I have been sourcing sales candidates the last couple of weeks for several of our clients and received a phone call from a recruiter. Normally, I don’t get a lot of calls from recruiters. It was an interesting call so thought I would share the exchange with you.
To set the stage, the recruiter did not ask if I had time to talk or if it was a convenient time for me. In fact, his call came just a few minutes prior to a scheduled screening call with a candidate.
Recruiter: Hi, this is John Doe from XYZ Recruiting. I’m not sure you know me but XYZ has filled numerous positions with your company. Have you filled the Account Executive position?
Rock Star: No, we have not. We just ran a couple of ads this past weekend and I am in the process of working through the responses.
Recruiter: Good. I have a very strong candidate for you and would like to get her resume over to you. How can I send it over to you?
Rock Star: I’m sorry, but at this point I am still working through the applicants who have called-in and emailed me their resumes. I’m not interested . . .
Recruiter: (cutting me off) I think you would be very interested in this candidate as she is an extremely strong candidate for the position.
Rock Star: Can I ask what makes her a strong candidate?
Recruiter: She has many years experience in your industry calling on your types of customers and is always above quota.
Rock Star: Again, I apologize but I am still working through applicants who have responded to the ad . . .
Recruiter: (cutting me off again) This candidate heard you were looking for an Account Executive and is very interested in exploring the possibilities with you and I would like to submit her resume to you.
Rock Star: At this time we are not looking for additional recruiting help, but I encourage your candidate, if she is truly interested, to follow the lead of the other applicants and reply to one of our ads.
Recruiter: I think you would be extremely interested in her because she is a very strong candidate.
Rock Star: I’m sorry, but I have a conference call scheduled in a few minutes and need to get prepared for that call. My recommendation would be to tell your candidate to respond to the ads as we have what looks like several strong applicants that we are running through our process. Thank you for your call.
I ended up having to hang up on him as he would not respect my time constraints and kept repeating his strong candidate speech. You might be thinking that I was a little hard on this recruiter. Maybe, but the only way he could have gotten my number for this position was by seeing the ad. And if he would have read the whole ad he would have seen that my email address was not from the client company and the ads also asked for only applicants to respond (no recruiters).
So why wasn’t I interested in this candidate? Let’s assume that this candidate did learn about the opening on her own as the recruiter said. My question is if she is a strong sales candidate, why would she have someone else make the contact for her?
This position’s primary focus is to open new accounts. If she was strong, she would be making the call, herself. Which brings me to one of my pet peeves, why does industry experience mean she is a strong candidate for the position? If you run this out, what the recruiter was saying was that the person with the most understanding of the industry would be the most successful as a salesperson. Wrong! This is an urban legend and certainly not the basis for successful sales hiring.
My advice is to stop extrapolating abilities based solely on industry experience. Screen, assess and interview. That approach is accurate and repeatable. The aforementioned recruiter’s approach is not.