When I started Dataspace in 1994, we were data consultants. We helped clients build data warehouses and data analysis systems. We started providing data contractors when clients asked for that. This taught us how to screen talent, which came in very handy when clients then asked if we could find them permanent data employees. In other words, we became headhunters more by accident than by plan.

But, something has bothered me since we pushed into the recruiting space around five years ago—the traditional recruiting business model is not customer-friendly. Think about it…

• When we find you a good candidate, you pay us a big finder’s fee.
• If that person leaves after a few months, you have nothing to show for that big fee.
• We don’t earn anything if we find a candidate who’s already in your pipeline so we separate our candidate pipeline from yours. But, we are experts in screening data talent while most internal recruiters aren’t. So, it’s up to your overworked hiring managers to screen the candidates in your internal pipeline.
• In many cases, HR views outside recruiters as competitors, not allies. 
• While we don’t do this, many external recruiters know they don’t get paid unless you hire one of their candidates. So, they have an incentive to throw a ton of “candidate spaghetti” against the wall and see if any of it sticks. (Most of our clients tell us that, in cases like this, very few, if any, strands do stick.)

So, as I see it, this traditional recruiter model costs you a lot, sticks you with risk, doesn’t align your interests with those of your recruiter, and limits the amount of value recruiting agencies can provide.

A Better Model for Data Talent Recruiting

It seems a better model for technical recruiting is long overdue. One that would:

• Embrace partnership between HR and the external recruiter, not competition.
• Include information sharing to keep you in the loop.
• Add the expertise of a recruiting team with a high level of technical skill.
• Reduce work for HR and your hiring managers.
• And, provide it all at a reasonable cost, mitigating your risk.

I am happy to say that this is the model we’re now offering. You’ll benefit from:

• Data and technology expertise: We’ve always prided ourselves on our knowledge of data skills and ability to spot data talent. As consultants, we come from a data background, not HR. So, we can spot not only the diamonds but the diamonds in the rough and the pieces of sandstone pretending to be diamonds.

• Hourly fees rather than large finders fees: Rather than charging you a huge fee when you hire a candidate, we charge you a reasonable hourly rate for our work. We become an on-demand extension to your internal recruiting team. Given our past experience, we believe this new model will save our clients around 50% of what they would pay under our traditional modified contingency model (which we’re still offering to clients more interested in that approach).

• We can process your candidate pipeline: Social media is full of stories of frustrated people who applied to 250 jobs and didn’t get a single response. These stories highlight a fact in today’s hiring environment—it’s much easier to apply for jobs today than 20 years ago. And all these applications go to recruiters, often overwhelming them. Just this week we posted a just-past-entry-level job for a client and, within two days, had received almost 300 applications. The same thing happens to internal recruiters when they post jobs. Wouldn’t it be great to hand off the work of assessing these candidates, 99%+ of whom won’t be good fits, so your team can focus on more important work? With our new model, you can do this.

• Detailed weekly status updates: While we’re available whenever you need us, we’ll also provide you with detailed weekly updates. These updates show the number of candidates at each stage in the pipeline. They also detail the reasons why candidates were rejected and provide our thoughts on how to speed up the search process.

• Candidate assessments: We’ll send you the resumes of those few candidates who make it through our screening process. But, we’ll include a good deal more information. Our assessments cover our impressions of each candidate and compare their traits and capabilities, against the qualifications you indicated are important for success in the position and in your organization.

• U.S.-Based: We recognize that there are other hourly-based recruiters in the market. However, most of these are based offshore. They frequently don’t deeply understand the required technologies and rarely get U.S. business culture and what success in the states requires.

Benefits You’ll See

As a Dataspace client, you’ll see several advantages from our new approach:

• Reduced costs: While we continue to offer our traditional, finders-fee model, we believe hourly pricing will be more cost-effective for most clients. Experience shows that clients should expect to pay around 50% of the cost of the traditional model.
• Aligned interests: Hourly pricing aligns our interests with those of our clients. We are now working with HR, not competing against them.
• Greater transparency: Hourly pricing provides greater transparency into your costs. Clients will always know exactly how much work we’re doing and what they are paying for.

Underlying all this is the fact that we’ve proven ourselves to be quite effective at finding and screening data talent. We’ve successfully placed tech talent for years and have a number of repeat customers.

Ultimately, our new hourly pricing approach will help our clients save money and find the talent they need faster. I’m eager to see how much more value we can provide by being a better partner in your data talent hiring.

If you are interested in learning more about our new hourly pricing approach or have data hiring needs today, let’s talk!