December 3, 2014

The Recruiter Mail Box

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Dear Recruiter,

I applied for a senior comms role with a not-for-profit. I sent my application late on a Sunday and got a call from the recruiter first thing on the Monday morning – the day of the application deadline.

We had a good conversation, she told me I was a great applicant and that the client would definitely want to meet with me. She hadn’t received my cover letter and asked me to re-send, which I did. She replied thanking me and said she’d be in touch.

I didn’t hear from her for about a week so I followed up with an e-mail to say I was still very interested in the role, hoped I was still in consideration and asked whether she needed any more information from me. She replied right away asking me to call her before 4 pm that day. When I called her, she proceeded to lecture me – as though I were an inexperienced job seeker – about how I had a good thing going where I was and shouldn’t be looking to leave, especially since I have a couple of short contract stints on my resume. I was baffled by the tone of the conversation and her message, and when I said I was only following up based on our earlier interactions she had no recollection of them! Truly bizarre.

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your tale of Recruitment woe.

This story is  bizarre indeed and I’m sorry you had to go through it. I’d like to say it was probably a rare case of you getting a bad agent

In reality, it’s all too common.

I hope that you have decided to end contact with this agency and have told anyone in your personal network not to use them either. There’s a certain point where agents need to be responsible for their actions and it’s the job seeker’s responsibility to see it happen.

The sad reality is that there are a lot of bad agents out there. This is primarily because the bar to enter the profession is so low and the turnover so high that most agencies will hire more agents than they need, expecting a percentage of them to drop off within the first three to eight months.

By the time I left one of my agencies the entire office received an e mail from a division manager outlining a lunch encounter he had with one of the Green Peace people who solicit donations on the sidewalk during the day. Upon discussing, he found that most of these people are paid only in commission as a full-time job and some of them are pretty persuasive salespeople. Therefore, if you’re out and about and happen to meet one, give them a card and tell them they should consider a career in Recruitment.

I wish I was kidding.

The bar is low.

The first sign that you were not dealing with a professional was this:

The Agent Should Never Speak on Behalf of the Client

If ever you encounter this, it’s time to get inquisitive. Ask them what about your background they think will guarantee you an interview with the client? How long have they been working with the client? Are they working with the client on an exclusive basis?

Unless the agent has an exclusive relationship with the client, there is no way for them to guarantee how a client will react to an applicant and should not be offering false hope over the phone.

 
The second sign that you were not dealing with a professional was the lecture.
 
Granted, a good Recruiter should know their client, should know their candidate, should know the market and should know what makes a good resume. However, they should not be in the business of lecturing candidates.
 
This comes back to the old William Goldman saying I pulled for my first post:
 
 


Your reasons for wanting to find a new job are not an Agent’s concern. Sure, we have probing questions to make sure you’re not the type who hops ship every six months or can’t hold down a job on your own accord, but by and large, the agent’s job is listening to what they can do to help you get the job you are looking for.
 
If this happens to you, again, get inquisitive. Ask them what it is that is prompting this line of thinking and see what they come back with. Probably what happened was that this is what the client came back with and they were unloading it onto you.
 
 
The third indicator that you were not dealing with a professional is that the Agent didn’t remember you.
 
Recruitment agents meet with a lot of people. As part of their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) they need to meet with anywhere from five to ten new candidates each week. That’s a lot of people to keep track of.
 
That being said, every agent should know who they have applied to their jobs. My educated guess is that this person was either tasked with meeting their weekly interview KPI’s or to find a pool of candidates to submit to their open job order. They fed you a line about you looking great on paper to appease you and hoped you’d forget about them the same way they forgot about you.
 
There are two things going on here. One is that just because an agent says they are putting you forward for a job, it doesn’t guarantee they actually will. Agents generally aim to submit three candidates to every open job. Hopefully you’re one of them. If a better candidate comes in after they say they’ll submit you, guess what?
 
 
The second is that, as a general rule, if an agent submits you to a job, you’ll never hear back from them unless the client agrees to interview you. Agents live for Yes. Yes is where the money is. If a client says No, there is no incentive to get back in touch with you. In order to combat this, make sure to set follow-up dates with your agent. Ask them when you should follow-up with them, take note and make sure you do. Unless you give them a reason to remember you, most won’t.
 
Keep these simple things in mind and hopefully your experience with Recruitment Agents going forward can be a positive and rewarding one.
 
Questions for the Recruiter Mail Box can be sent to michaelllippert@gmail.com or directly to Michael Lippert via LinkedIn.

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