Scott MacGregor
Scott MacGregor is fired up. The former VP of Sales and Marketing at Flo-Tech, one of the top document imaging dealers in the United States, recently embarked on a new journey, launching his own unique national recruitment agency, SomethingNew LLC, www.TrySomethingNewNow.com, earlier this year. It’s exciting and challenging and is allowing MacGregor to leverage all the experience he’s gained over the years from interacting with recruiters and hiring and building top sales and marketing teams. What’s he’s come up with is a twist on an old formula.
“We’re not a traditional recruiting agency,” he says. “We do things in a unique way.”
For instance, SomethingNew LLC uses subject matter experts for the different fields where they place candidates.
“We can’t be experts in everything so those subject matter experts help us vet candidates at a very granular level that only they can understand,” states MacGregor.
MacGregor has some strong opinions about recruiting and the reason for this unique approach is because he feels that the old recruiting model is broken and is frustrating for people. The big issues with the current recruiting model, particularly as it applies to the document imaging industry, and what he’s out to change include:
- Clients not knowing their exact sales rep ROI
- Clients not knowing their exact lost opportunity number
- Not building a strong bench
- Not having a set in stone talent acquisition strategy
- Negotiating for the lowest possible price with a recruiter
- Using too many recruiters
- Not building a true partnership with a great firm
“These mistakes are universal and not specific to the BTA channel,” opines MacGregor even though he finds them a bit more prevalent within the channel than outside of it.
“A dealership’s sales and marketing engine fuels growth, but it also has the potential to hasten its demise, especially as Managed Print has turned into Managed Services and people are trying to transition their businesses,” explains MacGregor.
In his experience working with CEOs or VPs of Sales or Marketing he’s found that many don’t have a handle on these key recruiting issues and by not addressing them it’s difficult to be successful.
Do people realize they’re making these mistakes?
“There are some intuitive things people know they should be doing but don’t,” responds MacGregor. “Building a bench is one. Everybody knows you always have to be recruiting. If you have a sales team and it’s more than one person, you’ve got C’s you need to replace and B’s you need to turn into A’s. You should be constantly evaluating that team like a sports team would. CEO’s and sales leaders know this, but don’t have a mechanism in place to build that bench. They don’t have the time to and I don’t think they know how to go about doing it effectively. Most firms will only start looking if there’s an imminent opening in which case it’s too late.”
He feels that building a bench is difficult to do internally, which is why some organizations use recruiting firms. The real challenge is finding a great one.
MacGregor’s firm is selective in how they build that bench and he cautions that it should be done in a way that doesn’t involve talking to candidates about a job that’s open today, but by creating a talent pool to pull from when the appropriate position needs to be filled.
He also cautions against using too many recruiters and about negotiating for the lowest possible price.
“Some people think if I use one recruiter my chance of finding that person is X percent, but if I spread it out to multiple recruiters, my percentage goes up,” contends MacGregor. “That’s not true at all. What happens is if you don’t give a recruiter some exclusivity, and you shouldn’t unless they can demonstrate they’re different and you’ve built a relationship with a great firm, you’ve diluted [the search].”
Why is that?
“Because all recruiters are working on multiple searches for multiple companies,” responds MacGregor. “They have a choice of who they’re going to spend their time on. Recruiting is extremely time consuming. We are busy long after 5 p.m. and on weekends because that is when many candidates have time to talk and be interviewed by us.”
The same holds true for negotiating the lowest possible price.
“You may feel good when you do that, but at the end of day is the recruiter going to focus on filling a position where they can make $5,000 or $1,000?”
Speaking of dollars and cents, understanding the sales rep’s ROI is something that many dealers working with a recruiter fail to have a solid grasp of. MacGregor has seen that over and over again.
“’How can I pay X thousands of dollars for that person?’” is a common response. “But if they looked at the sales rep’s ROI that’s a small price to pay if you find the right person,” he says. “If you do that your fee payment is nothing in comparison to what that person will bring in. It’s a one-time payment and if that person is successful for a number of years it’s an extremely nominal number.”
Something else that MacGregor finds important is understanding one’s lost opportunity number.
“Very simply, what is the cost/loss on a monthly basis for having an unproductive territory, either because it is an open territory or a territory that is being underserved by a C player?” he says. “Typically you are losing the cost of a recruiter’s fee every month. That’s why it is so critical to have a consistent way to fill positions with A players and to do it quickly. Knowing your lost opportunity number is the first step.”
One of the biggest lessons MacGregor has learned from working with recruiters and watching other dealers hire is that you have to follow a certain process, or more importantly, you need a process.
“I talk to people all the time and they have a loosey-goosey interview or talent acquisition process. If you don’t have consistency it’s like a recipe where sometimes you put in a little of this, sometimes you put in a little of that and you get a different result every time and then wonder why this person worked out and this one didn’t.”
Having a talent acquisition strategy involves not only identifying the criteria you’re looking for in a specific candidate, but the steps for vetting that candidate. That’s a problem not only in document imaging dealerships, but with recruiting agencies.
“Vetting a candidate the right way is very time consuming. There are interviews, thorough resume checks, LinkedIn profile checks, Google searches, reviews of social media like Twitter, reference checks and on and on. Sometimes people do these things, sometimes they don’t,” states MacGregor. “It has to be consistent.”
MacGregor doesn’t think it’s too much to demand that a recruiter do their due diligence. In his previous position as VP of Sales & Marketing, he’s seen it over and over again.
“I’d consistently get people where their résumé and Linkedin profile don’t match. That’s something a recruiter doing minimal due diligence should be catching, not me.”
Another issue with some recruiters is that they don’t think long term and are more apt to just put candidates in front of people without understanding the company’s needs or what the company does.
“The reason I started this company is because of 24 years of frustration where I would get e-mails or phone calls on a weekly basis from recruiters who had ‘perfect’ candidates for me. Yet I’d never spoken to them and when I asked them what they knew about my company and the positions we needed to fill they didn’t know anything. When you think about that, it’s like saying I have a perfect house for you, but I have no idea where you want to live, if you have kids, or whether the school system is important to you. The audacity to call someone up and say you have a perfect candidate when you’ve never spoken was always crazy to me. That’s having no process and not being willing to take the time to figure out other than a wild guess what that company is looking for.”
It’s beneficial too to for the recruiter to understand what the candidate is looking for. “You have to know exactly what the candidate is looking for and what the company is looking for in order to figure out if it’s a match,” says MacGregor. “If you know what the company is looking for, but are guessing on the candidate based on a résumé or a LinkedIn profile, you’re going to be wrong almost all the time.”
Surprisingly, he doesn’t believe a document imaging dealership needs to only hire people with experience in the industry. Other intangibles are often much more important.
“We look at all this criteria and one might be ‘I’d like somebody with industry experience,’ but that may not be a must have, but a nice to have,” explains MacGregor. “Their motivation and drive, business acumen could be must haves, and those are weighted more heavily the way we do it. MPS, MNS, copier sales, it’s not rocket science. If you have a decent on-boarding process these are things that can be taught to someone who has the intangibles—a strong work ethic, good business acumen, and the list goes on and on.”
Coming from someone who possesses many of those intangibles plus over 20 years of experience in the document imaging industry, MacGregor seems to have a good handle on what his former colleagues in the industry may be looking for and he’s ready to help.
