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Back Woods Recruiting

By Bryan Johanson, March 29, 2007

Last week I traveled to Pennsylvania to conduct a Recruiter Boot Camp training class for a small recruiting firm in the backwoods of the Poconos. When I say the backwoods, I really mean up in the trees, out in the boonies, and completely isolated. I felt a little like I was entering into a real time warp. Just to give you a flavor for the group, it's like one big happy family. Monday nights and Wednesday nights are reserved for their regular pool tournament. They have a company team and some of them are apparently pretty good players. Tuesdays and Fridays are bowling nights. Thursday is of course date night. The CEO and founder graciously skipped her Wednesday evening at the pool table to join me for dinner.

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She started the fledgling recruiting organization in 1978. Since that time the organization has grown every year. Today it is the number one contingency recruiting organization in their vertical niche in the New York/New Jersey area and they are extremely profitable. They have 28 people on staff. As I spoke with the CEO, I wanted to understand how they became so successful. The more she talked about their recruiting approach the more I became surprised. The CEO is a self-described technology illiterate. She admitted that she can't even program her own VCR, although she does now have access to email at home and can respond to an email if one should happen to come her way. She has modeled her recruiting organization after the recruiting approach she learned in 1978. Her recruiters don't have computers on their desks; they don't use the internet; they don't even have access to a master database of potential candidates. They are completely isolated from technology. Each desk comes fully equipped with the bare recruiting essentials - a telephone (I assume they upgraded to touchtone phones, but I'm not entirely sure) and a little black book of contacts - developed personally by each recruiter during their tenure at the company. By this point in the conversation my jaw must have been completely open and dragging on the floor.

I don't know about you, but I grew up in the age of technology. My first job out of college was with a software company. I personally bought the first "portable" laptop computer - a 5K Compaq luggable. I spent 15 years in that world before moving over to the recruiting side of the house. The thought of recruiting without a computer, without the internet, without direct access to job boards, ZoomInfo, Google, and Craig's List is absolutely incomprehensible. I just finished an in-depth recruiting process audit for a large financial institution on the east coast. Their recruiters' biggest complaint was technology. They don't have the right technology; they don't have enough technology; and, the technology they do have is slowing them down. Their conclusion is that without the right technology they can't do a good job recruiting. What a complete contrast to my backwoods recruiting friends in both attitude and approach!

Have we overestimated the value of technology as it relates to recruiting? Have we lost sight of our key purpose? If we're really honest, is technology helping us or hurting us? Below are a couple of the lessons I learned while visiting my new found friends from the wilds of rural Pennsylvania:

1. You don't need technology to be a good recruiter. Technology helps, but the essence of great recruiting isn't technology. The essence of recruiting is still the recruiter's ability to pick up the phone, call a potential candidate, convince him/her to consider an opportunity, and then move the candidate to invest time and resources to explore it fully. This is the lost art of recruiting. Some corporate recruiters complain that technology is just getting in their way. It's absolutely true that bad technology can become a hindrance. If you're feeling trapped by technology, ask yourself the following questions: How much time do I spend entering data into the system? Does my technology help me identify great candidates from the undifferentiated sea of resumes? Am I spending less time than I used to talking to candidates and more time managing data? If so, you might consider taking a technology time out. Try doing your job without the technology overhead. Bypass your current system for a week or so. Let candidates send resumes directly to you via email rather than forcing them to struggle through an inadequate and frustrating application process. See if you can get back to basics and start talking to potential candidates more quickly. You may be surprised at what you discover. Technology is no panacea. It can become an excuse for not doing real recruiting.
2. Separate name generation and database management from the recruiting function. Even my technology-challenged backwoods recruiters cheat a little. While the recruiters in this organization have limited access to technology, they have created a small sourcing group of three individuals that post all their jobs on Monster and CareerBuilder. This group enters new applicants into their 1990 version of a File Maker Pro database. This group is responsible for doing data inquiries and providing recruiters with resumes of active candidates who respond to advertisements, as well as names of candidates from the master database. They also search resume banks on the major job boards for new potential candidates, as well as conduct rudimentary searches on the internet for target companies who have hiring needs. The interesting lesson from their approach is that they have gone out of the way to isolate their recruiters from the intense data entry part of the job.
   
   This is not a bad strategy. Why? Data entry is a low value recruiting function. Companies making technology investments should take a lesson from this model. Recruiters need time to recruit. Technology that requires recruiters to spend less time recruiting and more time managing and entering data should be scrapped. It's not that technology is bad, but I personally know some recruiters who are so enamored with the 100 new ways to find names that they won't or don't have time to pick up the phone. That's not recruiting.
3. Getting names is easy! In a weird twist of fate, technology is also this contingency recruiting firm's biggest worry. As their clients become more adept at using technology, they are amassing their own huge databases of potential candidates. This has created a significant point of contention. Companies don't want to pay search fees for candidates that are already in their databases. They consider these people as known candidates. So, when this contingent search firm submits candidates for review and manager interviews, the first thing their clients do is compare the candidate's information to their own databases and the online resume banks of Monster and CareerBuilder. If the name comes up they will refuse to pay a fee. I understand the logic, but in practice it doesn't make sense. If a person is already in the database, then why didn't they just hire them directly to begin with? Why put it out to search at all? Generally, it's because their corporate recruiting staff hasn't engaged with the candidate - or worse yet, they already rejected the candidate for all the wrong reasons.
   
   Getting names is easy. Contacting candidates and getting them interested in another position is hard. I agree that a search fee should not be paid if a company is actively engaged with a candidate presented by a contingency search firm. However, if the person hasn't engaged with the company for three to six months and there is no current activity, then the fee should absolutely be paid. Eventually, everyone will have access to all the names available. When that happens it won't be the name that differentiates great third party recruiters, it will be their ability to deliver high quality candidates who are open to exploring new opportunities. If companies don't have a recruiting staff capable of picking up the phone and getting a candidate interested - even if they are in the database - they should pay the fee.

Could my new found friends in upstate Pennsylvania benefit from a better approach to using technology? Could technology make them even more productive? Absolutely, however, not at the expense of losing their focus on the lost art of recruiting. I applaud their efforts. They are successful because they've managed to focus their recruiters on job #1 -- actively influencing candidates to explore new opportunities.

Happy Recruiting