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Heading to the Fall ERE Expo? So are we and we’d love to see you there.
Glassdoor will be at booth #514 where we’ll be showcasing what Glassdoor has to offer and how we can help employers progress their branding and recruiting efforts.
Plus we invite all ERE attendees to attend a poker tournament sponsored by Glassdoor on Wednesday, September 7 at 8 p.m. at Rivals Waterfront Sports Grill…
A client of mine (we’ll call her Caroline) whose newly designed and compelling resume had attracted multiple, focused interviews at target companies and garnered various compliments for its impressiveness, received a call from a recruiter.
The recruiter requested she make formatting changes to standardize the resume to fit her recruitment needs in how she submits all candidates to her clients (i.e., her clients being defined as ‘the companies’). This strictly bulleted and non-design savvy format dulled the resume and made it less likely to set Caroline apart in other, non-recruiter-focused scenarios.
Caroline asked me later: “Why do recruiters have rules that would make a cool resume look just like everyone else’s?”
“Many are called but few are chosen.”
The business of matching people with jobs is horribly flawed, loaded with waste and abuse and impossible to navigate. While you may have heard about headhunters actively recruiting people from their current assignments, it’s a relatively rare thing. Fewer than seven percent of the workforce is ever contacted by a recruiter.
The odds are one in 12 that a recruiter will contact you, on average. In reality, the odds are way worse than that for most people. Recruiters work in markets where there are shortages and/or high demand. Most people work in occupations where there is relatively low demand. If you remove the seven percent who actually get calls from headhunters, the likelihood becomes infinitesimally small.
But wait, it’s worse than that…
So you’re going to try to get a recruiter to pay attention to your resume. Or, maybe you’ve gotten a call from a recruiter who wants to talk with you about an opportunity. Or, maybe you’ve decided to respond to some job ads you’ve found online.
If you are going to interact with recruiters, you need to understand some of their basic beliefs.
Recruiters don’t really make hiring decisions. They winnow a big pile of resumes into a little one. They make judgments about who is fit for a job and who isn’t. Not the final judgment, mind you. Recruiters make the decors that narrow the list of prospects from 100 to 10. Then they rank and present the ‘short list’.
Recruiters belong to the category of people who can’t give you all of the help you need. They can, however, exercise a veto on your candidacy. Recruiters are gatekeepers and evaluators. Here are five keys to understanding what recruiters believe:
If you poke around the internet long enough, you’ll find someone who suggests that you should get to know recruiters. The idea is that since recruiters find people to fill jobs, they’ll be in a position to find you one. Since they know where the jobs are, they will certainly know where there’s one for you.
It sort of makes sense. Recruiters have jobs and access to the flow of job openings. Why wouldn’t that be a good place to lay some ground work?
In fact, it doesn’t hurt to be on the radar of a good recruiter. But, it’s important to understand that they are hunting for people to fill specific openings and may or may not ever come across the right thing for you. It’s an interesting paradox.
Recruiters look for people to fill openings all day long. Still, it is unlikely that they will find the right one for you. Why is that?
Hi Hank,
I’ve recently been offered a chance to work with a 3rd party recruiter representing a large investment bank. They cold call and place stock brokers. My commission would be 30% of the firm’s fee, 8% of the broker’s trailing 12 months (I think).
They promised $300/week draw for starters and say $100K is possible within 3 years. Hours are M-F 7:30-4:30 with major holidays and no benefits. It’s a small start-up of about 7 people and growing.
I have another opportunity to make $40K at a regular, steady job with benefits but not much chance to increase pay other than the regular yearly raise. I have a 2-year-old to support and want to make a good life for us and feel the recruiter position offers a chance to move ahead but at a risk.
* What is it like being a 3rd party recruiter?
* What is the outlook for this market, specifically recruiting stock brokers, in the financial services industry?
* What tips or advice can you offer?
Thank you,
Greg
Recruiters are in demand these days by job seekers eager to move into new assignments and by employers seeking hard-to-find staffers.
So recruiting a recruiter takes thought and effort.
Some things will either turn a recruiter away or ruin any relationship you’ve started. Most missteps reflect badly on your integrity or honesty and some just make you look uninformed about the recruiter’s role. A recruiter’s role is to find and fill jobs for an employer, which is her client.
So here are seven serious mistakes to avoid when working with a recruiter…
About a third of jobs are filled through recruiters, retained or contingent. If asked, most people think a greater percentage are filled from recruiters and are a little surprised when they find the actual fill rates are lower than expected. That said, when the recruiter calls, it’s important to know how to respond in the best way as recruiters are usually working on more than one job at a time. They are building a database for the future, and if you help them, most will remember. I believe what goes around comes around, and these conversations could prove to be very important. So, how do you talk to a recruiter?
You had high hopes for this job: The job requirements matched your skill set perfectly. You aced your interview questions. And you imagined hearing those sweet words so many of us long to hear:
“You’re hired.”
Instead, you got another job rejection letter. According to recent U.S. Labor Department data, 5.5 unemployed Americans, on average, are vying for each job opening–so most interviews will end in rejection.
And that can be a crushing blow–but it can also be a career-making moment. When you don’t get the job, what should your next steps be?
I’ll say it over and over until you want to smack me around (I can hear you now “Too late!”): getting a recruiter on your side is critical to landing your dream job. And as we talked about last week, if you want to get a recruiter on your side you need to earn their trust. A recruiter is like your agent. You want them to use their credibility with a hiring manager to influence a positive outcome for you.
How do you build trust with a recruiter? We’ll review a number of tips over the coming weeks, but here is the way you need to start: ASK QUESTIONS!
First, please, take a risk and shut-up. It may be the hardest thing for a candidate to do, but talking too much is always a bad idea. I call it “Talking Your Way Out of a Job.” It happens all the time, with great candidates blathering away, boring the recruiter. The recruiter ends up convinced of one thing and one thing only: I can’t possibly put this person through to the hiring manager. I’ll look like an idiot!
In short, no trust!
Follow us:
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The Power Of Social Network Transparency by Kevin W. Grossman February 9th, 2012
Anger Management: How To Keep From Losing Your Job by FINS from The Wall Street Journal February 9th, 2012
The Hiring Process May Be Flawed, But You Can Still Land Your Next Job by onTargetjobs February 8th, 2012