When you forward your resume to recruiters you know or send it via e-mail to a targeted group of recruiters you have identified, you may get one or more calls immediately, or you may experience total silence–at first.
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“Purple squirrel” is recruiter-speak for a candidate whose qualifications are rare and for which a recruiter can charge a higher fee to the company due to the difficulty of the search. When sourcing candidates, recruiters will look first at resumes posted in the last 1 to 2 weeks and will generally not look at older resumes, unless they are searching for that elusive purple squirrel.
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Wondering what happens to your resume when you e-mail it to an executive recruiter as part of a job search campaign? Contrary to long-standing conventional wisdom, many recruiters are actually more receptive to receiving unsolicited resumes than used to be the case, and they do generate some good responses.
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One of the most misunderstood aspects of executive job search among executive candidates seems to be the nature of recruiting firms and how they operate. I have addressed this topic on several occasions, but the fact that I continue to encounter clients who have major misconceptions regarding the recruiter community tells me that this is a message worth repeating: “Do not expect an executive recruiter to ‘market’ you!”
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Recruiters are finding good talent in a place that most executives would probably not even think about: Craig’s List. Many of you are likely familiar with Craigs List as an online community site where classified ads for furniture and housing, personal ads, and discussion forums are to be found. There are also jobs listings, but the surprise is that recruiters are using it as a primary resource for candidates.
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Several of my colleagues indicated that recruiters seem to prefer Word format for ease of editing and tweaking for the particular job order they are working on, which confirms my experience. A neatly formatted text document is also welcomed by most recruiters, but this does not mean doing a “save as” of your Word document to text and sending it as is!
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A retained recruiter typically will NOT recommend a candidate for interview for several positions at a time, whereas a contingency recruiter will. Retained recruiters normally work at executive level exclusively, while in general contingency recruiters also work extensively with more junior level candidates.
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You may not be aware that The Ladders offers a series of free webinars annually that feature the latest in online recruiting, job search best practices, and contemporary perspectives on recruiting by top recruiting experts.
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Since it is accepted wisdom that most executive level jobs are found via some form of networking, this points to a major disconnect in the minds of employment seekers and the real world. Most statistics point to networking as the most lucrative source of job leads!
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“In my 16 years of headhunting, not once has an HR rep ever been the ultimate decision maker for any hiring outside of the HR department.” The bottom line in my view is the following: Where is the benefit to anyone on either side of the hiring equation—especially management and executive-level candidates—in meekly accepting the verdict of HR and quietly slinking away?
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So now you know that all other things being equal, a candidate’s chances are far less than 50/50 that they will receive any kind of response at all when they submit a resume to a potential employer. Of course, “all other things being equal” is the operative phrase here.
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While it is true that many companies do retain these firms for their important high-level candidate searches, contingency firms, properly used, can be of great value as well.
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