B.S. Breakdown: Letting Recruiters Dictate Your Strategy

Oh, recruiters. What a lovely bunch. They mean well and can be helpful, but they have a very nasty secret that doesn't get discussed enough regarding the military transition.

If you're currently offering your labor in the market, your goal should be to maximize your earnings-to-time ratio.

On the other hand, recruiters do not have your goal in mind. They screen candidates and provide a targeted list of prospective employees to an organization.

If they are an internal recruiter, they are doing it for their organization, and if they are an external recruiter, they are doing it for the organization. Either way, recruiters do what they do on behalf of someone who signs their checks. None of those people are you.[1]

A recruiter's secret, therefore, is that they have an inherent conflict of interest. So why would you allow the thoughts and opinions of recruiters to guide your career transition strategy?

Recruiters would have you believe they have privileged access to mystery jobs that only exist within their sphere of knowledge.

But it's just not true.

Suppose you take a top-down approach to your career research and generate as many high-level contacts as possible. In that case, you can bypass the recruiter roadblock and access those same positions. Better yet, you can create a custom position for yourself.

Said differently: recruiters are merely gatekeepers along your path to developing gainful employment that works for you. Their front-end work consists mainly of disqualifying people based on a pre-determined set of skills put together by someone in HR and (maybe) reviewed/edited by a hiring manager.

Then the recruiter gets a budget range, and off they go snouting for morsels. This system has no room to describe your added value outside the scope of a potentially arbitrary job description. They have their marching orders.

A Titan doesn't take a passive approach and does not allow someone else to dictate their marketing and branding. You should adopt a new mentality.

I recommend the following: "If you don't work for me, you don't get to sell me."

Titans know they only need to care about the opinion of someone who can say "yes" to a proposal. Titans understand and apply this principle repeatedly. Titans show up to C-level executives with their proposal for employment already worked out.

Titans decide what they want, win before they show up, and then bypass arbitrary recruiting games entirely.

Remember this: you are your ultimate cheerleader. Do not let someone filter you out who can't say yes.

You must also internalize the notion that a different approach is necessary to achieve world-class results.

To win before you show up, you must discover ways to build massive added value before stepping in the door.

Added value is not a focus of recruiters. Their advice and methodology frequently inhibit the creation of added value because recruiters want to fit your skills world into neat boxes they can sort.

Your job is to be outside the box. You need to find out where your target organizations have blind spots and unexploited opportunities that you are uniquely situated to correct and identify.

You then give them some demonstration[2] of your unique skills. This analysis and demonstration of your skills are how you create added value.

Some examples of demonstrating unique skills:

• Writing a white paper on the organization's competitive landscape that gives them a unique insight into their customer base
• Building or designing a prototype
• Creating a two-level outline for a book the organization could publish (if they hire you and purchase the IP, of course)
• Designing a landing page for their website
• Anything that proves you can do what you say in your proposal

Folks, no rulebook says you can't write your job description. You need to propose a win-win, show an organization what you will do for them, and tell them how much it will cost to have you do it for them.

If, during that process, you: 1) create enough added value, 2) quantify it appropriately in either cost/time reduction or revenue/profit increase, and 3) quantify that in dollars added to the bottom line: then you can name your price.

Recruiters will not help you develop a career system that will allow you to thrive. You will only ever jump from job to job, dissatisfied because you aren't fully utilizing your skills.

For a Titan, being in an environment like that destroys your flame. This article is not trying to villainize recruiters. They are honest people operating within a system that is not optimized to achieve your desired outcome.

To achieve your desired outcome, you must be bold. The recruiter's system doesn't nurture boldness.

Please don't undersell yourself. It's an insult to your service to undersell yourself. You need to understand that the skill you need to develop in the civilian job market is packaging your unique skills so that it's easy for a decision-maker to say, "shut up and take my money."

And certainly, don't let someone with a gigantic conflict of interest with your goals undersell you, either. Recruiters have their uses, but you should not be heeding their advice about how to package yourself because their main concern is making their job easier. You don't work for them, and they don't work for you.

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P.S. Recruiters do still have their uses. My next article will look at leveraging recruiters to work for you instead of you working for them.

Endnotes

[1] Some recruiters will work on behalf of the job hunter, but these are mostly services geared towards executives in the C-Suite. I don’t bring them up here because they could theoretically work for you, but their fees will cut into any “profit” you generate by securing employment. They can be helpful but waste your time just as much as any other recruiter.

[2] A resume and a cover letter are not a demonstration. Show; don’t tell. Resumes and Cover Letters are an advanced form of “telling” and only add you to a stack.