Recruiting 201: Be Selfish with Your Time

Recruiting successfully takes a great deal of skill; from defining job requirements and qualifying candidates to designing resumes and negotiating salaries.  But there are also a great many vague and indistinct skills involved.  One of those key characteristics is the ability to selfishly guard one’s time.  It may sound harsh or self-centered, but it is still one of the defining characteristics of a superior recruiter .

In the recruiting profession our time is our only asset; this is not a profession of endless meetings, discussion or debate.  No, this is a profession of speed, flexibility and hustle.  Recruiting is a difficult career to succeed in day in and day out.  We go fast, we go hard and we’re never satisfied.  Keeping that tempo of success as a recruiter is a challenge in and of itself; if you’re facing endless distractions you can be sunk before you’ve begun. Recruiters, Agency and Corporate alike, must guard their time selfishly lest they get pulled in the twenty different directions of the day. So guard your time and watch out for some of the biggest time drains you’ll see over and over in the days, weeks and years to come:

• Candidates:  Our business is our candidates, but that doesn’t mean we drop everything and waste our very valuable time on them.  It may sound harsh, but once the time you’ve spent on a candidate surpasses the time spent on your last placement, it’s too much.  It’s a very difficult balance; while our entire focus is finding, qualifying and placing candidates, our days can’t simply be centered on the people themselves.  If you have a candidate that requires too much time, energy and work you need to move on.  Sometimes it’s as simple as having to rewrite an entire resume…not because the candidate’s is bad, but because they’re not willing to do it themselves.  Other times it’s the candidate that needs to be convinced of the veracity of what you’re saying: the value of an interview or the advice you have to offer.  And worst of all is the one that just won’t go away.  Recruiters are nice people by and large and we enjoy developing relationships, but when you’ve reached the point of recoiling at certain numbers on Caller ID….well, you know it’s time to cut the person loose.  Time is money and I’m quite sure you wouldn’t go throwing your cash around to strangers willy nilly.  Guard your time like you would your wallet.
• Clients: Internal Hiring Manager our external clients, it’s all the same.  Managers have a strong tendency (sometimes justifiable, sometimes not) to assume that they are your only priority.  Worse yet, they demand to be your priority every single moment of the day.  It manifests itself with 13 emails, 9 voice-mails and 3 hang-ups simply to follow-up with you to see if you have a candidate yet.  Or, in agency recruiting, it shows up with a client who ignores your emails, but shows up two weeks later wondering why you haven’t filled the job yet.  But as Recruiters and Headhunters, our time is generally split over a great number of priorities.  We juggle managers, jobs, candidates, priorities and budgets.  We soothe frustrated managers, concoct innocuous non-feedback to put candidates off and simply juggle everyone else’s needs (often while ignoring our own.)  It’s what we do.  But if you find yourself buried under the people, the needs and the demands, you’ve crossed the line into relationship management….and nobody is paying you to do it.  When you’re getting crushed just coping with the tide of demands, it’s time to lay some hard (but polite) truth on the folks at hand.  Your job is to qualify, seek and deliver; wasting your time smoothing feathers and giving assurances will only make it take longer.
• Co-Workers: Successful recruiters out there…you know this one.  You’re doing great and have a track record of success, so management has bootstrapped you with someone who needs to be shown the ropes.  Ugh.  This is going to kill your productivity and break your stride every ten minutes when they have a resume to show you.  This is actually one of the most difficult time drains to do away with…primarily because you have to get very creative (or blunt) with your management. At the moment, I am dealing with my own suggestion that I take a new colleague out to my clients and let him shadow me while I recruit etc.  I’m not pleased.  Essentially at this point you have one of two choices: One, you can be painfully and brutally honest with your management and tell them that if they want you finding and placing top talent you need to do it alone. With some managers this will work…particularly ones who know your worth and rely on you.  Choice number two is to give in and do your best to ignore the person standing behind your shoulder with a dozen questions.  They can learn by watching.

At the end of the day you have exactly one person who is going to help you succeed: yourself.  No one out there is going to help you do well. They’re going to see that you’re good and they’re going to try to capitalize on it in as many ways as they can before you either walk or fall apart.  To succeed you must guard yourself and your time closely.  If you find others are impinging upon your success, move on and move out.