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Poll results

So, we ran a poll in the week leading up to Christmas that asked people, from the view point of a candidate, how they would like the initial contact from a recruiter to come.

The results were as below, and to us, very interesting.

From the poll you can see that most people (admittedly the number of participants wasn’t as high as we would have liked) said that they would prefer their initial contact to be via email. The medium that was least preferred was text or WhatsApp and it was quite close between phone call and LinkedIn  in 3rd and 4th place respectively.

I have to say, I was surprised. In practice in our day to day activates I would say this is our most regular scenario:

Phone call – conversation had or voicemail left. If a conversation is had, candidates more often than not request an email with further details about the vacancy in question, and/or the company. If a voicemail is left we often follow up with a Text or WhatsApp message to introduce ourselves and give an overview as to why we are calling. 9 times out of 10 this results in a call back, or a call booked.

LinkedIn – quick responses to approaches, normally to book a phone call to discuss.

Email – responded to the slowest, often after the recruitment process is well underway and normally with quick questions relating to salary, location, remote working etc – very rarely asking questions focused on the role itself or the company in question.

So from a recruiter’s perspective, the theory didn’t actually reflect the practice, but its lead us to ask why that is. Maybe the content of our emails needs some work, maybe it is the fact that if we are working from home more and on more video meetings or phone calls than we were we prefer email conversation that we can reply to as and when, or maybe a combination of all of the above. But it’s given us what we wanted, and that was something to think about and see where we can implement change so thanks for taking part.

We love talking to people. I can’t tell you how many time personally a candidate has told me they were not in the market, asked what it was I wanted to speak about and as the conversation has developed we have discovered together that it’s actually a sector that they’re really interested in, or the tech stack excites them, or the remote working options helps their work life balance, or more often than not that the initial role wasn’t right, but we work with a client that they have always wanted to explore. I could go on and on but there’s so much more to learn from a conversation than there is from reading an email (or not reading in time). I’m glad that a human experience is still up there for people too, especially with video technology being more prevalent than ever. I wonder how long it will be until the phone is replaced with the virtual meeting?

Keen to hear any comments you might have? We will take everything into account in our approaches in 2021.

Have a Happy New Year!!

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