Once upon a time there was a period of time in the staffing world were post and pray was the way. There were a large group of “staffing professionals” who only knew how to post a job, and pray they get what they want. As you can imagine this gave staffing a bad name with their hiring managers(HM) as, they rarely were able to give the HMs what they wanted.

Then came the next iteration, the throw and pray. These were “staffing professionals” who grabbed every resume they could from the job boards, threw them in the air and threw darts hoping one would stick. Or in other words praying one would be a fit. This again made staffing look awful not just to the HMs but to candidates as well, since the ones the darts hit were emailed and rarely with anything other than the standard, we have job for you call me. The resumes were garnered only by title and nothing else.

Now comes the spam and pray. This is where “staffing professionals” grab large amounts of people who show they have the buzz words and they spam email them all, saying the same thing and in most cases not realizing the people they are spamming are not what they are looking for. Example just this last week I got 200 emails about Oracle DBA jobs. I am not an oracle DBA, why did I get them, because I mention I have source for Oracle DBAs and that all the “staffing Professional” saw, the words Oracle DBA. This is a direct correlation to the advent of Linkedin, and other social job boards.

So the question is why? Well its simple, the staffing managers. They see this as a way to hire cheap labor and save money. They don’t care that it makes the industry look bad. They don’t train their people to do anything other than post and pray, throw and pray or spam and pray. Why should they as long as they can make their numbers, keep costs down they make more so who cares. Moreover they don’t have to worry about their people being trained and realizing they are not really staffing professionals but basically meat marketers, and the fact often they are marketing the wrong meat does not matter, because there is plenty more where they came from. Also by not training them they don’t have to worry about loosing them, were will they go, and even if they do again there is more where that came from.

Now while this may work now as there are a lot more people looking than jobs, the reality is this will change. The problem is when it changes these so called “staffing professionals” and the managers they work for will be out of luck. Because they have only been looking at short term wins, and not realizing this is a marathon not a sprint.

Morale of the story train your people to be real Staffing Professionals not meat marketers.