My take on the telephone...

I think it's imperative that our industry continues the conversation about the significance of the telephone in recruiting and headhunting. I get it... it's 2016 and we have fantastic technology solutions to help with outreach and communication in recruiting. But I was talking with a junior recruiter the other day from a large staffing agency and she asked me how I feel about calling candidate prospects versus emailing them. I, of course, told her that I would never, ever in a million years choose to email a prospect if I had the opportunity to call them. She was blown away and couldn't believe that I had that mentality. "It's 2016!" she said. "People hate being called." I paused and realized that this is the exact mentality that is changing our industry for the worse. The majority of the recruiting professionals in the business (internal AND agency recruiters) feel that people simply "hate" being called. I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. Here is how I feel about this topic...

People do not simply "hate being called" in general. They DO hate being called by people who don't know what they're talking about and cannot provide anything of value with their call. This is why our industry believes it is better to email than call a candidate prospect. The talent pool is so incredibly fed up with untrained recruiting professionals calling them to eat up their busy schedules with information that lacks value. So instead of trying to figure out how to make the call worthwhile, what do we do? Rely on an email.

Recruiters must be able to call prospects with a level of sophistication and the call needs to be respectful, engaging, and informative. The call is not about a job. The call is a human-to-human interaction to briefly discuss an organization that is special for X, Y, and Z reasons. The recruiter needs to be incredibly knowledgeable about why this organization is special and they must articulate these things very concisely with energy and enthusiasm. What are the reasons for sharing this information with a specific individual or prospect? Because they're a relevant expert and you want to share meaningful dialogue to get their perspective. Also, because it may benefit the prospect's life/career because there may be an opportunity to join this special organization. This is not an easy thing to learn how to do but if our recruiting leaders start teaching this approach, people will become more open to taking our calls and they'll stop cutting us off to say, "Can you just email me the info?" They will begin to understand that you are the source of the info and nobody delivers it better than you - especially an email.

One of the challenges we are currently facing is that agency leaders do not find this recruiting approach scalable when building their businesses. It's too expensive to hire people who are at the level where they are able to make this type of phone call, because if they can, they are likely making good money. A more scalable approach is to continuously hire large groups of untrained people, "train" them in the "art" of emailing job descriptions or calling with a script, and telling them to be in at 7am and not to leave at 5pm. This is what leads us to where we're at today - a very upset group of candidate prospects who are getting less-than-stellar cold calls from untrained recruiters.

Disclaimer - I'm not saying that email in recruiting is a bad thing. I use email often and I understand its importance, especially in uber-technical recruiting. But we've become so dependent on electronic communication that we have completely lost our own ability to make an informative phone call without bothering someone. That's our own fault, and to say that we need to use electronic communication more often is adding to the problem.

I believe that you will find it very difficult to become a strong recruiter if you cannot make an informative and engaging outreach call to a candidate prospect. "New school" recruiting processes are healthy and imperative, however, we are losing touch with the fundamentals. I hope our recruiting leaders of today are able to educate the up-and-comers on a hybrid approach!