What Goes on Behind Closed Doors?

A common question I receive in my inbox from you, Readers, is this:

“Hey Marc, I’m looking for a great new position here in New York and I was wondering if you can recommend a recruiter I can hire to help me out.”

Well, in addition to sending you to our Find Recruiters page, Readers, I’d like to explain a little bit about how recruiters work in order to make your job hunt better.

The first thing to remember is that recruiters don’t work for you, the job seeker. Sure, they are helpful, useful sources of information, and are very interested in keeping track of, and getting you ahead, in your career, but they don’t fundamentally work for, or base their success on, getting you into your next job.

You see, recruiters are hired by a company to fill a specific position or set of positions. At any one time, a recruiter is working on one or, at most, a few, open “requisitions” from the hiring companies that engage them.

As you probably know from your experience with hiring, a requisition is created when a hiring manager has an open position in his or her budget, and submits a form that says “please hire a person with such–and–such experience” to HR. The HR group then will decide to either have an internal staff person work on filling the job (someone with a title like “Director, Talent Acquisition” or “Staffing Associate”) or will farm it out to a specialized third–party agency – an executive search or contingency recruiting firm.

And that’s how you have to understand the worldview of these outside recruiters. They make their careers successful by filling that position for that company, building a reputation for filling positions with great candidates, and building up a network, over time, of great candidates like you.

All of which means that when you are looking for your next job, the right way to work with recruiters is to find the ones that already have an open requisition for somebody like you.

Trying to go the other way, giving your information to a recruiter and then hoping that they can circulate your information to potentially interested companies, is unlikely to meet success.

So as I mentioned, we’ve built tools like Find Recruiters and Recruiters For You to help you do just that – find the recruiters who already have open positions for people with your experience or have a track record and a history of hiring people in your field.

Over the course of your career, including right now, what you want to do is make sure that you get in front of as many relevant recruiters as you can, so that when an appropriate position does pop up on their radar screens, you’ll be remembered.

A few final words on working with recruiters, dear Readers, and then I’ll let you go for the week.

The work of a recruiter is always about managing volume. Even though they have only a few positions they are working on at any one time, they are managing a tremendous inflow of candidates applying for their jobs, being referred to their jobs, or being suggested by their research assistant for their jobs. Sometimes, it can be frustrating for you when you feel that you are just perfect for a particular position. “Why isn’t my phone ringing?” you may think.

Well, keeping in mind the tremendous number of resumes that a recruiter has to manage when trying to fill any job, please be aware that it might take a good deal of follow–up, reiteration, and patience on your part to rise to the top of the heap.

And just because you don’t make the cut for this particular position this time, remember that “the road is long.” And any recruiter working in your field may not select you for the job today, but there are certain to be opportunities in the future. Be persistent, but be polite, and make sure you build those relationships for the future.

And that’s the smart way to get ahead.

OK, Readers, that’s it for this Monday morning...happy hunting!