Why Bad Recruiters Get Away With It?

The “CV blackhole”, “they never got back to me”, “I don’t know what’s happening”, and “it took forever” are all quotes that as a recruiter or HR professional we have heard over and over in our careers. So why is it that a profession that thinks it is uber professional and provides a great service, is so badly perceived by lots and lots of people and why are companies and people involved rarely called out on it?

Well it’s really obvious in my opinion – most job searchers do not want their existing employer to know they are looking for a new job!

As a result if you are treated badly in an job application process, at any stage, you’re probably at best going to voice your opinion to the recruiter you were dealing with (if you got past the screening process), or to an anonymous email address. Maybe you’ll get a reply, maybe not. You’ll probably get a somewhat apologetic and excuse laden response.

You’ll have nowhere to really escalate this to, and won’t want to use social media to name and shame as you will be ‘outing’ yourself as a job seeker for all to see.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is not just restricted to entry level or volume recruitment, it also happens at senior levels – perhaps senior people are even less likely to complain for fear of their activity in the job market coming to light.

Some of the most desirable companies in the world to work for are not immune to this, far from it. Just because you constantly preach good candidate experience does not mean you are executing it.

So why does it happen?

Well there is no easy answer as to why the experience can be so poor but here’s some contributing factors:

1. Under-resourced recruitment teams – simply put not enough people to handle the volumes of candidates and then prioritising certain tasks e.g. make offer to important hire you may lose or regret people from vacancy you have already closed. The under pressure recruiter will always do the offer but the people deciding on resourcing that department and how performance is analysed has driven those actions
2. The Candidate Experience Myth – some companies think they do a great job on candidate experience and can back this up with hard data from their candidate surveys. Of course most companies only survey successful hires so this piece of data is inherently flawed
3. Poor Employee performance
4. No accountability – as per the beginning of this article, the chances of being held to account for any of this is low

So if you think your company provides a really good candidate experience, why not really hold a mirror up to yourself? Survey unsuccessful candidates more often, look at qualitative assessment of individual applicants candidate journey on a regular basis, and resource your department to be able to live up to your stated candidate experience!