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The Death Watch

2/1/05

I look back fondly on my time working as a salaried employee.  It was fun, really--I got up, drove into my place of employment, and for eight hours, I (probably) did some work, attended some meetings and sailed home at a reasonable hour.  A lot of my day laborer friends did, and do, the same thing.

Still others work on bigger salaries, my lawyer friends, my doctor friends, my I-banking friends.  They get paid a shitload of money for much longer hours, often much more chance of negative responsibility (getting countersued or hit with a malpractice case, for example, if they aren't doing the right things), and don't have necessarily set schedules--they might regularly work 70-hour weeks, or work weekends, or work when clients need for them to work, if they are on call.

Either way, the salaried employee knows how much money they are going to make at the end of the year, not counting a percentage bonus the company might pay you based on your personal performance, company performance, or both.  So, as someone who has worked with a fair bit of comfort over the years knowing how much I would make in salary, it's a shock to the system to know that as a technical recruiter, I am now working not only on salary...

...but, on commission.

Prior to last fall, I had never worked on commission, because I had always been afraid of "adjustable income"...now, I realize that there is a pretty sweet upside to working on commission.  And, from the looks of it, a fairly painful downside as well.

Here's our setup:  at my firm, recruiters get paid anywhere from $40K to $60K in base salary, depending on time served, market tenure, etc.  As you can imagine, I am on the low end of this scale.  Then, we get a commission.  That commission is a percentage of every person that we put to work, based on their pay rate versus a bill rate to the client.  (Yes, this means that I do, in fact, work in the flesh trade.)  So, in essence, I make anywhere from 2-8% of a "spread" (bill rate minus pay rate) per hour for every hour that person goes to work.  My early guesstimates and information fed to me by HR tells me that our folks make anywhere from $60K to $150K, depending on your headcount.  Our top recruiter last year ended the year with almost 80 people working for her; generally, folks that have been there for more than five years are all making a hundred grand a year.

In general, it's good to be putting people to work, because the more people you have working for you at any one time, the more money you are going to make on top of your base salary.  In our business, we are required to place 3-4 people a month in contract or full-time positions.  Rookies like myself are not subjected to this quota until six months have passed, but so far things are looking okay; I made six placements in my first two months, so things started off just fine.  What management didn't tell me when they promoted me last fall was that each quarter, the Senior Vice President of the region and your Sales Director meet with you--and your whole team, all at once, in the board room--to discuss your sales results and how you did against the company quota.

This, of course, is not a problem if you make your quota...but, if you don't, you are unofficially on The Death Watch.  Main difference between working on salary and working on commission:  when you get to work tomorrow at your salaried job, chances are that everyone you worked with today are probably going to be there.  But, in the commissioned office...

...you just never know.

So, we had our Q4 2004 meeting with management last week.  I was nonchalant about it, since I had never been to one before but I'm a rookie, so I was confident that no one was going to yell at me.  That changed when I got into the room, and I was handed the fourth-quarter summary of sales results for my team.

Kerry, our resident team lead and long-tenured senior recruiter, had made 9 sales for the final three months of last year; this included a fairly nice December, given that we are fairly slow with hiring in the last month of the year.  I had six for the two months that I was charted, so again, kudos from the SVP.  I was eating cookies and soaking this up, because I realized two minutes into this meeting that I might never be this relaxed in the quarterly meeting ever again.

Sharee was next.  She had made five sales over three months, and she was working through pregnancy months four, five and six during fourth quarter last year.  This seemed to carry some weight with management, who didn't seem to question her results nearly as much as I would have.  But, Sharee is also just about the coolest woman in the office, so that may have had just as much to do with it.

I looked down at the sheet with our team's results; the next two reviews were going to be nasty.  Our SVP turned to Joel, father of two, the only male on my team, a guy that makes a chocolate chip cookie so tasty I told him to quit our firm to start up a Mr. Fields.  As nice a guy as Joel is, he had made one sale over the final three months of last year.

"Joel," started the SVP.  "Looks like you had a rough quarter.  What can we do to make this number come up this quarter?"

Joel wouldn't admit it later, but it looked like his forehead was glistening.

"You know, I was just working on a lot of hard requirements.  The skill sets were hard to find, and I just didn't have the kind of luck I was hoping for--"

"What kind of requirements are we talking about?" the SVP shot back.

Joel went into some of the jobs he was trying to fill--SS7 engineers (infamously difficult), J2EE developers that were US Citizens or Green Card holders (simply, Americans don't do Java/J2EE development), TAM engineers.  He also mentioned--correctly--that he was often given jobs to work on with Freddie Mac, which usually has amongst the hardest requirements in our business.

The SVP seemed satisfied by this, but the room was as tense as I had ever seen it.  And, we still had one person to go--Natasha.  Natasha sits next to me and is the Good Times Machine; she's unflappable when it comes to being discouraged, she's always having a good time, she goes out late on Wednesdays, she goes to NYC all the time to party.  Unfortunately, Natasha had also made just one sale in Q4, and worse, she has been with my company for more than a year.  The SVP almost seemed to be saving Natasha for last.

"Natasha, I won't lie to you, I'm a little surprised by these results.  You've had some great hits for us in the past...is there...what's going on with the requirements you have been working on?"

This time, I was the one sweating.  I was truly afraid that the SVP was going to fire Natasha right there.  I also knew that Natasha couldn't fire back with some of the same reasoning that Joel just used; she wasn't given requirements that were as hard, and she has had success placing candidates at Freddie before, her main account.

"You know, I think I just had a bad quarter.  And, I did take about three weeks of vacation between the beginning of October and the end of the year.  I think that had something to do with it.  But, I know that I'll be able to bounce back this quarter."

The SVP (and everyone else assembled) respected that Natasha took the no-bullshit high road in her answer, so after pledging to get her the chance to make a killing in January, he went into corporate bullshit mode, at which point I tuned out.  The meeting was over, and when we got back to our cubes, Natasha leaned over the wall.

"Justin, if you see the SVP call me into a meeting any time soon, just make sure to have my box ready.  I'm probably on the Death Watch."

I hated to admit it, but it's probably true--if she has another couple of bad months (she only had one sale in January), she might be out the door.  It's hard to work this way, under constant pressure to perform, but if you DO perform, it's all gravy, and the happy stay happy.  Seems like if you can hang around for the first two, maybe three years, avoid burnout and make your quota each year, the company keeps you around long enough to avoid any kind of quarterly disaster.  But, what if you don't?  17 people have quit or been let go in the 9 months I have been with the company; some folks just didn't have the right skills, some jumped off the ship before the axe found their heads, some went back to a more relaxing work environment.

But, I'm loving this stuff.  It's like a friend of mine said--sales work is the only kind of work that is truly like playing sports without actually working on an athletic field.  The great thing about recruiting has been that our hardest workers make the most money.  The slackers don't make as much money, and in a lot of cases, they get the boot.  There's no hiding in "the system" in sales work; that guy you hate in the salaried environment that is living off of the system and not doing much work can't exist at a company like mine, which literally demands month-to-month results from a person or they get fired.  Okay, the stress level is high--I don't know how some of these recruiters work knowing that they have to support a spouse and a kid or two--and the last 10 days of a month can really be touchy if you are having a bad month of sales.

And that's what makes getting up and going to work so easy nowadays.  If I don't, I could be the Natasha of this quarter's meeting with the SVP.  Just don't put me on the Death Watch.

 

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell and Longer Community Trust:

• The Internet:  Opening Weekend

• Meeting dudes on eHarmony:  $9.50 Show

• Regularly getting called a nerd:  Matinee

• Paying cover:  Rental

• Comcast DVR:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com