I’ve been in staffing long enough to remember when we faxed resumes. And I don’t mean that as some nostalgic “back in my day” story. I mean we literally faxed them. You’d send the resume over, call the hiring manager and say, “Hey, did you get it? Can you go grab it off the fax machine?” Then, because you already had them on the phone, you’d talk through the candidate right then and there.
Was it efficient? Absolutely not. Did it create a conversation? Every single time.
When I first got into this business, we also hand-delivered paychecks to our consultants every Friday. It gave you a reason to be at the client site. You’d drop off a check, see the manager, check in with the consultant and inevitably learn something you probably wouldn’t have learned sitting behind a desk.
We walked candidates into interviews and on their first day. I had a third-shift computer operator at Lockheed Martin once, which meant putting on a suit at about 3:30 in the morning, getting them through security, going home, sleeping for maybe an hour and then putting the suit back on to go to work.
I’m not recommending we bring that part back, by the way. Nobody at CLS needs to start steaming a suit at 3:00 a.m. to prove they care.
But there was something about that version of recruiting that I do think we need to hold onto. It forced you to actually know people, connect and build genuine relationships.
You knew your candidates beyond what was written on their resume. You knew your hiring managers. You knew which client liked to move quickly, which one needed more detail and which candidate had the exact background for something that might not come up for another six months.
You built relationships because there really wasn’t another way to do the job.
Fast-forward to today and the industry looks completely different. We have LinkedIn, recruiting platforms, automation, data tools and now AI. I’m not anti-any of that. It would be ridiculous to pretend those things aren’t valuable. They make us faster, more efficient and give us access to information that would have taken weeks to uncover years ago.
But there’s also a danger in becoming so efficient that we stop doing the part that made recruiting work in the first place.
You can search a database, screen a resume, automate an email and move somebody through a process without ever really knowing them. That’s not how I want us to recruit.
We keep trying to use technology to eliminate the conversation when technology should really be giving us more time to have better ones.
One of our longtime recruiters has this ridiculous memory. She can remember someone she worked with ten years ago, remember their skill set and immediately think, “Wait, they would actually be perfect for this.”
I’d love to tell you we’ve developed some proprietary technology that gives her that ability.
We haven’t. She knows people.
To me, that’s the part of old-school recruiting that still matters. It isn’t the fax machine, the hand-delivered paycheck or me standing outside a client site in a suit before sunrise. It’s that we used to have a lot more reasons to talk to each other, and now we have to be intentional about creating those reasons.
There are people in my network today who I’ve known through multiple companies and multiple chapters of their careers. I’ve worked with them in one organization, then another, and then another. When they eventually have a need, there’s already trust there. We’re not introducing ourselves through an automated email and hoping they remember our name later. We have a relationship.
That’s incredibly difficult to replicate with technology.
And I don’t think this has to be an old-school-versus-new-school argument. The best recruiting organizations should be doing both.
Use AI to find information faster. Use automation to take repetitive work off recruiters’ plates. Use technology to help manage the thousands of conversations and relationships that would be impossible to organize manually.
Then take the time you save and put it back into the human part of the job. Call the candidate. Talk to the hiring manager. Ask the extra question. Understand why they’re hiring instead of simply reading the job description.
That’s where I think recruiting sometimes gets backwards. We keep trying to use technology to eliminate the conversation when technology should really be giving us more time to have better ones.
There’s a reason the company is called Connect Life Sciences.
When I came up with the name, the idea really was that simple. We wanted to connect with people and we wanted to connect with clients. It wasn’t supposed to be some clever marketing line. It was one of the basic ideas behind the company, and we never stopped doing it.
So I’ll close with a note for the people on the other side of the desk, whether you’re a hiring manager or a candidate.
Even though the tools have changed, the things that mattered when we were faxing resumes still matter today. You want a recruiter who knows the people they represent, picks up the phone, asks good questions, and shows up when it matters.
If you’re a hiring manager and your recruiter has never really asked why you’re hiring or what success looks like in the role, you should expect more. And if you’re a candidate whose entire experience has been an automated email followed by a scheduling link, you should expect more too.
A lot of firms have traded some of the relationship for speed, and while CLS certainly uses technology where it helps, we have never believed it should replace the human part of recruiting.
Find yourself a partner who will throw on a golf shirt (we’ve retired the suits), come see you and shake your hand.