Holden had it Easy

When doing some heavy duty technical sourcing a little while ago, we had a pretty funny experience. We emailed a candidate about a prospective job. He received our email because his resume on file with us matched a particular set of keywords - for example, mySQL, PHP, Linux, "Web developer."

A few minutes later, we get back a very simple email reply from him - "*&^@ YOU!"

Well, that woke me up!

It made me think of Holden Caulfield. Remember how he saw that same message scribbled on his sister's school wall? After a while, things like this can really make you pretty jaded and cynical about people. (A cynical recruiter, that's impossible!)

But was this guy just crazy and/or demented or was that a succinct summary of what candidates think of recruiters these days?

I'm sure it's the former. However, we do have to carefully take notice of our interactions with potential candidates. It's pretty easy to abuse keyword-targeted email blasts. Over time, who knows how many people we are frustrating with irrelevant, impersonal job descriptions? People certainly don't feel obliged to respond to emails, but why should they really even have to look at them? People want to see personal, targeted, decent job opportunities. We have to focus on delivering nothing else but this type of candidate experience.

It is more important than ever now to sort candidates personally. It can be as simple as having custom tags in your database that you apply by hand for each individual. Especially with very large databases, it is no longer adequate to automatically tag people with keywords. Peoples' work history is not an assembly of keywords, but rich human experience. What if I had instead talked to this candidate and then tagged him, "Project Manager with a web background?" He would never again receive Web Developer opportunities, but I might find a well suited Project Management opportunity sometime in the future.

The difficult aspect of personalization is that it takes a long time! Tagging and sorting candidates individually can take years. It is only after thousands of conversations and ritualized data entry that we arrive at a "personalized" candidate database. The best candidate database can eventually categorize aspirations and personalities as well as skills and experience. The important thing to note is that even if you are starting from scratch, NOW is the time to start rigorously recording your interactions with people. The most important part of your job is to cement the nuances and aspirations of others in your mind (and database.)

Of course, we also know that no one deals with the hostile vagaries of the public more than recruiters. Let's face it- Holden had it easy.