A toxic industry?

Recruiters get a bad rep in our industry, unfairly in some cases, but then you see some of the absolute tripe that gets done in the name of chasing target and you realize that finding good recruiters is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

I don’t like having to write poorly of recruitment, some of my closest friends work in this industry and some of my most trusted network are recruiters. It’s a hard job, possibly one of the hardest. Long hours, ridiculous levels of competition and a business they serve who flip between either thinking they are all bastards trying to pinch their staff from under their nose, screw them over on rates or simply pester them with untold amounts of cold calls, and then suddenly are desperate to work with them when they have a hole to fill, yet want to knock them down on price until the recruiter is basically doing the job for free.

We all need to eat at the end of the day so no, I couldn’t ever imagine having to put up with the shit recruiters put up with, thank you very much.

So when you find a good recruiter, keep hold of them. This isn’t a one way relationship where you only answer their calls when you need something from them. Its like any other professional relationship. It needs to be maintained, cultivated. You need to be able to lend them a hand just as much as they lend you a hand. A good recruiter is like a pair of old comfy shoes. Yeah you could probably go out and buy a new pair, but then you’ll end up having to break them in and getting blisters for the next month whilst you get them into a comfortable fit. I’ve been lucky in that I know and have worked with some supremely talented recruiters, they end up being my go-to people.

The flip of this of course are the opposite of good recruiters, and unfortunately the longer I work in the IT industry, the more I see of these. You’ll recognize the sort immediately. The ones who call you on withheld numbers, or who send you a cold call email as if they are your best mate. Desperate, desperate for you to just hit reply rather than delete. The worst ones are the ones who quite clearly are doing this at volume, where you’ll see slapdash errors in their approach, things like ‘Hi firstname.lastname’ in the email where you just know they’ve used some screen scraping tech to grab your contact details along with 500 other poor saps before they forgot to press paste in their urgency to hit send and meet target for number of leads contacted this week.

The sort who’ll bombard you with emails telling you they have a ‘superstar’ (made up) client who when you suddenly decide to take the bait you are told that ‘damn, they just accepted another offer from Google/NASA/Facebook, but why don’t you look at this other (real) candidate’ who meets absolutely none of your criteria.

Or where they use the approach of trying to get you to answer some unrelated questions on the IT industry, or come and speak at their latest ‘definitely not selling you our service just ‘’sponsoring’’ the event conference’ or where you can go to their breakfast ‘round-table’ where along with the cheap bacon rolls you’ll eventually be asked about your own recruitment needs by them. At which point they’ve already got their foot in your door so to speak and are currently keeping you busy whilst the rest of their company rifles through your drawers and pinches the household silver.

These sorts of recruiters are like a cancer in this industry. They are making it toxic for the good ones, because eventually we stop answering the phone to unrecognized or withheld numbers, eventually we’ll ask our internal IT teams to block addresses that come from particular recruitment companies, until we decide to block them all and then we’ll decide when we want to approach you instead. Its why most companies I work for now have PSL’s which are great if you’re on them, but are harder to get on than trying to have a sane discussion with a brexiteer. We’re putting up the walls right now. And this genuinely makes me sad, because as I said, recruiters have a hard enough job as it is. But you need to clean house.

I’m bored to the back teeth of replying to cold call emails (And yes I know I could just hit delete and ignore them but I’m not a complete wanker). I normally try to politely explain that I can’t look at your candidate because we have a PSL. If the recruiter has been decent enough in reply then I may even suggest to them who or how they could get on the PSL. If they are really good and seem keen to build a relationship with me or my company then I’ll add them onto my ‘potentials’ list of recruiters. If you’re actually human and clearly interested in finding out about the business I work for and what I do then you’ll go on the ‘trusted’ list (This list is very small – which tells me how bad the industry is getting)

So yes, you need to clean house. Business isn’t going to help you. We’ll just continue building those walls and blocking your email addresses. The cream will rise to the top eventually using this method, but it’ll be cream in a gone off bottle of milk which none of us will then drink.

There’s also an onus on us as employers and employees to call out the good and the bad. I’m more than happy to recommend good recruiters and will write them recommendations, recommend them to my employers and my network and I’ll continue to do this, but we all need to get better at doing it. Good work deserves more work so if you’ve had a grand experience from a recruiter, then thank them, write them a recommendation. Don’t forget the company they work for and try and use them in the future.

On the flip-side, call out the bad. I’m tired of being a bystander letting unacceptable business practices be maintained.

This week I lost my rag on here with a recruitment company and named and shamed them. I annoyed myself a little by doing it but this company were absolutely relentless and if I need an example of the crap practices a bad recruiter can use, this company will now be at the top of the list. Sending an initial cold call email to me and forgetting to paste my name in (Instead it said firstname.lastname), acting overly friendly and generally pretending we’d been in a business relationship for ten years rather than ten seconds. But even here I replied and simply asked to be removed from their database and pointed out the obvious quality issue they had with their email.

Instead within 4 days (2 of which were weekend days) I’m hit with a different approach, come and speak on our podcast (What I like to call the ‘butter up approach’). This time I ignore it. By that afternoon a second email chasing me for a reply to their invite to speak on the podcast. Within 5 minutes another email from someone else in their company sending me (A likely fictitious) candidate ‘available immediately’ (They won’t be, they aren’t real). So I snapped. I’ve complained to ICO about them and did my name and shame post. I shouldn’t have to mind but it appears to have done the trick.

So what am I saying with all of this ranty post?

Let me sum up. Recruitment as a job is bloody hard. I wouldn’t dream of doing it and nor would you. So don’t be an arsehole to recruiters who are good and decent. But recruitment as an industry needs to sort its shit out. You’ve got a growing population that are poisoning the well. Eventually the people drinking from said well are going to up sticks and find somewhere else to drink – and you (However good you are) won’t be invited.

When we as employers and employees see good practice, recognize it. Support the good recruiters. When you see the bad, call it out, and ditch the bad ones.

And finally, recruiters aren’t a utility we just use when we need them. It should be a professional business relationship with a responsibility on both sides to maintain it.