Do Your Candidate Searches Match the Jobs?

It’s a fact of working as a recruiter that a lot of the emails you send out to try and find potential candidates are not going to be 100% relevant to their recipients. Most professionals accept the slightly off emails, for example getting an e-mail about a contract as a Ruby developer when you’re a Python developer, or an email about a job that is slightly too junior or senior for you. They don’t really think anything of them, and just delete them.However, when people get comically irrelevant jobs emailed to them by recruiters, they tend to notice, and may well regard sending them as incompetence on the recruiter’s part. If they’re irrelevant enough to be interesting, they may even tell their friends, spreading the embarrassment for the recruiter who made the mistake.

Take my friend Mike, for example. Mike has spent most of his career as a database administrator, mostly for large banks, but one of his earliest jobs – a good 12 years ago – was in the IT department of British Gas. This is on his CV, way down on the last page after all of his more recent jobs with people like Barclays and Bank of America. However, that one company name on his CV from over a decade ago means recruiters contact him on a fairly regular basis with jobs as a gas fitter.

Mindless Searches Are Bad for Your Reputation
When you want to choose who to send a new vacancy to from your recruitment database or any online systems you are using to widen your candidate search, running a very basic search and then mindlessly emailing everyone who comes up is a bad idea. Searching on companies people have worked for can be problematic if you don’t check what they actually did there, because just as Mike knows nothing about gas fitting, someone who was a scientist for Boots won’t know much about retail management.

Don’t assume everyone who has worked for a retail brand worked in retail, or everyone who worked for a software company has technical skills. You should learn to run smart searches that are good at finding what you are looking for. How exactly to approach this varies depending on the kind of recruitment you do, with most people finding their own methods as they get good at using their recruitment databases and online recruitment systems.

Use Your Brain as Well
Doing better searches will already stop you getting a lot of irrelevant people in your mailshot list, but really, the most important thing you can do is actually look at each person on the list’s information before you send. You don’t need to spend time checking over everyone’s specifics, because as discussed, most people don’t judge you for sending something just slightly wrong for them, but give a quick glance over just to make sure there isn’t a huge gap between what this person does and their level and the job you are trying to fill.

Searching smarter and using your head can save your reputation taking a hit with people who, when it’s a different job, you might actually want to work with.