What’s up with the recruitment industry and lack of courtesy!
Last week I sent a mail to a recruiter who works at a top IT firm (one of our clients).
No reply.
He was busy I guessed and tried reaching him a couple of times on the phone later.
No call back.
People are not available for a call all the time. Understandable. So I left him a text message.
No reply.
This, my friends, is the problem with the recruitment industry. They think it is absolutely ok not to respond to you.
If you think my example above is a one-off case, you’re wrong. Majority of recruiters we work with do not reply to emails, call you back, or respond to messages.
I work at Geektrust.in, an online recruitment platform. Prior to Geektrust, I was head of delivery for ThoughtWorks and have spent 13 years in the IT industry, primarily in the services sector.
In my career, I have worked with apathetic sales people, apathetic marketing people, apathetic techies, apathetic operations folks, but I have never ever seen this level of lack of courtesy as in the recruitment space.
What amazes me is that this is not 1 or 2 recruiters at a few companies. This is the accepted standard. I know many of them personally and they’re very nice people. Which leads me to believe that this is the industry norm. They believe it is absolutely ok not to respond. It is accepted.
“I will ignore human decency because in my space, I need not respond”.
What happens as a result of this apathy is that it creates a vicious circle & generates an equal and opposite reaction from candidates. They too refuse to show the decency to let companies know if they’re not joining them. Candidates think it’s ok not to respond because in their experience, they have mailed, called, inboxed many many recruiters with less than 10% response. So when they decide not to take up a company’s offer, they just don’t bother to tell the company.
This in turn hurts companies that have great hiring policies and take the effort to respond. There are companies that spend significant time with candidates and rely on them joining. For a candidate, he does not differentiate between the good ones and the bad because his overall experience is poor.
“You’re all trying to hire me and none of you care about my time or my mails. So I don’t care about you.” is the narrative in the candidate’s head.
This is the problem in this industry, and I’ll stop my rant here.
The real question is why is it this way and how can we change this? Like I said earlier, I have friends who are recruiters and they are genuinely nice people. So there must be some reason why they don’t follow basic etiquette once they don their working hat. Here are my theories as to why recruiters think it’s ok not to respond.
- Too many people are reaching out to them. They get tons of emails/messages/calls and are genuinely not able to respond to all of them. So they prioritize the most burning ones, the backlog keeps building up, and gets to a point where they just drop the backlog.
- End of the day, recruiters are facilitators between candidates, recruitment agencies and hiring managers. They are not the primary decision makers and are dependent on others to give them a decision. What do you do when the head of engineering takes 10 days to respond to a profile you shared with him?
- Recruiting is only part of what they do. They have other HR functions to look after and recruitment is not the most important thing on their minds.
I suspect all of these can be solved with technology and a willingness by recruiters to start the change. Automation, AI etc., can be used in assisting recruiters to close the loop, and to make the recruitment space one where, at the bare minimum, all candidates get to know what’s going on with their candidature.
Today at Geektrust, we make sure that every candidate that applies to a company matches the company’s requirement before the recruiter gets involved. If it does not match, the candidate is notified. If the profile does not have enough information, the candidate is notified. If the candidate needs to go through a coding round, again the candidate is notified without the recruiter getting involved. Only once all these checks are in place, do we notify the recruiter so that they can spend time on candidates that are a match. In parallel, we are always keeping the candidates notified on the status of their application, and informing them what else they need to do to increase their chances of getting placed at a company.
More transparency, more closures, more dialogue can instil a better sense of respect and understanding in both candidates and recruiters. On our part, we at Geektrust do our best to make sure there is more respect to both candidates as well as companies that are on our platform. But lots more needs to be done to make this less of a job market.
P.S — I have to say we do work with some outstanding recruiters as well but they’re few and far in-between. What we’ve noticed is that it does not matter whether they’re working at a startup or a corporate. It’s just a personal choice they made.
[About the author — Krishnan is co-founder at Geektrust.
Geektrust is built for technologists to connect with remarkable job opportunities.]