|
01.10
When It
Comes to Your Career, Don't Play the Waiting
Game
By Elizabeth Lions
Still waiting by the phone,
hoping a recruiter will call? Don't bother; your
job search will be better served by taking an
active approach — and staying on top of both
your job leads and the people who are helping
you to find them.
The most common complaint I hear
from unemployed engineers during this recession
is that they often seek out the help of a
recruiter to find them a job , only to find that
their calls don't get returned. It’s confounding
for people in a job search to apply to an
organization, or take time out of their day to
interview with a headhunter, only to realize
that they have wasted their time.
Here are some suggestions to
help you manage your job search with a
headhunter:
Remember How the Headhunter
Gets Compensated
Even in recession, the fee
structure of a headhunter doesn’t change. Yes,
they may cut their fees somewhat, but due to
overhead costs of running the office, they are
unable to cut too low or they won’t make money.
Standard fees are 25 percent of the annual
salary, based off of yearly compensation, not
including bonus. For example, if you make 60,000
a year, and a headhunter places you, they will
bill $15,000 for a direct hire position.
Contract jobs are billed differently, and over
time. In periods of high unemployment, very few
companies will pay an agency to find them talent
because they think they can find it on their
own. And, usually, they are right. Consequently,
the available jobs that a headhunter is working
on are the very-hard-to-fill positions, giving
them lower odds to bill. In the industry, we
call these the "needle-in-the-haystack" jobs
because that’s how hard it will be to find the
right candidate for the employer.
Don't forget that headhunters
are sales professionals who need to make a
living just like everyone else. The headhunting
profession is set up such that if you don’t
bill, you don’t get to keep your job. While we
would like to believe that they are all
altruistic souls who are on a mission to find
work for everyone, we have to keep in mind that
our own interests are not always first and
foremost in their minds.
Why Recruiters Don’t Call You
Back
Many engineers are frustrated
because they develop an e-mail exchange with a
headhunter, send over their resume and then
don’t hear back. This poor professional business
practice only occurs for a few reasons. One is
that a recruiter knows that he cannot place your
skill set, but doesn’t bother to tell you. Or he
doesn’t have any jobs available to show you, and
is instead focused on filling what he has in
order to keep his job. Some headhunters will
avoid confrontation at all costs and will not
tell you that you aren’t a good fit, that your
skills aren’t current or that your resume needs
to be re-worked in order to entice an employer.
And most will not take time out of their day to
re-write your resume, thinking that you should
be responsible for your curriculum vitae.
Without valuable and critical
feedback, how can you possibly work with a
headhunter, or even understand the current job
market?
First, get your conversations
out of e-mail. Pick up the phone and talk
directly to a recruiter about your goals and
your skills, then close them for an interview
time. If the recruiter resists, claiming that he
doesn’t have any work for you, push back and
make him the expert. Try the following
questions:
-
Do you fill positions with
my title often? When was the last time you
had a job like this open?
-
In your opinion, are my
skills marketable?
-
What could I do to improve
my resume?
-
If your firm doesn’t work
with people like me, who does?
The last question is critical
because this is your breadcrumb trail to finding
the job. All headhunters know what their
competitors work on, as well as their client
list. Competitive knowledge is what keeps them
alive.
Recently, I urged an electrical
engineer to call a large agency to find some
contract work to tide him over until he could
find a full-time job with benefits. To his
amazement, he found that the recruiter didn’t
really understand his skill set, level or the
importance of the software/hardware packages he
had worked with in the past. Together, we
discovered in order to get the maximum results
out of working with a recruiter, he would
actually have to educate the recruiter and then
develop the business relationship.
Statistically, working with
headhunters during a recession isn’t the best
way to find a full-time job. But if you’d like
to use their services, in addition to regular
job search techniques, manage the business
relationship. Keep your own interests in mind.
 Elizabeth Lions is an
author
and career coach, specializing in working with
engineers. Her book Recession Proof
Yourself! can be found at
www.elizabethlions.com
Comments may be submitted to
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
|
