How do you know if a recruiter is useless?

Ok, I’ll admit to the title being clickbait (a bit) but it is a good question. How can you tell if the recruiter you’re considering or already working with is terrible? We have an awful reputation as an industry - I feel like I spend a lot of my time apologising for existing. However, a good external recruiter is a huge asset to your business. Now if only you knew how to spot the bad ones…

There’s a few indicators that can help before you’ve invested too much time. 

Invasion of the wasps

A major complaint you might hear from job applicants (or as they like to be known, “humans”) is that recruiters ghost them. With hiring managers or any else in a hiring position in companies, the problem is more like “wasping” - a term I just made up.

You have recruiters constantly messaging you asking for a quick chat, pitching their services, “just wondering if you’re open to using agencies?”

A recruiter pinging you to ask if you might want to hire through an agency doesn’t mean they’re crap. 

Refusing to take no for an answer and contacting you 400 more times is what turns the tide into “this recruiter is a jerk”. 

CV’s sent to you from people you don’t know

A fairly popular form of Business Development is what’s called the “Speculative CV”. It’s like a wee taster. I’m sure anyone in a hiring position will have been sent the rando CV for a job posting. 

This is terrible - it doesn’t really work. Never say never and all that but it has a fairly low rate of return. We can potentially find applicants from just the job posting but without knowing the background and speaking to the company, it’s hard to send anyone truly spectacular. 

It’s like someone posting a ham sandwich through your door as an advert for their shop. They don’t know your position on ham. It's probably not the right time. There's no providence. The sandwich is mostly likely going straight in the bin.

Are they even trying?

A simple test is to check out the recruitment company’s adverts. Take a chunk of the advert and Google it. If you end up on the end-client’s website, that’s not ideal. Also, setting aside qualifications and such, would you apply to those adverts yourself? Do the jobs sound attractive?

If they can’t manage to even write a job advert for other clients, it might indicate they don’t have the knowledge to find the best candidates.

Writing a good advert requires enough understanding of the role to break the spec down and present it in a different way. An advert isn’t a shopping list and it isn’t the job spec - It’s an advertisement. The highly in-demand and picky techies who read the adverts have to think “that sounds like a great job which I want”. 

It’s tough when we can’t really name the client but with practice, writing a job ad that excites doesn’t take long. Copying and pasting the spec the client sent into the advert is just lazy. 

Loads of terrible CV’s

This seems like it is a no brainer - if you’re getting loads of CV’s that don’t hit the mark, this isn’t good. Every recruiter has completely failed at getting the right people across. I failed quite recently! I was working on a toughie and I can’t seem to hit the right profile. 

However, the difference is that bad recruiters will just keep throwing mud at the wall. If the first 5 didn’t work, just send over every single person who consents to have their CV sent! #EpicStrategy

If we’re finding ourselves sending over applicants who are not getting interviews, something needs to change. We need to qualify the job spec or perhaps there’s a communication lapse. Sometimes I just need to hand the role over to a colleague because I’m having a mental block or can’t get a handle on the role - a set of fresh eyes is needed. 

However, sometimes the hiring manager / company genuinely sucks rather than the recruiter - the spec isn’t defined enough or you sort of don’t know what you want but “I’ll know it when I see it”, or you’re being insanely picky (unicorn syndrome can be fatal). So if you’re getting loads of CV’s and you hate them all - take a step back and see if a conversation with your recruiter can straighten things out. 

If you find yourself talking to a lot of applicants who don’t understand the role or have no idea what your company does. 

A good recruiter will do their best to prep their candidates for the interview. We’ll tell them what kind of questions they can expect, give them information on the company, and provide interview tips.

Obviously you’ll have the odd person who does absolutely zero research and definitely didn't read the prep email. There’s nearly nothing we can do about that aside from following them home and shouting key points through the letterbox. (Obviously, this currently only works for candidates within 5km of my house.)

But if every candidate you speak to doesn’t seem to have a clue what is going on? Then there’s a problem with your process or a problem with your recruiter.

Terrible communication

Recruitment needs a flow of honest communication. Not just in the sense of “reply to your damn emails” but also in the sense of “That salary is unrealistic.” or “That applicant you love has a final round interview tomorrow so if possible, you could speed your process up.”

If you feel like you have no idea what is going on and the applicants have no idea what is going on, the recruiter might suck. We’re not going to tell you every move the applicants make (they deserve privacy) but you should be kept updated. 

Interview details need to be disseminated in a timely manner. Everyone involved generally needs to be up to date with major events. 

If you’re not getting clear and consistent updates, worry a little. 

Not telling you if you are seeking a unicorn.

If a requirement is unrealistic, a bad recruiter won’t offer advice or push back on them. They'll just try to find whatever impossible madness that you / your boss / HR has complied for the job requirement. (Or more realistically, they’ll just ignore your role and go work on something more likely to result in a fee)

Sometimes a client needs feedback and advice. It’s Recruitment Consultant, not Recruitment CV Delivery.

It’s not a negative reflection on you or your company if you’re offering a salary below market value or a skills combo that’s rarer than a hen’s teeth. If you’re not hiring all the time, you’re going to lose track of what is going on. 

They do not care what your company does

I mean, it’s hard to be completely in love with every single company in existence. However, if you find that your recruiter doesn’t understand what your product is at all and/or doesn’t seem to care how the product fits into the market landscape - that’s not great.

A recruiter is at the core going to be “selling” your company to potential applicants. If they haven’t a sausage what your SaaS platform does how are they meant to convey this to someone and tempt them to join? There’s loads of possible applicants who sort of don’t mind what the company does. They look at the tech stack and the salary and make a decision accordingly.

However, I find that the best applicants often do intensely care about the product / company / culture. They’ll research how the company is viewed publicly before deciding to move forward.

You need a recruiter who understands. If your product is technically complex, take some time to explain it to them. It’ll pay off!

A defense of “bad” recruiters.

A lot of the things I’ve highlighted here are sort of basic human How not to be an asshole 101. I’ve met very few recruiters who were genuine assholes. Mostly we’re regular folks, doing our best to do our job, and get other people jobs. 

For a lot of agency recruiters, the job is really tough. You have targets for everything - Hours of call time, CV’s sent to clients, candidates interviewing with clients, fees booked. I’m not working in that environment any more but I remember the pressure and stress of it all. 

At the end of it all, recruiters are subject to the vagaries of the human they recruit: I can do absolutely everything right and find the perfect person for my client’s job when a personal emergency crops up for them and the person can’t change jobs. All the work, no pay off. 

If I’m having a bad quarter (or a bad 2020, thank you coronavirus), the pressure is seriously on. The desperation set in and the temptation to cut corners and to just start throwing CV’s at a role mounts. I think “I have no idea what I’m doing so perhaps a JavaScript Developer is what this Head of DevOps needs. Now I’m really thinking outside the box!”

Recruiters also rely financially on the commission - base isn’t usually too high so we make a lot of our money off the fees we bring in. We might come across as obsessed with getting those fees but it’s honestly the core of our income! 

None of that is an excuse in my view for being a crap recruiter. I just wanted to give a little bit of a view of what it’s like on the other side. Internal recruiters will remember their agency days but I know to hiring managers we’re merely wasps that they need to talk to sometimes. 

Conclusions?

Well, obviously this whole thing is a way of saying “nineDots are great, please use us to recruit all your jobs”. 

I’m definitely not saying that we’re perfect here at nineDots. We’ve probably all committed each of the sins on this list at some stage. However, we never do it deliberately. We always strive to improve candidate and client experiences. We’ll always tell you the truth and attempt to be as unannoying as possible!

Check out our website for more blogs, view and judge our job adverts, or get in touch on [email protected]!