Are you taking charge of your career and heading off problems before they happen? Or are you subject to the whims of your company’s management?
Benjamin Franklin said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain”.
The more you advance in your career the more valuable your time becomes. This is certain. However, this fact is lost of many companies. Firms often give their staff lower raises than they could get by taking a job with another company. Compensation isn’t in step with the market. This is especially true when there is a shortage of workers with key skills. Managers tend to overlook the fact that their compensation is a big contributor to retaining top talent. Many workers value higher pay above all else. How can we not with student loans, mortgages, and auto loans being common?
Furthermore, this problem so many companies have reveals something deeper. They ignore the high cost of hiring a replacement – which can often be from 50% to 200% of annual compensation. Also, the new hire will have to be offered the market rate (which was not given to the worker who switched firms to get that rate). Wouldn’t it make sense to develop a process that avoids the high cost of replacing workers?
The thing is not all management sees that and aligns themselves with this market reality.
So what options do you have if you find yourself not being compensated adequately for the skills you bring?
Consider recruiters.
By building relationships with recruiters, you will have options. They can bring you opportunities regularly. This will give you an escape path away from under compensation and ineffective management.
Compensation might be under-reported as a cause of turnover. We have been told by pop culture to view always wanting more money as being “greedy”. Never mind the media executives who earn far more than their average customer.
Even so, a PwC poll has compensation as a close 3rd as reasons for voluntary turnover at 12%. The other 88% include factors that can change AFTER taking a job. These include “Lack of Supervisor Respect” at 13% and “Supervisor lacked leadership skills” at 9%.
It doesn’t matter how good you are at taking care of customers, shareholders, and your supervisor.
Making friends and influencing people is no guarantee.
Your supervisors and co-workers are individuals and new ones will come and go. A way to lessen this risk, it to have recruiters who know, like, and value you. You don’t need to be at the mercy of chance, politicking, your boss and co-workers.
Sending an email regularly to employment recruiters will lesson the risk of these problems. A good method is to email one recruiter every other business day. This will keep you top of mind.
In his book Pre-Suasion, Robert Cialdini says “anything that draws focused attention to itself can lead observers to overestimate it’s importance”.
By being important in the eyes of 10 recruiters, they will think of you first when they have a client who needs your skills. Recruiters and their clients want positions filled as fast as possible. They will both be happy to consider you first (since you’ve built a connection with them).
If you have not developed relationships through email, you might be apprehensive about regularly putting yourself in someone’s inbox. The way to make this work is to be infotaining. Recruiters work long hours with many boring clients and job candidates. By sending a weekly email with a bit of creativity and humor in each, you will have recruiters looking forward to reading your emails and matching you with a client. Everybody is an individual. You might find some recruiters who don’t match your personality. That’s fine. Think of this as making friends. You will find recruiters who like you for you.
Building relationships with recruiters has a downside. As much as recruiters may like you, their clients still have to be convinced. However, you can develop relationships with hiring managers directly as well. Twitter is a good way build professional relationships and be viewed as an expert in your field. Using polls, charts, and automation makes building a reputation and a following a smooth process.
And I know this process works. I was offered my dream job by a Twitter follower.
To see how I implemented this approach check out the videos I made of the process.
