Why do recruiters insist on phone calls for everything? Why can't they just send an email? I can't get on the phone while I'm at my job to talk to you about some other job.
Because their job hinges on maximising the effectiveness of their persuasion and they can't read you and react by email so well. The irony being for engineer types it has the opposite effect, at least it does for me and you.
Having done the sales grind for a bit now, I'll give my 2c:
Phone calls (or any form of live communication, really) are extremely efficient in comparison to email.
Email is pretty much the worst form of communication for most people. A conversation that would take 15 minutes on the phone might take weeks (if not months) to conclude over email, and because of that latency things frequently get forgotten or lost.
You might say: "Hey, if I don't respond to your email that means I'm not interested" or "This clearly isn't a priority for me, that's why it takes so long to respond" but on the other side you'll semi-frequently encounter people who actually are really interested but take a few follow-up emails to respond for whatever reason (busy, OOO, just forgot, etc).
Email is just very forgettable for most people, even for things that they might actually be interested in. You might be an exception. I'm a pretty strict Inbox Zero person, so I feel your pain. Still, you choose the tactic that works most effectively for the vast majority of people, and that's live communication of some kind.
It's as bad if not worse if you have decision-making power at a place which is hiring and therefore are a client or potential client. For example, I (reluctantly) agreed to have coffee with a recruiter next week. I'm not looking for a job - he wants to be put on our preferred supplier list. So now he sends me an email - he wants to have a quick catch up call before we meet for coffee.
Since I think having coffee with him is a total waste of my time, how do I even begin to think about a pre-call for the coffee?
I usually say I would be happy to meet (or call or whatever), but what is the call about.
If they are good, they'll lay out everything they want to cover and be upfront. Sometimes, this works well and I'll bite and accept the service or we will know right away it won't work.
The worst is when the person thinks they want to build a relationship first and hang out and talk about other things and then they'll tell me what they want to do. I simply won't give someone I just met some business just because (or if) I like them.
Never been in recruiting, but just from sales experience it's very hard to sell without direct contact. You have to adjust to what your prospect wants, you can eficiently find out from the sound of their voice whether they're intereste or just polite.
I agree about the business hours, almost none of us have our own offices anymore, so the business hour phone call should only be about making an appointment outside business hours when you can actually talk.
I've had a recruiter literally call up the office of my (at-the-time) current job to ask if I was looking for a new job. After politely rejecting them, they continue by asking if any of my colleagues were looking for a new job. These recruiters are aggressive!
Most recruitment agencies have hard targets for number of phone calls made per day. "It's a numbers game" is a default, golden rule at every cookie cutter agency out there.
I don't think it works that way from their perspective. For boiler room recruiters in particular, they maximize their return on effort by blasting email like that. They don't want to waste time on people who are content with their current job and might be all goldilocks-y about potential new employers. They want to be talking to people who want a new job so badly that they're willing to respond to spammy recruiter emails.
Source: At a former job, I was work buddies with a guy from the in-house recruiting department, and he'd tell me stories about just how different his job there was from his previous job at one of those firms.
This might be true, but I still think there's a market for people who might not be content, but aren't so malcontent that they want to go through these recruiters that can't get basic information like the name of the company, what the company does, how much it pays, etc. in an email. Heck, I would think that even if you're mass mailing a copy/pasted template, having a good hook in there would get more hits — and that's perhaps what irks the rest of us. We'd like to be hooked… but this is like a bad late night commercial, and we're expecting something more mid-day and professional (but still a commercial).
These recruiters sure they're not sitting on a local maxima?
There is. And there are recruiting firms that specialize in that market, too. I've gone through one to get a job before, and it was a great experience.
You aren't going to encounter them nearly as often, though, precisely because they aren't just spamming indiscriminately. Also because there are fewer of them recruiting for fewer positions. The hiring company needs to be willing to pay for that level of service.
