The Kennedy Recruitment Conference just finished up yesterday with Shally’s Sourcing Summit. It sure was fun participating and sharing information with a lot of passionate recruiting colleagues.
If you have not attended this event before, I highly encourage you to consider attending the spring event in Vegas.
Probably my biggest AH-HA moment came from two sessions put on by Ryan Loken (Senior Manager of Talent Services for Wal-Mart) and Don Ramer (CEO of Arbita). Don’s presentation was, by far, the most intense and powerful presentation I have seen in years.
While both of these speakers have completely different styles, they were both passionate about:
- Treating people with dignity and respect
- Doing the right thing
- Creating raving fans (Ryan’s term) as a result of treating people with dignity, respect and doing the right thing!
In the current economy, we, as recruiters, are going to be receiving more requests from folks that are struggling to find employment, under-employed, or somewhere in-between. As we know and experience, the recruiting profession, in general, tends to forget the human/compassion side of our industry. We sometimes forget that these requests from “unemployed and potentially unqualified people” are still coming from human beings! And, as Don illustrated in his message: “…these are our brothers, our sisters, our children…”
How do we treat them? Do we engage? Treat them with respect? Go out of our way to help them if we can’t employ them?
Or do we delete their request and/or send them a canned response telling them they are “unqualified”?
We can make every excuse in the world why we cannot personally touch/help everyone that applies to our respective organizations; BUT . . . each and every day, we can also try and reach out to as many folks as possible and, with those we do interact with – take the time to help.
If req. loads are lower, would you invest in helping others in their time of need? Maybe give tips on interviewing? Resume writing and/or finding positions that fit them?
I’m certain if you have friends/family members in similar situations you would hope that they are treated with dignity and respect by the recruiters with which they interact. You would hope those recruiters take an extra few minutes to provide interviewing tips, share resume advice or even make a quick recommendation.
Sometimes in our quest to “fill req’s,” find new ways to source candidates, improve candidate quality, etc., – we forget about the true nature of our business; Connecting hiring managers with talented professionals and helping professionals find a dream opportunity!
We truly do have the ability and opportunity to “change peoples lives” each and every day.