How Should Job Seekers Choose a Recruiter?

I met an old friend of mine, who is in the middle of a job search, for coffee recently. He mentioned he’s getting absolutely flooded with messages from recruiters, so much so that he wouldn’t have enough time to follow up with each recruiter without compromising his actual job performance. So he asked me: how do you choose which recruiters to work with?

I know, I know. “Hey everybody a recruiter is writing a blog post about why you should work with him get ready for some not-so-subtle, self-aggrandizing schlock” - yeah the thought occurred to me. But the problem is real and if I were in my friend’s situation, here’s how I would triage who I’d work with.

The Quality of the Outreach

I’ll say this until I’m blue in the face: no matter the industry or the field, anyone who takes their career seriously in the business world must develop their writing and communication skills. With recruiting, I think it is an imperative. Not only is this a profession where the initial outreached has moved more and more towards the written word (vs the cold call), it’s a profession that also continues to move from a pure sales function to a sales & marketing hybrid. The people who haven’t taken an interest in developing their own writing abilities clearly do not take their own careers seriously, so why should you trust them with yours?

And I’m not just referring to typos, misspellings and simple grammar. Is the message they’re sending you concise, yet compelling? Virtually everyone has to use some sort of template system in order to reach the scale that is needed to be successful in recruiting (and sales, email marketing, etc.) But are they targeting the right audience with the messaging they’re using, and are they thoughtful enough to customize appropriately?

In short, does this message truly deserve a response?

Some Basic Research

A little research can go a long way. And I do mean a little; if you’re so tight on time that you’re struggling to sort out which recruiter to use, you certainly don’t need to be spending hours on this.

The first thing I would do is pull up their LinkedIn profile. I wouldn’t base my decision on the length of their career. I’ve known some junior recruiters who are excellent, and some senior recruiters who will absolutely waste your time. But I would do what every recruiter, HR person, hiring manager and executive would do: look at their tenure at each job and rule out the “job hoppers.”

Yes, I said it. This is your chance to put the shoe on the other foot. Using the same logic that is commonly applied to job seekers, if they were any good, they wouldn’t be getting new jobs every 6 to 12 months. Eliminating people based upon consistent short tenure is one of those things that’s effective on the aggregate, but can be unfair in certain specific situations. But in this scenario, it’s your time and your decision on who you spend it with, so do it, or don’t. You do you.

The other thing I’d research is their company. Nothing tricky here. Are their ratings on review sites (Glassdoor, Google, etc) in the trash? And do they have expertise and a practice area focused in your skill set?

Talking with You, Not at You

This is the real test. At some point you’re going to have to talk to some recruiters and gauge their abilities. A recruiter’s job is to find the best talent for their client, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also have your best interests at heart. The great ones always do - they want to set up both their candidates and clients for long term success, and they want both candidates and clients to come back to them in the future. Better yet, they really want the referral business that comes from treating people well. The bad ones? They just want to get somebody, *anybody*, to take this job so they can move onto their next transaction.

How do you tell the difference? You really just need to gause if there’s an honest, two-sided conversation happening and if the recruiter is showing a genuine understanding of what you’re looking for, what’s important for you and how you’re going to make a decision. As opposed to someone who is reading from a script and rifling through endless old school sales tricks and pushy rebuttals. And how deep can they get in their explanation of the role and questions about your background? You shouldn’t expect a recruiter to be a subject matter expert in your field (that’s literally your job, not theirs), but you should expect someone who takes their career seriously to know the high points and industry trends.

Appropriate Follow Up vs The Black Hole

At this point we’re past choosing who to work with, and really deciding who to continue to work with. You should know that the way the job economy has evolved into being ultra-specific in a lot of different competency areas, it could be a while before a recruiter has another job that’s a great fit for you (depending on your skill set obviously). But that’s not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is not giving you feedback on interviews you’ve done, not returning messages, and just generally leaving you hanging. Some recruiters fall into the trap of themselves not getting any material updates from their clients and thus not having anything productive to share - but they should at least feel comfortable telling you that. Others just don’t care.

But there are a lot of recruiters who do care. I hope this helps you find one.