We all face situations when Clients are not replying right? You worked hard to find candidates, it may have taken you a week to find them, then you submit them to your Client, and crickets… How do we avoid this?
Before you start your search, agree with your Client on how often you would get feedback from them. Especially, if it’s a new Client and you don’t know what to expect.
Ask the Right Questions
Here are some questions that you could ask in order to verify how important the position is to them and if they are serious about working with you as a vendor.
- How long has the position been open? If it’s more than 2 months, most likely something is wrong. Your Client may have unrealistic requirements, or they’re trying to find a candidate that doesn’t exist, or maybe candidates are dropping out during the interviewing process. There may be more reasons of course, but on average if a company can’t fill a position within 2 months, most likely something needs to be tweaked in their approach.
- Who’s working on the position? They could have an internal team of recruiters/HRs or other vendors like you. It’s good to know how much resources they are investing into this position.
- What has already been done to fill this position? This question is tied to the previous one but also allows us to expand on what tools they used. Job boards, websites, resume search databases, etc.
- When do they need someone to start? Probably, one of the most important questions in this set.
- What will they do if there’s no candidate by that start date? This will show if they have a plan B and if not it will serve as an indicator of how important it is for them to have that person.
If your new Client has recruiting vendors or an internal HR team and they are taking you on board as a vendor, most likely the position is hard to fill. Otherwise, they would have filled it without you. A logical question to ask in this case: What are the challenges of filling this position taking into account that it has been open for quite some time and there are other resources who are working on it?
Make sure to ask these questions during your first interaction with the Client in order to assess how much time you should invest into this position and whether you should invest any time at all.
Share Resume Samples
Also, the sooner you’re able to present someone to your Client the better, since this way you’ll find out how responsive they are. A good practice, in this case, is to scan through a couple of resumes right after your conversation with them and share it just to check if you’re on the same page. You don’t even have to talk to these candidates, just sharing their resumes is good enough to check your understanding of the position and check the Clients interest in working with you.
Once you submit a couple of resumes and get no feedback make sure to follow up a couple of times, if the feedback is slow, emphasize the importance of speed and mention that great candidates don’t stay on the market too long. If you don’t get any feedback for your initial submissions then there’s no point in investing more time in the search.
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