Why Recruiters Resist Industry Switchers

They’re polite about it, of course. No one could survive as a recruiter without some tact and discretion, some attention to the social niceties. But they still blow people off, especially people who try to explain why rich experience in one industry has prepared them for success in another.

“With people trying to switch industries, it’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that I know they won’t get hired. So why bother?” according to Art Romero, CEO and managing director at The Academy Group, which recruits financial and sales managers in financial services.

It all comes down to finding candidates who’ll satisfy recruiters’ clients: the companies doing the hiring. “As a recruiter, it doesn’t make sense for me to promote someone whose skills aren’t relevant,” he said. “I put a lot of effort into wording my ads so they’re as detailed as possible without revealing the client. So people know exactly what the position is. If they send me a resume that says they were a C++ programmer and Unix administrator, that’s just irrelevant to me. I delete it and go on to the next one.”

In a crowded field of candidates, employers know there are plenty of job seekers available, so they feel perfectly comfortable writing up dream lists of qualifications and waiting until someone shows up who meets every last one of them, said Lynn Hazan of Lynn Hazan and Associates, a Chicago-based executive-search firm that specializes in marketing and communications. “If a client gives me a list of 10 criteria and I have a candidate that doesn’t satisfy all of them, I can’t present (the candidate).”

That leaves people completely out of the picture who are trying to improve their chances of getting hired by applying for jobs that are outside their own experience – whether that means a similar job in a different industry or a different job in the same one.

“Even the wrong amount of experience in the same industry doesn’t work,” Hazan said. “For positions that ask for five to seven or 12 to 15 years’ experience, I have candidates with 20 or 25 years, and I can’t present them. The client isn’t interested… I call it ‘fussy-client syndrome,’ and it’s all over the place.”

You’re a risk for the recruiter

It comes down to how the recruiter is compensated, said Irene Marshall, a former recruitment manager at Robert Half International. Marshall now runs her own career-counseling company, Tools for Transition, where she applies her insider knowledge to help job seekers navigate the world of executive recruiters.

Recruiters are hired guns employed by the hiring company to find target candidates, and the targets they go after are very specific. Job seekers who don’t fit exactly in the target zone are a risk for the recruiter, she said.

“I spend a lot of time with candidates working out what their skills really are and how to present them, to make them a better candidate,” Hazan said. “Sometimes I can bring in someone who’s a reach, but it can’t be too far off, and I can’t do it often. If I don’t bring clients what they’re looking for, I lose credibility, and they look for another recruiter next time.”

“Recruiters do not do career transition,” she said. “They’re paid to bring in something specific. If you make $100,000, the fee (for the hiring company) might be $25,000; is someone going to pay $25,000 to help you switch careers?”

Transferable skills

Most recruiters and coaches say candidates should focus on their transferrable skills, but the definition of “transferable” has narrowed, Romero said.

“People who are at their core relationship-building people, salespeople, not accountants or whatever, are fine. That’s a very transferrable skill,” he said. “That one thing has to be clear to me in a five- or 10-second scan of the 100 or something resumes I look at every day.”

“Some functional areas – treasury, accounting, HR, IT, law – tend to cross industries with relative ease,” said Carole Tomko, executive vice president and partner of the Woodmansee Group, an executive placement firm. “Marketing, operations – things that are really embedded in one particular industry — are much harder.”

Job seekers resent outright rejection from jobs they think they’d be able to do well, but the potential downside for the hiring manager is at least as serious as it is for the recruiter.

“If you’re in manufacturing and you hire someone from retail and they fail, you fail,” Tomko said. “If you hire someone from a competitor [in the same industry] and they fail, it’s (the job seeker’s) failure.”