Cautionary Tales from a Slack Channel, or “Recruiter Beware”
I sit and listen to how technology people talk about recruiters and how we do our jobs for hours.
Literal hours.
I make a point of lurking on a jobs slack channel that is made up of mostly developers and it can be the most painful part of my day. I sometimes find it super hard to keep my mouth closed because holy CRAP the comments are really difficult to hear. Job postings are dissected. Emails from recruiters are shared. Bad actors are called out. Once in a while I chime in but I try to keep it to a minimum because my presence there is a privilege.
Every day I cringe and every day I shake my head with annoyance and frustration. I try to remember this phrase and yes I learned it on a feminist blog post: “If it is not about you, don’t make it about you. If it is about you, DO BETTER.” So I put my defensiveness in my pocket and listen and learn in order to do better.
Recruiters, it is about us a lot of the time. Yes candidates and hiring managers can be goofy, especially in this market. Yes, there are many great recruiters who do a fabulous job, but there are way too many horrible nugget smacks out there making all of us look bad.
The painful truth bombs I hear from the developers are a reminder of how poorly we as an industry do our jobs. Look, I get it. We are overwhelmed with positions and it is a challenge to treat people as human beings and write compelling descriptions but I have little sympathy really as THAT IS LITERALLY OUR JOB.
Last week a recruiter sent an email to what they thought was a compelling candidate on Linkedin. Unbeknownst to the recruiter the profile was a spoof profile set up for a dog that comes to the office. Now that can happen, except I looked at the profile and it was clearly that of a canine. Do a little research! The sad thing was several emails were exchanged all of which were full of doggy puns. The recruiter didn’t get it.
It was hard not to wince. I did wince.
I also imagined the excitement she felt. She had a live one! A potential candidate! We live for this! Ouch.
In real time 3,4, 5 emails sped back and forth. The puns got punnier. The incredulity grew on the slack channel as we watched this train wreck play out in slo-mo. How could this woman not get it? I even called her number to see if she was real. She was. I could have told her she was being roasted live on the internet, and part of me regrets not doing it, but I did not make the time. Maybe she will see this. Sorry! Do better, okay?
Today there was a job posting that was not the worst I’ve seen but it was bad enough. It used ROCK STAR and STUD in the text. This is not a small company. They should know better. I am embarrassed for them. Stud? REALLY? I have friends who work there and I know they need help hiring. With job descriptions like this it is absolutely clear why.
Shameless plug:
COMPANIES! I am available to help your recruiters do better. You don’t have to hire me to fill your jobs, but I am happy to help you stop embarrassing yourself like this. Take me up on it. I am an entertaining and effective trainer.
The position was lambasted by the developers as it should be. No one wants to be talked to like this, people. They want to be treated as professionals with respect. Technical people appreciate recruiters who know something about the positions and the companies and who have done some work to understand at least some of the technical aspects of what we represent.
Our job is to enthuse. Buzz words and lint do not enthuse. They are empty calories — sugar words with no informational benefit. People need protein and substantive detail in order to be enthused. We make this process far more difficult if we know nothing or serve up only sugary snack words with a side of fizz.
Look, I am not a developer, but I damn well look up every unfamiliar term in every job I represent order to know what the terms mean, to know how to use them in a sentence, and to know how they fit into the greater technology ecosystem as a whole.
It is not that difficult.
And although this stuff comes arguably more easily after 20 years of doing it, I still triple check my assumptions. It matters. DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT, I KNOW YOU ARE NOT DOING IT!
THEY ARE LAUGHING AT YOU. DO BETTER.
Technical knowledge, though important, is not the key to credibility and trust. People might take a job because of the tech stack but I think what I refer to with the extremely technical term “human stuff” matters more. People take jobs and stay because of the work, the sphere of influence and impact, and the people. Unsurprisingly, that is also why they stay…and leave.
If you do not know the human stuff about the jobs you are pitching, you are losing so many opportunities to stand out. And trust me, no matter how many “rock stars” and “studs” and “ninjas” you sprinkle into your text it won’t help. Ugh!
But the most important thing we can do to improve credibility is to strive for congruence in word and deed. Say what you do, do what you say, and make sure what you say lines up with reality. Strive to make a human connection. Learn what people want and deliver it on both sides of the equation. Find the mutual win. Making sure I do that may be the most important thing I can do to earn the trust of not just the candidates I represent but the companies I serve.
It doesn’t seem so hard, but from what I see daily on just this slack channel, we have a long way to go.
