A walk-in is how we refer to someone who, without an appointment, walks in off the street with a resume and demands to speak with someone.
Why don’t we like them?
Because it’s Thursday afternoon, I have a day and a half before the weekend to hit my weekly targets, the guy I had scheduled to start this morning didn’t show, and my 20K placement for this month just e mailed to let me know he’s going to move forward with an offer from someone else. Unlikely I’ll hit my monthly sales target now. And what’s this? There’s a guy in the lobby that no one has heard of who wants someone to interview him?
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Are these really the conditions you want to be interviewed under?
I get the logic behind why people walk-in. Somewhere out there, someone is telling people that one way to get a job is walk in to offices with a resume and demand to be seen.
It could work.
But here’s a secret. The ratio between the number of people who walk off the street with a resume that actually get a job to those who don’t is very, very low. In most cases, you’re probably killing your chances before anyone has met you. You’d better have some serious talent if you decide that this is the approach for you. Unless you’re anything less than this:
You’re probably not getting a job.
In most cases, you’re going to potentially create a bad first impression by interrupting someone’s day without warning. Our thinking is, if you’re any good, you wouldn’t need to be walking in off the street. We would have heard of you by now. The expectation that the interview will be a waste of time is raised considerably when you’ve walked in.
Here’s another secret: if you walk in, someone will probably sit down with you. However, rarely will it be with a seasoned Recruiter. In the past, whenever we’d to get a call from reception asking who’d be free to take a walk-in, the general response would go something like this:
Who usually got assigned the walk-in? The junior Recruiter who just started and needs to ramp up their talent pool by doing practice interviews. We don’t expect much from walk-ins, may as well let the juniors hit their targets and make their mistakes with them.
Of course, we’ll assign someone to make sure that you don’t actually have the cure for cancer or any other such superpowers that may be of value to our clients. More realistically though we expect that you’re there to waste our time. You’ll need to put in double the effort to convince us otherwise. If we wanted to meet with you, we would have returned your call or responded to your e mail. Walking in isn’t really going to change that.
But trying to find them makes Recruiters feel like this:
At the end of the day, all any good Recruiter is looking for are Purple Squirrels.
Purple Squirrel is a term used in the Recruitment Industry to describe the hardest kind of candidate to find: The perfect one.
If a client calls and says they need a CFO with eight years of experience who is also fully skilled in Java Development, must be Trilingual and needs to start next Monday, that’s a Purple Squirrel. Why? Because good f@#%ing luck finding that. This is the kind of candidate that Recruiters could spend their entire career searching for and still come up empty handed.
And for a lot of Recruiters who don’t have the skills to hunt Purple Squirrels, a very short career it will be.
The reason is that Purple Squirrel jobs are generally the ones clients are most willing to shop out to Recruitment Agencies. They are the jobs by which most young Recruiters will be judged. In short, Recruiters live and die on the backs of Purple Squirrels.
Cute, aren’t they?
Purple Squirrels often act as the gateway into establishing a relationship with a client. Clients get an endless number of calls from Recruiters every week, all promising the same things: the best talent pool, the best guarantees, the best candidate screening tools, etc. They’re all the same. What really differentiates one agency from the next, is how skilled their Recruiters are at catching Purple Squirrels. So, to test the waters, the client with throw them one and see what happens.
Most clients, especially in Toronto, are not going to throw out jobs to Recruiters that they could easily fill themselves. They’re going to send out the job that every other Recruiter in the city has worked and that all have come up blank on. If you want to party at the top, you need to prove yourself at the bottom first.
The general mentality is that, if you can find a candidate to match an unrealistic job description, you can probably find just about anything and it’s worth a client’s time to know you. Catching a Purple Squirrel is almost an automatic invitation onto a client’s vendor list and into their good books. That is, if you don’t get on their nerves first.
These are the positions that separate the great Recruiters from the ones just passing through.
Ed – I am pleased to announce to all the fans and followers of this blog, that this post acts as a direct tie-in with a new Canadian television series, co-written and directed by yours truly, set in a Recruitment Agency, entitled Purple Squirrels. If you like Notes From the Recruitment Desk, you’re going to love Purple Squirrels.
