Hire quickly: Addendum, recruiters

Recruiters: Here’s the rules.

1. The first recruiter to tell me the company name, and then send the job-spec gets to forward my details – if I think it’s interesting.
2. No company name, or spec, no chance
3. If you send my details without my OK, you lose. And I tell the company you are a loser (chances are, they are too).
4. Sending me all the information I could want to know is good – but when you do it on spec (and probably en-mass as well), does not mean that you get to claim the bounty.
5. Let us know what is happening. That especially includes feed back from the employers.

All of the above have happened to me.

About that last point about feed-back? There’s one recruiter that is on my list (it’s not a good list) because he didn’t bother telling me what the employer was saying about me, but a different recruiter did find out and let me know. The 2nd one has still got a chance to place me, but the first, not so much. Ironically, the comments were about some rants I posted on my LinkedIn profile. It’s also a potential employer I no longer care about working for.

The strangest story happened to me about 15 years ago. I was working with a small recruiter and spending a couple of days to tweak a CV so that it was just perfect for a potential job (this was when I still wrote CVs, this year, it’s all on websites to read, not MSWord documents). Then I got a phone call from one of the largest recruitment companies in town – they had sent my CV (without my knowledge) and the employer was interested in talking to me. WTF? That was so not good. It was even worse for the small recruiter though – it turns out he knew the rogue recruiter. He was married to her.

Finally, when you do contact a candidate with a potential role, make sure you send them your details – and about the job(s). Just a quick email with a note with the what and where. Without it, they will not know how to get back to you for anything. I know you love to talk on the phone (and it avoids that pesky audit-trail), or you might make wonderful notes in your recruitment systems for yourself, but when us developers are looking, we can get a dozen phone calls a day from all different recruiters, and quite likely on our mobile phones to boot. We’ve not got the chance to write it all down most of the time, so you should, and drop us a note about it. Otherwise, we can’t get back to you – if it was interesting. So, it’s in your own benefit to keep us in the loop.