Three Surefire Ways to Lose a Recruiter’s Attention (And Tank Your Search)
Three Ways to Lose Any Recruiter’s Attention
If you’ve used a recruiter to source sales candidates successfully, you understand the importance of your role in the recruitment and hiring process.
Taking an active interest in the recruitment process, making yourself available, and fostering open communication with your recruiter are important parts of developing a productive working relationship.
If you’ve struggled to use recruiters successfully, here are three of the most common traps that will put your search to the bottom of a recruiter’s heavy workload:
If you don’t respond to your recruiters’ emails, calls, and questions for days…it’ll be hard to keep the search momentum going.
Recruiting depends heavily on real-time communication.
If response times slow, candidates start to lose interest. And recruiters will move their time and attention to more responsive clients.
Restarting a search due to an unresponsive hiring manager won’t yield exceptional results. When you’re ready to start a search, make it a top priority or think about delaying it until you’re ready to give it your full attention.
2. Fail to Provide Feedback
Have you ever given a recruiter a search assignment, reviewed resumes, or even interviewed some of the candidates presented, and then failed to give the recruiter your feedback?
This happens to recruiters of all kinds—from in-house to agency recruiters.
It makes us crazy.
Imagine sourcing, recruiting, and interviewing candidates for a position and then having a hiring manager go radio silent. Frustration starts to grow with every unreturned voicemail and email.
Lack of feedback is unprofessional and shows disrespect for the recruiters’ work. Not only have you wasted your recruiters’ time, but your recruiters have candidates on the hook who are waiting for answers about their status in the interview process.
3. Be Indecisive
I’ve had clients who have said they are writing up offers to candidates, and then they changed their minds.
They told the candidate the offer was coming, and I had to deliver the surprising bad news.
I’ve had clients who’ve changed their position halfway through the search. I’ve had clients who couldn’t decide which candidate to make an offer to and deliberated for days before making a final decision.
Being decisive doesn’t mean you’re impulsive, stubborn, or rash. Decisiveness is the willingness, after shrewd deliberation, to decide, to act, to do. Strong leaders are decisive.
They possess the self-confidence and the assertiveness to decide.
When a recruiter runs up against an indecisive manager, the search tends to go sideways. The candidates lose interest, and the organization misses out on the best and the brightest.
After all, who wants to work for leaders who aren’t worth following?
A recruiter’s biggest challenge is to not only find candidates who match hiring requirements, but who are interested and ready to make a move for the right opportunity.
Once these candidates have been identified, interviewed, and vetted, they need to be seamlessly moved through the hiring process.
This can only be done successfully when the hiring manager takes an active role in the process by being responsive, providing feedback, and making timely hiring decisions.
Boost Your Hiring Success: Follow Up, Communicate, and Secure Top Talent
Who do you need to follow up with on your open positions? What new information have you uncovered that needs to be communicated to your recruiter?
Help solidify your reputation as a hiring manager who’s easy to work with, and you’ll soon be first in line to meet the top talent.
Your open roles will be filled faster than you ever imagined as top recruiters begin to prioritize your openings.
