Before You Toss That Recruiter Out the Window...

We've written pretty extensively about the strained relations that often go on between recruiters and job seekers. (See That Recruiter Is Just Not That Into You and Tired of Recruiter Mismatch on LinkedIn?) It's certainly no secret that the two groups often find themselves on different planets. To reiterate this point, I recently came across this infographic by MedReps.com that sums up the situation quite nicely.

The typical response I've been hearing lately by many job seekers is that they find recruiters just too frustrating to deal with, so understandably their reaction is to give up trying.  

But before you toss that recruiter out the window...

The problem is that social recruiting is on the rise. Big time. This means that avoiding recruiters altogether could be a hindrance in your career progression simply because you are cutting off a viable job search method (I advocate for a diverse job search approach that uses several different methods to create "pipelines"). Furthermore, recruiters can be a great pipeline, particularly when you aren't in active job search mode as they can bring opportunities to you.

In the past, it didn't take much effort to cultivate these pipelines with recruiters, particularly in the technical arena where jobs were aplenty and many professionals were recruited away from one company to another without even really needing a resume. Today, however, the field is much more chaotic and, frankly, confusing (at ITtechExec, we call it a "zoo").

The biggest issue I find has to do with misalignment or mismatching of the job seeker with external recruiters. It's no longer about talking to a recruiter who is located near you or near the area you want to move to. You need to know the areas he or she specializes in, the typical companies he or she recruits for, and the geographic regions. (Executive recruiting isn't all that local anymore.)

 Recruiter matching is important to starting the relationship off right...

 It's one reason why we've been encouraging our technical members to use Recruiter Matching. By building an extensive network of technical recruiters, our concierge Job Search Agent can vet the ones she sees as most valuable to our member and his or her goals. She can also help our members set up longer term communications with the recruiters who are most responsive to our member.  

So be careful not to toss them all out just yet...

Make sure you have been properly matched or aligned first, and then build engagements with the ones who seem the most interested in keeping the dialogue going.