A Call to Action for our Recruiting Leaders

After every conference I attend, I go back to the office with my mind full, an extra bounce in my step, and an extra ounce or two of tenacity to get things done. Last week I was a part of the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference (#SRSC) in San Francisco. I am back in my office this week, and my mind is on what our industry's leaders should be doing to show our recruiters how to communicate with candidates. For me, it starts with high quality training, delivered immediately after someone joins the team. We have a worsening recruiter spam epidemic on our hands, and it will not get better without time spent educating our recruiters on effective messaging.

EFFECTIVE MESSAGING AND #FIGHTSPAM

To tee up this article for you, I will start with how I define two phrases: "effective messaging" and the "#FightSpam movement."

A few years ago, Glen Cathey created the phrase “effective messaging” and at Kforce we use it to describe the art and science of creating compelling emails, InMails, tweets, and other messages in a way that earns a response from the message recipient.

The #FightSpam movement involves solving our ever-growing recruiter spam epidemic. Lately, this issue is getting the attention it deserves. Our candidates have been talking about this for a while (see Exhibit A, B and C for examples), and our industry is starting to respond. If you haven’t been in the conversation yet, check out my SourceCon article, read this post by Marie Burns, follow the hashtag #FightSpam on Twitter, and check out the active Facebook group that is open to anyone who believes our industry can do better by candidates. We had our first #FightSpam unconference session at #SRSC last week, and I am sure it will be one of several. Some of our industry’s brightest minds gathered around a conference table and had an hour long active discussion (hat tip to our host Kara Mignanelli and GSMI, our facilitators Stacy Zapar, Andrew Gadomoski, Crystal Miller, and superstars in attendance Jen Davis, Gerry Crispin, Katrina Collier, and every other person in the room!).

TRAINING NEW RECRUITERS

There aren’t many other training topics I feel are as critical to address with new recruiters immediately as effective messaging.  Showing them how to write messages that earn responses from candidates is one of the very first concepts new recruiters in your organization should be taught.

When you bring in a new recruiter to your organization, they may have experience recruiting at other companies, across a variety of environments (RPO, corporate, agency, etc.). They may come with bad habits. They may have been in an environment where quantity, not quality, is measured and celebrated.

Or, your new hires may be what some of us affectionately call “baby recruiters” – those who are brand new to our profession. These are your “blank slates,” with hopefully little to no bad behavior to "unlearn."

Show recruiters how to write that first outreach message to a candidate. Teach them to never spam, no matter how busy they are or how efficient they think it will be. Each message sent should be customized to that unique individual, tying in personal details found beyond the resume (think of sites like GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, etc.). Recruiters should not lead with a job description, but first seek to understand a candidate's current situation, goals, interests, etc. before slapping a JD on them. Plus, job descriptions usually fall significantly short and don’t really depict what the person would do in the job anyway. Definitely not the card to play in the very first contact.

Make the first message to a candidate about THEM, not about you and YOUR needs.

You’ve probably heard dozens of times that it is a candidate’s market. I believe it is. People in our society expect custom experiences and meaningful interactions with brands, in real time. Our industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Online candidate behavior and attitude mirrors consumer behavior – after all, it’s the same people we’re talking about!

Our industry benefits from studying and adopting traditional marketing best practices, such as inbound marketing, using personas, and more. 

We need to teach our new recruiters to customize messages. I suggest a mantra for your new hires:

"Be a person first, and a recruiter second."

It’s a phrase we use at Kforce throughout our social media and effective messaging training programs. A simple sentence packed with a lot of meaning. During your onboarding process, have it up on the screen. Have everyone say it together, out loud. Discuss what exactly this mantra means for their day to day work. It isn’t just a catchy phrase – it really is a way of life. A way of working. Of communicating. A way to approach candidate engagement, the candidate experience, and much more.

We are never going to solve our growing recruiter spam epidemic without comprehensive, next-level training.

I am thrilled about the recent conversations about messaging candidate (another hat tip to Kerri Mills for this insightful article). Effective messaging is not an innate skill – it must be taught. As recruiting leaders, it is our responsibility to support recruiters and provide high quality training to empower them to be successful. Think about your team’s average response rate. Is it 25%? That is a 75% fail rate. Is it more like 13%? That means that, on average, 87% of candidates are flat-out ignoring your recruiters. Talk about a loss of efficiency and productivity! Taking the appropriate time to train your recruiters is a pretty good use of your time, when you put it that way, right?

I want to hear from you. What are you doing to train your recruiters how to message candidates? Does it start with new hires? Do you hold your recruiting managers accountable for developing their team's skills? And finally, when you see one of your recruiters spam candidates, what do you do about it? If you've written about this, please post a link below.