5 Ways To Separate Good Recruiters From Bad

[Joywtome231]

In a recent post, ‘The first job interview; prepare to succeed’, I briefly mentioned using an external recruiter to help with your job search. This article, on how to spot good from bad, is the follow up and is designed to help candidates make the most of working with an external recruiter. I hope it’s also useful to internal recruiters and hiring managers, as some of the behaviours mentioned should ring alarm bells for client and recruiter relationships.

Engaging with a good recruiter is a clever way to put yourself ahead of the pack when the time comes for a move. There’s a widely quoted figure that 40% of jobs are not advertised. This is a good indication that there’s a ‘hidden’ jobs market which you won’t come across if you only search on job boards. Good recruiters are constantly talking to their clients and candidates and often matches can be made without the need for advertising.

There is no doubt that working with a good recruiter can help candidates to make spain phone number resource objective decisions about which companies to approach and ultimately which job offer to accept. Working with a bad recruiter, however, can be painful and time consuming when time is at a premium in the first place. Stick with the following five tips and you’ll make your job search more successful and less stressful.


Check out their social media presence
Before picking up the phone or firing off an email, consider looking on social media for someone relevant to your search. LinkedIn has some pretty powerful search tools as does Twitter, and you can filter the results afterwards for even more clarity. This serves a dual purpose, as you’ll unearth potentially good recruiters in your sector and equally you won’t find the recruiters who haven’t bothered to work on their profiles. A bad social media presence is often an indication of the person behind the profile.

I was at the Festival or Marketing last week in London, learning about the latest and greatest things in the marketing world. It was fascinating and I picked up some excellent snippets of information. One quote that stuck in my mind was this one, attributed to Danny Santagato, ‘To know a person, watch what they do, not what they say.’ This is so true. Anyone can talk themselves up on the phone or even in person, but it’s their actions that will really tell you all you need to know. This applies to social media as well. If the person’s timeline is full of untargeted job postings and nothing else, you can be assured that this is what you’ll get if you engage with that recruiter. If, on the other hand, the recruiter is offering advice and sharing interesting content from within your sector, it’s likely that you’ll get a much better service, from someone who shares a passion for your area of expertise.