It's a Recessions. Fire Your Recruiters. NOT!

In this episode, we'll be discussing a topic that's been on the minds of many CEOs and hiring managers lately: whether or not to fire your recruiters.?In today's challenging economic times, it's more important than ever to find the right candidates for your organization. However, some companies may be tempted to cut costs by reducing their recruiting team or even firing them altogether. But is this really the best approach?

Kathleen Smith from?ClearedJobs.net?joins me to discuss her expert opinion on the recruiting industry, the benefits of having a dedicated team, and exploring the potential consequences of firing recruiters. We'll also be discussing some of the common misconceptions about recruiters and what companies can do to improve their recruitment process.

Whether you're a hiring manager or a recruiter yourself, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in improving their recruitment strategy.

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Read Transcript Here:

Mike: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Mike LeJeune here with Game Changers for Government Contractors, and I've got an old guest on here. We haven't had you on for what seems like forever, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Yeah, it has been forever.

Mike: Yeah. You've done a handful of episodes. You were in the Game Changers book. And it just seems like with Covid or whatever, it's just been a while since we had you on. So I'm glad to have you back today.

Kathleen: Glad to be here.

Mike: Before we get into the episode, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Kathleen: Well, my name is Kathleen Smith and I started with Clearedjobs.net almost two decades ago and have built the marketing efforts and the community outreach efforts over the last 20 years. I'm a military spouse, so it's really nice working for a veteran-owned firm. What we really like doing is building relationships with our customers. I have customers I've had for over 20 years.

Mike: Mm-hmm

Kathleen: And we've helped them with their recruiting strategies from what they do on the job board, what they do in social media, what they do with job fairs, and just sort of keeping touch with what their challenges are. And then also keeping in [00:01:00] touch with security cleared professionals and what's going on with that. It's been fun over the last six, seven years really getting involved more in cybersecurity. Doing some conferences that are sort of not in the GovCon space

Mike: mm-hmm.

Kathleen: but more in the hacking space.

Mike: yeah

Kathleen: And that's been exciting and some interesting relationships built there. So that's me.

Mike: I think the last time we were on we talked about like the hackathon and things like that. I think it was the episode on how to retain people. Today we're going to be talking about the fact that we've got this recession going on, whether people want to admit it or not. Let's forget about the politics. You know, when you look at the math of the people not working and prices going up.

And the fact that, I found this funny by the way. I just said, let's not talk politics. But I found it funny that all of these big companies waited till after the midterm election to all announce like within days, we're laying off thousands of people, right? That was kind of interesting how they all waited for that, right? It's all about timing. You've got all these major [00:02:00] companies laying people off, the job market doing what it does, it is natural for a lot of people to see times getting tough and say, oh, we're going to cut our budgets. We're going to squeeze everything tight.

I know how that is being a service provider. Sometimes you're one of the first people. I imagine it's similar on the recruiting side, being like, ah, you know, we could probably do that in-house. Maybe because the times are so tough, we don't even need to recruit right now. Maybe set the stage for the disaster people are setting up by getting rid of a recruiter that they depend on regularly.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm. Again, you know, Clearedjobs.net is a job board- job fair company. So we are a tool that the government contractor recruiters use to build their talent pipeline. Most of the companies that, well, all the companies that we work with have their own recruiting staff. We specifically do not work with staffing firms or headhunters. Because we work with people who hold a security clearance, a facilities clearance. But you're [00:03:00] right. I mean, you hear this nervousness. You hear, oh my gosh, you know, there's huge layoffs going off in the tech world. That nervousness does permeate into the management levels of many government contractors. And you start to see people sourcing. You know, we need to cut back. We need to really evaluate our ROI. We also look at the fact that they see what is overhead. And this is the one thing that I've always been shocked at. And you know, you and I have talked about this before, that they see their recruiting staff as overhead.

But at the same time, the recruiting staff is bringing in the talent that they're fulfilling their contracts with. If you're not able to fulfill your contract, you are not going to be able to get your funds from the contract. You're not going to be able to re-up the contract. So I always say, please don't look at firing or cutting your entire recruiting departments during bad economic times because it's only going to hurt you down the road. There are so many things that your recruiting [00:04:00] department does for you that people really just don't understand. The relationships that are built within the community, I mean, you talk about relationships all the time. When you work within the government contracting field, it's knowing your customers, knowing the people that have specific skillsets. That same sort of mentality happens in recruiting and building your talent pool. Most of the recruiters that we provide services to, they have people that they have been in touch with for six, seven years that they constantly keep that relationship with.

I know an Intel analyst who is very big on specific projects within the national geo space, and they're not ready right now to move. But they might be ready to move in six months, and I need to maintain that relationship. I'm so disheartened. I think I've seen at least four complete wipe outs of the entire recruiting department in the last 20 years that I've been here in the community. Where people just say, we're just going to save money and we're going to get rid of the entire recruiting department and we're [00:05:00] going to outsource it. Or we're going to start with new people who are cheaper. And again, those people are not going to have the relationships. They're not going to know your contracts. They're not going to know the customers that you're serving. They're not going to know your process.

There are so many other things that you can have your recruiting department work on while you're sort of figuring out how to move with the down economic times. And the one thing that I'm always surprised at is that there's not more conversations going on between the BD and the proposal departments and the recruiting department. Because, if you're going to have a competitive contract that goes forward, you're going to have to know how much that talent is going to cost. And you're going to have to know the competitiveness within that particular industry and within that particular community. And most times, the recruiters have already been talking to candidates that are working on that contract. And so they may actually have some insights on how to better position that [00:06:00] proposal going forward. So you know, the number one thing I always recommend is be sure that your recruiting department is talking to your proposal department.

Narrator: If you're struggling with your government contracting business, I want to encourage you today to go sign up for a free coaching session with me. You can go in the description of this podcast, there's a link to my calendar and you can go pick a time where we can sit down for 30 minutes. Talk about what you're doing, what you're doing wrong, what you should change. And then if coaching makes sense for you, I'll actually go over the options on how you can get started with coaching so we can take your business to the next level.

Now, let's get back into this episode.

Mike: You know, when it comes to the relationship side of things, this is something that we probably don't talk about enough here on the show. And it really applies to this scenario here. When you look at the personality profile wheel. Do use DISC for a moment.

DISC only has four main personality profiles. Employees fall into the category of not being: most of the [00:07:00] time employees, especially in this type of environment, they don't fall into that high I personality profile where they just want to meet everybody and trust everybody right out of the gate.

Most employee worker bees in the tech field, in engineering, any of the hard to recruit, high salary type of jobs: those type of people, if you look at their personality profile, they are on the wheel of it takes a long time to build trust.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: Not only does it take a long time to build trust, they're not that open to new things. So like if they've got a relationship with you, Kathleen, that's their bridge to the market.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: And they trust YOU with, Hey, this is where I'm going with my life. And I'm going to open up, you know, 10% of that to my employer. But in the back of my mind I'm sharing those things with you because this next job hop is strategic for me.

I'm going to spend five years there, get the past performance I need to then make it to the manager level. And if that works in that [00:08:00] company, great. If not, I'm going to come back to you and try to go to the next level in another company. Because I trust you. That's why I'm sharing it with you.

It's going to take years to develop that trust from those people because of their personality type. That's just the way it is. I think people overlook it and think, well, everybody's just like me, but everybody's not like you. As an owner or as an executive, your profile is probably more in the, oh, I'm ready to meet new people all the time. And this is easy, and, I'll give away trust like it's nothing, and that's just not the deal. I think that's an important thing that you brought out there about that relationship. You mentioned the years you may know somebody and how, they're not ready yet, but they're going to be ready. And knowing those kind of things to get to good people and not just fill a slot. Which I think is what a lot of people think, this is just filling a slot. I just put a thing online and it's done right? It's that simple. Right? You know? Yeah. Cause GovCon recruiting is not any different than commercial recruiting, right?

Kathleen: It's funny because I'm actually talking later with some [00:09:00] folks about government contract recruiting. That's just easy. Just throw a lot of money at it. And I'm like, yeah, no it's not. We have very specific agencies that government contractors support. So each one of those customers have a very distinct culture profile. The kind of work they're doing. Are they doing DOD? Are they doing intelligence? Are they doing energy work? So that is one aspect. Then two, there is: what is the clearance level? So are you talking TS? Are you talking secret? Then you know from there, there is also the culture.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Kathleen: There is the culture of the customer. We do job fairs and a lot of people, I remember when we started here, said, Oh, job fairs are going out.

No one's going to want to do job fairs anymore. I said, well actually, a job fair shortens your hiring process. Because you can look at somebody when you talk to them at a job fair. And you can look at their resume and you can say, okay, they've got the clearance, they've got the 10 years of tech talent. They've got all of the certs. [00:10:00] But you as the recruiter know sort of the culture fit of your customer. You're going to be able to have that conversation with someone and say, they're just not going to meet the culture. They'll still put 'em through the process. But they're not going to have them pin all of their hopes on them. Because the hiring process takes anywhere from three to six weeks, maybe longer. After you've gone through all of the interviews, then you finally meet the customer. And the customer is the one that finally says, you know, we all wear argyle socks here and Argyle sweaters. And he's more of a black polo kind of person. And that just doesn't fit for us.

Mike: Yeah.

Kathleen: And people think that that's just a minor thing, but it's not. Because if you're working on supporting the mission in a high stress environment, in a SCIF, you're going to want to know that someone's going to mesh with your team. If they're not a argyle sweater kind of person, they're probably not going to mesh with your team quite well.

Mike: Right. When I was trying to, to leave jobs early on in my career, it was my first GovCon job. I was frustrated. I couldn't get a raise. I [00:11:00] kind of reached the top. All of a sudden somebody at a company reached out to me in St. Louis and offered me a job and it was the program manager or whatever. We negotiated back and forth, came up with salary and stuff. And then I was like, gearing up to go and then I stopped and I was like, no, I'm going to stay here. One of the reasons why I made a decision was I was just negotiating directly with the company and I didn't have somebody in between that I trusted to help me with that process. I just remember that very vividly. I don't know these people. I have to move my family all the way across country.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm

Mike: I'm taking their word for it. I assume they know what the culture is. Because I, I was very much thinking about the culture. I just couldn't put my finger on it.

They didn't necessarily want to fly me out for an interview. They just wanted to hire me. It was only like a $10,000 a year bump or whatever it was, which was a lot back then. I didn't have somebody in the middle that I could trust to say, so tell me, how often do they hire this position? Tell me, does [00:12:00] everybody there wear bow ties and slacks or is it the argyle sweater? I didn't have anybody I could ask those questions and there was just an uneasiness about making that decision. Again, it was just I didn't have anybody I could trust to talk to about that.

And I wound up staying at the company I was at because I knew it. Even though I wasn't happy, I knew where all of the pitfalls were in that. I think that's an interesting aspect again, that I don't think owners realize that recruiters or tools bring to the table.

In your opinion, how do we change the mind of somebody that's listening to the podcast and they're thinking, I listened to this podcast today because I'm thinking about firing our recruiter. I like ' em, but I'm scared with the money. What are maybe two or three benefits? Or, maybe there's a way they should be engaging their recruiter and they're not. How do you convince them that's a bad decision?

Kathleen: Great , because a lot of people will look at their recruiting staff and they'll say, we have 50 positions open and you've only [00:13:00] hired four people. They'll probably have some staffing firm come up and say, We'll give you candidates for that and we'll fill them.

But you have to remember that the recruiters who work on your staff know your company and know your customers better than anyone else will outside there. They have invested in building the employment brand, employer brand for your company. What is it like to work with your company? Employment brand has been something that has been building within the government contracting community for a very long time. Are you someone who can be trusted? Are you a company that can be trusted? Are you a company that treats your employees well? Are you a company that wins all of your recompete? What is your status as a company that hires talent?

Those are the responsibilities of your recruiters. Your recruiters are also supposed to go in and talk to your program managers and say, you know, we've been having difficulty filling this position. Let's sit down and talk about what makes the best candidate.

I can tell you one of the biggest [00:14:00] problems I see. This has been a problem over 20 years: is the way job descriptions are written within the government contracting community. So many times, program managers or people who are responsible for fulfilling the obligations of the contract just basically take it out of the proposal and they put it into a job description and send it out.

Yes you have to have those minimum qualifications in the job description. But you need to have someone who can interpret what that means and what that means for your company. And also whose responsibility is to go in and talk to the program managers and say, You say you have to have a certain amount of experience for this job.

?Let's really talk about the candidate that's going to be successful for this. At the end of the day, you want a successful employee in that position. Not a butt in the seat. Because the butt in the seat is going to rotate through every two or three months, and is going to cost you more down the road and probably cost you the recompete.

Your recruiter has an enormous amount of responsibility within your [00:15:00] company, but they also have to know that they have your support in doing this. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to like an AFCEA luncheon or something. I, I remember this very clearly. It was about 15 years ago, and was at AFCEA Nova Luncheon and I brought one of my recruiters, recruiter managers from one of a big company. And lo and behold, all of his, sales team was at the same table and I was like, Hey, this is really great. We're all together. The salespeople ripped the recruiter apart about how awful it was. They weren't seeing any candidates. They weren't doing their job. They were making them look bad. Then of course, the customer turned to me and recruiting manager said, gee, thanks Kathleen. Really appreciated that one. So I think that recruiters get the short end of the stick so much within our industry that they really need to be respected and really need to be treated with the same kind of trust that you trust everyone else in your company. I found it fascinating, not only in the [00:16:00] government contracting community, but also in the commercial community, that there is now finally an executive role. Someone who sits at the board level that is responsible for talent retention and talent recruitment.

That only happened within the last 10 years when companies both within and without outside the government contracting community realized that attracting talent and having really great employees is the important, most important thing to your bottom line. Not necessarily the technology or the science that you have, but the people who create it and deploy it and manage it.

Those are the people that are going to make you successful. And if you don't have an executive who is responsible for empowering and leading that team, then you have some things you need to look at within your management team.

Mike: Yeah. that's really interesting. And you know, you bring up the last 10 years or so. I think it's interesting what I've seen in the job market in the last few years. When Covid hit it was very interesting to [00:17:00] me to see the amount of people that left the job market. They just completely left. Whether they started their own company. Or sold everything they own and rehabed a van, and started, you know, literally living down by the river or whatever they wound up doing. It was just this mass exodus of people. Can you talk for a minute? Has that made recruiting more difficult? What I see is the, I'll call it the young people, is people in that 20 to probably 45, 50 year old, which I'm, I'm in that bucket as well, seeing people in that range just say, I'm just not doing this anymore.

Kathleen: Yeah. We had, as you pointed out, we had people who left. People who said, life's too short. We really learned the true definitions of work-life balance once we didn't have the kids home just for being sick.

Mike: They were always home.

Kathleen: We had them there all the time. I think that Mental health and people's stress levels were so high that [00:18:00] we, all of a sudden, it was not only an epidemic of covid, but it was an epidemic of a variety of work situations. A lot of focus went on that. I'm really very impressed and proud of how the government responded from a working standpoint, a remote working standpoint, and how government contractors responded. Because we now can have those conversations. Can security cleared work be done remotely? Can it be done on a hybrid? What are the mechanisms that we can put into place to make a better work-life balance for people who work in this community?

Really the work for that started almost 12 years ago when the CIO of the GSA, Casey Coleman, who's now over at Salesforce, she really started pushing the GSA into hoteling and remote work and what do we do? And then a few years later, the technology caught up for it. So we finally had everything in place to be able to work remotely.

But then the one critical thing after [00:19:00] that was trust of the employees. And I remember when I worked at a large nonprofit and we were going to telework. And we had the technology, we had the abilities, we knew how to do the schedules.

Mike: No trust.

Kathleen: It was, how do you trust? Yeah. How do you build that trust?

I think we got through it pretty quickly, considering that everyone went home March, 2020 but we still supported the mission. We still did work. People rotated at the Intel agencies, you know, every two weeks, every three weeks. People who had to work in SCIF's. Things worked specific way and then we started, we noticed all of our customers, our government contractor, our customers were turning around and talking to their customers and said, okay, what work can be done remotely? What has to be done on site? And we've now seen this new sort of plethora of options to say, what is true remote work?

What can be done on site? Does someone move to another state? Well, no, you can't move to another state because once a month we need you to drive in.

Mike: Mm-hmm

Kathleen: [00:20:00] So, little plug for our podcast, so "Security Cleared Jobs, Who's Hiring and How?" We always ask, how do you do remote work? I mean, do you do remote work? Do you do hybrid? Do you do remote? What are the qualifications and how did you come to that? You and I have worked in the government contracting world for a very long time to see this kind of evolution within the last two years. I'm impressed with this.

Mike: It's pretty wild.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's pretty wild and it's pretty fast. You know, people are like, it took forever. And I'm like, sometimes emergencies happen and we come up with solutions.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, you know, for me, I've been working out of the house for 20 plus years. When Covid happened I was like, this is a normal life to work from home. Except I'm not doing it in my bedroom with the bed background, which became so popular. But now people have become so accustomed to it so fast. The thing that I really loved was the bosses that were, and the CEOs that were like, never, never will anybody on my team ever work from home. And [00:21:00] now their whole company works from home. They were forced to trust, right? Because it was like, well, if I don't trust them, we're going to go out of business. I know it was a huge freak out for a while, but then it was like, wait, this is working. We don't need office space. Wow. Okay,

Kathleen: mm-hmm

Mike: so we can divert all those funds.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm

Mike: And there's so many things to me, office space is one of those big waste of money in a lot of cases. Not all the cases, but in a lot of cases. And so I like to see people working from home, in different settings and, stuff like that.

Kathleen: Well, but going back to what we were talking about earlier, I mean, it's about the relationships. And when we're doing critical work that supports the mission, we do have to build trust. And it's really hard when you're in your office. I'm sure there's studies have been done on how your trust is built on only virtual or only Zoom calls. But at some point you do need to go face-to-face at some point.

Mike: Mm-hmm. ,

Kathleen: You do need to talk. We talked about it a lot in several of our webinars that we did at the beginning about body language and how it's so important when you're building a [00:22:00] relationship with someone. And when you're only doing body language from, the top half of, of your body, you just can't get that. We do trainings for job seekers who are going to a virtual job fair. And we tell them look, you have to have a little bit more

Mike: Yeah

Kathleen: excitement because they're trying to figure out what kind of person you are.

Mike: Yeah. it's really hard to make a first impression that way when people are uncomfortable with it.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm

Mike: I've heard a stat, and I've used this for probably 15 plus years. I assume it's different now. But I'd always heard that the average bad hire costs a company somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 if they make a mistake. Do you think that's in the ballpark now, or is it higher?

Kathleen: I would say it's much higher, especially in the government contracting world. That relationship that they're building within the team, and then that relationship that they're building with your customer: your team and your customer trusted you to bring in the right talent to fit out the team. And now that's all eroded because you brought in

Mike: Yeah

Kathleen: someone that didn't quite fit. [00:23:00] When you go into your negotiations for your contracts, or you go in for your proposals, you have to say, you've got to trust me. I'm going to bring the right people in.

Mike: Yeah.

Kathleen: And then you don't bring the right people in and they're like, okay, are we really going to move forward with you on that contract?

Mike: I've seen it more than once where it's a one-to-one replacement. We're like, Hey, this person didn't work out. They quit. They got a better job. Whatever. It's a one-to-one replacement.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: They don't necessarily skip a beat, but there's some downtime.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: There's some downtime that they're not billing. There's some retraining they've got to do. It's not effortless and it's not without cost, even if it's just labor internally to retrain, recruit all the things that you have to do. But to your point there, I've seen where it's not just one person.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: You know, you have 30 slots to fill. Maybe you're a sub, and two or three of those slots aren't working out, so the prime takes 10 away from you.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm

Mike: They don't just take those two, they take 10. And they're like, okay, out of the 20 you've got left uh, you know, these two aren't working out. So they take five more from you

Kathleen: mm-hmm

Mike: and they don't let you [00:24:00] replace any of those. And so now instead of having 30, you've got 15. And it's a lot more costly there because you've made a couple of poor judgments of just putting a button in a seat

Kathleen: mm-hmm

Mike: as they always say. So if you could leave folks with one thing about working with your recruiter, what's your number one tip, strategy, whatever it is about that relationship with the right recruiter?

Kathleen: With your recruiting team, be it that you're a small business and you only have one recruiter, always work with them honestly. What is at stake for this proposal? What kind of talent do I really need to find? I can't tell you how many times I talk to recruiters, they just find out that morning that they have to fill five positions by the end of the week. That is not a way to work with your recruiter. Be sure they're part of the business process. Be sure that they understand how they're going to be successful. I love all of our customers that we work with. They're just really talented individuals and I just really hate it when they find out at the last minute that they have to fill a position. I would much [00:25:00] rather have them work with us on an overall strategy that makes both them, the candidate, and their company successful.

Mike: So yeah, they need time.

Kathleen: They need time. it's also just honesty. Instead of just throwing something over and saying, fill it. How important is this position to the four other positions you gave me last week? Let's talk about priorities. Let's talk about what is going to make the team successful. What is going to make me successful? More often than not, the recruiters are always thinking: I interviewed someone last week. They're not going to be good for this position. But if something comes, down the road, I might be able to put them in that position. I just love this work, but I always feel badly for my customers who are not treated well.

Mike: That makes perfect sense. Thanks for coming on and talking about all this stuff today. It's a great topic. We could talk about it for hours. Obviously we don't have hours. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this, sharing your wisdom. As always, if anybody wants to get ahold of Kathleen, all of her contact information is in the notes for the podcast.

Kathleen: Mm-hmm

Mike: Once again, thank you and I look forward to having you on again and not taking so long to have you on next time.[00:26:00]

Kathleen: No problem. Happy to come back.

Narrator: I really hope you enjoyed the podcast today. If you did, I would really appreciate it if you would like and subscribe to the podcast and screenshot it and tag me on LinkedIn or whatever social media you use. So thank you again for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.