For the last month, I have had my nose deep in statistics and monitoring roles on LinkedIn. I have noticed a few trends:

Advertising roles on LinkedIn:

The first thing I noticed was a significant number of roles that have been periodically reposted on LinkedIn. As someone in the Executive Search space, I am on LinkedIn quite a bit, a lot of these roles first surfaced mid-2024 and have repeatedly been advertised on LinkedIn, closed and then re-advertised again.

This brought up a few observations:

1. It’s evident that the role was re-advertised because the hiring process was unsuccessful; this could’ve been during the interview steps, whereby the 100-200 candidates that applied ended up not being good candidates/fits for the role, or perhaps someone was hired but ended up not being a fit for the role. This made me think about what the average law firm or company is doing.
2. We all know that everyone has the strictest budgets, nobody wants to use a recruiter or a renowned company like GRM for their hiring needs, so companies tell HR to advertise for a role through LinkedIn which is free, because they are deluded into seeing a lot of applications 100-200 applicants, feels like a win right? Wrong! I did some deep diving for the last month to really understand what the hiring life cycle looks like. Firstly expecting your HR manager to be able to onboard new employees, set up contracts, manage any pending hearings and warnings, manage employee complaints etc. and a lot of the time deal with payroll matters too plus sift through 100-200 cv' s for a legal role that they have minimal insight into and expecting it to be result in a successful hire, doesn’t seem like a smart use of their time.
3. If your internal people team is lucky, maybe 27% of the applicants could be a fit - although this might be ambitious, a lot of the candidates that apply through LinkedIn are typically not the right fit in terms of PQE level, skillset and the quality of the candidate is typically not great, we've seen through research that a lot of the candidates move around a lot and are just not good.
4. Whilst LinkedIn provides you with a big pool of applicants, the quality of the candidates can be questionable.
5. A lot of your Human Resources/people management team's time can be lost, at least 3-5 hours often go towards sifting through bad profiles.
6. According to our data analysts, only 2% of applicants sourced via LinkedIn progress to the interview stage. If your team maintains strict criteria regarding candidate qualifications and skill sets, it is even less likely that these candidates will be shortlisted. And for those who do make it through, are you truly satisfied with their performance and output?

The cost of a bad hire in South Africa:

• A bad hire in South Africa - in terms of a specialist hire like an attorney on the junior end, can roughly cost a company R400 000- R1.4 Million
• Middle management - costs between R750,000 - R3 million
• Executive Positions - R2.5 Million - R15 Million
• Besides the financial implications, a bad hire can impact things on an operational level, affecting things such as causing a ripple effect on productivity. According to our analysts, this can equate to up to 18% lower productivity compared to your counterparts, a 15% reduction in the profitability of your teams. THIS IS HUGE!!!! So you are not only losing out on money invested in your talent, but you are losing out on a much deeper level, a bad hire is frustrating for everyone involved - the team ends up more pressured because now Sally has to put in more time or work after hours to catch up on the work that the bad hire has been butchering, or the Manager/ Senior Legal Counsel has to spend 17% of their precious time which is nearly a full day of work each week, supervising underperforming employees, which results in them diverting their attention from their tasks - this can cause frustration with your clients because the work is delayed, maybe money lost because you cannot take on more mandates because your team is so heavily pressured.

So I am sure at this point you have your back up a bit, you’re wondering what on earth is this 29 year old rambling on about: “Where’s the damn solution, Kay? I am a Director of a reputable law or company and I don’t have the time to just browse through stats that you and your data team have gathered”.

Unfortunately, your solution is not an easy one and its not a one size fits all solution, there are a million things that need to be evaluated, and you are not going to be able to fix it all by yourself or with the help of your HR team, and yes, before panic sets in about costs, you have seen what you are roughly losing annually by investing in the wrong talent let alone the mental and emotional impact that this has on your A-team, which should be your biggest priority.

You need to invest in a specialist team that comes in and evaluates what your business needs:

• I truly believe that they are strong indicators about what a company needs, we don’t all need Stars and Rainmakers, we need them but there's a certain number of these people that are needed, and then we need steady accumulators, mechanics (foot soldiers, that are diligent, follow processes well). I need to remind you that not everyone is built to be a Star and Rainmaker. Just because they have reached director level or senior legal counsel level, does not mean that they are equipped to bring in big clients and close massive deals; similarly, not every junior person is a strong foot soldier. As much as we hate to admit this, there is a science to everything - we all have certain genetic make-up that makes us strong for certain tasks, that is how the world has always worked, and will continue to work. It is crazy that in the age of technology, AI and innovation that we are merely hiring because someone graduated Cum Laude and finished their articles at a prestigious law firm, this doesn’t equate to someone that can successfully bring you what you need!!!
• I have been trained by someone who has been in this business for years and years, who studied these patterns, who built teams that work, and we have now heavily collaborated with data and technology to ensure that we help you engineer profitable teams.

I can’t give away all of my hands so I am going to end off with some easy pointers about why an Executive Search team is highly successful and effective:

1. Candidate quality - our consultants will not be sending over a 100 applicants, in fact we will probably send a maximum of 5. And all five of our profiles will match what your company needs, ranging from skills, culture fit, to compatibility with their hiring management and predictions about how the candidate will impact efficiency and inevitably the generation of money.
2. Our process typically starts by taking a bit longer than the Linkedin process would take as we map the entire market to find every single person in South Africa or Internationally if requested that matches this role, before we tirelessly analyse the key considerations to see which candidates should be headhunted and then presented to our client.
3. We also provide vetting to ensure that the candidate is "fit and proper"

The world is changing and evolving constantly, we cannot use the same hiring principles that we’ve been using for the last 20 years to achieve the success that we haven’t tasted yet, that has new problems and requires new and innovative solutions. You have to evolve, you have to look at real specialists to resolve these issues, and not by just hiring me to replace x3 roles, and you expect me to just fling CVs at you, you need to have a meeting with me. Let me come into your office for a week straight, interview your staff, let me do testing on your teams that require expansion and see what the personalities are, what is needed and then go out and map the entire market to find you the exact right fit. Successful hires are a long game and an investment.

I’d love to have a chat to break down why my team and I are the best solution to your problem.

Contact Kayresha at kay@thegrmgroup.com

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