Recruiters and the Recruitment Process - An Insight to Healthcare Recruitment
Recruiters and the Recruitment Process - An Insight to Healthcare Recruitment
(Phone call to an imaging professional about an employment opportunity)
"Hi Mr. Anderson, this is John Doe from XYZ Radiology recruitment. How are you today!"
Click!
"Hello, hello? Mr. Anderson?" .... "Ouch!"
(End of phone call)
Hi everyone! Thanks for checking out this blog. I am glad that I got your attention and I am also glad that quite possibly, I may grab your attention just enough so that you read further. Have I got it? Good! This blog is going to focus on recruiters. The good, the bad, the ugly, and also all the important information that you will take with you the next time that recruiter calls you, which will probably be tomorrow or sometime next week.
In this blog I am going to focus on a lot, but not all at once, so don't worry. The goal of this is to inform you about recruiters. The roles they play; the companies that they work for; what locations they recruit for; the different types of recruitment; the processes of these different types of recruitment; the new avenues that recruiters are taking to go out and find the best talent; and a bunch of other really usefully boring topics that you are going to love to read! I will try to make this as light and entertaining as possible, but if I start to bore you, this blog may become a valuable sleep aid to get you to bed at night. :)
The very end of this blog is going to also discuss the important guidelines that you should think about when working with a recruiter because even though you may have that little inclination that recruiters don't add value, you will find out that they actually do. Which is going to land you that next dream job. Trust me!
Ok, first off. I would like to say that this is an open blog. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE feel free to comment, continue discussion, and even tell me I am wrong. I will let you know right now that I am not claiming to be a 20 year veteran of recruitment, but I have worked for about 5 years focusing on radiology recruitment and I have come to understand the frustration that many imaging professionals have with recruiters. With the knowledge that I bring, hopefully this will help you in deciding if the recruiter that you have is good, or if using a recruiter is beneficial in your job search.
Definition of a Recruiter
So what are recruiters? Well Wikipedia defines a recruiter as: "Someone engaging in recruitment, which is the solicitation of individuals to fill jobs or positions within any group, such as a corporation or sports team. Recruiters can be divided into two groups; those working internally for one organization, and those working for multiple clients in a third-party broker relationship, sometimes called headhunters or agency recruiters."
Good old wikipedia. Hey if it's on the internet, it has to be true, right? Well after doing this for a while now, I know that recruiters are more than just what Wiki says. I also sometimes get that negative vibe about what recruiters do and what attitudes there are with recruiters.
Used Car Salespeople?
The quote form the top of this blog is what recruiters run into every day (or some variation). I often get the feeling that recruiters have become some sort of used car salesperson. Someone that is slimy and untrustworthy. It happens in all areas and in all industries. From manufacturing, to high level sales executives, the misconceptions and beliefs are pretty common. "oh, recruiters are only interested in the money." "Recruiters are a waste of time" "They never get back to you" ...Etc. etc.
A lot of this negative insight on recruiters comes from the misunderstanding of a recruiter's role and why things don't work out sometimes.
So why work with them? Well working with a good recruiter can add a great deal of value when trying to find a new employment opportunity. To make this brief, I will bullet point many of the reasons why. Please feel free to comment on all of these and add your own too!
• Great recruiters will be able to find you the hidden opportunities that you are not going to see online and in traditional advertising.• Great recruiters will be able to effectively market you to both existing clients, and new clients who may have a need for your skill.
• They most often work directly with the hiring managers and get your resume right in front of them instead of channeling through several people before getting to the hiring manager.
• They have in depth experience and knowledge of the local market and can give you great insight into pay ranges, employment needs, even tell you who and who not to work for. (trust me, I know plenty of facilities that I would NOT recommend people to work for.)
• During the whole search and placement process, recruiters should be able to give you sound advice on interview preparation, resume critiquing, and professional presentation of you and your resume. Heck, they may even walk you into the face to face interview with their clients!
• They have resources at hand to help you find all the other things you may be looking for when job searching like schooling info, apartment and housing information, cost of living information, and plenty of other resources to help you in your search.
There are pitfalls too of working with recruiters. These pitfalls can be both in and out of the recruiters control, which I will discuss more throughout this blog, but will site a few right now.
• Bad recruiters. Some recruiters are just not meant to recruit. They may have just started their career in recruiting and lack the experience it takes; or they may just not be good at it. This industry is fairly easy to get into and there are not many roadblocks that get in the way when starting up a recruitment firm.• Some hospitals and healthcare systems just don't utilize recruitment firms. They see it as too much of a cost for them or they may have built up their own in house recruitment team that focuses mainly on recruitment. They may be bound by corporate red tape, or they may already have enough recruiters that they work with and don't need to hear from anyone else.
• Motivation of the recruiter. I'm not saying that recruiters are lazy here, what I am saying is that sometimes a recruiter may have a list of great radiology professionals, but you are not at the very top of their list. Although they are trying to find you a job, they have someone else that they are searching for that is a super star thoroughbred champion that every employer wants. So naturally, the recruiter is going to focus on placing this person first. This does happen a lot, and you should be aware of where you are on their list.
• The role of the recruiter may be a lot different than you think. When you think recruiter, or at least when I do, you think of a really energetic, almost geeky person that is making calls, networking with professionals, and scouring the earth for your next job. Well, unfortunately, some recruiters roles are just to find candidates for a particular job. Once they do, your resume is handed off to an "account representative" who submits your resume to the active client which the recruitment firm has an existing business relationship with. It's something that you might want to look out for, and I will discuss this more later because this is an important process to understand.
• They do not have the resources available to effectively search for new opportunities for you. Your recruiter may be really good, and can get the attention of hiring managers. But there are resources out there that may just be out of reach for some recruiters. These things can include; the cost involved to use resources; limits due to geographical areas; liability limits with certain types of recruitment; the size of the firm (or lack of size); etc.
Again, there are many more pros and cons of recruiters, which we will discuss throughout the course of this blog.
Recruiters are a great source for finding new employment. In the next "episode" of this blog, I will cover in more detail the recruiter and recruitment firms that they work for. We will start to really dive deep into the various roles of recruitment, the various types of recruitment firms, and identify the motivators that are involved in this profession. So please, stay tuned and be active in this discussion. I will respond to any questions or insights that you have throughout this blog. Hey, maybe we can even get into some heated discussion. Create some drama, so to speak. If you have any good horror stories, please feel free to share!
Matthew Lauderbaugh
However, I will say that once in a while, I get a genuine person on the other end of the line. Not just another headhunter or drone looking for another "pod person" tech. I was eventually picked up by a recruiter from a really outstanding group, so I'd have to agree with you, Matt, you guys aren't all bad.
Keep on roping and wrangling those young ones haha
I often hear horror stories too from people that I have worked with. Most of which is from recruiters who are too pushy or are not tactful.
We are trained to be "head hunters" and a lot of that is scouring for information that will get us connected with the right people.
I would say though that reaching out to a relative or friend to find you is a little crossing the line. If it was an emergency or something that would be another story.
Im glad to hear that you have found a good recruiter. Dont forget them either once they place you. They are great people to have on your team the next time around and can also be valuable when you are advancing within your organization. I have had several calls from past candidates who ask me for advice when looking at a job internally.
Many recruiters expect that we as job seekers are to be trilled with any prospect job interviews or job offers, but if they listened to what the prospect employees are looking for, maybe that will happen and it will happen more often.
One thing that bothers me about recruiting companies is that they advertise about “possible” openings, but when you call to find out about it more you are told “well… we do not have anything right now, but let me get your information and if we happen to have what you are looking for we will call you.” Then the junk e-mails never stop…the phone calls either. I know that there are very good recruiting companies out there with knowledgeable and willing to work for your recruiters, but they are rare to find.
A recruiters main goal is to get people excited about a job. But a key trait of a great recruiter is that they LISTEN! It happens to the best of us. They see a great candidate and get their hopes up and don't listen to what the candidate is really looking for.
There are firms out there that advertise "jobs" that turn out to be bait to get resumes in the door for future opportunities. Unfortunately prospective job seekers do not have much information to go on when responding to these opportunities.
(Another important thing to note here is that with todays technology, there may be a job out there that is a couple months old, but is still being seen as active online. There are websites out there that pull advertisements from other sites like Monster, Career Builder, even hospital websites. They take this information and post it on their site so that they can attract job seekers there. The more hits on the site, the more advertising money the website can get. A couple sites that do this are: indeed.com, and simplyhired.com. So take this into account too when searching.)
My advice for this, and really for any job, is to give the recruiter a call before you apply. Here are some good questions to ask when you get that person on the phone.
1. What can you tell me about this position? Ask detailed questions about the department, shift, equipment, people, culture, etc.
2. Is this an active position that you are working on? If so, what is the time frame for them to hire someone. If not, ask them when an opportunity like this will be coming up in the future. If they know of something that is coming up in a couple months, either let them represent you now or connect with them a month before the position is going to be active.
3. What has been done so far in the interview process? Are there candidates in front of the position already and if so, how many of these candidates are being represented by said recruiter.
It is very important for a job seeker to control their resume, which I will talk about more in length later on in this series.
Also, many recruiters work on opportunities where they do not want to give out detailed information including the name of their client right away. In fact, sometimes the area is so recognizable that they wont even tell you what city it is in.
This is most common with permanent, full time employment opportunities. Dont get discouraged by this. Recruiters hold this information for many reasons. Mainly, recruiters do this because they are protecting their opportunity to represent you to the client. Recruiters also do this because many times they are engaged in a search where there are going to be a lot of candidates applying and that the client has asked that the recruiter screen candidates to make sure that they are a right fit and to weed out the candidates that are not good for the position.
Right now I am engaged in a search where I have seen over 100 resumes and only about 3 so far meet the requirements for the position. Having me in the process saves my employer a huge amount of time in reviewing resumes. When I submit resumes to them, they know that the resumes that I am sending are going to be a very close match to what they are seeking.
So don't let the secretive nature bother you. Your recruiter will give you this information once they have screened you and made sure that your skills and requirements match what the employer is seeking.
Regarding the spam emails, you can also let recruiters who you work with know that you do not want to be put on email lists and that you only want to hear about opportunities that are a close match to what you would be interested in.
Personally, I LOVE these types of spam. It gives me great information on the market, what opportunities are hot, and what employers are out there that I may not know about. (I am talking personally from a career focus, not recruitment focus)
Also, there might be an opportunity that comes past that is one of those "I have to hear more" positions. If you shut yourself off to this information, you might miss hearing about great opportunities.
And yes, those web sites that keep on recycling old postings are very unreliable and annoying. I was very surprised to find out that many of the postings have been already closed - 2-3 months ago, and they still have them and some show more than 3-4 times on the same web site (i.e. indeed.com). I know that doing such a business is for short term. On the long term they will not win.
Throwing bait out there to catch candidates is very annoying as well. If I am a serious candidate and I am looking for a job now, I surely do not want to waste my time with artificial flies, and I would not wait on someone to maybe find me an employer that likes me if now they are just baiting me. The moment I figure out that the recruiter is such; I try my best to politely sever the connection. I do not want to waste anyone’s time and do not want my time to be taken for granted. I’ve had some call me a year after I had responded to an “empty” add. Well… guess what, I had already found a place to work. Surely I would not wait on them a whole year to find me something. But what I find very interesting is that for someone to think that you would still be looking for a job after year and call you and ask you that is quite unprofessional and they don’t even realize it. If you have a candidate that you feel is worth keeping in touch with, then do so. Don’t file their contact information away and remember that they do exist after a year. Cause loosing a good candidate is like loosing a good deal.
I am not sure what you meant about job seeker controlling their resume?
Basically, it all depends on the area and the need that the employer has. Often times it is too hard to market new grads to facilities because of experience and location.
I have had facilities that are interested though in new grads and most of the driving force is on the existing candidate pool and also wanting to train someone who is "fresh".
If you are in a market that has a high amount of new grads, it is very difficult for a recruiter to market them to facilities in the area because they are already seeing a lot of employment applications. But if you have a graduate that is open to relocation, then that can really help out.
Another point to mention is that the employers that we work with spend a good amount of money and time hiring and want to see candidates who have experience because that way they get the most "bang for their buck".
I have worked with several facilities who will consider new grads though as long as they are top performers in their class and are highly motivated. If you would like to discuss this more, please do not hessitate to connect with me. I would be glad to try and help you.
Matthew Lauderbaugh
matthew.lauderbaugh@clinicalone.com