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Do you cringe when you hear the word “recruiter?” Both employers and job seekers are eager to share their horror stories about working with a recruiter. But is everything that you know about working with a recruiter wrong?

There ARE recruiters out there that don’t do their due diligence and send clients tons of resumes that are clearly not a match or never follow-up with candidates. It’s SO frustrating and we completely understand why employers and candidates are hesitant to work with a recruiter. 

However, it doesn’t have to be like that. Let’s look at some of the common complaints we hear about recruiters and examine what we here at AHA! Business Consulting may do differently.

One of the most common complaints about recruiters as listed in a recent blog from The Recruiting Brief is that recruiters don’t know what the job they are hiring for actually entails. How can you find the best candidate if you don’t even know what to look for? One of the ways to avoid this is to hire a recruiter that specializes in your industry. We don’t always agree with this advice as we believe it is just as important to understand the company culture as it is to understand what skills are needed for the position.  Skills are often easy to evaluate, we specialize in learning about how to be successful at your company and finding the right fit for your culture.

This involves putting in a tremendous amount of work on the front end.

Before we write your job posting, we have a consultation with you where we take a deep dive into your company. We want to learn more about your company culture and your core values. We want to know what your employees think is the best part of working with you. We will ask you what are some of the qualities of your best hire and worst hire. We’ll probe for specific examples of anecdotes. 

Basically, we want to learn as much as we can about your company and the role so that we can draw in your ideal candidates and repel those that might not be the best fit for you.

If you’ve read our blog, “5 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Recruitment Process,” then you know that hiring a recruiter should save you time and money. From an employer’s side, there’s nothing more frustrating than receiving a large pile of resumes to sort through only to find that none of them is a good match. I mean, that’s why you hired a recruiter right? It was to hand you a curated selection of top candidates, not the same results you could have gotten by posting your own job ad. 

This may come as a shock in the modern age where technology is ever prevalent but at AHA! we don’t use screening software to read and sort through resumes. An actual human reads every single resume that we receive. We understand that you are looking to bring a real live person into your work dynamic and not just a collection of keywords. 

By doing this we are able to be a bit more discerning than a program can be about who we pass through the next steps in our process. Speaking of our process, before we send you a candidate for review, they have typically gone through a one-sided video interview, a telephone interview, a reference check, and in some cases completed assessments. We value quality over quantity.

In the blog, “Six Reasons Candidates Hate Recruiters,” one of the top reasons that candidates give (if not THE top reason) that they don’t like working with a recruiter is because they never hear anything after submitting a resume. We understand. Job hunting is not easy. It can feel like you are just sending resumes out into the void and never getting any sort of response. Quite frankly, that sucks and there’s no excuse for it.

Here at AHA! it is our vow to respond to every candidate within three business days. If we’re going to be honest here, we usually respond within one day. We value communication throughout every step of the process. If a candidate is not the right fit, we let them know. If we’re moving them to the next stage, we let them know. If there’s a delay in the process, we let them know.

Are you sensing a pattern here? It doesn’t end there. We keep track of when we send candidates for interviews. We make it a point to wish them good luck and to follow-up afterward. 

That’s great for the candidate but why should you care about that as the employer? While we are working diligently on your behalf, we want to ensure that the candidate has the best possible experience from the very beginning because it will set the tone for the rest of the hiring process and even into the onboarding process. It would be a shame to lose that superstar candidate because of a negative experience during the recruitment process.

If you have realized that everything you knew about working with a recruiter was wrong and would like to learn more about working with a recruiter the right way, check out our Hiring Kit or contact us today to schedule a consultation.