Humans are animals and animal behaviour is hard wired and mostly predictable. One behaviour in particular:
People always choose the easiest way to get what they need. Which doesn’t mean our needs can’t be complex or irrational or altruistic. Just that given a choice we always choose the easiest path.
Now job seekers who have had 40 unreturned phone calls would argue, but recruiters are human beings. They will find and choose the easiest path to make the money to feed their kids and to support their favourite charity.
The point of this Rant is to look at the way most employers work with recruiters: They brief 3 recruiters for the same job.
What the recruiters then do is totally predictable: All 3 focus on the low hanging fruit, the active job seekers who are doing the rounds of recruiters and applying to ALL the online job ads. They are easy to find, and each firm races to put ads up so they can find them first. The screening can be quite perfunctory as the race is to get their resumes in first.
Why is it predictable that they do this? They are all on contingent fees, so get your agency brand onto the person who is hired and it is $20000, lose the race and it’s a big fat nothing.
That’s the first hard wired, predictable behaviour. The second is the bit that seems to baffle many employers and HR managers.
None of the 3 recruiters will invest the 3 to 4 days of hard work to dig out some high hanging, quality fruit as they have only about a 20% chance of getting paid for their efforts.
Why just 20%? Because after a week of talking to candidates, other agencies have heard of the role, and they have talked to some other low hangers. And because there is sometimes an internal candidate who gets the job or perhaps the position is restructured.
As pointed out in last week’s Rant, any experienced recruiter can dig out candidates if they put the time in. Predictably they won’t bother if you brief more than one firm. Would you in their shoes? Employers think they are ‘testing the full market’ or ‘keeping the recruiters honest’.
No. Just predictably not getting value. And wasting a lot of their time looking at candidates who only barely match the brief but have been put forward because the agency wants that $20000.
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