Finding and Using a Recruiter - Colorado
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Finding and Using a Recruiter
This article is taken from WorkInsight: A Headhunter’s Guide for Finding Your Perfect Job. Available at www.workinsight.com
You can’t ignore the new world of recruiting, driven by a strong demand for technology people worldwide. Boosted by a fickle job market that has employers seeking outside assistance to find workers, North American staffing industry revenues reached $160 billion in 2000.
There are 125,000 professional third party recruiters in the USA. Whatever euphemism you use to describe these unsolicited callers – recruiter, headhunter, executive search professional – learning how to work with them is a skill you need to master. Here are a few tips:
1. Find a headhunter BEFORE you need a new job. You're probably wasting everybody's time talking to a headhunter unless you're at least thinking about making a job change, but the absolute worst time to make first contact is when you need a new job right away! The purposes of a first contact are to let the headhunter know that you exist, give the headhunter some idea of your talents and let them know you're sort of looking around but you're in no big hurry. You need to have a six month runway in front of you to use a headhunter strategically.
2. Be prepared to tell the recruiter why you deserve to be designated as an “MPA,” a Most Placable Applicant. To be an MPA you need to have a well-honed rare skill set. Being a C++ programmer isn’t rare. Being a mainframe Java programmer with 5 years of real-time experience might be. Most financial people are “vanilla” unless you have US GAAP experience and have done an IPO on NASDAQ. I am sure you get the idea. So what do you do if you aren’t as rare as the guy next to you? Have a great personality and co-operate. You might also want to learn how to speak properly by attending six months of Toastmasters luncheons. An inexpensive program with huge dividends for you personally.
3. Find a headhunter who specializes in people with your talents. They specialize by geography, technology, or industry, or some combination of the above. Try to find a headhunter who specializes in your technical field and geographical preference. The ‘delete' key files irrelevant resumes. Go to Google.com and put in your city, industry and the word ‘headhunter.' Voila! More headhunters than you can shake a stick at. Now go and read their sites carefully. Find the individuals who specialize in your skills. Log onto the Net and check out Kennedy Publications for their list of North America’s top headhunters at http://www.kennedyinfo.com/er/erindex.html. Kennedy is THE authority.
4. If you're employed, don't be too quick to send your resume to an unknown headhunter. When you finally find a good one, your goal is for that headhunter to keep you in mind for career-building positions that they’ve been engaged to fill. When you’re solicited ‘cold' inquire as to whether the headhunter has an “exclusive”. If they do, they should have no problem telling you about the company. They often are just fishing… trying to find a skilled candidate they can package and market. While there’s nothing unethical or wrong about that, you really need to know exactly what they will be doing with your resume. Having your resume ‘shotgun blasted' to every one of your current employer's competitors is a career-limiting move.
5. Provide the headhunter with your salary expectations. Most people find it hard to discuss compensation and that's fine. Not me. It’s the most natural thing in the world for me. It’s usually the third or fourth question I ask. Judging by the looks I sometimes get, I am an exception. People like to keep this information private. There are however, at least three people in this world that need to know your current salary: the IRS, your spouse and your headhunter, (actually, I'm not convinced the first two need to know – but I digress). Headhunters do because we need to exclude you from all jobs under your salary level. If you play cat-and-mouse with us you’ll end up in the circular filing cabinet and brand yourself as a premadonna! The entire firm will take a hands-off approach to you.
a. Interestingly enough, most headhunters don’t use your salary to peg your seniority. Years ago I met a great Marketing Director who was making $38K. She was grossly underpaid and under-appreciated. She went on an interview for me and got an offer for $92K. She was floored, and it took me two days to convince her that was what she was worth. (By the way, my client’s upper end was $125K, so he didn’t overpay for her skills). More importantly, if he had known what she was making at the time he wouldn’t have made an offer because he would have concluded she was too “light” for the position. She’s done a fabulous job and has been promoted to vice president.
6. Don't put important facts in your cover letter. They tend to get lost in the shuffle, are often not even read, and most headhunters only keep the resume. If you are sending an unsolicited resume get to the point fast. You have somewhere between six to 30 seconds to convince a headhunter to read a resume they didn't ask for.
7. Make it easy for a headhunter to get and read your resume. Don't assume that everyone has every possible technology in place to receive and read your resume. We sometimes hear, "Use your Web browser to log onto my personal Web site and download a copy." Forget it. Send it as an attachment in Word or in the body of your email message. Do not send an Adobe PDF file unless requested to do so. This is not as common a technology with recruiters as you probably think, most still struggle with Word. No one uses WordPerfect. Only use industry standard technology unless otherwise told to.
8. Headhunters are usually NOT good vehicles to help you change careers. Employers use them to help them find people with a particularly well-honed skill set and several years of practical experience in a particular field. If you're an unrecognized ‘super star,' headhunters are usually quite good at helping you get recognized and accelerate the advancement of your career. We are not very effective at helping you change careers. Read What Color is Your Parachute, instead. It is truly the best book around for career changers. Headhunters won’t care about your transferable skills – they have six other candidates already who don’t need morphing... thank you very much!
9. If you know the game ahead of time you’re odds of winning are greatly increased. Headhunters recruit; career counselors counsel! Headhunters like myself are constantly inundated with requests for free career counseling, free resume writing advice, free practice interview sessions, free job leads, etc. While most of us are more than qualified in all of the above, our ‘real' job is to hunt heads for our client companies. Don’t expect you’re doing someone like me a favor by letting us “have a look at your resume early” or “getting the opportunity to market you”. That’s not how we feed our families.
10. Headhunter is not a pejorative term. You won’t however find the term on most recruiter’s business cards so when in doubt call them executive search professionals - ESP for short. Most good ones have ESP anyway… it goes with the territory.
In summary if you want to be found, be visible. If you want to be considered, co-operate. If you want to be successful, be proactive.
This article is taken from WorkInsight: A Headhunter’s Guide for Finding Your Perfect Job. www.workinsight.com
If you are intersted in this positon, please contact:
David Perry
Perry-Martel International Inc.
(613) 236-6995
dpe...@perrymartel.com
http://www.workinsight.com contains over 35,000 jobs and that number is increasing by 500 a day.
Refer to Job: A375150 for more information OR CLICK on the link:
( http://workinsight.com/j/fmpro?-db=jobs.okt&-lay=we&-format=m&job+id=A375150&-find= )