When an employee resigns and sends you into a tailspin, you may be tempted to post your own opening online and/or hire multiple recruiters and staffing agencies to help you fill your open position as quickly as possible. In reality, this is the WORST thing you can do. If you haven’t worked as a professional recruiter, it’s impossible for you to be aware of the reality on the flip side of the process. Here are three things you should know:
- Candidate Optics
Multiple recruiters contacting the same person about an open position can turn a quality candidate off in several ways:- It seems like the hiring company is not very selective.
- The position feels unimportant and lackluster.
- It makes the company seem desperate.
Recruiting is like dating. The more exclusive a position seems, the more attractive it is to candidates. Hiring managers and human resources professionals hate seeing the same resume over and over; it typically means that no one is interested in hiring the candidate, which in turn doesn’t make the candidate seem desirable to anyone. Passive candidates feel the same when they are contacted by multiple recruiters about the same position.
- Trusted Confidentiality
Communication and trust are critical to successful placements within your organization. You need to be able to share freely the good, bad and ugly about the position, and that information needs to be held in the strictest of confidences. For example, you may have a challenging and demanding attorney or two that many employees have struggled to work with in the past. This knowledge is critical when searching for a candidate that will suit the position for years to come, but its sensitive information that you do not want to share with multiple recruiters if you don’t have to. A talented and trusted recruiter is also able to retrieve and navigate the same type of information from candidates. In the end, the person with both sides of the equation is best positioned to find a successful match for the long term. - Favored Dedication
When recruiters know that a firm/company is using them exclusively, they make that firm/company their top priority. In contrast, when recruiters know that other recruiters or staffing agencies are trying to fill the same position, they don’t work as hard for the organization. They may not tell you this, but it is the reality. There is only so much time in a day. When taking on a new search, I always ask if there are any other recruiters working on the same search. While I still want to work on the search, the reality is that if the answer were “yes,” the majority of my time has to be spent on those who are counting on me the most.
