Working with Recruiters

January 20, 2012

My desire to share thoughts on how to best work with a recruiter was driven by the frustration I had personally, and witnessed in the eyes of my contacts through the course of the job search process.

One of the most common complaints about recruiters (from the Job Seeker’s standpoint) is a lack of follow up, that recruiters will get a resume, or meet with you, then simply disappear. Since I am personally far from flawless in this area I want to do my best to share some insights on what’s going on behind the scenes.

If a recruiter is able to put you in front of a strong opportunity (or place you), it is because of his/her industry knowledge and strong contact/client company relationships. The biggest challenge to a seasoned recruiter is that neither of the two strengths above are DIRECTLY enhanced because of strong follow-up with job seekers, who do not fit into any current opportunities. But any recruiter with half a brain also knows that if you never follow up with people they will have little motivation to take your phone calls down the road.

The best solution I can come up with has three parts; two parts fall on the shoulder of the recruiter, one part on the shoulder of the job seeker. First, recruiters need to do a better job of setting expectations on the front end with their candidates/job seeker contacts. Second, recruiters need to develop a “system” for keeping a more open feedback loop. Finally, the job seeker needs to analyze the situation and determine their best means of follow-up with a recruiter.

The amount of job seekers a recruiter interviews on an average month will vary depending on the level of positions they tend to work on. For us target number is 20 per month. Now for some interesting statistics for you:

• At this level of search, on average a recruiter will place approximately 10% of the people they interview (the % is slightly lower for those interviewed by phone only, and slightly higher for those interviewed face to face)
• In the BEST of times a recruiter can hope to place 25% of the people they interview

Don’t interpret these stats too quickly. I would say that for me personally, about 5 out of 20 are people I simply could NEVER hope to place in a position. I do my very best to give these people value in the form of advice/consultation/direction before they walk out of my office, since I can often tell right away that this is the case. The opposite five are those I am highly likely to place in a position. I will have multiple opportunities for these people because of a combination of factors; their personal presence, relevance of background to our core space, and realism of salary expectations.

The remaining ten, the ten folks in the middle, are those who I would make attempts to place but have no success with. More often than not, these are simply people who find something through other means before I have a chance to place them. But a good number of these are people who have good skills, and fit into our core space, however, they simply don’t fit into anything we have AT THE MOMENT. These are the people I have the most advice for.

To these people I would say your strongest ally should be e-mail. A strong recruiter is going to either have a great memory or a great system for categorizing candidates after each interview and their intentions will be nothing but the best. On the other hand, if you want to increase your odds of being at the top of their radar screen I have a very simply/easy plan.

Write up a 1-3 sentence email (that you can use as a template in the future) that you will set up to send to your recruiter once every week or two. While many of the strongest recruiters will shutter at the thought of making “touch base” calls every day (with no purpose, no opportunity) to candidates they have recently interviewed, ALL recruiters will be thankful if you send them an e-mail just touching base every week or two. This will make certain that you remain high/bright on their radar screen and you may be thankful in turn when this turns out to be the reason a recruiter thought of you first upon spotting an exciting new job opportunity!