How Much Contact Do You Expect from a Recruiter?

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

I received an e-mail from someone who sent a resume for a job a client was trying to fill, asking me about the status. Two weeks had already gone by and, I’m sure most of you know that two weeks normally means no interest.

I responded to his e-mail letting him know that the client was not interested and received a response back that I interpreted as being sarcastic. I then thought that if he thinks this way, certainly others do, too. That is the germination of this article.

A typical day when I worked as a recruiter had me arrive at my office between 8 and 8:30 a.m. to somewhere in the area of 100 e-mails (spam is filtered out). As I start to read them, more keep arriving and calls start to come in. I try to respond to every e-mail I receive with a call, an e-mail acknowledging that I received the e-mail and offering some services through my website that they might find helpful or with an e-mail asking a few questions.

Often, these calls require additional action — interviewing someone, calling someone, inputting the resume into our system for later retrieval, submitting a resume to a client.

I leave messages; I read more resumes, receive more calls, and schedule some interviews.

Opportunities start to present themselves that require that I check back to see if someone is still available. Sometimes I need to re-schedule an interview because one party or another needs to make a change.

Oh, yes, I eat lunch, do some networking, write an article or two for my blogs, ezine or book and answer a call or two from my wife or a friend.

So, what gives if I respond to everyone who wants to check and find out “what’s going on”?

Unless I was coaching someone, you didn’t pay me for anything I did; I am was paid by the institution to evaluate and assess people for their suitability for the job I was attempting to fill.

Obviously, I needed to understand a person and their needs, wants, skills, and such in order to bring the two sides together. But until someone started paying me, I decided how I managed my time to help the most people.

If you work with a recruiter who has the time to take all your calls and tell you every piece of minutiae that they are doing to help you there will come a time where they will not be there to help you in the future. They have too much time on their hands.

 

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