SOMEONE TO DO ALL THE HARD WORK FOR YOU?

Candidates are often comfortable working with agencies because it keeps them in passive mode – you hand over the problem to someone else. Agencies often reinforce this impression, suggesting that they will market you to a range of organisations. While some do, most are focused exclusively on a small number of jobs they are attempting to fill at the moment.

Recruitment agencies are an important part of a multistrategy job hunt strategy if handled right. They range from headhunters and executive search agencies to those handling interim managers, to high street agencies handling anything from clerical staff to industrial operatives. They operate under different names but all essentially perform the same function – solving the needs of employers by providing staff, whether on a permanent or short-term basis. Their consultants have better access to decision makers than candidates, and rather more leverage in terms of persuading an organisation to fix interview dates or to make a final hiring decision.

Candidates who make the mistake of believing that recruitment agencies are acting for them fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the game. Career coach and former recruiter Zena Everett reminds us that:

Agencies earn their living by coming up with the most talented candidates for their clients. They don’t want to be in a situation where they are sending in the same CV as their competitors: they earn their supplier credentials by getting to the best candidates first and ideally exclusively.

An agency that regularly handles roles you fit will always show strong interest. What agencies find it harder to do is to match candidates to a wide range of roles. Many agencies are highly sector specific.

FINDING THE RIGHT RECRUITMENT AGENCIES

Every day agencies receive unsolicited phone calls or CVs from candidates they will never be able to place. It’s difficult to spot relevant agencies from websites and listings, often because agencies claim to handle many categories of staff – this catch-all language is designed to attract vacancies from employers rather than candidates, but can give you the impression that an agency regularly handles the kind of job you seek.

Career coach Claire Coldwell advises:

Get to know recruitment agents and view them as a key part of your network of contacts. They are working in a high-pressured environment so you need to make it easy for them to help you. Be responsive, be clear about what you want but also be clear about how they can help you – if they don’t have credentials in supporting recruitment within your chosen market, then move on to an agency which does.

What’s the best way of working with recruitment agencies? Effective job hunters usually end up making well-crafted approaches to about 20 properly matched consultancies, and have a good working relationship at any one time with about half a dozen recruiters. That sentence contains nearly everything you need to know about agencies, and reveals nearly everything that goes wrong when candidates misunderstand what external recruiters do for a living. Below-average candidates register online with anything up to 100 agencies, with almost entirely random results. Strong candidates know how to find, approach and build good working relationships with these professionals who can make a big difference to shortening the time you spend job hunting. See http://www.rec.uk.com/jobseeker for advice from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation on getting the most out of your relationship with an agency.

MAKING AN APPROACH

The best way of finding recruitment agencies is to trawl for jobs they are advertising at the moment – in any media. These vacancies give you an indication of the main sectors covered by the agency. Approached the right way, an agency won’t just file your details, it will make an early decision to help you.

If you want the relationship to be short-lived and largely unfruitful you will simply email in your CV to the ‘info@’ email address the agency uses to keep speculative approaches under control. Since it’s likely your information will be lost in a long queue of emails, that’s the worst way to approach an agency. Talk to someone. Building relationships is what matters. Agencies have been known to put forward the most unconventional candidates, including people without sector experience, when they know them well.

Careers specialist Malcolm Watt writes:

Whether approaching agencies on an advertised or speculative basis it’s still the personal contact that’s important. Get to know who the agent is, use your contacts to network to him and use him as a network contact to other consultants. When answering an advert use this new personal contact relationship to try to get more information about the job role to enable you to construct and send a tightly targeted letter and CV. Most recruiters are results-driven extroverts who enjoy getting results through other people, but they are far more likely to act as a result of a conversation than a document.

So take every opportunity to speak to someone – and not just anyone who picks up the phone. You want to get to speak to a consultant who handles the kind of job you want. If you’re unsure what that is, put some more time and effort into identifying what jobs are called in your target organisations (see Chapter 10).

Recruiter Pauline Godley advises:

After sending your CV for a specific role that is advertised, leave about 48 hours and follow up with a call asking if you can schedule time to talk to the recruiter to go through your CV. Don’t be pushy but be as succinct as possible explaining why you feel you will be good for the role and ask for some more of the recruiter’s time.

Career coach Michelle Baker draws on her recruitment experience when she advises, frankly: ‘ask them how many times contacting them a week is stalking!’ Jo Bond’s advice is:

Reposition the power balance with recruiters by thinking what information, knowledge, contacts you have which may be of value to them. Will you be a future corporate client of theirs in the future? – if so, make sure that they realise this.

Often you need only mention a function or job title which the agency regularly fills. This may immediately get you the name of a consultant – someone who regularly fills the right jobs. You may also pick up this information from published advertisements. Research the agency and the consultant on the Internet, and then make a phone call. Sometimes you’ll be put through immediately, other times you’ll have to get past a receptionist who tries to send you back to square one with ‘just send in your CV’. This gatekeeper mode is designed to filter out callers who want something the agency can’t deliver. Show that you’re not one of these candidates by giving valid reasons why you need to speak to a consultant: start with a question about the job or a statement about why you might fit it. Use the language the agency is currently using in its advertised positions, and have a clear message about one or two kinds of job you’d like to pursue. Don’t get locked into a conversation about your work history until you get to speak to someone actually handling roles and interviews.

If you’re prevented from speaking to the actual consultant, ask a relatively detailed or technical question about an advertised role. The job needs to be relatively close to the kind of job that you’re after, but might be one that is imperfect on the grounds of location, pay or status. The point is to ask a question that can only be answered by someone with a detailed knowledge of the vacancy and employer. This gets you two results simultaneously – you speak to the right person and you are providing evidence of where you might fit.

Remember that recruitment consultants are busy, focused people looking for the right result within a tight time frame. They can provide extraordinarily useful insights into the marketplace and give you great feedback on your marketability and impact, but only if you fit their job range. Zena Everett advises that you:

Define how you are the ‘best’ candidate for the job to persuade the agency to put you forward. Be very clear on your skills and what you have to offer a potential employer: give examples of your previous achievements the agent can sell to a client. No one can charge a fee for a cheap, desperate job seeker who will do anything!

Don’t get too distracted by recruiter ‘rules’. Most experienced recruiters freely express strong opinions on how many pages a CV should be, use of bullet points and whether a profile is a good idea. They also have views on interview technique and whether your proposed career change sounds realistic. Take all advice seriously, but don’t change your game plan every time you meet a recruitment consultant and receive conflicting advice.

When you hand over your CV to a recruiter (ideally in a face-to-face meeting), don’t ask for an opinion, ask for a summary using a question like ‘what does my CV say to you?’ Listen carefully to the reply. If the story you hear played back makes sense, your CV is good enough. If the response is ‘I haven’t really worked you out yet’ your CV needs more work. Zena Everett adds a warning: ‘Recruiters are not your friends – so don’t confide all your insecurities to them, save that for your real friends or coach.’

AVOIDING OFFERS OF REPEAT EXPERIENCE

Agencies are relatively conservative. They gain credibility by sending employers candidates with obvious, relevant experience. In a tight market they become even more conservative – putting forward safe bets, ‘identikit’ candidates who have done exactly the same job recently. This safety-first behaviour is frustrating for candidates working with agencies who often give feedback along the following lines:

• They keep offering me the same-old, same-old I am trying to escape.
• I get offered jobs I could do in my sleep.
• I’ve been offered jobs at the level I was working at five years ago.
• They don’t seem to understand me or what I need.

Where the only evidence available is your CV, agencies assume you want to do similar work. A CV without a clear opening either says ‘same again please’ or ‘next rung up the ladder’. The data you feed into the system – or the lack of it – predicts the result. Only one person can take full responsibility for the way your CV message is remembered. You. Therefore your CV has to have a secure handover message.

The first five lines of your CV pigeon-hole you. This can be a positive outcome if someone ‘gets’ you immediately, but otherwise leads to false assumptions. If you start your CV ‘Qualified book-keeper’ or ‘Change manager’ those are the roles you’ll be offered. Similarly, if like most CVs your paperwork emphasises your most recent job, that’s what you’ll be offered again. Look at the first 40 words of the document. If someone reads no further, what jobs might come your way? Review the first page as a whole. Bearing in mind that a decision maker makes some kind of pigeon-holing decision early on page 1, what thought processes are you trying to trigger?

Is your CV the kind of document that only really works if you’re handing it over in person saying ‘let me tell you a couple of things before you read that …’. While the document is still mid-air you’d probably explain why, although it’s an accurate history, it doesn’t really explain what you’re best at or what you want to do next. That handover rarely happens: most times employers will be reading your paperwork cold. Writing a good CV is all about understanding what that ‘cold take’ is all about. With recruitment agencies, however, you have every opportunity to explain what you’re looking for. In fact, that’s what they want to know.

Agencies can help you move on into a very different role, but only if you explain what you’re looking for (often more than once), and if you provide answers, not puzzles. So don’t waste time saying ‘I’m complicated’, and don’t assume that sending in a CV is all the explanation you need to deliver. As soon as you get a chance to speak to a consultant (see above for strategies on how to do this), deliver a practised two to three minute pitch. In this order, talk about:

1. The skills you hope to use in your next job.
2. What your target job is called, and the kind of organisation you’d like to join.
3. Your background including any information you can provide about your breadth of experience.

If, as will happen more often than you think, an agency still sends you details of the kind of job you’d rather avoid, don’t lose patience, but thank them for their interest and give a clear repeated explanation of what you are looking for.

PERSUADING AGENCIES TO HELP YOU

In addition to the above complaints, candidates often add ‘When I tell them I want something different they lose interest’. Here again there is a basic misunderstanding. Although there are noble exceptions, the average recruitment agent doesn’t have the time or commercial motivation to advise you on a difficult career change. However, they can help if you have a very clear message about what you’re looking for. An agency needs to understand your career intentions in very clear, simple terms – they need to get your ‘story’.

Michelle Baker writes: ‘don’t lose faith and apply for every job – it sends very confusing messages to recruiters and will dilute your impact when a job you are perfect for comes along. The spray and pray approach will not work.’ Career coach Zena Everett also draws on extensive recruitment experience:

Agencies’ real hate is candidates who say they will or can do anything. They want you to have real career objectives that they can match to their clients’ businesses and demands. ‘I am looking for a role that does X in a company that has XXX, so please call me if you get a role like that’ is far more compelling.

This is of course a good way of not using job titles to describe your work, ensuring that you don’t get put in the wrong box (but recognising pretty early on in the conversation that a recruiter is going to want an answer to the question ‘what does this person do?’). Then move on to talk (with real examples wherever possible) about jobs and organisations you’d like to pitch yourself at. Remember that enthusiasm is as important here as facts. Definitely don’t say ‘I bet you don’t get many people with a mixed-up CV like mine’.

Just because employment agencies are not paid to be out there digging out opportunities for you, they can still help enormously and quickly. They can also provide useful connections. Keep records of who you’ve approached, ideally a printed list ready to hand wherever you are in case you receive a call on your mobile phone. Zena Everett adds:

Manage your recruiter relationships intelligently and don’t play them off against each other or apply direct to an employer if you know a third party has already introduced you. You will just burn your bridges with everyone.

Michelle Baker:

Big pet hate for recruiters – you’ve applied for a job, they call you but you can’t remember the role. Keep a spread sheet of all your applications and attachments with details of job, recruiter and company.