The Recruiter’s Perspective

A lot of my friends look at me funny when they realize that I’ve worked for more than a year as a recruiter, and yet I don’t have a job yet.

First off, I’m picky.  There are jobs available – in many cases, jobs with decent money and benefits – but they don’t fit into my career plan.  Secondly (and more importantly), the skills I developed to recruit niche professionals and consumers for market research projects, and to recruit engineers and support personnel, are not perfectly generalizable to getting a job in the finance industry.  As excellent as that would be.

I don’t mean that they’re of no use whatsoever – far to the contrary.  During my time as a recruiter, I picked up a lot of tips for job searching, resume writing and interviewing, which I will take the liberty of setting down here. So this entry could be subtitled, “The right way to get a job.”

1) Make a career plan. Getting a job is easy; you’re only unemployable if you refuse (or don’t have the ability or facility) to clean yourself up and communicate decently with other people.  Getting a job which moves you toward where you want to be in five or ten years is more difficult. So first, develop a goal. I want to be a corporate financial analyst or an equity researcher in five years, and CFO of a mid-sized (50-500 employees, $10 million to $100 million) company in ten or fifteen years. Figure out how to get there, with interim positions along the way. In no particular order; mine are Analyst, Research Associate, Portfolio Manager, Finance Manager, and some others. It’s worth applying for jobs that don’t fit into the overall goal, as fallback options or if you need the money, but if you’re reading the offer letter, consider whether the job fits into your plan.

2) Do your due diligence. Learn what it takes to succeed in your industry, and make sure you know what the interim steps are along the way. Figure out who the big firms are, the major players, the periodicals that you should read. Maybe you should subscribe to the Harvard Business Review, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, or other trade publications. When you go into interviews, know as much as possible about the company, the job, the job requirements, and the person who will be interviewing you (and be able to relate all of these to your own background and skills). If your interviewer got his degree from Boston College and you didn’t, make sure you’re not uncomplimentary if you’re asked why you chose the school you did. If he published a case study, read it and have some intelligent comments.

3) Build your brand. This could be subtitled “Actively Network,” because the two concepts are intertwined. You want to present a favorable image of yourself at every opportunity, and make as many opportunities as possible for you to present that image. This doesn’t mean “Go to every Monster.com job fair,” nor does it mean “spam popular online forums with comments that include your name and a link to your LinkedIn profile.” Rather, it means that you should make friends in your field, get business cards, attend training seminars (and do your research beforehand so you look like somebody worth knowing), keep relationships alive with your old classmates and coworkers, and generally think about what kind of image you want to present and the best ways to do so.

4) Don’t neglect your training. If you want to be in marketing, you should have some graphic design background and/or experience. If you want to be in sales, keep current on your relationship management and communications training. If you want to be in Finance, make sure you have solid Excel skills and think about becoming a CFA charterholder (I just got my prep materials last week, by the way – six fat textbooks and some postcards).

5) Invest time and maybe money in your resume and interviewing skills. This one is kind of a throwaway, but worth mentioning. Your personality, talents, skills, abilities, ambitions, goals and dreams are encapsulated in that document; because if you don’t get through the door and into an interview, nothing else matters. So e-mail your resume to recruiters and ask for their advice. Companies like Kforce will often help you edit it and better emphasize the good stuff while downplaying the things which aren’t so complimentary. Once you get through the door, you need to impress the hiring manager in the interview. Dress in a suit unless specifically instructed otherwise. Do your due diligence on the company. Do some mock interviews and ideally get to the point where you look forward to interviewing. Or fake it.

6) Remember that every line on your resume will follow you forever. So don’t take a job you don’t want unless you don’t have a choice. On the up side though, this is a good incentive to gun for the assignments and the jobs that will make you look good forever, and make for good stories at the cocktail parties, business school classes, and even interviews. So do that month-long training seminar in Beijing, and participate in the pre-IPO financial statement review and reconciliation.

Each and every one of these goals applies whether you’re actively job searching or not. Always think about where you are and where you want to be, always build your brand, always keep your training up to date, and always stay informed of developments in your industry. Keep your resume current so you’re less sandbagged if your company folds, you get RIF’d, a merger or acquisition occurs – or if an incredible opportunity comes along. Interviewing skills are invaluable in any situation where you have to relate to people or persuade them to accept a point of view. And knowing that your background follows you everywhere may dissuade you from making a poor decision at the post-project cocktail party.