Your blog segment on recruiters is terrific. While I was researching my book The Complete Job Search Handbook I talked with several recruiters. I also interviewed for a Branch Manager position for a national recruiting firm for their SLC office. The interview process was quite long and very educational. I also thought that a recruiter\’s customer was the job seeker. Not true, the recruiter\’s main client is the company that needs the position filled. That is their main client base and the client that will bring in the big bucks. The one time job seeker is just that – a one time person that moves on and does not use the recruiter again. Any business would structure itself to gravitate to a position where you have recurring business as opposed to one off. So what does that tells us about the type of recruiters a job seeker should look for?

Anyone care to dialog around that?

Customers define value for any business. A business needs to organize itself in order to provide the value its customers will pay for with as little waste as possible.

Recruiting is a business. The customer is the client who is paying the bills. The customer values a slate of great candidates in a timely fashion – a slate full of “perfect” fits. Of course, such a slate is not often delivered, but I think that is what search firm clients are looking for. The customer is not paying for – does not value – any time the recruiter spends on candidates who don’t fit the spec. The customer doesn’t care less about you unless you fit the spec – and that’s as it should be, I believe.

The recruiter produces a slate by sorting through a large number of potential candidates and finding those that best fit the job spec. Recruiters would like to minimize waste – of their time, their client’s time, the waste of submitting candidates who are very poor fits for the spec, and so on.

The recruiter needs to spend his or her time on the activities that are going to deliver that value. My guess is that a large number of the really good recruiters are working long hours already. Is it reasonable to expect them to drop value-adding activities in order to call a large number of unsuccessful candidates and tell them they don’t fit? I don’t think so.

Job seekers are potential suppliers to the recruiter. Job seekers are not not not the client. Want to build a relationship with a recruiter that will get you a response? Find ways to eliminate waste and speed the slate-building process for that recruiter.

1. Don’t waste the recruiter’s time with an application that is far off the spec. Unless I meet 70 percent of the spec, or better, I don’t bother applying.

2. When a recruiter calls looking for candidates, troll through your network (within 24 hours) and see if you know anyone worth passing back to the recruiter. If not, tell the recruiter so (yep – ya wanna get responses in the future, you have to give ‘em today). I always then email a few folks in my network, asking them if they know anyone who might fit the search.

3. Always return any call or email from a recruiter as soon as you can. They are often working against tight deadlines, and the quicker you get back to them, the better.

4. Rather than sending letters or emails that essentially say “hire me,” find useful things to send them. For example, I have sent links to a few good recruiting blogs to some of my recruiter friends. Try the subtle approach of letting recruiters know how your search is going and offering to help them find candidates for current searches. When I do that, I get a thanks note and I know I’m top of that recruiter’s mind for a moment. Mission accomplished.

In general, respect the recruiter’s time. That recruiter is on a deadline. If you are a job seeker, you aren’t – at least not a deadline that you have any right to impose on the recruiter.

As I read what I’ve written so far, it takes me back to Jason’s brilliant pair of articles last Thursday and Friday. Treat recruiters like anyone in your network. When you contact them, concentrate on offering to help them. Ya gotta give to get. And, to paraphrase a quote/proverb I heard somewhere long ago, “If you give enough recruiters what they want, you will eventually get what you need.”

Kent

They are:
• Attitude – every Big Biller has reached a point where he or she has an unshakeable, winning attitude and relentless persistence.
• Focus – every Big Biller has a crystal-clear purpose and a strategy for success.
• Control – Big Billers control the process at every step, and are in control of the hirer’s expectations and the candidate’s presentation – nothing is left to chance.
• Discipline – every day is planned, routines are followed, the process is respected.
• Relationships – Big Billers put customer needs before fees (again and again it was emphasized that recruiting is above all a relationship business).

Time and time again the respect for the client, the candidate and their peers came through loud and clear. Two of the leaders I interviewed were Tom Johnson and Tom Ruff. Both are Million dollar producers and lead their own companies. Tom is a franchisor with 42 franchises in place while Tom dominates the pharmaceutical and medical device sales recruitment space.

To quote “Candidates for Life – Tom Johnson, founder of SearchPath feels “Probably the biggest thing that will create a big Biller is that you treat your customers correctly. If you treat them well, they’ll keep coming back. I never try to do a search and then walk away. I do a search, it’s the beginning of a relationship. And even today I’ve got very very deep relationships with, not a whole lot of clients, I’ve got my dozen or two dozen clients that I do work with. But they consistently come back because they’re satisfied and committed to me, because they know I’m committed to them.

“If you ever put the fee more important than the relationships, you will fail in this business. It’s not about the fee, it’s about making sure clients are given the service they want and they find the talent that they need and then putting the needs of your candidates in front. As soon as they realize it’s all about you making a deal and doing a placement they’ll never work with you again, they won’t refer you to their friends, to their peers.”

Build, lead and direct support teams Tom Ruff explained his philosophy of recruiting, based on a well-known touchstone of relationships, the Golden Rule, and how his company has benefited from this approach.

“We are a contingency based firm so we do represent both the client and the candidate. However we only get paid if the client hires our candidate. So just from what I’ve learned through the years of recruiting is the Golden Rule. Just always treat others the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

“Really getting to know our clients, our clients’ families. We take time to run consistently. We sent gifts to clients if they have a new baby, we send birthday cards to their children. We spend time with them going to sporting events, dinners. We travel to a lot of trade shows, and get to spend time with our clients at trade shows as well.”

“So they do become friends. And that has made a huge difference to us. And over the course of time a lot of the candidates that we placed back in the early nineties now have moved up through the ranks. So they’ve gone to district manager, regional manager. So now some of the VPs of Sales are candidates that we placed years ago and we’ve just stayed in touch with them so the relationships have made a critical difference in the success of a relationship with them.”

Bill

Bill Vick
http://www.BigBiller.org
bill@bigbiller.org
800-364-8425

The entire job-seeking / hiring process remains broken — and many talented executives and their families suffer needlessly. If I were in this thing just for the money, I wouldn’t find recruiting nearly as stimulating.

Jason, I have integrated job seeker tips on my site that are pretty detailed, and available for free 24 hours per day. In fact, I think that my email template points people right to them, along with career alerts and online job listings.

My take is that most job seekers don’t understand that we don’t have time to find them jobs. We only have time to deal with active candidates and those who can be. That leaves a bunch of people that are either going to “not get treatment” or end up “in the circular file.”

Keep up the great work in keeping the dialogue open. -Carl

So, I started another blog that grew into FRACAT. My candidates can keep in touch with me easily, see what jobs are available the second that they come available, and the typical advice that I tell people in order to be a better candidate is freely available.

What you’ll find often is that new recruiters will re-contact you a lot more often than season ones. The reason is that when they say, “You weren’t a good fit”, candidates often want to argue about how wonderful a fit they were.

This uses precious time and doesn’t change the outcome. Except the next time, the recruiter just won’t call.

Personally, I think this is a bad practice, but that is why it happens.

Dan