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Written text © 2011, Some Rights Reserved. You may forward this report to anyone you wish. No changes may be made, and attribution of authorship is required.
Brought to you by Pasquale Scopelliti & The Recruiting Manifesto
February 8, 2011
Recruiting 2023 Series, Part 4 of 4
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Greetings!
Long, short or in between? How far away is 12 years, 2023, from today? If I was a child right now, it would be so far in the distance as to not even be visible. As a young man, 12 years still felt like a good stretch. Now, in middle age, it's a serious chunk of time but I already know how fast it will fly by.
 | | The Necker Cube |
How far away is 2023 for you? Like the Necker Cube in our previous lesson, it shifts relative to how you look at it, doesn't it? (See previous issues here.)
Today, we're going to focus exclusively on you as a recruiter. I often think and dream about the future of our industry. I have big visions. But, today we must keep our sites on you, only you.
The question of you as a Rookie Recruiter, if you are one, is the place to begin, but we won't linger here long. Hey Rookie, I ask, can you make it?
Can you make it through your first weeks and months into the coming quarters? Can you make it through all of 2011 and into 2012? To do so, you'll have to make placements. You may need to close your very first placement. If so, here's my vision for you. Consider just one candidate, ready to quit and move forward in his or her career to a new place. He or she is ready to be the new kid on the block and to win all new stripes, new recognition, new respect and new rewards.
Now, consider just one hiring manager. He or she is frustrated, irritated, busy, a bit overwhelmed and absolutely in need of someone who can hit the ground running. Not just anyone, the right someone...well, perhaps the right "enough" someone! Remember neither of these two good souls is perfect, or anything like it.
In the mind of the candidate, it is the imperfections that define the old job. The new job will be anything but perfect, but here at the beginning it is the greater perfections that beckon. Old is boring, new is exciting. It's time to increase the excitement quotient! The hiring manager may or may not one day devolve into a major jerk like so many bosses do. But right now, the hiring manager is an enticing new partner and mentor.
 | | You WILL visualize your first placement, Rookie! |
So also with the candidate for the hiring manager. He or she may one day become just another pain in the butt employee. But right now, the possibilities are open horizons, new vistas, tremendous potentials and a new world to discover.
Rookie Recruiter, try to remember these emotions that your work will make possible. Keep focused on the fact that it is just ONE candidate and just ONE hiring manager that converts into your first deal. That will always be the case. Sure, you'll go through hundreds and then thousands of conversations with unique people along the way and through the years. But, in every single deal you ever close, it will end up being one candidate, one hiring manager, and one new job. In every conversation you have right now, keep looking for that potential. Remember that.
Now to the rest. Rookie, will you still be a recruiter 12 years from now? I'll tell you right now, I will still be serving recruiters in 2023. What will you be doing?
If you're still going to be here doing this kind of work, you'll need to escape the largest prison that contains the greatest number of unhappy recruiters. That prison is point-to-point, placement-to-placement, tactical recruiting with NO strategic direction or momentum. How many times have you heard soulful moans and groans about having to reinvent the wheel? Have you ever bumped into any recruiters who drive Ferraris? I have. I'm here to tell you, the four wheels on the road of that amazing machine can only be afforded by recruiters who get past the "reinventing the wheel" stage.
To break that down to its simplest possible challenge, the question to answer is this: How do I make my second placement? Not the second one you'll ever make, important as that is. No, it is the second placement with one client that matters so greatly. Picture it. In the second placement with one client you can also see, kind of in a seed-like potential, the third, fourth, fifth placements coming, etc. And, once you're past the fifth or sixth we can begin to shrink our time horizons. My own simple definition of a Key Account is 3 placements or more in any given working year.
If you want to get through the coming 12 years as a recruiter, happily, you're going to need true Key Accounts. We can't answer all the tactical and strategic questions about "how" to do these things right now. The important thing, though, is that these things CAN be achieved. You need to transcend your mind's natural focus on your next deal, your next fee, your next commission check, and find your way past all that into the long term yet to come.
Right now, make a guess. What is the largest number of placements you will ever make serving just one client during the course of your career? Picture the total number of dollars - in sum - that you will earn doing so. How high might that number possibly go? Can you picture earning a cool, hard MILLION DOLLARS from just one client? What's your number?
Believe it or not, the money isn't enough. I know, while you're still striving to make enough money, you can hardly picture needing anything more than money. I promise you, if you survive these years forward, you'll absolutely require more. At least, if you're going to be happy.
What more? Well, there's the rest of your life to contemplate. Do you like skiing? How about travel? How about that Ferrari I was talking about...would you like one of those or something else like it? House or houses; lifestyle? How about children and their college education and getting them started in life? What about your own romance and love life? What about health and fitness, athletics and competition? You'll have to have all these things, to what degree they appeal to you. Sure, you can live simply and if that's your cup of tea, I'd love to drink some of that tea with you. But, be clear, you really do have to get what you want. There's no point being a recruiter for more than a decade and NOT getting what you want!
Now, what about you decade-plus recruiters who have been here that long already and are nowhere near the kind of life pictured above? Perhaps it's even more important for you to come to terms with your potential and your recruiting dream than it is for the rookies and less experienced performers. Why are you doing this work? Has it descended down to just being your job? Did you let your dream slip away? If so, could it be that a dream crash cart, dream resuscitation is what you require? Do we need to hit you with some adrenaline, stat?
To make it to 2023 though, you'll need more than money and lifestyle. Maybe not to make it there and be happy as a person. But, if you want to be happy in your work itself, truly happy, you'll absolutely need more. Not a lot, but something very important. Here it is.
 You will need to be truly respected, appreciated and challenged. More, you'll need to be fighting for something bigger than and outside of yourself as well. That is, you must, you must absolutely be fighting for your clients and candidates to rise to new levels of achievement. Your client companies actually do have strategic goals. Often they don't even know what those goals are. Companies that fail to win strategic progress die. They go out of business. For your clients to win their way into 2023, they'll have to make real progress.
The key to that progress is having the right people fighting for it on their team. In fact, if I have but a single tangible vision for you for 2023, this it is. You will learn, between now and then, how to seek out your client's most important challenges for progress and you will learn how to provide the key players they require for that progress.
This may not seem all that different at first glance from what we do already. I assure you, though, it really is. Today, we fill openings. On the candidate side, we help them win new positions. But, how often do we have even the slightest clue about the real "why" behind all this? Sadly, very rarely indeed. We're so busy working our collective butts off to make the next placement that we rarely ever even engage in any "big picture" conversation with our clients at all.
My vision goes beyond those big picture conversations though to actual strategic objectives. More, it goes to the objectives that will ensure the firm's survival if won, and will put the firm into the dust bin of corporate history if lost. I'm talking about the most critical challenges a company can face. My vision is that you will be consulted by the firm, by the most powerful leaders in the firm, as regards who the right players are to win those challenges. More still, my vision is that you will be consulted over the challenges themselves.
Follow that out. If the right players really are the key - and you can be absolutely certain that they are - then the battles to fight are the battles where you can be sure you'll win the challenge to field the very best players. Why would an intelligent executive ever fail to ascertain whether or not the firm can win the war for the best talent in the key challenges it faces?
 | | William H. Seward, Secretary of State and trusted wartime adviser to Abraham Lincoln |
Picture this. A firm is going to build a plant. Will it not assess the capital requirements, and simply ask and answer the obvious question, "How will we pay for this plant?" Of course it will. Well, the same thinking is even more important in the war for talent, in the battle to win strategic survival and victory. No executive should ever contemplate a strategic objective without asking the sadly-not-yet-so-obvious question, "How will we be sure to have the right people for this mission?" Actually, go one step further with me. To even contemplate one strategic challenge versus another, the people equation - the availability of the performing players to execute that challenge successfully - should be equally as important as any and all other decision making factors.
It is this respect that I seek for you. I can't be certain that my projection for our entire industry's real achievement between now and 2023 will come true. I can, however, be certain of your individual potential to work with clients who will come to appreciate and respect what you bring to the table by then. You can invest yourself into more than just the placements that will make you rich between now and then. You can also select those partners who will use you to your fullest. Not just tactically, but strategically.
If you will, then you will become the single most powerful outsider serving your clients. More powerful than any other player on the field, bar none.
And that's my real vision for 2023. I want you to be the King, the Queen, the most important friend, confidante and advisor, the most powerful minister, the most needed and absolutely trusted servant, the most respected professional serving your clients and candidates. If you win that, and I know you can, then I can assure you that you will not have wasted and you will not regret the coming 12 years.
Here is to you, and to winning all that is your right and your destiny by 2023. |
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Yours in honor
and faith,
Pasquale
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P.S. To explore and uncover the power of this transformation further, please feel free to join the lively conversation here: Recruiting 2023
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