William Tincup was featured recently in John Sumser’s Top 100 Influencers, which is a running series that Sumser is doing on recruiting and HR professionals who have made an impact in our industry. While Tincup isn’t a recruiting agency guy, he is a self-employed professional services guy, just like many of you. Tincup, along with Bret Starr, co-founded their company Starr Tincup in November of 2000. Starr Tincup is a marketing consultancy that serves the recruiting and HR community. He has been responsible for building the company brand, including the website, book (Try Not To F&ck This Up), direct marketing, email marketing, event strategy, social media strategy, and so forth. Tincup has been known (affectionately? notoriously?) throughout the recruiting and HR community for his low-brow sense of humor, colorful language, and yet his approachability and willingness to have conversations about his work and his thoughts on business and marketing strategy.

Recently, he fell out of love with his work and decided to move on.

At this point, you may be wondering “What does this have to do with me? This guy’s a marketer; I’m a recruiting professional!” I promise – there is a good point to all of this.

Falling out of love with one’s work is common. We’ve all had days where we’ve sworn that if we get on the phone with one more rude person or if one more client tries to cheap out on paying a fee, we’re through. Of course, few are the time when we actually follow through on those threats. But that thought is still lingering in the back of our minds – “Is this all really worth it?”

William Tincup’s story struck me because he detailed the reasons he decided to throw in the towel. He stopped believing in the outsourced marketing services business model. He was frustrated with the double standards applied to his efforts vs. in-house marketers’ efforts. He became annoyed that, as an external service provider, his status was constantly being threatened by these ridiculous standards. And the final straw for him, as he states:

“…the realization that over the course of 10 years in the game I might of [sic] been told “thank you” seven or eight times.  I (read: my firm) changed lives, changed destinies, built lasting brands, created market share, created real value, got people promoted, etc, etc. Yeah, I know – payment for services rendered was my thanks.  Yeah, well, that wasn’t enough.”

I would be very surprised if just about every person reading this article hasn’t struggled with at least one of these issues at some point during your professional recruiting career. Who hasn’t felt like the red-headed stepchild at least once when working with a difficult client? Who hasn’t been held to some crazy standards as an external recruiter that an internal employee would never be held to? And who hasn’t wished that once, just once, someone would thank them for all of the amazing talent they’ve helped shepherd in to an organization?

When you really fall out of love with your work, how do you know when it’s time to say “Enough!” and leave before you become bitter? Is it just a bad case of the Mondays, or is this a recurring gut feeling that just will not go away? How do you get past the rut and fall back in love with what you do? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below. Sharing your experience might just save someone from calling it quits!

Profitable specialties come and go, and most people who have been in the business awhile have switched specialties from time to time – usually due to a combination of factors, but most often for economic reasons. The industry or functional area they worked, for whatever reason, tanked. In an industry where two non productive months in a row can drive you out of business, flexibility is a necessity.

Desks are specialized by industry, function, geography, or combinations of these, but it’s generally accepted that geographically specialized desks run the highest risk of eventually failing, simply because geography, by its very nature, is something fixed, inflexible, and subject to nature, man made disasters, or being too closely tied to one industry (please search: “hurricanes” “oil spill” “Detroit automotive”). However, there’s something to be said for firms which dominate their local markets. I know several owners who will not work outside their office’s immediate geographic location, and over the years they have become the “go to” guys in the industry for their locations. Most of these firms have desks specialized by function, but they generate all their business from the local marketplace. I admire these firms for how they have become dominant locally.

It’s also always better to look into the eyes of someone who cuts you a five figure fee; something local desk specialists can and should do. But I’ve found that I would rather have a few people in a lot of places cutting those checks than a lot of people in one place paying me, despite all the benefits of deep relationships with “clients” (note: quotation marks because I believe there is no such thing as a “client” in this industry). To my way of thinking, there will always be the need to spread out the risks so that one dumb oil company, or hurricane, or some other geo specific thing knocks me out of business. That said, my firm places by geography, but we do it in a different way: we take great candidates, find out where they want to go, then place them within 30 miles of exactly where they want to live, and usually within just 30 days [“30/30 Placement Program™”].

I’ve often wondered why anyone would perform “searches” anymore, which I did for my first eight years in the business. Why not simply “place”? Searches and job orders are means to an end…placement. The quickest way to make placements, good economy or bad, is to find a great candidate and place him/her exactly where they want to live and work. After 26 years in the business, I know that most people will accept a less than ideal position in their most ideal location before they will accept an ideal position in their less than ideal location. Also, solid placements result when you put someone into the city or town where they most desire to live and work. We recently placed a Navy lieutenant for 50k in his top location when he had an offer of 63k in his second favorite location. The other recruiter could not believe it. That is the norm, not the exception.

Editor’s note: Gary Stauble’s “2 Minute Coaching” gives you quick, easy-to-implement ideas on various subjects.

Topic #1: Should you start a search without a signed agreement?
We were all likely taught that you should never start a search without a signed agreement. This makes good sense for many obvious reasons.

However, what do you do if a hiring manager authorizes you to send people for a search but does not return your agreement promptly?

Hiring authorities (like all of us) only do things when it is obvious that it will benefit them in a tangible way. Reading a contract in detail before they receive a candidate is not always at the top of their priority list. Often it is your presentation of a star candidate that provides the motivation for the manager to sign your agreement.

Verbal agreements are theoretically binding but hard to prove. However, from my point of view, it’s ok to start a search with a verbal agreement on rare occasions as long as you follow a few rules. You definitely would want this practice to be the exception rather than the rule.

If you are going to start the search, make sure you have a verbal agreement on the terms. You can start the search with a verbal agreement but make sure you get the signed agreement before you schedule the first sendout. Also, be sure to present your candidate without revealing his name or current employer. Lastly, only send one candidate as a test to see how quickly your prospect responds before putting much effort into the search.

Topic #2: Don’t call it a slump
Have you ever thought about the importance of language and your chronic thoughts in terms of influencing your paycheck? Most people agree that we tend to become what we think about, what we focus on, and what we talk about. With that in mind, picture two veteran recruiters who haven’t made a placement in six weeks:

One’s inner dialogue goes something like this, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, nothing seems to be working, I’m in a slump. I may never make another placement. I suck.”

The other recruiter sounds more like this, “I know I’m on my way to better production. I’ve had slow times before and I’ve always figured a way through. I know that if I stick to my process, the placements will come. What’s the fastest way to my next sendout?”

Pretty different tone, eh?

One is weak and impotent, the other strong and hopeful. Who do you think will get to their next placement first? As recruiters we need to be watchful of our focus and inner dialogue and make sure that it’s leading us toward the success we really want.

Topic #3: What if my client insists on presenting the offer?
As with everything, you need to show your client why it is in his interest to have you present the offer. Here are some ideas:

Other interviews:
“Candidates will tell me things about other offers and opportunities that they won’t tell you.”

Counter offers:
“They’ll talk to me about their susceptibility to counter-offers whereas they’ll likely tell you only what they think you want to hear.”

Uncover hidden objections:
“I can act as a confidant for the candidate to uncover other hidden objections such as his spouse’s resistance, changes in his reasons for leaving and the fear of change.”

Save Dollars:
“We test all offers before we extend them. We can help save you in payroll cost and in avoiding rejected offers.”

We act as a mediator:
“It’s more professional to have the offer come from a recruiter. We act as mediator. Then the candidate calls you (Mr. Client) after acceptance to formally accept with you.”

Last resort:
“Mr. Client, if you won’t change your mind about presenting the offer, at least let me test the offer amount first and coordinate the timing with you so we’re sure the candidate is ready to accept.”

I’m serious.

Let’s get real, have you ever hired someone you knew little about for a job you knew less about? It happens to all of us.

I started my own company for the first time when I was 29 years old. I had a pre-teenager, a young son, and a new baby due any day.

The company I was with was shutting down, literally, that night. The girls and I took our stuff and needed a place to go, FAST. I had no operations experience, no management experience, no finance, no marketing, and certainly no technology experience. I had no operational infrastructure, organizational design or business plan.

We had a couple desks, a phone, and a hard floor. Failure was not an option, as I was the breadwinner.

Our first year we did $1,000,000.00 in sales, we had a temp division and a direct hire team. As I began to think about growing, I started to hire. I hired people who reminded me of me. Imagine that? In one year I hired 35 people. All failed, were fired, quit, or stayed far….far too long.

I was a producer and I knew how to make the donuts, fry them up in a pan, serve seconds, and then make more donuts. I did this over and over again for over a decade. It was who I was.

When the Pinnacle Society accepted my application I was flabbergasted.

My billing status was a pretty big deal. I was good at this job. So the technician became a business owner, not out of a carefully designed plan, out of survival.

The bottom line is in 10 years I spun through over 100 people. Some commission, some not. When I spoke to other business owners in the staffing and recruitment industry, I was told this is what we get; our industry has an extremely high turnover, deal with it.

My paradigm for the staffing industry was developed on my first job. I was brought up in a company that hired 10 people per month and if one was left at the end of the year, that was a victory. The difference between them and me was that they had a person whose only job was to hire, train, and churn people. I was the biller, owner, sales rep, recruiting manager, HR, and the so-called trainer.

Given my strong willed personality and insatiable appetite to get better, I knew I had to change, so I went to my Vistage chair (formerly known as TEC).

Mike Donahoe sat me down and we looked at what the high turnover, poor hiring practices and mediocre on boarding was costing me. I knew it was costing me money, I never considered it was costing me time with my kids, happiness and fulfillment.

That meeting changed my life.

My coach had me take the income I earned in one year and divide it by the amount of hours in a work week. Then he had me research how long each hire was with me, and the amount of my time was spent training, coaching, fixing, correcting, answering questions and un-ruffling feathers. Then he worked with me to figure out the cost to the organization in terms of lost sales, unhappy customers, unfilled orders.

Then he had me take a calculator to it. The impact was astounding.

It was then, the fall of 2002; I chose to become a Manager. I chose to be a business leader that is effective at hiring and selecting employees, managing performance, on-boarding, compensation, employee engagement and retention. Choosing was just the beginning; I then had to learn how. It did not happen right away, it took a ton of work.

However, when I finally got it, I got it.

Before I knew it, Alliance HR Network (my previous company) was training our customer’s HR departments, Corporate Recruiters, and their front-line Chicago area managers how to hire, onboard, and manage their new employees. The better I got, the better they got.

When we surveyed our customers they told us they would like to see us offer more ‘people consulting’ services, such as performance management, hiring process training, human resource consulting, new hire selection, employee on boarding, employee retention and succession planning consulting for the people we placed and some of their key players. Our first projects were about installing effective hiring processes for growing companies.

In companies where the hiring process used to be a game of golf and a shot of Jack, they upgraded to using psychometric assessment tools in addition to an M interview and a behavioral interview to evaluate candidates. In Chicago area technology start ups, where normally a skill on a resume gets an interview, they upgraded their hiring process to glean the right behaviors, competencies and emotional intelligence required by the role. Skills are a given, they wanted more than skill from their technical consultants, they wanted to achieve corporate effectiveness through each and every hire.

Since those early days I have worked with many companies on different variations of our service offerings from Recruitment Process in Sourcing, RPI to Employee Retention consulting.

More often than not, we are bringing our recruitment, hiring, employee selection, and onboarding knowledge and processes to companies that have little or no internal Recruitment and Talent Management infrastructure.

I find it interesting, funny, and amazing that most companies do not put more of a strategic emphasis on who they hire. The ones who do have sky rocketed in sales, in innovation, in service and in customer retention. The ones who don’t, well maybe that is one of the reasons they fade away.

Progressive, hiring savvy companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Enterprise Leasing, etc. do a very good job of following a hiring process, but most of the rest, from the perspective of over two thousand corporate recruiters and executive search consultants, don’t even come close. They treat hiring like a crapshoot or a collaborative popularity contest.

My question to a CEO of a growing organization is, “Why would you have a C player interviewing potential candidates?”

I have heard jokes cracked that Mo, Larry, and Curly led the interview in unison.

People who have never been trained in interviewing, who don’t fundamentally understand people or the role asking route questions, thinking about how much “other” work they have to do, and resenting ever minute of it.

No wonder my first sales coach, Tom, used to say: “The biggest problem with sales departments is the manager who does not know how to identify true sales people. They thought they hired John Wayne only to find out it was Woody Allen.”

I can’t tell you how many times I interview a company that hired the wrong person; he or she failed in the role because they hired from the hip and not the head.

I see that type of behavior, specifically in sales recruiting; the candidate shows up and looks strong, only to stop short of the finish line. The company, or the hiring manager, bought the shiny penny, the creative communication, and the glamour of having “the name” on the team.

If it is our job to run a profitable company, one that delivers excellent service, then it’s also our job to run an operationally efficient company.

Bad hires, people who miss the mark, people who are not aligned with the mission and vision, people who lack the work ethic and passion to get it done — they all lead to operational inefficiency and high cost.

Remember:

• We cannot compete with high overhead and operational waste.
• We cannot compete with average sales people.
• We cannot compete with inefficient people, systems, or tools.
• We cannot compete without the right people, in the right roles, doing the right things, in the right way.

If your company carefully vets its investments of time, money, and resources and your people are your largest, then it’s time for a change.

It’s time to choose wisely.

Q. I’ve been producing between $225,000 and $250,000 for the past five years. I hear about recruiters who produce over $1 million themselves and find it hard to believe. I’m working 60 hours a week just to maintain my production. I’d like to break the $300,000 level next year, but there are just so many hours in the day. What would you suggest I do to increase my production?

A. First, you don’t need to work more hours. After five years, you are working on automatic pilot; implement changes that will result in increased production and income. In order to form a new habit it takes 21 working days of repetition, which is why you should never make more than one change each month.

Select from the following ideas:

• Review the number of send-outs you book each month (candidate interviewed by decision maker). Increase the number of send-outs you book and you will increase your production.
• Study where your office made placements in 2009 and mirror those job orders. This is the quickest way to your next deal.
• Only work hot orders in 2010.
• Email a copy of your job orders to everyone in the hiring process to make sure they are all in agreement on the specs. Over 50% of the time our clients make changes.
• Increase all your stats by 10% and you will increase your production by 25%.
• Stop wasting time on candidates you can’t place (95% of your candidate flow).
• Climb the ladder: begin placing the supervisors of those you currently place. The salaries are higher, and so are your fees. You also have a database of candidates — the supervisors are listed on all your application forms.

Segment your day and attempt to make 65% of your planned outgoing calls by noon.

The one common denominator of Big Billers is they arrive at work with their outgoing calls planned. Focus on results-oriented actions, implement any of the ideas above, and you will more than hit your production goal.

Q. I saw you when you spoke in Montreal, and your session changed my life. When others were struggling this year, I have had the best year of my career by focusing on send-outs and identifying new clients for both Direct and Contract business. What happens in the United States definitely affects us in Canada. I was on the verge of quitting and want to thank you for convincing me to “tough it out.”

A. Thank you for your comments. Since June 2009, there has been a steady increase of job orders in the United States in most niches. Many U.S. companies cut too deep and the lack of talent was negatively impacting their bottom lines.

I’d like to share two ideas with you that will help you increase your business:

• On the contract side, ask all your clients and prospects how many Baby Boomers will retire this year. Baby Boomers are retiring at a rate of one every six seconds. Suggest they bring them back as contractors on YOUR payroll. They could work fewer hours or several months of the year, whatever fits their retirement plan. Your bill and pay rates will be high and there is NO interview process. We’ve had clients very grateful for this suggestion!
• On the direct side, ask clients and prospects if they have hired anyone in the past few years they need to “upgrade.” There was great competition for talent in the past five years, and many clients hired the best person they could find rather than the talent they needed. Explain that now is a great time to upgrade those marginal hires.

There will be great competition for top talent in the future so continue to be perceived as an expert in your niche, continue increasing your send-outs, and expect to have a great year!

Q. I’m having a difficult time staying motivated every day. I arrive at work with a positive attitude and it seems to take only minutes until I get a call that ruins my day. It can be someone no-showing for an interview, someone accepting a counter-offer, or one of my clients hiring a candidate who is not mine. The calls we get from candidates are getting nastier and nastier and our clients are not being straight with us. I often feel the job boards are going to put me out of business. Your answers are always so positive and I’d like to know how you never seem to get down? I know I’m not the only recruiter who feels this way.

A. You sound like you may have “quit and stayed.” Our profession is impossible if you’ve lost your passion. A call can’t ruin your day unless you let it! None of us can control what happens each day, but we have 100% control over how we react! You have to adapt the attitude “next” or “so what, now what?”

Problems increase when you are not following systems and let details fall through the cracks. If you want to decrease problems, listen more when you are interviewing to identify the real reason candidates are contemplating a change. When you write a job order, ask for interview times and get a specific target date to fill so you can determine which orders are hot. If your candidate calls are “nasty” you are not being honest with the candidates you can’t place, which represents 95% of your candidate flow. If candidates don’t have skills, stability, and experience, you quite often can’t place them and need to provide them with alternatives.

Job boards will never replace us! Most of our clients want to hire the best person for a job, not the best person on the job boards. They normally want us to recruit a qualified candidate from their direct competition. If you are only attracting candidates from job boards, you need to learn how to recruit.

Clients do not want us to present the same candidates they are surfacing from job boards. They often want us to present “passive candidates” who will consider a change for the right opportunity.

I believe this is the greatest profession on Earth, which is why I maintain my positive attitude.

You need to have an attitude adjustment, you need to get back your passion for “changing people’s lives,” or you need to consider a different career! We hold people’s lives in our hands, so evaluate whether you have indeed “quit and stayed.”

My email inbox is empty…FINALLY!

Well, we finally made the move. I resisted it just like I resisted the iPhone. (I didn’t realize what I was missing out on.)

Last week our recruiting and software business switched from Outlook to Google Apps email. I was so worried I would miss my folders and the interface I grew so accustomed to. Once I realized the goal was to have an empty inbox and my time spent digging for old emails had come to an end, I was excited.

You know those emails that you try to locate at a moment’s notice (where your client committed to something important) that often seemed impossible to find in Outlook?

For companies trying to cut costs and become more efficient with fewer resources, this is a no-brainer.

While Google Apps Email is very similar to Gmail in most ways, there are a few key differences between the two services:

• Google Apps email addresses are issued by an IT admin, not created by individual users. They use the format username@your_domain.com rather than username@gmail.com.
• Google Apps Premier Edition provides built-in disaster recovery, a 99.9% uptime SLA, global scalability, and world-class security. No more maintenance, upgrades, or hassles.

The capabilities are very impressive. With Gmail, each message is grouped with all the responses you receive. This will save you a LOT of time since Gmail saves all your messages in conversations.

With a click, you can chat in Gmail with the people you already email or reply to emails by chat. You are also able to talk face-to-face with Gmail voice and video chat if you have a webcam, and download the free software. Since we started using Google Apps our Spam has disappeared and the fact that it houses all the essential communications with clients makes our team very efficient.

The labels are very cool. They provide much more flexibility than folders. A conversation can have more than one label which is nice. You can create filters to automatically manage mail. You can use Gmail on your mobile device to access your email from anywhere without having to set up a sync.

It’s not just small businesses making the switch, large enterprise companies like Diversey Lever and SC Johnson Wax and Valeo to name a few have done so for reasons related to cost and also to reduce their global footprint by reducing servers, travel, etc., taking advantage of Google Apps tools like video chat and instant messaging.

Last but not least, by far the coolest stuff in Google apps is “Labs,” a little green icon with some magical experimental tools that offer some pretty slick capabilities like canned responses, Got the wrong Bob (for when you address the email to the wrong recipient) and my favorite of all favorites, the Forgotten Attachments Detector prevents you from accidentally sending messages without the relevant attachments. Prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so.

Google Apps Enterprise Edition costs $50 per user, per year.