These days, it takes a well-crafted sales pitch and a customized offer to pull in the top-notch project managers. Slapping a job announcement on a message board or cold-calling candidates simply isn’t adequate.
In today’s cutthroat battle for talent, the best project leaders aren’t always actively looking for work. So hiring managers may have to resort to poaching from the competition—especially those companies known for grooming project management talent, says German Herrera, managing partner at the Miami, Florida, USA office of recruitment firm Egon Zehnder.
“You’ve got flagship companies that invest a lot of time and money in developing people,” he says. “They do so to primarily fuel their own growth, but eventually become sources of good project managers.”
Once recruiters identify a target company, they still have to find a way to build relationships with individual project managers. One Carlos Kingwergs, managing partner with Pinnacle Vision Latin America, a recruiting firm based in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.
Learning about an individual’s personal life can help determine his or her viability as a candidate, he adds. For example, if a project requires someone to relocate for an extended period of time, recruiters may need to examine the candidate’s family situation to see if this opportunity would fit their lifestyle. Although hiring managers must keep local employment laws in mind, establishing a person’s marital status or children’s ages can be a huge help when headhunting in regions where social obligations frequently outweigh professional goals.
“It’s not just finding a candidate, taking the candidate out of the current job and placing the candidate with the new company,” Mr. Kingwergs says. “You have to be interested in what is happening with them as well.”
Once they know where a prospect is at in their career and what they’re looking for, companies may have to alter the job role to option is to leverage connections with people they already know, Mr. Herrera says.
To snag an in-demand project manager, hiring managers should play up their company’s strengths and capitalize on any weaknesses in the competition.
Next, hiring managers should try to learn as much about the individual as they can. Generally, a five- to 10-minute discussion reveals whether the person is ready for a new opportunity and if the timing is right, says meet the individual’s needs, Mr. Herrera says. Although an organization can’t change the location of a project or the work that needs to be done, adjusting compensation, increasing supervisory responsibilities or even boosting an initiative’s funding can help a company bring the right person on board.
“There are many things you can work in your favor to attract the best talent,” he says.
The Competitive Landscape
To snag an in-demand project manager, hiring managers should play up their company’s strengths and capitalize on any weaknesses in the competition. Recruiters can customize their pitch by emphasizing any points where their company has the edge, such as an attractive project location, nice bump in salary or solid career path.
Talking up corporate culture also helps, Mr. Herrera says. Outlining whether an organization is centralized or decentralized allows hiring managers to paint a more vivid picture of what the candidate’s responsibilities would be. The amount of discretion project leaders have to allocate budget and hire staff, for example, can be a determining factor in a person’s decision to join a company.
“Corporate culture definitely weighs in heavily for project managers,” he says. “Responsibilities vary significantly culture by culture and industry by industry.”
At Satyam, a global consulting and IT services provider based in Hyderabad, India, for example, recruitment activities focus heavily on the company’s culture of corporate and individual development, says Anand Kalidass, head of human resources for Satyam’s application development and maintenances services group.
“We definitely seek professionals who reflect Satyam’s value systems and have demonstrated a passion to make things happen,” he says. “The corporate push is for all associates to think like a CEO and take ownership for their sphere of influence.”
Satyam wants its staff to be as committed to meeting the company’s goals as they are to advancing their own careers. To drive that message home, Satyam offers employees up to 40 hours of free training each year and pays for any relevant professional certifications. And it’s those kinds of extras that help the company attract project leaders interested in advancing their careers—and the business, Mr. Kalidass says.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
One of the best ways for hiring managers to connect with potential recruits is to introduce themselves through social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Orkut, says Carlos Kingwergs, Pinnacle Vision Latin America. Connecting online gives recruiters easy access to all sorts of project talent, but many potential recruits are skeptical of unsolicited offers and will respond with wary questions—if they respond at all.
“Social networking sometimes takes a lot of time,” he says. “They want to know a little bit more about who you are as a recruiter. They don’t give you the information right away.”
To make a successful connection online, recruiters need to provide detailed information about the company, as well as the open position, says Tracey Harris, PMP, a consultant at the Chicago, Illinois, USA-based business consulting firm Fabunni.
“A lot of recruiters aren’t able to answer the detailed questions,” she says. “Recruiters will call and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great position,’ and they’re basically reading to you off a piece of paper.”
But as long as they’re professional and informative in their approach, many passive candidates enjoy the casual nature of connecting with recruiters online. Plus, social networking venues allow the candidates to vet their recruiters as well, says Alejandro Aramburu, PMP, senior project manager for Buenos Aires-based NEC Argentina, a technology solutions organization.
“In most cases, the recruiters and I are connected through our networks,” he says. “So I can ask people I know for their personal and professional recommendations.”
“Our chairman firmly believes that we are in the business of making leaders,” he says. “For prospective project managers, it is important that they have a clear idea of [personal] growth so that they know the opportunities.”
BT, a London, England-based telecom company, has also customized its perks to snare a certain type of project leader. The organization plays up its flexible scheduling and work-life balance in recruitment discussions as a way to pull in proactive, engaged individuals, says Dave Wilson, head of employment policy.
“We have loads of people at BT who are local counselors, who work in the local community and volunteer [with] charities,” he says. “All of those things bring this rich cultural diversity into BT, which we then use to create fantastic products and services.”
That flexibility has led to increased retention rates as well. BT’s maternity and paternity policies have gone a long way toward keeping recruitment costs down. In 2007, 97 percent of the company’s employees who took maternity leave returned to work, Mr. Wilson says.
“It’s about saying that we accept that you are not just a BT employee,” he says. “If you’re good, you’re going to have lots of other responsibilities as well.”
RECRUITERS:
TIPS OF THE
TRADE
1 You might have to do some digging. Sometimes the best candidates aren’t looking for work. So go in armed with a good reason for them to make the switch.
2 Know your competition. Another company’s weakness may be your company’s strength—use it to your advantage.
3 Listen up. Strong candidates will tell you what they want out of the job. Ask them questions about their goals to learn how you can sweeten the deal.
4 Be honest. Telling half-truths to get someone on board won’t help the organization—or the candidate. Be clear about the roles and responsibilities the job will require.
Global Forecast
Because BT runs projects around the globe, it needs project managers around the globe—but that can be a daunting assignment given the competition for candidates. To make the most out of the limited talent pool, BT has adopted virtual collaboration technologies that make it easier for leaders to run projects from anywhere in the world. That gives the company access to people who were off limits just a few years ago, Mr. Wilson says. And in the war for talent, every worker counts.
“We want to be out there attracting the best talent wherever it is in the world,” he says. “We have the tools and technologies to enable those people to then work together. We can move the work to the talent.”
Yet not all projects can be run at a distance. Although virtual project managers have become a great asset for some multinational companies and IT-driven firms, a majority of project managers still have to go where the projects are, Mr. Herrera says.
Separating yourself from the competition requires customizing the offer and—above all—being honest
about the opportunity.
—Carlos Kingwergs, Pinnacle Vision Latin America, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
That leaves companies with two options: import international talent or hire a local project manager to run the operation on the ground. Organizations generally prefer to hire native project managers who understand the culture. But the best people have often left the region to manage international projects and are hesitant to return to their home country to work, he explains.
“Usually, the better project managers have an international scope or career,” he says. “Some companies have tried to bring them back to their own countries as local nationals, but that’s very difficult to do. Once these individuals … become international talent with international compensation and expatriate packages, it’s really hard for them, financially, to go back to a local country with a local package.”
Although there is no such thing as a perfect fit, companies can mitigate most of these challenges by applying due diligence to human resources processes, Mr. Herrera says. Structured interviews, reference checks and assessment tests provide a solid foundation for getting talented people into an organization’s most critical positions.
But separating yourself from the competition requires customizing the offer and—above all—being honest about the opportunity, says Mr. Kingwergs.
“A project manager is very analytical, so you have to be candid,” he says. “If a candidate detects that something wasn’t openly stated in the interviews, they will probably tend to move away from the hiring process or the company. They are in high demand, the market is hot, so it is no problem for them to look for a new opportunity.”
PROJECT
MANAGERS:
ANSWER THE
CALL
As companies intensify their recruiting efforts and search out passive candidates to fill their ranks, project managers are becoming accustomed to the sound of opportunity knocking.
But savvy project managers ask the right questions before they answer.
One of the ways Tracey Harris, PMP, of Fabunni assesses the value of a new opportunity is to ask about the project management philosophy of the company. If the recruiter can’t outline the company’s project management processes and describe how the success of a project is measured, her interest in the organization quickly wanes.
“It’s about how you learn from the mistakes and also the wins from previous projects, so that you don’t have to make it so hard in the next project,” she says. “And if you have a company that’s not doing that, you have to wonder—what is it going to be like to work in that environment?”
Just think of it as any other sales deal. Companies that want to close with a candidate will have to be open about their offerings.
Pitch the truth, and talent will buy in.
<< www.pmi.org << NOVEMBER 2008