Courtesy of Kathy Lavinder
Veteran recruiter Kathy Lavinder now thinks twice before posting jobs.
She’s spent 25 years finding candidates for a narrow niche: corporate security, intelligence, and investigative roles — jobs that require very specific skills. Most people aren’t qualified to do them.
That doesn’t stop them from applying.
A few years ago, Lavinder might have gotten a couple of hundred résumés for a role. Now, almost any job she puts up gets more than that, and sometimes more than 500, she told Business Insider.
“It has been getting worse every single time I post something,” she said. “It used to be I’d get a robust response, and now I get a tsunami.”
The reasons aren’t hard to spot. The job market has cooled, especially for desk jobs, and many people’s searches are taking longer. On top of that, artificial intelligence tools can churn out custom résumés — and catapult them to employers — in seconds.
The trouble with ‘security’
Lavinder, the founder and executive director of SI Placement, also faces a challenge that’s specific to her industry: the word security itself.
She recruits for physical security roles — the kind where people protect corporate facilities, often in person. That’s distinct from cybersecurity. Yet you wouldn’t know it from her inbox.
When Lavinder posts a job, she’ll put in all caps that it’s NOT a cyber role. Yet, she said, she still gets flooded with IT résumés.
“I mean, I’m shouting at them: ‘This is not a cyber role,'” she said.
That mismatch is one reason Lavinder estimates that when she goes public with a job, about 80% of the applicants she gets aren’t qualified. As the number of résumés she gets has shot higher in recent years, she said, the effort required to slog through them often isn’t worth it.
“I really don’t like to use hyperbole, but I feel like I’m drowning sometimes in candidates that really aren’t responsive to the job post,” Lavinder said, referring to the number of people who aren’t suited for a position.
Résumé FOMO
Not posting jobs publicly helps her avoid the flood — but it comes with its own risk: missing the ideal candidate.
That person might not be job-hunting but instead “keeping their head down” at their current job, she said.
“They might love this opportunity,” Lavinder said. “They’re the ones who are going to miss out.”
She still occasionally posts open roles because she worries she’ll overlook someone good. Lavinder has joked with colleagues that going public with a job post is an act of “temporary insanity.”
She’ll then predict that, “by tomorrow, I will be complaining to you about the deluge, and I will pull it down.”
Unlike in years past, when Lavinder wants to fill a role today, she’ll often contact people individually through texts, emails, LinkedIn messages, or by picking up the phone. The more bespoke approach is a return to how she used to do recruiting, she said.
“It’s like throwing me back a decade or more in terms of my process,” Lavinder said. “Is this progress?”
‘It’s not Taylor Swift’
Lavinder uses platforms like LinkedIn to maintain ties with those in the fields she recruits for. She often posts career advice and about workplace trends. That can be fruitful, Lavinder said, because she has some 37,000 followers on LinkedIn.
“It’s not, you know, a million. It’s not Taylor Swift,” she said. But, “it’s a substantial population and a precise niche.”
Many of them are interested in the unique industries she traverses, Lavinder said. Yet even though she would like to share more about specific roles with her amassed network of industry insiders, Lavinder often hesitates.
“I think they would appreciate if I could occasionally pull back the curtain and actually tell them what I’m working on,” she said. “Instead, I’m pulling the curtain shut more and more.”
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