I recently decided to do a survey among 25 of my candidates about their experience with recruiting agencies. Candidates ranged from Hospital CEO’s, CNO’s, Registered Nurses, Allied Health Professionals – management, experienced and new graduates.

Their experiences were also similar, whether they were working with a corporate recruiter, a contingency recruiter or a retained recruiter.

One candidate, an experienced Chief Nursing Officer (CNO), recounted her experiences with a hospital recruiter. The recruiter called her from a referral. She had done no research on her at all. She did not know how highly respected she is nor that she had very impressive experience. The recruiters questioning was basic and simplistic, and it was clear that the recruiter didn’t have any insight into the position aside from the job description provided by the hiring manager.

After talking to this CNO for awhile, the recruiter told the candidate that she probably wasn’t right for the job because she had not previously worked in a hospital of their exact size, and that was a prerequisite for this position. This came after 10 minutes of a basic phone conversation and despite her 20 years of experience, reputation, and solid credentials.

A lack of recruiting skill results causes tremendous inefficiencies and much higher costs for corporations and loss of placement fees for contingency and retained recruiters. Untrained recruiters lose many good candidates and spend too much time screening good candidates out instead of screening the right candidates in. It seems that while unskilled recruiters in a staffing agency do not stay around very long, they seem to do well in corporate recruiting where they do not have to rely on commission and their ratio’s are seldom monitored.

I work mostly in healthcare and find that few healthcare organizations have ever surveyed their applicants on their recruiters behavior and style, whether successful or not at employing them.