The mistakes I made as a recruiter were plentiful and varied.

They cost me a great deal in terms of stress, time, unhappy customers, and money.

But I still value them as they were the stepping stones to improvement.

At my ‘height,’ I was a good recruiter—not a great one, you understand—just good. You would probably have hired me.

I was never anything like the most outstanding recruiter ever to walk the earth, who I was proud to call a colleague and still a friend. Read about Graham here.

But the lessons I learned were invaluable.

I share them here with no shame. They are the scars of battle and the ladder I climbed to improve.

But why not avoid the pain and learn from my mistakes?

1: Making assumptions

This I did often. Ironically, as I got more experienced, I started making more assumptions because I felt I had ‘seen this before’. But over time, I learned.  With candidates and clients. Constantly checking in, calibrating, questioning, offering alternatives, posing scenarios, peeling the onion, and asking, ‘What has changed since we last spoke?‘ is crucial to reduce nasty surprises.  The candidate who last night at 6 pm said she would accept your job at $100,000. Don’t assume at 8 am today, this is still the case. Who knows who spoke to her about what at 6.10 pm? Always ask the most essential question of recruitment calibration.

2: Not genuinely understanding the candidate MTA

Another lesson slowly learned by me. I thought I was a good interviewer because I could accurately assess a candidate’s skills, work history, and qualifications. That’s the easy part of interviewing. The hard part is understanding the candidates’ true motivators for making a job change. To decipher precisely what it is that will encourage them to accept a new role. That will be a heady cocktail of salary, employer brand, flexibility, workstyle, responsibilities, opportunity, and much more. The point is you need to know what they are. And have them ranked in order of importance. To the candidate

3: Not qualifying job orders

This was a painful journey. Young and brash, I was so excited to take an order, that I accepted everything the client said at face value. I did not drill down on unreasonable hiring criteria. Qualifying a job order means testing and calibrating the client’s assumptions, often outdated or flawed. Skilled storytelling from the recruiter can play a big part in bringing authentic evidence to the discussion and acquainting the client with the market as it is today. It includes managing and agreeing on the process and setting time frames and communications parameters. For quite a while, I was not credible or skilled enough to challenge the client’s assumptions. The nuanced skill of qualifying job orders was slow in coming, but it was a beautiful thing once I nailed it.

4: Blaming poor outcomes on ‘bad luck’.

BS. There is no luck in recruitment. The sooner you learn that the better

5: Poor listening skills and thinking that selling is talking.

I was guilty of the same mistake for many years. I must still fight the urge every day. What urge? The urge to ‘tell’. The instinct to jump in and ‘preach’. The innate belief that ‘selling’ means talking. Slowly, I understood. When the client is talking, you are selling. Selling starts with questioning and listening. Peel the onion. You don’t learn anything when you are talking.

6: Treating all job orders as ‘equal.

They are not. It took me some time to learn that some job orders are far more ‘fillable’ than others. Many are not even real, approval to hire has not been given, or are in competition with four other agencies, or are just a process to benchmark already highly regarded ‘internal’ candidates. A smart recruiter will ‘triage’ their job orders; to do that, you must know your ‘fillability- factor’. You must learn triage, as I eventually did.

7: Not understanding and driving the one outcome that drives success in permanent placement recruitment

It’s easy to be lost in ‘being busy’. So much to do! Yet, the cold, hard reality is that only one thing ultimately drives success for a perm or search recruiter: The golden metric. How many of your candidates are sitting opposite your clients? That is it: ‘Client-candidate interviews’, or CCIs, as I call them.

8: Working with the wrong definition of a ‘candidate’.

For years, I defined a candidate as ‘someone looking for a job’; to this day, most recruiters will say the same thing. And that is right, of course, but it does not go nearly far enough. A candidate is a person who has the skills and presentation that your clients will hire. Whether or not that person is looking for a job is simply a matter of timing! They will be – someday. We need to invest for the longer term by engaging and bringing candidates into a conversation long before they plan to move.

9: Leaving a counteroffer to chance or lecturing candidates on the reasons not to take a counteroffer.

That is not the way to handle this nuanced issue. Countering a counteroffer starts at the very first interview. A counteroffer must never be ‘unexpected’ for the candidate. Making an offer that will be accepted and not counteroffered successfully is not an event – it doesn’t happen in a single conversation. It’s a progression, a step-by-step process – managed by you. I blundered for years before I learned this, and the difference it made was enormous.

10: Not navigating ‘The Valley of Death’.

So much pain is caused by leaving the ‘VOD’ to chance. Not sure what the ‘Valley of Death’ is?  That period between job acceptance and the moment your candidate puts their delicate derriere in your client’s seat. You need to know. And act.

There are the ten disastrous blunders I made in recruitment in the early years. There were many more, but how long can a blog be?

But remember, it’s a constant battle to stay ‘match-fit’. Experienced recruiters can fall back into wrong ways, as I did many times.

Don’t judge yourself by whether you ‘know these mistakes.’

Judge yourself by whether you continue to make them

And act

I plan to write a blog soon on the mistakes I made as a recruiter leader and manager. There are dozens of them. Let me know in the comments whether that blog interests you.

If I get enough chat, I will write the blog.

Meanwhile, my book ‘Recruit. The Savage Way’ covers all these mistakes, how to avoid them,  and much much more

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