Jeremy Johnson has a new guest blog post this week with things to think about if you are thinking about working with multiple recruiters as part of your job search.
Jeremy is a recruiter in Kansas City for EHD Technologies, a recruiting, staffing and managed services company serving the IT, Engineering and Automotive industries.
You can also follow him on Twitter at jsquaredkc
Should You Work with Multiple Recruiters?
Maybe this isn’t exactly the right question to ask anymore. “Should you work with multiple recruiters?” Maybe it is. For folks who have worked with recruiters, I think most have been at least open to the idea of working with more than one – that is, if they aren’t doing so already. And maybe it’s not one of the top questions job seekers ask themselves, but it’s still worth asking and there are some good lessons to be learned by asking it.
If your job stinks, you really need a change of scenery, or don’t have a job at all, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you’ll work with whatever resources that you think can help you improve your situation. It could be one person, two, three, whatever.
As a recruiter myself, I do have an opinion on this, too. Well, maybe it’s not an opinion as much as an admission of reality. So here it goes: no one recruiter has a monopoly on all the available jobs you’re potentially qualified for, so it probably doesn’t make sense to lean on only one recruiter.
Big caveat, though. Big. Though no one recruiter has access to every available job you might be interested in, there can be multiple recruiters working on the same job. When multiple recruiters contact you about the same position, things can get messy if you let it.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
1) Be honest with recruiters about your job activity – As recruiters, we don’t mind being told ‘no.’ What we hate, however, is being told ‘yes’ when we should have been told ‘no.’ Recruiters don’t make widgets. We’re in the people business. So, trust and credibility with our clients is all we have. Springing candidate surprises on those clients is something we seriously try to avoid. I get the gripe that recruiters don’t always offer up a ton of information, whether about the job, the company, or submittal and interview feedback. In our defense, a lot of times we don’t have it to give or aren’t allowed to give it. But, the more on the same page you can be with any and all recruiters you’re working with, the better the process will be. Tell them your salary needs and flexibility in that area. Be upfront with other interviews. Tell them your concerns from an interview. Whether information is good, bad or ugly, recruiters appreciate it.
2) Don’t let yourself be double-submitted – This goes hand in hand with the first point. The most important thing to watch in working with multiple recruiters is being double-submitted – meaning two different recruiters submitted you for the same job. There’s absolutely no upside to this and it actually damages both the recruiter’s reputation and yours. It makes the recruiter look lazy, that he didn’t bother to ask if the candidate’s been submitted to that job. And, it makes the candidate look conniving, like they’re trying to game the system and up their odds at an interview. Believe me, it doesn’t work. And, I’ve seen companies show interest in a candidate, have that candidate subsequently double-subbed by someone else, and that company promptly drop that candidate like a hot rock. Why? They now think that candidate isn’t trustworthy. The lesson? Don’t let a recruiter submit you to the same job you’ve already been submitted to. The second recruiter will be disappointed that she didn’t get to you first, but she’ll be grateful that she didn’t double-sub you.
3) Don’t use multiple recruiters as a shotgun approach to job-hunting – This idea would be similar to someone going on Careerbuilder and applying for every job that has the word “analyst” in it, regardless of the job description. It’s a numbers game approach – the notion that if you throw enough resumes against the wall, one of them is bound to stick. Guess what. That approach doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work with recruiters, either, where you think that working with more recruiters means that one of them is guaranteed to find you something. Bad idea on two fronts. First, it entices you to take your foot off the gas and stop looking on your own – big mistake. Second, recruiters can only work on positions that their clients give them to work on. So, sometimes the right job coming along can be a timing thing where you’re concerned, which goes back to the first point that you need to keep looking on your own. Third, just because a recruiter has a position that fits you, doesn’t mean they will call you about it. For one, we talk to so many candidates that it’s an occupational hazard that people fall off our radar. I wish it didn’t happen, but it does. The other thing is that the recruiter is more focused on filling the position with the right background as defined by the client than they are with fitting you to a job. The burden is one you to make sure that recruiter knows why you’re qualified – why you can solve the problems this position is meant to tackle.
Should you use multiple recruiters in your job search? Probably. Should you lean completely on those recruiters? No. Should you be open and honest with your recruiters? Always.