Recently I have written a post about why candidates were getting frustrated and I noticed it sparked some interesting conversation. It triggered me to think about this topic in even more detail and I started to get the feeling that the expectations that we have about recruiters might not always be realistic.
Why is that and where does that come from?
As most of us know, recruitment has a fairly low entry point. From an agency perspective as well as from an in-house perspective. There are no recruitment schools/degrees and therefor almost everyone in our industry starts from scratch and are trained on the job (or not trained at all).
That this, especially in the beginning of someone´s career, results in to frustration for candidates, hiring managers and the recruitment consultant alike is nothing new.
One of the reasons that in my opinion is overlooked though is “expectations”. To be more precise: Expectations that are not in line with someone’s experience.
I have always been working in the field of Technical recruitment myself, so will base my personal findings on this sector.
More and more people start to realise that a strong Tech recruiter is very hard to find. Yes, sometimes even harder than a Software Engineer believe it or not. Just having a look at how many times our own tech recruitment team members get approached for other jobs on a weekly basis, gives us a good idea on the demand in the market.
And it makes sense right? Many startups and tech companies see their Engineering & Product team as their most important “asset”. So hiring someone into your business that has the task to build these teams is key, you would say.
However, run a quick search online on Recruitment jobs and you will find that many companies have advertised a junior IT recruitment position or sometimes even internships.
Back to “expectations”, it makes me wonder why we believe someone with little industry experience is expected to fill such a key position within an organisation. Of course, not every company has the budget to take on a well paid senior Tech recruiter in an early stage of their startup.
But I also believe that recruitment is a highly underestimated job. Before I entered the recruitment world myself I also thought, how hard can it be? Setting up interviews and communicating feedback. Little did I know that running a complex recruitment process, understanding technology and dealing with people who are in high demand (who are all different and have different needs) at the same time is the hardest thing I have ever done…and still is.
Having made many mistakes myself over the years and having frustrated several candidates for sure along the way, the key thing I have learned is to manage my own expectations when it comes to people who are new to recruitment.
I would be very interested to hear anyone´s thoughts on this topic, do we have really have wrong expectations or is it something else that causes frustration?
