Partnering?

There is no such thing as partnering.  It’s a word that’s often used in recruiting, I’ve yet to see it happen.  They often talk about partnering with the hiring manager.  In reality the hiring manager usually just says or does whatever they want, and then the recruiter does damage control by selling their latest stupidity to the candidates.  Whether it’s one more interview on top of the three that have already happened, or a skills test for skills the candidate already said they didn’t have, it gets done.

The reason it gets done is because there’s too much sales in recruiting and not enough collaboration.  Usually there’s a sales manager who handles the account, and a recruiter who handles the candidates.  Sometimes one person does everything, but rarely these days.  And the sales guy, he really has trouble saying, “No,” to anything the client asks, which idea the recruiter then has to sell the candidate on, no matter how foolish, time intensive and wasting.

As an example, I routinely get these positions which are supposedly, in the words of the sales people, easy fills.  Then it turns out the salary being offered is 30%-50% lower than the market rate.  That’s not an easy fill by any standard, in fact, the more the salary deviates below the area’s mean, the harder the fill will be, and this holds true at all levels.

Now, a real partnering with the hiring manager would mean pointing this out and setting realistic expectations for the hiring process and timeline, etc.  That happens maybe one out of every thousand times.  So, the reality of recruiting is really that any position is taken from almost any client, and the sales guys agree to fill it in a certain time frame at any price, and the recruiters are left trying to make that happen no matter how far the target is from being realistic.

There is no partnering, there is only Sales! in the worst, used car salesman sense.