[Anonymous]

I intended for this to be a response to a post in another thread, but that thread was mostly about resume help. To avoid hijacking, I thought I’d make a separate post for those who are fairly new to working with recruiters. Feel free to vent your frustrations about your interaction with recruiters, as well.

The post I was responding to was about getting no traction with Robert Half.

I wouldn’t put much stock in the big recruiting firms like Robert Half. It sounds counterintuitive. You think “well, the big firms must be legit, or they wouldn’t have gotten so big.” But because of their reach in the market, they get inundated with accountants looking for jobs. No single candidate is a big deal to them.

A smaller recruiting firm (especially a local one) needs to get some big wins. They need to place a great candidate in the perfect role, and then they need to repeat that process a lot more times. The last thing a fledgling firm (or a firm that only serves the local market) can afford is to place a bunch of middling candidates in bad jobs. That only results in negative word-of-mouth among job-seekers AND hiring companies.

So instead of waiting for a company to come to them and say “Here’s an open role. Go fill it for us,” and then trying to convince any random applicant to accept the job, they scour the job posting boards and pick out the postings they think they can find people for. Then, they scour LinkedIn, Indeed, and CareerBuilder for job-seekers to present for those roles. They still get a finders fee from the hiring company, but there is also more motivation for them to help the candidate because, again, they need a win. They’re more likely to say, in an internal discussion, “This is one of the top candidates on our board. We NEED to find her a role she will not only accept but love. Then the hiring company is happy and more likely to bring us direct business, and the candidate is happy and will give us a good testimonial.”

Robert Half and the like will say “Eh, we’ve got a lot of good candidates. No one is so important that we’ll start advocating for THEM instead of the companies that continually bring us business.” So they’ll be unresponsive and basically ignore you.

My advice (assuming you are not having success on your own or with big recruiting firms): Work really, really hard on your resume. REALLY hard. Even get a professional to help you if you can afford it. This is truly like dating; you can whine about how people should like you for your personality, but no one can assess your personality from across the room, and they’re not going to approach if they aren’t physically attracted to you. Nailing your resume is like getting super hot and strutting your stuff in front of all the people who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you were fat (I know this because I used to be really fat, and I used to send out awful resumes).

Then, reach out to some small, local firms. Let them know what kinds of opportunities you’re interested in, and find out if you could have a face-to-face meeting with them to discuss your background and goals. Once they know and believe in you, they will sell you because, again, they need a win.