Why hospitality recruiters need to be as careful selecting clients as they're, supposed to be, when selecting candidates.

As a hospitality recruiter I'm never asked what type of client(s) I like to work with, and which ones I don't (like to work with), but even though nobody's asked I'm going to tell you all anyway because the difference matters and because, I think, recruiters need to be at least as discerning about their clients as they are (supposed to be) about their candidates.

1) Clients willing to invest time with me upfront to discuss their requirements in detail and who don't get defensive or secretive as to why their vacancy exists in the first place. There’s always a reason and it’s better if we are told it upfront because it will become apparent later on anyway. 

Knowing this information will matter down the line so knowing it upfront is vital. 

High quality candidates will insist on knowing why the last chef left and if clients don't provide this information they put me, indeed any recruiter, in a weak position to satisfy the demands of top talent. 

Smart recruiters won't accept this type of information being withheld but too often recruiters eagerness to please prospective clients overrides their critical faculties and letting it slide becomes the Irresistible option they don’t resist. They, and their candidates, usually pay for this down the line. Their clients often end up dissatisfied too. Good clients don’t make recruiters beg for this information, they give it upfront.

If the chef they're after really matters then the client won't mind spending longer than 5 minutes on discussing the job brief. If they do mind then, as a recruiter, I've learned to not accept such jobs. The jobs you say no to are the ones which determine how good a recruiter it is possible for you to become. Good recruiters work most of their time on good jobs, bad recruiters waste their time attempting to talk chefs into bad jobs. This isn't just bad business, it's bad karma too. You only end up hating yourself and believe me, as a recruiter, that's work best left to others.

2) Clients who are genuinely interested and excited about their own businesses. How on earth can I be expected to first find, and then sell, top tier culinary talent, on their position, on their job, when they're not even interested themselves. If you’re enthused about your business it’s easier for us to become likewise and if we’re enthused about your business we’ll do a much better job for you because we’ll want the top chefs we know to know about this really exciting opportunity. 

Yes, sometimes clients, and this is understandable, think their business is the best in the world, when it's not, but this is a better problem to deal with than the low motivation client who can't even excite themselves about their business. 

3) Clients who treat the chefs I introduce them to with extreme courtesy - yes I expect chefs to reciprocate this courtesy always! Failure to do so is not only discourteous to the chef it’s discourteous to the recruiter too. 

If they're rude towards any chef I introduce to them I begin immediately winding the intensity of the assignment down. Yes, anyone already "in process" will be attended to but, without a solid explanation from the client, I won't pursue any other chefs on their behalf. 

It really is that simple. There are too many jobs chasing far too few high quality chef’s, so as a recruiter I'm not going to burn my bridges with those chef's to please someone who doesn't appreciate this obvious fact. 

4) They must be clients who are happy to disclose to us any other activities they're doing to fill this vacancy. Okay, I know this is a biggie for some clients and, on the face of it, the obvious rejoinder to us is: “what the hell has that got to do with you”?

Okay, I’ll start my answer here: I need to know this to assess whether working on this vacancy is a good business decision for me, any my company, or not. 

Some people don't like this but most agencies work "contingency," that means we only get paid if and when we have solved the problem and that means our client has hired our chef and they’re through the guarantee period. 

A recruiter can work for days/weeks, even longer, and not get paid a dime for the job so yes, under those circumstances, it's entirely reasonable for us to ask, and expect to be told, whether a client has already interviewed for the position, has interviews scheduled, whether they have this job with other agencies (and if so how many) and/or whether this job is advertised elsewhere. 

A surprising number of, putative, clients will, at this point, attempt to obfuscate, shift the subject and if pressed, even flat out lie. 

Why the shiftiness here, you might wonder? Well, in such situations what's happening is they're setting the agency up as a fall back position only, however they don't want them to know this, so they'll do anything to obfuscate, misdirect etc up to and including, lying. Yup! And there you were thinking only recruiters were “full of it.”  

This problem is so common our company invests thousands every year on AI social listening tech to uncover this early, at least before we lose thousands working on jobs that are literally, available almost everywhere else imaginable. 

This isn't just about saving ourselves time and money, although its most certainly about that too, it's also about saving us from wasting the time of chefs on absurd long shot jobs. Not wasting the time of chef's matters to us as much as not having our own time wasted. In fact it is one and the same thing for us. 

So clients who declare truthfully what they’re doing, or planning to do, are golden. They usually make good employers too and we’re really happy to have such people as clients.

5) They tell me clearly what their interview and evaluation criteria are ahead of time. 

I approach, on behalf of my clients, a lot of top tier talent. I disturb them and they don't take kindly to approaches from recruiters who haven't even bothered to get this information. 

So if you don't know what your process is, or can't be bothered to tell me then you need to find another recruitment company.

6) If you want a chef, at least one I've introduced you to, to travel for a trial then that chef must know what you want them to do in that trial and you must provide the facilities, and the ingredients, they need to execute flawlessly. This might seem obvious but in practice it does not always happen. Also if that chef is helming a kitchen somewhere else on the same hemisphere I expect you to go and pay for a meal at their place before the subject of trials at your place is ever raised. 

 7) They'll always communicate honestly and in a timely fashion with me, and with chef candidates. If I've a chef being interviewed by a client on a Wednesday I don't expect, and I do not appreciate, finding myself trying to close out the week on a Friday without having already obtained interview feedback from the client. 

If you make me work too hard getting this information I'll be off your job and focusing on someone else's without further notice. 

I just don't have the time to waste, and neither do the chef's, whose time I'm intruding upon too. 

8) Clients who know when to exit. Okay what do I mean? 

Well in recruiting there's a thing called “analysis paralysis.” When analysis paralysis strikes your client becomes paralysed and incapable of deciding on anything, so they stuck remain in a “decision loop.” 

They haven't given up on making an appointment, not consciously anyway, but they've entered a recursive loop which burns time and burns candidates. 

As a recruiter if I stay on board with them they're capable of stealing months of my time for nothing. 

A lot of these clients are EXTREMELY process driven but their process doesn't have an exit so they stay stuck in it. Often clients like these end up hiring only the Chefs who were prepared to stick around forever and be subjected to numerous interviews and dropped into holding patters which seem to go on forever. Are these likely to have been the top taken they could have hired? Well, I’ll let you take a guess on that one.

A lot of recruiters are familiar with this type of client and they all figure they've a strategy for dealing with them. The only truly sensible strategy is to avoid them completely but that's hard and you're often a week, or a few, into an assignment before the red flags start to go up. 

A classic warning sign is when you've just put the perfect fit before them and they start procrastinating. 

They'll delay interviews, they'll look for extra interviews because they want someone else (someone else neither I, the recruiter, nor you, the chef, have heard about till now) to "get a chance to evaluate them" etc, etc. So what's happened? Here’s what’s happened: they're terrified that you've got them exactly the type of chef they asked you to get them and now they're looking for someone else to get them off the hook for making the decision to hire, or now. 

Are any of these situations familiar to you? And if they have you've probably blamed recruiters exclusively for them, right? Well next time it might be an idea not to make this assumption.