Expertise and Specialization

I saw a reference to an article today on the risks of promoting your 'expertise'. The article sort of began to coalesce some of my own thoughts, ie. it's better to under-promise and over-deliver, rather than the other way around.

My own experience has been that if you sell a client on your abilities and then fail to perform, you may be in worse shape than if you'd never sold them at all. Sort of along the lines of the saying, better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than open it and remove all doubt.

When I started in recruiting, my career had been in IT. It covered a number of areas; lots of enterprise project management, a little development, operations, ERP, supply chain, EDI, etc. As a matter of fact, I had just come off a bunch of EDI projects for a telecom company.

My first search assignment ended up being an interface programmer position for a hospital. Now granted, I hadn't worked in a hospital, hadn't worked on Egate (the tool in question), or used HL7. And I didn't tell the client I knew anything about those. But I did ask questions that told them I understood applications integration at a reasonable level, EDI, and some of the issues involved. After filling that position, and many other similar ones, eventually candidates and clients started telling me how surprising it was to talk to a recruiter who actually seemed to understand what they were talking about.

The point is, I didn't proclaim myself a specialist, the clients and candidates did.

Too many recruiting firms hire newbies and proclaim them specialists in some area the minute they sit down. Once they talk to a few people and remove all doubt as to their 'expertise', they have already set the stage for their failure.

My personal philosophy and the philosophy of ROI is to under-promise, and over- deliver. Our reputation is built on performance, and we do very little advertising. We believe in telling you and showing you what we do, and letting you be the judge of how well we perform.

Recruiting 2007

All signs are pointing to continued heating up of the search market in 2007. Both current hiring trends, and long term demographics seem to support the idea of continued growth in demand for hiring and consequently, search services.

Whether a hiring manager or candidate, one should realize that this 'hot' market is going to attract hordes of recruiters back to the field. This has already been happening since around 2003 when the 'dot-bomb' slowdown bottomed out and started to turn.

While this means there will be more recruiters to choose from, it also means that ever increasing numbers of recruiters will be newbies and marginal performers. As always, your time is your most important investment, and it will be important to figure out quickly and efficiently who you should be dealing with.

Some points to think about:

Most recruiters are essentially entrepreneurs. Even those working for large firms typically find their own clients, find their own candidates and do their own deals. Craig Silverman from Hireability forwarded a link recently to an article by Margaret Graziano talking about developing recruiting teams. The third paragraph talks about the high turnover of recruiting firms, and the resulting dilution of talent at those firms:

http://www.hireability.com/recruiter_news_03.12-Employee-Development.html

My own experience and discussions with other agency recruiters confirms her findings. 75-80% of recruiters at most firms are newbies or marginal performers. The majority won't last long. Most of the rest, the performers, are likely to leave for other firms or start their own. Your attention should be on identifying the performers that can help you. Wherever they are.

Be careful of new recruiters who claim or imply expertise or accomplishments based on the performance of others. Key questions to ask:

How long have you been a recruiter?
Do you work both sides of the desk? (search orders and candidates)
How long have you done both?
How many positions have you personally filled?
What types of positions?
What types of clients?


Simply put, if they have not been a performer previously, you would be better off investing your time with someone else.