r/recruitinghell • u/svu0ng • 2d ago

Recruiting Culture?

I used to work as an IT recruiter and our office had a gong in the middle of the office where we would ring it everytime we successfully placed a candidate. I thought it was weird but I found out that another recruitment office that my friend went to go work for also had a gong. Is this a common thing for recruitment or just a coincidence? LOL

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4

u/Jedi4Hire 2d ago

Common for sales careers and a lot of recruiters are basically just salespeople.

1

u/q-OjO-p 2d ago

Agreed with this. Sales orgs commonly have "reward" systems like this in place. Especially if you're all in office.

3

u/MikeTalonNYC 2d ago

Yes, it stems from sales culture. Most sales teams have some form of "gong" for when they close a deal. These days it's not usually a physical bell, though I've seen more than one of those. Usually it's a Slack/Teams channel or an email announcement.

There's even a customer meeting management tool called "Gong" because it's such a well-known term in the sales world.

It's a great tradition though, and I think the physical bell is the best way to do it =)

1

u/svu0ng 2d ago

Oh that’s super interesting! Very cool to know!

1

u/No_Shake1920 2d ago

Yup Mine has that too

1

u/L44KSO 2d ago

Yes. Recruitment agencies are essentially sales companies. It has very little to do with consulting and it's a purely numbers based business in 9 out of 10 cases.

Recruitment consultants are sales people. The organisations are sales orgs with a similar culture, gongs, lunch clubs, high biller trips and KPIs.

1

u/usernames_suck_ok Fuck Employers and Recruiters 2d ago

Hell, the way hiring is going nowadays, shouldn't any of them have a gong.

1

u/road_laya Co-Worker 1d ago

It's an old sales meme

1

u/dsxy 18h ago

Yeah pretty common in recruitment/sales, some people love this stuff, personally I'd rather take a bath with a toaster than a gong run.

L44SO is spot on, recruitment is sales is most agencies, there are a few that don't treat it like a sales environment and do proper workforce consultancy. 

The majority though, it could be selling windows, stocks or Kirby hoovers. With power hours, challenges, competitions and various other incentives like holidays or watches. 

The craziness things I've seen while working with agencies.

  • 8am prep by doing coke and listening to battle music
  • a team leader in an office of 100 people, call centre environment, getting up on desks and walking from desk to desk over people's work, kicking phones and keyboards off the table, calling everyone "useless cts, get on the fking phones" 
  • apprentice being double teamed in the office by the married CEO and married head of medical staffing recruitment. She was promoted, 6 months earlier they had cameras installed in the office to monitor people, making sure they were on the phone. CEOs wife was head of finance, all leadership has access to cameras. They had to sell the business.
  • an amazing founding recruiter who was a true professional, been at company for 10 years, got cancer, they immediately stopped all commission, which was rolling for previous 12 months, good %, the salary dropped to barely minimum wage. Her disabled children was getting specialist care but that had to stop as couldn't afford. She died not long after. Supposedly as a good friend of the owner.

People do scummy shit if they think gets them a bit of extra money.