How do your clients recruit candidates?

How do your clients recruit candidates?

Geez, you think, that’s a dumb question, Doctor! They use my recruiting services!!

Well, hold on, pardner. Do you really understand how your clients actually recruit candidates – everything they do, in addition to your services? Do you know how they think about candidates? How they treat them? What their retention rate is? Do they burn through employees like a box of donuts, or do they treat them so well that they never leave?

I don’t know, you say, this sounds like a lot of work on my part. I just want to sell them stuff.

Let’s put it this way: if you don’t understand how your clients recruit candidates, you will never know when they are going to quit buying your stuff. And let me tell you, a sudden cancellation is an unhappy event.

Over the years, what I’ve noticed about employers is that they fall into two (very general) camps: those who search for candidates, and those who lure candidates (via job ads). In fact, most employers do both, but lean more in one direction or the other. I recently wrote about the pros and cons of a resume database, and how some type of resume or profile database helps to meet the needs of employers that actively search for their candidates. Most job boards or recruiting sites tend to think about how to lure candidates – via job ads, content marketing, and so on. So it’s logical that those types of services would line up with an employer of the same mindset.

But things have changed over the past several years. Even before the pandemic there was a mismatch between the number of available candidates and the number of available jobs. The pandemic seems to have accelerated this mismatch: early retirements rose, hundreds of thousands died, remote work became more common, and – perhaps most importantly – many people who worked in certain types of jobs decided it was time for a career change.

Those changes seem to be serving as a wake-up call for employers to reexamine how they recruit candidates. The same-old, same-old may not work as effectively. And if employers are rethinking how they recruit, they may also be rethinking what recruiting services they use…like yours.

So maybe – just maybe – it’s time to be a little more curious about how your clients recruit candidates. And understand how you fit into their recruiting plans. Maybe there are things you could be doing that you aren’t yet. Maybe there are thing that you’re doing that you shouldn’t.

This is one case in which curiosity does not kill the cat. In fact, it might even save it!

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