A Job Hunter Interviews a Recruiter, Ep.2: Richard Mackie "The Recruiter who doesn't care about your career"

Richard Mackie is the “recruiter who doesn’t care about your career”, at least according to his LinkedIn headline anyway.

As an ever-curious Job Hunter, I had to ask about this!

Q: Why don’t you care about my career, Richard?

A: Do not confuse caring with being interested.

"Aw… Richard doesn’t care about my career ?." That was my gut reaction. BUT, as a successful recruiter he is interested in getting to know my story, my work experience, and my suitability for the role he is recruiting for. According to Richard, the problem with recruitment is that it is seen often as a transactional buyer/seller sales role, where the recruiter is both selling a job to a prospect, and also selling the prospect to the hiring manager. This is an incorrect perception of the recruitment dynamic.

Three Parties and Their Untruths

The recruitment dynamic should be viewed more as a matchmaking process than a sales process. And there are three parties involved in this process of making a match:

1. The Company that is hiring
2. Recruiter (3rd party or internal)
3. Job Hunter

Richard says that each of these parties have untruths built into their psyche about the hiring process. Each party creates their own vision of the process, but the process is failing to connect these visions together.

1st, and biggest ‘Untruth’ per Richard: Employment is a solution. WRONG! Employment is a tool for improving life.

2nd Untruth: Many people see the hiring/role-filling as a complicated system. In other words, they think of it as a wrist watch: once the watch has been assembled, it has become a complete system with no further work required. Recruitment is NOT a complicated system, recruitment is an ongoing, complex system. In this context, a complex system is one that is dynamic, fluid, ever-changing in terms of requirements.

3rd Untruth: The recruiting process is not to fill a job opening, recruiting for a role is more often simply to help a company fix a particular challenge, or pain point, they’re experiencing. In Richard’s recruiting experience, the hirer has a single challenge they need address, but they wrap an entire job description around this challenge. The true point of the interviews is to establish whether or not the job seeker can overcome this particular challenge for the company.

The Third Untruth, Expanded

The third untruth we’re facing is a case of misaligned buyers and placing the cart before the horse; wrapping an entire job posting around solving the current problem. This is also not applicable to every recruitment situation, so be mindful of that. With this in consideration and looking at tech interviews specifically, the Job Hunter might consider acting as a consultant solving a particular challenge, rather than attempting to talk through being a great fit for the entire role.

Ultimately, the interview with the initial recruiter is to establish whether or not the applicant will resolve the company’s current unmet challenge. This final untruth sheds light on some important realizations to have as a job hunter: The recruiting market works via push factors and/or individual motives. Therefore, recruiting market is generally reactive rather than proactive; responding to needs after they arise, rather than anticipating needs prior-to.

What does it mean that the recruiting market is "reactive"? Well, each of the three parties (hiring company, recruiter, job hunter) are reacting to their own push factors, or motives.

• For the company, the push factor that determined the need to hire was the challenge the arose.
• For the recruiter, the push factors are time limitations like start-date requirements
• For the job hunter, the push factor could be unemployment, dissatisfaction at the current job, being underpaid, etc.

Hot Tip and a Mindset

A tip for job seekers from Richard: Don’t go grocery shopping while you’re hungry. AKA Don’t job hunt when you’re desperate.

Why? Because your priorities will be skewed, emphasizing subjective appetite and desires rather than objective need. If possible, you should not be ‘starving’ when seeking your next job; have emergency savings, keep your current job until you land your next one. Do not consider your next job “landed” until you have concrete evidence: cleared background checks, established start date, bank account connected for Direct Deposit, etc.

Even if you are starving and desperate for a new job, maintain this mindset:

• I am not desperate to find a a new job/career. I am slowly and intentionally seeking a great fit.
• Employment is merely a tool, it is not the solution. Employment is a means to an end goal.
• The recruiter has a problem to resolve, not me. I can act as consultant during the recruiter interviews and aim to find their push factors/motives and then address those items. Richard says, "Recruiters are trained to close doors rather than build bridges"; help them move you forward so they can move on to their next task.

Wait, what… “Recruiters are trained to close doors rather than build bridges”. This directly contradicts our previous idea that recruitment is a complex, and ongoing process! What the heck?! We can’t fix this particular contradiction, but we can be aware of it and work with our added knowledge. To me, this means that I need to prove to the recruiter that I’ll close this door for them, and then, I need to move on to prove to the hiring company / manager that we will build our bridge together.

Note: It is still quite important to build a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with any recruiter you work with! Consider reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to learn how to build better relationships.

Step 1: Get through the initial door with the recruiter, in order to be moved through to the next steps of the process.

Step 2: Sell yourself to the Hiring Manager / Hiring company. Evidence how you will bridge a bridge together to fill the gap in their business.

This series “A Job Hunter Interviews a Recruiter” is currently addressing only Step 1 above. But it’s important to keep digging into Step 1, as we have much to learn. Each recruiter is different, each recruiter has different perspectives. And the next recruiter you work with certainly won’t be the last. In the near future, once I am satisfied with what I’ve learned from recruiters, I’ll begin interviewing hiring managers and technical recruiters. Hopefully, we can all make ourselves more desirable when hunting, being hunted, seeking, and being sought.

Final Considerations: On Motives

• As the job hunter, what are your motives?
• What is a recruiter’s motives? Remember, each recruiter is different (like a snowflake). Do yours and the recruiter’s motivations align, compete, etc?
• What are the Hiring Company’s / Hiring Manager’s motives? For the next interviews I conduct with a recruiter, I think it’s important for me to ask more about the clients that recruiter is hiring for. For example, is the client hiring to fill a new role or to fix an old challenge?

A very special Thank You to Richard Mackie for his willingness to chat, for sharing his perspectives and philosophy around recruiting.

I am currently #opentowork as an #AWS Cloud Solutions Architect, and Richard is actively recruiting!

Links:

• Richard Mackie: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/recruitmentsolved/

Happy Hunting