Killing Mind

In applying for engineering jobs over the last couple of months I've given my details to no less than 20 recruiters[1]. I've never dealt with recruiters before, and the experience has been eye opening.

To understand the motivation of a recruiter, it is worth considering how their role casts employees and employers into positions they are not used to. It has come to my attention that it is more illustrative to consider a recruiter as a provisioner of goods rather than a service provider. A recruiter provides a service only in the same sense that a bakery provides specialist access to bread. In the tricky world of recruiting however, the good is people like me. A recruiter works to sell me to an employer, who pays the recruiter for the acquisition.

It's not hard to see why an employer would shop at a recruiter - acquiring humans goods is a really tough task. Attracting talent a hit and miss affair, interviews are notoriously ineffectual at evaluating suitability, and vacancy advertising is expensive. Given that companies only function if people do good work, it is clear why sensible employers would consider going to the expert suppliers of human goods.

That leaves the relationship between recruiters and employees like me. Evidently I understand the need for recruiters. In fact, for me, the recruiter is providing a service for free! I only need to present my case for employability to a recruiter and then kick up the hells and relax, while the recruiter scans the job market, evaluates their network and finds a great match for me.

Except that's not how it works at all.

Fundamentally I am a bread roll at a bakery. If the bakery has a thousand customers who pay x dollars for looking for a hearty white roll, they are going to sell the hearty white rolls that have the 5 ticks of approval and are cheap to store. If the bakery has another roll also worth x dollars, that tends to be picky about who consumes it, it makes no business sense at all to work to sell that roll when there's a stack of hearty white rolls that sell for the same price. Even if the bakery finds a customer looking for that other roll, the one with the sesame seeds on top, there's only a certain amount of bending over backwards the baker is going to do to sell the roll. If that roll digs its crusty feet in, the baker has easier and more lucrative hearty white rolls to go on and sell.

So what's a person like me - a crusty sesame seed roll - to do? I want to get sold, and being of able mind and body, I put myself on the market. As already established, the consumers shop at bakeries, and it is to bakeries I go. Not every bakery knows the specifics of the sesame seeds on my roll, so for them to be able to sell me they need me to enter the poly-unsaturated fat content breakdown, or my seed chewability, or my resistance to oat bacteria, into their product register.

Up to this point the market forces are working - I'm a crusty, picky roll presenting myself on the shelves of the bakeries that the discerning customers shop at. Imagine however, that there are about equal number bakeries to customers. Suddenly each bakery is jealously protective of its customers. Suddenly the possibility of a crusty sesame seed roll being sold relies entirely on being available at the right bakery. Further, that roll needs to make sure it is completely devoted to offering itself to every bakery, has low on-going costs, and is easy to sell. Otherwise, if the bakery wants to make money, it will work hard at selling that which is modestly suitable and easy to move.

The analogy provides the background to my process of realisation in visiting recruiters. In recruiters we have a business selling a good. Their expertise lies in the selling of that good, not in the way that good is constructed. Recruiters are faced with a good that talks, that knows about its target market, that could in fact, communicate on a practical level with its customers. And therein lies my frustration with recruiters - in general I have found that they:

• Jealously guard their clients
• • Sure, without that exclusive relationship I'd be less motivated to sign up with recruiters, but the secrecy means I'm wasting time signing up with recruiters that may well have nothing that interests me.
• Have no expertise (or have tried and failed) in the work their candidates do.
• • I think the ideal role for recruiter would be as a mediator between me as an engineer and the human resource elements of the employer. The general lack of appreciation for the work an engineer does however, means most recruiters are entirely committed to salesmanship, rather than mediation.
• Push clients and candidates to make a sale rather than satisfy both.
• • Every recruiter had their own spiel about how special they were for working to satisfy employer and employee. Every recruiter that found a company willing to see me also bugged and pestered me to pursue that course without consideration of my own desires. The recruiter only gets paid if they place me, and that is therefore their primary concern.
• Consider themselves special for having contact with employers that any in-touch employee is already aware of.
• • Given their were maybe 10 high potential employers on my radar, and many more recruiters, I quickly become sick of each recruiter telling me how special they were to have direct links to company X. Despite how special that recruiter feels, I still need to sign up with every one just to get my resume in front of a wide variety of companies.
• Consider that their own particular generic, lengthy candidate questionnaire warrants full attention.
• • These questionnaires take time. A lot of time. That would be a mild frustration if it weren't for the fact that I'd already spent considerable time on my own resume and cover letters, and that the questionnaires invariably are vague and unintelligent.

Typically enough, this post has taken a path I did not plan. I'l save the original impetus for part two of this post, and conclude by saying that from meetings with 20-something recruiters, I had about 8 job interviews. 5 of those I set up myself through contacts in the industry. During this time my referees have been contacted zero times.

[1] While I'm doing a recap, it's worthwhile actually listing the recruiters I can find details of:

• Hays
• Hayden Recruitment
• Hudson
• EMA
• WorkPac
• Hunter Industrial Recruitment
• Davidson
• Macro Recruitment
• BSI People
• Personnel Concept
• Calibrate Recruitment
• Nizza
• AllStaff
• Manpower Professional
• Agile Consulting
• Forsythes
• Gemteq
• Executive Talent International
• Avantia
• Connect Personnel
• Interlogic