How Much Work Do Recruiters Do?

The number of job orders a recruiter handles is a strong influence on the quality of her candidates.

Corporate recruiters: handle 20 to 40 jobs at a time
Agency recruiters: 8 to 12
Retained recruiters: less

From Lou Adler

Comments

[Yogizilla]

Interesting "teaser" article here... What's interesting here is that the relationship between quality and quantity is not just unidirectional. To me, it seems that today's recruiter struggles between serving their clients or serving their candidates. What they fail to see is that serving both sides well helps everyone out.

It's really quite simple: if you take a little extra time with each candidate, you can make sure you do not waste their time or that of the clients. All too often, I see recruiters send off candidates in herds, which naturally dooms them from the start. If these candidates are preceeded by the worst-possible matches, the interviewers will show marked frustration and their bias may become "this recruiter is not sending any candidate that is worth my time so let's get this over with."

On my blog, I get into one of the fallacies that results from poor recruiter habit. I've seen the industry shift from people that really could say they were professionals to an increase in pure headhunting. It's all about numbers so the quality goes out the window.

I remember, not too long ago, recruiters would function as success coaches, do pre-interviews, and help you identify if the positions were what you were looking for. Now, they're more focused if the candidates have some of the skills rather than looking out for everyone's best interest. When asked for more details on a position, they typically regurgitate the details provided on the req documents. I think that the biggest problem is that most recruiters have paper credentials but little or not relevant field experience, which amounts to all of nothing. They only know what they see themselves and, if you're lucky, what little they research.

I'd say that, out of my lifetime experiences with recruiters, only one out of fifty really knew what they were doing. That being said, I think that both employers and job seekers need to consider other options in addition to working with recruiters since, really, that's only one of many "fishing lines" that can be used. Certainly, if one can afford to have a recruiter on retainer, that can be a better option but even that is not all it's cracked up to be.

[Angelina]

I have very bad experience with recuiters. Why can't they answer a phone call? I am a person with a good resume, a Bachelor's degree and 7 years experience in the field. I understand not returning call to candidates that don't come close to the requirements but, no calling back at all? I once left 10 msgs to a recruiter, not ever once returned the call back. By this was not an isolated event, in general, I have dealt with 20 recruiting companies, if not more, I have kept a very organized chart and log for each one of them every time I have done a job search, I have to say one thing: JOB RECRUITERS DO NOT RESPECT THEIR CANDIDATES!