Part of a balanced job search campaign should involve engaging with recruiters, particularly the ones specialising in your function or sector. (Only about 20% of your time though, with the rest spent mining your own contacts.) However, a very common source of frustration is the lack of response from recruiters – and by this I mean recruitment consultants, executive search consultants and in house recruiters. You send a CV and don’t hear anything back, you meet them and don’t hear anything back, or they call you about a role and you still don’t hear anything back. What’s going on?
I am not excusing poor customer relationship skills or plain bad manners. However, the recruitment industry has a turnover of over £31.5 billion so it must be doing something right. I have spoken to my network in the industry to get their perspective. Without naming names, here’s three reasons why the relationship between candidate and consultant can go horribly wrong:
1. They are just not into you.
What’s in it for them? Why should they bother with you? They have 100s of candidates already, so your job is to spell out your USPs and get to the top of the pile. Your CV and covering email need to explicitly state what you are looking for, how this links with their clients’ requirements and what makes you better than the rest. Before you call or email, look at the vacancies they advertise and make sure you are a good fit. Frankly they don’t care about you and your career narrative, they are paid to only care about what you can do for their clients. They simply don’t have time to respond to unsolicited and irrelevant CVs. They get to the top of their game by finding great talent for their clients so you have to present yourself as a high potential candidate that will make them look good. Help them with evidence of a successful track record of achievement (quantified with percentage improvements, performance against objectives, the changes you have made and the outcomes you have achieved).
Make sure it is your voice too: a common complaint from recruiters is receiving CVs that have obviously been written by a professional CV writing company. They are crammed with hyperbole and it’s a fair chance that the person turning up for interview will be very different from the master of the universe described on paper.
Head hunters are paid by their clients to, well, head hunt. Generally speaking they just won’t interview speculative CVs unless you are the kind of candidate they regularly need for their assignments. They might be friendly if you are a CEO or perhaps a very senior HR candidate who will give them mandates in their next organisation.
If your package is much below £250K it is unlikely that the top Search firms will be interested in you, period. Retained search firms don’t work on candidates. How can they get their clients to retain them for a full search service, if they also ring them with speculative CVs? Assuming you position yourself properly, their researchers will find you if they need you – that’s what they do.
2. They want you to be more passive
Passive means being in a successful job now, but prepared to go on interviews provided the role fits with your stated career strategy. Being active but sounding desperate (‘I’m open to opportunities, what have you got?’) is not compelling. You need to present yourself as Talent: a desirable and hard to find skill set coupled with strong personal presence. Get a career strategy; at least be clear on your skills, what you contribute to your current/most recent organisation and what your next step up could be.
Recruiters tell me that ‘good people don’t post their CVs on job boards.’ This of course isn’t always true but they do prefer to find you directly or that you approach them; the sales tactic of ‘ I pulled this CV off Monster, Mr Client, and here’s my invoice’ isn’t very sustainable. The larger boards may have their place in your campaign, particularly at more junior levels or for contract work. There are very effective niche ones also. However, just loading your CV on a few of these and keeping your fingers crossed is not a plan.
Being active, or not working and immediately available, could still be turned to your advantage as you don’t have a notice period. Most hiring still seems to be done on an urgent rather than planned basis. Target a half dozen agencies that work in your sweet spot and make a focused approach to them, then engage properly with the ones that respond. By targeting, I don’t mean mail shotting them or sending a LinkedIn invitation and hoping for a response. Find out who the correct contact is (often on the agency website, but if not pick up the phone and ask) then send them a business like email and CV. (The CV should be a word attachment with your name as the title, don’t make them log on to a file share site to read it, they find that particularly irritating). Follow up with a call a week or so later; sometimes volume of work means that emails can be ignored. Recruiters are fallible too.
3. It’s all one-sided
Like any relationship, it’s more about giving than taking. Put yourself in their shoes and approach the relationship from a reciprocal perspective rather than just a transactional one. Be nice, look after the recruiter and they will do the same for you.
I’m amazed when people tell me they have been rude to agencies who ring them with vacancies that aren’t quite right. Generally it is the junior resourcers or researchers who ring first and it may be that they don’t quite understand what you do. I know it is not your job to train them BUT this can be a clue that you need to improve your CV or tweak your key words. Patiently explain what you want them to ring you about and, if you can, recommend someone who could be right for their role. You are all on the same side here; you want access to their vacancies and they want to hit their sales targets. It’s a myth that they are ringing you just to fill up their databases – there is no advantage to them in having more candidates to filter through.
One of the reasons for the lack of information flow is that that there are many more chains in the loop now in corporate hiring. The recruiter you are dealing might have to send your CV to another recruiter in an outsourced recruitment company that manages all the client’s hiring. In turn, they forward it to the organisation’s internal recruitment department. Only the internal recruiters or HR department get to talk to the person hiring to get a full brief. No wonder the internal candidate, or someone networked in, very often lands the job: they get to communicate with the person doing the hiring. It can be virtually impossible for your Consultant to get feedback for you: they suffer from a lack of information themselves as mere secondary suppliers. It’s highly frustrating for all concerned. I know they should explain this to you at the time, but you could ask about the process and what you can do to help it along. For example, emailing them with a bullet point summary of why you fit the vacancy that they can easily cut and paste to send up the chain. You can do the same after an interview (why me, why I am interested and what I can bring to the organisation).
Don’t expect recruiters to meet you unless they have something exactly right for you. A head hunter who wastes time having coffee with random candidates is unlikely to be in their job for long – you want them out in the market getting vacancies for you and not acting as unpaid, unqualified and biased career coaches.
Once you have got a job, maintain contact with the recruiters who have been helpful, giving them leads and sharing market information. Make it a pleasant experience for them to pick up the phone to you and it could become a habit which will be useful to you both in the future.
I hope this sheds some light on the frustrating but sometimes avoidable black holes that your CV can disappear into. I know there are some notable exceptions (outstandingly good and shockingly bad) and love to hear about both. As ever, don’t shoot the messenger and feel free to forward this to anyone who might find it helpful. Talk to me and visit https://www.zenaeverett.com about how I can help with your own career strategy and your organisation’s internal career development and career confidence initiatives.