Does your boss hate you?

OK, hate is a strong word. I am sure she does not actually hate you. (Well, maybe not).

But let’s say you irritate her, disappoint her, and ultimately incline her to regard you more as a liability than an asset. And that can only end in tears.

30 years of managing recruiters, and managing managers who manage recruiters, have given me a fair insight to those behaviors that really tick a recruiting leader off. You might assume it’s all about poor results. Sure, a bad month, or quarter, is not going to thrill your boss, but trust me, she will forgive you far quicker for a poor fee tally, than she will for serial offending in these areas.

Be honest now. Recognise yourself at all here?

• You contradict or argue with her in front of the team. Or at best you show your disdain for her ideas and initiatives with negative  body language, smirks, and audible sighs.
• You are negative about new ideas, cynical about change, and undermine initiatives.
• You come late to meetings, and often to work too.
• You inflate your sales pipeline and potential billings, and always fall short on what you promise to deliver.
• If there is a dress code, you flaunt it, or push it to the limit, putting her in the awful position of having to counsel you on how you dress.
• You repeat the same recruiting mistakes time and again, and appear to be immune to coaching and mentoring.
• You don’t comply with even the most basic admin requirements, and seldom complete the required data updates on your CRM/ATS.
• In meetings, or any discussion about the business, all your ideas involve the company spending more money. You sulk when they don’t fly.
• You fan the flames of gossip and discontent, instead of dousing them where you can.
• You muck around on your phone during meetings when she is trying to convey a message, or enthuse the team.
• You take the credit for new clients, and deals done, even when you had little real involvement.
• You don’t prepare for your weekly meetings with her, and you put almost nothing into your performance review preparation. But you complain bitterly that your ‘career is going nowhere’.
• You are cynical and disinterested in ‘training’. You often find a reason not to attend sessions she runs. If you do attend, you dominate the session with war stories about the way ‘you do things’.
• When you do well, you are smug and insufferably arrogant, prancing around like a prima ballerina on smack. But when your numbers are shocking, you blame the market, or the database, or the admin staff, or something else. Just never you.
• You squabble with your colleagues over the tiniest of incidents, hold long grudges, and spend a good chunk of your time ‘in a huff’.
• Two or three disappointments in a week will throw you into a downward dive of despair, wasted emotion, and ‘woe is me’. You mope around the office, looking for sympathy and re-assurance, dragging down the team with you.
• You complain bitterly that ‘no one ever gives you any leads’, and demand access to everyone else’s clients, but guard your own clients with the intensity of a rabid honey-badger, hissing at anyone who even hints at an approach, with a vicious, ‘that’s my client!’
• You take so much for granted. Training, bonuses, marketing expenditure, benefits, company-paid team beers. Pretty much everything really.
• You never, ever, ever, say thank you.

Now, before Managers get too smug, nodding at every point above, and recruiters get all bitter and twisted over this harsh expose of their sins, take note that next weeks blog will be, “Recruiting Managers. 10 reasons your consultants do not trust you”.

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