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Matters That Measure

Nov 20, 2006

Recently, Raghav Singh wrote an excellent column entitled “Measure What Matters.” It was a formula for judging recruiting effectiveness, and Raghav seemed to boil all the rhetoric down to one stunning fact when he said, “The clearest measure of an organization’s success is the number on the bottom line…anything that makes more money for an organization is strategic.”

He then went on to say, “Being able to show that recruiting makes more money for the company is unambiguous proof of effectiveness.”

It sounded like a challenge to me, and that’s what this article is about. I am going to show you how telephone names sourcing makes money for an organization by saving money.

Now that we understand names sourcing, I would like to clarify just how it brings more money to the bottom-line in your organization.

If you have five telephone-names sourcers in your recruiting organization (who are tasked with doing nothing but names sourcing) supporting 20 recruiters, and those five names sourcers each produce 200 names and titles per week, you have 1,000 names per week flowing into your company’s pipeline.

Remember, these names have been telephone sourced and the majority of these names (some +/-80%) carry the very high likelihood of never having been placed into a pipeline before. These names have been “dug out” from behind their corporate brick-and-mortar walls, and they were busy doing the job your company needs them to do.

However, they were doing it as an employee for someone else, somewhere else. They are not thinking about another job; they’re too busy effectively performing their present jobs to have another job even cross their minds. Until you come along!

Okay, those 1,000 names per week (and let’s use Raghav’s six-month marker, though I believe results will begin to show after 30 days) means that 26,000 new names will be entered into your company’s bloodstream in that 26-week period.

To make it simple, let’s back down our calculations to the 1,000 new names per week and run the numbers on those: out of 1,000 names contacted, 100 to 200 are going to tell you they’re actually looking, “Hey, you’ve had my resume for four months. Why haven’t I heard from you?” (I don’t know if you want to open that can of worms!); 300 to 400 are going to tell you, “Uh…I wasn’t really looking for a job, but what do you have??; yet another 200 to 300 are going to say, “I’m not really looking right now, but you never know what the future holds, so what do you have?”

One hundred unenlightened souls will tell you, “No thanks, I don’t have time to talk and am not interested” or maybe even just hang up on you. Or perhaps you won’t be able to reach them for whatever reason in a specific timeline (vacation, maternity leave, just left the company, etc.).

Let’s examine those numbers and use the greater of each category because they add up to 10. They’re also hard-number results that I’ve seen emerge over 10 years of telephone-names sourcing, so I have every confidence in them.

Out of 1,000 new names being mainlined into your company’s veins, 800 are going to be the truly passive type in which nobody has recently seen their resumes, haven’t been pitched before, or weren’t really thinking about changing jobs. That is true until, allow me to say it again, you come along.

Out of those original 1,000 names, it’s a pretty good bet 100 of them can become immediate hires. Of course this number is contingent upon the overall scarcity of talent in the specific industry you’re working to fill, but overall, it’s a solid number. Yes, I mean immediate or as long as your company’s hiring process takes to bring them on-board.

Taking this number out to the six-month marker again, we see that in the first six months after implementing a functional and aggressive telephone names sourcing campaign, your company has the potential to be invigorated with 2,600 new hires!

All of them are hand-picked by you at the orchard for quality. You’ve been the chooser, not the chosen.

Adding the Numbers

If you pay $42 per name to exorcize these folks out of corporate America, we can calculate that for 1,000 names at $42 each, it adds up to $42,000 to affect 100 hires.

I understand there are other costs associated with handling these hires, but think about it, what does 100 hires normally cost you in your organization? I offer that it’s a whole lot more, I mean a whole lot more, than this number plus your costs of ownership.

We’re not finished. Those same 1,000 names is likely to produce another 100 hires (as long as you’re pipelining the names correctly and your recruiting organization is creating “relationships” with these people) in the next five months and another 50 or so hires in months seven through 12.

So, to fractionalize, about 250 potential hires out of an initial investment of $42,000. It makes my head spin.

Remember, this is only for one week of names sourcing! Imagine the results when you take it out over six months with the constant streaming of potential new hires at a rate of 1,000 per week. The value ratio is mind-boggling and as soon as the CFO’s office gets wind of these savings it catches her attention like very few other products can.

I am going to close by quoting Raghav again, “Results matter, and there is no better measure of results for an organization than money added to the organization.”

Or money saved.

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