On the symbiosis of recruiting

This post was originally published on the PSC blog on March 2, 2020

A few weeks back I read yet another blog post telling candidates all the things they do that are annoying. This specific instance aside, recruiter Twitter has been spending a lot of time complaining about candidates. Trust me, I get it. Dealing with people is very hard. Dealing with people who want something is even harder. And I also get it because, well, jobs are hard. But, can we stop being so damned adversarial.

I don’t know if we know this, but I think we do: We need them as much as they need us. You know the data points. Unemployment is at an all time low. We have more jobs than people looking. Everyone is open to a new job. Most are dissatisfied at work. This should be alarmingly easy, however, it’s still REALLY hard. We’re making it harder than it needs to be because we are and have been burning candidates bridges for hundreds of years.

Candidates standing you up? Maybe they’ve been stood up by recruiters for 20 years. Seriously, I can attest to some of the worst recruiter behavior first-hand because I am married to a purple squirrel. The one who gets 60 generic inMails/month. The one who will once-in-a-blue-moon take a call from a recruiter and gets stood up at least 60% of the time. You want to know why people aren’t responding to your inMails, calls, emails, well, it’s because a few bad apples have spoiled it for everyone. As my friend Tim Sackett recently said: “All recruiting is difficult if you suck.”

Here’s the thing. We’ve all been candidates. We know why it’s scary to put yourself out there. We know how it feels to fall into the black hole. We know what being ghosted feels like. We know how long it takes to hire someone. Our audience doesn’t know what we know. But we know what the audience knows. We can do so much better. We can be so much better. All I am asking is that we take a hot minute, and remember what it felt like to be a candidate. And when we do that, try being who you needed when you were a candidate. Try it. You know you needed someone to usher you through. You needed someone to keep you posted. You needed someone to cheer you on. You needed someone to tell you it was ok and these things take time. You can be that person. You can be the person you needed when you were a candidate. We all deserve that.