Do Recruiters Work for You, or for their Clients?

With any partnership or relationship throughout your career, it is vital to know who is “selling,” or providing a service, to whom.

When working with a recruiter, there are a few affiliations to consider: your relationship with the recruiter, the recruiter’s relationship with the hiring organization, and, hopefully, somewhere down the line, your future relationship with the hiring organization.

As you might imagine, I’ve been contacted by a lot of procurement pros in the past few months, asking for help with finding a new job. Many ask what services I provide to prospective job seekers and how much those services cost, so let me provide the answer. I’ll help provide feedback on your resume; I’ll give you advice on personal branding, applying to jobs, interview tips, and salary data. And, of couse, I’ll contact you about any roles that I am representing that I think you’d be both interested in, and qualified for. And I won’t charge you anything at all for those services—but then, I’m not working for you. 

If that sounds a bit harsh, let me put it another way: We are being paid by companies looking to identify talent for open positions, not by candidates looking for jobs.

Why am I going out of my way to share this with you? Mainly, because I think there is some confusion out there as to how the industry works, particularly among job seekers who haven’t been in the market for quite some time, if ever. Also, because I believe it’s critically important to establish open, honest, and realistic expectations from day one, in terms of how your recruiter can help you and what you need to do to get the most out of the relationship.

It absolutely doesn’t mean your recruiter isn’t there to help you. Top notch recruiters will represent you and your interests as well as they can, and are not in the back pocket of the hiring company just because that’s where their fees come from.  They will be able to bring job opportunities to your attention that you’d never normally know about, and prepare you for the intereview and negotiations process to a degree that you wouldn’t be able to without an ‘insider’ guiding you. They will also think about how they can market a strong candidate among their professional network.

However, introducing candidates on a purely speculative basis is not usually where the majority of their time is spent, nor is how they derive the majority of their income. At the end of the day, a recruiter is unlikely to take on a candidate as a project and make calls with the singular goal of finding that person a job—since they’re paid by companies, this simply isn’t how the industry works. So, what do you do with this information?

A key takeaway for candidates is to be proactive in your relationship with your recruiter. They may or may not have a suitable role for you at any given time, but if you nuture and develop the relationship in the same way you would any other, you will stand out when they do kick off a search that fits you well. Treat the relationship as a long term investment that benefits your career overall, not merely a transactional conversation you have every few years when you come to look for a new job. If you are simply sitting at the end of the phone and waiting for the recruiter to call you about a job, you’re not getting as much out of that relationship as you could be.

Instead, engage with your recruiter on a semi-regular basis, and ask high-quality questions about what they’re seeing in the market, how you can optimize your job search etc. and you will likely yield many valuable insights that you can put to work in the long run, even for interview processes with other companies that you are pursuing directly.

Again, a good recruiter genuinely cares about the candidates they work with, but it’s important to understand how they work, meet them halfway, and make the most out of that relationship.