Candidate Control ... A Dirty Lie

One of the more odious fictions bandied about by recruiters on a seemingly daily basis is the idea that an experienced recruiter has magical powers allowing him or her to exert control over the candidate being represented. For me, it has always conjured up the image of Vincent Price practicing mesmeric mumbo jumbo upon a hapless victim.

Short of some fairly transparent forms of manipulation, I believe that the lie of "candidate control" has considerably more to do with recruiters attempting to make themselves feel like they are not powerless to prevent a candidate from accepting a counteroffer or from behaving true to form in some horrifying fashion or other.

The fact of the matter is that people tend to be pretty consistent in their behaviors and no amount of persuasion, wheedling, or cajoling short of illegal coercion is going to change that.

The matter hit home for me this week when, for the second time in as many months, I had a candidate I was representing do something that was quite literally beyond my control. In one case, it was a counter offer that was accepted (and, yes, we had covered that ground well ahead of time and during our work together) and in the other, it was a matter of the candidate going to one of my clients through another recruiter when I had first made him aware of the opportunity through me. Ouch.

In a competitive market for talent, which is where we are ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be seeing a lot more of this funny business. What can you do about it? Really? Nada. Or, rather, you can control your own reaction to it. People are going to do what they are going to do. You might, at most, influence a thought process or a decision here or there. Beyond that, you can try to recognize the signs of trouble during the interview process:

• Are calls and e-mails returned promptly?
• Are you hearing signs of interest in your candidate's voice?
• Are you detecting other signs of engagement, like questions about benefits or the like?
• Does the candidate bluster about multiple offers of employment elsewhere?
• Does the candidate avoid engaging with you in small talk, seems standoffish, or otherwise unsociable?
• Are you sensing an attitude of denigration about recruiters either in general or personally against you?

If you are at all good at your job as a recruiter at building rapport and respect from those whom you're trying to represent for employment and see these signs, get ready for trouble. You may want to mitigate your and your client's risk by identifying additional candidates as backups.

People do change, but it is slowly and over a period of years. A good word from you might have some small chance of making a difference in the hiring process, but more often than not I've found that attempting to persuade someone to do something they don't wish to do is far more trouble than it's worth.

(Creative Commons photo courtesy of headcase)

How do you hire talent? Patience!

A friend who works as a recruiter for a large corporation shared with me this week that she manages about 160 open searches for full-time positions. I regularly carry a large number of searches myself, but the enormity of that search load staggered my imagination. Recruiters are regularly asked to manage an untenable number of searches, and that is likely to get worse as the recruiting and staffing industry continues to grow to a $121 billion industry through 2012.

If each search is a project with phases including requirements gathering, research, screening, presentation, interview, verification of credentials, offer, and lessons learned, then how are recruiters successful at all? The answer, of course, is that most aren't. The vast majority of searches never come to a close for a variety of reasons that are well beyond the control of the recruiter him- or herself. The number of concurrent searches is but one.

What we, as seekers of talent, can control is our own attitude toward the completion of the searches we take on. In my early career, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, I felt overwhelmed by the number of requirements I was asked to work on at any given time. It was only through the constant repetition of the recruiting project cycle that I and others have come to see the parts of a search and, largely through instinct at first, learned how to recognize a "real" search from a bogus set of requirements. We ruthlessly prioritize when faced with a large number of searches, weighing a series of risk factors. Some senior recruiters will tell you it's something that can't be taught, something I'm always skeptical of when I hear it. But it does require an understanding of the process, almost a meta-sense of the parts of a search and a recognition of the factors that could make a search easy or hard.

Understanding the process brings a sort of inward acceptance of the fact that there will be numerous setbacks and delays strewn along the road of any recruiting search. That understanding is a factor to look for whey you are thinking of hiring or engaging a senior level of recruiter. I'm not going to say that it's the most important thing to look for, but what ought to be there when you are contemplating whether or not to use one recruiter over another is patience. A patient recruiter will not be alarmed when a candidate brings up a complaint or problem with an opening. Nor will a patient recruiter become alarmed when a client or hiring manager has a question. Less experienced recruiters can hurt the chances for a placement happening themselves by virtue of their own panic or feelings of being overwhelmed.

So, the next time you are thinking of hiring talent for your organization and are looking at one or more recruiting sources, it wouldn't hurt to ask the questions: How did you go about handling obstacles in a hiring process? and How do you prioritize amongst an obscene number of open searches? The details of the answer don't matter. Listen for patience.

(Thanks to MShades on Flickr for use of his photo with attribution under Creative Commons license)