What a recruiter does behind the scenes

boxing dayToday is the day after Christmas – in some Commonwealth countries today is referred to as Boxing Day – so for those who celebrated Christmas yesterday and ate too much, today should probably be just a rest day where we take it easy and talk about fun stuff.

Here’s a quick story regarding a placement I made earlier in my career as a recruiter, a case where I helped a person relocate to a new country and get a better job than what they had at the time I first started dealing with them. It might give you an idea of some of the things a good recruiter can do behind the scenes to help you get a job.

I had been working on a particular job that the hiring manager had been having difficulty filling. It was a six-figure job so it was a good paying job and a senior one at that. It required specific skills and the hiring manager hadn’t been able to find someone so she let me work on the job and help her fill it.

I immediately thought of someone who I thought would be the perfect candidate and I was certain that they would be interested in the job. I was also fairly certain that the company would want to interview them, too.

The problem was that this candidate was living outside the country and would need to relocate with their child and was working in a job that was below where they should be as they’d been laid off previously and had taken this job until they could find something better. In fact, they had jumped around a bit since getting laid off so they’d had a few jobs since then and none of them really matched their level of experience or income for that matter.

So I had to convince the hiring manager that they should look at a person who was living outside the country and would need to be relocated, was currently underemployed, had jumped around a bit from job to job and as a result were earning less than what they really should be.

I didn’t have to convince the applicant because as soon as they saw the job, they told me they were interested in it.

Fortunately, the client was open-minded and decided to interview this person. I helped the candidate get ready for the interview as I normally would but found that I really liked dealing with this candidate and really wanted to help them get the job as I knew it would be a nice, fresh start for them and their child. I spent a fair bit of time on the phone helping them learn about the company, the job, and the people they’d be interviewing with.

The employer decided to start with an HR phone interview which went very well. It lasted for about 1.5 hours from memory. I helped my candidate get ready for the phone interview as they’d never done one before and gave them suggestions on how to do well in the interview.

This was followed by a skills test being administered which the candidate passed with no problems. Again, I helped the candidate prepare for this although I had no knowledge of the answers to the questions, rather I just helped them understand what the employer was looking for and how to complete the test on time.

The candidate was then flown in for a face to face interview at the employer’s location for several hours (most of the day actually) to meet with several people including two senior managers and the HR manager. Again, I helped my candidate prepare for the interview and also figure out their actual schedule since they had to not only fly into the the nearest airport, they then had to drive 4 hours to the interview by car.

I then completed four reference checks for my candidate and then made another phone call to reconfirm a few things on one of the reference checks at the request of the hiring manager.

At this point, thy employer told me they wanted to hire this person and after we worked out salary, etc (which was more than what I’d expected they’d offer) and negotiated the fact that the company would pay for moving expenses (which my job candidate was not expecting), they made the job offer and it was accepted by my candidate who was very happy about it.

The candidate was happy to get the job and the client was happy to have finally filled it. My candidate’s child was very happy to be moving to a new life with their parent, too.

What my client didn’t realize was how much other stuff had gone on behind the scenes. My candidate’s ex-spouse had been giving them grief the whole time and for awhile it seemed they might not allow my candidate to leave the country with their child to take the new job! It wasn’t until my candidate called me from the airport when they arrived to start the job that I knew it was actually going to happen.

I must have spent 4-5 hours on the phone with my candidate in the previous weeks just discussing this issue alone, where they had told me numerous times that there was a chance they might have a problem with their ex-spouse but fortunately it never happened.

This was a great experience because I knew that the candidate and client both deserved each other and as they were both really nice people, it was nice to help them. Of course I got paid for it – it was my client and my candidate so it was especially good since I was the only one involved in the deal – but the feeling I got helping to work things out was very nice from a personal perspective.

This client ended up hiring 4 people through me in a short period of time and in all 4 cases, the people who got their job all had to relocate, two of them from outside the country.

In each case, I had to manage the relocation of the candidates and did a lot of behind the scenes work that the client – and in some cases the job candidate themselves – never knew about.

In this case, I think the moral of the story is that a good recruiter can do a lot of little things behind the scenes to help you that you might not be aware of.

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