The Six Habits of Ineffective Recruiters

Posted on April 7, 2008
Filed Under Online Recruiting, Best Practices |

Written By Peter Weddle, Weddles

If you’ve been alive on planet Earth at any time during the past decade, you’ve undoubtedly heard about Stephen Covey’s blockbuster bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The book has helped millions of people center their lives on seemingly simple but powerful principles for leading a meaningful and satisfying life. It is, if you will, a guide to right actions in the ups and downs of our day.

As Dr. Covey also acknowledges, however, there is a dark side to habits. These oft repeated actions can be harmful as well as helpful. They can cause us to fail as well as succeed. So, while it’s appropriate to bias our lives toward the right habits, it’s also important to avoid those that can undermine or derail us. To put it another way, we must be as proactive about protecting ourselves from bad habits as we are about pursuing good ones.

What does that mean for those of us in recruiting? I think bad habits can actually cause an organization to lose the War for Talent. To ensure that doesn’t happen, it’s critical that you stay away from what can harm you and your performance. Fortunately, while there are a fairly large number of dangerous habits, you can get significant protection by avoiding just a handful as they represent the greatest potential threat. I call them “the six habits of ineffective recruiters.”

These bad habits fall into two categories:

those that are artifacts of the early days of online recruiting, and
those that are artifacts of earlier days in traditional recruiting.

Let’s look at the six habits in a bit more detail.

Bad Habits That Are Artifacts of the Early Days of Online Recruiting

Habit #1: Using the same employment Web-sites over and over again. Today, there are over 50,000 job boards and career portals operating in the U.S. alone. That’s a 25% increase in online recruiting capability in just the last five years, yet many recruiters persist in using only the one or two sites with which they’ve always posted and are thus most comfortable. Regardless of their recruiting requirement or the access that other sites provide to their target demographic, they limit their job board selection to a familiar handful of sites and no others.

What’s a more effective habit? Learn how to shop smart for job boards. Use reference guides and colleagues to help you scan the job board universe for sites that might be appropriate for your particular opening. Then, evaluate the alternatives focusing on their ability to attract passive, high caliber talent in your target demographic. Finally, select the set of sites-I suggest you use seven-that are most likely to connect you with the top talent that you need and your clients and competitors can’t find. Why can’t they find those top prospects? Because they’re still going to the same old sites they’ve always used.

Habit #2: Relying exclusively on job postings for candidate sourcing. For much of the past decade, recruiters have focused almost entirely on the use of recruitment advertising to reach candidates for their openings. Today, however, the Web offers a range of sourcing methods for finding and establishing relationships with top talent in all professions, crafts and trades. Despite these advances in capability, however, many recruiters persist in simply posting jobs online-putting a check mark in the Internet box-and then spending the rest of their time doing the same old things they’ve always done in the real world.

What’s a more effective habit? Adopt a multifaceted online sourcing and recruiting strategy and acquire the expertise necessary to implement it effectively. For example, the Internet now offers a way to supplement your traditional networking with online networking that can significantly expand your access to the candidate pool. Unlike social networking, this professional networking places your interactions with prospects in the appropriate venue for building useful (i.e., work-related) recruiting relationships with them. However, as with any other activity, this sourcing method is only as effective as the time and effort you put into it.

Habit #3: Following the herd to the latest recruiting fad. Since its earliest days, online recruiting has been absorbed by one “great new thing” after another. Countless tools have been introduced for sourcing, selling, selecting, segmenting and systematizing candidates, all accompanied by breathless claims that they are going to change recruiting as we know it on the Web. All too often, however, the time and energy that was devoted to learning these new (and unproven) techniques precluded recruiters from gaining expertise in the proven tools they already had.

What’s the more effective habit? Invest your limited time in becoming an expert in the tools that have proven their effectiveness online. Don’t avoid new developments, of course, but let others prove or disprove their claims. Early adopters gain no significant advantage in the recruiting field, so let them experiment while you pursue excellence in what we already know works: recruitment and search advertising, online networking and a limited set of data mining tools.

Bad Habits That Are Artifacts of the Earlier Days of Traditional Recruiting

Habit #4: Writing job postings the same way classified ads are written. Recruiters have been composing classified ads for newspapers and other conventional publications for decades. They’re comfortable with the way such recruiting messages are composed and structured in print, and they’ve been effective at writing them. This success has encouraged many recruiters to assume that they can use the same approach online. The Internet, however, is unlike the printed page; it has very different physical dimensions, and it creates a virtual experience that engages people in a very different way.

What’s the more effective habit? Acknowledge two differences: (1) People, in general, interact with a written message differently on the Internet than they do on the printed page and (2) Passive prospects, in particular, interact with job ads differently than do active job seekers. Learn the structure, syntax and vocabulary of persuasive online recruitment advertising and perform the tailoring necessary to adapt those principles to the information and motivational needs of passive, high caliber talent.

Habit #5: Treating the resume database as a static stack of documents. Paper resumes have always had very limited utility. Basically, they provided recruiters with a summary of a person’s qualifications and their contact information. That situation has now changed, thanks to the widespread installation of resume management systems that can be (and often are) linked to the Internet. This architecture provides recruiters with a way to communicate regularly with the people behind the resumes and build relationships with them. As useful as that activity would be, however, many recruiters fail to make the effort.

What’s the more effective habit? See resumes as people not documents. Use the mass one-to-one communications capability of the Internet and the organizing capacity of computerized databases to develop and implement a campaign of regular, personalized messages to all previous applicants. Properly designed, these communications can help you pre-qualify them for and pre-sell them on the openings you have to fill today and in the future.

Habit #6: Viewing recruiting as an activity that anyone can do. A growing number of organizations are assigning recruiting responsibilities to HR generalists. They ask these individuals to perform an activity for which they have had modest (if any) training or worse, they expect them to recruit effectively while concurrently accomplishing a laundry list of other HR duties. As we all know, however, talent has never been more important to the success of the enterprise, and that includes the talent required to recruit successfully.

What’s the more effective habit? If you really believe your organization is in a War for the Best Talent, staff for victory, not for a stalemate or worse. Recognize that recruiting is a profession unto itself, with an ever-growing body of knowledge and ever more complex set of skills. Then, give recruiters and HR generalists the training and the priority of mission they need to hone their talent and perform their role successfully.

Thanks for reading,
Peter