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Unless you have been under a rock, you will either be receiving countless approaches or seeing your LinkedIn feed overloaded with recruiter jobs. The shortage isn’t news.
There have been posts about the 14k recruiter jobs being posted on LinkedIn in the US, in the first few days of the year, or the 4600 posted in just 24 hours. Or perhaps you saw Toby Culshaw’s post on Jan 4th, where he searched LinkedIn using “talent acquisition” OR recruitment, with no function specified, worldwide and received 32,730 job results. Large numbers, especially when this doesn’t include all the other job titles, like sourcer, etc.
Surely, if there was such a shortage of recruiters, I wouldn’t see posts like this so often?
Especially, when a quick glance at Olivia’s profile reveals:
– 5 months of recruitment experience and a bucket ton of customer facing experience!
….and she is definitely going to know how to deliver a great candidate experience after the experience she’s having!
So are we struggling to recruit recruiters or are we not hiring for potential?
Instead of thinking, “Wow, look at all that ‘people-facing’ experience!” and getting her on a call, instead we are leaving her at breaking point!
Breaking. Point.
I fell into the profession from aftermarket sales in the motor trade. Richard Norris, Steve Simms and Mel Agostini saw my potential. (Even though I swore in my interview! )
With some nurturing, hard work, and a bit of luck I have done okay for the profession…
But imagine if they’d not seen my potential…
Okay, maybe you don’t think you have time… but what about this?
In this comment I’m referring to my friend. Someone I have trained. Someone who has held some seriously senior roles in TA.
Someone well connected. Someone quoted in my book, The Robot-Proof Recruiter.
Someone who, when they get their confidence back after being shat on for 18 months, will run rings around most recruiters. (Oooh, I can hear the feathers I’ve just ruffled! )
Okay, I just made that one up but let’s get real here. Most of you can’t write your own CVs! Recruiters, who spend day-in and day-out looking at resumes cannot write their own. Don’t tell me you can, I’ve seen enough of your LinkedIn profiles to confidently guess what your resumes look like!
Yet here we are in 2022 still recruiting on someone’s ability to write a CV. Silly, isn’t it? To be so judgemental over something that we can barely write ourselves? (And, frankly, until all people can write their resumes, AI will never replace recruiters)
Talking to my friend, I discover this is the circa 100th iteration. They’re lost. They’re now so despondent that they don’t even know how to write a document that has enough panache that a peer will be kind enough to call or email them. It’s a vicious downward spiral.
It’s something we can stop. Because what is clear on their (self-declared) CV is the 8+ years of recruitment experience. Why not give someone the benefit of the doubt? Why not call and ask, “Hey, you’re selling yourself badly here, but you’ve got 8+ years of experience, did you do this… did you do that?”
So, I ask again… are recruiters really unicorns or are we dismissing them because they can’t sell themselves on a Word doc? Have we forgotten how to be curious and dig deeper? Have we already lost the empathy and compassion we gained in 2020?
[This, of course, applies to every profession not just ours!]
This article first appeared on the Recruitment isn’t Broken newsletter and has been republished here with permission.
