Recruiting Blogs

Does anyone remember the old days of recruitment?

Perhaps you were there too. We used to log our client list on index cards, our candidates availability was recorded in a folder which we had to pass around the office. Urgent messages were posted first class. We used to speak to our customers on the telephone every day. the website was little more than an online brochure that nobody read. Key notes were written on the back of a fag packet (all recruiters used to smoke in the 20th century).

And here we are now. My top sales consultant seems to break record after record, barely touching her telephone. Everything gets recorded and administered via the centralised database. The entire candidate or client base can be contacted with just a few clicks. Not to mention the SEO work. The blogging etc. It seems more critical that we constantly drop a mention of the company website than anything else- just in case Google forgets about us and we vanish into the ether forever.

It certainly is a funny state of affairs.

So here's to good old fashioned recruiting. It still exists if you look hard enough. Alongside customer service and local telephone numbers. If anyone wants to reminisce, you can always drop me a telegram.

Dan Midwinter, Completely Care Ltd.

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Comment by Sandra McCartt on May 6, 2014 at 11:50am: You made me smile. I remember when a website meant there was a spider web in the corner of the ceiling. Not much interest in going back to the "good old days" of slow communication but in my opinion good recruiters still work the the same way. They stay in touch, know their clients, build relationships with both candidates and clients and don't get derailed by every goofy new technology that tries to eliminate people from the people business.

Time still kills deals. You can't totally believe either your client or your candidate, nobody really knows exactly what they are looking for. In my opinion recruiting is like being a translator between two entities who may want the same thing but have trouble defining it. Learning to speak "candidate" and learning to speak "client" makes for a successful definition that gets everybody on the same page no matter what it's written on.

Comment by Jerry Albright on May 6, 2014 at 12:56pm: We use to put more "time" in to our product I think. To get a candidate on your clients desk took considerable effort. Often there was only the most basic of resumes that we would retype - or at a minimum photocopy on to our letterhead. We knew more about the individual I think, because there was no other way than to have a lengthy phone call.

Now it's just as easy as forwarding an email from a candidate who you've barely gone beyond "are you available" with - and hope for the best.

PS: This is not me, per se. I say "we" as an industry collective. :)

Comment by Keith Halperin on May 6, 2014 at 2:18pm: …Index cards and folders”: New-fangled gew-gaws for wusses and wimps! When I was a new recruiter, we would have been GLAD to have “index cards and folders”! There we were: 30,000 of us in an office the size of a gopher hole on top of a mountain where we had to get up three days before and hack our way through 300 miles of jungle with our teeth. We took our job orders on granite tablets we carved with our fingernails. We got job orders face to face, calling on the clients using a flock of hundreds of passenger pigeons WHICH WE CAUGHT ONE AT A TIME ON OUR OWN TIME. We called on over 5,000,000 clients to get a single job order, it took nearly 3 trillion candidates to get a hire, and we were paid in buffalo chips. When we got a hire, the manager would beat us for 8 months straight with the thighbone of a giraffe, and WE WERE GLAD FOR IT, TOO! Young whipper-snappers, I tell ya….

Keith “Almost That Old” Halperin

Comment by Derdiver on May 7, 2014 at 1:11pm: I remember my old boss telling me that Monster was ok and all but it was in the database that he had scanned hundreds of resumes in to. Told me Monster board would last another 6 months then fade away.

Comment by Tiffany Branch on May 8, 2014 at 3:37pm: Restrac, Resumix, MonsterTrak which was initially JobTrak. Mail merges for rejection letters, paper cuts from handling resumes on nice "paper stock" and/or stapling the ones that came over the fax.

Does anyone remember writing ads and sending it to your publication for editing, pricing, etc. by Thursday so it could run in the Sunday paper?

Comment by Sandra McCartt on May 10, 2014 at 11:43am: How well I remember those ads. In fact those ads were the catalyst that motivated the start of my own firm. One Friday the owner whom I worked for asked for my ads. I replied that I didn't have anything worth advertising. She said, " make something up".

Nope, not gonna do that then have to lie to somebody who responds. I thought about it over the weekend. Walked in on Monday morning and announced that I was in fact going to "make something up" it would be called Professional Search, Inc. and there would be no bogus ads.

Two weeks later we had office space, phones and a bank note. No bogus ads. That was 1979. There are only two ways to do business, honest and dishonest. I chose the former. So far it's worked pretty well.

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