My friend Jason Alba of JibberJobber asks a good question in his article “How do I help my buddy.” He wants some input from recruiters, so I thought I would step up to the plate.
Now I’m participating in the blog carnival that Jason is hosting, so I won’t go into all the detail of the post that I am preparing for that event, but I do have a few ideas on how Jason or you can help someone (including yourself) get connected recruiters and utilize them. It has been a plan of mine, since posting comments on Jason’s blog on Love your Recruiter to do a series on how to best utilize the services of a recruiter. Now seems as good a time as any. This will be the first post in the series and it may be a bit short, but it will be a start at least. I think the series will tie in nicely with my Recruiters Bill of Rights.
If you want to get connected with a recruiter and have one work on your behalf, the first thing that you must do is Identify Recruiters in Your Field. Now, I’m not the world’s greatest expert at CyberSluething but I think I can figure out that if I work in the restaurant industry, then search terms like “restaurant recruiters“, “executive restaurant recruiters“, “executive restaurant search“, “restaurant search firm“, etc. will yield a number of sites on the Internet for companies and individuals who recruit in the restaurant industry. Now, if you just substitute your industry for “restaurant” then you should start to be able to build a pretty good list of firms that recruit for people like you.
Identifying the companies is the first step, then you want to start contacting them. But BEFORE you contact them, you are going to want to have a presentation that will get their attention…. so I think will finish the post up here, and discuss what and how to present to recruiters next time. Oh, almost forgot…. when you identify these companies that recruit in your area of expertise, you are going to need to save them in some sort of database. You are going to want to keep track of your interaction with them. I suggest that you take a look at the career toolset over at JibberJobber.com, it will do a bang up job of that (and more.)