Recruiters: Pick Up the Phone

I spent a lot of time thinking about potential topics for my first blog post of the year and then it hit me square in the face. At the beginning of each year, most of us ask ourselves, “What can I improve upon this year?”. In my case, the answer was incredibly clear.

As each year passes, recruiters are becoming more and more reliant upon electronic communication, including but not limited to email, LinkedIn, Twitter and messaging through their ATS. The more time they spend typing, the less time they spend on the good old fashioned phone. The trend has to stop.

While technology has many, many virtues (too many to list), we’re losing part of our humanity when we rely almost exclusively on emails and texts. Every last one of us has received a text that we perceived to be far more harsh and severe than what was intended by the sender. Why is that? The answer is context. When you speak with someone, you hear tone, inflection, volume and timing. With an email or text, you get none of these things. So if you see a text that says “No way!”, you might not know if the sender is angry or just joking around. Obviously the longer you know a person, the easier it is to understand the context but when it comes to recruiting, context is everything.

This is my 16th year as a recruiter and while I still have a lot to learn, I do know that the phone is the single most important weapon in my arsenal. Without the phone, I have no way of differentiating myself or my company from the competition. There is no way for your true self to come through if all, or even most of your communication with someone is via email. We’ve been placing recruiters for over 6 years and from my experience, the single most important skill for a recruiter to have is a strong phone presence. Think about it. A recruiter might meet with 5-7 candidates in person per week, on average. They might speak with 75 candidates over the phone. So what’s more important, their firm handshake and crisp suit or their ability to quickly establish trust and rapport with folks over the phone?

When dealing with a new candidate, you need to quickly discern whether or not you can and/or want to help them. How do you figure this out? Easy, pick up the phone and call them. How many times have you seen a resume, gotten really excited, emailed the person a few times to set up a time to speak and once you’re on the phone, realized this is a God-awful candidate you wouldn’t place in the basement to make copies? If they can’t come off as capable and professional over the phone with a recruiter, how would they do in an in person interview with your notoriously difficult hiring manager? Can I bet on the under?

On the flip side, how many unscrupulous recruiters have emailed screening questions to said candidate and immediately submitted to the hiring manager once they have the answers? Answer: far too many. But that’s a good thing because while your competition is wasting time with a dead in the water guy or gal, you’re speaking with other candidates and eventually, you’ll find a hard-working, trustworthy person who is both interested in the job and the culture.

In many ways, email is incredibly efficient. Unlike the phone, you can email someone any time, day or night. If you have a question that can be answered in a sentence, go for it. But have you ever been in a situation where you’re suddenly in an email chain of 10+ replies? You probably thought to yourself, “Man, if I would have just called this person, I could have figured out everything in less than 5 minutes!”.

A general rule of thumb for me is that if I have more than one follow up question, I pick up the phone. I’ve had conversations where I learned a ton of valuable information, all in less than 2 minutes. Even better, I was able to convey warmth and empathy. You really connect with someone when you talk. Email can be very impersonal and you’re never going to build a solid relationship with someone until you’ve spoken over the phone and/or met in person a number of times. As effective as email is, it will never and can never replace true human interaction.

In closing, make that call you’ve been putting off for days!

Conor Nicholson is the Founder and CEO of NSS RPO, a consulting firm that provides on-site and virtual recruiting professionals. Contact NSS RPO to learn about how we can help your organization meet and exceed it’s hiring goals.