I had a different blog post planned for today but when I learned today is World Kindness Day, I had to adjust. I might be the Gen X-iest Gen X-er there ever was. My life motto comes from a business that peaked in the 90s and is now dead – Blockbuster. Be Kind. Rewind. If you’ve never heard this phrase, you must be younger than me! Blockbuster found that their employees were spending a large amount of time rewinding videos for the next patron and it was costing the business hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost hours across the business. To solve the problem, they added a sticker to each video calling upon the kindness of strangers. Simply asking customers to Be Kind and take the time to rewind their video before returning it changed the behavior significantly enough to avoid further measures. The other option might have been the more obvious choice to many business leaders – fine people who don’t rewind their video. Rather than create a punitive approach, Blockbuster decided to call upon altruism. It worked!
When I founded Recruiting Experiences in 2021, one of the core drivers for me was to bring Kindness back to the Recruiting process. It sounds very Pollyanna and perhaps it is. Nonetheless, it is critical to me that my personal values are reflected in the business and we’re not building a Recruiting organization that is just like all the others. Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing Recruiters and firms out there. Unfortunately, there are some amazingly bad ones too. I strive to bring a bit of kindness to my work every day. Sometimes I find that I swing a little too hard to the ‘nice’ side of the table. Other days, I have to practice deep breathing to find the good in a situation and maintain a positive attitude.
My team and I use a hashtag often that exemplifies how we approach our recruiting work: #recruitkind
Our model of Recruiting often affords us the opportunity to act on behalf of the customers we’re representing as an extension of their talent brand. That is not a responsibility we take lightly. If we’re representing another company’s brand, we have to be 100+% sure we’re delivering a quality, consistent, and positive candidate experience. Below are some of our team standards to which we strive to meet our #recruitkind goals:
- Touch base with candidates within 3 business days of application or outreach and then every 3 business days thereafter until regretted or hired
- Call every candidate who went through an interview with a personal regret
- Respond to EVERY application
- Give candidates a heads up when they have a silly error on their resume or cover letter
- Avoid unnecessary application hoops – make the process simple & quick
- Refer candidates to fellow recruiters or past clients if we don’t have the right fit for them
Of course, we make mistakes and sometimes are unable to meet these commitments. If possible, we will give you a heads up that we don’t have info yet or will call the next day to reconnect. If you are pending a decision from me or our team, remind us. It’s our job and, if you approach us with genuine kindness & curiosity, we will respond in kind (see what I did there?).
If you are a job seeker, what is the most kind action you’ve encountered in the job search process?
If you are a Recruiter, Hiring Manager, or raving fan of Recruiting Experiences, how will you #recruitkind today?
Recruiting Experiences offers contract, fractional, and direct hire Recruiting as well as fractional HR & Training solutions. We operate with 4 core values: Reliability, Excellence, Simplicity, Kindness.
