Recruitment firms are very good at shouting about themselves, their successes, the smoke and mirror jobs they might be dealing with (ahem!) and well, just about everything. But should we really be shouting about everything or is it time to be a bit more empathetic?
I ask this because I’ve been through a few months of not advertising all roles but specifically targeting people via LinkedIn for these positions. Really there were a number of reasons for this. I guess, being entirely honest, I knew I was going to get inundated with applications that would be difficult to manage. I’ll give you an example. Earlier in the year, a CTO role for a marketing agency I handled had 500 applications, of which 30 could have been suitable and of which 4 got 1st stage interviews. Responding to each and every other candidate was a massive job, but I did it. And with surprisingly nice emails back – clearly not many agencies do this.
Another reason I didn’t advertise was that I felt there’d be a lot of people applying who weren’t suitable. In this challenging market it would probably be more of a disappointment to have applied and then started questioning themselves on why they didn’t get an interview, than if they’d never applied or never known about the role. This one feels like a bit of a conflict to be honest but I went with it.
It’s a tricky one but i think if we’re all cognisant of the challenges candidates are facing in the job seeking world right now, particularly at the mid to senior end of the market, then we should be able to balance our comms approach to suit the market as it is and the people within it.
As an aside, and as a bit of encouragement for people struggling to find the right role, I’ve been through 30 years of recruitment and seen tough markets before. They come and they go. This one has been here a while so the law of averages must mean that we’re due a bounce back. Let’s hope the PESTLE analysis (particularly P & E!!) are looking in our favour and we see businesses opening those budgets back up.
(You might be wondering what the relevance of the picture is on this post. Well, other than taking 5 minutes out of my day at 11:00am to have a coffee and look at the views from my office then not much! But hopefully you’re not reading just because of the picture!)
