Jeremy Johnson has a new guest blog post this week on what it is like to be a recruiter. Hopefully it will shed some light on what recruiters deal with when they look for candidates and how you can help them if you are recruited for a job.
Jeremy is a recruiter in Kansas City for EHD Technologies, a recruiting, staffing and managed services company serving the IT, Engineering and Automotive industries.
The Recruiting Life
Recruiting is simple; it’s just not easy.
I tell that to people all the time. By simple, I mean that the mechanics of the job aren’t rocket science. It’s pretty straight-forward. But, actually doing the job successfully over the long haul, well, that’s not easy. From the outside looking in, recruiting probably looks like a piece of cake. You find peoples’ resumes, you call them, ask them a few questions and get them a job. No problem, right? Oh, how I wish that were so.
I’ve worked with some great people who just couldn’t do the job. They saw it from the outside, thought it would be great, got into it and in six months, admitted it was a lot tougher than they thought and were ready to quit. Below are several of the reasons why – a bit of perspective from the recruiter’s side of the fence. This profession is a lot like herding cats – while blindfolded – and you have to have a high tolerance for things you can’t control. It’s tough.
The point isn’t to ask for sympathy. Our skin is thick enough that we definitely don’t need it. But, you might be surprised by what our world looks like from the inside. Here’s a glimpse.
Working for free: One of the toughest things about recruiting is that you can do a ton of work and not get paid for it. It’s actually a major reason companies use recruiters and staffing firms: they don’t pay a dime unless someone starts a job. Since most recruiters are compensated based on productivity (i.e. how many people they get hired), doing a lot of work to have no one start can be a big letdown. It can also play havoc with your monthly budget since your paycheck is constantly changing.
It’s a roller coaster: Recruiting has a lot of highs and lows. It can have stretches where things seem easy: you’re finding good candidates, interviews go smoothly and you’re putting lots of people to work. And with it, your productivity numbers are climbing, your compensation improves and you’re getting a lot of pats on the back. Then, what follows is weeks where you seem absolutely cursed: you can’t find the right people, open positions fall through for any number of reasons, background checks and drug screens are failed, candidates make outlandish demands or counteroffers that lose the job, and a contractor walks off the job site and simply disappears. And then, you finally fill that impossible position and things start to turn back around, then that person quits after two weeks to accept another offer that they’ve been hoping all this time would come through. Agh!! These sorts of things happen all the time.
Multi-tasking on steroids: A huge frustration of working for free that I described above is all the work that goes on behind the scenes while you’re doing the work of trying to fill open positions. Multi-tasking on steroids is probably the best title for this problem but I refer to it as the headless chicken syndrome. Every day, we’re bouncing all over the place, switching gears a hundred times a day. It includes everything from traditional candidate sourcing and phone screening, to pre-employment screening and paperwork, to resolving contractor questions (which come up a lot!), to client meetings and interview walk-ins, to HR issues like workers comp, discrimination or harassment, and more. Again, this stuff isn’t rocket science, but you can be pulled in so many different directions at a moment’s notice, you can feel like a human pinball. For those craving evenness and consistency in their day, recruiting is not for them.
Incomplete, inaccurate or changing job descriptions: Granted, it’s frustrating when a recruiter gives vague or inaccurate information on a job they’re calling you about. In our defense, most of the time we’re caught in the middle and we can only give the information that was given to us. Sometimes the job descriptions we have to work from are several years old. Sometimes they were written by someone who’s no longer there and the new manager has different priorities – which may not be fully expressed until you’ve spent a week finding and sending candidates that match the job description on file, only to have them turned down because they don’t fit what the new manager wants but didn’t verbally express. Or, the candidates you send make the hiring manager rethink the true need, and he changes the search criteria – after you’ve invested several days on your current search. Oh, and guess who gets to contact the candidates you’ve already submitted and break the news? That’s right; you do.
Lack of feedback: One of the biggest frustrations I hear from job seekers is lack of feedback. I completely agree! That’s because most of the time, I’m in the same boat. We submit candidates and then get no response. Or, a manager turns down one of our candidates, won’t tell us what they don’t like but still wants us to send more people – basically, turning it into a game of mind reading. Frustrating!
The 11th hour surprise: This could also be called the giant question mark. And it’s the one that all recruiters work to avoid (and why good recruiters ask so many “lockdown” questions). You’ve spent hours screening resumes and making lots of calls; you’ve found the right candidate, confirmed their fit and interest in the job; they do an initial phone interview for the position, and it goes great; the client company tells you afterwards that this is an awesome fit and they want to do a face-to-face interview which, if it goes as expected, should result in an offer. You excitedly call the candidate with the good news…….and that’s when it happens. “Yeah, I’m sorry but I can’t interview. One of my old bosses called this morning, and I’m going to go back and work for him.” Didn’t see it coming and no lockdown question could have avoided it. Completely out of our control and completely frustrating.
Having offers declined: This is only slightly better than the 11th hour surprise, but worse than if someone else’s candidates got the job. Everything that goes into getting someone hired goes out the window if they get the offer but don’t accept. A good recruiter will ask the candidate if they think they’ll accept the job if offered but nothing’s a guarantee. As recruiters, we selfishly want a good person to the get right job. Again, we’re working for free until someone we represent gets hired. Once the process gets to this point, you’re often starting over if yours is the lead candidate who then declines the offer, and all that work has been pro bono.
Hiring managers not ready to make decisions: Nothing is worse for a recruiter than to have someone call you in desperate need of help (“I need to interview immediately for three positions, so send me people within the next two days!!”), you respond quickly, send great candidates and then……nothing. This usually happens when someone jumps the gun and isn’t actually in a position to hire yet. Maybe they didn’t have budget approval after all, another decision-maker vetoes the hires, they didn’t win the contract our candidates were supposed to support, or they decide – nevermind – they’ll fill the openings internally. Regardless, you’ve done a lot of work, disappointed several candidates, and it’s not fun.
When candidates are unethical or untruthful: I hate to break it to you, but it happens. Candidates don’t always tell us the truth, and it can put us in a real pickle when we put them in front of a client company. For example, I’ve had a candidate tell me and a client company that he was great with a software program crucial to a particular six-month contract position. He talked us into doing pre-employment testing on the software at home, instead of at our office, and the testing score was excellent. He got the job but after his third day, the hiring manager called us, concerned that the contractor couldn’t even operate the most basic functions with the software. Needless to say, I had to fire him after less than a week. Because we still had to pay him for his hours but couldn’t bill the client since we put an unqualified person to work (since we “confirmed” his qualifications with our testing), we ate the cost, part of which I paid back out of my own paycheck. Talk about adding insult to injury.
Necessary but uncomfortable conversations: Yes, recruiters have to fire people. Fortunately, I haven’t had to do it much, but it’s never fun. I’ve also had discussions with people about why they failed to show up for an interview, about personal hygiene at work, about yelling at our admin staff, about no longer being able to work with them, or why I can’t submit them for a certain position when they demand that I do or desperately need a job. You’d be shocked at how many uncomfortable phone calls recruiters have to take part in.
This list was by no means comprehensive. There’s a lot more that makes a recruiter’s life challenging and unpredictable. I hope you’ll leave with at least a grudging respect for what we do. If not, then maybe at least some understanding of what a recruiter deals with on a regular basis. Like I said, it’s simple, just not easy.