Hacker News Reader

Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

Recruiting and hiring isn’t considered a core activity

Previously maybe. The trend towards acquiring internal recruitment teams is growing dramatically. Despite not actively looking for work, I've had four job offers for internal recruitment roles in the last 6-8 months.

Remember that oftentimes by the time an employee comes to tell you he’s leaving it’s too late to retain him.

I have to disagree. It's difficult to convince an employee to stay when they inform you they want to leave and quite often it's not worthwhile as their motivation to leave will resurface again in a few months but it can and has been done successfully if you know how to go about it and actually listen and understand your employees needs.

View on HN

In every "job advice" article I've ever read, the employee is warned NEVER to accept an offer to stay at the same job, for ANY reason at all, because the employer will no longer see the employee as "loyal".

Seems funny to me that companies expect loyalty out of us, but provide nowhere to develop. I'd have been glad staying at my past two jobs if they'd continued challenging me. Instead, they started making poor use of my time (getting me to be a data entry monkey despite years of sysadmin and software engineering experience because I was the fastest typist they knew and was "around"). They paid too much for their use of that skill, and we both knew it, and I left, and I hear mumblings and incantations to the effect that they never wanted me to leave. Well, show it.

because the employer will no longer see the employee as "loyal".

Is this really true, though? I've heard it for so long and it's always had the air of received wisdom without facts (or even anecdata) to back it up.

I don't know how prevalent it really is, but I was once labeled "disloyal" for looking around at other internal positions. Needless to say, I got out of that company (though it did take almost a year from that incident to do so).

A year? So even with an actual accusation of disloyalty it didn't affect your employment.

Steve, I read all over the place that employees who take counter-offers are usually gone within the year anyway. Is this because the employees talked themselves to into staying in an unhealthy situation or because the employers are simply keeping them around long enough to replace them with someone without the demonstrated propensity to shop around? I've never actually been in this situation so I'm curious what insight you can share.

Thanks!

Steve, I read all over the place that employees who take counter-offers are usually gone within the year anyway.

More often than not this is usually the case. It's all contextual but if you take one of the more common reasons for leaving (being offered a better salary/opportunity elsewhere) the employers reaction tends to be an instant promotion and a reasonable salary increase to match.

Money is rarely the sole factor in peoples decision to move on and over time the underlying issues become more and more prominent.

As mentioned below, I'm going to put together a blog on the issue tomorrow as it's a bit too lengthy to get into it here so keep an eye out.

The rise of internal recruiting teams is definitely promising. We work with a lot of companies that are smaller and/or growing at a slower rate and therefore can't justify a full time equivalent for recruiting. They're hiring maybe three or four people a year. For those kinds of orgs I think "making it a core activity" is just as important, and perhaps more difficult because they can't justify full time help.

Good on you if you've figured out the formula for retaining employees that are potentially on their way out the door. I'll stand by my statement that it doesn't happen often. I'd love to read a blog post about how to do it successfully! :)

I'd love to read a blog post about how to do it successfully!

I've been looking for inspiration for my next blog post and now I've got it!

You might be interested in my own musings on the recruitment industry: http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/6/15/all-that-is-wrong-wit...

The trick, when you can't afford good full time help is to look part time, or hire somebody on a retainer (which would be the best in your case, given that they probaly do need help at least full time when they are hiring).

And yes, you will pay more per hour going that route than the traditional full time. But lets be serious -- if you are hiring people the difference between 20k and 25k isn't that much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com