Emails are Sucking the Life from Recruitment

When I started in recruitment e-mails played a large part in the way business was done.  But thinking back, it was pretty much only to do things like send a CV or other attachment, receive CV’s from jobseekers, or perhaps share a hilarious joke e-mail that had been going around your mates in the UK and made it’s way across to me in Australia (whatever happened to those emails?)   I had a smaller range of options when it came to communicating a message across to someone, but there was a distinct order of frequency to the methods I used the most, and they were in order:

1. The phone on my desk
2. Meeting someone in person or wandering over to a colleague’s desk to discuss something.  Or shouting at them from my chair.
3. Calling from my mobile phone.
4. Texting
5. Emailing

Without doubt emailing came in last.  I could make six or seven sales calls to clients before having a quick check of my email inbox (to see if any mates had sent a new joke or my future wife had emailed from New Zealand, mainly).   But things have changed, haven’t they?  Now I’m definitely all for progress.  I’m a change agent extraordinaire, I love it.  I have way more communication channels at my disposal now to add to the list above.  But I can’t for the life of me see how emails have been anything other than an absolute destructive distraction to us recruiters.  One of the best recruitment leadership quotes I ever heard was:

“You know the sound of tap, tap, tap on keyboards in a recruitment office?  That’s the sound of money falling into the bank accounts of your competitors.”

Yet I now find myself running my desk, and my day, and ensuring I’m on top of everything, by waging a war of attrition with my email inbox.  My constant aim in recruitment these days is to try and maintain my inbox at a level where I can still see the last email at the bottom of my inbox.  And it’s getting harder and harder to achieve.

We in recruitment are talkers, we’re networkers, we’re agitators, influencers and negotiators.  Some of us are even consultants…  But we can’t possibly be all these things over emails, can we?  Yet an internal recruiter friend of ours who is 6 weeks into a new position told me recently that 70% of the approaches or prospecting calls he gets from agency recruiters are via email.  The ones that call are always the recruiters who are either on the PSA or already have some kind of history or relationship with his company.

Another internal recruiter tells me he is losing his mind at work.  The job has become so administrative, so dominated by emailing all day, that the hushed temple of tippy-tap he works within is sucking the soul from his recruiting spirit.

Another guy who I travel to work with (in the corporate world, but not in recruitment) had a long weekend up North and returned on Wednesday to over 500 emails in his inbox.  When I suggested he’d need another day off to get through them, he said “No I won’t”.  He showed me his smartphone and bulk deleted them all right in front of me.  As of this morning he hasn’t had a single person chase him up for something he hasn’t responded to on email.

The deluge of emails in business are like pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a car.  They’re nice in moderation but completely slow down and screw up the engine of business when applied in too much volume.

So what are we doing to ourselves here?  Let’s not give in to emailing.  Stop hiding behind it.  Remember who we are in recruitment and why organisations that employ us, need us.  They need us for our gregariousness, our ability to relate, to converse, to broker deals, overcome hurdles and form solutions on the fly, to generate awesome talent attraction results for your company.

Sean, you know Sean, the bloke who sits opposite me every day (yes that Sean, sorry for reminding you)?  He worked for a massive UK telco company that once famously banned all emails, apart from branch managers sending one email per week to head office with their sales results for the week.  It caused mayhem, but eventually performance, morale, innovation and communication effectiveness all went up.

I bet the same would happen if we did that in recruitment too.  Give it a go.  Next time you’re about to robotically click “Reply”, think about it, and ask yourself if you can pick up the phone, or wander over to your colleague in person.  Amazing things could happen.