Understanding and appreciating criticism

Our launch of SplitHire went viral on LinkedIn for what an outsider might see as the wrong reasons. We reached 25,000 members in a week.

The post was not crafted or refined by AI and it didn’t have a hook. The business model was the provocative bit. I’ll share it below, skip ahead if you have already seen it.

Here’s the link to the post. 

All negative feedback came from recruiters. I’ll reword their feedback on their behalf to keep them anonymous. These are their two key concerns:

1. The candidate will take the extra money we’re paying them as part of this business model and leave, pocketing the bonus.

2. Being paid will affect candidates motivation in a negative way, and they won’t take the job for the right reasons.

There were other concerns but those would be addressed in a conversation with the client, I don’t want to give away our whole strategy for free. I might cover the further concerns in another post if you are interested.

What we’re doing at SplitHire has never been done before, as far as we can tell. With that comes an element of experimentation within an outdated model. We would only ever work with a very low number of clients at one time to minimise that risk in the first year. We’d also happily change the model if it was not working. That should be obvious - there’s no ego here - simply a desire by the team to improve a broken process and industry that we feel needs a lot of work.

Every client we have now (15 and growing) is either a contact of mine or a referral by one of the team. Our first active hire will have as many eyeballs as possible ensuring everything goes smoothly.

In today’s job market, if you don’t get a good job via a referral or knowing someone, I would argue that you’d feel incredibly lucky. We are placing people in jobs that we think they’ll love, not any role we can find for any person that is an OK match. We talk to thousands of people between us as a team. We will work with the right clients and the right candidates to minimise this risk.

Employers can also choose to stagger what we’re calling a ‘commitment bonus’ or choose to pay it in a month of their choosing, such as Month 9 for example. There is total flexibility. It gives the employer another reassurance that the candidate is not going to jump ship and find something better, which is a risk every employer is running currently. All in all, we’re doing things slowly and carefully until we perfect them. As I’ve said in previous posts, there’s no rush or world domination plans. On that note, someone slid into my email inbox to try and sell me splithire.com this morning for £3000. Let’s look at point 2:

1. Being paid will affect candidates motivation in a negative way, and they won’t take the job for the right reasons.

Signing bonuses are not new. What we do isn’t a signing bonus, but candidates accept roles (in most cases) because they would like to be paid money in order to stay alive. How that money is delivered (salary, bonus etc) isn’t high on their priority list when evaluating the 100+ factors associated with accepting a new role.

Being rewarded does not undermine motivation. It enhances it by aligning incentives and recognising the candidate’s value. Receiving half of a finder’s reward doesn’t change these priorities; it simply acknowledges that candidates contribute to the hiring process too - just like recruiters are paid for their role. Top candidates are driven by opportunity, not a cash bonus.

I’m open to being challenged on all of this thinking by recruiters or employers. I’ve been a candidate, internal recruiter and employer at different stages of my career but it would be unwise to ignore experience. That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop until we get it right.