Recruiters: The Estate Agents of Jobs?

Max, my youngest son, thought I shouldn't post about a rejection email I got as it would limit my 'employability' on LinkedIn. For me, this screams how important it is that we change recruitment processes for the better. He’s 17 - if he’s already worried about how he appears on LinkedIn, and what impact my, and implicitly his, views could have on getting a job and being employed, then I’d suggest there’s something very wrong here.

Are you ready for a long winded waffle? I hope so…

So I received an email which told me that I hadn't got through to an interview, which is fine. I don't have a problem with that.

What really annoyed me in that email, though, was that the following paragraph then proceeded to ask me for direct feedback to the business via an online form. “It’ll only take two to three minutes”. This felt a little bit cheeky because, in the email, it said that due to the massive number of applications this business gets, they can't spend the time to feed back to applicants individually.

I'll get on to how this is changing in a minute. But the current expectation, as I understand it, is that we should be putting a lot of time and effort into our applications, I think that's fair enough. You know, if you want a job, you want to spend the time to make sure that it's the right job for you and therefore write an application which is evidential of that fact. However, the reality of this is that when, in today's world, we're applying for jobs, we're using platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, some of the more specialist platforms, or alternatively, we're using recruiters. To be clear - this is when we are applying for jobs.

Recruiters have the same remit in the job world as estate agents have in the residential one.

For me, there is an implied personal gain driven by the ability to sell assets - and that means recruiters have to find the right asset for the right buyer - this should work for both parties, right? Many will rely on simply pitching easy sells - in fact, I’d go so far as to say that the vast majority will be in this camp. The really ‘good’ agents will find niche product for niche buyers - but they won't come cheap. So we’re left in a place where if a product is unusual, it won’t be sold through these agents, and if the product fits a trickier shape then it’ll be in lower demand, and sold at a premium.

It’ll probably come as no surprise that this is not something I'm particularly comfortable with - and I do realise that I’m posting this on what is essentially the worlds largest recruitment platform, no doubt dating myself into obscurity for all recruiters that read this post. Of course I could be being very unfair.

I do recognise that there's a need for recruiters in the current setup, the way things are working at the moment, but I'm not 100% comfortable with using them. I don’t, and won’t, use them. I've spoken to a few, and they're perfectly nice people, but I’d sooner find a job that fits me by my own merits - being mis-sold, in either direction, is a recipe for disaster, especially at my age.

Not every business uses recruiters; not every business can afford to use recruiters, especially good ones. There is a need, really, for people to be able to apply for a job directly to a company. Now, I think it's fair to say that this exists, but it's also, I think, fair to say that the process is nowhere near as personal as it used to be, and is becoming a lot worse.

Whilst applicants are spending a lot of time and effort filling in applications and writing cover statements and customising their CV for the job description, that is not reflected on the other side of the table unless, of course, you get through to the interview. To be honest, even if you do get through to the interview, you don't necessarily get particularly detailed feedback as to why they choose to go with someone “whose skills were more appropriate” or what-have-you. If you don't get the role, you don't get the role; such is life. You could argue that getting an interview and spending that one hour or 45 minutes, whatever it is, with the interviewers is your reward for spending three or four hours, or longer, crafting an application. I'd suggest it isn't.

My main concern here is that the prevalence of LinkedIn and platforms of its ilk, in particular when looking for jobs or finding the right people to fill your role, means that recruiting a role has become simpler, cheaper and more automated. It's become easier to do at the business end. Recruiters and businesses are using the platforms because the platforms are attracting people by offering access to a wider range of jobs. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not a virtuous circle; it's whatever the opposite of a virtuous circle is. The large number of users on the platform (dopamine addiction, anyone?) means that for the business recruiting people it’s a no-brainer, and because this is where they advertise their roles, they are driving an increase in users of the platform who are applying for jobs. Rinse and repeat. Works great for LinkedIn Talent Solutions .

If I had applied for a job 20 years ago, I'd have been looking locally to where I lived.

I've posted about this a couple of times recently on LinkedIn. I'm a marketer, for good or ill, and as a marketer, I'm one of roughly seven and a half million marketers on LinkedIn. That's based on just over a billion users, which is how many users LinkedIn has. If I had applied for a job 20 years ago, I'd have been looking locally to where I lived. I'd have been going to the companies, I'd have been writing letters, I'd have been putting together, you know, an application which is one of a few applications that would have come in, and these available resources (which is the current term for human beings) would then be looked at and compared with each other to decide whether or not to offer an interview. Now?

Compare this with the current model: a company puts together a job description, probably by somebody who's put together a business case to validate the need for that job, which means that the terminology is probably pretty specific and listed out so that the business, if a business is large enough, can judge what level of pay they should justify for this particular role. The role, if it's advertised through an HR business unit, will then be put through the process, which is probably being done by somebody who hasn't got a clue what the actual job is or could be. It is then thrown to something like LinkedIn or Indeed or what have you, where there are thousands of people looking for roles. No personal involvement, and as much automation as possible to save money (it all comes down to money, doesn’t it?).

The people using the platform apply for these roles, potentially in their thousands. Some of them will be gaming the system, some of them will be using AI - Linkedin actively encourage it! - and some will be spam applying with a fixed CV. Some people, however, will be going through a full-scale application process, optimising their CVs, writing covering letters and statements of suitability and sending applications off - and these are the ones I worry about.

I know from my own experience of recruiting for roles recently where I've had people apply for marketing roles who don't even understand what marketing is, which is not helpful because you end up with this pile of applications, a massive pile of applications, which then have to be filtered. So how do bigger businesses filter these applications? Well, they can either use an automation system, they can use AI, they can use an HR team, or they can use junior members of the team that are recruiting for the roles. But when you're hitting thousands of applications, I would suggest that this filtering is as automated as possible. HR teams often don’t have a CLUE what to look for in more specialised roles - through no fault of their own.

As soon as you automate, you take out any worthwhile judgment calls

I don't think I've ever worked with a business that isn't interested in saving money. Those of you that read what I write know full well how I feel about that stuff, but the reality is that it's the world we're living in. Businesses don't want to spend money; they want to save money, so let’s say they automate the filtering of these applications. As soon as you automate, you take out any worthwhile judgment calls on whether or not these applications are worth perusing. Now, in many cases, they might not be, because they may have been simply thrown in the bucket; they may well just be spam applications, especially through systems like LinkedIn. But sometimes, in amongst the dross, you will likely miss someone that is worth looking at.

The system is broken.

Recruiters are out to make money, of course. They want to do a good job, ultimately, and again, because of money, that means they are mainly going to be focused on treating people as assets they can sell quickly. The ones that are going to be harder to sell, the ones that are going to be, say, for the sake of argument, too old or neurodiverse, I would imagine they may well get just left at the bottom of the pile because "I'll come back and look at that later."

And I'm not particularly blaming any individual recruiters for this. I'm, you know, just recognising that there's going to be a large group of people who are easier to sell, and there are going to be a few people who are not quite so easy to sell and therefore probably not worth the effort for a recruiter. But nobody's ever going to say to those bottom-of-the-pile people, "We're not going to bother," because no-one wants to tell someone there’s no hope.

Alas, in my view (perhaps predictably) it's at the bottom of this particular pile where you could find the real gold - those that don't conform and don't comply, those that are the outside thinkers. Those that you want.