Personalisation dynamics

So yesterday, again, I got some more CVs stuffed into my inbox from a recruiting company that’s pushing its latest hot candidate.

The candidate was a “high level sourcing strategist” with years of experience in banking and financial services. Apparently, this candidate was especially good with cards, and had led massive cards transformation programmes.

The thing is, I don’t do cards anymore.

Interestingly, this email arrived to by government inbox, and correctly identified me as the CTO at DWP, so they must have at least a little bit of a clue.

That is just so annoying to me.

Firstly, I just hate unsolicited CVs, which are worse than ordinary spam mail because they release piles of personal information into the wild.

But even worse than that, I hate it when recruiters don’t bother to check their details before they contact me. I didn’t give them permission to come into my mailbox, so they have to earn the right before they can expect anything decent to happen.

So anyway, I called this recruiter and told her not email me ever again. And this was the exchange:

“Oh, sorry, we do it as a service. We think it is helpful for you to know the great candidates out there”

“His experience isn’t relevant”

“He’s still a great candidate”

“He doesn’t know anything but cards, which we don’t do”

“Well I have this other candidate….”

After a few more minutes of argument, I got them to remove me from their mailing list.

I suppose the recruiter was just doing their job, however badly.

But isn’t it interesting how some firms, who supposedly are all about personal service (when we hire a recruiter, they aren’t just shoving a CV in my face, they’re supposed to be about search), fail to understand the dynamics of the personal.

Here are the dynamics of the personal:

1. If you get any detail at all wrong about me, you’re deleted.

2. If you guess wrongly about what I want, you’re deleted.

3. If you dare to follow up after guessing wrongly and being deleted, you’ll get deleted again and then you’ll get blacklisted

4. If you get blacklisted and you still refuse to stay deleted, I will be on a personal mission to make sure you’re blacklisted everywhere.

This is not just me, by the way. I see it from everyone who gets touched by poorly done personalisation.

Considering the number of things that have to go right for such an outreach to work, I am surprised why companies ever spam anyone with poorly constructed personalisation. Certainly, it seems impossible that an organisation I’ve never dealt with before can ever know enough about me to get all this right. Even with the amount of stuff you can find out online.

Now, as to this recruiting firm, and this candidate, this value destroying exercise has eliminated much chance of you dealing with me again. But by all means spam my inbox and that of my colleagues as well. I can assure you the response will be predictable, and pretty much the same as on this occasion.

Comments

[Andrew]

Ah. Recruitment companies. About a year ago I found myself on the other end and having to find a job through recruitment companies (something I haven't had to do for a long time). It was a thoroughly demoralising experience and needn't have been.

Without ranting too much, and following on from your post, the thing that amazed me the most is their lack of service (and a lack of comprehension as to why it is important). Now that I am in a position again of hiring people, I kept a list of every agency that provided rubbish service and have blacklisted them in our organisation.

What amazes me the most is that none of these agencies think about the repercussions of their actions (or lack of). Something that would have cost them an additional five minutes in effort has resulted in their blacklisting.

[James Gardner]

Andrew:

Ah, so you too have blacklisted because of a failure to personalise correctly.

What interests me, though, is that so often organisations thing that by sending out personalised stuff, they are doing a good job. When actually, by getting personalisation wrong, they are destroying value.

I think its obvious. Apparently, though, it isn't.

[David McGhee]

Thats it James, you are now blacklisted.

The blog post is far too impersonal.

;)