Marketing Victimhood: Trashing Recruiters on LinkedIn
1-minute 30-second read
It’s fashionable for job seekers to publicly trash recruiters for being [insert whatever words stand for them not being treated however they feel they deserve to be treated].
And these public grievances are met with rousing applause by the most virtuous and welcoming of the LinkedIn universe. (Which as of today seems to be a lot of people.)
Trash a recruiter on LinkedIn. Get lots of Likes. Probably get seen by someone who’s hiring.
It’s not a bad move on the surface.
But to those in the hiring seats, publicly airing your woes feels closer to a cheap attempt at marketing your victimhood in a hail-mary attempt to get attention than genuinely trying to improve the system for your fellow job seekers. Aka, it’s purely selfish.
That doesn’t fly with pragmatic recruiters. Spoiler alert: Almost all recruiters are pragmatic. It’s basically a prerequisite for the role.
Now, there’s certainly some validity to these criticisms. Let’s face it: Some recruiters are just bad at their jobs. And there are a lot of candidates running through the system. The labor market is really freikin’ big. Bad experiences will occur. They’re inevitable.
But let’s take a step back and look at the reality of most in-house recruiting functions:
Internal recruiters tend to be highly empathetic people. They’re people people.
They’re generally overworked, under-resourced, and use dinosaur technology. They’re flooded with low-quality applications from job seekers who blindly apply at scale (This is a topic for another day. JC!). All while trying to manage sourcing in an effort to find quality people who actually take pride in their work.
(Identifying the people who’ve become comfortable with the idea that they've somehow earned the right to an incredibly high income in exchange for mediocre contribution takes more effort now than it did in the pre-Covid era.)
Is the system to blame? Probably. It’s jacked. And fixing it at scale isn’t likely to happen.
That said, "candidate experience" is one hell of an agreeable talking point on LinkedIn. But when it comes to the practical application of whatever that term means in a real-life experience, it's not gonna happen across the industry—no matter how hard the market sucker punches it.
Recruiters: Kudos to the brave few of you who sacrifice scale for connection. That's a hard thing to do.
Job seekers: Calm the hell down. You want empathy? Give to get. Trust that good people are doing their best with what they have available to them. Even if this isn't true, it’s a much healthier way to live.
— Nate