LinkedIn Recruiters: Risks and Consequences of Unsolicited Engagement

Description

• Recruiters on LinkedIn: Harrison explores working with recruiters who reach out through LinkedIn. He highlights that experienced recruiters may not actively seek candidates on LinkedIn, as their established networks and experience bring clients to them.
• New Recruiters: New recruiters often use LinkedIn to contact potential candidates, especially for law firm jobs. Harrison explains that this approach might be shared among those still in the field.
• Sophistication with Experience: Harrison emphasizes that experienced recruiters, like those at BCG, have extensive resources, thousands of law firm connections, and historical data on jobs and candidates. Their depth of knowledge and sophistication sets them apart.
• Quality of Service: The critical point is that recruiters actively reaching out on LinkedIn may have fewer job opportunities or the same level of expertise as established firms. Harrison encourages candidates to be cautious and consider recruiters with a record of satisfied clients and successful placements.
• Hungry New Recruiters: While new recruiters may be more enthusiastic, hungry, and willing to work hard, candidates must weigh the pros and cons. Experienced recruiters with a proven track record often have more extensive resources and connections.
• Conclusion: Harrison concludes that candidates should approach LinkedIn recruiters with caution and consider the recruiter's experience, track record, and the quality of their services. He suggests that recruiters who spend more time placing candidates may offer a more valuable service than those primarily reaching out through LinkedIn.

Transcript:

Is working with recruiters who reach out through LinkedIn and solicit a bad idea? What are the consequences of working recruiters little about? Okay. So, personally, if you know me and you're, I've never reached out to you on LinkedIn. It's like the people who are the best at something aren't necessarily doing that.

This is something that recruiters use now all the time. They contact people on LinkedIn, preferably because they need suitable candidates. So let me tell you a little bit about that. It's anytime a recruiter is reaching out to you about a law firm job, it's probably most of the time, it's at a giant law firm that, you know, but if you, it's like anything, and again, I'm not being critical of the industry on it, being critical of anything.

But if you want to be a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, you will start there. With no business, you will be expected to cold call people to your friends from high school and college, and then you're. Relatives of your parents, friends, or your parent's people may be part of your parent's country club.

This is what a new financial advisor does. They do that because no one else will do business with them because they need their clients. And so, a new financial advisor, that's what they do. They could call and try to find people. But the problem is they have yet to learn what they're doing.

So, they need to figure out what they're doing. So, because they need to know what they're doing, they must get clients like that. Not only that, but they need to learn what they're doing. So, what happens in this situation? Most people quit because they can't get clients.

So most people quit, then the ones that stay with it. Some become very good, and some become very good. And so, what is, what does that mean? That means they have plenty of business, have learned how to succeed in the profession, and don't cold call anymore. Do you think someone who heads a giant hedge fund is cold-calling people looking for business? They've got more people than all these bars and things to enter.

In my case. No, I don't cold call or message people through LinkedIn because I have; because I've been doing this for so long, I know what I'm doing. Not only that, but just to tell you how sophisticated this business is, there are over 300 practice areas. We work with over 10,000 law firms, and it's just wild.

Like how, when you have a lot more experience, how it can make a difference. So, if someone's reaching out to you on LinkedIn, they probably need to. They're getting established, they have yet to learn what they're doing, or they may just, that may be what they're doing, and then they're new.

So, the problem with that is, and I'm not saying, sometimes a very experienced recruiter may reach out to you to be the general counsel of a company if you're a partner. Still, I'm saying it's sometimes wrong, but the problem is that people need to learn what they're doing often. There are all these things you need to say to law firms to get them interested.

Do things, there's all these, it's just a lot to the business, and you have to, there's a lot you need to understand. So, is it a bad idea? Typically, what happens, and I'll just tell you how most recruiter’s work. We don't work this way because we've got, anyway, I'm not going to talk about myself, but people will subscribe to services that, and there are only one or two services that, that that give them access to to a list of attorneys and big firms.

And then also give them access to big-firm jobs when they come out, and when they come out, sometimes they come out; the law firm posts a job on their website, and boom, the service will email recruiters and big cities like New York. All of a sudden, you'll be inundated with LinkedIn. And calls and things.

And so those, so that's, people will just try to get resume and hope. So that's how it works. So, is it a bad idea if you're getting a call like that? They're talking you into applying for the job. Maybe they're That sort of thing. So, if that's what you want, that's perfectly fine. But most of the time, the recruiters on LinkedIn will only have a few jobs.

So, if you go to BCG, and I'm getting, I don't want to brag here, but typically there's 3000 jobs that we have. There's, I'm just telling you, and other big recruiting firms may have similar resources. All we do are law firm placements. And again, I'm not trying to brag here. I'm just saying that placement's all we've ever done.

We have 10,000 law firms we work with. We have history. And again, I'm just, I'm trying to show you what it looks like when you look deep into something. We have history, so we know where every person's ever been interviewed, where tens of thousands of thousands of people have been interviewed.

Interviewed we have. Every job a law firm has ever had in the past and future. So, we have things that every job, and again, I don't want to talk too much about this; I'm going to move on. This is not a BCG, but every firm it's ever, every job a firm ever had. So, the point is that everything is fine if a recruiter wants to tell you about a big firm everyone knows has a job if they go to their website and try to work with you for it.

But if you and they can throw your resume in the pie, we'll see what happens. But the point is that this business, like any business, the longer someone does it, the more sophisticated they become, the more people they know, the lighter, the more they know how to do it, the more established they are.

So again, everyone starts somewhere. It doesn't mean that's a bad thing. And every very successful person when they're younger often is much hungrier. So, it's not, so there are pluses and minuses, but I think that should be enough to answer your question again without saying anything negative about new recruiters because I certainly was one at one time; that's how things work.

But what I don't like. It's about reaching out to people that they should have a lot of satisfied clients if they've made a lot of placements, and then, it's all they can do to keep up with those placements, trying to go to new and new firms. That should be; they should have nothing but doing that.

So even after doing it for two years, like I think my first year, I had more work than I could handle just from people. Within six months, I'd immediately placed referrals from the people I placed. So, I, because I was good at it and I understood it. So, it's just, that's how it works.

So, someone that's reaching out on LinkedIn, you don't know. And there's, I hope that answers your question. But that's what most people do, but they don't have. People coming to them or people that they've placed many times. So that's what they do with their time. I think it'd be more, but just one final thing: I hate to keep harping on this.

If I was a, if I were someone reaching out to candidates on LinkedIn, and that's how I spent my time, I think my time would be much better spent trying to look for jobs for my existing candidates and place them than just sending people to one firm and hoping something extraordinary happens. It's just my opinion. And some other firms that came out on this list.