Why do we need Recruiters?

It must seem pointless or comical to ask, “Why do we need recruiters?” Ask any recruiter and, after the laughing stops, you’ll hear all the reasons you—or at least that recruiter—could possibly imagine.
Yet, even though the list of reasons will be compelling, anyone who is the stubbornly curious type will still want to know the reason, the main reason and the real “prime mover”.
That’s the nature of human curiosity: What was the real (or main) reason for the Civil War, the 2008 economic meltdown, the tangling of my phone cord and, of course, (the Biggest Question of All) why does the physical universe or anything at all exist rather than nothing?
As for needs: What is the real or main reason we need vitamin C, why does the Fed rather than the Treasury control the money supply, why do we need recruiters? Do we?
The Need for Gods and Recruiters
Somehow, we can’t help believing that there has to be one reason that is more important or that is the “real reason” for whatever we want explained.
That’s what has made many religions so attractive and durable (with exceptions like the now defunct ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian polytheistic religions. Like modern science, they insisted that, whatever happens, there is no single explanation or factor accounting for it—in their instances, because of the maneuverings of squabbling, multiple gods as the multiple causes of everything, including why one’s well or goat has gone dry).
We are tempted to look for one reason or cause even when we know that what is to be explained is
1. “over-determined”—there are multiple independent causes, each of which is sufficient as an explanation, e.g., the sad fate of a chicken that tried to cross the road but that was simultaneously hit by both lightning and a truck;
2. “multiply-determined”—there are factors, like the quarreling Greek gods, individually insufficient as explanations, that together are the reasons, e.g., the presence of gasoline plus the presence of a match plus the presence of someone dumb enough to have lit that match jointly explain the predictable explosion.
Viewed this way, looking for the reason recruiters are necessary may seem fruitless, in the same way as looking for the reason someone else has been hired to do a job. But notice how persistently tempting it is to ask for the reason when somebody else got the job or the client company you were hoping to get.
Then there is the even more probing pair of questions, suggested above: After dropping the question “What is the real reason we have recruiters?”, it is just a matter of time before the most inquisitive among us will drop the other shoe and ask, “Do we really need them?”
Reasons Why We Need Recruiters
So, let’s take a look at  some of the (un)usual reasons why we need recruiters, if we indeed do need them, and see whether there really is what deserves to be called “the reason”—a number #1 reason why recruiters are necessary.
Division of labor in obtaining labor: Perhaps the most obvious reason why we seem to need recruiters is that their specialized skills and resources (including networks) make finding, vetting and placing talent a much more efficient process. We can thank Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for this explanation: Basically, specialization creates efficiencies that create wealth. Being a recruiter is merely just another form of facilitator specialization.
Moreover, the employers that recruiters serve are subject to the same laws of efficiency: A project manager or CEO also has to specialize in his job to compete and succeed. Hence, because there aren’t enough minutes in an hour and no hours in a minute, the delegation of hiring to an HR specialist is advisable and generally unavoidable. It’s that simple.
Swelling ranks of the employable and of employers: In a tribal village of 200 people, recruiters are completely unnecessary. The small labor pool means that extensive and elaborate sorting and sifting of job applications is not required at all. Not only are the labor pool and applicant numbers small, but also the applicants will certainly be well known to the C.E.C.—the Chief Executive Chief. This reduces the sourcing and screening time to virtually zero. On top of that, compensation package negotiations will be streamlined in a tribal village, since there will be few, if any, opportunity costs for either the C.E.C. or the applicant, inasmuch as there will be very few applicants or jobs to choose from.
The modern world of work on a crowded planet is completely different. First, the huge numbers of employable people, applicants and companies create innumerable mathematically possible combinations of employers and applicants as matches to be checked out.
Second, the kind of tribal firsthand knowledge of both the employer and the prospective employee is, apart from cases of nepotism, pre-existing acquaintanceship and in-house hiring, virtually non-existent.
Third, the existence of countless competitors for both those hiring and those to be hired makes shopping around, vetting and negotiating in the world’s huge modern economies more protracted, costly and complex processes.
The need for human buffers in a vast, impersonal bottom-line-oriented marketplace: We’ve all heard, “This isn’t personal; it’s business.” That sums up the massive transformation of the close-knit tribal village into the modern urban faceless-bee beehive, of simple, friendly bartering with neighbors and friends into complex, remote, money-denominated, automated and highly impersonal marketplace transactions. That’s the transformation of “Gemeinschaft” (personal, community-based) interactions into “Gesellschaft” (formal, impersonal, commerce-based) interactions that is one of the most important transformations in all of human history.
Yet, despite the fact that recruiters are part of this modern gargantuan system of formalized business relations, they somehow are expected to and do manage to maintain a human face and to provide a “human touch”—especially because they are the helping hand that makes the employer-new employee deal-sealing handshake possible.
Because the recruiter’s defining function is to help employer and job-seeker achieve their goals, his or her role is special in the domain of  hardcore business: Recruiters, like caregivers, exist to help and only to help, including helping those who may be motivated to help themselves (to what they desire).
In contrast, employers and prospective employees will always, or at least initially, be tempted to play a “zero-sum” game, e.g., with respect to salary, in which gains for the candidate mean losses for the prospective employer and vice versa,  and where maximizing satisfaction on one side means reducing it on the other.
Recruiters, however, are readily perceived as trying to maximize satisfaction for both the employer and the candidate (even though this is in practice, if not logically, impossible). More reasonably, what the recruiter actually does is to maximize such respective satisfactions subject to unavoidable constraints (that manifest themselves in the negotiations the recruiter helpfully facilitates).
To put this point in terms that Adam Smith might approve, recruiters supplement the cold, impersonal, often merciless “invisible hand” of the Gesellschaft marketplace with their own Gemeinschaft warm “helping hand”.  In this way, a recruiter serves as not only a catalyst of employment, but also as a personalizing buffer between conflicting expectations of the hiring and the hired, and between the impersonal forces of job supply and job-seeker demand.
The Main Reason We Need Recruiters
Being only examples of the reasons we need recruiters, these cited explanations are, nonetheless, at least sufficient to answer the second question, “Do we need recruiters?” In terms of the framework outlined here, we can say that the need for recruiters is “over-determined”: There is, in our modern world, more than one reason why recruiters are necessary.
Still, the temptation to ask for the reason stubbornly tugs on the mind. Habits die hard and slowly; such an intellectual instinct as this one dies even harder and more slowly. So, as a concession to this reductionist urge to know the reason, the single most important reason we (still) need recruiters, and on deep reflection, I will try to offer one.
We all need to eat.

Why Posting Resumes on Job Boards and Company Web Sites Doesn't Work Well?

So you're surfing on one of the job boards. You've been laid off, or are afraid you will be, or maybe you're just the type who likes to keep his options open. And you see it, the perfect job. It's so perfect that if you ARE working, you have to do a double take to make sure it isn't your own company posting your own job.
But it's not. In fact, the job is posted by a company you've heard good things about, one of the top five on your list of places to apply to. You can't believe your luck. You check the date it was posted. Today! It doesn't get better than this. So you go through all the links, fill in all the boxes; paste this and re-type that; maybe they even let you attach your Word file or PDF someplace. You hit the send button and YOU ARE IN!
You know where we're going with this. Nothing happens. No calls. Weird, but you've seen it before. The job requisition could have been cancelled, or they might have already had someone in mind for the job. Who knows?
A couple weeks later you get a call from a headhunter, looking for someone like you. Exactly like you. Something clicks and you ask him if he's calling about that perfect job you applied for a couple of weeks ago. The headhunter tells you he is in fact working on that position and the employer just gave him the search assignment this morning.
You tell him you already sent in your resume via the job board or via the company's web site. There's a pause. Does somebody see his commission slipping away? Then the headhunter suggests that if you want, he'll approach the company with your resume and try again. "What the heck," says the headhunter, "If they hire you, I try to collect the fee. Maybe I do and maybe I don't because companies don't like to pay a headhunter for a candidate who is already on file. " but either way, you still get the job.
What happened? Right now your resume is stuck in "screen-bot" limbo. The hiring company has your resume in their database. It never made it to the hiring manager because the automated search and screening methods (screen-bots) can't be perfect when it comes to lining up candidates with hiring managers.
So you tell the recruiter to go ahead and submit your resume one more time. You know where we're going with this, don't you? Nothing happens again.
A few weeks later, you call the headhunter and ask him about it. He can't figure it. He sent in your resume; the company said they'd already seen it, and they weren't interested. The headhunter asks if you know anybody else. Depending on the kind of person you are, you may or may not express some crankiness at this point. Two weeks later the job is re-posted by the company, still unfilled.
Welcome to the job-hunting world of today. You have just fallen victim to a very serious glitch in the recruiting process; one that will get worse before it gets better, and one that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE wants to admit even exists. You have stepped onto a land mine that quite possibly will not only limit your own job prospects, but is potentially serious enough that it could actually slow down hiring once the job market starts to pick up, hurting hiring companies & investors as much as job-seekers. The glitch is simple enough to fix but it won't happen soon enough to help you out.
Here's what may have happened. You did everything right on the job application. Unfortunately for you, the company you sent your resume to has had hard times just like everybody else, so you sent your resume to a reduced and overworked HR department. When they programmed the screen-bot to search for your resume, maybe they didn't put in enough key words and it didn't get picked up. Maybe they programmed in SO MANY keywords that every morning the hiring manager opens his email and saw three hundred resumes, none of which was ever close to what he was looking for. That's why he stopped reading resumes from the screen-bot months ago. He was just waiting the two weeks until his boss let him hire a headhunter to go find the right person.
The problem here is that the hiring company didn't just lay off people when it cut costs. It also re-negotiated all agreements with search firms and demanded a clause: "If a search firm sends in a resume that's already "in the system" the search firm doesn't get credit for it. " HR figures this way it gets a couple freebees now and then. Good for keeping a lid on hiring costs. The search firm was hurting too, of course, so to retain the account, it signed the contract.
Thus the headhunter knows that if he sends in your resume, not only will he DEFINITELY NOT get paid, but also you may actually get hired. The position gets filled, his search disappears, and he gets NO commission. He's just coming off a bad couple of years, himself. Do you think the headhunter will really present your resume?
What are you going to do about it? Send in your resume again? If that worked, the employer would have caught it the first time. Call a different headhunter? Any firm that works with that company have probably signed the same agreement. You are stuck, my friend.
There is no HR department in Silicon Valley or anywhere else in the world that wants to admit it could fill many of the company's open jobs with resumes that have been submitted or posted on the job boards for weeks.
Searching and screening by HR either results in too many resumes to send to the hiring manager, or so few that the right candidate isn't included. HR people are tired of hearing from a hiring manager that the last stack of resumes were a bad fit and caused him to waste an hour reading them all.
Screen-bots just aren't as good as a headhunter who really knows the hiring managers and the candidates. A few really smart companies already know this and they hire headhunters to data mine their resume databases for a reduced fee.
There's also no headhunter who wants your resume to go anywhere near a job where he won't get paid because they already have your resume on file. Open positions are rare and headhunters want to fill them with candidates who will generate a commission.
You are stuck in screen-bot limbo. What can you do? You have options. You should forget about using the online job boards as they really are a waste of time and are cluttered with too many candidates & jobs. You should call a headhunter you trust and have them work for you.

We don't get paid to find candidates!!

Wow… stop and think about it. Anyone can find a candidate – that is, anyone with a computer and a little know-how about Boolean searches. Simply put in some key words and "voila”… out pop dozens of candidates. Or how about putting a half decent posting together and sticking it on some job boards. Easy – right?????


Here’s where we differentiate ourselves as professional recruiters (yes, I did use the term professional!)….


Adding Value – a commonly misused phrase. What does "adding value” really mean? So many of our clients (or potential clients) think that all we do is to grab resumes from job boards and flog them. No wonder we get objections about having candidates submitted who are already on the boards. What we fail to do is to EDUCATE our clients on the PROCESS of what we do as professionals.


Think about it… we can find a resume, chat with a candidate and even get them interested in going to an interview. However, that is not what makes a PLACEMENT!! Here’s where our expertise comes in.


The ability to assess the appropriate "fit” of the candidate to your client’s particular position is paramount. No matter how "technically qualified” the person is, if they are not a fit, the placement won’t fly. You don’t just need to know, "Can they do the job?” but "Will they do the job well?”


Ask yourself, "How well do I know this candidate?” The more information you have about the candidate, the higher the chances are that you will have a successful placement. You know how many times you have presented a candidate – only to find out that they turn the job down. 
Did you stop and examine, "What could I have asked or learned about the candidate to mitigate the potential of a turndown?” Sometimes we fool ourselves into believing that they will say "yes” when it was a "no” all along.


You should be asking for more info about the candidate – things like… what motivates them? 


Why would they consider moving from where they are? What’s missing in their career now? 


What do they value (as opposed to what you value)? How long have they thought a potential career move through (people don’t tend to change careers overnight… it takes time!)? So many questions we fail to ask and yet it really is part of the overall process of making a successful placement. Is there a "favorite” question you like to ask, no matter what? I tend to close the interview with… "Name three things that are important to YOU as you consider moving from one career to another.” Expand on each thing and write them down… go back and reflect on this as you work through the recruitment process because that is the benchmark that the opportunity will be measured against. 


Restate this wish list to the candidate throughout the process to remind them of what they said was important to them. Draw parallels between your job opportunity and what they consider to be important to them. As you work through the process you will find it easier, the more information you are armed with!


So you see… we don’t get paid for finding candidates and submitting resumes! We get paid for our ability to bring the placement to a successful close

Tips to Successfully Interview over the Phone

Employers use telephone interviews as a way of identifying and recruiting candidates for employment. Phone interviews are often used to screen candidates in order to narrow the pool of applicants who will be invited for in-person interviews. They are also used as a way to minimize the expenses involved in interviewing out-of-town candidates.
While you're actively job searching, it's important to be prepared for a phone interview on a moment's notice. You never know when a recruiter or a networking contact might call and ask if you have a few minutes to talk. Review these tips on how to pull off your phone interview without a hitch.

Be Prepared to Interview

Prepare for a phone interview just as you would for a regular interview. Compile a list of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as a list of answers to typical phone interview questions. In addition, plan on being prepared for a phone conversation about your background and skills.

• Keep your resume in clear view, on the top of your desk, or tape it to the wall near the phone, so it's at your fingertips when you need to answer questions.

• Have a short list of your accomplishments available to review.

• Have a pen and paper handy for note taking.

• Turn call-waiting off so your call isn't interrupted.

• If the time isn't convenient, ask if you could talk at another time and suggest some alternatives.

• Clear the room - evict the kids and the pets. Turn off the stereo and the TV. Close the door.

• Unless you're sure your cell phone service is going to be perfect, consider using a landline rather than your cell phone to avoid a dropped call or static on the line.

Practice Interviewing

Talking on the phone isn't as easy as it seems. I've always found it's helpful to practice. Have a friend or family member conduct a mock interview and tape record it so you can see how you sound over the phone. Any cassette recorder will work. You'll be able to hear your "ums" and "uhs" and "okays" and you can practice reducing them from your conversational speech. Also rehearse answers to those typical questions you'll be asked.

During the Phone Interview

• Don't smoke, chew gum, eat, or drink.

• Do keep a glass of water handy, in case you need to wet your mouth.

• Smile. Smiling will project a positive image to the listener and will change the tone of your voice.

• Speak slowly and enunciate clearly.

• Use the person's title (Mr. or Ms. and their last name.) Only use a first name if they ask you to.

• Don't interrupt the interviewer.

• Take your time - it's perfectly acceptable to take a moment or two to collect your thoughts.

• Give short answers.

• Remember your goal is to set up a face-to-face interview. After you thank the interviewer ask if it would be possible to meet in person.

After the Interview:

• Take notes about what you were asked and how you answered.

• Remember to say "thank you." 

• Follow with a thank you note which reiterates your interest in the job.