The harsh treatment of recruiters
I read a post recently in one of LinkedIn’s UK recruitment groups that made me smile. The piece was entitled “Harsh Treatment of Consultants” and in it the author regaled the story of an incident he witnessed in a recruitment agency where, to encourage more calls, a consultant had his phone sellotaped to his head. I found this amusing on two levels:
- The image of someone’s face cocooned in a sticky head-piece
- The fact that the author was so shocked by the act in the first place. He’s been in the recruitment industry for 10 years!
The post’s author described this practice as “bullying”, but I’m not so sure it is. Having worked in the recruitment industry for many years now I have witnessed and, indeed, partaken in, many pranks designed to test boundaries, encourage competition and build team performance. And this is the way I suspect the ‘sellotape incident’ was meant.
Yes, times have changed and new-age recruitment doesn’t lend itself to phone-bashing and so this element of competition has lessened. But recruitment is still about making placements and turning these into cash. Galvanising your team through alternative methods is part of the job and if I were still a recruiter I don’t think I’d be comfortable working with people who didn’t get the banter.
All this has reminded me of a trick we used to pull on consultants reluctant to make calls: simply unplug the ‘victim’s’ phone from the BT socket and set a timer. The phone still looks as though it’s plugged in so it is rather amusing to watch the puzzled consultant attempt to work out what’s happened to their phone in the 20 minutes since a last call was made! With the rest of the office in on the joke it ensured that person was never embarrassed in that way again!
I wonder if japes like this still occur..?
