Alex Benjamin of OnPoint Consulting On How To Identify and Engage The Best Talent For Your Organization

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Along with its aid in retaining employees, creating an internal growth plan is a great way to fill higher lever, more specialized, and harder-to-fill positions. By promoting up the ladder, you can backfill the lowest rung, which is usually easier, cheaper, and lowers the risk of finding the right candidate. In the simplest of terms, if you promote a manager to director, then backfill the manager position with an internal promotion, you now need to backfill the associate-level position instead of taking the risk of hiring the leadership position externally.

Companies are always on the lookout for exceptional talent in today’s work environment. In addition, the perks needed to keep talent have changed as people are not simply running after a paycheck. They want something more. What does a company need to do to identify and engage the best talent for their organization? In this interview series, we are talking to HR experts who can share ideas and insights from their experience. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Benjamin.

Alex is the Director of Recruiting at OnPoint Consulting. He has been recruiting since 2006, placing over 1,000 clinical research professionals at pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and clinical research organizations across the U.S. and Canada. He manages candidate, client, and hiring manager relationships and supports permanent and contract hiring. Alex is an active networker who shares industry news, trends, and collective knowledge with his ~30k connections on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to get to know you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?

As I’ve networked with and interviewed other recruiters and asked this very same question, it is funny how we all tend to have the same answer. Recruiting is not a career path that most people dream about once they graduate. We tend to “fall into” the industry; my story is no different. As a recent college psychology graduate, I was looking for a career in my field and happened to nail my second interview as an entry-level recruiter. Little did I know the greater impact and excitement of that decision.

What has kept me in the industry is the truly wonderful things I get to accomplish. I get to partner with pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and clinical research organizations across North America to help them hire highly-specialized professionals who work on clinical drug trials. At the end of the day, I get to help better the lives of those who ensure the safety and efficacy of new therapies and expedite the timelines of getting life-bettering drugs to the patients who need them most.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you first started? Then, can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the characteristics that determine a recruiter’s success is their ability to show empathy. We must look out for the best interests of our candidates and the hiring team to succeed.

As a new recruiter, I was immediately thrown into the “pit,” where I called down a list of potential candidates, making at least 100 calls per day. I didn’t have a computer set up for the first week, so it was just me, my phone, and a list of names and numbers. What could go wrong? We were hiring remote positions across the United States, so all I had to do was find people whose titles matched the search. It wasn’t long into my smiling and dialing, leaving voicemail after voicemail, that I came across a pretty irate candidate.

This person was not angry at receiving a cold call. Back then, finding the candidates we were placing was very difficult for employers. Job boards were not very effective, printed ads were only effective in specific markets, Facebook was just for college students, and LinkedIn wasn’t around. Cold-calling industry-specific lists, creating a database of candidates, and nurturing those relationships were the gold standard. Our candidates appreciated being in the know.

So, why was this person so angry? Well, our office was out of PA, and I happened to start my day off at 830EST calling candidates who happened to live on the West Coast. Whoops!

It is a mistake that most recruiters make at some point (if they staff across different time zones), but it is a lesson that I learned very early on and was one of my first lessons on empathy… it’s not kind to be the alarm clock.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote” and how that was relevant to you in your life?

One of my favorite quotes, which you can find on my LinkedIn summary, is, “You must seize opportunities when they present themselves, not when they are convenient or obvious. The only way to cultivate your own luck is to be more flexible (you’ll need to give up something for the right opportunity), humble (timing is out of your control), and gracious (when you see it, seize it!). Life’s greatest opportunities run on their own schedules…” by Scott Belsky.

I work with people during their career transitions, which is a big deal in most people’s lives. It’s a life-changing event full of uncertainty, managing risk and rewards, and leads to a decision that ultimately determines how they spend most of their waking hours during the week.

The best opportunities for personal and professional growth are not necessarily available when you are actively looking for them. You fall into two traps if you wait to explore new job opportunities until you “need” to find a new position. First, you are limiting your search to the best of what is currently available. Take the analogy of the housing market. If you give yourself two months to identify a new place to live, your options will be limited to what is available during that short timeframe.

On the other hand, if you don’t need to move but keep your eye open for the perfect dream house, you are much more likely to find precisely what you are looking for and be more satisfied afterward. Second, your decision-making is skewed when you are running away from a bad situation versus running toward a better one. When you are perfectly content, it will take a pretty special opportunity to consider making a change. The benefits have to outweigh the risks, and there has to be a worthy motivation for you to change careers. On the flip side, if you wait until you are miserable in your current position, the priority becomes getting out of a bad situation rather than moving into a better one, removing pain instead of increasing pleasure. In addition, you tend to lose negotiation leverage when actively looking.

There are benefits to opening your mind to potential career changes when you are perfectly happy. Direct your thoughts and achievements with a positive mental attitude. Be open to opportunities as they arise, and you will be surprised by how many wonderful options exist. Even if you don’t intend to act, it is easy to get an idea of your value in the market, keep an eye on the hiring trends within your industry, and chart out growth opportunities for the future.

With networking platforms such as LinkedIn, being a passive candidate has become increasingly simple.

Are you working on any exciting new projects at your company? How is this helping people?

As mentioned earlier, I get to help pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and clinical research organization build teams that help bring life-bettering and life-saving therapies to market. The teams we have staffed over the years have been making breakthroughs in cancer treatments, bringing life-saving drugs to patients with rare disease, and advancing the technologies used to fight infections and diseases. During the pandemic, we partnered with multiple companies working on various COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, many of which made it to market (and many of our arms).

Wonderful. Now let’s jump into the main focus of our series. Hiring can be very time-consuming and challenging. Can you share with our readers a bit about your experience with identifying and hiring talent? What’s been your most successful recruitment-related initiative so far?

I have been recruiting for nearly 17 years and have identified talent from associate-level staff up to executive search. Working on the staffing agency side of the business brings a unique perspective to recruiting. I have the opportunity to support multiple companies over a wide geographic area with varying sizes and needs. For example, I have clients that range from ten employees to Fortune 5. In addition, I place permanent staff as well as contractors.

Since there is a cost associated with utilizing a staffing agency, we are usually engaged for one of three reasons. As we like to say, our industry is inch wide and a mile deep. It takes an army to get a drug to market and the soldiers, lieutenants, generals, and commanders that work on drug trials are uniquely and specifically trained for their tasks. Therefore, the most prevalent roles we are engaged to fill are industry-specialized, experienced professionals that are in demand, hard to find, and gainfully employed. The second are what I call “bulk” needs. In other words, our clients need to scale up and may need to hire 20, 50, or 100+ of a specific skill set, and they needed them yesterday. Although the internal recruiting team is chipping away, we provide on-demand support. This is especially useful when the growth is sudden or shorter, as it doesn’t make sense to build and grow talent acquisitions teams if the current growth in volume is temporary. Lastly, we hire teams of contractors which help with temporary projects, plug in resourcing gaps, reduce headcount, outsource projects, and/or provide subject matter expertise where it is needed.

I mention all this to create the groundwork that we are not working on easy-to-fill positions. Our clients generally have entire internal recruiting teams, formalized referral programs, access to an internal database, job boards, and postings. We are engaged in attracting and identifying talent that they haven’t been able to find.

Our talent doesn’t generally exist on the job boards and will rarely need to apply to job postings. Don’t get me wrong, I am a proponent of leaving no stone unturned and trying all methods of attracting talent, but I can honestly say that I haven’t signed into a job board for the last ten years and don’t think I ever will.

Our most successful recruitment initiatives are focused on passive talent. Bringing together two earlier points of empathy and the value of keeping an open mind to better opportunities, our campaigns target qualified candidates with direct outreach, selling the opportunity to better their careers. Individualized, personalized outreach with an understanding of our client’s needs and those of our candidates is a delicate dance and comes with years of experience within our industry. Motivation for change comes from many factors. It could be a micromanaging line manager, instability, compensation/benefits, company culture, or lack of career growth, to name a few. Once we identify qualified candidates, we aim to learn what makes them tick and offer them a better situation. It all sounds easy on paper, but gainfully employed professionals who lead busy lives, professionally and personally, don’t always see opportunities for what they are.

What has helped us, along with our extensive database, is our referral network and the overall trust of our clients and candidates. The relationships we have cultivated through clear and open communication, empathetic advisory, and, most importantly, delivery have led us to succeed where others continue to spin their wheels. Trust with our clients and hiring managers results in more open communication, letting us know the good, the bad, and the ugly to ensure we are transparent with the candidate pool on the challenges the position is looking to solve. Over the years, I have placed over 1,000 candidates, many of whom continue to provide referrals for some of the best talent in the industry.

In short, to be more successful at identifying and attracting candidates, you have to do things differently than your competitors; otherwise, you are swimming in the same pool. The typical job postings and job board methods shouldn’t be abandoned, but their efficiencies only go so far. Understanding your candidates, their wants, and their needs are becoming increasingly important, especially in the candidate-driven market we’ve been in over the last couple of years.

Once talent is engaged, what’s your advice for creating a great candidate experience and ensuring the right people go through the process?

The most successful companies make it easy for candidates to apply and continually engage them until a hiring decision is made. Once a decision has been made (positive or negative), let the candidate know. Clear and open communication builds trust during a potentially stressful time in the candidate’s life. Have clear expectations on the number of interviews, and the timing between interviews, while maintaining an open line of communication with candidates throughout each stage of the process.

We all know that hiring managers are busy, and it isn’t easy to get the feedback needed, especially when interviewing multiple candidates for one position. Conducting a two or three interview process can pair down the list of applicants to take less of the leadership’s time. For example, many of my clients will conduct an initial call with HR to ensure the candidate meets the minimum qualifications and to answer company-related questions that the candidates may have. Afterward, they will have a second interview with a hiring manager or someone more accessible on the team to dive deeper into specific knowledge, skills, and problem-solving abilities. The last interview will be a select few that the manager feels best fit the vacancy. Those candidates are invited to interview with a panel of team members, including direct managers and leadership. Let’s say ten candidates apply. HR then passes the top five for the initial team-member interview, of which three make it to the final round.

This process ensures feedback is easily and quickly disseminated across the hiring manager, HR, and the candidates. Those who don’t make the cut can get scratched off the list, while the others can move on to the next step.

Time kills deals! If there is one thing that lowers your chance of hiring talent, it is time. It pains me to think of all the times we have lost out on a candidate because another company moved more quickly through the interview process. An offer in hand, especially the first, is a compelling motivator. This is the time when a change becomes real. They start to visualize themselves in the new position, with the new salary and rehearse giving notice to their boss. Most importantly, they think about the company that made them the offer, not the other interviews in the queue.

There is a delicate science to thoroughly vetting talent and moving quickly. However, teams aware of the pitfalls of the slow and painful interview process will most likely address these issues and, ultimately, attract and hire better talent.

Based on your experience, how can HR and culture professionals work with the broader organization to identify talent needs?

There is a popular adage that says, “People don’t quit companies; they quit managers.” The opposite is true when it comes to recruiting. The interview process is kind of like speed dating. Even if you follow the three interview process noted above, there is only so much information that a candidate and hiring team can gather about one another in such a short time. This means a lot of the decision-making is based on first impressions.

HR is usually the first point of contact for candidates. There is a big difference between someone who truly believes in their company and mission and those who are just checking off checkmarks and moving people into one of two buckets. Hiring, training, and developing motivated HR and talent acquisition members who interact positively with candidates is extremely important. If you don’t get a good vibe from HR, it sours the rest of the interview process.

This is even more important when it comes to the hiring team. Pick team members whose personalities are in accordance with your company’s missions and beliefs. Having a warm and bubbly HR contact is a great first start, but a candidate is sold on working with people they click with, trust, and set clear expectations of what life looks like for someone in the position. I am not suggesting overselling the role or underselling the challenges. I am offering the opposite advice. To find the best long-term fit, you need to be open and upfront; however, there is a big difference between interviewing with team members who are genuinely engaged or even excited about what they are doing and others who are just trying to fill a slot.

Is there anything you see that recruiters, internal or otherwise, do regularly that makes you think, “No, stop doing that!”?

In the last couple of years, we’ve heard the terms coined The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting. The fact is that there has been a war for talent in most industries. Candidates are being inundated with outreach, and the messages are, overall, falling flat.

I receive a lot of outreach for potential jobs, and I am almost embarrassed for my industry with some of the messages that make their way to my inbox. Many are entirely off the mark, do not provide any value proposition, or are blanketed messages that you can tell are sent to hundreds of people, hoping that at least one fish gets caught in the net.

I’ve already mentioned that I am a big fan of direct outreach. If you want to post your job on the website or a job board, go ahead, that is completely fine. But, while you cast a few fishing lines on the boat, grab a spear, put on your scuba gear, jump into the water, and go hunting. You might have a fish or two on one of the lines when you surface. However, I can guarantee you will be much more successful by creating a proactive outreach campaign, targeting qualified individuals, and creating a value proposition on how your offer can better their lives.

With so much noise and competition out there, what are your top 3 ways to attract and engage the best talent in an industry when they haven’t already reached out to you?

1. Start the conversation early with passive candidates. Let candidates know who you are and what you do. Become a familiar name. The more people are familiar with your company, the more open they will be to start a conversation. Ideally, you want to create a value proposition that would entice them to make a change, but if the timing is off, you’ve at least planted the seed for when the timing is better.
2. Individualize your outreach. People want to be seen and heard. They want to feel that their experience is valued. Try to individualize your outreach the best you can. If you talk directly to your candidates as people rather than a pool full of people, you will start to gain their trust and interest.
3. Differentiate yourself from all of the noise. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We can take this further and add the same thing your competitors do without success. Think about what your competitors aren’t doing that would add value to your candidates. Even better, think about what they are doing poorly and how you can do it better. Great ideas with poor execution are different from poor ideas.

What are the three most effective strategies you use to retain employees?

Employee retention is just as necessary as talent acquisition. The more people you lose, the more you need to hire and backfill. Even if you backfill the role quickly, you still need to train the new hire, who will not be as effective as the person who left for a while. In other words, turnover is a negative sum game. Losing one plus hiring one is still a loss of knowledge, talent, and efficiency in most cases. To help retain employees:

1. Develop leadership from within. Create an environment with upward mobility, training, and line management representing the company’s mission and goals.
2. Maintain fair and equitable pay and benefits. Well-compensated employees will generally work harder, stay at the company longer, and be more apt to assume responsibilities outside their job descriptions. Conversely, and especially since the pandemic hiring boom, I have seen more and more people leave their jobs strictly due to compensation. You are at risk if competitors pay 10–15% more for similar talent.
3. Conduct exit interviews to identify and address potential satisfaction issues early. There are two reasons why people make a job change. The first is the reason that sounds good, and the second is the real reason. Although many people will want to leave on good terms, it is crucial to see if any areas within your organization are leading to turnover. You’ll want to phrase the questions in a way that doesn’t make the person uncomfortable to tell the truth. For example, “If we could make three changes that would make life at XYZ company better for our employees going forward, what would they be?”

Bonus:

1. Counteroffer often! Sometimes people don’t feel appreciated or are scared of confrontation. Maybe they are too nervous to ask for a raise and find it easier to find another position to avoid uncomfortable conversations with their manager. To be clear, counteroffers don’t need to be just about salary. It is an opportunity to listen to the employee’s concerns which will give you, the employer, a chance to address them (or not). Of course, salary may be a part of it, but usually, there is more going on. Worst case scenario, you get to treat this as a pre-exit interview to gain insight for the company. In the best-case scenario, you have a worthwhile conversation and retain the person you were about to replace. Even if you see a 20% counteroffer acceptance rate, it could positively impact your business without needing to replace, rehire, and retrain.

Here is the main question of our interview. Can you share five techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill? Please share an example for each idea.

1 . Create a monetized referral program. Most industries are at least somewhat tightly knit, and tapping into your greatest resources, your employees, is a great way to find and attract candidates. Since the employee’s reputation is on the line, you tend to receive better quality referrals than the general market. In addition, the candidate has an internal champion which means both the employee and the candidate are champions for one another, creating a sense of commitment. There is a word of caution. If you compensate too high, people will either a) work the system or b) send over anyone and everyone to collect the bounty. For example, I’ve seen posts on LinkedIn where companies have been offering $10k referral bonuses. Employees then post that they will split the bonus if you send them your resume and let them put in the referral to receive the compensation. In my experience, most referral bonuses will range from $500-$5,000k without issues arising.

2 . In addition to any passive outreach (job postings, mass emailing campaigns, website applications, etc.), create and execute active outreach campaigns that target qualified candidates. Only use well-thought-out and meaningful messages that deliver a value proposition on WHY the opportunity is of value. This is easier said than done, as you need to know your target and their motivations. If you are large enough to have multiple recruiters, separating them by skill set is valuable. The deeper their knowledge, the better they will be able to connect with the candidate and create a meaningful relationship.

3 . Get hiring managers involved. Very often, the interview and hiring process feels cold and detached. Usually, you meet with someone in HR that you will never talk to again once you start. Afterward, you may meet with some people on a team that you will only vaguely work with or may be assigned to another hiring manager you’ve never met. If you can personalize the journey and get your managers involved early, you go from just filling a position to trying to fill the position. It may seem like an insignificant change in terminology, but people want to feel that their experience is valued. They want to make a difference in their job and not just be replaceable cogs in the wheel (even if, in reality, we are all replaceable to some degree). A great example is having the hiring manager post and promote the position on their LinkedIn profile with either a short video or at least a short writeup on why someone should join their team. Motivation, excitement, and candidness are all infectious in a good way.

4 . Along with its aid in retaining employees, creating an internal growth plan is a great way to fill higher lever, more specialized, and harder-to-fill positions. By promoting up the ladder, you can backfill the lowest rung, which is usually easier, cheaper, and lowers the risk of finding the right candidate. In the simplest of terms, if you promote a manager to director, then backfill the manager position with an internal promotion, you now need to backfill the associate-level position instead of taking the risk of hiring the leadership position externally.

5 . Partner with a staffing agency that is an expert in your niche. Of course, I am at least a little biased here, but there is a reason why we are the preferred vendor for many of our clients. Staffing agencies can add value in multiple ways, whether scaling up search efforts during times of growth, supplying contractors to plug in gaps or fill in holes, or acting as brand ambassadors that have their finger on the pulse of the industry. There are many times that we are brought in to fill positions that have been open for well over a year. By asking the right questions and learning about the opportunity and the team(s), we have created the right value proposition and attracted and ultimately filled the positions. The best part is that the candidate, the hiring team, and HR are all mutually excited.

We are very blessed to have some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a private lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this.

This is a great question; I would probably have to list two here. The first is Tim Ferris. My industry is based on influencing the decisions of others with the ultimate goal of helping to make life better. Tim has built a fantastic career surrounded by the best of the best, the most interesting of the interesting, and the wisest of the wise. To be able to tap into even a little of his collective knowledge and influencer reach would be incredible.

The second would be the 14th Dalai Lama. The world is becoming more complex, more divisive, and more violent. If you step back, away from the noise and the nonsense of our daily troubles, we all have limited time on this earth. Many of us can use a reminder of how enjoyable life can be to live in the present, that we are more similar to other people than we are different, and that the pursuit of happiness is more important than wealth, power, or prestige. I couldn’t think of anything more humbling than a private lunch with someone who embodies these qualities and helps others live their best lives.

How can our readers continue to follow your work online?

I am active on LinkedIn and can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbenjamin/

Thank you so much for these fantastic insights!