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The Overlooked Job-Search Method
Presented at ENG on November 16, 2006
by Ken Cole
Summarized by Tom Jakubowski
Ken Cole, a noted, retained executive recruiter, offered business management insights to the employment search process. Relying upon traditional marketing management principles, he presented convincing evidence for the effectiveness of a direct mailing campaign, more effective than networking. “The behavior of hiring is analogous to the process of consumer buying.” By identifying four marketing channels (networking, third party contacts, direct marketing, and visible markers), he showed how one can apply three models of cash flow analysis to determine the effectiveness of each channel. A cover letter only is the principal component of direct mailing.
Referenced Websites:
http://www.jacquielawson.com/
http://rsronline.com
www.zapdata.com
http://www.jobserf.com
http://marketing.theladders.com
http://netshare.com
http://badbusinessbureau.com/ & http://www.ripoffreport.com
www.ExecuNet.com
http://www.jobserf.com
Comments, Congratulations, or Rotten Tomatoes to:
Tom Jakubowski
Naperville, IL
tomjay@thomastm.com
Tired of “networking not working,” and the black hole of the Internet? Ken Cole demonstrated and taught us how to add a breakthrough direct marketing strategy to executive search consultants and selected CEOs. While the outplacement firm says mailings are “expensive and ineffective,” Cole has developed a tweaked, superior strategy over the past 23 years. A remarkable 73% of his senior executive clients have been placed this way.
Ken Cole, a U of C executive MBA graduate, is a retained‐search recruiter who has published several works on the subject of “head hunting.” He is an expert witness, is a member of the National Association of Executive Recruiters, and a Viet Nam Vet having attained the rank of Major as a helicopter pilot.
Ken advises that job seekers, especially those at the higher income levels, become business‐like in their approach to job seeking. Put simply, that means high quality marketing analysis, execution, and review. In his experience, “…Hiring behavior is analogous to the buying behavior of consumers…,” and therefore the savvy job‐seeker should subject her/his search to channel analysis. Once done, the rate of return of each channel can be measured. Because you may have neither the time nor the resources for complete channel analysis, Ken has segmented the channels into four convenient areas for your consideration:
Marketing Channels
Networking: Perhaps the best known resource to find work, the actual numbers, as a percentage of effort, may not be as high as commonly accepted. In Ken’s experience, 60% of high‐level jobs are found through networking.
Third Party Firms: These include executive recruiters, both retained and contingent, who fill the hiring requirements of employers across the globe. Another not‐so‐obvious group can be collectively called VCs/Private Equity firms. 15% of jobs can be placed here.
Direct Company Contact: This is a direct mailing/faxing/emailing campaign aimed primarily at chief executive officers. Placement rate is about 10%.
Visible Markers: This channel consists of easily visible sources: classified advertisements in newspapers, professional journals and newsletters, the Internet, you get my drift. 15% of placements come from this channel.
Thankfully, the numbers add up to 100%.
The percent of jobs filled through networking (60%) suggest that a large portion of time should be spent on networking, but is that really the case? Other factors, determined through cash flow analysis, play a larger role in breaking from the networking numbers model for finding work. Something different needs to happen.
There is another model, “bottom up” thinking, that has generally been the mainstay of engineers and project managers for deriving the amount of resource required to reach a goal. In one question, “How much stuff do you need to pack into the top of a funnel to receive three job offers and take one of them?” we learned that some realignment of thinking is well justified.
The goal of a job search is not one job offer made, one job offer accepted. Three or more contemporary offers are the goal, because we want to maximize our ability to negotiate the best settlement among the several offers. In order to receive three offers, however, generally accepted practice has it that you should be successful in 25% of your face‐to‐face (F2F) interviews; that means you need 12 F2Fs to reach your goal of three offers.
Now, in order to receive 12 F2Fs, generally accepted practice has it that you need to be 25% successful in telephone screens, or more bluntly, you need 48‐50 phone screens to get 12 F2Fs to get 3 offers. Here is where your knowledge of the process becomes important. If you go through recruiters only, you will be contacted by freelancers: executive search assistants. “Just the facts, M’aam,” is their motto. Something about your cover letter must grab their attention, and oftentimes you won’t know what that is. In order to get 48‐50 phone screens, you need an attractive‐resume‐ success‐rate of 5% to be successful. So you need to contact about 1,000 recruiters to get 48‐50 phone screens to get 12 F2Fs to get 3 offers. There are only about 2,000 retained recruiting firms around, and these are mostly segmented by industry, function, or level of executive.
Something more needs to happen.
Consider the third channel, Direct Company Contact. Generally accepted practice has it that you will be successful in attracting a CEOs attention only 1% of the time. In order to get 48‐50 phone screens leading to 12 F2Fs and 3 offers, you need to direct your efforts to ~4,000 CEOs.
“How much will this cost?” your spouse or significant‐other may ask. Well, it depends. There are three levels of cash flow analysis: burn rate, variable rate, and cost of opportunity. What are your fixed costs? What are your direct and indirect costs of actually making the effort to find work? And, what is the cost in loss of income while you are between jobs (euphemism: fully employed but not paid)?