Cussing out your recruiter: a discussion on disconnections

You guys, I had the BEST most FUN day yesterday. I stumbled into the office, coffee in hand, and was greeted by an elegant and articulate email from a candidate that read like a Shakespearean Sonnet. I won’t rehash the entire thing, but will provide a brief synopsis:

“Ingrid F*$#&$ up the entire process from start to finish. She is a fresh piece of steamy dog poop recruiter. Hands down the worst ever in the county, possibly even in the entire West Coast region. One star review. F%#$ YOU. ”

Yikes. I was awash in emotions. My first reaction was feeling bad for this particular candidate. My second reaction was thinking OMG I’m in trouble. My third thought was wanting to print the email out and frame it because honestly, it was kinda funny.

But I knew I was going to have to address it, and that it was going to be bad, bad, bad.

I mentally girded my loins. I printed out the email and walked over to speak to my boss, hoping I was not going to get shit-canned right then, but prepared for if that was about to go down.

She read the email as I waited. I watched her expressions change as she processed the diatribe and wiped off the nervous sweat forming on my lady-mustache.I scanned the entrances to the office for the security guard who was going to escort me out with my box full of desk accoutrements.

When she finally finished she put the print-out on her desk, looked up at me and said “Oh, Ingrid, this happens ALL the time. Don’t worry about it. I’ll call him. We get these kind of complaints at least once a week.”

Da wha? How? Why?

Well, what happened with this candidate is not unique, because it comes from a place of completely misunderstanding my job and the job of most other recruiters.

You see, I had a job to fill. I got the job order on a Wednesday, and I had until Friday afternoon to compile my list of candidates and present them to the employer. People generally come to us because they are desperate and need people ASAP.

So I had barely 48 hours to locate, interview and qualify 3-5 great people and hope that they were just perfect enough for that particular job to get an interview with the hiring manager. This is not an uncommon timeline whatsoever. My day-to-day is a total mad rush clusterf&#@.

I went to the mattresses. I called people who I knew, people who I found stalking LinkedIn and people who were already in our system from past positions. I managed to find a pool of about 10 “Maybes.” They weren’t maybes because there was anything wrong with them, they were maybes because every single job is a special, unique snowflake and finding the perfect candidate for the company, culture and day-to-day job requirements is tough (hence my paycheck).

I set up a bunch of in-person interviews. I’d have to meet them all, learn their career goals, assess their skills and make sure it was a good match before I could send them over.

The last interviews were happening Friday morning, as I had until exactly 1:00pm that afternoon to send over the right people to my client.

I had a candidate scheduled for a Friday morning interview. It was at 9:00 am here in my office in downtown Seattle. On Thursday night at 9:00 pm he’d sent an email to my work email stating that he was mixed up on the day and was it really Friday? And then he stated that he would need to know that night or he wouldn’t have time to come into Seattle in the morning and make our interview.

You guys, I was assed-out sleeping on Thursday at 9:00 PM. I work my patootie off and I’m also a single parent of a 3 year old. Momma’s tired.

So I got into the office and went right into my early-morning interviews. 9:00 came and went and said candidate no-showed, as he’d mentioned in his email. At that point it was out of my control. From a pure timeline standpoint, I simply would not be able to submit him to the client.

I brushed my shoulder off and did my job. I created a beautiful package of stellar candidates and sent them off to my client. She was pleased. I was pleased.

The candidate was NOT PLEASED. You see, he thought we could just his reschedule the interview for the next week.

He thought we had ALL DAY to get this done and that I was purposefully screwing him out of this job opportunity, when in reality he totally missed the boat. It was far, far away from the dock by the time I’d even had 14 seconds to read through his email.

I left him a voicemail that afternoon explaining that I was very sorry to have missed him and would keep him in mind for future roles.

That was clearly not acceptable to him. He stewed on it all weekend and then cranked out his literary masterwork, the “Ingrid sucks manifesto.”

This happens. A lot. Candidates DO NOT understand our process or really understand our jobs. They think we’re here to help them get work. For free! Just out of the kindness of our hearts. That we can push things back and reschedule and make it work if something comes up in their lives.

What they don’t understand is that we are 100% commission employees and we are providing them with a FREE SERVICE but only if we have a job that they are suited for and a timeline that they can work within.

We are not magicians. We cannot pull a magical sparkly unicorn job for each and every candidate out of thin air.

And, we are in a HURRY. The pace of this work is cuckoo bananas. This week I might be doing database marketing. Next week it could be UI. The week after I’m seeking gaming producers.

It’s this disconnect that creates the bad candidate experience.

A healthy candidate experience would be that we are here to create relationships with you in the long-term. We’ll get to know each other and when the day comes that your perfect sparkly unicorn jobs comes across my desk, I will call you up and you’ll jump with joy because you know that I know you and I want you to be happy and I’d never waste your time because frankly, I have no time to waste.

I don’t even have time to explain this to every candidate. I’m only writing this because it’s Memorial Day weekend and there’s no one home at my client’s offices and I had 3 glasses of white wine last night and I’m kind of feeling like a trash bag with no motivation.

So I hope you understand now where and how the candidate-recruiter relationship should start and what it will look like in the long term. Having realistic expectations allows for smiles on both ends of the transaction.

Or you could just tell me to F*#& off. I can always use a laugh.