Before I became a recruiter, I used recruiters for my own job searches with mixed results. My first experience was a very good one. I had moved to New Zealand and walked into a recruitment office to talk about getting them to help me find a job. A week later, they’d helped me find a job that I ended up working at for 3 years. It was my first job out of university so it was certainly one I remembered well.
A later experience with a recruiter wasn’t as successful. I responded to their newspaper ad – this was the late 1990s so while the Internet existed, job boards weren’t as prevalent and newspaper ads were still popular.
I met with the recruiter in his office for a job I was interested in and then several days later, got an interview in the recruiter’s office with the hiring manager of the company who was hiring. I noticed that there were 2 other guys interviewing for the same job so I figured I might have a good chance since there were only three of us being considered for the job.
I never ended up getting the job. In fact, I never actually got any feedback from the recruiter and never did figure out if the company hired anyone for the job.
Another recruiter in the same recruitment firm then hooked me up for an interview with another of their clients, a company that was located within walking distance of where I lived which I thought was great. They seemed to be a good company, the job was interesting and the walking distance appealed to me too.
It wasn’t until 30 minutes into the interview that both the interviewer and I realized we had a problem.
The job paid around half of what I was currently earning.
What a waste of time! For both the interviewer and I.
We decided to end the interview at this time since we both realized it was fruitless to continue.
How could this have happened? How could I have attended an interview for a job that clearly wasn’t suited to me?
Years later after I became a recruiter, I realized what had happened. The recruitment firm I had used – and the recruiters I had dealt with at that company – were essentially useless. I realized they didn’t do any of the things I was doing for job candidates that I was helping, now that I was working as a recruiter.
They just slotted me in for interviews for jobs they were trying to fill rather than trying to match me up for positions that actually suited me.
They didn’t prepare me for the interviews.
They didn’t tell me in advance about what sort of things the interviewers would be asking me about or what keys skills were required for the job.
As shown in my example above of the second interview I attended, they didn’t even match me up for a job which paid an amount that would be of interest to me. Who wants to interview for a job that pays half of what they’re currently earning?
I remember asking them questions about who I’d be interviewing with (ie. names of people, job titles, etc) and they found it hard to even answer those questions. They really didn’t know what they were doing.
They provided absolutely no value to me whatsoever or to their clients for that matter. Which probably helped to explain why the recruiter kept telling me that he’d received no feedback from the hiring manager for the first interview he’d arranged for me. The hiring manager had probably realized this recruiter was useless too. Unfortunately, I was one of the people who paid the price.
It wasn’t until I became a recruiter and learned all the things I needed to do for job searchers to help them, that I realized this recruitment firm hadn’t done any of those things for me.
Moral of the story: know as much as you can before you attend the interview. Don’t waste your time pursuing jobs that don’t match your skills, experience and interest. You won’t always have 100% of the necessary information before the interview takes place – in fact you’ll probably never have every question answered before the interview so you’ll make some assumptions going in – but try to gather as much information before the interview as possible.
And don’t waste your time with useless recruiters like I did.
Pingback: Should you disclose your salary to a recruiter? | Bailout My Career