On the surface, a longer search warranty might seem attractive over a short warranty. Let’s take a closer look.
Barton Professional Placement Group is a trusted advisor to clients asking this question. It’s our reputation and to our advantage to be open, educating and transparent with clients. Many tell us we steered them right.
On July 19, 2013, we published our blog on Staffing Guarantee and Warranty Replacement, discussing how a balanced relationship can produce exceptional outcomes. Then on March 11, 2014, we wrote a simple recipe discussing 8 Things to Know About Your Recruiting, Search and Placement Warranty.
Winning vs. Losing
Negotiation, “The Art of the Deal,” winning vs. losing and good deals vs. bad deals are topics in the news lately. Real practitioners know winning is not at the expense of the other party losing. Winning is negotiating an outcome where both parties gain by satisfying respective needs.
This balance applies to your direct hire recruiter’s warranty. Negotiate a valuable outcome for your recruiter that also is an incentive to your own team to achieve the hiring objective. Your search firm has put a lot of thought in their warranty language and terms. Ask us about ours.
Basis for Advantage
A short warranty is to your advantage for a number of reasons.
Hiring Sense of Urgency. A short warranty increases focus of the hiring manager and quality of interviewing in your organization. In an urgent search, it’s not uncommon to hear HR professionals tell us the “hiring manager is too busy.” Then how can it be urgent? A shorter warranty drives a sense of urgency to select that good candidate. A longer warranty gives hiring managers a sense of no rush to fill this. Candidates sense no rush too and often get hired away by competitors, without a sense of urgency to hire. A shorter warranty is to your advantage to accelerate interviewing and select the right hire the first time.
Collaborate for a Best Outcome. A strong collaborative recruiter-client relationship is created when a replacement warranty is short. Both have skin in the game. Recruiting firms sense when clients take the process seriously by the level of collaboration. Focus on your recruiter’s business success as much as you focus on your own hiring (business) success. Strengthen trust and actively collaborate with your recruiter and your job searches will be their primary focus. Be responsive, and help them help you. That’s a good thing in the long run.
Best Candidates Always. A good recruiter is going to always present excellent quality candidates because their reputation is based on the tenure of placements. Lesser recruiters (and certainly the digital online resume mills) brag about how fast they will send over resume’s. That’s a red flag. Search firms that differentiate on their long warranty as a point of value are telling you something. That differentiation indicates candidates will be just resume’s they found, with little qualification and vetting. If a warranty replacement is needed, they just send more un-vetted resume’s until you get tired of them throwing them over the wall.
Try-and-Buy is Bad for Everyone. Better candidates are selected with a short warranty period because the risk of a bad hire is directly felt by the hiring manager/team. No manager wants the reputation of turnover inflated by a try-and-buy approach. Longer warranty periods propagate a try-and-buy attitude and ultimately the dreaded revolving door turnover reputation for your company. HR leaders know the risk of this reputation well. Recruiters lose too. Each time a warranty requires a replacement, your search firm does twice the work, for half the fee.
Effective and Efficient On-boarding and Training. With a shorter warranty, HR leaders develop effective and efficient on boarding processes to integrate new hires into the corporate culture and effective job training programs to accelerate a new hire’s contribution. That’s critical for hiring activity driven by the real deadline of a short warranty. With a long warranty, new hires often do not get the early attention they need to be effective contributors, they get bored and turnover faster.
Resume’ Mill Indicators. Some direct hire agencies don’t qualify candidates the way Barton Professional Placement does. They are resume’ mills, churning through the undesirable candidates as fast as clients turn them over. Certainly the web-site resume’ mills do that – they have no skin in your game. Their business model is to rely on your team to do all the work, from sifting through (digital) paper to find an acceptable candidate. Barton Professional Placement Group doesn’t believe that is good enough. Our clients get exceptional candidates, as a result of real recruiting effort.
Competitive Advantage. We like warranties. They are helpful and motivate our team to always do excellent work. We’ve found our client’s skilled HR practitioners prefer a (shorter) search and placement warranty. It’s to their advantage to accelerate and improve their internal hiring processes with the time-bound sense of urgency a shorter warranty creates. They, and the companies they serve, are more competitive because they hire the best candidates faster and those candidates become contributing employees more efficiently. This of course, achieves business objectives for the firm where they work. That’s real competitive advantage.
The length of a warranty is relative to the position and other job-centric factors. This has been a discussion about “longer and shorter” replacement warranties. To learn how Barton Professional Placement Group can help you, give us a call today.
