Recruitment incentive

[ProfessionalLocator]

I am going to cover two points, a recruitment incentive and reason to recruit.


It is common in many industry's to offer a recruitment / sign on bonus to new hires who are experienced in the company's field. This is not common in the locate industry. I have seen CATV installers offered a sign on bonus payable after 3 to 6 months and their level of expertise is much less.

The thing with a sign on bonus is one does not want to get experienced employees for who money by itself is their motive, few months later they go to another firm offering them another 50 cents per hour.

The strongest motive for recruitment in any industry is discontent with the current employer. You cannot foster this but one must look to see where it exists.

My suggestion for a recruitment bonus is to replace what they would lose by going to another firm. Almost invariably this is vacation or leave time of some type. A locator with 10 years experience may have three weeks vacation by this time. They hire on with you they suddenly have only one week or often no vacation until they build it up again. Vacation / leave time is a major hold on many employees who have a great deal of discontent with their current firm. Remember that after this amount of time they often have families of their own. They need this leave time for family vacations, to use when the kids are sick, etc. For these employees the leave time has more value to them than money it represents.

The problem is that a new hire cannot be brought in and given vacation time that company policy does not extent to the other employees. This can be circumvented by giving them a sign on bonus in the form of days off in addition to their normal vacation time. The structure of the bonus can be stretched over several years with the bonus being reduced as regular vacation / leave time catches up. This way you pay a great sign on bonus but not all at once. Plus if they leave after a year there is not an obligation to pay the balance of what they would have gotten had they stayed.


Now then there is the question of the value of such an employee. This will vary by firms and their attrition rate and overall damage rate.

An experienced locator represents years of investment of which there is not a clearly stated value unless one bothers to look.

An employee must be brought in as a newbi as part of a group of brand new inexperienced trainees. There will be in the first three to six months fallout of those who find that locating is just not for them. There will be the termination of those that just do not catch on no matter how good the training is. There will be the termination of those that are just bad employees who are falsifying their manifests to indicate work completed that was not. There will be the termination of those that show up drunk, get dwi's, fail drug tests, use the company truck after hours, and the long list of wrong things to do.

It usually takes several years to develop a good locator, often three years. And still there is much to learn as a locator of five years can be much better.

Say you look at all your locators with five years experience. How many locators did you spend money on to train and develop them that you lost for any reason. What was the loss to damages of this group plus to cost of damages for the five year locator. Of this group what was the profit or loss.

In the end it cost your firm X dollars to develop your top locators. If that locator left the firm for any reason that is the money, adjusted for inflation, you would have to spend again to replace him or her.

So what is a top locator worth to your firm in development costs? $25,000 - $50,000 - $100,000 or more? If you recruited 4 top locators from a competing firm you just saved that $X amount times four which is much greater than a week or two of extra leave time yearly.

There is a bonus here as for every top locator you recruit from another firm is not only money you put in your pocket from saved development costs but an equal or greater amount (depending on their development costs) you force your competitor to spend.

Recruiting needs be aggressive. One must scout the competition's employees and determine who are their best. Then go after them and get them.

When it comes to business I can be a little competitive.

[paintitnow]

When CLS was awarded the SBC contract in 2006 in ILL they mainly did it with offering more cash per hour. Giving guys $2-3 or more in per hour, this got some but probably not the most experienced guys. i am sure sm&p at the time give some of the guys they were worried about a few more bucks an hour. Now that the two have merged there are locators with more expeirenced in locating and at a lower pay than the former cls guys. Having vacation is nice, but if they make you take it before unemployment when off during the winter months. So you have no vacation time for the first few months of the year. there is probably black out times during the summer months. So you get to take a vacation in Nov and Dec or use it when times are slow. You are right if single and no kids having 3 weeks compared to one week is not as big as a deal. A competitor doesn't have to foster disconnect if the employer is doing a good job already about it themselves. Just have to read the threads to see that.

[ProfessionalLocator]

When CLS was awarded the SBC contract in 2006 in ILL they mainly did it with offering more cash per hour. Giving guys $2-3 or more in per hour, this got some but probably not the most experienced guys. i am sure sm&p at the time give some of the guys they were worried about a few more bucks an hour. Now that the two have merged there are locators with more expeirenced in locating and at a lower pay than the former cls guys. Having vacation is nice, but if they make you take it before unemployment when off during the winter months. So you have no vacation time for the first few months of the year. there is probably black out times during the summer months. So you get to take a vacation in Nov and Dec or use it when times are slow. You are right if single and no kids having 3 weeks compared to one week is not as big as a deal. A competitor doesn't have to foster disconnect if the employer is doing a good job already about it themselves. Just have to read the threads to see that.

I only gave one line to discontent which was "You cannot foster this but one must look to see where it exists." I did not stress this but it means that one must research the competition to see where discontent exists as it cannot be fostered by another firm.

The sign on bonus I suggested is like all things imperfect and changing situations like the merger you described can offset it.

One thing about the sign on bonus is that it does not offer any extra money for base pay. There is very little the company being recruited from can do to counter this as it is based not on money but discontent. They can offer a dollar or two more an hour but for the employee with discontent the primary urge for them to is get out. This type of sign on bonus removes one of the obstacles that hold the discontented in place. Besides, once they are fully aware of the problem their best employees are already gone. You are not trying to recruit their run of the mill employees.

For some reading this they will say only money matters and they are not the discontented so their opposition does not matter.

For a company targeted for this type of recruitment of their employees, of all most any type of firm, is that if enough of their experienced people are taken it leaves inexperienced employees to train the new replacements. The overall effect is very detrimental.

The only way a company can counter such a recruitment effort is end their practices that caused the discontent. Discontent is a long term thing and it the practices that caused discontent breed distrust. It would take 3 to 5 years to get rid of the discontent and even then they may not be successful. After all, the same mangers that implemented the practices that caused the discontent are still in charge.

If the target company of recruitment did make large pay raises and kept most or even all of their best employees the company trying to recruit those employees still wins. They just caused their competitors to raise their overhead significantly.

You did point out a serious problem with vacation time that exists in some firms. They force you to take vacation when you do not want to. This also needs to be addressed or the people you recruited may return to their old firm.


I worked at one place where during the summer workload they prohibited vacation. Then suddenly they prohibited vacation during the winter. They said that during winter workload was low and they could not afford to pay vacation time. So you could only take vacation time in a very narrow time frame. The only reason they could not afford to pay vacation during the winter is because they spent the money the employees earned as vacation pay, that money should have been set aside. A lot of discontent there.

There are details to be worked out and trust is a major issue in this industry. So many locators do not trust the companies to honor their word. So the sign on bonus need to be in the form of a binding contract which also closes the loopholes.

Like I wrote before such a sign-on bonus can be simply cash but I think this vacation / leave time offer gets rid of a few potential problems for the company and still is good for the locator.

[yahoo]

I rated your thread excellent!! it was well thought out!!!