Basics of Recruiting 101

I started my career in recruiting in 1995 when the landscape looked a lot different than it does now. I remember that my database was piles of resumes sorted by main skills and sitting in filing cabinets or even on the floor. Many of these resumes were faxes on that horrible thermal fax paper that turned black if it was left in the car in the hot Arizona sun. We posted ads in the newspaper and "smiled and dialed" to speak to as many potential candidates as we could before our competitors did. We physically sat in the room when RFP's were opened so that we could find out who else proposed their services and who the competition was. We had computers that used that horrible dial-up screech to access the limited websites like MonsterBoard.com, now just Monster.com, and a new site that targeted technical professionals called Dice, and it only cost $495 per year.

Fast forward to today. Jobs are posted on various websites, including LinkedIn. Contact is primarily made by email or text. Job descriptions are sent to candidates blindly and not directly discussed with them. Relationships with our candidates are not direct but indirectly done electronically and sometimes candidates are even submitted to the clients without anyone ever speaking with them and sometimes without the candidates permission.

Rewind again to the 90's, and most importantly, candidates were not GHOSTED, we didn't even know what that meant. We built relationships and levels of trust before even considering a submission.

It makes me cringe when I read all of the posts of people looking for jobs, applying to 100's, and often with little to no response. Call me old fashioned, call me antiquated, but a candidate should never submit a resume and then fall into a black hole of unknowing and wonder if they were being considered, this is intolerable. Ghosting should not be a term in the recruiting process, keep it in the haunted houses for the month of October. It is not hard, with today's technology, to provide a response to someone that has applied or been presented to a company to not know where they stand. If you have been interviewed for a position someone should call you if you ultimately were not chosen, not getting a generic email.

When I launched my current company I did it after being laid-off from a company that had recruited me to lead global talent acquisition only to be looking for a job 6 months later following a restructure. I launched TSG to make some placements to make ends meet until I found a new job. I applied to, and I confirmed this recently out of curiosity, 312 positions. What shocked me the most was that I got some sort of response from only 8% of all 312, about 25 of them.

It is Recruiting 101 to close the loop with candidates and closing those loops is what separates recruiters from paper pushers who see what sticks to the wall when submitting, we are all not spaghetti. 17 months later I still haven't landed that job I have been looking for, but like many of us, we push forward and trust on the recruiters that contact us to keep us in the loop on what is happening and to actually speak with us. In the beginning we had just as many candidates as companies do now but they have technology on their side, with a few clicks they can tell you if you are still being considered or not. If you interviewed, they can go back to basics and call you to share why you weren't chosen so that you can learn where your weaknesses and strengths are.

To close this out, recruiting leaders, take your teams back to the basics and build relationships with your candidates so that you can better represent them, whether it be by a recruiter submitting to a client or the internal TA team submitting to a hiring manager. If your team doesn't know the basics, coach them, if you don't know the basics, speak with someone that does because we don't want to see the recruiting process be diminished to a bunch of impersonal emails and automated text messages.