Unfortunately, worker bees may also not have many clients. They are by definition profit centers because of the quality and quantity of their work—
as long as they are generating billable hours, they are producing a profit for the firm. Worker bees also must perform the tasks that rainmakers have no
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patience for or that specialists do not have the breadth of knowledge to perform. What worker bees are not, however, are revenue generators, and this is where they present particularly vexing problems in terms of retention. Rainmakers and specialists will always be paid more than worker bees, just as the star running back always gets paid more than the right tackle. But the running back cannot score and cannot even begin to achieve success without the tackle. It is the worker bee who performs the mundane tasks on which the client relationship depends. So keeping the worker bee happy is critical to the overall success of the firm.
The Misfit
The persons in this category are the source for many of the firm’s stories that become part of the apocrypha of the firm culture. Any firm cannot know whom they really want, who will “fit” into the firm, without knowing who does not “fit.” The reasons for being a misfit vary as widely as the firms themselves. A person who does not like to work long hours will never fit into a “sweatshop,” and at the same time, a workaholic will never fit into a firm that emphasizes quality of life over quantity of billable hours. Neither the misfit nor the firm is necessarily right or wrong in either situation—it’s simply a matter of one person not fitting within the culture of a particular firm.
The issue when dealing with a firm misfit is to identify such a person as rapidly as possible. The ideal, of course, would be to identify that person in the recruiting process. In that perfect world, neither the firm nor the person will waste any time in attempting to make a situation work that, by definition, cannot happen. But in the real world, this is not the case more often than not. Every year, in every firm, someone gets through the process who is a “bad fit” (referred to ironically as a PURE—“previously undetected recruiting error” by staff of at least one firm). When this happens, it is incumbent on both the firm and the person in question to rectify the situation in such a way that does no lasting damage to either the firm or the individual.
For example, if the workaholic is thrown into the culture of a firm that prides itself on quality of life issues, it is likely that the problem will be identified by both the firm and the employee within a matter of six months.
Intuition would indicate that the best scenario would be to sever the ties between the professional and the firm immediately, but this is not necessarily the case. The firm, if it jettisons professionals too quickly, can quickly obtain the reputation of being too “clubby” and a difficult place to work.
Further, the individual can obtain the difficult-to-overcome reputation of being a job hopper or one with whom it is difficult to work. Neither the firm nor the professional is well served, then, by an immediate severance.
The challenge is either to find a manner in which the misfit can carve his or her own niche within the firm or to find a series of tasks and projects through which the firm can obtain a reasonable return on its investment
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and the professional can obtain a reasonable amount of professional development before leaving for greener pastures.
Having now identified some of the personalities (and attendant quirks) of the recruits and employees in a firm, the question now turns to how to recruit them. Recruiting focuses on the importance of putting in institutional benchmarks and cost controls for the following phases of the process:
• Initial screening/criteria for the candidate pool
• Initial identification and contact of potential employees
• Advanced screening
• Interviewing
• Strict decision-making process for offers
• Compensation negotiation
• After the offer: selling the firm and the opportunity
Retention involves the following phases:
• Periodic individual review and feedback (individual review)
• Employee satisfaction programs on a classwide or levelwide basis
(group review and feedback)
• Mentorship programs
• Compensation programs on an individual and group basis
• Quality of life concerns
The Phases of Recruiting
Every firm has its own needs and resources for recruiting. Many of the attendant factors depend on the size of the firm. A CPA firm with four accountants may need just one more professional to grow its business to the size that it has identified in its business plan. Conversely, a huge consulting or law firm may need a constant inf lux of talent to service its clients and groom the next generation (taking into account planned-for attrition) to take over the firm in 20 years. But regardless of the needs of the firm, the recruiting process itself should be institutionalized. That is, it should be agreed on by all necessary decision makers. This serves several purposes. First, it prevents one partner or other decision maker from subverting the process or playing favorites. Second, it allows for the time spent on recruiting to be efficient. Throughout the recruiting process, the firm should always be concentrating the majority of its resources on its revenue-generating activities, not on the non-revenue-generating process of recruiting.
The ideal structure is to have a single person in the firm whose primary focus is recruiting. In larger firms, this role is almost always fulfilled by a
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professional recruiting coordinator. This is an industry unto itself that is discussed in more detail later and is a luxury well worth the investment for a firm that has large, continuous human capital needs. But even if this role is a luxury that a firm cannot afford with a full-time person, it is well worth it for any firm to have a person who is not a profit center in his or her own right (such as the business manager, accountant, or operations manager) to own the logistics of the recruiting process: identifying recruits, arranging interviews, researching compensation packages, and so on. This allows the professionals in the firm to do what they do best, which is generate revenue through the servicing of clients.
Initial Screening/Criteria for the Candidate Pool
At the beginning of the search process, there should be in place an initial screening that is completely dependent on what the candidate looks like on paper. Whether for new hires or laterals, the persons ultimately making the decision should set forth specific, detailed criteria. This is not, however, a mandate to create the ideal candidate—very rarely will such an animal be found, and the potential pool of candidates would be noticeably brief. Instead, this criteria should set forth the minimum criteria by which a firm will interview a prospective candidate. The idea behind this is to increase the applicant pool, not decrease it. With the criteria in hand, one of the search methods set forth in the next step can be used to establish the initial candidate pool.
Initial Identification and Contact of
Potential Employees
There are a variety of sources for potential employees for the professional services firm. I will discuss the most important sources.
NEW EMPLOYEES IN THE WORKPLACE.
At some point in their lifetime,
most professional services firms require some quantity of employees who are entering the professional workforce for the first time. In larger firms, the need can be quite large, with hundreds of new recruits being hired straight out of school. The target recruits in this situation are usually the easiest for the firms to identify: They must fit a certain predetermined profile, they must have a certain GPA, they must come from a school that the firm believes will have provided its graduates with a certain minimum level of knowledge, and they must have a level of maturity or other life experience that the firm considers valuable. The initial resume vetting is done by the person who is in charge of the recruiting process, and a potential candidate either fits the criteria or does not.
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The talent pool for fitting the firm’s criteria is also readily available, because it comes from the schools themselves. Almost every professional school has some form of career counseling, and most of the top schools have professional placement administrators, whose entire job consists of selling the schools and its graduates to potential employers. These schools most often have interviewing programs, whereby firms send a certain number of representatives for a day or multiple days, during which the firms interview a series of preselected candidates in 20- or 30-minute interviews. Once these initial on-campus interviews are concluded, the firm then informs the schools or the candidates directly whether they are interested in pursuing further action.