Commenting on a disgruntled Candidates Rant…
I stumbled on this blog by a mysterious “Bag Lady” who had a run in with a technical recruiter and ranted about it on her blog. I have a couple of comments that every entry level recruiter should think about.
1) Didn’t know anything about my company - When you are a recruiter you are supposed to know what your client wants. Obviously this woman didn’t even do enough research to call the right number and didn’t even know the location of the company.”
This is a huge mistake. You have to know what the company you are calling into does, who their competitors are, and what current news has come out of the company. You need to do this for one not to sound like in imbecile to the person you are calling. Knowing little bits of information about the company can also help you to impress the person and get them talking about themselves or their company.
“2) Insulted a potential client - Okay, I’m not a hiring manager, but if you are trying to get information out of someone you shouldn’t insult them by calling them a weenie. That’s just excessively stupid.”
If this isn’t obvious then you need to reconsider your involvement with recruiting and possibly even quit. ASAP.
This is a toss up. Making small talk is probably one of the best ways to win the confidence of the person you are calling and “connect”. I sometimes joke about the weather, or a local sports team. It also depends on the person who is receiving the call. They might be in the middle of debugging a horrific piece of code and your small talk interruption into his conundrum is just one more straw.
A good recruiter will be able to tell by the first few words the tone he needs to take for the conversation not to end in a “click”. Anne obviously had no idea, but Bag Lady definitely lead her on and gave out too much information to be so angry after the fact.
Some more points The Bag Lady had…
“1) The bait and switch - A lot of the times recruiters send out emails to potential candidates saying that they’re recruiting for a position that pays a certain number, and then when you do interview or get an offer the number is much lower. That is a classic bait and switch and that has happened to people I know. I think that is borderline criminal.”
I agree. I don’t know about criminal but this is a fantastic way to destroy relationships. Since relationships are the life blood of a technical recruiter, this tactic is equivalent to attempting suicide.
“2) Obviously did not read my resume - I think a lot of recruiters search resumes for keywords, and never read the resume afterwards. So they end up spamming a bunch of people who do not qualify for the job they are recruiting for. It takes a bit of time and effort to screen resumes, but the results might be much better.”
Another critical mistake. A lot of recruiters use databases that bring up lists of candidates that may have one or two keywords associated with the search. Most of the candidates will have nothing to do with the job. When I first started out, I would pull up lists based on titles and send out emails. Most of these emails never led to any good candidates.
Building a distribution lists and blasting your open positions once or twice a month to a subscriber based list is a good tactic. Mindless mass emailing your database is worthless.
“3) Doesn’t take no for an answer - There are a couple recruiters I keep in contact with because they were professional enough to take no for an answer when I wasn’t looking. If the candidate or client company do not need the services, I think it’s best for a recruiter learn to back off politely instead of annoying the crap out of people.”
Another toss up. You have to be tactful. There are ways of getting someone to say “Yes”, but you need to be cognizant of the feel of the conversation. You are not selling a car. You are marketing an opportunity. The Bug Lady makes a good point by saying that the “yes” may come in a future conversation if you manage to make a good impression on the first call.
“4) Don’t know jack about technology - Bad technical recruiters generally have no clue what their clients need or want in an engineer because they have very little knowledge about technology and thus do not understand the resumes and requisition orders. The best technical recruiters I have met were former engineers that know what to look for.”
You need to know the technology. You don’t need to know every middleware vendor in the
In other words, if you call me for a java job, I will assume you have no idea what you are talking about because I am a technical recruiter who happens to have a technical resume.
Read the resume, know the technology, and understand what the person does. Your recruiting manager should be able to help, if he cannot… Shoot me an email! I charge 5% of your commiss 
Career Advice, Career Development, General Recruiting Advice, IT Staffing
