Prospective candidates who haven’t used a recruiting agency to help them land their next role often don’t have a great idea of how much value a recruiting agency can add to their search and at no cost to boot. Working with a recruiting agency might seem a little mysterious as well. We’ve written this article to dispel some of the mystery around working with a recruiter as well as dispel some of the myths and urban legends. There is a ton of upside with very little to zero downside.
Let’s go over some of the ways working with an agency can elevate and turbocharge your job search.
No cost to you
First of all, there is never any cost to using a recruiter. Some job seekers assume they would have to pay an agency for their help with finding a new role. That couldn’t be further from the truth. For a job candidate, working with an agency is free of charge. Recruiting fees are always paid by the employing company. An employer engages a recruiting agency to help them fill a role and then in most circumstances pays the agency the fee after you are hired.
It is important to understand that from a recruiter’s perspective, a motivated, highly professional candidate is an asset, simply by being on their radar. By getting in touch with a recruiter and getting on their radar, you have already provided value for that recruiter. Recruiters have no need to charge you and stay away from any recruiter that implies otherwise.
Visibility
To land your dream job, you have to be considered.
Someone actually has to look at your qualifications and form an opinion. How many of us have gone to the website of a company we love and posted a resume or submitted an application never to hear back? That’s often because the hiring manager at your target company has received your resume along with a thousand other resumes that weekend and quite frankly, they are often too busy to evaluate them.
Job requirements and specifications can be helpful to hiring managers in these situations in narrowing down the pool of applicants they consider to a manageable amount of qualified candidates. But one of the drawbacks of precise requirements, and one of the biggest challenges folks on the job hunt experience, is that rigid requirements can sometimes filter out otherwise excellent candidates. A recruiter with insight into the role can help the right candidate jump the rope so to speak and get directly into the process if they see a great fit, even if the initial filtering would otherwise have disqualified them.
Invisibility
Going beyond increasing visibility to employers, there are jobs you might qualify for that aren’t posted, anywhere. In some cases, these “invisible” job opportunities may not have been made public yet, and your recruiter may be able to put you forward before the general public has a crack at them. Or, the opportunity might be part of a confidential search that the recruiter has exclusive search rights to.
In some cases, the perfect job for you might not even exist yet. The recruiter might create it for you out of thin air. Great recruiters have an intimate knowledge of the hiring needs and overall business position of their client companies. If they know of an individual who they believe could be a particular asset to their client, at that particular stage in the maturity of the business, they will bring that candidate to the employer and help fill a need the employer hadn’t even started looking to fill, or even realized they should be trying to fill.
The best recruiters are partners in their client’s growth.
Confidentiality
Working with a recruiter is also discreet. No one needs to know that you are actively looking for a new opportunity, aside from you, the recruiter and the right hiring manager. You don’t need to broadcast your availability at all if it doesn’t make sense for you at the moment. You might only be testing the waters on a search, or maybe you haven’t made a final decision to leave your current employment, or perhaps you’re just looking for leverage with your current company.
Working with a recruiter helps keep your options open if you already have a job.
Saves time
One of the hardest parts of a job search, especially if you already have a demanding job (is there any other kind?), or other responsibilities outside of work, such as family, is finding the time to conduct a comprehensive search. You can try to be your own recruiter, without any outside help, hoping you can outcompete all the other applicants and their recruiters to find the best fits out there, or you can boost your odds and your options by letting a recruiter come to you with opportunities that make sense.
Even better, once your recruiter presents you with an intriguing opportunity, they can help with scheduling and coordinating the interview process. They will serve as a go-between between you and your target company. Now you don’t have to tire yourself out trying to hit just the right-sounding tone with each of your words every time you send an email to suggest an interview time-slot. When you’re starting a job search, often after having been out of the job hunting game for a bit, a knowledgeable recruiter can get you up to speed on market conditions very quickly without you having to do much research on your own. Markets seem to change a little bit at a time and then all at once.
It’s nice to have a market whisperer in your ear to help you avoid spending time you don’t have on opportunities that don’t make sense.
Insight
We mentioned the value of insight earlier, but it cannot be emphasized enough. Good recruiters are living and breathing your target job market all day, everyday, talking to and working with many of the employers you hope to work for. They know key details such as:
- Your target employers’ current needs
- Their requirements for those roles
- Their biases in terms of candidates for consideration
- The kind of salary you can command
- The kinds of non-salary benefits and perks that are appropriate for your prospective role
- And so on…
The most insightful recruiters often understand deeply, and from experience, the profile of the type of candidate who is most likely to succeed in a particular role, in some cases better than even the employers themselves. At Rocket, one of the ways we ensure that we bring that level of insight to every role we work on is we only recruit for roles in job areas where someone at Rocket has direct, high-level work experience. We can intuit, and then answer, key questions such as, would a given role benefit most from being filled by an inexperienced, but hungry general talent, or a seasoned veteran? Should the CEO hire a COO who is essentially a clone to get done what the CEO doesn’t have time for, or should the new COO bring something entirely new to the table that compliments the talents of the founding team? As a candidate, you want to be walking into your interviews with the confidence that someone–who knows–believes you are a good fit.
Ally and Advocate
When you partner with a recruiter for your job search, you are no longer entering your candidacy alone. You have an ally in the decision room who has a vested interest in seeing you receive an attractive offer.
Recruiters invest their time and effort into vetting quality candidates to present to their clients. Since their relationship with their client, your potential future employer, is on the line, a good recruiter won’t put you forward unless they believe in you. And your recruiter won’t be compensated unless they fill the position. Once they’ve put you forward, you can have confidence that your recruiter will be proactively advocating for your candidacy. They will be able to figure out any hesitations your potential employer might have in offering you the position and help alleviate the concerns.
In a sense, you have someone in the hiring conversation who has already said yes to your candidacy.
Feedback
Your recruiter can provide you with feedback that a prospective employer might not feel comfortable providing directly to you. Employers will often be more frank and direct about reservations they have to their recruiter. They don’t owe anything to you, but they need to make sure their recruiter knows what they want. This is intel that is incredibly valuable on your search. A simple “thanks for applying, best of luck” leaves you with only your own speculation as to why things didn’t work out, exposing you to potentially making the same mistakes, or applying for the wrong roles, again and again.
Beyond the Offer
The benefits of working with a recruiter on your job search don’t end after you’ve accepted a great offer. There are other, often overlooked benefits that extend beyond the moment of acceptance. As we mentioned earlier, your recruiter has a vested interest in seeing you succeed in the role. Most recruiting contracts require recruiters to find a replacement if things don’t work out with a placement within a specified time frame. It is vastly more valuable to your recruiter to see you succeed than to go back to the drawing board with a frustrated client if the placement doesn’t work out.
For the best recruiters, that means following up with you and your employer to see how things are going. For example, a good recruiter wants to make sure their placed candidate is onboarded properly. A botched onboarding can significantly handicap a newly hired employee. Habits form quickly, as do the impressions of others, and both become more and more difficult to correct as time goes by.
Your recruiter might check in to make sure you have connected with the right people at the new company, perhaps facilitate introductions if necessary. If your recruiter has done their homework or has worked extensively with an employer, they will know what a new candidate will need to do and who and what they’ll need to know to hit the ground running. Your recruiter can also be an excellent intermediary between you and your employer to help sort through any potentially awkward disconnects or misunderstandings, especially in the early days of the employment.
As the years go by, if you’ve developed a strong relationship with your recruiter, you can take advantage of their knowledge and expertise. Your recruiter should always have the pulse of the market, you can check in with them from time to time to understand the major trends in your field, in hiring and more. An experienced recruiter can be an excellent source of career advice as you advance at your new firm and beyond.
As you settle in at your new company, and rise through the ranks and begin building your own team, you’ll already be connected to a hiring partner you can trust for info and for help with your hiring needs.
Ultimately, working with a recruiting agency for your job search unlocks an incredible amount of value for you with little to no downside. From the initial conversations where you can obtain valuable intel on the marketplace and your positioning within it, to the years down the road when you’re building your own team, your recruiter can serve as trusted advisor, advocate, and agent throughout your job search and beyond.
About Rocket
Rocket pairs talented recruiters with advanced AI to help companies hit their hiring goals. Rocket is headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley but has recruiters all over the US & Canada serving the needs of our growing client base across engineering, product management, data science and more.
