Why external recruiters need to do better!

What are your bad experiences with recruiters?

To start off, I will share my personal worst experience which led me to start my business in helping companies recruit better so hopefully they won’t make the same mistakes.

I was applying for an HR Business Partner role at a Japanese company, I won’t reveal any company or recruiters names. The company had engaged a recruitment firm to do the search and selection. The job was advertised on LinkedIn and my first phone call with the external recruiter was very professional and pleasant. We met up for a proper interview to go through my experience and at the same time receive more information about the company and role.

Being a Human Resources professional myself and having done numerous recruitment interviews you tend to be a bit more critical on how others handle the recruitment process.

A few days after the face-to-face interview I received a short email asking me if I could enlighten her on the following topics in English (the email was in my local language but she needed the information in English for her report to the company).

What is your experience with:

• Talent acquisition
• Training & development
• Building HR strategies
• Writing and implementing HR guidelines
• Assessing HR-processes
• Performance & Evaluation Management
• EMEA experience

How well do you know the Hay method for job scaling?

How would you rate your knowledge of labour law self on a scale of 10?

How would you rate your analytical skills?

Do you have a strategic mindset? Please motivate. 

I was seriously surprised that I was asked to write this, especially considering I just had completed an in depth interview. Normally you would expect a recruiter, who is paid to do the selection, to find evidence on all these questions during the in depth interview. Recruiters should be well trained in evidence based interviews. I also would understand if after the interview there are a few things that need further clarification, but this was just me doing the recruiters job for her. All she then needed to do was  just copy and paste everything I had sent to her.

It seemed that I did a good job because I was invited for more interviews with the HR Director and General Manager. Spoiler alert, I dropped out of the process after it went on for 3 weeks and they couldn’t make up their mind. I didn’t get the feeling that I was their preferred candidate.

Sadly, when an external recruiter does such a lousy job, it doesn’t just reflect on them as recruiters, but it also reflects on the company they are working for. Why have they been selected as the recruiter and what does this say about the company’s own standards?

Unfortunately, the customer (being the company) will be unaware of this and a candidate won’t tell them. So why aren’t we checking the candidate feedback more? Is the recruiter doing a good job or not? In my example where the recruiter had sent me the email with the questions,  to my surprise some of those questions had already been answered in the face-to-face interview and others were already covered in my resume, had she taken the time to look. She could at least have answered those herself and made the email a bit more personal.

This same recruiter also called me on a Saturday at 7 PM asking who I had an interview with previous  Thursday. She had booked that interview with the client but she didn’t know anymore with whom it was with, and she was mixing up candidates.

This experience, made me wonder how many other candidates are out there with with similar (or worse) experiences. Feel free to leave a comments.