Founder @ Crossbridge Executive | The Institutional Digital Asset search firm
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Reading Dragonfly's new compensation report. One stat in particular grabbed me.
Usage of agency recruiters correlates with low offer acceptance rates (just 50% for companies that exclusively hire with agencies).
Strange.
Our offer acceptance rate is close to 100%. We go entire years without getting a turndown. So what could be causing this?
Two main possibilities:
- Companies that use agencies more have less to offer, so the turndown rate is not a result of agency use but their unattractiveness as an employer
- Most recruitment firms in crypto (and especially the more prolific ones who probably drive 80/20 of the total agency recruiting activity) are "candidate-led". Which sounds all nice and warm and fuzzy but what it really means is that their operating principle is to get their candidates placed, not to fill their clients' jobs. So you'll have much more competition for these agency-sourced candidates who are also being shopped around to a half dozen other teams.
This is, unfortunately, the model of agency engagement most crypto founders prefer.
Want to beat the odds?
Hire two kinds of recruiters only.
1) The ones who can embed like an in-house team and understand how to really RECRUIT, not just trade candidates
2) The expensive niche specialists who can pull off the impossible and generally charge those retainers you don't want to pay but should anyway
Keep feeding the agency race to the bottom and the bottom is exactly what you will get.
It's not about finding candidates.
There are endless candidates to be found instantly at your fingertips from the very website you're browsing right now.
Before social media we used to gather names manually by dialing into switchboards and making endless referral calls. It was skilled and laborious work. And we usually knew nothing besides a job title and a company about the candidates we called.
Today "finding candidates" is entirely a solved problem. You can do it yourself or get someone off Fiverr to do it for $10.
So what is it then? Why is hiring harder than ever?
You're optimizing for the wrong thing.
"Recruiters are useless and have no idea what they're doing, not like those other professional services like lawyers, accountants and consultants!" - guy who refuses to professionally engage recruiters the same way he engages lawyers, accountants and consultants
brb hiring 3 no-win no-fee tax filings, will pay the one who gets there first
NGMI
Lord give me the courage to boldly dish out terrible advice like a Linkedin "Influencer" who can't keep a job for more than six months
My morning routine (steal this) 👇 👇 👇
07:00 Wake up
07:00-08:00 Get ready for work
08:00-09:00 Do work
09:00-10:00 Do work
10:00-11:00 Do work
11:00-12:00 Do work
You're welcome
Most recruiting problems stem from not doing enough on the front end.
>> Gone through a 2 month process, churned through a bunch of interviews and ended up back at the drawing board?
You didn't contact enough of the right people initiailly.
>> Trawling through applications. "Hmm, mayyyyyyybe we should interview this guy with seven jobs in three years, his experience looks kind of OK."
Would you still be wasting your time on those applications if you'd built a big enough funnel from the start?
>> Noone good is interested in the role.
What have you done to deserve their interest? Did you put any effort at all into your "product", offer and positioning or did you just spam your job description across the airwaves?
If you do the work properly on the front end, the back end becomes easy.
Know the last time we had an offer turned down?
Three and a half years ago!
That's obviously because of our superhuman closing skills, ability to sell ice to Eskimos and so on.
Or.
We just don't put people into the process who are going to turn down the offer in the first place.
Frontload the suck, you'll be glad you did.
What agency recruiters are taught to optimize for:
- Number of resumes sent out
- Number of new clients won
What I optimize for:
- One candidate, one submission, one hire
- Never lose a client
Built different
You can't reach escape velocity without full throttle.
100% effort for a sustained period of time = victory.
95% effort = you never get off the runway to begin with.
I don't accept contingent work because it makes 100% effort unviable.
If you think every recruiter sucks it's probably because you insist on engaging them under lose-lose conditions.
Is crypto obsessed with hustle culture because it's such a young industry?
When you're 22, you need to work night and day because you don't know anything - and you have all the time and energy in the world to make it happen.
If you're 42 and still working 70 hours a week, you've gone horribly wrong somewhere along the way. It's certainly nothing to brag about.
A bit like being a 42 year old nightclub guy.
You never want to be the 42 year old club guy.
The purpose of recruiters is not to find you a job.
It's to fill extremely difficult openings which have unusually stringent requirements.
Typically requiring niche candidates that the company are unable to attract on their own.
Recruiters are not representative of the broader job market because most jobs don't get filled by recruiters.
If you're the perfect fit for the role, a competent recruiter can be a huge asset in helping you land it.
Trying to make a career change, pivot or "break in" to the space? 9 times out of 10 - forget it, that's not what people hire recruiters for.
That's a DIY job.
Bear this in mind and you'll have much more productive dealings with the industry.
IBM's revenue per head is ~$221,000.
Uniswap's is $14.9million.
Your hires are 67x more valuable than the ones your outdated hiring playbook was designed to make.
I'm sure that disconnect has absolutely no influence on crypto's enduring lack of PMF or why most projects flame out and go to zero.
But what do I know? I'm just a recruiter.
After 39 and change years on this earth, I'm fully convinced the barbell approach is the superior way to live.
You're either relaxing or being productive.
Investing in BTC/dividend stocks or full turbo shitcoining it.
Deep learning or pure entertainment.
I'm either moving heaven and earth to win the search and putting 150 hours of focused effort into doing an incredible job, or I'm not touching it at all.
There's no middle ground. No halfassed effort. No sort-of working or sort-of winding down.
A skill I'm learning recently is focusing on the big rocks. Stop trying to squeeze out every moment of productivity out of the day and focus on the big things that actually matter.
So it's 5PM and I usually finish at 7 but everything is handled and I'm just occupying the time with marginally useful busywork?
Maybe it's time to go do something fun instead.
Try it out, you might be surprised.
You think recruiting is about matchmaking.
But it's not.
In this reality, supply and demand would live in perfect harmony. The right job for every person and the right person for every job. They just need to find each other.
That's not how it works.
If recruiting were just about matchmaking, noone would need recruiters.
What recruiting really is: a war against supply shortages.
The better the people you want, the fiercer the competition.
If you want to hire excellent people consistently and not just when you get lucky from time to time, you need to break the supply and demand mechanic.
ie. you need to master the art of recruiting people who aren't interviewing elsewhere and who aren't listening to recruiters.
If you're doing it right, at least 50% of your candidates should be only interviewing with you.
If your recruiter's primary concern is pressuring you to speed up the hiring process so that "we don't lose the best people to faster teams"?
Sorry. NGMI.
Some things that happen when you ignore this:
Hiring a BD person because they have a "prestigious" resume and they crash and burn - turns out their success was enabled by the teams they worked for, not their ability to turn water into wine.
Taking a highly-compensated Head of Growth role with a cool title and a flashy sales pitch, but the project sucks and there's nothing there worth growing.
Burning all your runway trying to scale a dud.
How many times do you think you can point to zero track record of success before doors start closing off to you?
In previous eras, access to information was critical for success.
Today, more information is added to the internet in a single day than you could consume in an entire lifetime.
More than perhaps any other industry, crypto requires putting yourself headfirst into the endless information vortex of overwhelm.
How do you take the good and discard the bad, while protecting your sanity?
Enter the inimitable @emrosedallara on The Blockchain Startup Show 👀