Recently, I wrote a blog to (a minority of) candidates titled stop being dicks when they are dealing with recruiters and potential employers. And an interesting thing happened…a recruiter used our anonymous LiveChat feature on our website to complain that I was damaging the reputation of the recruitment industry with my blog. When I was told…I laughed. So Dear Recruiter, whomever you are because you were too afraid of actually using your name, if you think, that advising candidates to treat recruiters and employers with respect is damaging to our industry, you have clearly forgotten the real issues which the recruitment industry faces. Crap Recruiters Yes, it’s a fact of life.
I might complain about candidates being dicks, but there are WAY more complaints about recruiters being dicks. And to be honest, rightly so. Here are the global top complaints by candidates and clients : Candidates:
- Advertising non-existent jobs. I just wish more recruiters got sued for this. It’s lazy, illegal and completely undermines the good operators. How I wish we could name and shame!
- Consultants never return calls – now nobody gets this right 100% of the time, but there are agencies with terrible reputations because their consultants don’t return calls and it damages us all by association.
- The consultant has no idea what they are talking about – candidates lose faith in consultants who ask stupid questions or who call them about clearly inappropriate roles. This is a training issue and everyone makes mistakes, but as an industry we need to provide more support for new consultants to ensure that they are credible with both hiring managers and candidates.
- The consultant never gives feedback – giving a candidate negative feedback is hard and so many recruiters just avoid it by sending a reject email. This can be fixed with training and support, but until it’s the norm for consultants to provide feedback to candidates, we are all damaged by association (again).
Hiring Managers:
- Only putting a bum on a seat – hiring managers like to be consulted to; to feel that we are offering them market insight, offering long term solutions and helping them to think outside the square. If all we are doing is working to a job spec, then we are charging an awful lot of money for not a lot of demonstrable skill.
- Taking the money and running – let’s face, it the job placement is the best and worst moment of our day. We love to place the job and then hate the worry that it will all go wrong. So the bad consultants never follow up on placements. Here we are trying to tell hiring managers that we offer a service and WE are the ones treating it like a commodity.
- The Flick and Stick Recruiter – you know the ones – they spend an hour on a visit with a hiring manager, big noting themselves and not bothering to listen to what the hiring manager actually wants. Then they just flick resumes hoping that one will stick. These recruiters are my pet hate.
And as one recruiter to another – and this is one that neither the hiring manager nor the candidate particularly cares about, but which damages YOUR reputation in our industry; I loathe it when lazy recruiters send resumes to clients/hiring managers without the express permission of the candidate. You completely undermine every ethical, honest, hardworking recruiter in the industry, when you do this. So Dear Anonymous Recruiter, who thinks that me telling candidates to buck up their ideas is undermining the industry, I am not the problem with the recruitment industry. Crap recruiters are.
