Recruiter on a job hunt

Return to the job market

Dear reader, because you are accessing this article on LinkedIn I assume you either have a job or your are looking for one. Maybe it's the very first one, or maybe you have been there, done that many times already. We all know it's not easy. Maybe it can be easier when you are a software engineer and all companies are fighting for you to actually join them? I still think being a candidate you need to expose the vulnerable side of your professional personality, and it's simply stressful.

I am in Talent Acquisition for some time now. Furthermore I really love being a recruiter, creating processes, talking with people and most of all, it makes me happy when those people join and are happy with their job. After 3 comfortable years of being on this side of the interview process, my situation changed and I started looking for a new job.

In this article I will try to summarise the good and the overwhelmingly bad experience I've had.

1) What went wrong?

2) Why?

3) What can be done better so recruiters stop writing LinkedIn posts about how hard it is to find candidates.

Because now I am sure - it's not that hard - you just have to respect people and their time. Sounds so simple, right?

Response time

Let's talk about the biggest issue - response time. At the beginning it’s important to mention that for some roles I submitted applications and for others I accepted LinedIn InMails (messages that Recruiters send to you to invite you to talk with them). I immediately created a Google Docs to document the process. For each process I started, I wrote down the name of the company, who approached me (name and title) or who was the responsible recruiter, what the company does etc. I wanted to be prepared, I wanted to properly track it. I treated it as a little experiment that would be useful for my job in the future.

I also added dates of application, first call, second call and all milestones of the process.

Let’s talk about applications I submitted myself:

• 30 % of the companies didn't respond to my application - some of them sent the automated response e-mail saying that they will review my application, but some of them didn't even have that. And I am talking about some BIG names in the Berlin tech space.
• 30% of the companies replied extremely late. An example would be a very well known company that I truly respected, as I had previous contact with them: I applied on the 3rd of May and they responded on 4th of July. We scheduled a first call where the recruiter told me that they already have a candidate in the final stage (!) but they wanted to talk with me to have a backup. I was speechless. But because of this little experiment, I decided to give them a chance. I told the recruiter that I am flexible and can finish the whole interview process quickly. She said: "it's lovely and I will get back to you tomorrow". Guess what? She didn't. Another person came back to me 3 weeks later that it was a mistake and overlook from their side and they would actually love to continue the process (when I was already signing contract with another company).
• The rest of the companies did fairly OK. They responded, scheduled interviews, kept in contact with me. Still, all the interview processes were really long. Many unstructured stages with no clear understanding of what a goal of each stage was.

Working with a recruiting team before, I was always putting emphasis on SPEED. Of course your goal is qualified candidates but to be able to close the best candidates on the market, you need to make sure that your interview process makes sense and does not drag over an unnecessary period of time. There are multiple other companies that will do it twice as fast and potentially even offer the candidate more money or better benefits. To win this race, if you don't have the highest budget and the best offering - be fast and be great.

The agencies

Don't get me wrong - I worked with some good agencies in the past. With agencies, I mean recruiters contacting you, offering you a role at the company that they don't work at. Those recruiters are working with clients, sometimes also having multiple offerings.

My experience here was tragic:

• Messages about roles not at all related to my CV - either disregarding seniority or really offering jobs not at all specified in "I am looking for" section of my profile.
• Messages too long, in German (although I specify in my profile I work in English), too general, using a wrong name - everything happened.

Agency recruiters (and I know that from experience) are mostly operating with KPIs around how many people they contact per day. They focus on sending hundreds of messages, hoping that a little percent of them would be successful.

I agreed to many more calls that I should have - mostly because I really wanted to check the market. Most of the recruiters I talked with were completely unprepared - they really didn't understand the companies and roles they were offering. They never wanted to share with me anything in written before the call (often even the company name), but during the call when I had questions, they mostly didn't have any answers.

Most of the calls felt like an interrogation about basic things that can easily be found in my Linkedin profile. Which clearly meant that those recruiters contacted me via bulk messages, were happy to get me on the call to have a KPI checked. But that turned out to be pointless. If you put more effort into people and not numbers, you will most probably fill roles much easier.

Putting the negativity aside, I've had some great experiences with 2 external recruiters being prepared, friendly and just passionate about what they do. They understood and genuinely liked the companies they collaborated with, and that made me recommend them further to my contacts as great agencies.

Your focus should be on your candidate

Another thing I do put a lot of emphasis on in recruiting related trainings is the HOW part. We already established that from around 30 companies I was in contact with - 10 didn't respond, 10 were very late and 10 were OK. From those last 10, there were really a handful of companies with well thought-through interview processes.

To share some examples with you:

• I had a call with a People Manager who talked for 90% of the interview. I didn't have a chance to properly introduce myself, forget about asking any questions. The funny part is they actually moved me forward based on the 5 minutes I had a chance to talk.
• I was asked to complete a really weird personality test that took a very long time, and until this day I can't understand how it was related to the job I applied for. I have a very strong opinion about personality tests. Studying psychology, you do many of them - that is why sending random personality tests to candidates, while not being qualified to judge their results is a big no for me.
• I was approached on Linkedin and invited to a process. When I said yes, I was asked to deliver copies of my University Degree and High School diploma with all information about grades. I am 31 years old, I finished my Master's. I can understand the need for more information about the university - but high school? How is it related to my current job? When I asked about relevancy - the company ghosted me.
• I had a call with a VP of Technology of a Berlin fin-tech where I immediately realised I wouldn't want to work with this person. The call was focused only on a number of people to be hired and ways of opening an office in India to hire more and more people. When at the end there was time to ask my questions and I mentioned the quality over quantity aspect, I knew it's not a right place for me and withdrew my application.

Summary

To summarise those examples, what I was really missing was the candidate focus. So let me tell you about the good practices and examples:

• A dedicated recruiter that you get familiarised with in the first call, that is involved in your process from beginning to the end - only now I realised how much better it made me feel compared to the processes where recruiters were changing.
• Good e-mail templates explaining the process and how to prepare to each stage. It takes half of the stress away from the candidate when they know what to expect.
• A proper introduction from the interviewers. I joined the company that did it in the best way - where a manager talked about what he does, the team and even his cats ??. That's how you make people remember an interview process - by being authentic.
• If you ask for a task, make it make sense. I get it that many companies ask you to prepare something for them. Do I think it's necessary? For some roles yes. For a recruiter? Not 100% sure on that. But I was ready and eager. What is important though - when you ask a person to prepare an extensive presentation very early in the process - you have to make sure you gave them enough information and encouragement to commit. Think about when and why are you asking people to spend their time on an additional task. Make sure you give them a chance to actually present it.
• Make sure your care. The chance of the candidate accepting your offer increase a lot when your company cares. Caring means follow up e-mails and calls. Offering to answer questions. Additional e-mails from the future manager. Ability to meet the team.