Curiosity May Have Killed the Cat, but it Helped the Recruiter

“Yes – things are good in my current role. My manager and I are very close and work well together…She did say I would get promoted last year, and I still haven’t heard anything, but I still like it here.”

Right as you are about to wrap up the call, you hear these words from a candidate that you are speaking to.

You realize how hungry you are as you finish up this call – literally hungry. It makes sense since you skipped breakfast to get into the office early so you can get those phone screens done.

Normally you would continue the screen and probe further, but it’s a Thursday. Thursday is a special day. Thursday is the day you treat yourself to Chipotle… and you just can’t wait to get your double meat chicken bowl. If you leave now, you may be able to beat the lunch hour rush.

You were looking forward to this!

For the past week, you’ve been working on a tough-to-fill role, one of those positions where the skillset is hard to find, the pay is never high enough, and it's wrought with rejection, but the client is only working with one other vendor so you have a shot at filling this.

The more candidates you can speak to, the better.

After 5 minutes on the phone, you know right away that this candidate is not fit for this role. She keeps glowing about how much she likes her manager, and besides, she’s way too expensive!

Realistically, it wouldn’t hurt to wrap up the call then and there. You can’t stop thinking about your lunch and how excited you are to eat it, you may even chips and guacamole with your burrito bowl…. but something gnaws at you on the inside, a feeling that there is more you can do on this call, a little sign to probe further.

She did take your call for a reason, right?

But would it really make that much of a difference if you thanked the candidate for her time and then stayed in touch in the future? She did say that she was perfectly happy in her current role, she is making way more than the role you have open pays, and it sounds like she and her manager are besties…

Something is still biting at you though, and it’s not just your stomach growling for fast food. There is something about her tone that tells you that things are not 100% perfect in her current role, and you know deep down this could be a legitimate need on the candidate’s part.

But…Chipotle.

Finally, the better part of your judgement takes hold and you put on your big boy pants and probe further.

You ask:

“Interesting – it sounds like things are going really well, but I am curious, what does long-term growth look like in your current organization? Is there a clear path of upward trajectory?”

Candidate (after a slight pause):

“Well, actually…not really. I really like my manager and we’ve worked so well together in the past, but if I really wanted to get into a director-level role, I may have to consider making a move at some point.”

Right then and there, an opening. A need from the candidate.

The conversation goes back and forth for another 20 minutes. It turns out, the candidate was open to a new role, but nobody had asked her just yet what her true motivations for work were. At least not beyond salary, work from home flexibility, and skillset. Nobody had probed further than the traditional, run-of-the-mill phone screen questions. Nobody had framed the question in a nuanced enough way to find that out.

No recruiter had been curious enough to keep asking.

On paper it looked like this candidate had everything she needed in her current role, but with the right questions, one could see that she was open to a change. ?

6 weeks later, you coincidentally find that same candidate a director-level role with a good client and stable company that she is interested in. She interviews and gets the job a few weeks after that.

You did have to rush your Chipotle lunch on that fateful Thursday, but the placement of a happy candidate was well worth the short-term “sacrifice.”

Does this story sound familiar?

Curiosity and its Natural Decline with Age:

Though this story is fictious, I would wager that most of us have had similar conversations with candidates in our careers - those who were happy on paper, but after further discussion had a legitimate need that their current employer was not fulfilling.

All because we were curious enough to ask those deeper questions.

Curiosity is an interesting concept. When we are young, we are taught to be cautious for good reason – children are naturally curious beings and will often take risks unbeknownst to them out of pure wonder, awe, and inquisitiveness: babies put things that they should not in their mouths all the time, toddlers touch the big red button out of pure curiosity, and puppies chew on shoes that look like potential food. ?

Because “why not?” The only way to know if something is good or not often is to try and learn from the outcomes.

Over time, with enough conditioning, bruises, scolding's, and natural consequences, we learn some common sense for our own safety - a healthy level of caution.

We know that spending hours out in the sun without sunscreen is probably a bad idea. We know that if we put our finger on the stove, it will hurt, so we don’t do it. We know that eating that extra slice of pizza at 12:30am will come back to bite us in the morning, so most of the time we know to stop scrolling the Dominos menu after hours. ?

The point is, there is a healthy level of caution that allows us to function, survive, and flourish as adults. And this is a good thing. However, when taken too far on the other end of the spectrum, this conservatism completely shuts off the risk-taking curiosity bug inside all of us.

When taken to an extreme, a lack of curiosity can massively stifle growth.

If we are never curious enough to learn about something, to explore, and to ask why or how people or things work, we cut off the opportunity for growth proportionate to how soon we stop asking. Failure and sometimes (within reason) pain are necessary parts of the evolution of human beings. Often, we only learn what NOT to do, by doing something and learning the consequences of that action. On the flip side, by being curious we discover golden information that would have been unavailable to us otherwise.

The Curious Headhunter

When we take this into the context of recruiting, we can see how a lack of curiosity can hinder growth.

In our first recruiting jobs, we are taught early on to ask questions about each new candidate that we speak to, with the goal of uncovering the following information:

• Skillset
• Location
• Salary
• Commute
• Timeline
• Reason for Looking

This is the tried and true “recruiter screen.”

A combination of this information can be called a “prescreen”, G2, “qualifying call”, “discovery call”, MOATS (money, opportunity, availability, travel, skillset), or something along those lines.

These questions are listed in different standard forms, but they amount to the same goal – to uncover the necessary information required to submit a candidate for a particular job.

This will cover the required information to submit a candidate for a job - implying that this is the bare minimum amount of information a recruiter needs to submit a candidate.

If a recruiter follows his or her script to a T, asks the standard questions to each candidate, and takes thorough notes, he or she will generally have a good idea if they can submit a candidate to a role. ??

But do these questions teach a recruiter to really probe and dig to find a candidate’s true motives for looking for a role or even being open to taking a call in the first place?

Do these questions help a recruiter look at the candidate as a unique individual rather than a means to an end (submittal)?

Do these questions teach a recruiter to sell a job to a passive candidate who may need some encouragement to explore other options?

By asking standard prescreen questions and focusing on the job at hand, we often overlook fine details such as:

• Candidate that may say that they are perfectly happy in their role, but secretly have been waiting for a promised promotion for over two years.
• Candidates that are already making more than the job you are pitching is offering, but their commute is slowly draining their mental energy and causing friction within their family.
• Candidates that have a cool senior title but have hit the absolute max ceiling in terms of challenge and growth in their job and are secretly bored and looking for a challenge.
• Candidates that have an awesome commute and work for a great company but are secretly working 60–70-hour weeks and scared to speak up about work life balance with their current manager, slowly increasing their resentment.

Many times, early in our career, we are not taught these things – and it is exactly within these nuanced questions that can make the difference between placing a highly sought after candidate or assuming that they are not interested in the potential of a new role and missing out.

Will asking deeper, more curious questions always guarantee success?

Of course, no – we are always still at the mercy of the right timing, having good jobs, and the general market conditions. But asking these questions gives us an undeniable edge to better understand our candidates and what makes them tick. In fact, one could argue that asking higher level questions and uncovering motives, really getting to know candidates is not only ideal, but necessary to reach higher levels of success in recruiting.

Transactional recruiting only goes so far, and frankly is a luxury for only when available jobs and candidates are abundant. One of the few ways to beat transactional recruiting is through curiosity.

ABC – Always be Curious

How does one go about becoming a curious headhunter?

Picture this:

Let’s say you are working on a specific role – you want to find the perfect candidate for a Validation Engineer.

You start calling through the list of searched candidates in the database and ask the typical screening questions. The second candidate that you call picks up the phone and says that he is not looking for a role currently. ?If you take that at face value, you will move on.

However, if you start asking more nuanced questions like:

• “It sounds like things are going well, if you could craft an ideal role that fits the specifications of what you are looking for, what would it look like? Just so that I can put it on my radar.”
• “I understand you want a higher salary – but hypothetically, if I found you something that has more remote flexibility, would you have some wiggle room on your salary requirements? I know you said your current commute is quite long…”
• “What does growth look like in your current role?”
• “How is the rapport between you and leadership?”

And then…you listen.

Do you see how these several questions (and hundreds of other combinations) allow us to try to approach from an angle of curiosity? Rather than trying to fit the candidate we have in front of us into a job that may not be aligned at face value, we take the time to learn about our candidate, uncovering a need with them that may not have been there at first glance.

Often, as soon as we start talking about the role that we are trying to fill, we cut ourselves off to receiving new and valuable information. When we go into each call, while having an agenda, but with an open mind, we allow organic growth to occur, we open ourselves to the possibility of new information and a new relationship. We go into each call with the opportunity to provide value, even if it is as simple as telling the candidate that they have a good situation where they currently are.

Over time, the more we approach each phone screen with a candidate as an opportunity to learn and explore, rather than a means to an end (submittal), we will open ourselves to exponentially more information than we previously thought possible and more importantly, show interest in our candidates who will appreciate someone taking the time to learn about their needs and wants in the job market.

Over time, these types of open-ended, curiosity-driven questions build rapport and plant the seeds for long-term professional relationships with candidates. He who is curious, cares.

If we don’t do this, we shut ourselves off to learning new things that could potentially pay dividends in the long run.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it helped the recruiter. Chipotle can always wait.