Why Do Recruiters Go Dark?

As a recruiter who doesn’t sugar coat, I can honestly say that we go dark for a lot of the same reasons that candidates and clients go dark on us…

1. Low Interest (less than 50%) – Unfortunately, not every candidate’s background is a perfect fit and most are far from it.

We have to make quick decisions whether or not someone is a viable candidate and if they are way off or of no future value to us we may intend to call or email back to close the loop but simply never get around to it. How do you combat this? Enhance your skillset, write an awesome resume and your time will come.

2. Lower Priority – Most recruiters live on commission and dedicating too much time to anything that won’t make them money can be fatal. Therefore recruiters are always stack ranking clients, accounts and activities based on which is closer to the money, which are cooperative, have the better story, are paying a higher fee, etc. You may be great, but the job may lack urgency.

3. Memory loss – Sometimes a recruiter can be so busy that they flat out forgot about you and never made an appropriate note to follow up as more and more things piled up on their To-Do list. This is a simple case of “my bad” and you should harass me. Be the proverbial squeaking, stalking wheel.

4. We Didn’t Go Dark, We Went Grey! – Often times when we haven’t gotten back to a candidate it’s because we have nothing new to share, the update is no update (for candidates already in process) Taking a couple of days or sometimes even a week to respond can be very common. A couple weeks to a month however is a different story, something has most likely died on the vine. You’re out. Like I said, no sugar coating.