Ever wonder what your candidates are saying about you when you aren't there? When they talk behind your back, which they do, what are they saying?
If you are a recruiter or involved in recruiting you sure better wonder and you had best be concerned. There are few things as important as how you are perceived by prospects and candidates. Unfortunately, the news isn't so good when it comes to prospect and candidate perception of recruiters in both third party and corporate.
When I started Bearing Fruit Consulting (BFC) in June of 2006 I thought about this at length and began to collect data from those prospects and candidates we contacted and or engaged with in an effort to improve our level of engagement, service and recruiting technique. In 2007 I decided to continue this practice but then go one step further and actually ask potential prospects and candidates in multiple industries and across different geographies what they think of the recruiters they get calls from and those they engage to assist with their career move. We have done this each year since and recently completed our 2009 sample and survey. Now that we have 3 ½ years of information I decided to share some insights from what we learned. If you have ever been a participant in our recruiter training or if you have been a client we have shared some of this information with you as we collected it but I felt it was about time to share this a bit more publicly.
I plan to share this information in two posts to follow this one. The first post will focus on how recruiters are perceived when they first make contact with and attempt to engage a prospect or candidate. We called this the Recruiting Call.
The second post will focus on what prospects and/or candidates have to say about their experience once engaged with the recruiter. Not surprisingly we called this the Recruiting Engagement.
More after the jump!
The statistics geeks out there probably want to know all the sample size and survey methodology stuff right now. Since this isn't a white paper or something we intend to publish I am not going to bore everyone with an intense diatribe of how we did what we did. If you have questions just give me a call and we can discuss it in more detail. That said some background information is necessary to fully understand and interpret the results.
For the purposes of our survey we contacted, via phone, 500 professionals annually in 13 different industries (using LinkedIn definitions) and asked them to answer a series of questions about their experience with recruiters in two phases: the Recruiting Call and the Recruiting Engagement. In order to achieve the 500 person sample we actually contacted more professionals but some did not wish to participate in our survey. Each of these professionals occupied positions in which their annual salary was greater than $50,000 and the sample group represented 8 defined geographic areas of the United States so that each state and region would be represented. Additionally, utilizing the same criteria, we surveyed each prospect and or candidate we called and/or engaged as BFC on behalf of our clients. On average, this added an additional 564 participants to the survey.
The details of the survey for both the Recruiting Call and the Recruiting Engagement will be revealed in two posts next week but as a bit of a foreshadow it is safe to say that, as an industry, we are failing miserably when it comes to making first contact and engaging prospects and candidates. Though there are many key findings from the information and interactions we had over the last 3 years, it is evident that our prospects and candidates do not trust us, they do not believe we really care about them and their career goals, we view them as a means to an end and they believe that we are in the same category of annoyance as telemarketers and car salesman. That said, just like car salesman, they put up with us and our poor performance because they sometimes need us to gain access to a better career opportunity. But if they had their way, they would do away with us altogether. More to come!
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