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ExecuNet_Executive_Job_Market_Intelligence_Report_2013
Click the above link and print the document for easiest view and read. There is lots of great intel on what industries & geographies are hot for Executive Job Growth as well as compensation, sign-on bonus, annual bonus, stock option information to help give you the edge! Want to know what strategies executives are using in their job search, this is a good read.
These Days, Recruiters Are Worth the Money. Article Written by: Vanessa Merit Nornberg
When it comes to sourcing the right interview candidates, I’ve never been keen to use recruiters. But I recently changed my mind. My company, Metal Mafia, has an excellent candidate screening process, a super training program, and a very successful team of employees to show for it.
But hiring has always been a difficult task for me because each time I get ready to hire, it takes me forever to find the right type of candidates to even get the screening process started.
Despite the fact that I carefully consider where to advertise for candidates–I try to maximize the search dollars and get a good mix of potential applicants–it always takes me a long time to find people suited well to the company, and therefore, even worth interviewing.
I’ve tried everything from placing ads on large job boards like Monster.com, to smaller specialized job boards that cater to sales hires or fashion jobs, to local university boards where I can post for free (or close to it). Each time, I experience the same slow crawl toward finally finding the right person. It has taken me up to five months to find the right kind of hire in the past. So in November when I decided I needed to think about hiring for the new year, I was not optimistic.
For me, recruiters have traditionally been out of the question because I figured they would be a waste of time and never be as good at sending me the right people for the job as I would be in reviewing resumes myself. They’re also too expensive for my small budget. But as I got ready to place my job ads again, one of my senior staff members came to me and offered me the name of a fashion recruiter she knew and thought could help. I was skeptical, but I called her anyway, figuring listening would cost me nothing.
The recruiter convinced me she would do a thorough job, but I still hesitated because of the price. I do not have large sums of money to devote to the hiring process, and by my calculations, when all was said and done, using the recruiter was going to cost me three times as much as my usual techniques. On the other hand, the recruiter would only charge me if she found someone I decided to hire, which meant I was risking nothing, and could always come back to my original methods. I bit the bullet and signed up, reminding myself “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
The recruiter sent me the resumes of 10 entry-level candidates. I screened six by phone, met three in person, and found the right hire–all in a month. The cost suddenly became much less, because I saved so much time in the process, and because I got a pool of applicants who were decidedly better to choose from than in the past. Even more interesting, perhaps, was an insight the right candidate shared with me during the interview process. When I asked why she had chosen to work with a recruiter rather than post on job boards, she said “because recruiters make sure your resume gets seen, while submitting via the Internet is like sending your resume into oblivion.”
If most people these days are thinking like my new hire, the recruiters will clearly have the best selection of candidates every time. Looks like I’ve got an essential new hiring strategy.
Vanessa Merit Nornberg: In 2004, Vanessa opened Metal Mafia, a wholesale body and costume jewelry company that sells to more than 5,000 specialty shops and retail chains in 23 countries. Metal Mafia was an Inc. 500 company in 2009.
Written by investor Jon Soberg
B players and C players are far worse than D’s and F’s. In fact, in my experience, B players are the worst hires you can make.
Before getting into the details, it may be useful to level-set and explain what I mean by these employee stereotypes (although there have been some differences of opinion over the years.)
A player: Fully self-sufficient and takes initiative that positively impacts the company.
B player: Does some things well, but not fully self-sufficient, and not consistently strong.
C player: Just average, and does not excel in any area.
D player: Poor performer, and shouldn’t last long if you are a half-capable manager.
F player: Should be out…like yesterday.
Good Enough is the Enemy of Great
When you have someone on your team that you think is doing well enough, you will likely trust them with mission-critical tasks like hiring or pushing code. This will impact the entire evolution of your company. If you entrust important decisions to someone who is just “good enough,” you will watch the opportunities pass.
This is why hiring B players will kill your company. The work will be good, but not great. They will deliver on time most of the time, and hustle sometimes, but not always.
Let’s say you are in a startup, and you have a B player as your vice president of sales. The person will close a good account, but won’t consistently beat targets. If they go head-to-head against a competitor with better salespeople, this person (and potentially the whole startup) will lose. If you’re an early-stage startup, you are walking dead. Raising the next round will be like selling against a stronger competitor — you won’t ultimately win.
I have built multiple engineering teams from the ground up, and I always started with an anchor rock star. The engineer that everyone wanted to work with, and whose work was so solid that he or she made everyone else more efficient and effective. I’ve been asked before how many engineers it would take to replace someone like that, and the correct answer is that there is no way to replace a person like this. Even if I could hire 10 B player engineers for the same price, I would never do it. The product quality would suffer and the time-to-market would slow; you simply can’t replace skill with numbers.
Lessons learned
My opinions on hiring and people haven’t come by accident. I’ve got scars from my career (and I’ve seen it from many angles — founder, executive, consultant, investor). I’ve made some pretty bad hires along the way. The really bad hires are the easy ones — it is obvious when someone fails or is clearly the wrong fit. You wonder what you were thinking, but at the end of the day, you can reverse these mistakes quickly and efficiently.
I have needed to fire a fair number of people as well, and I will say this is one learning from my experience — I have never felt that I fired someone too soon.
At one of my startups, I fired my entire QA department and made the engineers do all their own QA. The result: better quality product, released faster. The QA department had become a bottleneck, and they weren’t doing quality work. The engineers weren’t happy, the product management team wasn’t happy, and the product suffered. I saw the release cycles slowing down, and saw some of the tension between the QA and Engineering departments. As I dug in, my conclusion was one I had not originally wanted to see — I had a B player at the top of the QA department, and the rest of the department was B and below. It was killing us. My biggest mistake was not recognizing it sooner.
When I was a little boy, my uncle used to tell me “he who hesitates is lost.” Those are words to live by.
I have plenty of individual examples as well, and the toughest ones are always the ones who are doing fine. Managers often blame themselves. Is the job not well-defined? Does the person have enough support? Maybe they just need more time, and they will improve. It isn’t easy to find great people, so why let the decent person go hoping to find someone better?
There is an opportunity cost to keeping someone when you could do better. At a startup, that opportunity cost may be the difference between success and failure. Do you give less than full effort to make your enterprise a success? As an entrepreneur, you sweat blood to succeed. Shouldn’t you have a team that performs like you do?
Every person you hire who is not a top player is like having a leak in the hull. Eventually you will sink.
Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.
A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.
Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.
A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.
Read more here.
Job creation in the U.S. is on an upward trajectory. While growth has been slower or stagnant in certain areas, there are many industries where the production of new jobs has accelerated. Markets tied to energy, production, technology, health care, transportation and consulting have increased employment 10 to 30 percent over the last few years.
The following is a list of specific industries where job growth has increased by double digits with an addition of at least 20,000 jobs from 2010 to 2012:
The study uses Economic Modeling Specialists’ (EMSI) rich labor market database, which pulls from over 90 national and state employment resources, such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and state labor departments, and includes detailed information on employees and self-employed workers. EMSI removes suppressions often found in publically available data and includes proprietors, creating a complete picture of the workforce.
For the seventh consecutive quarter, Foote Partners, LLC’s Pay Index shows that the average pay for a large group of IT certifications declined, falling 1.6% in the six months that ended April 1. But salaries for a similarly large group of noncertified skills have continued to advance for an even longer period, since mid-2005. That group of 164 skills saw salaries rise nearly 2% over the same 6-month period.
Foote Partners notes that the increase in pay for noncertified skills is due in no small part to competition for IT professionals with experience in various SAP Applications.
David Foote, CEO and chief research officer of the Vero Beach, FL firm, said in a press release that SAP “caused skills and labor shortages that have gripped sizable segments of the employment market in North America and around the world and created some nasty supply and demand fluctations.”
Only one SAP skill is among the Top Five for average pay increases over the most recent six-month period, but eight are in the Top 25.
Top 5 noncertified skills, plus seven other SAP skills that made the top 25:
1. Network Security Management (+25% increase for 6 months, ending april 1, 2008)
2. Wireless Network Management (+22.2%)
3. Business Intelligence (+20%)
PHP
SAP Master Data Management
7. SAP ERP (+18%)
8. SAP Netweaver BI (+16.7%)
10. SAP Business Objects (+12.5%)
14. SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) – (+11.1%)
19. SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – (+10%)
SAP Materials Management (MM)
22. SAP Netweaver Applications Server (+9.1%)
Source: ComputerWorld – July 14, 2008
ASAP Talent Services places the new VP, Human Resources for Aurigo. Aurigo is an industry-leading SaaS business with headquarters in Austin, TX. ASAP Talent Services is an Executive Search Firm based in Houston, TX and has demonstrated experience placing CIO, CTO, CISO, CFO, and CHRO among other c-suite leadership roles. Read more about … [Read More...]
September 1, 2020 Houston, TX According to Forbes, "The job market today is nearly unrecognizable from its form three months ago. The economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic has left more than 40 million Americans unemployed and countless companies reducing staff and freezing hiring in an attempt to cut costs. For organizations looking … [Read More...]
