The CEO of one of our long-term clients, writes me an email: “We’ve been looking for a controller through you all for almost six weeks. How come we haven’t gotten any candidates?” So I call our associates in the accounting division and I asked him why we haven’t been able to get this guy any good candidates, and here is what they tell me:

“Here’s why we don’t send this guy good candidates. He makes us send a resume, instead of just seeing the candidates that we tell him are qualified. He tells us to send their phone number and he’ll call them some time. We are getting our candidates interviews right and left at specific times, with specific people… face-to-face. If we tell a candidate that hiring authorities going to call them some time, they aren’t interested. And why should they be? We don’t like to tell them that because we never know when the CEO is going to call them. And if they get caught off guard, they are not going to interview very well, so it’s a waste of time, especially when we can get the candidates we have other really good interviews.

Besides, sometimes he sits on the resumes for a day or two and we never know whether or not he’s going to interview the candidates. And then, instead of just interviewing the candidates we tell him he ought to interview…there just aren’t very many of them…he tells us we have to send him the resumes. He’s just not worth the investment of the time and effort. We like him and he’s a nice guy, but while he’s asking us to jump through hoops, other clients are interviewing our candidates face-to-face…and hiring them!”

This is the kind of market we’re in today. Candidates are really hard to find. We are very fortunate here at Babich, because we have more than 100,000 candidates in a database that we have interviewed face-to-face and we are contacting these candidates all the time. So, we can always come up with some good ones. But we ask our clients that they need to interview quickly and decisively, because it is not uncommon for us to be able to get our candidates three or four interviews very quickly, as well as offers.

So, if you’re a hiring manager, please, if you need to hire someone, please listen to our advice.