Dear Recruiters,
This is how you pitch a CEO
PSA : I was a recruiter. I think recruiters are an essential part of the market. While there is a general hatred of recruiters these days I think it is due to lack of training, not because recruiters are bad evil people that should be replaced by technology. Here is some advice.
I got a call today. On my phone. I usually don’t pick up the phone but I did. On the other end of the phone was this eager, nervous guy introducing himself as a recruiter at xyz firm and that he has some candidates he think would be perfect for my company. He must have gotten my number from one of those awesome data aggregators — thanks guys! — and I will probably never answer my phone again.
It is interesting to be the receiver of these calls considering recruitment is a craft I worked at mastering over the course of 15 years. Now that I am the founder of a company, this kind of flailing phone call is a lot like the ridiculous peppy emails that recruiters send me with blind resumes. Unlike your typical tech assholes I decided to handle the situation differently because what I care about is making recruitment better.
You don’t do that by shaming you do that by educating.
So instead of hanging up on him, I spent a minute of my time and refined his pitch. I am going to now share that with y’all. And if you aren’t a recruiter, you can be kind to a recruiter and share this with them instead of being a jerk. Recruiters are people too.
His phone pitch:
Hi my name is X from company Y and I work on Z kind of positions and I have candidates that would be great for your company.My adjustments:
Hi, My name is X from company Y and I specialize in recruitment in Z kinds of positions. In doing research, I noticed your company was looking for people with this kind of background. I would love to introduce myself , learn more about your company, hear how you have been handling your recruitment efforts and if I can help. Is now a good time or can we set up a time to talk?
It may seem like it isn’t too far off but the whole feeling is different. It’s all about attention. Where is the attention in the first one? It is on him. It is on what he is trying to pitch and sell. He shows me very little value add other than the potential of what is behind door number two. Meaning, even if I looked at what he had to show me, it doesn’t show me he can really deliver what I need. This shows me he is throwing candidates against a wall and hoping it sticks.
Good recruiters can call a good fit, so I am not saying this can never work. I was known for calling fits. But I would never call a fit for a client I had never spoken to. You can’t. You just don’t have enough information.
My adjustments accomplish a few things that shift the attention and the focus onto the person being pitched. If he thinks my company is hiring and he can help me, then his strategy should be to consult with me and offer his thoughts based on our conversation. That has the greatest liklihood of turning our conversation into a relationship.
What would that conversation look like?
1 — He would have done RESEARCH on my company and ME. Jesus. You do not pitch someone who used to do retained search that way. It would have taken him less than 5 minutes to figure that out. This happens before he emails or calls.
2 — He would then talk to me about our current hiring methods and where we have been successful. So this is — what platforms or tools do we use? Do we have a process? Are we using job boards? Have we had bad experiences? What has yileded a good experience? You need to know all of this before you can recommend anything.
3 — Then, since he was pitching me engineers, he should have asked about our technology and what our team’s current strengths are to get an understanding of where we are and where we are going. It would be great for him to understand where our product is going and how our needs will evolve.
4 — Only after this can he think of pitching me a particular candidate. He would have to absorb our wants, needs, and culture and compare that mentally to what he learned about the candidates he has been talking to.
So here is the other problem with all this. His approach is candidate centric. I would never hire a candidate centric recruiter. That recruiter is in the business of taking people who are on the market and finding him/her a job, and getting paid. It is not done through the lens of what is best for my organization. This does not mean it never works, but it is luck based strategy.
I could seriously write a novel about this but I’ll finish up. With the rise of automated recruitment tools and LinkedIn, there has been a significant fall off in real training for recruiters which goes way beyond finding a resume on the internet. However, recruiters are not the only ones to blame.
Companies contribute to the problem like this:
1- Companies desperate to hire actually take the bait and look at it as a no loss since they don’t pay if they don’t hire. My founder friends talking to 16 contingent recruiters — you are the problem.
2- Most founders and hiring managers have zero clue what a recruiter really does, how to work with a recruiter and have most likely never worked with a good one.
3- Recruiters are disrespected and treated like shit.
4- Founders think putting an administrative assistant in front of a LinkedIn Recruiter seat is the answer to your recruitment problems. Yeah that is off topic. I just wanted to get it in. ☺
That’s all for now! @bethebutterfly
