If you’ve ever been a recruiter, you’ve probably received that “we need to talk about this req” e-mail. You know the one – the one that puts you on notice whenever you have an unhappy hiring manager (or HR Business Partner, depending).
Another frustration to what’s always already one of the most frustrating parts of recruiting: struggling with an open req, whether or not it’s your fault, just plain sucks. Period.
But you know the drill. You’ve got to justify the inevitably inexplicable, and prove you’re worth your paycheck.
So, you start gathering statistics as supporting evidence.
CYA Later, Suckers.
Whether that’s market data or activity-based metrics – we’re paying x amount under average, here’s why we need to consider paying for relo, I’ve made this many phone calls or screened this many candidates, and whatever other numbers support your story that whatever it is keeping that job unfilled isn’t your fault.
You can’t argue with math, after all – and we all know that the bigger the numbers (generally speaking), the more likely you are to get some slack cut for you after the meeting. But if you can’t back up your math (and they’re likely to check), then don’t bother. Your numbers need to add up if your story about why you’re struggling has any hope of buying you a little more time or a little more leeway on minimum qualifications, or whatever action it is your analytics suggest.
Because we don’t have a seat at the table, we go into these meetings with a CYA mentality. Spoiler alert: if every meeting requires you to continuously cover your ass in order to justify your existence, guess what? You’re not a partner. You’re a vendor at best – although often, you’re actually seen as an adversary instead of an advisor.
When that happens, you’re screwed. And that’s kind of the underlying goal of most of the clients at these meetings, this inherent assumption that you, the recruiter, must not have done your job. Hiring is our job. When it doesn’t happen, then, it must be our fault.
Which of course, is a complete load of crap.
Recruiting Spam: Shooting The Messenger.
Nevertheless, since they’re calling your competency into question, then you’ve got to directly address implicit, if unspoken, question they really want answered:
“What the hell is it you recruiters do all day, anyway?”
It’s a good question. And I get why sometimes, even the best recruiters can’t find meaningful metrics or substantive supporting evidence to prove why they just can’t fill the worst reqs and crappiest roles.
This is, I suppose, the closest you can come to justifying blasting SPAM to hundreds of candidates and connections for roles for which you already know none are an actual fit.
It’s a big old activity metric – look how many candidates I’ve contacted! – and active ammunition for ensuring that ass stays covered.
But CYA can’t cover the fact that these tactics are demonstrating increasingly diminishing returns. In fact, while you may (and that’s a big ‘if’) generate a small, short term personal gain, SPAM actually causes a huge amount of professional harm – to you, and to me, and every other recruiter out there – over the long term. Since we’ve long ago hit our saturation point for recruiter SPAM, I propose a different path forward.
Because SPAM needs to get canned, or else we will. Besides, sending SPAM just makes you look stupid. If you’re a recruiter, seriously.
Stop it already.
Recruiting Spam: The Canary In The Industry Coal Mine.
Now, I’m not here to try to inform your views on climate change or play canary in the coal mine, but basically, every time you send out a blast, you’re basically making the ozone hole in the talent acquisition atmosphere a little bigger.
These sends are the coal stoking our recruiting fires – dirty, non-renewable, and ultimately devastating to our overall environment.
Now, at one time, it might have made economic sense as the cheapest and most effective way to power our pipelines, but technology has advanced. There are better options out there.
And if you’re still burning the proverbial fossil fuels of recruiting technology by sticking with SPAM, you’re edging precipitously close to extinction.
So, here’s the fundamental problem. The more SPAM you send, the worse it works. Your emails will get ignored, your candidates will get agitated, and the amount of CYAing you have to do will increase exponentially. Sure, volume metrics may buy you some time, but ultimately there can only be two possible conclusions the business can come to once time’s running up on your req.
For you, the recruiter, both of these conclusions seriously suck. But if you’ve picked SPAM, then all that’s really left is to pick your poison between these two possibilities:
1. You are not accurately reporting your activities.
2. You are actively recruiting, but suck at converting contacts into candidates.
Either one of those conclusions will cost you your job. Sucks to suck.
But there’s another way to CYA without having to rely on SPAM. I know, it sounds too good to be true, right? But real recruiting results take real work – and high touch beats high tech any day of the week. So if you want to cover your ass and convert candidates, never, ever send SPAM. Just don’t do it. Instead, take the time to source a personal email (if not, at least find their most up to date work email so you know that your message is at least getting delivered).
Then be human. Don’t use a template. Use your voice, and tell the candidate why they should want to consider your opportunity and your company.
That’s it.
Why Recruiting Spam Doesn’t Work (And What To Do About It).
It takes time, but so too does everything worth doing. Which is why SPAM is the crutch so many lazy recruiters erroneously rely on to cover their asses. But if anyone can do what you’re doing, you won’t be doing it very long – the more depersonalized a recruiter is, the less that person is required. Any idiot (or intern) out there can send out a shitty template to a mailing list.
OK. So, you already know SPAM sucks – this is not news to anyone with an inbox, and you already know it’s a real issue for real recruiters. But one thing that we should probably discuss is why SPAM doesn’t work anymore.
Well, the reason that even those crap results have probably dropped all the way down to “snowball’s chance in hell” is that spam filters have gotten way more sophisticated, even over the past year.
Here are some examples of what happens after you send out those SPAM recruiting emails.
1. It’s almost always marked by a corporate firewall or VPN as having “come from an external source.” This is particularly true of business email addresses (and therefore, the overwhelming majority of recruiting related records).
2. It will be identified with a readily visible label identifying whether or not it comes from a recognized list of “safe” senders. As an example, I subscribe to RecruitingDaily.com – and you should, too (Editor’s Note: Word.) – but when I receive an automated email from them, it’s plainly marked as [Marketing].
This means even if you’re sending to subscribers who actually want to read your content, your message could get flagged and sent straight to the SPAM folder.
Point is, even the best mailing lists still have pretty crap results these days. Hell, even the way you format an email can cause a filter to flag it.
Do you put punctuation in your subject line? Or rhetorical questions?
DO YOU WRITE IN ALL CAPS?
Do E-Mails From This Domain Have a Low Open Rate?
If so, you’re really just wasting everyone’s time – including yours.
For example, let’s say your roles regularly require you to recruit out of the Big 4. Let’s say you e-mail one of those firms all the time, since you’re targeting their candidates with multiple recruiting campaigns. Only let’s say that you’ve seen a couple of those have really low open rates, and the number keeps falling with every send. Guess what?
The reason your open rate sucks is because it’s been flagged as spam by that firm’s firewall. And you’re pretty much SOL – as are any recruiters sending email from your domain to theirs. Their program has a rule that if an email from a certain sender (or company) doesn’t meet a certain open rate, it’s SPAM – even when it’s not.
You’ve ruined it for everyone – although let’s face it, chances are pretty good any shot you had at not getting filtered out probably died a long time ago. This is why SPAM doesn’t work for recruiting – and never will.
The sooner you can accept that, the better off we’ll all be.
Stop The Insanity: How To Kill Recruiting Spam Forever.
So there it is.
There have been a ton of people out there sermonizing on SPAM, but obviously the message (like your blasts) isn’t getting through – at least judging from my inbox. Now, I’m not telling you not to SPAM, necessarily – I’m just telling you why it doesn’t work, and in fact, if we’re being honest, never really did.
Not only does spamming generate absolutely no return on recruiting investment, but it actually impedes our collective efforts.We’re the cause of these problems – we’re the ones who sent so many InMails to candidates that getting any sort of response these days feels like a miracle worth celebrating.
That it’s a big deal when our message actually gets through serves as pretty readily apparent proof that we’ve polluted our environment, and that we’re left paying the costs we incurred sending so much spam that we completely damaged the already fragile recruiting ecosystem – and soon, our networks will stop working altogether.
If we don’t make real change today, there may not be a tomorrow for recruiters. Now, I get why you keep doing it (even though you know you shouldn’t), and admit that I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve sent my fair share of SPAM, but just like those CYA stats you collect before one of those CTJ meetings, you can’t really argue with hard math.
And the bottom line is, there’s plenty of evidence out there that recruiting SPAM simply doesn’t work at all. While you can choose to ignore it, if you can’t evolve with the recruiting times, you’re probably going to go extinct. The good news is it’s not too late to change. You just have to do the only thing that’s ever actually worked in recruiting, technology or tools be damned.
The secret: Don’t blast “people.” Talk to a person – and remember that every person you talk to is an individual with unique wants, needs and aspirations.
No template can ever speak directly to those things and other intangibles that successfully convert potential candidates into actual hires.
Only recruiters can.
About the Author:
Mike Wolford has over 10 years of recruiting experience in staffing agency, contract and in house corporate environments. He has worked with such companies as Allstate, Capital One, and National Public Radio.
Mike also published a book titled “Becoming the Silver Bullet: Recruiting Strategies for connecting with Top Talent” and “How to Find and Land your Dream Job: Insider tips from a Recruiter” he also founded Recruit Tampa. Mike currently serves as the Sourcing Manager at Hudson RPO.
An active member of the Recruiting community, Mike has spoken publicly in an effort to help elevate the level of professional skill.
Follow Mike on Twitter @Mike1178 or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Wall Street banks have had a lot of trouble hiring young talent since the financial crisis. They have had to come up with plenty of creative ways to rebrand themselves and entice the bright young college graduates. For example Citi announced back in March that they would allow their junior staff to take a year off for charity work while still earning 60 percent of their salary.
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
Believe it or not, most employers actually want to treat their applicants well, build positive employer brand buzz and acquire the best and brightest brains in business for their teams and organizations.
Well, let’s imagine that an employer – for this example, let’s go with a high growth startup – just raised a major funding round for $50 million, which means that they suddenly have to hire an additional 50 employees over the course of the next fiscal year. Most companies receiving this sort of capital infusion inevitably reach what can be considered something of an inflection point, and hire their first in-house recruiter, whose primary task is scaling up staffing and hiring.
This might seem like a reasonable response, but making recruiters fill reqs without enough resources to handle the day to day needs of running a recruiting function is the talent equivalent of tilting at windmills. The answer to why recruiters spend so little time proactively engaging candidates or alleviating the pains and frustrations most commonly associated with the job search is purely in the numbers.
Even with the odds overwhelmingly stacked against employers like the one in the above example to deliver the sort of requisite candidate experience most recruiters know top talent truly needs, the best talent practitioners are smart enough to understand that if they can simply prioritize sourcing and screening better candidates faster from the deluge of resumes constantly flooding their inboxes or ATS, then the rest of their pipeline will have far better yields, saving an enormous amount of time while increasing both candidate experience and quality of hire alike.
When given a repetitive task with statistically skewed or improbable outcomes, recruiters, like anyone else, tends to optimize and streamline their time and resources to ensure maximum efficiency and efficacy in driving those outcomes instead of focusing on those tactics or strategies least likely to lead to the optimal end goal (in this case, closing a req).
About the Author: Dean Da Costa is a highly experienced and decorated recruiter, sourcer, and manager with deep skills and experience in HR, project management, training & process improvement.
When building a global team, it’s essential that your people have both a deep understanding of the industry and deep knowledge of the world – or, at least, the markets in which you want to operate. They should be willing to travel, make cold calls to other companies as needed and work odd hours to accommodate different time zones. ‘
The ability to take on different assignments around the globe can be a big advantage in your recruiting strategy. Providing the opportunity to lead a team in another country and take the company to the next level will help your organization stand out and attract the best talent. And how those individuals are moved around the world will contribute to their own and the company’s success.
Next to recruiting the best talent possible, one of the biggest challenges will be creating a unique, global culture consistent for all employees, no matter where they’re located.
Many companies have the dream of going global, but not all of them achieve it. In my experiences, people are the biggest contributing factor to success.
The problem isn’t that it’s a nebulous concept, that it has no demonstrative value. The thing is, it’s impossible to know when you’re measuring employer brand if you’re measuring with the right metrics at all. You need a baseline for any sort of measurement, but it’s completely futile if you can’t confidently say what that baseline should even be.
We have many metrics in recruiting, from time to fill to quality of hire, and while I’m sure they mean something, I am not sure they are the best way to measure the employer brand. Doing that successfully means rethinking our analytical approach entirely.
Another good sign you’re building a great employer brand is through increasing the percentage of your applicants or candidates come from direct competitors, a ratio that’s relatively easy to measure (provided those competitors remain consistent). In many cases, as you probably know, a great employer brand can actually impact how likely a candidate will be to accept an offer at or under the going market rate.
Similarly, while it’s not a terrible idea to track the number of visitors to your company career site, instead of looking at overall uniques or general traffic trends, measuring site traffic that’s specifically tied to a particular campaign is a far more effective measurement of your employer brand. Of course, an increase in overall visitors over time is a great trend and good sign, but usually by the time job seekers actually land on your career site, they’ve almost always seen at least some form of employer brand collateral, even if that’s just a job posting, that drove them there.
While I concur that many of the methods discussed above are more or less traditional metrics long utilized by consumer and brand marketing groups, they’re often imperfect or incomplete when it comes to measuring employer brand. To ensure that you have the most relevant recruitment marketing data, try shifting your approach to focus on these employer brand metrics instead. They’re not the most mainstream, but in my experience, they’re much more meaningful for measuring talent acquisition outcomes instead of simply marketing metrics.
Tom Laine is considered to be one of the most visible and experienced social media and digital recruiters in Europe, having founded his first social media startup in 1999, and a social recruiting agency in 2009 – the first ever in the Nordics. Before founding his own agency, Tom worked as a Channel Campaign Manager for Oracle in Denmark; previously, he lived in London, where he worked at a variety of recruiting agencies and search firms.
President-elect of the United States Donald Trump had a meeting with select leaders of the tech industry this past Wednesday. They exchanged warm words and smiles, and perhaps buried a few hatchets.
A Google product manager 
There’s a reason you never see search history used as evidence in trials or civil cases, despite such information being pretty clearly material to most litigation or investigation: because, well, that’s a trade secret, and a violation of the company’s data privacy policies. And who’s going to argue with Google on such a seemingly pedestrian and pedantic point?
The thing about talent trends posts is that if it were possible to predict the future of recruiting and HR, we’d probably have figured out some way to make it suck a little less. Of course, the glacial pace of change in these parts means that for the indeterminate present, 2017 Is shaping up to be same shit, different year.
6. Recruiting and Retention Collide: 
It’s almost cliché to talk about your jobs as “opportunities,” or talk about how you promote from within, develop your people or offer your employees room to develop and grow (personally and professionally). But while these are cornerstones of career site copy and employer brand collateral, if we fail to deliver on that promise, then we shouldn’t be surprised at the revolving door that neglecting these areas – 
Referrals are, essentially, an employer net promoter score – effectively, it’s that Glassdoor question of “would you recommend this as a place for your friends and family to work?” That score should provide a critical metric when measuring organizational health and employee engagement – it’s basically the talent version of NPS.
I’ve written about how artificial intelligence in recruiting and hiring is really dumb, but equally asinine is the idea that somehow, our industry’s move towards algorithms and automation somehow represent a threat to the future viability of the HR and recruiting professions. This, of course, is complete bullshit (dedicated sourcers, on the other hand…)
While it’s probably a bit premature to assume that recruiters are going to be able to leverage the deluge of data and actionable analytics in any sort of meaningful way, that doesn’t make “big data” any less of a big deal.
If you’ve ever taken a job in recruiting or staffing, at some point you’ve probably been asked (likely by a close friend or family member) what the hell, exactly, it is that you do for a living. I’ll never forget the e-mail sent by my mother years ago, when I was first starting out in this industry, telling me that she was having a hard time understanding what it was I did all day.
It’s been years since that first innocuous query, and it’s most decidedly not been the last time I’ve been asked how it is I make a living – which is somewhat of a standard question you get asked when meeting a new person for the first time.
Of course, we have trouble accepting that reality, and get lost in overly complex concepts and too much nuance, but let’s be real: if we weren’t salespeople, we’d be in customer service, instead – reactively responding to issues instead of proactively resolving them, which is what finding “passive candidates” and building pipeline is all about.
About the Author:
