The Upside of Recruiters

I’m a big believer in recruiters and placement agencies, but only the good ones. A bad recruiter will find out your name, company and contact info; then spam you with phone calls and e-mails about opportunities. He is attempting to flip you – to turn a fee by getting you into a new position for his benefit, not for yours. The ideal situation for this recruiter would be if you took the new position and stayed there for a year. At that point you could expect more “opportunities,” and ideally you would make another move. In this way, the recruiter would make an easy $3,000-$9,000 off of you on an annual basis. Even if his agency takes a 50% cut, with thirty of these ideal candidates on his list, this recruiter will make more than $80k per year. That’s until word gets around that he’s shady and recruits from his clients. Generally they try not to do that (or are contractually bound to avoid it), but it happens.

Good recruiters operate on two levels. First, they keep a list of active and passive candidates, most of whom are (ideally) currently employed. They keep track of their candidates’ skills, abilities, desired positions and workplace environment preferences. If you’ve spent time in food service, developing and maintaining this database is the staffing equivalent of side work – chopping lemons for hot tea, preparing table settings, etc. It’s the stuff that doesn’t directly generate revenue, but makes your job run far more smoothly when things get hot.

Then they have clients and openings. These are the firms that have positions that need filling, and the people at those firms who liaise with the recruiter and communicate about those opportunities. Good recruiters will post these positions on job boards, both internal and external, and at the same time start thinking about who on their list would be interested. Then they start calling their candidates – the ones who have expressed a desire to move on, or who would be making a substantial jump in salary or prestige or general fit.

Good recruiters earn their fees by taking all the expensive, time-consuming, pain-in-the-butt aspects of staffing – getting a bunch of resumes, conducting initial screening to make sure that applicants actually have the skills they say they do, doing the actual interviewing, running background and credit checks on the short list of applicants – streamlining them, and just presenting a handful of really decent prospects to their client companies, who can then take their pick.

This is excellent for both the candidate (who doesn’t have to actively job hunt, or at least spend as much effort doing so, and who can use the recruiter as a source of information) and the clients (who don’t have to have their HR people waste a month filling each open position and who generally enjoy a higher success rate with their new hires, if the recruiter is good). And that is why the clients are willing to pay the recruiters a fee, generally 4% to 10% of a new hire’s annual salary, spread out over six months or a year to minimize the risk of the hire not working out.

Incidentally, this gives the recruiter an incentive to negotiate a higher salary for you and to be relatively up-front about it.

If you find a good recruiter, keep him or her in your business card binder, and send an e-mail once or twice a year with a few words on how you’re doing in your position. Because if you do, then the recruiter will keep an eye out for openings that move you upward in terms of salary, or fit, or prestige, and e-mail you if they come up. He (or she) will not waste your time with repeated phone calls or e-mails, and will respect your “no.” Like a good salesperson, a good recruiter makes a living by creating deals that benefit everyone involved – himself, the client and the candidate.