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Saying No Gracefully

Heather Hamilton always has smart things to say about recruiting. And she and I share rather unique seats in the recruiting world in that we are both large-scale conduits for candidates, but not actually recruiters/ hiring managers ourselves.

As a result, the thousands of folks that pass from Heather's desk to Microsoft's recruiters, and the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to TheLadders.com weekly newsletters (676,315 to be precise!) frequently deem us to be their must-have lunch date.

Now this isn't the result of our sparkling personalities and witty repartee (though from her blog, I'm certain Heather possesses these attributes in droves!) but from candidates' misplaced belief that we are the actual hiring gatekeepers.

Saying no to these requests is always a little bit of death for me because it feels so... impolite. But as Heather mentions, and my excellent trainer at Crunch would agree, having 40 lunches a week would be, let's say, unproductive and fattening :)

If any Stoners out there want to share their most graceful way to decline these well-meaning invitations, please do comment below!

Posted by marc at February 18, 2006, 10:48 AM

Comments

Hi Marc,

I get candidates sending emails quite often saying that they need a job, advice, or just want to "network."

I have an email template for these folks that explains to them that I am a sales and marketing executive at a job board and I go on to offer ten very brief steps that I recommend they take to help them along in their job search. It sounds canned and is, but it's better than ignoring them or having to talk to each one. And the advice is useful and from me personally after 10 years in the industry; not just "post your resume" stuff. Some like it, others bite back with, "Thanks for nothing jerk," which makes me glad I didn't meet with them.

I make it clear in the email that I don't give out contact information to other executives, but point them to sites like LinkedIn, etc. (even though I'm not a huge fan of these saturated sites for reasons I'll type about another day).

I usually personalize the email so that it says, "Thanks for the invite, Bob!" And then go into the template.

It works for me and I get more "thank you's" than I do "expletive you's" ;-)

Great blog! Keep it up!

Michael Turner
VP, ComputerJobs.com

Posted by Michael Turner on February 21, 2006 04:45 PM

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