Omnipresence: How to Be Omnipresent to Government Buyers

Let us make you omnipresent to GOVT buyers.....

Omnipresence is a divine thing. We can’t make you divine, but we can make you “seem” ever-present to GOVT buyers by enabling you to show up so often to sources sought, RFPs, and RFQs that you begin to get noticed.

We enable you (we do the heavy lifting) to chronically respond to every SS, RFP, and RFQ in your niche with a complete slate of qualified candidates. In the words of a "deep work expert,“ Cal Newport, we create a situation in which you “become so good they can’t ignore you.”

When you are that good and a buyer gets in a bind, guess who they call? Omnipresence is the yellow brick road to sole source awards. Sales is all about solving problems and being there at the right time when the need is critical. How do you know when to be there? Well, if you are always there - you’ll be there at the right time.

How do you know when to be there? Well, If you are always there, you will be there at the right time.

Last fall, we started working with a firm with no track record in healthcare staffing (read “zero past performance”). Between 01 September and 31 December, we provided them with candidates, enabling them to respond to nearly every RFP that came out during that period, with a few exceptions—twenty in total—five RFPs every single month.

What happened?

During the first 30 days, they won their first award ever - a contract for a radiologist. Ninety days later, they were awarded a respiratory therapy contract. Not bad for the first 120 days!But here’s the kicker...Last week, one of these buyers, to whom they have been omnipresent, called them directly.

“We have an urgent need for a child psychiatrist to care for children in northern Arizona, near the Utah border. Can you help us?”

Think about this for a moment.

The buyer is calling a staffing firm with no track record. Their past performance consists of two brand-new awards. Why would anyone call them with an urgent niche need in a highly remote area? Omnipresence is the reason. If you are always there, you will be there at the right time.

The call came to our client on Friday afternoon. They turned around and called their secret weapon KurzSolutions. The following Tuesday morning (less than 48 business hours later,) we presented the client with a board-certified child psychiatrist willing to serve children in Red Mesa, AZ. All of a sudden, they are not only omnipresent but omnipotent!

Side Note - Miracles are not always possible, and we have learned an important lesson in twenty years in the GOVT staffing arena. Once you perform a miracle - clients and buyers tend to expect them : )

Hire Faster Now - Strategy #5: Be Ready to Pivot Again and Again

The workforce landscape is facing a level of instability that will require constant agility on the part of HR departments and staffing firms. The not-so-successful "gig economy" is taking shape as a "free-agent economy" in which workers broker themselves with schedule and location flexibility ranking higher than salary. Meanwhile, the resurgence of unions will radically change the face of 20th Century startups that are rapidly becoming legacy establishment companies. We see constant movement from candidate-driven to employer-driven environments along with shifts in work models (hybrid, remote) and significant cultural shifts resulting from the "back to the future" pandemic effect. Disruption is now not just a strategy for startups, but a normal business environment for everyone.

"Every investing strategy works in a bull market, and every business strategy seems brilliant during an economic boom."

Recruiting firms, recruiting trainers, and support products for recruiting agencies including coaching programs and tech tools have grown at the rate of 120% in the past decade. But how many will survive a deep recession? Right now every employer is desperate for hiring assistance. What happens to your firm when no one is hiring? During the last recession, 63% of recruiting firms went out of business.

While financial and business experts continue to practice public denial, the facts are these:

"Risk is a big topic during a recession, but the time to do risk assessment is during the boom."

Companies get "fat" during a boom and pride themselves on their success, not realizing that it is the boom – not exclusively their brilliant business strategy – that produced the results.

What Trends Should We Watch and What Can Be Done?

AI/ML will continue to dominate. When seen as enhancements to efficiency these are essential, but don't rely on them to actually land candidates – this requires humans.

Massive layoffs are coming. The focus will shift from client development to candidate development as we will need to shift our emphasis to enabling workers to make the cut. During the last recession, unemployment hit 10%, which would be almost three times the current level.

Diversify your client roster. Somebody is always hiring, but if your sector takes a hit it is best to have a backup. Now is the time to get started, before you need to make money in a new niche. As with the pandemic, most companies will take a "wait and see" approach until it is too late to pivot.

Shift from hiring to consulting. If no one is hiring, what other services and expertise can you market? Build that capacity and expertise now, before you need to generate alternate income. Financial services and luxury goods typically take a severe hit during a recession. Healthcare and sales tend to be more resistant, especially if you can offer the top performers. How fast can you retool?

Shift from quantity to quality. With a reduced labor pool, companies will need to focus on having the best, and search firms who can deliver the top 10% are the ones that will win. Jeff Colvin, writing with the 20/20 vision of hindsight after the last recession, says: "During a boom, no one focuses on hiring the best because everyone seems to be performing well. During a boom, it is easy for people to appear like rockstars, so evaluations become less rigorous. Companies cut back on training and development even though they can afford it because it seems unnecessary. Every one of these sins will come back to haunt a company in a downturn." Recruiting firms need to prepare for when these failures hit the fan and real top performers are critical.

Adults don't change unless they have to, and neither do companies. The advent of a crisis is a catalyst for change which can be good or bad depending on how you respond to it. Companies that anticipate change early are the winners – along with companies that are prepared to take advantage of the upturn when it comes.

Our boutique firm lost hundreds of thousands of dollars during the last recession. Nearly half the recruiting firms in the U.S. went out of business and 33% of staffing firm employees lost their jobs. In response we did what might have seemed foolish at the time – we invested lavishly in technology. The move now appears prescient. Almost any technology related to recruiting, i.e. job boards and social media, was just taking off at the time and reached its peak in 2010-2012. As a result, we were able to hit the ground running when the recovery began and were out ahead of larger firms that were behind the curve technologically. In fact, we sold data to some of the largest firms coming out of the recession.

Take a lesson from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

We Help Ambitious Entrepreneurs Build Best-In-Class Gov't Staffing Firms | Find Out How: SCHEDULE.KURZSOLUTIONS.COM

Hire Faster Now - Strategy #4: Radically Streamline the Hiring Process

If you can't hire fast you lose! The best commercial staffing companies respond to candidate inquiries and replies within 3-5 minutes. The importance of the first 72 hours cannot be overemphasized. Take stock of your hiring timeline and do everything possible to eliminate inefficiencies, realizing that while your hiring team dawdles, another company offers and closes. In most cases, this will require a serious heart-to-heart with the HR specialists who tend to be process-oriented rather than mission-oriented. Remove as many up-front barriers for applicants as possible and recognize that the candidate pool is finite.

The world of recruitment is fast-paced at the best of times, but in the current climate, it is vital to be even quicker off the mark. It's estimated that top talent is being snapped up and off the market in just ten days – significantly lower than the previous 27.5 days!

In the GOVT staffing arena, we have clients who want to collect all the credentialing paperwork before they extend an offer! We have even dealt with clients who require an application – 59 pages long – before they will consider a candidate. These companies will lose the talent war.

Recently we spoke to a primary care physician who had just relocated to Colorado and received a job offer immediately over the phone, sight unseen. During the credentialing process for the new employer – note, they have not yet met her – they called to ask if she would accept a Medical Director Role. Not having been "on the market" recently, she was literally blown away! In her words, "it was even difficult looking for a new position because I get so many calls every day it is hard to figure out what is real."

In this competitive market, the race goes to the swift. If you cannot hire quickly you will lose candidate after candidate to employers who are more nimble. The company in the above story is not a small multi-specialty group, as you might think, but a billion-dollar provider in 36 states. However, they understand the concept of FAST.

With candidates entering and exiting the job market at a record pace, what can you do to ensure that you're recruiting the best candidate for the job? The answer is simply speed!

Most employers and HR departments will argue that in speeding up the hiring process, quality will suffer. Actually, just the opposite is true.

John Sullivan – PhD and Professor of Management at San Francisco State University – provides the following reasons that speedy hiring actually improves the quality of hire:

In a tight labor market, the race goes to the swift.

In the Government space, there are some things outside our control. However, we discover that many contractors do not understand the concept of FAST and have not streamlined their processes on the front end to lock candidates down quickly.

We Help Ambitious Entrepreneurs Build Best-In-Class Gov't Staffing Firms | Find Out How: SCHEDULE.KURZSOLUTIONS.COM

Hire Faster Now - Strategy #3: Love the Ones You're With

Since it costs 4-5 times the annual salary of a worker to replace them in terms of recruitment, training costs, and lost workplace efficiency, it pays to give attention to loving the ones you're with. We often tell clients, "if you are not recruiting your own people, you are the only one who isn't." Staying close to your employees, listening to them, showing appreciation, and creating paths for upward mobility are all intensely important right now. Loyalty is earned. Having said that, if you have a toxic manager, now is the time to show them the door. Not dealing with chronic department discontent will be deadly when workplace alternatives are resplendent.

The most common reason by far given for leaving a job is "I found a better opportunity." What if you were offering your employees better opportunities every day in your own organization? They would not be leaving. This is not about money, it is about opportunity. It also is not just about upward mobility.

An employee said: "The only career path I saw was up — and up was in short supply. I felt stuck."

However, there are five career paths other than up. Do you know what they are and are you offering them to your employees? Just yesterday I spoke to a Medical Technologist who told me his manager doesn't want to help him get certified for fear he will leave. How short-sighted is that!

For years we have provided new hires with a free book during their third week on the job, Love It, Don't Leave It: 26 Ways to Get What You Want at Work, to help new hires take responsibility for their own job satisfaction. But the employer has a key role to play in retention and it doesn't take much.

If you don't have a retention strategy, I highly recommend the international bestseller now in its 6th edition: Love 'Em or Lose 'Em by retention experts Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans. This is the essential manual on getting good people to stay.

Managers will often say, "I'm already working harder than ever. I don't have time for this stuff."

Tell me – if you don't have time for this, how will you find time to recruit, interview, select, orient, and train your talented employees' replacements?

Rob Kurz is a Certified Employee Retention Specialist (CERS). KurzSolutions employs a sixteen-point retention plan.

We Help Ambitious Entrepreneurs Build Best-In-Class Gov't Staffing Firms | Find Out How: SCHEDULE.KURZSOLUTIONS.COM

Hire Faster Now - Strategy #2: Your Tech Can't Sell

As early adopters of technology, our firm spends a lot of money on advanced tech tools. We were among the first recruiting firms to invest in semantic search and resume parsing before the terms entered common parlance. But technology has limits, particularly during a talent war….

It was Neil Postman, channeling Marshall McLuhan, who first said, "in a noisy world, silence is golden." In the world of AI, human contact is extraordinary. AI-driven candidate matching based on sophisticated algorithms is ineffective when more employees resign from jobs than apply for them. Companies like NurseFly, rebranded as Vivian Health, experienced rapid growth based on the pandemic staffing surge response to their AI-based technology. Their rapid growth recently landed them $60m in venture capital, but they may find themselves languishing like Peloton post-pandemic. In the purely virtual recruiting universe, the best jobs with the highest salaries and maximum flexibility will be the winners. Small to mid-size companies will not be able to compete in that world. High touch will always trump high tech in a candidate-scarce environment.

"In the world of AI, human contact is extraordinary."

Job postings and technology cannot persuade someone to work for your company. Video is the closest thing to automated selling, but video can't answer questions or tailor the message to individual candidate motivations.

Some time ago, we received a job order for an Anesthesiologist for Anchorage. The client asked me what motivated a particular Anesthesiologist candidate to want to work in Alaska.

We explained: "He didn't want to work in Alaska. He was happy living in Little Rock. If he ever moved, he would like to move to Arizona."

"So why is he open to Alaska," our client asked.

"Because we sold him on the opportunity to serve the troops, the adventure for his young family, the baseball recruiting opportunities for his son, pharmacy opportunities for his wife, the Air Force support for his niche pain therapy treatment, etc.…"

In other words, we did our job. We sold him on the job, the location, and the salary.

Put that in your algorithm!

"The tools never made the carpenter, nor did they make the mechanic. The typewriter never made the author, the camera never made the photographer, and the canvas never made the painter." — Sales Guru, Anthony Iannarino

Related Reading:

We Help Ambitious Entrepreneurs Build Best-In-Class Gov't Staffing Firms | Find Out How: SCHEDULE.KURZSOLUTIONS.COM

Hire Faster Now - Strategy #1: The Proper Invitation

The first time we visited our favorite luxury hotel in Taos, we never left the property – it was that good. A return visit last November was a different story. It was clear the property had suffered during the pandemic and customer service was poor. The heating in our room did not work, and the swimming pool and hot tub were out of commission. Lightbulbs of various colors made the property look like a cheap hotel at night, and an impressive, full doggy bag left on our terrace were all indications of trouble.

I asked one of the poorly-trained valets if the hotel is having difficulty finding staff. He said, "Yes, we had a career fair recently and only five people showed up. Only two were hired and those are part-timers."

"Career Fairs are mid-twentieth century recruiting strategies that predate the mobile phone."

My first thought was, "career fairs are mid-twentieth century recruiting strategies that ignore the existence of the internet!" The whole premise of a career fair is that people are looking for jobs and will come to the "fair." The strategy not only predates the mobile phone but is also obtuse to what is happening in the labor market. My second thought was, "we are staying at the best resort in Taos, one of the most beautiful anywhere. They should not be having difficulty attracting talent."

We were in Taos for a long weekend and so had time to visit museums, the ski resort, and several restaurants. In each of these locations, I identified bright, hardworking employees that should be working at our favorite hotel. Capable people are available. There was a lovely receptionist at the Fechin House and excellent waiters at the Medley. I later suggested to the manager that if I were him, he would be visiting all the businesses in Taos – this is not a large town – to find the brightest and best and invite them to come work for him at the most beautiful property in town. He seemed shocked at the suggestion! Understaffed enterprises are literally waiting for people to show up to work for them.

"You must find and invite the people you want to come work for you. This is an invitation-only hiring environment."

Although the landscape may be shifting, we are still experiencing a candidate-driven environment in which workers hold all the cards. What we have learned from this is not that recruiting is now harder, but that little recruiting was – or is – actually being done.

Another example is from my state, New Mexico. There is a chronic and severe physician shortage in the State which is the subject of numerous front-page news stories every year. A recent graduate of the University of New Mexico Medical School wrote a letter to the editor explaining that he is from New Mexico and wanted to practice medicine in New Mexico, but no one in NM invited (recruited) him to stay. He ended up taking a job in California.

Invitations may be in person, by phone, via email, or even a text. But no one is coming to the party who is not invited. Recruiting has not been tried and found wanting. Recruiting has not been tried.

Related Reading:

We Help Ambitious Entrepreneurs Build Best-In-Class Gov't Staffing Firms | Find Out How: SCHEDULE.KURZSOLUTIONS.COM

Remove Talent Acquisition from HR!

I routinely tell clients that if they want to improve hiring in their GOVT staffing firm, they need to remove recruitment from the Human Resource Management Department. Talent Acquisition and HR are very different animals. What is happening in HR right now proves this is the case.

Shifting Priorities in HR

"New research from WorldatWork and uFlexReward suggests that recruitment, sourcing and selection-based skills are indeed hot commodities throughout the HR suite." — Workspan Daily, World at Work

Human Resources Exposed!

The current Talent War is more severe than any in recent history, and clearly, our "troops" are ill-prepared. Suddenly, I am seeing articles that talk about adding "sourcing and selection" skills to HR job descriptions and hiring requirements. HR has tipped its hand! If you are relying on HR specialists to do your recruiting, think again. "Sourcing and selection" have not been high on the training priority list previously, and there are three justifiable reasons for this…

#1 - HR Competencies and Recruiting Skills Are Distinct Sets

HR is about compliance. Recruiting is about sales. These two functions mix like oil and water. People who enjoy and are good at compliance activities are typically not good at sales, and companies that are sales-forward (and every company needs to be right now) do not let compliance (the tail) wag the dog (sales). Let me give you an example:

Years ago, I wrote and used an article to prepare candidates for HR phone screens. The article was entitled "Prepare to Meet the Terminator," which is exactly our experience after two decades of working with internal HR departments. The article provided insider secrets for interviewing and warned that "failure to be available at almost any time the HR specialist might call" is a basis for elimination. We have often had HR specialists call health providers at work without notice and tell us that the candidate is "not available" or "rude" on the phone. We also warned our candidates that they should remain patient and professional even if the HR specialist was inexperienced or condescending with the understanding that this entry-level HR person would solely determine if they went on to the next level. Here's a quote from the article written for candidates:

"First, you should understand that the purpose of the phone interview is not to get to know you better or to do an initial screening. It is specifically designed to eliminate you. The interviewer is typically not the hiring authority but an HR specialist whose assignment is to pare down the 'finalists' to the probable 2 or 3, and who is trained to look for red flags that will remove you from consideration before precious time and money are wasted on a face-to-face interview. You will need to know how to handle this scenario with savvy in order not to get terminated before you even land an interview."

HR specialists all too often have the mindset that they have the goods, the job. As a result, they make a single call or two to a potential candidate and then assume the candidate is not interested. In fact, their conclusion is correct. All excellent candidates are fully employed, well-paid, and busy. They do not need your company or your job. Your company needs them!

The fact that so many companies are unable to find employees right now is obtuse to the reality that it might be because no one is recruiting them. (BTW - Career Fairs are not recruiting and represent mid-last-century recruiting models.)

#2 - HR Is Faced With Too Many Competing Priorities

HR has a lot more to do than talent acquisition. We know this by the title: "human resource management" is not the same as finding or acquiring humans. Lists of "critical skills" for HR seldom mention talent acquisition, and, if they do, the emphasis is on interviewing skills, not sourcing or recruiting.

There are a minimum of seven (some lists have nineteen) other important HR responsibilities that tend to take priority over recruiting for the obvious reason that recruiting right now is hard. Furthermore, HR training and syllabi for HR training courses do not even mention talent acquisition. They may mention ATS technical skills as a requirement, but it is assumed that there will be an incessant flow of available candidates to interview from job postings without doing any heavy lifting.

Right now, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is taking center stage as companies scramble to become more inclusive and compliant, as it should. However, this is just one example of the overwhelming number of priorities for an HR professional. Of course, DEI has as much to do with talent acquisition as talent management, but the current emphasis is on "creating a culture of inclusion," NOT on an inclusive sourcing process.

#3 - Hiring Dynamics Have Changed

Although this has been true for two decades, the job is no longer the commodity – the candidate holds all the cards. This means that more will have to be done to sell the job and to sell your brand. Four and a half million employees left jobs just like yours last month. Flypaper recruiting or the "post and pray" method, which is dependent on response to job postings, is an inadequate talent acquisition strategy when your posting is one among 11.5m and 4.5m employees are resigning from jobs just like yours every month. Passive matching through job boards enhanced with AI is only effective during a crisis or when you have the best job with the highest salary – in the present environment, you will actually have to fish for candidates with bait and set the hook, i.e. sales. Put simply – you will need to talk to candidates and "recruit" them to join your team.

Take a Lesson From New Car Dealerships

Successful auto dealerships know what they are doing. The flashy new cars are out front, where well-dressed sales professionals await the arrival of the next victim standing on well-polished floors. The soft top is down. The doors are open. Music is in the background. The environment could not be more alluring. They want you to smell the "new car smell," to sit in the leather seats, to grasp the steering wheel and drool over the instrument panel. Meanwhile, the sales professional recites all the never-before-heard-of features of "your" new car. Ultimately, they insist that you take the car of your dreams for a spin – all intended to make you fall in love with the new car.

Once you are hooked, comes the hard part. They send you to the "compliance department," finance to qualify you for the purchase.

Get the point? Putting recruitment in Human Resources is no different from putting the cars in the back of the dealership and having rows of desks with hard-nosed finance managers in front.

Need better recruiting results? Get talent acquisition out of HR.

Understand the Difference – Talent Scouts vs. HR Specialists

But don't make the fatal mistake of creating a new department, say talent acquisition or recruiting, and putting the new team under the leadership of HR. HR directors should be seen as business partners reporting directly to the CEO – as essential as a CFO or COO, since HR manages your most valuable asset, employees. But building the right team is just as important as managing it.

Sports analogies come to mind, and we might liken the two positions to that of General Manager and Coach. In the words of Bill Parcells, who led the NY Giants to two Super Bowl victories, "The GM is the guy who goes grocery shopping, the Coach is the one who cooks the meal."

We Help Ambitious Entrepreneurs Build Best-In-Class Gov't Staffing Firms | Find Out How: SCHEDULE.KURZSOLUTIONS.COM

News Flash! Health Providers Cannot Be Requisitioned Like Combat Supplies

An Open Letter to Federal Contract Officers

In the highly-regulated Federal Acquisition space Contracting Officers are perched between the three chasms of requirements and definitions, competition and pricing, and contractor oversite; all of which can be counterproductive to actually purchasing services or hiring contract personnel. In some markets such as the procurement of defense and space systems the government is virtually the only buyer. However, in the services economy the government is but one of many players.

"In the service sector the Government will have to become a smarter, more commercial-oriented buyer." Butch Hinton (Assistant Comptroller General)

In his GAO Report Hinton goes on to say that "The labyrinth of regulations and requirements, all intended to make the acquisition process both fair and honest have created a situation that leaves little room for the exercise of sound business judgment, initiative, and creativity for satisfying the needs of their agency customers."

As a result, the staffing perspectives of Acquisition Specialists can easily stray far from reality and the difference between internal acquisition strategies and real-world staffing realities can become stark.

Take this recent actual staffing proposal floated by Acquisition Specialists for staffing Military Treatment Facilities:

Priorities

Staffing contractors should place a priority on recruiting active duty providers coming off terminal leave on the assumption that they are (1) military environment savvy, (2) Security-cleared, and (3) Privileged thus making for a smooth transition from active duty to become a civilian provider.

Alternatively, staffing contractors should target civilian providers whose contracts are coming to an end, on the assumption again that they are military-experienced, security-cleared, and already privileged.

Let me pause to say that any staffing contractor worth his or her salt is already practicing these obvious priorities in selection and recruitment. The priorities are not at issue, being able to execute them is....

Process

Here is where the proposal enters Alice's proverbial Wonderland. It is suggested that contractors maintain an "inventory" of such folks, on hand so that the contracting officer can issue a Task Order at any time and the contractor can simply respond with a list of the available providers who are already security-cleared and privileged. You should be able to hear the audience laughing about now.

Problems

Stated simply, healthcare providers are not like military supplies sitting in a warehouse awaiting requisition. Not only do they have their own priorities, but like everyone else, they have to earn a steady income. Healthcare recruiting is a dynamic, competitive environment and the government is not able to compete for the following reasons:

All this to say that Acquisition Officers are too often not only out of touch with staffing in the real world, but are also not cognizant of the internal obstacles to their idyllic staffing strategies. Open dialogue with staffing vendors would go a long way to alleviating frustration on both sides of the equation. Just saying.

KurzSolutions has experience staffing in the GOVT space at more than 100 MTFs, more than a dozen GOVT Agencies, in more than sixty-five major labor categories. Call us to discuss your staffing needs today.

Critical Fill - Need a Home Run?

If you need a home run and have only one "up-to-bat" left, do you want to put Barry Bonds at the plate or an unknown, untested rookie? It seems obvious, doesn't it?

We chronically encounter GOVT contractors with mission-critical staffing vacancies who fall into faulty thinking when choosing a strategy. The most common is what I refer to as "The Leaky Bucket Strategy."

The Leaky Bucket Strategy

Many Federal Contractors have a strategy based on hoping that putting enough leaky buckets together will lead to a successful fill of the holey bucket. So they engage an ever-increasing number of usually smaller, less-experienced GOVT staffing firms to do what they have been unable to do. Let me just say that "hope is not a strategy" and having a dozen firms "trying" to fill your positions in JV or contingency role is not a winning strategy.

Contingency vs. Retained Search

Recruiting industry guru and thought leader, Jonathan Bartos, shares enlightening statistics regarding the relative success of different types of relationships with recruiting or staffing firms:

Non-exclusive contingency recruiting relationships

where you work with several or more firms to fill a position result in success in one of eight searches - 12.5% Success Rate

Exclusive contingency relationships

where you contract with only one firm yield a better success rate of one in two searches - 50% Success Rate

Engaged or Retained relationships

have the best result - 90% Success Rate

Limited Candidate Pool and Elite Candidate Market

Furthermore, when the mission-critical vacancy has to do with the physician market - a market in which less than 4% of the talent pool is EVER open to new opportunities - retained or engaged search is the silver bullet. Let me explain...

Physicians belong to an elite talent market and want to feel targeted and special. Getting calls from several different companies for the same role gives them the impression that you are desperate and that you must be hawking a less-than-ideal position (this is the feedback we get from physicians).

Given the limited available pool we have learned that if you don't land an available candidate on the first attempt, subsequent attempts have a poor conversion rate. In this context, you usually only get one chance to hit the ball. In this elite sales environment, you don't want an inexperienced recruiter making such an important pitch to possibly the only candidate available for your location within your target salary parameters in a given window of time.

"Some companies have learned that one strategy to combat the low fill rates of most contingency firms is to simply hire more of them for the same search. This is the kiss of death when there is a limited talent pool" ("Sales Talent," - Chris Carlson)

Market Depth

Most JV partners and most recruiting firms will indeed accept your mission-critical assignments on a contingency basis. Most would not engage in a retained agreement with you because they are not confident they can fill your vacancy. They simply do not have the market depth and expertise to ensure success.

KurzSolutions has more than a decade of experience in the GOVT staffing space. Most of the candidates we provide our clients are providers we have known for years and who have worked for us at another MTF. We are not hoping for success, we guarantee it. Fills at more than 90 Military Treatment Facilities in all branches of the military substantiate our expertise.

Barry Bonds or an untried rookie? You make the choice

Call me today at 505-379-3306

That Shiny New Technology & Your GOVT Staffing Firm

Be wary of geeks bearing high-tech gifts….

We live in an age when the lure of technology is intoxicating. New recruiting tools arrive daily. Some are from new startups still in "stealth mode" which means so secret they can't tell you the company name. Others promise to transform your sourcing process while you sleep. And ALL are essential lest you be left behind in the dust like a proverbial Luddite.

The promise of these new recruiting tools is outsized and, in most cases, severely exaggerated.

ZipRecruiter is my favorite. Using their "secret matching technology" you can get qualified candidates for your job within the first day. Just "click and post." After all, how can a million customers be wrong?

According to HRExaminer, an online newsletter that focuses on HR technology, companies get five to seven pitches every day about new technology, most from vendors using data science to address recruiting issues.

Recently I was pitched by an online video interview company promising to delight my clients and candidates and make video interview simple resulting in:

Those of us who jumped on the "first wave" of the video interview concept soon discovered that there is nothing simple about video interviews and most of us do not want to allow our candidates to create their own video interview to be sent directly to the client!

Here Are Some Reasons for Embracing the New Tools With a Bit of Caution:

1. Lack of Science

For all their boasts about using data analytics, most of the tools have not been adequately evaluated with reference to improving recruiting workflow and success as a function of the learning curve and cost.

"They bring a fresh approach to the hiring process—but often with little understanding of how hiring actually works." (Peter Cappelli, HBR)

2. Lack of Integration

The number one challenge for a recruiting professional is a fully integrated workflow. Nearly every new tool is essentially a new ATS or CRM that requires management. In spite of APIs and Zapier, unless you have the acquisition budget of Salesforce or a full-time API integration team to run Lightning Platform, every new tool is another plate to keep spinning.

3. Lack of Accuracy

Matching technology (algorithms) including semantic search is only as accurate as the skill of the creator. If it is not you, the person trying to fill the requisition, it will be off the mark. Machine learning has a long way to go. Linkedin and Glassdoor have both matched me for aerospace engineering jobs, in spite of my complete lack of experience or education in the field. Indeed.com candidate matches are laughable. Our experience after more than 3,000 hires is that it is only about once in a literal "blue moon" that an actual candidate is discovered by an "algorithm."

All this to say that the shiny promise of technology has not yet been realized. But, more importantly, discovering a qualified, available candidate is only 10% of what is required to get the job done.

Talent Acquisition Is Sales and Neither an Algorithm Nor AI Can Sell!

I am fond of telling the story of an Anesthesiologist Recruited for Anchorage.

Our client asked:

"So, what are his reasons for wanting to move to Alaska?"

Our response:

"He wasn't at all interested in moving to Alaska. In fact, he was happy where he was at in Little Rock, Arkansas. If he were to consider a move, he wanted to move to Arizona! Our team sold him on relocating to Anchorage and your substandard salary."

Put that in your algorithm!