By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Some of you may think I’m sucking up. Some of you may cheer. Whichever camp you are in corporate recruiters have a bad rap in too many organizations and with too many people.
If you are a potential employee of a firm, corporate recruiters are symbolized by the “evil” and “incompetent” recruiter who just won’t let you interview for the job you want and have applied for.
If you are a hiring manager, recruiting is symbolized by that same person who doesn’t deliver enough resumes for your insatiable quest for every person in the Western hemisphere who is qualified to do the job you need to be filled.
No matter where you are in a firm, HR often is perceived as the corporate nag complete with gender stereotypes. After all, many women have gravitated to human resources and there is a sort of embedded memory of mothers or wives who tell the men to do things.
“Pick up your (fill in the blank) and put it in the hamper.”
“When will you be home? I expect you home by 10:00.”
“When will I get feedback on the person you interviewed last Tuesday?” (That piece of crap?)
“I’ve submitted 12 resumes to you for the positions you say are urgent. When will I get feedback” (Oh those)?
“We have a new initiative and your input is important. When can I get a two-hour block of your time (Somewhere between never and when hell freezes over)?”
I went looking for an image to use with this article and searching several free and paid image websites, it was difficult to find one that didn’t involve a scene of a woman nagging a man.
Being the Corporate Representative for Nagging and their staff is an awful position to be put in.
Being the messenger that hides the uncaring behavior of hiring managers in your organization and taking the brunt of job hunter frustration is another tough position to be in.
I know many of you would like nothing better than to free up the last loser you phone interviewed but your hiring manager refuses to make a decision about whether to interview them and now you are left to stall.
And then there is the matter of the hiring manager who doesn’t find anyone who “fits.”
Or the two groups who refuse to agree on what a candidate should know and have accomplished and refuses to work with one another to resolve what each should be evaluating candidates for. You’re left with a spec where one group wants a polymer extrusion engineer and another group wants that same person to know accounting!
And, of course, it’s your fault that you are not delivering candidates in sufficient numbers to them so they complain to your boss who would like nothing better than to be left to her projects. UG-LY doesn’t describe it.
It’s corporate recruiters who don’t respond to the waiters and interns who have applied to your latest C-level position.
And it’s the recruiter who may notice and call attention to the biases your hiring managers may have in their selection process and encourage/nag them to be more conscious of them instead of always insisting on people with a degree from a particular foreign university that only sends a few hundred people to the US each year.
And, finally, corporate recruiting is often the face of frustration for many third party recruiters who are “chomping at the bit” for some small sliver of good news about a candidate they have submitted or held at bay by a vendor management system looking for that infrequent message left on a message wall of the VMS about how their candidate performed at their last interview.
So corporate recruiters have a thankless job that few truly appreciate or value.
But, as I wrote in another article if you need a friend, get a dog.
© The Big Game Hunter, Inc. Asheville, NC 2015, 2021
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