There is an adage ” If you are an experienced professional, it is whom you know and not what you know that lands you a job”. I have got friends who had worked with me in yesteryears who have more belief in me than myself on me. Interestingly such good buddies do refer me to interesting opportunities that they feel I would fit in(sometimes I may not have that confidence honestly), mostly due to my soft skills and leadership skills.
But the way most of the hiring works at the senior level is someone gets selected and then the job gets advertised to fill statistics unfortunately. And the highest filter takes place at the recruiter’s end (wrongfully called as ‘talent’ acquisition folks) – and these filters do not have a clue most of the time as to what the job really entails, but they send their pre-selected lists to the hiring manager who disposes off the profiles accordingly.
When these recruiters call, first you can very well say that after 10 minutes into the conversation, they are just having a small talk because it came through a ‘referral’ internally that they cannot bypass. They seem to be so disinterested in listening to you. After the usual few minutes, as you know, they would close the call with “we will get back to you”. Then nothing happens.
For senior roles, you need to check what the candidate brings in to the table and what value he adds rather than fitting exactly to the description and ticking the skills against the profile. Have a holistic view – you can still reject on some mandated criteria
I had a certain experience recently of an interesting opportunity that this head recruiter calls because someone internally had pushed my profile. I was on a vaccination week for my mom and myself and I had informed I would be available the next day at a particular time. He agrees, no call comes, I followed up and no response comes and two weeks later, I called up my referral to see what is happening and the referral tells me that the head recruiter had called me many times and sent many messages and no response came from my end and hence he had informed that I was not interested. No calls or messages ever happened. Such is the ethics. Do I even want to trust this company anymore? Usually such behavioral pattern gets established by the senior team and this trickles down. The message this recruiter just gave me is to avoid this company at any cost. If this is the experience I have now, even if something positive happens, I would not trust anything that they would say – this speaks a lot about the company and its management itself.
We keep having such discussions with my ex colleagues, and almost everyone have the same experience many times over. Best hiring takes place when the actual hiring manager and his team filters the candidates and chooses whom to call and not have recruiters send him the profiles that they select – yes, the volumes would be high but your people are good investment if you are serious.
#hiring