February 19, 2000
It is a simple fact that today there are more jobs available than there are actual qualified employees. With the continued growth of successful companies and new Pre-IPO startups every week, it is becoming virtually impossible for members of the workforce in the Silicon Valley to avoid getting calls from headhunters and contract recruiters regarding new opportunities. If a recruiter is going to employ such recruiting tactics, they should do it right. Much of the time, the recruiters coldcalling do not know what they are talking about. It is not uncommon for many recruiters to read a buzzword and hope for a candidate to say they know the buzzword or find it written in a resume. Many will call potential candidates from a list, write their notes on paper and later put their notes aside. Six months will pass and they will work on another list they obtain, call some of the same people again and not realize they had already spoken to them before.
Essentially, gone are the days when recruiters can pick up a company telephone book or a list of names without titles and try to blind coldcall someone at a company hoping to find the right fit. Engineers and other employees get turned off when someone calls to recruit them and the recruiter doesn’t even know what they do. It happens too often today. In fact, I was called several times by headhunters who tried to recruit me as a systems validation engineer. Clearly, I am not a degreed engineer and I am simply a Staffing Rep from HR. My name was included in an organizational phone list with a business unit at Intel and a headhunter somehow got a hold of that list and made blind coldcalls. I was tempted to tell him I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and lead him on. Have you ever wondered why the term headhunter carries a negative image?
People have choices and if recruiters want them to consider their company as a potential employer, they need to get to know the potential candidates and understand what their objectives are. Recruiters can’t treat people as if they are part of a cattle call just to fill an empty seat. They should be helping the candidates to find a position that is a great fit that will benefit both parties in a productive manner. I have recruited many people to AMD who never imagined working for us, let alone even looking for a new job. Because I did my research first, I called with an understanding of what they did and was able to talk about how their background can apply to some of our objectives. Another area of relationship building is the fact that recruiters and sourcing specialists who talk to non-jobseeking candidates have to think of what’s good for the company short and long term. It isn’t always going to be about today’s job opening. They need to take good notes and remember the conversation six months later. The potential candidate may not be interested today because of a project that will complete in half a year. It is important to note it in a database and have an online calendar remind the recruiter in half a year. It is important for the recruiter to understand what kind of projects and challenges candidates are interested in pursuing to advance their career. Can the company provide such a challenge to that person? Can the candidate’s background add value to the company’s bottomline? We don’t always try to fit a job description word for word. We are recruiting talent. Whatever is the reason for why a candidate is not interested in the company today, staffing should make use of the reason and perhaps they can turn it around and use that information to present a job opportunity the potential candidate will be interested in. That can either apply to something for today or tomorrow in the future. I have had incidents where I was able to come back two weeks or two months later with a new opportunity that did fit the candidate’s interest and suddenly they were looking at possible employment with AMD. In other cases, we simply recognized the challenge that was being sought and the hiring manager was more than willing to restructure the job responsibilities to provide such a challenge. It meant the hiring manager was going to get more productivity from the role he was trying to hire so it was quite a reasonable adjustment.
When I do my own research or obtain a listing from someone else, I won’t immediately rush to call someone unless there is a minimum profile. I hate calling someone without a little bit of knowledge. A scouting report is developed, much like our favorite sports teams who scout out potential ballplayers of their future teams figuring out who has what skills and what they have accomplished. If my list has little information and not much more than a name and company, I like to take it to our existing staff. Much like my network of HR people where we all know each other one way or another, the engineering world knows each other. It’s similar to the premise of John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation--that everyone on Earth can be connected using six associations or less. When I pull up committee or alumni lists from the Internet, I run it by my colleagues who are somehow connected to the list. They can tell me a brief summary of what some of the people have done or where their talents have been proven. Our veteran employees have been around and may know some people from previous employment or simply from their network. Are we ready to play the game Six Degrees of Strategic Recruiting? Do your scouting report and build your relationship with the talent.
A design manager at a leading OEM once gave me a list of people he suggested I should call about opportunities at AMD. He told me it was okay to use his name and if they got annoyed at him it is okay because he said, “you’re not as bad as a headhunter.” I am almost certain that was a compliment. 8-)
What it comes down to is the fact that relationship building is an important key to recruiting the top talent. It would be nice if we could post our positions on our website and all the best talent came knocking at our door. But that just isn’t going to happen. As members of staffing, it is important that we recognize the importance of building the relationships with potential candidates. We need to allow them to get to know the organization’s culture and allow them to see the environment they will work in. Some of the key players at AMD today who have been credited for making Athlon a success would not be here today if our staffing organization did not take the time to build a candidate relationship. Those key players would not have even been in the job market and would likely still be at their previous employer. Relationship building is an important step in World Class Recruiting.
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