Contacted by Recruiters: Frequency, Relevance, and Other Survey Findings
Some time ago, we decided to ask candidates about their experience with recruiters.
We wanted to focus on such aspects as:
- How often do recruiters contact people?
- Is it somehow associated with people’s roles? Who is targeted the most by recruiters?
- How many of those recruiters work for an agency and how many are in-house recruiters?
- Are these job approaches more relevant or irrelevant to candidates?
- Who fails more at relevancy, agency recruiters or in-house recruiters?
- What are the most common reasons why a position is not relevant to a candidate?
TL;DR:
If you don’t feel like reading the whole article, please jump to the part “What can we take from the survey?” where we have summarised the key takeaways. For recommendations, read our conclusions at the end of the article.
We asked questions through Typeform
We used Typeform to create a survey. We sent it via our Newsletter and shared through social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter). To encourage participation, we offered a crate of choice beverage to a randomly selected winner.
These were our survey questions:
So, who took part in our survey?
In total, 53 people participated.
Although the number of responses we got is not enough to talk about valid and extrapolatable results, we still can draw some conclusions.
We targeted respondents who work in technology and software development. However, as we shared the survey via social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), we had no control over who participates. Based on the responses we can assume that most of our participants live in Berlin specifically or Europe, although we didn’t specifically track it.
Below are the most prominent groups of respondents by their position types.
For example, 62.2% people hold engineering roles. 45.2% are Software Engineers/Software Developers, and 11.3% are DevOps.
16.9% respondents hold high-level positions/executive roles (Director, Managing Director, CTO, “Head of”), and 5.6% are Project Managers.
RESULTS
1. How often were people contacted by recruiters?
The average number of times respondents were approached by a recruiter per month — 16.36. One can see the distribution on the graph below.
We would also like to point out certain peculiarities.
- A majority of respondents (66%) got contacted 10 times or less. 11% respondents were contacted only 4 times within a month.
- Only 6% respondents were approached more than 30 times. Namely, 50, 75, and (reportedly) 300 times in a 4-week period prior to taking the survey.
Who were contacted more often than others?
We wanted to see if there is a correlation between people’s job titles and a number of times recruiters approached them.
So what do our results say?
(1) The average
Respondents with engineering roles (62% respondents) were on average approached 22.7 times per month, which is more often than the survey average.
Software Developers/Software Engineers (45% respondents) were on average approached 22.19 times / month:
- Engineers with unspecified seniority level (37.7%) — 27.18 times;
- Senior-role engineers (18.8%) — 12.30 times;
- Lead-role respondents (9%) — 24.6 times.
(2) The median
At a first glance, there is no correlation between the stated seniority of engineer respondents and number of times they were contacted by recruiters. However, if we take not the mean, but the median, we will see that it favours engineers with stated higher positions.
- Engineers with unspecified seniority level — 6.75 (Half of engineers were approached less than 6.75 times, and half of them more frequently)
- Senior engineers — 11
- Lead engineers — 20
On the other hand, respondents who hold executive or high-level management positions (9% respondents) were on average approached 5.72 number of times, with a median of 5 times (and the range between 0 and 12.5).
2. Are there more agency recruiters or in-house recruiters?
On average, 72.9% of recruitment approaches came from agency recruiters.
- For engineering roles, the percentage was 75.94%;
- For senior-level engineers — 70.67%;
- For executives and high-level management — 51.67%
26% respondents were contacted only by agency recruiters.
See the graph below for a fuller picture:
3. How relevant were recruitment approaches?
On average, less than half of recruiters’ approaches (42.8%) were relevant to our respondents. Only one person (who was contacted only once) reported a 100% relevancy. One participant was not sure.
We also divided our respondents into three groups:
- Those, for whom half of the job approaches were relevant
- Those, for whom a minority of job approaches were relevant
- Those, for whom a majority of job approaches were relevant
We found that respondents of our survey, when approached by a recruiter, were less likely to be contacted about a job relevant to them.
More agency recruiters: Less relevance
Next, we asked ourselves:
Who approaches candidates with more relevant jobs, agency recruiters or in-house recruiters?
Thus, we have divided our respondents in two groups:
- the one where a person was mostly contacted by in-house recruiters (47.2% respondents)
- where a person was mostly contacted by agency recruiters (52.8% respondents)
As we can see from the graph, the average percentage of relevant job approaches was 30% higher in the group where most recruiters were in-house recruiters.
When we looked at the relevancy of recruitment approaches, we got the following results.
- In cases where only 0–8% job approaches were relevant, between 60% and 100% (average: 90.28%) of them came from agency recruiters.
- On the other hand, between 0% and 93.33% approaches came from agency recruiters (average: 63.78%) in cases where 80% and more jobs were relevant.
As we remember, on average, 72.9% of recruitment approaches came from agency recruiters.
According to our survey result, a person is more likely to be contacted about more relevant jobs if he or she is contacted by an in-house recruiter.
5. What made recruitment approaches not relevant to candidates?
Among the respondents who stated their reason why jobs pitched by recruiters were not relevant to respondents, 46% said that the job description did not match their skills and/or experience.
Now let us look at all reasons:
- Job description did not match your skills and/or experience — 46% respondents
- Seniority level of the job did not match your seniority level — 23.1%
- A proposed job was in a different location — 15.4%
- Other — 15.4%
Respondents who selected “Other” specified the following:
- Multiple reasons from the list
- Happy with the current job
- Did not like the “type of the company and impact”
- The salary was too low
- The job was in a field where the candidate worked previously
TL;DR
What can we take from the survey?
- Of people who responded to our survey, 62.2% work in engineering roles.
2. Respondents were contacted by recruiters between 0 to 300 times (16.6 on average) per month.
3. Those who work in engineering roles were contacted on average 22.19 times / month.
4. The average number of recruitment approaches did not say much about which seniority level is more favoured by recruiters. However:
- Half of lead engineers were contacted 20 or more times within a month
- Half of senior engineers were contacted 11 or more times
- Half of engineers with unspecified seniority level were contacted 6.75 or more times
5. The majority of recruitment approaches (72.9%) came from agency recruiters. 26% respondents were contacted only by agency recruiters.
6. Recruiters were less likely to contact our respondents about a job that is relevant to them. On average, less than half of approaches (42.8%) were relevant.
7. Our respondents were more likely to be approached with more relevant jobs if they were contacted by an in-house recruiter (than an agency recruiter).
8. When we asked why respondents found some jobs irrelevant to them,
- 45% respondents answered that the job description did not match their skills and/or experience
- 23.1% replied that seniority level of the job did not match their seniority level
- 15.4% responded that the job location did not match their preferences
- 15.4% provided other reasons (for example, 2 of them were happy with their current jobs)
What can be done to ensure that recruiters do not spam candidates with irrelevant job approaches?
We have learned that there are more agency recruiters contacting people than in-house recruiters (the ones who hire for the company they work at). Moreover, many recruiters, especially agency recruiters, contact the wrong people about the wrong jobs.
This can be subject to a variety of reasons, including:
- Agency recruiters source within a large candidates pool and tend to view candidates’ profiles in haste or purely do keyword match without understanding the in-depth skillset
- Some agency recruiters might lack sourcing skills or technical understanding
- Agency recruiters do not have a complete understanding of the job due to the flawed communication with the hiring company
- Agency recruiters might not have a detailed enough job brief
- Some job descriptions might be too vague, which makes search queries too broad
- Candidates maintain not updated profiles or provide inaccurate information in their CVs
Still, there is no evidence that in-house recruiters are “better” than agency recruiters. Indeed, approaches by company recruiters proved to be more relevant to candidates. Still, it is clear that in-house recruitment does not offer the same search breadth across the market that agency recruiters are able to achieve (with agency recruiters contacting around 2/3 more candidates than in-house recruiters).
In our experience at Caissa Global the relevancy of the approach — or the relevancy of jobs pitched to candidates — can be improved through:
1 — Closer collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers
2 — Obligatory and timely feedback from the hiring managers at every step
3 — Collaboration between agency recruiters and in-house recruiters
4 — Effective communication with the candidate
5 — Excellent knowledge of talent market
6 — Use of advanced talent sourcing and talent mining techniques
7 — Ensuring technical recruiters have a deeper understanding of skillsets and follow the developments in the technical sphere.
In an ideal world, recruiters would combine the sniper-like precision of recruitment approaches with a deep access to the job market. This though can only be achieved through proper briefing of agency recruiters by hiring managers, as well as close collaboration between all parties and detailed feedback at every stage.
Thanks for reading!
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If you have something to add or want to share your experience, do not hesitate to write a comment below. Any feedback is welcome.
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