Bad Recruiters

Preface: I have been thinking of posting this for a while now but I haven’t had the time. This article is not in any way directed at any one individual or company and given the timing of the post it is not associated with recent people or organizations either. I am also referring to third party recruiters and not internal corporate recruiters.

I think everyone gets spammed by recruiters now-a-days. I am going to tell you about my experience. I have been working with this recruiter on a specific job. It was all confirmed and I sent this person all the pertinent information. 5 minutes later I get another email from the same person. It is the exact same job and same email this person sent me a few hours ago. When I asked why I was getting this repeated email I was told that I was on a spam/group email list that they used.?

First of all, that is terrible because I thought that I was being submitted specifically for this role because I fit the mold. Why is this person submitting more candidates to muddy the water!

I have been noticing a very disturbing trend. Now I know that not all recruiters do this but there is a large number that do. They are giving the proper recruiters a bad name because of it.?

When a recruiter randomly sends out mass emails about a role they are trying to get a number of people to respond back to get qualified people for a role. That makes sense in the short term. After a while however the people being sent these emails will start to feel like they are not being heard. So we start to place certain recruiters on a spam filter.

This is not just a problem at the first email communication. When a recruiter starts doing this they sometimes start to get complacent. I cannot tell you how many times I have written a long email back to a recruiter explaining my situation and them not reading it! Then they call me and asks the same questions that were answered in the email or was in my resume.?

The real problem with this is the client company that is trying to fill a job will now gets hundreds if not thousands of resumes/CV’s submitted to a role that the client and possibly even the employee don’t fit. This is because the recruiters are not actually reviewing anything. Or if they are they are just skimming the email and/or resume.

The client company is paying these recruiting companies large amounts of money to get them the right employee for the job. Instead they are just wasting both the employee and the clients time by submitting unqualified candidates in large quantities.

What is sad is that the recruiters actually think that this is a sustainable solution. Well, it is not. I have been working with good recruiters that actually interview me, read my resume and communications and I keep them updated on my situation and vise-versa.

When a good recruiter calls they schedule a call with me and don’t call me at 6:00am or on Sunday at 9:00pm. When they do schedule a call they are on time and they actually call. They don’t schedule a call and then ghost me for two days or don’t call back at all! If you don’t get the job for some reason, a good recruiter will email you back and tell you why you didn’t get the job and some amazing ones will forward the reasons why! You know what I do with the bad recruiters. I block their emails and phone calls.

This is a bit of a rant but I am not the only employee who is fed up with bad recruiters. I hear this issue from coworkers, friends, family, bosses, and even a few CEO’s I have interviewed with. The community of recruiters out there needs to be aware that not everyone is happy with how some of you do business.

Please post a response to this article, good or bad. I would love to hear your experiences and stories when it comes to recruiters. I believe it is important to get alternate perspectives on experiences that I have had in my own life. Thank you!