the model was working for them for whatever reasons.
Yeah.
Both outcomes were unacceptable to me. So when I joined Hirewell, it was kind of my, it has been my sole mission to define what that space looks like for the market and how it would benefit our customers with unique challenges.
So recruitment process outsourcing or RPO as the nerds would call it.
We had to come up with some sort of name. Joke time. The first name that we had was, it didn’t fit. It was called managed recruiting and nobody knew what we were talking about. So we just went back to RPO. RPO. A few scenarios. So when do people need, when do companies need this? It’s generally speaking, when they go through periods of high scale or high growth, large builds.
You know, they’re building a new team, they’re building a new function, they’re divested and have to build up a new silo, lots of different reasons. Or a key team member on the talent acquisition team is going on leave for a baby, maternity, paternity, maybe there’s a medical instance, et cetera. We can and do provide single point of contact recruiters that understand internal recruitment.
And we interviewed and onboarded a ton of people with that dual hybrid agency and internal recruitment background. It’s really important to kind of point that out.
It’s very important. And those are the individuals that deliver the piece of business. We incentivize our folks to finish the job quickly so that there isn’t that conflict of interest. And all of those folks have completed multiple projects with multiple different technology stacks or applicant tracking systems. So the ramp up is minimal. I want people recruiting. I want our folks recruiting within 48 hours.
We want to turn that faucet on all the way up with a great resource and shut it down when it’s time to go. Now, so sometimes these folks do it alone. We have, they’re armed with a database of a hundred thousand candidates, etc And that can work. Alternatively, sometimes one person just won’t do. If you’re building 70 a 70 person organization, you’re going to need more resources. That’s when the lead recruiter is harnessed with
and can interface with the rest of Hirewell’s delivery or be it tech, go to market, corporate functions, real estate, you name it. They can interface with any of those individuals. The point being no company can pay 25% at scale. Our solutions get these sorts of jobs done without bankrupting your recruiting budget. So sometimes it’s fixed monthly costs, all you can eat. Sometimes it’s a lower monthly with an appropriate rate card. We’re going to listen to your opportunity.
We’re going to wrap a delivery model and an investment around that piece of business that’s custom to you.
So if you ever wonder why, do these, ever wondered what do these guys do when they’re not making video podcasts, that’s what we do. And if you need to hire, you want to discuss, you want to see what a truly customized solution looks like, hit us up. Me, James, I can be james@hirewell.com. Jeff, reached at jeff@hirewell.com. Or just go to hirewell.com, there’s a bunch of contact forms to reach out. Use promo code OASIS25, kidding. do, Jeff and I do want to go to that show though. But we’d love to chat with you if you do have hiring needs scaling up and
with how things are picking up right now. And that’s it, that’s the 📍 pitch. We’re short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning in to the 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insight series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com, as well as YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, see you soon.
