Saturday, January 12, 2008

Are People Raiding Your Firm to Take Staff?

As job markets become tighter recruiters, both third party and corporate are resorting to raiding their competition to hire staff.

A former Director may contact 10 key people and try to bring them along with her.

A recruiter leans that four of the last 7 hires have come from your firm and is bouncing around your voice response system trying to find potential recruits to fill the job or jobs.

What defenses do you have?

1. Figure out who you don't want to lose and take time with them. Many people like to be stroked by their bosses and taking a few minutes every week or two to praise their performance and speak about opportunities.

2. Figure out who you can afford to lose. there are nice people who are adequate performers. Can they be replaced? Absolutely . . . and probably for around the same money they earn (plus interview costs and fees). Why buy them out of another offer if they are dispensable and can hire someone with better upside. This leads us to

3. Compute your break point. At what point should you walk away from losing a person to a competitor? Also, find information about what staff say about your competitors on social network sites and anti-company sites to develop responses to potential resignations.

4. This is not a job for the HR Department but for every manager and business leader. No disrespect to HR but if your culture doesn't have culture taht values HR, then having them lead this will doom it to failure.

5. Scan job boards for your own employees. There are two reasons to do this-- the least important one is being prepared for a resignation. The primary reason for doing so is to be able to sit down with the disgruntled employee and see if what is bothering them is something that can be resolved before getting to the point where they are sitting in your office ready to quit.
I addition, it affords you the opportunity to contact former employees or "boomerangs" who might return to your firm.

There are a lot more things you can do, but these are the five easiest to implement. In doing so, you will slow down losses and put yourself and your firm in a stronger position.

Jeff Altman

The Big Game Hunter
 Concepts in Staffing
thebiggamehunter@cisny.com

© 2008 all rights reserved.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, is Managing Director with Concepts in Staffing, a New York search firm, He has successfully assisted many corporations identify management leaders and staff in many disciplines since 1971. He is a retired certified leader of the ManKind Project, a not for profit organization that assists men with life issues, and a practicing psychotherapist.

To receive a daily digest of positions emailed to you, search for openings that The Big Game Hunter is working on, to use Jeff’s free job lead search engine, Job Search Universe, to subscribe to Jeff’s free job hunting ezine, “Head Hunt Your Next Job, or his staffing ezine, “Natural Selection”, or to learn about his VIP program, go to www.jeffaltman.com.

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