The Recruiter as Stand-Up Comedian

“A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time.”—old joke

 

STAND-UP RECRUITER/Image: Michael Moffa

The concept of a stand-up recruiter comedian sounds frivolous at first. You know at least one recruiter who is a “stand-up”, stand-out guy, but none who is a stand-up, stand-out comedian. However, when you think about it, you, as a recruiter, may find some useful tips and parallels if you consider how it is that a good stand-up comic manages to hold, guide and play with the attention of his audience and have what he says validated by laughter and applause—and how the comic accomplishes this largely through skillful presentation, just like a recruiter.

Presentation Careers and Targets

A select few stand-up comics, like super-recruiters, become fabulously wealthy and household names, like SNL’s and “Ghost Busters” Dan Aykroyd, who started in Toronto stand-up. Many become regulars and repeat invitees—exactly what virtually every recruiter wants. Not bad for a job that, like recruiting, is at its core built around great presentation that is largely within the control of the performer. It is even more crucial for recruiting, since all three parties—recruiter, candidate and client—are at risk of flopping if their respective presentations fail.

The instructive similarities do not end there. Neither do the useful tips to be gleaned from stand-up comedy and applied to the practice and processes of recruiting. Moreover, differences between the two presentation styles and techniques can be as usefully studied as the similarities.

A key difference is that the recruiter uses sequential presentation more than parallel presentation: Typically, a recruiter will spend more time in one-on-one, one-at-a-time presentations with candidates and clients than in simultaneous group talks, e.g., with a cluster of job hunters at a job fair.

For the stand-up comic, it is the reverse: The bulk of his presentation time is allocated to a crowd at a club, accented later with a few one-on-one interactions with hecklers and other individual “targets” as spice—”You sir, are those your empty beer cans on your table, or am I looking at this club’s recycling bin?” (or, in rarer instances, in informal one-on-ones of the kind I had with Aykroyd when we briefly stayed at the same Toronto house).

Notice, that in addition to the allocated time proportions, that the comic generally succeeds by also initially engaging and “warming up” the “herd” (simultaneous/parallel processing) that has been assembled for the explicit purpose of experiencing the presentation anonymously as they sit at some comfortable distance from the comic, semi-hidden in the dark, sipping their drinks. Having gotten their attention and having evoked their interest, he is then free to make it personal in the one-on-one (sequential) banter, transforming, yet sustaining, the presentation by “recruiting” someone in the audience.

Traditionally, the recruiter did the same thing: “Warm up” the “crowd” with a job posting, then zero in on a select few. The key difference was that the proportion of time allocated to the one-on-one and group-pitch was the reverse of the comic’s.

Why is that? The main reason the stand-up comic and the recruiter employ opposite time allocations, as between aggregate and individuals, is that, despite identical group-starts for their presentations in clubs vs. in job postings, the comic is “recruiting” members of the audience for a purpose that is entirely different from that of the job recruiter. The comic’s goal is to use the individual in order to win and keep the group, whereas the traditional recruiter’s job-posting goal has been to use the group to win and keep the individual, e.g., by collecting resumes to screen.

What if the recruiter adopted the comic’s strategy? Target the individual to win over the group. How? One way wise gambit already used is to network with a key person at a university campus, who can then deliver a very large group of potential applicants. That’s Applied Stand-Up Comedy Science. It works for comedians and other recruiters; it can work for you, if you aren’t already doing that.

Comedy Questions

Such parallels raise two questions that are worthwhile for you to ask:

1. How much is common to the formats of great comics and great recruiters that confirms the wisdom of using these frameworks in both presentation forms?

2. Is there something that only the comic generally does or does in an opposite fashion that could enhance a recruiter’s presentations? (The above-mentioned stand-up comic strategy of using the individual to win over the groups is one example of this.)

As for the first question, regarding the similarities: As noted, both comic and recruiter usually start with the “herd”—the mass audience and the pool of candidates—often created through mass job applications. Frequently, however, through networking, resumes on file, etc., the recruiter’s pool can be as small as a single table in a comedy club, just as, occasionally, a stand-up comic may open his act with a single table as target.

But before that, they both do their best to make sure they are “playing the right club”—in the case of the recruiter, the match is between his expertise and the client-candidate profiles. For his part, the successful comic will not accept a gig at a losing venue, e.g., present his raunchy style at a Mormon retreat or his “cops are pigs” shtick at a policeman’s convention. Likewise, an aerospace recruiter will rightly hesitate to place a thoracic surgeon.

In this respect, the successful stand-up comedian and recruiter validate each other’s modus operandi: Work only with clientele that match your expertise, if you want to succeed; start with the aggregate, then zero in on the individuals. (However, as will be argued below, there is a difference between determining how much time should be proportionally allocated to these two audiences—the aggregate and the individual—and with which one the comic and recruiter should begin.)

Comedy Club and Recruiting Aggregates, Groups and Mobs

In accomplishing this much, however, the comic and the recruiter may and should make an attempt to transform the disjoint “aggregate” crowd into a linked “group”.

This is a central distinction drawn in the terminology of sociology: an “aggregate” is merely a physical collection of disconnected individuals who have nothing in common except all being in the same place at the same time and/or having no sense of cohesion with the others in that collection, despite their all having identical, possibly competing goals in participating. A silent crowd of Blackberry and iPhone addicts at a bus stop is a good example; a movie audience is another.

However, because the Internet allows people to come together in cyberspace, physical proximity, as a defining characteristic of an aggregate, has been supplemented with “virtual proximity” in cyberspace—an important consideration for the online recruiter and live-stream blog-capable Internet comedy performance, especially given the opportunities for real-time interaction between otherwise physically separated people.

A group, by contrast, is a collection of individuals who embody a sense of solidarity with many, if not all the others in the gathering, sharing an identity of purpose—not merely identical parallel private purposes such as those motivating each ticket-holder in a movie theater crowd, but the kind of integrated purpose seen in the spontaneously choreographed and executed human-wave phenomenon of fans at a game achieving a critical mass of support for “their” team in an “us” against “them” game.

Interestingly, a “mob” is an ambiguous phenomenon: On the one hand, it can be a united front, a frenzied, out of control cohering group, like the pitchfork and torch-wielding village mob single-mindedly chasing the Frankenstein monster into the forest or Tunisian protesters; on the other it can be the diametrical opposite—screaming, clawing, competing shoppers scrambling for the deep-discount post-Xmas bargains as the department store doors open. Recruiters and comics alike must make sure they do nothing to transform their aggregates or groups into that angry villager kind of mob.

Transforming Your Aggregates into Groups

For both the stand-up comic and recruiters, the important question is what can you do to transform your aggregates into groups, while making sure you don’t create angry mobs? LinkedIn recruitment groups are already well-establsihed and allow not only recruiter-recruiter interactions, but also recruiter-recruited communication and other connections.

That’s a smart step forward from the old days and ways of exclusively parallel, non-intersecting, otherwise competing job application blitzes. What is unique about such recently innovated formats is that they allow those who would otherwise exclusively operate as aggregated competitors to also cooperate in groups to an extent—much as guys chatting over their beers at college frat parties do while maneuvering near and eyeing the girls.

Intriguingly, the evolution of individual recruitment networks seems to replicate the evolution of the industry as a whole, much as  in biology, “Haeckel’s Law” maintains that embryonic development passes through the same stages of development that the species did—single cell…colony,..fish…amphibian…primate (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, as the “recapitulation” hypothesis puts it, meaning an individual organism’s development mirrors its species development): Stage 1—aggregate registered users, as was traditionally the case with sourcing (or import pre-existing groups, e.g., onto a new website); stage 2—allow that their interactions will be a mix of competition and cooperation, e.g., traditionally, cordial conversation between applicants waiting in the reception area for the same interviewer; now, friendly recruiters and job applicants posting their respective constructive and “advertorial” comments; stage 3—develop the site into a “community” of like-minded, mutually supportive members.

When the Mob Turns Ugly

Recruiters and stand-up comics may not only lose their respective audiences, but also transform them into angry mobs, using, in some instances, very similar disastrous techniques: A stand-up comic goes after one person in the audience and appears to be victimizing her; what was formerly a jovial aggregate or happy group-in-the-making instantly becomes a booing angry mob, acting in sympathy with a stranger who, for them previously didn’t register at all.

Analogously, a recruiting website gets an angry blog-mail from a self-described “victim” of the company, triggering a “class-action”-level tsunami response among many others who now realize they are not alone in believing they have been victimized or who merely otherwise empathize with the complainant.

Both recruiter and comic in such scenarios will have been done in by their “black swan”—the unexpected individual, statistical outlier that changes everything. A very recent “black swan” parallel is to be found in the case of the single angry man who protested government inaction in Tunisia by setting a fire—both literally and figuratively—at the doorstep of a government building, thereby, it has been reported, triggering the recent regime change there.

This discussion can barely scratch the surface of a vast field of possible lessons to be learned from the style and strategies of stand-up comics. A more complete discussion would involve a detailed comparison of not only the presentation approaches of recruiters and stand-up comics, but also of the content of those presentations.

That will have to wait for another day.

However, if the ideas presented so far motivate you to contemplate keeping your day job as a recruiter and moonlighting as a stand-up comic, there is one piece of advice for you to consider…

…..If one of your clients is sitting in the front row at your comedy debut, target somebody else.