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While recruiters can be a valuable tool to your career, working with a bad recruiter can be a frustrating and unproductive experience. A good relationship with a recruiter can allow you to skip a few career ladder steps. It can result in an immediate benefit or it can result in a phone call 4 years from now about a perfect job, a 20% raise and a shorter commute. A bad relationship with a recruiter can result in wasted time and embarrassment on your part. I am the first to admit that many recruiters are unskilled and are transients to the industry. Because there are unprofessional recruiters, it would be wrong to conclude that no recruiter could be valuable to you. The answer is to know how to evaluate a recruiter.
There are two types of recruiting firms-contingency and retained. As a rule, retained firms work on high-level jobs and contingency firms work on mid and lower level jobs. Here at Right Recruiting about 25% of our business is retained work. Most of the recruiters you will speak to are contingency firms so let’s address them.
Recruiting has no "barrier to entry". Anyone can print a business card and call themselves a recruiter. This is important to understand because, when you call or e-mail even the oldest, most established recruiting firm, you can end up speaking with someone who was selling cars last week. In fact, some recruiting firms lose so much of their staff that you are almost guaranteed to speak to someone with less than a year experience. The company that bought my last employer was proud that they only turned over 60% of their staff a year. Wow.
That’s important for a lot of reasons. Someone new to the business may not know that your company is actually owned by another company and send your resume to the parent company. An unskilled recruiter may not really understand what you do now or what you want to do. Many recruiters are only interested in getting you to go on an interview - any interview. Most recruiting firms grade their recruiters on how many interviews they set up. It doesn’t matter whether someone gets hired. The more interviews a recruiter schedules, the less grief from management.
Those are a few of the obvious reasons why you should know your contact. There is no substitute for competence. There are some less obvious reasons as well.
Even the worst recruiting firm may have good recruiters with good contacts mixed in with many bad or newly hired recruiters scrambling for business. If your initial contact is with a new or bad recruiter, he often has "ownership" of your file within the company. So, if a good job opens up, the account manager needs to work with the newbie to represent you. This is bad for a few reasons. The senior recruiter has to split the potential commission, which is demotivating. Also, the communications process gets ugly. I have seen more turf battles over who gets to speak to a candidate than fights over a World Cup soccer match. All this is static that gets in the way of accurate info getting to you.
OK, how do you tell whether someone is competent or not? Well, it starts before the phone conversation. Most people hear about recruiters through one of two ways, personal referral or a job advertisement. If someone refers you to a recruiter that’s a good sign, not conclusive, but good. It’s the ads that can really tip you off.
Here are some clues. First, is there a recruiter’s name in the ad? If not, the ad response for that job is being rotated around the office. The ad may be fiction or you may end up being "owned" by someone who knows very little about that account. Recruiting firms don’t like to put recruiters names in the ads because they don’t want the individual recruiter to be as well known as the firm. This is the sign of a recruiting company with a lot of turnover. Bad for you. If there is a name in the ad, does that recruiter have other ads as well? Companies invest more in skilled employees by giving them more ads.
Is the ad well written or does it look like cut/paste copy from the hiring company’s job specs? The latter is a bad sign. It suggests the recruiter doesn’t even know enough about the job/company to describe the job using normal semantics, not HR-speak. I have actually seen recruiters cut/paste descriptions for senior professional jobs and include the HR verbage that says, "Candidate must be able to lift 20 pounds." That’s the sign of a lazy recruiter.
Is there an actual phone number or just an email address? The more depersonalized the initial contact, the worse for you. It implies an attitude that the applicant is a distraction. Personally, I hate doing business with a cyber-presence. Have you ever downloaded software and then found out there is no number to call when something goes wrong? A recruiter hiding behind email in the initial contact is not good. There is a reason our phone number is in all our ads. Sure, it can be annoying when someone needs to call before sending a resume but I know why they do it and unless they need a large amount of hand-holding, we always make the effort to talk. One of the biggest gripes people had in 2003 when the market was lousy was that they couldn’t follow up on resumes when they answered ads. I promised myself we would always maintain the ability for someone to call us, if even to just complain about something or vent.
OK - you’ve sent the resume and gotten a call about your background but no one will tell you who the hiring company is or what they do. Why do candidates accept not being told the name of the hiring company at this point? My first boss told me that if I told a candidate who the hiring company was, the candidate would go around my back and contact the employer directly. Maybe I am naïve, but why the heck would anyone with half a brain do that? And, guess what, people with half a brain won’t get hired anyway!! Assuming I am competently explaining the situation, what earthly good would come from someone doing that? The company gave me the job for a reason. They want me to send good people and fill the job. The easiest way to get hired is to work through the process that the company set up - work with me. I think very few people are deceptive enough to short-cut the recruiter and the few that do generally outsmart themselves.
So, if the recruiter won’t tell you who the company is, it’s the sign of a problem. Maybe he’s paranoid, maybe the recruiting firm is unprofessional, and maybe he’s just fishing for resumes. Some recruiters like to withhold information as a sign of "control". "Candidate control" is a big phrase in recruiting circles and information control is a symptom of that. My guess is that you don’t want to be controlled; you just want a better job. Don’t let someone play games with you in order to make themselves feel important. Unless the job is confidential because the hiring company is replacing an incumbent or another internal reason, there is absolutely no reason you should not be told the company name and given their web site once you’ve sent a resume.
Also, be careful if the recruiter seems more interested in getting names of people you work with and references than they do about your fit for the job. They are just file building. No recruiter does references before sending a resume. It’s not efficient. Save the references for the end of the process.
My favorite is when the recruiter asks you what your salary goals are and wants to get your bottom line figure. End the relationship-immediately. I have always thought that was both demeaning to the applicant and a stupid, stupid question. How the heck do you know what salary you want with any specificity? A lot depends on benefits, location, job content, promotions, etc. Anyone demanding to get the lowest salary you will accept is just using that as a sales technique. Expect to hear, "Hey, I got you an offer of $60,000 and you said you would accept an offer as low as $60,000. You must accept or you lied." Yeah, but you didn’t say you would accept an offer of $60,000 for a job 50 miles from home working for a guy you don’t like with lousy benefits.
If the recruiter asks you to only work with him, run. Put simply, I have been doing this in a local market for 25 years. I have a database that lists companies and managers at 2,532 firms in the region. My fee structure is low enough so that almost every company out there is accessible to me. Knowing that, I don’t know everyone and would never pretend that I do. I begin the relationship fully aware that a candidates career is more important than any one fee I may generate. Don’t let some dope limit your options so that he maximizes his chances of making a few thousand dollars.
Lastly, don’t be impressed that the recruiter met with you. This is important. Many recruiters are trained to use a physical interview as part of the "candidate control" process. It’s a way for them to pretend to interview and evaluate you, but in reality you are just providing them ammo to close you on a job you may not want. For example, a standard question for you is "What are the 3 things you want in a new job?" Like a good soldier you provide that list. Then, miraculously, whatever job the recruiter has that might result in an interview has those 3 things. And, they are always in the order you listed them.
For some recruiting firms there is a more insidious reason to physically interview you. They want you to sign their application. Many applications look like standard employment apps with a signature at the bottom. However, look carefully. Some firms include a teeny paragraph that says that if they find you a job and you don’t start or you quit within a year, you actually owe them the fee. Ouch!!
OK, enough does and don’ts. Now a brief section on what I thinks makes Right Recruiting different. It’s very simple.
First, we are successful. You do not survive in a commission intensive business for 25 years without being good at what you do. You also don’t survive for that long without being straight-forward with people. Because we have been successful, we know we will continue to be successful. We don’t need to trick people, play games with companies or manipulate situations to pay our rent. We know with absolute certainty that if we do our job our success will continue. Our job is simple, make good matches. That is all we need to do. No one placement is worth pushing the envelope to get. Candidate control, sales closing techniques and all the other sales tools taught at other firms are distractions.
Second, we have no interest in growing the company. I’ve worked in enough places to know that growth increases overhead. You suddenly have training costs, add managers, etc, etc. Overhead means you have to charge more or beat your staff up to cut those ugly corners. Sooner or later you need to try and raise your fees and, in doing so, eliminate those companies who won’t pay your rates from your client base. As a candidate, that hurts you because you can’t be represented to some potential employers. Because our overhead is so low, I can tell you with total assurance that our rates are the lowest in the region. We have never had a potential client balk at our fee schedule and I would never let a fee dispute prevent a candidate from being hired.
We remember everyone. Our biggest expense is software and our database. If we talk to you today but can’t place you today, we are evaluating you for every job we get from now till you retire. Because we won’t be selling cars next year and we will still be in business, every contact point is of value to us. That’s why we sometimes place people in great jobs years after first contact. Last month we placed a fellow into his first managerial job. He has 15 years of experience and we first placed him 12 years ago. We’ve stayed in touch off and on during that period and when something good appeared he was one of the first to hear about it.
Lastly, when we contact you about a job we assume you are intelligent. We give you the facts and let you draw the conclusions. Intelligent people are smart enough to know what’s in their best interest and, guess what, intelligent people are also the ones who usually get hired. Sometimes, candidates misinterpret this. They expect us to chase after them and hound them about jobs. Instead, we leave a message or send an email and spend the rest of the day looking for other potential candidates. People who know us know that they should pay attention to messages from us. There is always a good reason we call.
That’s all folks. Please remember us when you want to explore the market and, as ever, referrals are greatly appreciated. Enjoy your summer. Jeff
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