Recruiting challenges candidates and competitors

 As an external recruiter you're going to face many challenges on the candidate side of your process as well as with your competitors. One of the biggest problems I hear from recruiters consistently is a lack of communication with their candidates. I hear consistently that they're not calling you back, they're not answering your emails, and so you have to wonder why they are not doing that. Obviously they don't see what's in it for them and when they're not communicating, they don't see the benefit to them to answer your calls or to send you back a response to your email.

And this can go back to your initial interview. Did you really listen to them? Did you really understand what's most important to them? Because people only care about what's in it for them, and if I see the benefit of calling you back, I'm gonna call you back, but if I don't think you understand what's most important to me, I could be off on my own. You know the Internet has made it easy for me to network with my social network, reach out to my friends and my connections, and possibly get other interviews going on my own. So if somebody has stopped communicating, you really have to look at, do they see the benefit of calling you back? Are your emails strictly, you know, self serving? Are you looking for updates or are you giving them information, are you getting them excited about calling you back? A no show is another area of concern and can be a real challenge, you know, for you.

If a candidate does not feel you understand what's most important to them and what they really want to do next, often they will no show an interview with you, possibly a telephone interview or face to face, or worse yet, they will not show up on an interview with your client. The solution of this is you've got a listen twice as much as you talk. You gotta make sure that you understand what they see as their next logical career move. It is not your job to agree or disagree with what candidates say, our job is to figure out what will make them move.

What will make them go through the trauma of job change to accept a new opportunity through you, and so if people are no show in the interviews that you're scheduling, it's because they don't understand what's in it for them, and again you've got to really key in, always remember, they only care about themselves. If you want somebody to communicate with you, if you want them to show up, they have to understand how it's gonna benefit them, and they have to know that you truly understand what's most important to them, and you only present jobs that they're going to accept. No starts and offer turndowns often happen when somebody has accepted a job but it wasn't really their dream job.

Don't think for a minute that when somebody accepts a job, that they stop interviewing. If this isn't their dream job and they have other interviews going, they're gonna keep interviewing. They're gonna keep the job search going, you know, and so you don't want somebody to accept a job and then not show up their first day, or worse yet, they get an offer that they turn down. You have to close both the client and the candidate on exactly what they're going to accept. You've got to know the salary level, you've got to know the job opportunity, you've gotta know their benefit packages if you're an HR benefits person because you have to know the costs involved, you know, and what they're looking for, and again, a lot of this information you're going to get from your interviews.

You really have to key in, again, on what they're saying to you. And often we have selective hearing. Somebody says something and we're thinking well, my client doesn't have that but I'm going to send them anyway. But you know what happens, it ends up coming back and you end up with a no start or an offer turndown. So again, listen very carefully and make sure you understand, and you've got to keep in touch with people. If somebody has accepted a job, you want to make sure that you're helping them hand in their notice. You want to ask them to check a reference at their current employer, because that's the only way you're gonna know if they handed in their notice.

Often they'll say, I quit, and you're like okay, can I check a reference at your current employer? My client really wanted that, but I wanted to wait 'til your resigned, and then they're gonna say well, I didn't resign to my supervisor, I just told a co-worker, but somebody's out of town and all the sudden your realize they never even handed a notice, so you've gotta do certain things to confirm the fact that they have quit, and have them align with your new company. Have them to tax papers, have the new employer take them to lunch, have them align with the new employer, you know, and then they're going to take that job.

Another problem that has just become, you know, more serious than ever before, counteroffers. If somebody is only making a job change for money and advancement, they will take a counteroffer. There's no doubt they will take a counteroffer. Sometimes they're using you to get a counteroffer from their current employer. So what you have to ask when you're interviewing people is what are you going to do if you get a counteroffer? Ironically, many of them will admit, well I'll accept it, and so now you have to explain the lack of trust, the lack of loyalty.

They might get, you know, their next raise, and their next position because that's what a counteroffer is. It's their next promotion and their next raise. So they might get that, but now the company knows they were out there interviewing, so long term, are they gonna trust this person? When another promotion comes down, are they gonna give it to this person or someone who was not out there interviewing? Accepting a counteroffer is almost like somebody having an affair in a marriage. Now the spouse may forgive, but they never forget, and neither do employers.

And so if you talk to a candidate and they say, I'd accept a counteroffer, what you need to do is tell them to go get it right now. Say you know what, don't jeopardize your loyalty, don't jeopardize your career with your current employer, go right now and ask for your promotion and your next raise, and if you don't get it then come back to me because you don't want to waste your time on individuals that are going to accept a counteroffer. Also, you've got to sell against a counteroffer from the very first conversation that you have with somebody, and let me give you a tip that really works, on your application form someplace put a box, just draw a box, and ask the person what you should say to them if they get a counteroffer, and they're going say things like I would never take a counteroffer, you know, I don't like this, I don't like that, I don't like this, and you write down everything they said, and you always got to identify the five things they'd change about their job if they were their boss, because that's the reason they're leaving.

Something is going on that they have no control over and that's not money and it's not advancement, but there's something powerful about reading a person's words back to them, it brings them back to the interview because understand something, their employer knows how to get to them, they know their Achilles heel, they know their hot buttons, they can get to them much easier than you can because they've been working together, so just use their own words and you will not have to deal with counteroffers. Falloffs. Falloffs are just gut-wrenching, you put somebody in a job, and now they don't do the job, they kept interviewing, they got another job opportunity, and again, people just have a tendency of continuing interviewing if you haven't found them a job that they really want.

Ask them the companies they want you to target. The best thing you could do is place somebody in one of their dream companies, they are not going to fall off. The next problem is surprises, and in the external recruiting profession we don't like surprises. And we're dealing with the human being and things change. And you've got to ask the question, has anything changed since the last time we talked? Because things change. You know, what is there's a death in the family, you know we dealt once with a candidate that was the supporting income and during the interviewing process, her husband asked her for a divorce.

Now did her whole world change? Because now she was gonna be the bread winner, and so of course money now became much more important than it was early in the interviewing process. So just ask that question and you will not be blind-sided. I want to now talk for just a bit about the challenges that you're gonna face with your competitors. Your competitors are going to try to get talent in as quickly as you do, and the biggest challenge you have with competitors, is you have to beat them. See in this competitive market and with the Internet, it's not only about getting the best person out there, is getting the best out there faster than your competitors.

So you've got to know who you are. You've got to pipeline candidates in advance so when clients call you, you can react faster than your competitors, and also if you've got competitors that just don't do the job right, they give us a bad name. I like when people refer to us as you people, well when they refer to us as you people, they've had a bad experience in the past and sometimes that can be as a result of competition. You can't change what happened to them, but you can change their experience now and going forward.

The great news to all of these challenges is there's a solution to each one of these that you can master, and what this is going to do is help you really align the best talent to you, and you're gonna differentiate yourself from all your competitors