tips for working with recruiters during a job search
Posted Mon 12 Mar 2007 by Brad under Slacking at work
About eight months ago, I went on the job search while still working at my old job. It took much more time and energy than I anticipated, but I eventually landed my current gig.
During the search, I worked a lot with recruiters and had both good and bad experiences. The majority of them I found of craigslist. Here are some tips that I learned along the way.
- Let them spruce up your resume. In most cases, the recruiter gets paid only by finding somebody to fill the available position. They know exactly what the company is looking for. If they want to remove certain skills and highlight others, trust them…but never lie. Study up on the topics you haven’t worked on for a little while and they want to highlight.
- Don’t let them make you feel stupid or a bad candidate. I bombed my first big phone interview by forgetting some technical information due to nervousness. An hour or two later, the recruiter called me and wanted to know what went wrong. I explained to him that my mind just went blank. Then he began to grill me, references specific questions and saying, “I mean, I don’t know Java, but shouldn’t you know the difference between….”
I felt bad enough already, and now the guy who had been buddy-buddy with me over the last week was using a tone I hadn’t heard from him before. I resisted the temptation to tell him that if the job was so easy, why didn’t he take it? I mean everybody can do J2EE Java programming, right? Just more on to the next opportunity
- Look for short job descriptions and an email address to reply to. The jobs advertised with lists of years experience necessary in multiple different areas are looking for something too specific. If you have everything they need, great for you. Too often you don’t have enough, and you’re ignored.
The more generic descriptions are often more flexible, focusing more of skills such as communication and ability to pick up new technologies. The employers aren’t pigeonholing who they want and are willing to look a little more broadly.
The two descriptions which got me job offers were along the lines of “Looking for J2EE developers for mid size company. Email resume to xxx@xxx.com.”
- Try to work with someone from out of state. I looked almost exclusively for my job on craigslist and was initially wary of jobs where the phone number to call was from outside of the city or state where I live. I ended up calling two of them and those were the two that led to job offers.
Why? These were the only recruiters to immediately get me into an interview at the company. The local recruiters had me meet up them for lunch, take a phone test to evaluate my technical skills, discussed different places around town, etc. It took weeks just to get me to the initial interview.
