Why Do Some Recruiters Have a Negative Reputation in the First Place?

There are reputations for many professions, lawyers, engineers. Yes, recruiters sometimes get a bad rap. It starts because many companies, organizations, and staffing firms train their people to be paper pushers, resume pushers, as opposed to being a genuine career advisor, a right partner to the candidate as they’re working them through the process.

What often happens when the environment is set up to “push,” as described above, is that the recruiter will have a position to work on, and then they will source people based on keywords for that position.

What happens is that anyone a push style recruiter gets on the phone will experience the recruiter trying to force them into that one position. The bad reputation stems from this wrong way to approach recruiting, which is heavily position focused. This scenario best describes a role focused approach: The recruiter’s manager provides the recruiter an opening to work on. Without any analysis or considerable thought, they attempt to put every peg they find, square or not, into a round hole. On the flip side, there is the candidate focused approach, which is the way OpenArc operates.

What Changes with a Candidate Approach Recruiting Process?

The most significant change with the candidate approach process is that the recruiters first tries to get to know the candidate, understand their career goals, and then define their requirements for each position. Ultimately the goal is to uncover what they want to accomplish in their career, and only then can one determine the shape their peg is to find the appropriately shaped hole for them.

What Are Ways Candidates Can Spot the Bad Apple Recruiters?

As a candidate, the best thing you can do is ask many questions. One of the worst things that bad recruiters do is they gray the line between contract and contract-to-hire. They will represent every contract position as a contract-to-hire role. It’s vital to ask many qualifying questions about any role presented to you.

What Are the Red Flags to Look For:

· If a recruiter is unwilling to tell you the company name you will be applying to, that’s a red flag.

· If they are unwilling to tell you the compensation or salary requirements, that’s a red flag.

· If they cannot point to direct relationships, they have within the organization that they’re recruiting for, that’s a red flag.

· If they look for a right to represent, a blanket right to represent, that’s a red flag.

The caveat to the last red flag is that some companies require the right to represent to be submitted, although a vast majority do not. OpenArc looks at it as our right to represent you is based on us talking with you in detail about a position, a company, a salary, a situation, and you giving us your permission to send your resume over. OpenArc does not need anything in writing to work with you unless the client states it’s a requirement on their end. We operate through working relationships based on trust.

Talk About Recruiters Who Care About Short-term Success Versus Those Who Care About  Building Your Career.

When a recruiter is position-focused, it is very myopic, it is short-term, and that is all they care about. The most common complaint I hear about recruiters and the deserved aspect of why recruiters get a bad rap is they will talk with a candidate for a super short period and then proceed to pretend like they’re your best friend.

A position focused recruiter will submit you to a job, and it is unlikely that you will hear from them ever again. A primary reason for this is that you did not move forward in the process. Since you did not move forward in the process, you’re not a value to them. What’s worse is when you do move forward in the process, have multiple interviews, etc. Then, for whatever reason, do not get the position; again, that recruiter goes dark and does not give you the feedback.

At OpenArc, we find it valuable to advise you when you do not get to the position, and in most cases, why you didn’t get the job and what you could improve on in the future.

The reality is anytime you submit a resume to a position, whether it is on your own or through a recruiter, the likely situation is for you not to get that position. If a recruiter is focused merely on the positions they’re working on, they’re not going to follow up, or they historically, they don’t follow up.

Whereas with a candidate-centric approach, we look forward to– even in a circumstance when the candidate does not get the position– to provide that candidate with the feedback as to why. This way, we can take that information and utilize it to continue to go for the position.

My team’s focus is to develop a true working partnership with you that is intended to last the entirety of your career. It is improbable for– if you’re looking for a new job, the next job you take for the one being that job will be the job you retire from. It brings us joy to help people negotiate positions and get jobs, even if that’s not through OpenArc.

My Resume is So Closely Suited to the Job. Why Do I Need to Work with a Recruiter at All?

It’s a great question; a company’s internal recruiters, internal HR, are very rarely req experts, especially when it comes to technology and making those alignments. The benefit that OpenArc can provide and the benefit that any right staffing firm should provide is a direct resume submission to a hiring manager. That hiring manager is the expert when it comes to technology and when it comes to resume alignment. And they are going to be the ones that can see your resume and make the determination.

More often than not, even if your resume aligns perfectly, it is a struggle to get it in front of the person who understands the technology, and internal recruiters, internal HR are just looking for baseline keywords. Additionally, what’s more important outside of a resume is the personal and cultural alignment for the position.

Even if your resume perfectly aligns up with a position, that company might not be the right fit for you, that team might not be the right fit for you. That is why our relationship-based approach is so important. It’s successful because we are making alignment from a resume to a job description. It’s about making alignment from an employee to a hiring manager or a candidate to a team.

Tell Us About a Bad Experience a Candidate Has Had with Another Firm and How It Was Different From OpenArc.

It is customary that during the initial phone call with a candidate, we seek to describe the negative experiences they’ve had with other recruiters. It is one thing that makes our jobs difficult because that makes them resistant, hesitant to work with us, and makes them resistant and reluctant to trust us. We cannot invalidate that experience because that experience is, unfortunately, the norm.

The bright side of that is, when we do get the opportunity to interact with our candidates, demonstrate to them what we do, how we do it, why we do it, and how it’s different, we experience an extreme amount of candidate loyalty, appreciation, because once they realize that we are other than the rest of the herd. They understand that OpenArc is the type of firm they want to work with and have a long term relationship with.

Describe Other Key Takeaways.

What do bad recruiters do? A soft term would be, they misrepresented. More often than not, if a recruiter gets to an offer stage with a candidate and they don’t have an additional one to three other offers on the table, and they decline that position, it is a result of the recruiter not getting a full understanding of the candidate, their needs, and their desires.

An honest recruiter would much rather stop an interview process– not submit a resume, end an interview process early, than waste everybody’s time going through an interview process to get a job that was never in alignment with what the candidate was looking for in the beginning.
Again, a tried and true recruiter is not in the business of getting offers; they’re in the place of finding the right opportunity.

What else do bad recruiters do? They sell. Keep in mind that recruiting is not a sales job, necessarily. It is a situation where you’re working closely with somebody to present them with all the information; they need to make an informed choice. People naturally put up walls if they feel like they are being sold.

Tell us about some of the fantastic people in the recruiting field and what makes them unique.

We’ve talked about when it goes wrong, yet I don’t want to neglect the people in the field that are doing it right, and, of course, I like to believe that OpenArc represents an excellent example of these types of people. The recruiters that are good at this are the ones that ask a lot of questions about you and your experience. The people that do this well– understand that they might not place you today. They might not place you this week. They might not place you this month. And they might not place you this year but fully understand that the value is in the relationship.

The value is not in the timeframe it takes to put you in the position. There are plenty of candidates whom we had– we developed a long-standing working relationship with based on our understanding of the value of an individual that we did not place for some cases, months, for some cases, years, and even candidates that we still have long-standing relationships that we never placed at all because we never had the right fit for them. And more often than not, those candidates, because they were talented, personal, career-driven, and ambitious individuals, found themselves in positions of managers, directors, executives. And they choose to work with OpenArc because they understand the experience that– their candidate experience that the people that we’re going to present to them are going to get.

What Does This All Boil Down To?

It all boils down to trust. If you cannot trust your recruiter, if they’re not demonstrating to you that they are trustworthy individuals who care about you and care about what you’re looking to accomplish, they are not somebody whom you should waste your time working with.

If you have a specific question or needs some guidance on your current situation, please connect with me via email to continue the conversation.