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#BestofFSCBlog : Reality Check- Recruiters are Not your Friends. There’s No Such Thing as a Professional Job-Finder. MUst REad!

October 13, 2022/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

This fact may burst a bubble for most job seekers. The hard reality is job seekers have the wrong idea about what recruiters and headhunters do for a living. When one starts a search for a new job, the first professional they may try to connect with is a recruiter. A recruiter would know where to find a job…right? They can take the resume and push it to everyone they know…right? Dead wrong.

Here is the hard-core truth. Recruiters are too busy to call anyone their company isn’t ‘interested in’ for a specific job. Recruiters will not return phone calls, voice mail, email, or text messages to strangers or applicants who don’t meet the minimum job requirements. They are already overwhelmed with communications trying to find the ‘perfect candidate.’ If you are not ‘the match,’ – you can talk ’til you’re blue in the face,’ but it won’t change circumstances. You will only waste your and the recruiter’s time.

There’s no such thing as a professional job-finder. Resume writers, career advisors, career counselors, life coaches, or outplacement service professionals may operate with parallel tasking – but they’re not job-finders. Recruiters are candidate finders. It’s not their responsibility to find a job for job seekers. Don’t blindly contact recruiters and ask them to help you find a job.

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What Skill Sets Do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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Article continued …

It’s also a numbers game – job seekers submit resumes, aim for multiple interviews, and hope for an offer letter. Recruiters review hundreds of resumes from websites, headhunters, or employee referrals for each position, query the resumes for matching keywords, and send the top 5-10 results to a hiring manager. The hiring manager picks the top three to interview and make a decision based on salary (budget), availability, knowledge, skills, experience, abilities, and personality in the interview.

It sounds harsh, but it is reality. Finding a job is not a matter of justice, fairness, or luck. No one owes anyone a job. Recruiters are your ‘friend’ only if you meet the immediate requirements of an open job requisition. Recruiters don’t have time to invest in job seekers, their inconveniences, and their car or family problems. Recruiters do care about recruiting, filling jobs, keeping hiring managers happy, and staying within a staffing budget. They will be polite to qualified candidates and perform the steps necessary to get that candidate hired. Likewise, hiring managers do not care about applicants’ inconveniences and problems. Hiring managers care whether the qualified candidate has great skills, stays within a labor budget, and can get the job done.

Recruiters and headhunters are ‘people finders,’ not ‘job finders.’ They have a set number of specific openings at any given time and usually only hire one person per seat. One. Recruiter’s jobs are to conduct a ‘high throughput’ process. It is a matter of getting the right resume with the needed skill set to the recruiter to solve a company’s problem.

Job seekers must ask when the decision will be made during the interview. If the company is interested in hiring, they’ll call. If you know when the position closes, call the day after if you haven’t gotten a ‘sorry, we found another more qualified candidate’ message. One call…no more. Drop that job lead into the dead file if you get a voicemail and no callback. Most recruiters have an email management system within their ATS, and there is a chance they’ll notify the ‘rejects.’ But most likely, they don’t have time for follow-up.

To summarize, there is little point in calling a recruiter to ask them to help you, the job seeker, to find a job. Job seekers should recognize the recruiters’ viewpoint for what they do for a living. It is up to the job seeker to find that job and apply. It’s not a recruiter’s responsibility to help the job seeker find or get that next career position.

FSC Career Blog Author:

Dawn Boyer, Ph.D., is an associate of First Sun Consulting, and the owner of D. Boyer Consulting – providing resume writing, editing, and publishing consulting services. Reach her at: Dawn.Boyer@DBoyerConsulting.com or http://dboyerconsulting.com.

Bio: Dawn D. Boyer, Ph.D., manages and operates a consulting firm in Norfolk, Richmond, Colonial Beach (Dahlgren), and Gloucester, VA. Her background is 24+ years in the Human Resources field, of which 12+ years are within the Federal & Defense Contracting industry. She is the author of 940+ books on business, human resources research, career search practice, women’s studies, genealogy lineages, and adult coloring books. Her books are listed on Amazon.com under her author’s page for Dawn D. Boyer, Ph.D.

FSC Career Blog | October 13, 2022 | Dawn Boyer, Ph. D.

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#Leadership : The Downsides Of Using #PersonalityTests For #Hiring … Personality isn’t Everything, and Companies Who Rely on It to Predict #Performance can Run into Trouble.

February 24, 2018/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Finding the perfect candidate for an open role is hard work. In a competitive market for talent, companies are not settling for a standard application and interview process. They’re coming up with oddball questions, devising strange vetting methods, and “auditioning” candidates before giving them a permanent offer. They’re also making them do personality tests.

The use of personality tests isn’t new. Executive coaches have used them, and so have career placement organizations, as Fast Company previously reported. However, recently, we’re seeing more companies sell “personality tests” as a recruitment method. SquarePeg, for example, asks job seekers and companies a series of questions on traits and preferences before referring them to each other based on their results.

Traitify sells its own personality assessments developed by psychologists, marketed as a faster and more effective option to the Myers-Briggs test. Talify connects college students with jobs that are supposedly the best fit with their skills and interests, which are assessed through a . . . personality test.

But just how effective are personality tests as a tool for hiring? Neel Doshi–coauthor of Primed to Perform, How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Motivation , tells Fast Company that while it can be effective, there is a lot of danger to the practice when organizations don’t use it effectively.

WHEN RESULTS HAMPER A “GROWTH” MIND-SET

The biggest problem with personality tests, Doshi says, is when companies weaponize them. That is–when the “results” of their test is used for justification on their progress (or lack of) at the company, whether it’s getting a promotion, being tasked with important assignments, or getting the green-light to lead an ambitious project. This kind of thinking discourages a “growth” mind-set among employees and implicitly encourages blame, leading to a toxic workplace environment. It can discourage employees from trying to improve and grow, and send a message that their “ability” to do something is static–rather than something they can hone over time.

As psychology professor Art Markman wrote in a previous Fast Company article–personality is a factor that can motivate people to act, but is not the only factor. Markman wrote, “A person who expresses a strong desire to take on a particular role is likely to learn new skills and habits that will allow them to succeed in that role, even if their personality characteristics would suggest they are not well-suited to that job. That internal motivation to succeed is often a stronger force than the motivation provided by personality characteristics.”

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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THERE IS AN INCENTIVE FOR APPLICANTS TO “GAME” THE TEST

Doshi also notes that when you pose something as an assessment, there’s a very real possibility of applicants trying to “game” the test, which defeats the whole purpose in the first place. Because applicants believe that this is something they will be assessed on, they’ll be more likely to answer in a way that they think the company wants them to, rather than how they actually are. “In a recruiting process, it’s not easy to get a truly accurate lead if the questions are part of an evaluation. You see time and time again where an organization will try to assess personality. The candidates tend to see it as tests, and they’re trying to figure out how to game the test,” Doshi tells Fast Company.

THE DANGER OF BIAS

Proponents of personality tests will argue that they’re using it to combat bias. After all, it’s just more data that they can use to predict an individual’s performance, right? However, Doshi argues that in actuality, companies run the risk of bias when conducting personality tests for hiring, particularly in regards to diversity of thoughts. For starters, certain personality traits are not relevant to job performance. But if hiring managers believe that they are, they might miss out on talents who don’t fit the personality type, but whose skills, motivations, and other attributes bring a lot of value to the company.

This example is well illustrated in the technology industry. As Bloomberg journalist Emily Chang recounts in Brotopia: Breaking Up The Boy’s Club Of Silicon Valley, during the mid-1960s, the tech industry hired two psychologists, William Cannon and Dallis Perry, to determine what kind of individuals would make successful programmers. First, they concluded that such individuals needed to enjoy problem solving. Second, they concluded that good programmers “don’t like people.” Five and a half decades later, this stereotype continues to persist, even though product gaffes have shown, time and time again, of the dangers of not having emotionally intelligent developers who can understand their users’ concerns and point of view.

USING PERSONALITY TEST AS A MOTIVATIONAL TOOL

Doshi believes that personality tests are best used as a “motivational” tool rather than a hiring tool. That is, once a candidate is hired, the personality test should be a way to have “safe conversations about your natural preferences at work.” Rather than trying to determine whether one is an introvert or an extrovert, the “test” should ask questions like, What part of your job do you find painful?

Businesses often jump to personality tests because it seems like a silver bullet, Doshi tells Fast Company. It seems easy and alluring to boil someone down to four factors–but when a company hasn’t taken the time to think about what they actually need to create a high-performance culture, they can end up running into more problems than benefits.

FastCompany.com | February 23, 2018 | BY ANISA PURBASARI HORTON 4 MINUTE READ