idealpeople blog

Firstly, Happy New Year to everyone from Idealpeople. We’re sorry that - unlike so many other Recruitment bloggers out there - we forgot to say Merry Christmas.

2008 should be an interesting year. There’s some uncertainty in the economic outlook and no-one seems particularly sure what (if any ) impact will be felt on the wider industry’s ability to recruit under the pressure of the credit crunch and the housing market hysteria.

This, of course, shouldn’t stop you and your company from continually looking to improve your Recruitment Brand - in fact, in a world where high-performers will become increasingly harder to come by, your Recruitment brand will inevitably make the difference between hiring the A-players and the B-players.

Now - in order to give more constructive advice, 2008 at our end will be a year of experimentation. We’re always interested in evaluating the user experience offered by Recruitment and HR departments - and whilst the focus is inevitably on Recruitment websites (check out Peter Gold’s blog on the on-line job application process here), our first experiment involves the old-fashioned telephone call.

It might be construed by some as a little sneaky, but there’s value in where we going with this. We picked (at random) 10 big, well-known companies. We then called these companies, explained to whoever it was who answered the phone that we were interested in working for them and asked whether we could have the name of a suitable person to speak to. We wanted to know how we were treated as an “applicant”. (It must be stressed that after a minute or so on each call we came clean and explained what we were doing - if we were given the chance).

It’s true that a telephone call to a company that you want to work for is fairly rare during a job-search. For whatever reason (possibly fear), most applicants would seem to prefer a letter or an e-mail to a phone call. This is apparently much less the case in the US - where people are generally much more inclined to pick up the phone.

However, we figured that by getting a representative of the company in question on the phone, we’d be able to get an insight into the first impression they make on people interested in working for them.

So then, the results. Generally speaking, most people were what we would call quietly effective - i.e. they were polite, and gave us the information we needed (normally by pointing us to HR, when maybe a better tactic would be to have asked us a few questions about our background and then directed us to the most suitable hiring manager) or transferred our call.

A couple were very cagey (it’s possible that they had an inkling that we weren’t all we were claiming to be). One stood out for it’s exceptional rudeness. Here’s roughly how it went:

Company X: Good morning, Company X, how can I help?
Idealpeople: Yes hello, I wonder if you could help me. I’m interested in working for you and wondered if you could tell me who I need to speak to about employment opportunities with Company X?
CX: We don’t give out that kind of information.
IDP: Really? Well, perhaps you could give me some details of whom I should write to or e-mail?
CX: I don’t even know who you are or anything about you, why would I give you an e-mail address?
IDP: Well, er…
[BOOOOOOP] Line goes dead.
We were slightly dumbfounded by this. What if we’d been the CEO of their major competitor and wanted to bring half our team with us?

This aside though, perhaps the most striking thing about the exercise was that none of the companies we called went out of their way to find out about us or to be overly helpful. Quietly effective, yes - but not one gave us the impression that they were happy to hear from us or keen to find out more about us. If it were us receiving the call, we’re fairly confident that whoever took the call would have gone out of their way to help with information, as well as trying to find out more about the individual in question and arranging call-backs.

Maybe this is the reason that most jobseekers don’t go down the phone call route. In any case, it’s well worth thinking about the impression that your staff have on potential employees who get in touch. Talent is precious and reducing the number of barriers people have to get over to get through to you is vital.

We’ll be running the same experiment via e-mail soon - so come back for more.