There Is No Chivalry In Recruiting

The business model of a recruiter is really quite simple, but naturally has differences depending on if you are a corporate recruiter or an agency/freelance recruiter. No matter what, all types of recruiters get paid by a company to find the candidate they are looking for. It’s not like in sports where the players have agents to find them clubs they want to play at or to negotiate personal terms if two clubs have agreed to sell or trade said player. No, in recruiting the company is the client – not the candidate. 

The typical recruitment process 

Most companies want to make their customers happy by selling a product that either equals or exceeds the products price in value. The recruiter wants to make the customer (remember it’s the company – not you) happy by finding the best possible candidate that, not only will make the company hire the candidate, but also make it a successful relationship for the ages. To do that the recruiter will sift through many candidates, mostly on LinkedIn, and make contacts with all those that seem like a good fit. Sometimes it might just be dropping them a note after which it ends as the candidate is not interested or the candidate replies in such a way that it turns away the recruiter. In other situations, it leads to a call and an interview with the recruiter. The recruiter will evaluate the candidate like a normal HR interview as well as present the company (s)he is hiring for. Again this might be the end station as the candidate performed poorly in the interview, lacked chemistry with the recruiter or scored poorly in tests. A selected few candidates, however, might make it through to the interviews with the company. Once a candidate is here it might end for all the same reasons as the interview with the recruiter, because the company thought it was a poor cultural fit or simply because they found someone that was better than you. 

Recruiting is not about win-win situations 

Now let’s turn the tables and look at it from the candidate’s point of view. At first you are contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and you are very excited about the opportunity presented. You quickly reply back only to never hear back from the recruiter again! You will never know what happened, but one thing is for sure and that is that you wouldn’t want to work with this recruiter again. On the other hand, if you actually made it through to the next round and had the interview with the recruiter you are now even more excited. However, following the interview you never heard back from the recruiter or at best a month later you get an auto-generated e-mail saying there were other candidates that were better than you (despite you being an awesome candidate). Ok, so once again you will never really know what happened and it’s doubtful if you would entertain any future suggestions from this recruiter. If you were one of the lucky few that made it through all the way to the company interviews this is the time it starts to get really interesting and you practically feel the job is yours. However, two weeks after the interviews you still haven’t heard from the company and you know something is wrong. Right you are, as two days later the auto-generated e-mail hits you again or in the rare case they actually call to tell you that this isn’t your lucky day. Common for all these situations is that the candidate never receives any actual feedback. They learn nothing that can help them get the next job. There is no win in it for them. In fact, only the obvious candidate wins i.e. the one that got the job. 

Where has the chivalry gone? 

Now think about how many candidates actually go through this terrible process every year. Think about how many potential future prospects recruiters lose in this process because they never invested in any of the “losing” candidates. Truth be told, this process is so wasteful that it would never last long in any Sales or Operations department within a company. Most companies employ some sort of process improvement techniques such as lean, six sigma, PDSA (Plan Do Study Act) etc. so that they can learn more about the process and make improvements. It would seem, however, that no recruiter ever offered a candidate to do a PDSA following a rejection. No one is helping the candidate in those cases where they are rejected which is especially terrible when it’s a formality or technicality the candidate could easily rectify that’s stopping them from moving on in the process. Only the great recruiters offer this kind of chivalry to some of their candidates. They can see when they have identified a talent even it might not be the right fit for the particular company they are currently working for. They would even invest time in the candidate to help them understand where they want to go in their careers and help them get there. However, it doesn’t have to be so complicated and time consuming. What if you, the recruiter, took the time to offer each rejected candidate 1-3 real reasons for why they didn’t move on to the next round? I get that this would, of course, take more time than sending an auto-generated message, however, you would also build a relationship with each and every candidate you interact with and compiling a vast talent pool for your next assignment. Remember that having candidates in a database doesn’t matter at all if the candidate is not willing to work with you. Another thought could be to flip the business model upside down. Think about if you were paid by the candidate to help them land a job and you would get a certain percentage of that candidate’s salary for 6-24 months. First of all, you would have an unlimited amount of customers, but more importantly, you would also have an unlimited amount of companies to help hire the best possible candidates out there. 

The recruiting process has to be improved 

I know flipping the business model upside down might not be the way to go as at the end of the day, the company makes the decision about who to hire and they are the ones with the money. However, the process has to be improved to eliminate all the waste it produces. If recruiters just spend 20-30 more seconds on each rejection providing real reasons for why a candidate is rejected it could greatly improve the process. It would bring some chivalry back into recruiting and make it easier for people to get hired for jobs. Is that really too much to ask? 

Does all this sound very much familiar to you? What do you think about the recruiting and hiring process? Is it really broken or you think it works just fine? I hope you have enjoyed reading this first post in a series about job hunting and recruitment where I will publish a handful of post over the coming weeks. If you like what you read why not click the like button or share the post? I also very much encourage you to leave a comment so we can continue the discussion. 

For a few more articles about your career seen from my perspective, you should also check out below articles. 

If I Were 22: Stop Thinking About The Future And Focus On Right Now

Grateful To Be Here Or Already Moving On?

How To Avoid Ending Up Single In Networking 

Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Regional Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line North Europe and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. Anders has participated in several transformation processes amongst others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. He would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. If you are looking for more advice on how to get the most of LinkedIn Anders also has a few tips to share as well as if you want help in your job search. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.