3rd Time’s a Charm
This is a real recruiting story from this year, and even after 25 years in this business, it’s one I didn’t expect.
In March, I took on an engaged search with one of my clients, a global specialty chemicals distributor, for a Dynamics 365 CE Developer. We closed the search successfully in about 4-5 weeks, and everyone was thrilled. The client was very happy, the candidate was excited about his new role, and all was well.
About 8 weeks after he started, my primary contact, the VP of IT, asked for a meeting along with their VP of HR. I hoped they wanted to talk about additional recruiting needs, but that wasn’t the case. Their new hire had become seriously ill and gone on short-term disability, and they didn’t know whether he would be able to return.
They had already paid my full fee, so they were understandably unhappy and wanted to know what I was going to do about it.
I carry an unconditional 100-day replacement guarantee on all my placements, but candidly, I would have run the replacement even outside that window. They clearly didn’t get their money’s worth, and that’s just how I operate. It was also the very first time in my 25-year career I had faced a situation like this, but hey, here we go.
So I ran the exact same search all over again, this time on double time. They had a massive backlog of projects and major initiatives lined up for the first hire, so they were really hurting. Within 2 weeks, I delivered a fresh slate of qualified, interested candidates; they extended an offer to one of them, he accepted, and a start date was set.
I figured I could finally get back to my other active searches and business development, right?
Unfortunately, that isn’t how this one played out. The day before he was supposed to start, I got a call from the Microsoft Applications Director, his new boss, letting me know he had failed his background check.
My first reaction was, what in the world?!
That had happened to me exactly once before, more than 16 years ago, back when I was still with MRI before starting DynamicsFocus. In that case, a candidate had accidentally put the wrong year on his college graduation date.
So I restarted the same search for the 3rd time. I went at it in earnest and delivered a strong slate of qualified, interested candidates within a week, and this group was probably even stronger than the last. They extended an offer the following week; he passed his background check without issue; he started, and my client is very happy that we saw it through together.
What’s the moral of the story?
I’m not entirely sure, other than that even after 25 years, you still haven’t seen it all. What I do know is that sometimes you have to put your head down and take care of your customers, even when it doesn’t make you any more money in the short term, because it’s the right thing to do. This is why I keep saying the relationships in this business are worth far more than any single fee!
