Recruiters Versus Career Coaches - Hire Imaging

Recruiters Versus Career Coaches - Hire Imaging Top 10 List to Get It Straight Many people looking for a job have only a vague or mistaken understanding of how recruiters and career coaches work. Here is some food for thought to help you clarify and manage expectations around the differences. What is the difference between recruiters and career coaches? The career coach works for the individual job hunter while recruiters work for companies. Career coaches and recruiters work for two distinctly different sets of clients. Career coaches help their individual clients to find jobs while recruiters help their client companies find employees to fill open positions. Okay. Then do recruiters place people in jobs? No, and this is a second ironic misconception. Recruiters dont care about finding jobs for people. They make their living by filling open positions with the most qualified people they can find. There is no reason for them to be interested in the average out-of-work professional. Often the most qualified people are not even looking for a job, but are successfully employed at other companies. And even when the recruiter finds the ideal candidate, he/she can only recommend the person to the company. Recruiters present qualified candidates to companies, and sometimes conduct preliminary screening interviews. Career coaches work with people on career exploration, resumes and marketing documents, networking, interviewing and other aspects of the job search to help them market and present themselves as effectively as possible to both recruiters and to the potential employers who are hiring directly. Can recruiters do career coaching? Some are able to help people they want to present to a company to beef up their resume and to interview intelligently. But recruiters are not experts at how to obtain a job. This means that career consultants and recruiters are not in competition and can often work together for the clients benefit. How do recruiters work? There are two kinds of recruitersretainer and contingency. Retainer firms have an exclusive contract on their assignments and are usually paid a portion of their fee at the beginning of their search and the balance at the end of their assignment, whether or not they fill the position. Contingency recruiters seldom have an exclusive assignment on a position and compete with other contingency firms. They are paid only when they fill the position. Retained recruiters are often called executive recruiters. A major difference is that retained recruiters usually deal with positions that pay $100K or more, while contingency firms handle positions around $50K and up. In addition, there are employment agencies that work with people in the $25K to $50K range. Okay. What are executive recruiters? Headhunters? Executive recruiters are the same as retainer recruiters, though some contingency recruiters will advertise themselves by that name. Headhunter is an accepted slang term for executive recruiter. It is like calling a psychologist a shrink. The higher your salary (generally $75K and up), the more useful a recruiter might be. Are there people who should not use recruiters? Yes, people who have been out of work for a while, and career changers. These people will simply not be served well in general. Why dont recruiters respond to emails or phone calls? Its not worth their time. In this present economy, an executive recruiter may be working to fill 50 positions at any one time. To do so he/she spends most of her time speaking with people he/she already knows to be qualified for one of the positions or can recommend other qualified people. A headhunter can easily get hundreds of resumes a day. The chances that an unsolicited resume will present qualifications exactly matching one of the current open positions a headhunter is working with is exceedingly unlikely. So these resumes are fed to a database that already holds one or two million resumes. For even the largest search firms, the number of positions filled out of the databases is 1% or less. This dramatizes why it is that recruiters rarely look at the resumes which cascade into their offices. Okay. Should I as a job seeker, forget about using recruiters? Not necessarily. However, you should have a track record of successes and be willing to do some legwork. First, conduct research to identify firms and recruiters who specialize in your industry or profession. People who are job searching often have their best chance of success with small boutique firms that have only ten or fifteen recruiters. Second, visit the firms Website and proceed only when you are virtually a perfect fit for one of the positions that need filling. Third, first send your resume and then follow-up with a phone call. Fourth, Do all this with low expectations and as only one part of a comprehensive job search strategy. How do I get to know recruiters? If you are connected with a recruiter, cultivate that relationship as much as possible. Treat recruiters with the same respect you would a company human resource representative or a hiring manager. If you behave unprofessionally with a recruiter sending unsolicited documents, misrepresenting your background, being nonresponsive and timely to calls you will lose credibility with that recruiter. And word travels! Whats the overall theme here? Certainly consider recruiters as part of your job search strategy. However, dont have unrealistic expectations of your work with them. Recruiters are not in business to find you a job. Do not rely on recruiters to the exclusion of other job search methods, especially networking, networking, and networking! And dont take rejection personally; it plain and simple isnt personal. Instead, explore whether there are things you could be doing (and not be doing) to tap into using a recruiter as a spoke in your job search wheel.