Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
When your conservative recruiting can’t compete with $100M sign-ons, your aggressiveness must increase.
This Is A Think Piece – whose goal is to encourage you to scrutinize the current level of aggressiveness in your recruiting strategy.
If You Haven’t Noticed, “Outrageous Recruiting” (OR) Is Back
If you were involved in recruiting at the beginning of this 21st century, you already know about the aggressive “war for talent” recruiting practices. These practices were championed during that timeframe by the recruiting powerhouses at Cisco and Google. Well, after a couple of decades of conservatism completely dominating recruiting, take this as an alert that the extremely aggressive approach I call “outrageous recruiting” is back with a vengeance.
The name “outrageous” comes from the first reaction most executives have when they hear about these practices for the first time. Because they invariably respond with either a “that’s outrageous” comment or alternatively, a “WOW” comment. And unfortunately, that shock utterance is almost always followed by some variation of the haunting phrase, “We could never do that.”
Unfortunately, it is by itself an admission that your corporation won’t be very competitive during this latest round of “The war for AI talent.” It also means that you will struggle when you must hire for other mission-critical strategic jobs like quantum computing, robotics, and data security.
Which Of These OR Examples Would Literally “Take Your Breath Away”?
You may better understand why I call it “outrageous recruiting” after assessing these OR examples. And while you are scanning them, keep track of how many examples literally made you think to yourself, WOW?
- Who can match these outrageous sign-on packages? – It has been reported in the press that Meta has been trying to poach AI experts from their powerhouse competitor OpenAI, with $100 million sign-on packages.
- Top companies are poaching groups of AI leaders and experts directly from their competitors – Microsoft’s recruiters have targeted and successfully hired away dozens of Google AI professionals, including Google Gemini’s head of engineering!
- Why buy the company, when it’s cheaper and easier just to poach its leaders? – The press reported that Mark Zuckerberg, instead of buying the whole company, got personally involved in a precision poaching strike designed to hire a cadre of top talent directly away from prime competitor OpenAI.
- Are you willing to give top candidates almost everything they want in an offer? – Recruiting leader Natan Fisher described the current state of AI offers. Noting that in addition to outrageous salaries, “We’ve seen top candidates win with remote flexibility, front-loaded equity, big sign-on bonuses, and tighter cycles on compensation refreshes.” Even hiring friends as teammates (that’s an OR practice). Are you willing or able to match these kinds of outrageous candidate-friendly offers?
Also, note that outrageous recruiting has already been extended to non-technology firms.
Here are two current examples.
- Even Wal-Mart is spending billions to attract technologists – Wal-Mart, which has been known for its conservatism and penny-pinching. Has recently opened a multibillion-dollar renovation of its headquarters, with the primary goal of attracting and retaining a tech-savvy staff. Those attraction features include a 500-capacity daycare, seven miles of walking paths, a food court, a wellness center, a rooftop lounge, and numerous collaboration spaces. The buildings will even have automated drone lawn care.
- Yes, Wall Street interns are also being actively poached – J.P. Morgan reports that for the first time. Even its junior bankers are being directly poached by hedge funds before they complete their internships.
Why Is Outrageous Recruiting Becoming Mainstream?
The CEOs of five of the top six most valuable global firms (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook) have all made it clear that they expect their future corporate success to be dependent on recruiting and retaining AI talent. The fact that so many prominent CEOs have publicly declared the critical nature of AI has only encouraged other CEOs to follow suit.
It is this business case realization that occurred without much support from their recruiting leaders that has forced so many CEOs to prioritize their recruiting into mission-critical positions.
For the first time in most corporations, any type of recruiting has appeared as a corporate strategic goal. And because this march of technology will only get stronger, I predict that outrageous recruiting will be with us for the foreseeable future.
Historically, the only other time when outrageous recruiting was in widespread use was at the beginning of this century. When Google and Cisco dominated recruiting’s War For Talent. To illustrate that level of outrageousness during that time period, Google had a process for getting a “multimillion-dollar counter-offer” to an employee within an hour of them receiving an offer from a rival.
A Few Action Steps To Consider
For those who are considering implementing their own version of outrageous recruiting. Here are some action steps to consider.
- Begin tracking current OR best practices – you should begin tracking examples of outrageous recruiting. First, look at what the top five most valuable firms (Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta) are doing. Next, conduct a benchmarking scan covering what’s happening in your industry and at your direct talent competitors. Because you really have no choice but to match your talent competitors head-to-head.
- Expect top talent offers to get more outrageous in these areas – the areas in which company offers to mission-critical talent will likely keep expanding include sign-on bonuses, abundant stock equity, access to the latest technology tools, and flexibility and the freedom to act. Fortunately, there are some low-cost actions that a corporation can take to make its AI recruiting more competitive. Those actions include broadening your referral program, speeding up your time to offer, offering exploding offers, and substituting skills for traditional job requirements.
- Prepare to prioritize your jobs – you should immediately begin assuming that some of your jobs will eventually be assigned the highest priority. So, immediately start benchmarking the processes that others are successfully using to prioritize their jobs. And if you have open AI or quantum computing positions. Go right ahead and assume that they will eventually be assigned a top priority.
- Identify your most aggressive recruiters – because outrageous recruiting requires extremely aggressive recruiters. I would begin preparing for the inevitable shift towards more aggressive recruiting. By identifying your most aggressive recruiters and those who have the highest potential for becoming aggressive.
- Begin identifying the most likely OR approaches for possible implementation – start compiling a list of the OR practices that are likely to be the most realistic to start out with. And once you’ve selected a shortlist, begin benchmarking others that have implemented the practice.
- Prepare for intense resistance – you must be able to effectively respond to the intense internal resistance that every OR practice that you suggest will inevitably generate. In fact, you can use a lack of HR resistance as an indicator that your suggested recruiting approach isn’t outrageous enough!
Final Thoughts
I have been trying to alert recruiters the world over about the permanent War for AI talent since 2017. And now that this current battle for strategic mission-critical talent has reached a fever pitch. The return of outrageous recruiting, coupled with the rise of recruiting as a top strategic business goal, should be greeted with excitement by smart Talent Acquisition leaders.
Unfortunately, at the same time, outrageous recruiting is likely to scare (and freeze) the many risk-averse recruiting leaders who have been comfortable operating for decades using only conservative recruiting strategies and methods. From my perspective, it is this latter group of TA leaders who must realize they risk being replaced by their impatient CEOs, who are now watching strategic recruiting like their careers depend on it (it may).
Finally, you should also make your internal retention experts aware that competitors poaching your technology talent with outrageous offers will soon become commonplace. And that high level of unexpected turnover will make strategic recruiting even more impactful.
BTW, thanks for reading and passing this article on to others.
Note to the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company. And you can subscribe to his weekly Talent Management articles here or by following him on LinkedIn.
