Chapter 5
Elephant: Your Recruiters Don’t Know Their “Why”
A candidate’s complex emotions toward recruiters needn’t be an elephant standing in the way of your unicorn. As you read in Chapter 4, a recruiter should not transmit stress from the hiring manager and CEO; a conscious recruiter has the emotional intelligence to manage stress and create strong interpersonal relationships with candidates, no matter what pressure is coming from the higher-ups. These recruiters can provide a great experience for the candidate.
But very often, recruiters’ attitudes don’t match the organization they represent. I’ve met plenty of recruiters with little to no interest in enhancing their EQ. In short, they don’t know why they are doing their jobs. They’ve lost their way in terms of how their identity relates to the work they do. They have lost their purpose; they have lost their “why.”
In this chapter, you’ll read about the importance of knowing your own “why” and helping your team rediscover theirs so you can apply it to your search for unicorn candidates. As a jumping-off point, I’d like to share my own “why” story with you.
I came to recruiting “accidentally on purpose.” When my second son was born, I gave up my role as a founding partner of a London-based PR agency. I was living in Vancouver, and my newborn had a rare neurological condition. I needed flexibility that my business partner couldn’t give me.
Shortly before my second son’s birth, a friend had asked me if my husband could refer some racing game talent from Electronic Arts, where he worked as a software engineer. I declined to pass along the request, as there was no way I was going to jeopardize my husband’s credibility at his studio. This was before LinkedIn; talent scouting was a lot more painstaking. When my friend asked me to do some headhunting, I shared many ideas on how to find people but ultimately refused. However, I realized that the detective work involved in finding the right person for the role was more interesting than simply giving referrals to someone else and hoping for the best.
I quickly fell in love with headhunting. A new vision started to take hold: I could be a different kind of headhunter. I wanted to not just place talent, but to help candidates adapt to their new roles—to provide concierge-level treatment to both the candidate and the organization through a full-service agency. Thus, after much soul-searching—and with a heaping dose of encouragement from my husband—I founded FORWARD in 2013.
From the beginning, FORWARD had three pillars: talent placement and coaching, executive coaching, and recruiter training. That last bit confused a lot of people. Training for recruiters? Was that a wise investment? What was the purpose? What was the “why”?
The business was truly a labor of love. Despite a lot of negative perception, I’d always been intrigued by recruiters (long before I became one myself). A good recruiter must be a scout, a coach, and a confidant. Her job is a service, both to the candidates she is trying to place and to the companies needing talent. Yet it was rare to come across recruiters with a true service mindset. What I saw instead was a lot of chest-thumping bravado, boasting about monthly commissions, and viewing each placement check as another feather in their cap. It was “me, me, me.” On the flip side, I saw recruiters who were totally ruled by their stress. When speaking with candidates, these recruiters inclined toward bullying—so desperate were they to relieve their anxiety.
Though the braggart and the neurotic may appear like opposites, these models are two sides of the same coin: at the end of the day, both are ruled by outside forces. Both refuse responsibility for their own emotional intelligence and growth; both have lost sight of the larger picture and the people they’re meant to serve. Neither has a sustainable modus operandi. Even the recruiter boasting about his six-figure monthly check is likely to exit the game sooner rather than later. Why? Because human beings are meant to work for more than just a paycheck. We desire work that is meaningful and connected to something bigger than ourselves. If a recruiter sees candidates only as obstacles in the way of a commission check, she’ll likely burn out quickly.
At the time, I had a thought I couldn’t let go of: “What if people actually enjoyed working with recruiters?” I’d encountered such widespread disconnectedness in the recruiters I’d interacted with over the years, but what if things were different? What if candidates could tell the recruiter was actually interested in their well-being rather than merely trying to sell them on switching jobs?
I began to dream up a new goal: I wanted to transform the recruiting industry. I started writing articles on how recruiters could maintain a human-centered approach in their work. I wanted as much content out there as possible so recruiters could truly “get it.” Yet I soon saw that I needed to be more explicit about my mission—that it wasn’t enough to have an arm of my headhunting agency dedicated to recruiter training. I needed something bigger, but I wasn’t sure what.
In 2017, I launched the Emotionally Intelligent Recruiter podcast and training platform with the goal of helping recruiters increase their emotional intelligence in the AI age. Finally, people started to get it. With artificial intelligence and deep learning systems taking over large swaths of the recruiter job function—mainly the repetitive bits, such as scanning resumes—it’s more important than ever for recruiters to focus on the human-centered part of the job. At the end of the day, humans hire humans. People need someone they trust guiding them through the candidate and onboarding processes.
The Recruiter Satisfaction Gap
At the EI Recruiter, my team and I surveyed more than 200 recruiters. Experience levels were pretty evenly split: 50 percent had worked in recruiting for more than 10 years, while 50 percent had been in the game for less than that. Our results were extremely telling (though not entirely surprising). We found that a huge majority—92 percent—dislike aspects of their job. Oft-cited job stressors included communication failures, administrative mishaps, and the repetitive nature of the work. An astonishing 46 percent reported that they did not communicate their own needs.
Most disheartening of all was the number of recruiters who have a clear “why” for doing their job: 2 percent. That’s two out of 100. It’s shocking! Can you imagine any other profession in which such a huge majority of practitioners are as disconnected from why they’re doing their job? What if only 2 percent of doctors found meaning in treating their patients? Or 2 percent of teachers understood why their students should learn the subject material?
It’s no wonder so many candidates have such negative interactions with recruiters. That kind of ambivalence seeps into job performance. Recruiters—or any other professional—who are that disconnected from their “why” are distracted, stressed, and careless. They become little more than a cog in a machine, completely divorced from their own power in the talent acquisition dance. Resentment grows—of the hiring manager, the candidate, and the job itself.
Lagging Satisfaction Leads to Lagging Development
It’s little surprise, then, that recruiters are often uninterested in developing their EQ. We’re not interested in investing in ourselves unless we understand the value of the investment. Most recruiters are simply trying to get through each day. They are juggling the demands of hiring managers and the needs of candidates. They’re dealing with ever-changing schedules, communication breakdowns, missed calls, mounting pressures, etc. They are generally overstressed, overstretched, underappreciated, lacking direction and motivation, highly frustrated, and disconnected from their own curiosity and problem-solving abilities. No wonder they often can’t find their “why”!
Yet their job is vitally important. Recruiters alter the course of people’s lives! They offer a tremendous boon to organizations as well—talent is the biggest driver of success, and a recruiter’s job is to get the talent. Recruiting can be exciting and gratifying.
I recommend using the following questions to get a read on your recruitment team’s attitudes toward their own development. Whereas the last set of questions was designed to get the recruiter thinking about how to help the company, these are meant to figure out ways for the company to help the recruiter. Your show of good faith that you are invested in the development of your recruiters as both people and professionals will go a long way toward building trust. (That is, as long as you actually follow up on it by working to implement tools to help your recruiters grow.)
To help recruiters find their “why,” start by asking:
▶ What is the most stressful part of attracting and retaining talent?
▶ What tools could help you?
▶ What’s missing in the organization’s approach to attracting and retaining the talent we need?
▶ Why are you a recruiter?
▶ Why do you do what you do?
Your recruiters may not be accustomed to bosses who genuinely care about their personal and professional development. As individuals, we rise to the level of what’s expected of us. Your recruitment team is more than just the numbers they produce for the company—but in the past, they may not have been treated as such, and this cold-hearted, bottom-line thinking will be transferred to candidates. Conversely, when you nurture recruiters, you begin a chain reaction of connection. The recruiter extends this sense of connection to candidates, and relationships that have the potential to transform your organization are formed. It all begins with you.
What Recruiters Can Learn from Agile Methodology
Agile methodology is characterized as a lightweight framework by which teams can respond to ever-evolving technology and deliver business value rapidly. Agile methodology is meant to take some of the risk out of experimentation. Developers can respond to changes and fix mistakes in real time, as technology and the business landscape evolve. It’s contrasted with the traditional “waterfall” method, a more linear approach in which progress flows in one direction through conception to construction, all the way to deployment and maintenance. In the waterfall method, development flows downward. Agile development is better represented as a circle—deployment of the product occurs before the circle is complete. The product is then tested and reevaluated, and then the circle of development begins again with any necessary adjustments being made.
Yet Agile methodology is not only for technological and product development. Its tenets can be applied to the human-centered business of recruiting, too. Kelly Nestor, head of technical recruiting at CoverMyMeds, used Agile methodologies to rapidly scale her teams and contribute to the company’s runaway success.
CoverMyMeds is one of the nation’s fastest-growing health-care technology companies. Since joining the organization in 2015, Kelly has tripled the size of the technical teams and built out the product management practice. She’s overseen the growth of the work force from 135 employees to more than 800 in four years. With such a rapid rate of growth, Kelly realized that she and her teams simply didn’t have time for activities that were not adding value to the organization. “Value over everything” is their motto.
Kelly’s teams work closely with software teams that use Agile principles. She was curious: Could incorporating Agile methodologies with her recruitment teams make them happier and more productive at work? The short answer was yes!
Kelly spoke of the four core values that compose Agile development:
1. People are more important than processes.
2. Collaboration is more important than negotiation.
3. Solutions are more important than documentation.
4. Responding to change is more important than following a plan.
By making these four values a bedrock of their practices, Kelly and her team experienced amazing results. They could do the most important things fast, focus only on activities that added value, maintain a sustainable working pace, and experience better cohesion as a team. Most important, these four values allowed the team to retain a clear picture of their “why.” That’s pretty amazing when you consider how frantic and disorganized things can become when a company scales that quickly.
Let’s look at each value one by one and see how recruiters might integrate them into their work.
People Are More Important Than Processes
Never lose sight of the human being on the other end of the line, be it a candidate or a hiring manager. Dig into your own humanity. Deploy empathy and continually place yourself in the shoes of the people you’re serving. If there’s a certain process by which you’re required to contact people, follow it, but if you believe the situation calls for another approach, don’t be afraid to break with protocol to best serve your clients.
Collaboration Is More Important Than Negotiation
Negotiation implies that two entities are coming to the table with competing desires and only one can win. Collaboration is different—it’s when all parties are working together for the greater good. It’s not a zero-sum game: Everyone can come out a winner, and the recruiter plays a vital function in making this happen. The goal is for the hiring manager, candidate, and recruiter to walk away from the transaction satisfied, each with their needs met. It’s possible!
Solutions Are More Important Than Documentation
What procedures do you currently employ for documenting your interactions with candidates and companies? Are they helping your communication, or slowing it down? In agile development, documentation is meant to be as brief as possible. Communication should be simple but clear, geared toward finding solutions rather than documenting for its own sake.
Responding to Change Is More Important Than Following a Plan
If a recruiter can’t adapt to the changing technological landscape, he won’t be employed much longer. The AI revolution is transforming the recruiting industry much faster than other sectors of the economy. As new technology continues to be unveiled, recruiters must learn to work with the changes rather than fear them. An emotionally intelligent recruiter who understands his “why” will be able to ride the tide of change brilliantly.
The Emotional Intelligence Factor
From an emotional intelligence lens, it’s incumbent on recruiters to enhance their self-actualization, one of the pillars of self-perception. Self-actualization, as defined by the EQ-i 2.0 system, outlines “the willingness to persistently try to improve oneself and engage in the pursuit of personally relevant and meaningful objectives that lead to a rich and enjoyable life.” When recruiters work on self-actualization, their perceptions of themselves—and consequently the importance of their role—increase. The recruiters become connected to their “why” and the tenor of candidate conversations changes. Everything is aligned with a larger purpose.
There’s an old story about JFK visiting NASA in 1962. He came across a janitor carrying a broom and asked the man what he was doing.
“Well, Mr. President,” said the janitor, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
The janitor was connected to his why. He saw the deeper meaning in what he was doing, even if others might have viewed his role as menial. How might this sense of dignity and larger purpose have carried the janitor throughout his workday?
Once recruiters have this service mindset, their interpersonal skills can flourish, especially empathy. A recruiter seeking the good of the candidate will engage in empathetic listening and keep the candidate’s needs foremost in his mind. Conversations are marked by trust and compassion. Even if the candidate-recruiter-company dance is long and complex and requires great patience, the recruiter doesn’t lose sight of the big picture. This way, the recruiter can stay humble and flexible, not taking disappointments too personally or letting success go to her head. It’s one way to keep a firm hold on your “why.”
This call for recruiters to “dig in” to their humanity becomes more urgent as more of the job is ceded to technology. The recruiting landscape is changing day by day. It’s impossible to keep up with the tech. In trying to imagine a way for recruiters to stay abreast of shifting currents while retaining their “why,” I believe it’s crucial for them to adapt an Agile methodology model, as Kelly Nestor’s people did, if they want to position themselves well for growth and scale.
To understand the impact your recruiters’ attitudes are having on your employer brand, ask the right questions. I recommend the ones below. Design a system by which employees can answer anonymously and freely. The answers you receive from your recruitment team will allow you to put your finger on the pulse of their beliefs, feelings, frustrations, etc. You’ll then have a clear picture of what recruiters may be transmitting to candidates—either consciously or unconsciously. Most important, it will help you help them identify and honor their “why.” Consider asking these questions:
▶ Where do you see your role in the next five years?
▶ How will you get there?
▶ What do you enjoy the most about your role?
▶ Imagine anything is possible. What would you want to change to make it easier to attract and retain talent within your role?
▶ What do you need to learn to be successful?
▶ What do you want me to know that is important for our success?
▶ How does your function relate to the company’s mission?
You need to know where you stand. Knowing your recruiters’ honest feelings will give you a clear insight into how candidates are experiencing your company. Remember: You gain nothing when your recruiting team is cautiously polite. Do whatever you can to ensure your team has the freedom to express the full, unvarnished truth and has a firm grasp on why they are doing this work. It’s only from that place that you’ll be able to grow.