At the risk of really getting you guys going - I'd like to take a stab at this. I've been a creative recruiter for two years, working at a company that's been around for 30 years, working primarily in tech and creative, so I know at least a little about what is going on....
To start with - NO - most of us do not have a specialized degree; however, a good number of us have worked in the advertising/creative industries at some point in our careers. I started as a fresh grad with an English degree from a liberal arts school. I got my job because I have excellent communication skills, am a quick learner, and have an eye for design. So, NO, we don't actually do what you do. Most of us are not hands on designers, information architects, or interaction designers. I had a client once who was outraged that I couldn't read HTML code to determine whether it would be pixel perfect - I told her that if I could, I wouldn't be doing my job, I would be coding! In other words, if we could do what you guys do, barring some exceptions we would be doing it, not recruiting. My company is very specialized, so 98% of the orders we work on are the same song and dance. We know the types of candidates who do it, often we are friendly with them, and are able to get our clients the talent they want and our candidates the exact type of work they are looking for. Everyone is happy and there is much rejoicing in the streets! That said, sometimes we do get an order that we don't understand. I am guilty of once writing a job ad that read something like, "first you wash the LAMP with the SOAP". At my company, when we don't understand an order we do a variety of things to get clarity - online research, drill the client, call up a candidate we have a relationship with that can shed some light on it (one of our recruiters is married to a hybrid AD/Flash Developer at an NYC agency, so he gets calls sometimes). All of those things completed, though, sometimes we still don't understand and we have a client that is crying and wants to give us money to find someone to help them. This is when things get troublesome. We often are forced to rely on skill searches to direct us to a candidate pool - so if you have the appropriate language on your resume, you will be worth calling in times of great desperation. (Also - our own candidate database is the most poorly designed piece of crap software that I have ever seen or tried to work with - but again, that's something that we can't fix because we don't have the software engineering skills to pull that off.) We often know that you haven't coded HTML/CSS for several years when we call. We know that your IDEAL position is not what we are presenting you with. But sometimes - probably more often than you'd believe - the stars line up and a candidate who is a little rusty in a particular area happens to be willing to do some work for a very desperate client for the proper amount of compensation. This won't happen, though, unless we make the call. Recruiters aspire to be matchmakers. It is "personal" in that way. However, sometimes in a desperate attempt to keep our clients happy, we have to make embarrassing cold calls. I don't like it any more than you guys do. I hope that helps and I'm bracing for your responses. Jackie O'Hare | Manager of Interactive Recruitment TTS Personnel, Inc Jackie at ttspersonnel dot com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
