9 min reading time

As originally asked by Ed Sussek.

This is getting serious. Recruiters are posting jobs, reaching out to candidates through Linked In, and joining various discussion groups. We use every tool at our disposal to tell candidates We’re Here and We’re Hiring, yet we cannot seem to connect with people for our jobs?

I’d love to hear from candidates and job seekers about this.

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Paula Heyer
Account Executive at Cenduit
Todd, best of luck to you. I am a Medical Technologist who got out of lab many years ago and went into laboratory/ medical equipment sales. The company I was with underwent an FDA consent decree and many of us left before the gauntlet came down. I ended up in dental sales and got plenty of cold callin, relationship building, B2B experience. Now that industry is struggling and I am trying to get back to medical sales- either device or medical supply or even pharma. I am sending at least 10 resumes daily(and most are going to recruiting organizations) and getting nowhere. I need to take the NAMR I suppose. Keep me posted if that is what gets you in the door with a company. Any suggestions to those out there???

Chris Hardwick
YouTube Creator at Chris Hardwick Animal Adventures
Todd, that course is pretty in depth. And with sales experience you shouldn’t have a problem landing a position, good luck!

Chris Hardwick
YouTube Creator at Chris Hardwick Animal Adventures
Todd, getting into a new field with no direct experience is one of the biggest challenges there is. I’m sure these are the most difficult to place for recruiters. I would try to contact the companies yourself, if you can’t get into medical device sales try to get into another area of sales to get some sales experience and in the mean time keep applying to your desired positions. By the way, how long did it take to get your medical device training certification? I wasn’t aware that there was official training for this.

Chris Hardwick
YouTube Creator at Chris Hardwick Animal Adventures
I think I live in a slightly different world than most, in the area of Analytical Chemistry our network is very strong and the field very small. Everyone knows everybody and your reputation goes before you. I know people that if they were to get fired, quit, or laid off they could pick up the phone and get another job in less than two minutes. I also know other people that end up unemployed long term because of major issues that everyone in our network is aware of. We are also linked by the instrument repair service techs who go into every single lab in multiple states across the nation and they can give you even more insight into who is doing what and who is moving where. It’s very rare that we even talk about recruiters. I have personally hired advanced level scientists who don’t last for more than a few months because other companies swoop them up and pay them double the salary or more with other incentives we just can’t match. Knowing this is one of the most important things in our field, everyone is watching everything you do, even if you don’t realize it.

Joerg Schulze-Clewing
Electronics Design Consultant
Mark, also ask hiring managers because it’s them who will ultimately decide whether or not someone gets an interview. Some who are among your personal friends and who will give you honest answers. I was a manager for many years and a web presence or something similar can make all the difference.

However, resist the temptation to “over-fluffify” the site. Mine doesn’t require Javascript, Flash or any other gizmo plug-in. Keep in mind that the industry’s movers and shakers are on the go a lot. They are often in situations where they must view stuff via a tiny 4″ screen (their smart phone) and where the data link is iffy.

QR code on a biz card is a good idea, I never thought about that. Although I rarely give out more than 20 biz cards a year these days, it’s become somewhat of a thing of the past.

Mark Bell
Naval Intelligence Officer
@Joerg, good points and I like your website, basic but works, I put together several sites myself as productivity tools just none for self-promotion.
Along this theme in my area of my local networking folks, maybe 5% use QR Codes on business cards linking their resume online. Would love to hear Ed’s thoughts from a recruiting perspective on personal websites and QR codes.

Joerg Schulze-Clewing
Electronics Design Consultant
Mark, there is another most crucial element that is missing in many cases and I believe also in yours: A personal or business web site. In my opinion one has got to have that in this day and age. I receive a large portion of my initial contacts via my web site, including overseas inquiries that result in consulting work. It’s a rather simple one but works. It costs me around $80/year and in terms of bang for the buck nothing can rival the web site.

Then, for engineers, there is Usenet. It is orders of magnitude more efficient than any social or professional network including Linkedin.

Ed Sussek
Talent Acquisition Consultant – Novartis (NIBR) – The Friendliest Recruiter You’ll Ever Meet!
As a Corporate Recruiter 6 weeks is pretty good. I send a resume to a manger, he reads and says phone screen. 1 to 3 days. If the candidate is working, phone screen could take another 3-5 days. Feedback to manager he says interview. At least a week to bring the candidate in. Another 3 days to get feedback. Team decides 2 nd interview. Another week to schedule and bring in to interview. We are now up to about 4 weeks. Could easily take another week to do references, and drive offer through approval process.

These numbers are real for Recruiterswith 20 or so openings.

Kirk D. Beckstein
Technical Training Course Designer & Facilitator.
I understand why it may take a while if you are looking for a C-level type of position or something exotic-but everything else? I would give the order to what ever local recruiter I was working with. In a week he/she would give me 10 resumes, During that time, I made travel arrangements. I would pick five to interview, travel to territiory to be filled, interview candidates, ref check the top one or two, and make an offer. Two weeks, max and done.
I always believed if I was looking at someone, so were others, and I better act fast If that person was the “one”.

Joerg Schulze-Clewing
Electronics Design Consultant
Ed, 6 weeks? Yikes. I did all the hiring without recruiters so far but from phone talk to interview it took only as long as it took to get a seat on an airplane. From interview to offer letter it took between 10 minutes and a few (very few) days.

If this process regularly takes 6 weeks then that’s an area that needs serious improvement.

Ed Sussek
Talent Acquisition Consultant – Novartis (NIBR) – The Friendliest Recruiter You’ll Ever Meet!
I am not sure if you have the correct steps in the process, but I get your point. Did you know that it takes a minimum of 6 weeks to move a candidate from phone screen to offer? The process takes too long and there is very little direct (phone calls) with the candidate. Companies who can build a relationship with their candidates have a better chance of hiring them.

C. Angelique Steccato
VP Business Development, Client Services and Marketing at USDTL
Lets see a recruiter scans a resume looking for the buzz words, contacts the individuals with the most matches, especially if they are from a competitor. Then phone screens, tests for personality/etc., then sends over to the client, who then phone interviews, more tests and so on.
Joreg made a great point as a consultant a person could have completed training, done a needs analysis of the problem and begun working on a fix.

I have seen the same jobs posted multiple times, only to hear candidates say that they took another offer because they either got stuck in the process (and the company and/or recruiter did not communicate as to status) or had no idea where they stood against other candidates.

Richard Jeffery
Managing Director
I look at this and see that we have the same problems here , when I look for people now I start with what I need as a basic skill set, and then look at what this person will bring to the business, personally, work ethic etc … if they don’t have experience we train them we have found that we get better outcomes, better sales and stronger loyalty, after all isn’t this what we all need. I have found with recruiters they feel they have to tick all the boxes which is impossible and wonder why they don’t get applicants. no flexibility and I think this is the secret, being flexible.

Paul Zalesky
Medical Specialty Consultant
These are good and important points. I’m confident that almost all managers and executives will agree that “good people are good people”, meaning they possess the critical inherent characteristics of energy, initiative, judgment, responsiveness and a few others.

Kirk D. Beckstein
Technical Training Course Designer & Facilitator.
In the old days, people were screened for skills and traits (organization, judgement, people skills, management abilities) and would be taught anything specific to the job needed. The emphasis was how do we make this person fit, now it’s how can we exclude them. I read some of the job descriptions, and I think to myself, you will NEVER find what you are looking for. The description is so restrictive, it screens out a vast majority of the persons who may be interested in the position.

Joerg Schulze-Clewing
Electronics Design Consultant
George, I fully agree. When I ran a division of a med tech company I hired several aerospace engineer with previously zero med devices background. Some folks in our company said I was crazy. In hindsight this was one of the best decisions I ever made.

George O’Clock
Formerly, Consultant, University of Minnesota Medical School, Pediatrics, Defense of the Lungs Project
Ed: This may not be relevant to your question, but I will mention it anyway. Over the past two years, I have read and have been sent a number of very interesting postings for employment opportunities with some large and small companies. Almost all of the employee profiles that HR or the recruiter describe exhibit the same characteristics. The engineering employee profiles that they want often call out for a BS degree (with implications that they are looking for someone in the mid 20’s to mid 30’s age bracket); with a background that matches an MS skill base (or at the other end, the skill base of a very accomplished and very old technician) and 25 years of over-all experience. For some reason, they are stacking the experience and skill base requirements so high, with so many specifics added on, that it is almost impossible to make a fit. There are a lot of excellent candidates out there, and there are more coming down the pipeline (I am a biomedical engineering graduate student who is associated with many of these skilled and experienced people at the BS and MS levels). If employers want to hire these very good and accomplished people, employers are going to have to sober up and side step the specific computer program and software skills, regulatory agency familiarity, ISO experience levels, specific technology/technique experience requirements, etc., etc. that they pile on in their hiring requirements. Some of the most productive employees a company will ever hire will often not have one bit of experience in the specifics listed in the company employment postings. I could be wrong, but experience tells me I am not that far off. George O’Clock.

Harvey M. Saunders
Highly experienced, innovative, accomplished, executive manager who specializes in international business management
Ed, it is time to move on and away from typical HR and recruiters and go out and find the best candidate for your company on your own. It is time that every senior manager takes responsibility for additions to his or her staff on their own. If you leave it to someone else you will be plagued by their value judgements. DO IT ON YOUR OWN

Todd Staples, MBA
Account Representative, GYN at Medtronic
My experience with recruiters in the past has been that they are all looking for the needle in the haystack, the #1 top top top seller, award winning super best at every category job performers, and if you don’t touch on all those points well the resume goes in the database for future searches. In the sales world it is not uncommon to post for positions that get 100 or more resumes submitted and only the top 2% of those resumes might get call backs. What is disheartening is when you are a job seeker and unemployment is high, it is a buyer’s market so recruiters truly have the pick of the litter.

Any recruiter that tells me they have lots of openings and need candidates is essentially saying that they need to network and build their search database so that they can source candidates on future searches. All a recruiter needs to do in February, 2013 to fill a position is post an ad on LinkedIn and sit back and watch as hundreds of applications are submitted. The problem with posting jobs as anyone who has ever done so knows – now you potentially have hundreds of people chasing you trying to follow up and get their name on the top of the stack. Recruiters like to network and build the database so that posting a job becomes a last resort when your database fails to produce sufficient candidates.

I personally don’t envy anyone in job search mode right now. Especially in the medical device industry where we get weekly news of more companies laying off hundreds or thousands of employees. Creative outsourced models that allow quality people to build their own destinies are the employment models of the future and where I plan on staying right along with Joerg, Paul, and Joe.

Joerg Schulze-Clewing
Electronics Design Consultant
Yes, Joe, there sure is opportunity. Always was, but typical recruiters seem not to have that much flexibility in their business models. Soon they will have to, and one reason was pointed out by Jeff in another thread, the fact that companies may want to stay under the Obamacare trigger threshold. So there will be a lot more marketing and connecting going on between new providers of services and corporations. Recruiters can either be proactive and become part of the game or miss the boat.