Tim Lawler
In coming days, I’ll post a fairly random set of thoughts (at first) exploring what I like to call “The Revolutionary Fundamentals of Recruiting,” every other day, alternating with the Cornerstones series. Today’s thoughts will give a bit of background and some recognition to a very important teacher.
We start our journey into the fundamentals with a couple of old, alphabet soup terms, dating for me back to 1993 when I first started serving recruiters. They are MPC and SOD. Those two terms triggered immediate and very negative reactions in me. The first term, MPC, stood for Most Placeable Candidate. I had an immediate negative reaction to the thought of being called up by a recruiter I’d never heard of before, and having some candidate presented to me, without knowing anything about any of these people, first. It struck me as archaic and almost laughable. SOD stood for Spin Of the Dial (referring to the old days when we had rotary dials for our phones), and was almost always presented in the command, “SOD till you puke.” Anyone who has learned the NLP term “anchoring” can imagine part of my negative reaction to the term. I’ve also been to England, where they use the term in a very different context and I found the term offensive for that reason, too.
Why share this ancient history? Well, let me skip forward to 1999 and perhaps the significance will begin to be clear. It was actually January of 1999, and I will never forget the practice-changing information that Tim Lawler gave me. Tim and I had been working together for a couple of years at this point, and he shared with me an analysis he did of his teams’ placements for 1998. He told me that the breakdown was just about 50/50 between MPC Placements and filled Searches. Tim can be quite the jokester. And, when he decides to deliver a line, he can do so with the straightest face and unflinching tone. Often, you just don’t even know he’s kidding around. Well, that was my reaction to his information. I laughed and told him he was pulling my leg.
You see, in the six years I’d been serving recruiters, all of them had spoken to me about MPCs, but no one, not one person, had ever said anything about actually placing an MPC. Rather, everyone told me they never placed them.
As time had passed, that had become my greatest argument against the MPC method. It felt like an contradiction, to call someone your most placeable candidate, but then to never, under any circumstances actually place them. So, when Tim gave me his data, I simply didn’t believe him. At first, he didn’t quite follow me, and just kept going with his analysis, but then when I still refused to believe him he got mad. Yes, Tim does have a temper!
The bottom line is that his data was absolutely real, and extremely significant. The other parameter Tim had measured was time investment. Where 50% of their placements had come in each category, only 20% of their time was invested into MPC Placement, and 80% of their time was invested into Search. That was what had so stunned Tim.
I’ll pick up on the story here, tomorrow. But, before I close out today, allow me to ask:
1. Where do you stand on the MPC Method?
2. If you use it, have you ever placed an MPC?
3. If you’ve placed an MPC, was it ever as a direct result of your marketing presentation, or was it just that you ended up placing your MPC into a Search obtained by other means?
I’d truly love to hear your answers! And, as we explore these revolutionary fundamentals (I know, I haven’t given you any revolutionary stuff yet, but it’s coming, I promise), I am quite confident that the MPC is very much the right place to begin. Let’s just frame it one additional way. If you found the most competent talent in your area, but had no Job Orders at the time, how might you go about building an approach to help this most valuable candidate find his next job?
You will not be disserved by meditating on this question…I promise!
2 Comments
Alright, I am writing here today as a confession. I have not placed an MPC in the traditional way – ever. By that I mean I have not made a 1-300 call campaign on behalf of a candidate. I have used MPC’s in bulk e-mail campaigns (very effectively) and I have placed MPC’s as a result of a 3-6 call mini-campaign, but mostly I have placed MPC’s as a result of fulfilling an ongoing search or one that has come up while I was contemplating “running” an MPC. I am sure that everyone believes that their recruiting space is unique and I’m sure that is true. I am NOT sure if I use this as an excuse to not market MPC’s, but I believe my space is not “as” conducive to the MPC marketing method as others. As an aside, I never liked the term SOD either!!
Gary, first of all, thanks for the confession. Second, I can’t help it, I have to give you this link: Recruiting Tactics & Strategy Group at LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2435424&trk=anet_ug_hm&goback=%2Eanh_2435424. That’s actually where I post these thoughts, originally, and there’s about a 2 – 3 week lag time from there, here. Nico improves them when he carries them over here. But, the reason I just have to share the link is that the ease of conversation there is, no question, greater than here at the blog. Now, make no mistake, I truly appreciate your comments here, as I do when anyone takes the effort to respond. So, thank you indeed. If, though, you do find your way over to the discussion group at LinkedIn, my suspicion is you’ll find a bit more action and broader responses from others than you’ll likely to get here.
Now, to just one aspect of your comments. You list out a number, 1 – 300, in defining the call campaign for the MPC. Understand, I’ve never been through the traditional training, and have only gleaned my knowledge, second-hand, from sources precisely such as yourself. That confessed (you know, right back at you), as an analyst and coach, I am not dependent on my training alone. Rather, as you so well know, with my clients we build new ideas all the time, and boldly take them out onto the mean streets for testing. And, in my testing, Gary, I’ve come to utterly reject the three figure call plan for MPCs. Mind you, that’s not qualified. I mean the word “utterly.” If you tried, you could probably sell me on rejecting the two figure call plan. The most powerful MPC Placement Campaigns (note the emphasis on the word PLACEMENT) may well have call plans of only 1 – 9, at most. I’m not sure about that. I happily go up to 20 or 25, and know of truly kick-ass strategies that max out around 60 companies. But, understand this. The larger call plans are part of a two-stage campaign, where the first stage, with the large numbers of prospect companies, is a research stage in advance of MPC Presentation and introductions.
But now you’re getting me way, way ahead of myself! I just had to let you know, and in the strongest terms possible, how utterly I reject the 1 – 300 call plan associated with SODDING your MPC until you puke. Horrible, horrible terminology, as we’ve agreed. But, it’s even worse as a strategy.
More, much, much more to come…
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