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PERSPECTIVE ON RECRUITERS and WHAT WE CAN and CAN'T
DO FOR YOU
The Fordyce Letter, the country's foremost authority
on the placement and recruitment profession,
maintains a database of some 33,000 firms in the
United States that are, in one form or another,
involved in the business of direct personnel
placement. (This would include even the "casual"
placers of people, temporary staffing firms or
companies who, as a part of their business, do some
sort of placement.) For the past ten years or so,
according to Kennedy Information, Inc. who publishes
The Directory of Executive Recruiters, there are
approximately 5500 permanent recruiting firms of all
types in the United States. 35% to 45% of this
number went out of business over the past three or
four years only and will be replaced by the same
number. 20 new recruiting firms open in the U.S.
every week. It is estimated that one-third of these
firms work on a retainer basis and the rest on some
form of contingency basis. The average recruiting
firm, according to The Fordyce Letter has 3.1
"consultants" in it who average successfully
recruiting and placing 1.5 people a month. The
average tenure of these firms is seven years and the
average "consultant" has been in the business for
three years. In the early '70s it was estimated
that 5% to 10 % of the professional people who were
hired in business were hired through the help of a
third-party recruiter of some sort. That estimate
today is closer to 20% or 25%. As the job market
expands, good candidates are harder to find and
third-party recruiters will be used even more.
Traditionally, recruiters have been defined in two
broad camps. The retained recruiter is paid partly
in advance to find an employee. The contingency
group receives their compensation only if they are
responsible for causing a candidate to be hired.
There is, however, a broad range of contingency
firms that you need to be aware of so that you can
decide if they can actually help you find a job.
We will
discuss, in general terms, the reasons why you
should use a recruiter and what the recruiter can do
for you, as well as what a recruiter cannot do for
you. I will then discuss in detail what you need to
know about the relationships that different kind of
recruiters have with employers and therefore the
kind of relationship they will have with you as a
candidate. The most important aspect of this
session is for you to know how all of the different
kinds of recruiters can help you, based on that type
of recruiter's relationship with the employer.
What you
should expect from and how each of you should deal
with a "recruiter " depends on your understanding of
the kind of recruiter that you're dealing with.
When you know the kind of recruiter that you are
dealing with and his or her relationship to the
employer, you will know how to manage your own
expectations.
In
general, here is what a recruiter, can do
for you:
- We
have access to and knowledge of opportunities with
firms before they are "broadcast" to the world.
- For
the most part, (and we will see the exceptions to
this below) we have a much more in-depth knowledge
about an opportunity than an individual could gain
on his/her own.
- We
will "coach" you and sell you and your attributes,
as well as sell around your shortcomings, better
than you can for yourself.
- We
know how you compare with your competition for a
position. We provide information about your
strengths and weaknesses. We know our market.
- We
will help you " manage " the process of interviewing
and negotiating. Because a recruiter deals with
this process daily, we know how to do it better than
an individual even if he/she change jobs often.
- We
are going to help a candidate maximize his or her
compensation possibilities. Most of the time the
recruiter is compensated based on the salary package
the candidate receives. It is in our best interest,
therefore, to help you reach your compensation
potential.
- We
can provide you more job interview opportunities
faster than you can do it for yourself. Most people
don't deal with the job opportunities, career moves
etc. on a daily basis. A recruiter does.
- The
help of a recruiter implies confidentiality. Most
top professionals don't want their job search to be
"floating around" the Internet or anywhere else for
that matter.
- A
recruiter, many times, has an intimate but objective
view of the hiring company, the hiring authorities
and the "politics" of the specific hiring process.
- We
are comfortable with all of the steps in the process
of getting hired.
- We
know what to do when things "go wrong " in the
hiring process.
Here are
some things that a recruiter cannot do for
you:
- We
cannot get you a job. We can open the door, coach,
teach, advise, strategize and help. But the
candidate still has to be to the primary force in
getting the job.
- A
top recruiter might give career advice, but we're
not counselors. We are information brokers and
hiring process managers. Unless the information or
process is of current and immediate importance to
the company or hiring authority we represent, we
don't have the time to "counsel" I.E.: other aspects
of your life.
-
We're not "miracle workers"... we can't get you the
" job of your dreams ".... an interviewing
opportunity that you are not qualified for.... help
you change careers when the economy won't bear
it.... help you negotiate compensation plans on
deals we are not involved in. We cannot do a lot of
handholding or immediately respond every time you
call or blindly e-mail a resume.
- We
don't analyze and peruse every single resume that is
sent to us. Unless we are a "boutique" search firm,
we receive hundreds of resumes. Each one will get
10 to 15 seconds of attention and unless what is on
it is so obviously stellar and needed by our hiring
companies it will be stored in a database.
- We
don't have time to give you advice about the
"market" or if it's time to "stick your toe in the
water" to see if your skills or experience might be
" more valuable " to someone else.
-
Unless we are involved in the process of securing
you a new opportunity we're going to be fairly short
on advice about "what you should do" regarding your
changing jobs down the line.
- For
the most part, we're not going to give you advice
about a job or career change that we are not
involved in unless we have a longstanding
relationship with you.
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