Ben Janssen, project manager at Danone, received hundreds of comments on his LinkedIn post about the hunting behaviour of recruiters within a few days. He placed a screenshot of an email he sent to a recruiter, asking: “is this not too short-sighted? If you do not take the trouble to explain why this job could be appropriate with respect to my LinkedIn profile, I do not expect that we can do a lot for each other”. In the last two years he receives several messages weekly. “They often appear in person, but if you look closer you see that the job description is simply copied”, says Janssen.
It is a common complaint in the IT sector. Jeff Wouters was also irritated with the behaviour of recruiters. He gets, for example, a job offer for a Java-developer, but that is not his speciality. When he responded annoyed, the recruiters said that the vacancy was placed for a broader professional choice.It is the same as “we are spamming you”.
Jansen has little understanding of that and he suggested that recruiters should double check if they are approaching someone with the right match to the company needs.
Jasper van Beek, recruiter at Affin-IT, believes that IT people should not complain so much. The IT industry is a saturated market, there are more jobs than there are people available. “In some specializations people get thirty or forty deals per week, it's weird what happens there”.
Maud Aertsen, in-house recruiter at MediaMonks recognizes this. There are many recruitment bureaus. “If you look at LinkedIn, only in the Amsterdam region, there are 10,000 recruiters”. At the same time there is a shortage of developers. “In the IT sector there is about ten times more demand than what is offered. They are so much approached that they sometimes even decide to go off ofLinkedin”.Aertsen also notes that the approach of the recruiters became more aggressive compared to five years ago.
General Emails
One of the underlying problems may be that it is expected from the recruiters that they can quickly come up with a candidate. Van Beek of Affin-IT: “I'm often asked if I want to find someone for a function that is released next month. Then we often approach two hundred people per the customer’s wish… in order to find three or four candidates. Then I just want a yes or a no”.
Spam
The reactions to Janssen’s LinkedIn post are generally positive, but there are also people who call Janssen ‘arrogant’. “Oh, I have published it because I wanted to get feedback”, he responds. “That the majority agrees with me, I am inclined to regard more messages as spam. But the problem is getting worse. I hope that with my message I can contribute so that the recruiters adjust their methods in searching for candidates”.
Source: http://www.rtlnieuws.nl
Photo credits: Designed by Freepik