I’m wondering if I should get together with a few of my retired friends and create a recruiting company.
We’ve all got computers, management skills, we’ve all been hiring managers, and perhaps we could bring some much needed clarity and professionalism to recruiting.
Based on the recruiters and recruiting agencies I’ve interacted with over the past five years I’m of a mind that we could bring value to an industry that honestly feels like dealing with a bunch of used car salesmen. Dealing with recruiting firms shouldn’t make you feel like you’ve been slimed.
The latest interaction with a recruiter is a real winner. I went to the trouble of creating an interview scheduling template a few weeks ago. It’s worked fairly well although there have been a couple of bumps along the way. (Just a little fine tuning here and there plus sending a couple of feature requests to improve the product.)
For the latest winner, I forwarded the link when they sent the inevitable “What times are good for you for a phone call,” message. My schedule is generally open but there are some things that pop up in my calendar that make me unavailable.
The recruiter, sent back an email saying they couldn’t commit to a particular time and instead picked Monday from 8am to 3pm. Really?
Now we’ve got recruiters that think they’re cable repair people? Super unprofessional!
Why did they send me the question in the first place? If their schedule is so full they have to pick a range of times (essentially their entire workday,) then why didn’t they just say from the outset, “I’ll call you on Monday,”?
Were I to create a company, I think I’d call it “No BS recruiters” maybe “Naked Recruiting” with a tag line “We strip your Job Search process to the essentials“.
I’d structure the process with no cute pictures, no goofball psych testing, no DEI, and automatically choose “Decline to answer,” on all Race, Gender, or National origin questions. The only valid question is “Are you authorized to work in the United States, Will you require sponsorship in the future?”
I’ll bet between the people I know, we could stand up a recruiting business in less than a month. The long poles would be settling on some kind of CRM software and setting up secondary phone numbers on our phones. I’m pretty sure we could have phone numbers up & running in less than 4 hours. The CRM software might be a little more difficult. That’s just because we’d want something that didn’t cost an arm & a leg and that wasn’t providing features we didn’t want or need. In other words, something that worked and didn’t require a whole staff to maintain.
One thing I’d add would be AI evaluation of resumes to catch people who’ve lifted sections from other people’s resumes, then determine who really did what.
I’m talking about a process that would be totally merit based. Something that connected hiring folks, to folks needing to be hired, bypassing all the stupid shit.
Maybe just present resume images instead of forcing the prospective employee to redundantly fill out dumb boxes on a site, then fill out those same dumb boxes on the prospective employer’s site, (because why would there be any data transfer,) in addition to putting in all the work on their resume in the first place.
You know, OLD SCHOOL!
The job search process at this point is more complex than applying for a freaking security clearance. It’s easier to apply to run for Congress than to get through some of the job applications.
I’m talking about applications for simple jobs. Even retail an application these days is often a multipage form. In my first retail positions the test was essentially does the person have a pulse?
I’m curious about this phone interview on Monday. Based on the initial contact email I think this “recruiting” firm is really trying to sell me something and it’s not a job, it’s training to enter the IT field.
If that’s the case, I’m just pissed off enough to send letters to the initial website that I applied on, better business bureau, Ken Paxton AG of Texas (the company is based in TX), and possibly to President Trump.
If a company is posting a job, then that’s it. They shouldn’t be trying to run some kind of bait and switch. That’s dishonest and begs the question; “Are these folks just trying to steal my identity?“
Why Trump? Because as a businessman who’s trying to get this country’s economy really rolling again, he might see the threat.
What threat? That’s easy. If people are frustrated to the point that they give up entirely, and filling out a welfare form is easier than filling out a job application. America won’t have a roaring economy based on American workers, companies will be able to legitimately say they need foreign workers because all the Americans are on the dole.
For more than 25 years, I’ve said outright the abuse of the H1B1 system by Corporate America is tantamount to Treason.
And don’t even get me started on Presidents Bush.