June 29th, 2008, 1:25 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: RecruitorI received a lot of CV from headhunters (cause I'm a team manager so I hire) and when I see the price (about 30% in average), I'm driving crazy. If I decreased the price (lol: LowCost HeadHunting) is that a good advantage or company will pay watherver it costs for the good candidate?Before you cut prices, you might need to do a bit of thinking first. Now my numbers may be off significantly, but I think you will find that pimping is more time consuming than it seems.Assume that you want to earn a "quants salary" by pimping other quants. Assume that to earn a quants salary, you need to get double that in revenues (to cover VAT, employment taxes, benefits, etc.). Can you successfully place 6.6 quants per year? Next, consider the number of people interviewed for each slot that aren't represented by you and the chance that your candidate wins the job. Thus, you need to get perhaps 3 to 6 interviews per successful placement (assuming your CVs are of market-clearing level of quality). Can you get 20-40 interviews per year? Next, consider the number of people applying for each slot that aren't interviewed or aren't represented by you. Again, you need to get perhaps 3 to 6 potential CV-slot pairs per expected interview (assuming your CVs are of appropriate quality). Can you find 60-240 good CVs and good job openings per year? Next, factor in various failure modes in which a promising CV fails to get a job (e.g., the employer kills the opening or the candidate declines the offer). Now, you need to find even more CVs and job openings each year just to get interviews, offers, and placements. Again, my ratios may be way off, but the fact remains that pimping is a numbers game -- you need to find large numbers of job openings and large numbers of qualified applicants to feed the job selection funnel and make enough placements per year. A low cost strategy only makes the numbers worse (unless you forego earnings). Because pimping is a numbers game, the amount of labor a HH can devote per candidate and per job opening is relatively modest. And because pimping is a numbers game, the incentives to over-promote a candidate or over-promote a job are really high.And even if you can find lots of perfect candidates for lots of perfect jobs, why charge less than 30%. How much is a really good candidate worth to a company? How often did you, as a hiring manager, pick the HH candidate because you'd rather have the right person at cost = salary*1.3, than the wrong person for cost = salary*1? Shouldn't an employer share the profit of having a good new employee with the person that recruited that new employee?All that said (and I don't mean to be discouraging, only pragmatic), I'm sure recruiting is a interesting line of work and I can imagine all manner of innovations that could make HHing better.Good Luck!