A recruiter called with a job just PERFECT FOR YOU! Great news, right….? I mean, recruiters are AWESOME! Recruiters connect people with jobs! Recruiters are the happy go lucky bridges between workers and managers making dreams come true! Recruiters are….
Oh.
Here’s the real deal y’all – recruiting is a game of rejection, unfortunately. As much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, we have to tell a lot of people NO. Whether it’s narrowing down our short list with hiring managers, or following up after interviews, there are all sorts of opportunities for us to anger people. Sure, there’s lots of advice on the best way to have that conversation, but this is not that blog post. This is for the passive target just minding her own business AND the active applicant who both desperately want to know – just what the hell is wrong with this recruiter and WHY should I trust them with my career?
First Contact
So you get a call from a recruiter. Or an email, tweet, inmail (shudder) or some version of outreach. This recruiter has NEVER SPOKEN TO YOU BEFORE. Should you respond? If yes, how?
Not every message deserves a response. There I said it. While it is KIND to reply to everyone, you and I both know it’s not REALISTIC. If I responded to every single form of outreach I ever received, I’d get hardly any real work done. So no – you don’t HAVE to respond, but you might want to. Questions to ask yourself –
- Does this recruiter work for / represent a company I’m interested in learning about?
- Does the job (assuming they’ve given you some context) sound intriguing?
- Am I at a point in my career where I MIGHT be willing to make a change for something AMAZING?
- Did the recruiter write a relevant, targeted message that clearly indicates they have a clue and did their homework on ME?
- Are you open to making a job change?
- Are you skills and abilities a fit for my hiring need(s)?
- Do you have reasonable expectations?
Full disclosure – this is MY perspective as a candidate / prospect who gets hit up all the time. I try really really hard to NEVER be this recruiter. I fail at this. A lot. But know it’s not who I want to be.
- Can’t or won’t disclose any details about the company / job / team. We’re not holding the nuclear codes here, people. If the recruiter doesn’t KNOW, then the recruiter is not truly a strategic adviser to their client and knowledgeable about what they’re recruiting for. Proceed with caution.
- Talks WAY TOO MUCH. Well shit. I’m guilty of this. I get excited, probably over share, so… the previous bullet isn’t really a problem 🙂 BUT – recruiters should be making it about YOU the candidate and taking lots of notes. If you have to remind your recruiter repeatedly that no you absolutely CAN NOT RELOCATE then it’s a good indicator they’re not listening. And that’s bad.
- Pretends to know more than they do. I don’t know shit about coding. I often joke about being the least technical tech recruiter on the planet. I won’t ask you a bunch of questions about latency or distributed systems or the difference between Java and JavaScript because frankly I’m not keen on embarrassing myself (much). I’ll ask you for a high level overview and understand enough to know what you want to do and where you could potentially do it (in my company). Equally important – I will be the absolute EXPERT on RECRUITING, what it takes to get from point A to offer, and how to help YOU navigate the tricky tricky process that is interviewing and negotiating. That’s MY super power. What’s yours?
