Aiding job-seekers helps executive recruiters

What can executive recruiters do to provide better service to job seekers?

This is the third in a three-part series on relations between executive recruiters and job-seekers.

• In June we explored why job-seekers often find their interactions with recruiters unhelpful and unsatisfying.
• In July I followed up with how job-seekers can get the most out of recruiting firms.

Now it's time for me to turn the spotlight on my industry and propose some best practices for how we interact with job-seekers.

As we discussed over the last two months, employers are the recruiters' paying clients, so recruiters routinely (and let's face it, appropriately) prioritize service to employers above relations with job-seekers. But recruiters also need to maintain good relations with job seekers, lots and lots of them, so we can find highly qualified candidates for our clients' jobs, and quickly.

Our quandary as recruiters is: How do we stay in touch with as many job-seekers as possible, and treat them as well as possible, while necessarily focusing most of our time and attention on employers?

Mostly, we can improve job-seeker satisfaction by redefining expectations, providing better information, and empowering job-seekers with technology tools.

High expectations

Job-seekers often start with an expectation that is impossible for us recruiters to meet: They approach us expecting us to be personal agents or job matchmakers who can provide jobs on demand.

But we recruiters tend to do a lousy job explaining to job-seekers just why that expectation is misguided: We are in business as casting directors working for employers, not talent agents representing job-seekers.

Unless we redefine these expectations, something most recruiting firms don't even try to do, we are bound to create a high level of dissatisfaction among job-seekers.

Recruiters need to reset expectations by creating, and communicating, a promise that we can deliver on: not that we will deliver jobs on demand -- we can't -- but that we will give each job-seeker the tools to monitor our fast-changing inventory of job leads, so that when the right job comes along, anyone who's paying attention and is qualified will have a fair shot at it.

Some good practices

To deliver on that promise, recruiters need to follow some best practices:

• Give straight talk to job-seekers. They appreciate being told explicitly what we recruiters can -- and can't -- promise them. This message should be supported on recruiting firm Web sites, in automated e-mail communications, and in how recruiting firms train their staff to interact with job-seekers.
• Strike the right balance between high-touch and low-touch. Recruiters need to focus their high-touch time and attention on finding, screening and advancing the job-seekers who happen to be the best fits for current openings. But they also need to maintain an informational relationship with the broader range of job-seekers through an informative Web site, e-mail updates and account profiles that job-seekers can create and check online.
• Automate as much job-seeker communication as possible. Recruiting firms should acknowledge resume submissions with respectfully written auto-replies, and e-mail appropriately targeted job listings to job-seekers on a consistent, automated basis.
• Delegate data entry of job-seeker records to job-seekers. Recruiters need to empower/encourage/require/train job-seekers to create and update their own profiles, the way the online job boards (like Monster and CareerBuilder) do. This helps job-seekers keep recruiters updated about their job status, and it helps recruiters find the right job seekers when an appropriate job opens up.
• Enable job-seekers to segment themselves -- by profession and level -- so we can find them in our database when we have an opening for them, and send them targeted job listings.
• Give job-seekers searchable access to our full inventory of opportunities -- so they can take ownership of their job search.

Some of these practices are just common sense that recruiting firms can implement through commitment and training. But most of them involve smart use of information technology linking the power of the Internet, e-mail, and database tools. This kind of technology-driven service capability is becoming more available -- and more understood to be a business necessity -- in all industries.

Putting top priority on serving employers makes sense for recruiters -- in the short term. But chronic neglect of job-seekers hurts recruiters in the long term.

It eventually damages their brand among their target professional communities, weakening their ability to introduce the best-fitting job-seekers to employers quickly.

Communication necessary

Good communication with job-seekers, on the other hand, feeds a virtuous cycle for recruiters:

• It generates good word-of-mouth in the industries where they recruit.
• Builds stronger relationships with more and more job-seekers.
• Leads to more job placements, and
• Pays dividends in employer loyalty and client acquisition.

And all of that, if we're doing our jobs well, helps us recruiters to place more job-seekers in more jobs.