Hi, this is Stephanie Maas.

Today I wanna share with you the most common conversation I am having with clients and potential clients, and it is about the quality of candidates, the market is varying.

Just in the last couple weeks I was on the call.

With a potential client, and I was very appreciative.

They had been referred to me by another client and they called me up and they were very excited.

They said, Hey, we typically don't use search firms, but we've heard great things about you and we really need help on filling this position.

So of course I was very excited.

Tell me all about it.

What are you looking for?

And as we started to get into some of the specifics, I started to understand why they were gonna have a hard time filling the role.

In summary, their expectations were incongruent with the compensation that they were offering.

And so when it became appropriate, I shared with them.

Hey, I really appreciate the call.

And, and before we take it too much further, I probably need to give you some education from the marketplace.

And we talked through a recent search or two that I had done that was very similar to what they were looking for.

In the same market, and I explained the compensation that the market was bearing.

They realized that quite frankly, they were pretty far off the mark.

We talked through a couple possible solutions and at the end of the day they said, well, gosh, if we make those changes, I'm not really sure we're gonna need you.

And while it was difficult to hear that, no one likes to hear that, I said, yeah, you may not.

And sincerely, you should probably try it on your own.

Save yourself my fee for a month and see what you can find.

Of course, if you get stuck and you can't find what you need at that point, please call me back.

I just did similar searches there.

They were so appreciative.

Here's what's interesting and what happened.

They called me a week later and they said, you know what?

We actually don't know if we're gonna be able to find what we want without you.

We really appreciated the approach that you took.

We're gonna give you the search anyway with the new criteria.

Of course, I was super thankful, but what it reminded me of was the conversations of right now in the marketplace, because competition for talent is so high.

What the market is bearing in passive candidates, and that's usually what I get called to go find.

The active ones are pretty easy to locate are let's go to the passive candidate pool.

Unfortunately though, what happens is when they go to call me, what they're thinking is, Hey.

I will take a six or seven without a recruiter fee, but if I'm gonna pay you, they've gotta be a 10 or a 10, or my favorite FA phrase right now is they need to be a purple spotted unicorn.

My response is always the same.

I'm not even sure unicorns exist for me to go find a purple spotted one.

While I think I'm pretty good at what I do, I don't know that I'm.

That good, but here's what I can tell you about with the market's spar.

I can go to the passive candidate pool and I will bring back for you three to four to five folks that are somewhere between a six and a half or an eight outta 10.

That's what the market's bearing.

It may not be a purple spotted unicorn.

It's still gonna probably be a four-legged furry animal that maybe has a tail, and I'm not saying it's a unicorn, but probably pretty close.