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The Professional Finders | The Reschool'd Podcast
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Aug 14, 2023
(General Career Series: Chapter 14) In our previous episode on how companies hire, we mentioned that recruiters are used by some to find potential applicants. And, thanks to the question submitted by a listener, we are extending that episode and discussing specifically professional recruiters. We talk about what they are/do, why they’re used, and provide you some tips on how to use and work with them. Episode link: https://play.headliner.app/episode/15943686?utm_source=youtube
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Welcome to the Reschooled Podcast, the show that discusses all the things that schools
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may have missed with your hosts, AJ Couty and Jason Gordon. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show
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We are the Reschooled Podcast, the show that discusses all the things that schools may not have prepared you for
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As always, I'm AJ, and sitting across from me, Jason. Jason, how you doing? Oh, doing great, AJ. At least for you guys, the semester is getting kicked off, right
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Well, no, it's next week is when our first class is, but you give me until Friday, and I'll tell you I'm doing a lot better
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That's when the end of my, me as a student semester ends, and I get finished with this
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I will have turned in this paper, good, bad, or ugly. I'm not sure which one it is going to be, but
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I will have turned it in by then. Man, balancing school and a full-time job is rough, isn't it
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I'm struggling. I am struggling mightily. Well, I feel sorry for my students
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Every time I talk to them and they're like, yeah, I'm working 20, 30 hours a week plus doing this full-time
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I'm like, you know, you got one more element to add in there and that's family and then that's the trifecta
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I don't know how you balance all of them. And I know you, you got a family, you're going to school, you're doing the other at the same time
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Yeah. And that was actually the hard part. That was the hard part when we went to the beaches. I was trying to, I told myself I was going to get some schoolwork done, but you know
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the kids wanted to go out to the beach or the pool. I wanted to hang out with them and then also had my brother and his wife there and my parents
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were there. And so we all kind of wanted to just hang out and I didn't get squat accomplished that week
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Um, and so it's kind of caught up to me now, but, um, yeah
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The addition of family and then you got work and you got school and then you got, you know, other things
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It's rough, but it's, you know, I keep looking at that light at the end of the tunnel
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Yeah. Getting it finished with because the outcome is going to be a lot better than what I'm going through right now
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It'll pay dividends, too. It will. You know, I mean, particularly in the education career, right
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Yeah. What you do has a direct correlation with earning potential and job opportunities
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Amen. That's why I'm doing it. Excellent. Well, today's episode, this is actually a piggyback on last week's episode because, you know, we're talking about how small and large companies hired their employees
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And more specifically, when we were talking about the large companies, you'd brought up this thing of professional recruiters and how that's such a big area or big kind of asset that large companies have when it comes to the hiring process
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And so we decided to just create a full episode just specifically on professional recruiters
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Well, finally, we were asking them to do. They reached out to her and said, you know, what's this deal with recruiters
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Right. So thank you for, you know, whoever it was. I can't remember your name that reached out to us and asked us about recruiters
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So you gave us something to talk about. Great follow up episode. And it is important
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Right. That's one of those things we sometimes get ahead of ourselves. We talk about things that the rest of the world, you know, may not be fully aware of
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So we're going to talk about that a little bit, which reminds me, go to our website
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reschool.com. That's where you're going to, you know, see all our recent episodes, anything we're putting
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on social media, things like that. It's going to be there, but it's also where you can reach out to us directly and tell
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us what you want to hear. So there you go. Reschool with a D, not an E-D, reschool.com
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And as we said last episode, the stars are free. So just give it to your heart's content
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Yeah, go on those social media. I mean, excuse me, those podcasting platforms and just tell the world how awesome we are
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You know, some of them you can even leave a comment. Well, today's quick question dealing with professional recruiters is what has been your experience with recruiters
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Well, honestly, I have never used a recruiter myself. But so many people I know personally have used work with recruiters successfully, my brother being one of them. And because I run it or did run the internship program at our school was I dealt with recruiters all the time
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time. Okay. It was something that regularly came up. I taught about them. I spoke with them regularly
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and you know, there's so many of them in the United States now, it's becoming a really valid
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career field opportunity for people who are interested in it. So there are all sorts of
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reasons, you know, why we should be talking about this. What about you? Do you know any recruiters
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you do any of that? So I've, I've had experience with recruiters, um, but it, it was when I was in
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college and it was for smaller jobs and it tended to be more of these kind of creepy, sleazy
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recruiters that, you know, it wasn't professional. Like it wasn't, it didn't come off as professional
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and which made me just realize I didn't want to go to that job fairly quickly. But, uh, yeah
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it was just, it was awkward. It was, it was weird. They were kind of almost speaking out of both
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sides of their mouth and, uh, it just didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. So that's why I just
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so recruiters, and, and that's why this one has, when I saw this one on the show doc today that
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we're going to do recruiters, like it, it, I had a bad taste in my mouth just because I guess my
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experiences weren't the best. Like I've never, I guess, I guess you'd say I've never experienced a
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professional recruiter, I've experienced people just trying to get people jobs to make it, you
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know, ends meet kind of thing. Well, well, you know, maybe us talking about that today will help
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people understand the process, will help people understand what recruiters do, and it'll alleviate
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some of those fears and it'll help people spot when you're dealing with less than savory characters
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or less than reputable recruiters or agencies when you in the job career hunting process So all good Very true Well let get into the main questions main topic And let just start with the most obvious one
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What is a recruiter? Okay. Well, recruiter is an HR function, human resource function
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What it means is companies either internally, right, having somebody inside the company or externally, somebody outside the company is going to handle the process of bringing in new employees into the company
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So recruitment itself is bringing in people. A recruiter is someone who works as part of that process
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Now, an internal recruiter or an external recruiter may only handle different parts of that process
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So usually, OK, if you're dealing with an external recruiter, their focus is on finding potential candidates to hire
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If you're talking about internal recruiter, their job will be mixed across the board, but they're going to focus heavily upon the actual process for bringing the person on board
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Once you get past the, you know, these are the people we're interviewing, everything else after that, the negotiation on compensation, the actual interview arrangement process, right
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The establishment of benefits, all of those things, everything it takes to bring somebody into the company
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So that being said, this isn't an HR course. So what we really want to focus on is that part of how do you get to the point where you have an interview with the company
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And that's primarily a job of the external recruiter or just a sliver of the job of an internal recruiter
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And I think for the common verbiage, if you've never heard the term recruiter or professional recruiter before, you've probably heard the term headhunter
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And that's essentially the same thing. I mean, you're looking for an external recruiter, bring some people in
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They're trying to fill a position of some sort. So they're going to go through
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and typically with your external recruiters, well, let's go to the next question
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because I think I was starting to teeter on the answer to that one. It was why are recruiters a thing
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And what I was going to say is I think one of the reasons why recruiters are so commonly used
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in especially large companies is because you're talking about potentially hundreds if not thousands of applicants
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applying for this position, and then you've got to whittle it down and whittle it down, whittle it down
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And that takes time and resources from the company, whereas if you can get a recruiter to do that
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that person go ahead and narrows it down, and they become more specific to what they're looking for
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They're looking specifically for skills. They don't actually have to go through necessarily and go through all the resumes or CVs or whatever
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They don't have to go through that because they have other ways to find these skills that they're looking for
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So it really cuts down on the work of finding the new potential hiree from the company's perspective and puts that responsibility on somebody else
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And they're willing to pay for it. And, you know, the Internet has exasperated the problem there
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Right before, when you had to mail in an application and that type of thing, you know, you weren't going to get all this garbage
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People who didn't put time and effort into it. If you did, you just could discard it really quickly
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But now when it's so easy, right, there's so many services out there that will allow you to upload your resume and stuff like that and just hit send and apply
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And then they'll do the rest for you through bots or whatever. Right. Or you can just sit behind your computer, upload a couple of documents and hit send
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People are listing companies are listing positions and they're getting hundreds, if not thousands of applications for the position
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And the problem is out of that hundred and ninety of them won't even remotely be qualified
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So digital anonymity, it probably leads to to more, if not, if not embellishment, outright lying on their resume
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And so your recruiters take that into consideration. They kind of take that out of the equation for the company because they go through the grunt work
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And, you know, talking to companies, I've asked and the number one
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Inhibition they have for listing a job publicly is that they get so many applicants who have none of the skills required, who have none of the qualifications
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Yet they applied anyway and they still have to sort through those resumes to find the ones who actually have the qualifications
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Now, some of these fancier platforms will help you turn on filters. Right
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That will filter out if they don't have a certain level of education, if there's not a certain number of keywords in there
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But with filters, you run the risk of losing good applicants, right
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Filtering out people who would be great candidates. So what this has done is while the Internet has created reach for people to be able to apply to jobs, you know, from anywhere and to find out about jobs more readily for the company, for the internal HR department or the HR person or whoever's doing the hiring
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It has become so difficult to manage this process. So what that has created they need for is the external recruiter to alleviate that process, to narrow down the field, to provide lists of potential candidates for the job for interview so that that mess, right, that all that work that needs to be done doesn't have to clog up the system for the company
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They've got somebody externally to do it. And we'll talk about how they're compensated in a method in a minute, but it's even more economical for the company to do that
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Real talk here. Okay. Honesty. Have you ever applied for a position that you were very underqualified for Oh yes Yes Oh yeah okay I did too Maybe I hit the lottery I don know Everybody has right
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Of course. Now, I will tell you this. I've never applied for a job where I didn't meet a primary list of qualifications where
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I, if they didn't have anybody else, would they have interviewed me
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Yeah. Yes. Right? Exactly. But have I applied for some jobs that, yeah, they're going to hire somebody a good bit senior to me
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Like I'm applying 10 years above my head. Yes. Yes, I have done that
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I was going to say like, you know, they have the requirements that they need. And it's usually like a list of like six, seven, eight different things
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I've applied for a couple of them where I've met one. The other five, I was like, not a chance, just one
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And then that way, if nobody applied for it, they're like, oh, well, at least there's somebody
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Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, surprisingly enough, you know, that is the
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I didn't get to job either. That is the common thread, right? That is the commonality across the board
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All right. So let's get into the next question. And that is, how do recruiters find potential candidates
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Like, how do they go about it, finding these potential? So the whole purpose of their job is to find candidates to potentially hire for this company because that's what they get paid for
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How do they go about doing it? Well, to start with, you brought up a good point
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Companies hire them to do it so they know who they're looking for, right, the type of candidate they're looking for
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So the company or the internal HR group at the company or whatever has said, these are the type of people we need and we need for this position, blah, blah, blah
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Now, recruiter now has to find candidates for the company that meet that requirement or, you know, specifications of employee
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Now, what they're going to do is once they find these individuals, they're going to give the company the list and contact information
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And the idea is that if the company interviews these people and hires any of them, the recruiter is only compensated if they hire one or more of these individuals
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And it's basically based upon a percentage of salary paid to these individuals
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So if you propose five candidates, they hire five of them and your contract is that you get 15 or 20 percent of what whatever is their first year salary
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Well, it'd be great for you if they hired all five of them, right? So you get 20% of all five salaries
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So I know that's a little bit different question than you asked, but I just wanted to lay out
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there ahead of time the motivation for the recruiter, right? They want to find really solid candidates who have a legitimate chance of being hired
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One, they want to earn the money. But two, if they give over candidates who aren't a good fit, bad candidates for the
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position, right? And the company doesn't hire any of them or doesn't see any value in interviewing
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them, that recruiter is not going to win that contract from the company in the future. They're
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not going to be recruiting for that company any longer. So those are our recruiter's motivations
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right? That's the reason behind what the recruiter does and why they do it well. Otherwise
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they would just sling resumes at the company, right? Throw out anybody that could potentially
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they get hired. So the recruiter is going to work as hard as they can to find the absolute best
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candidates for the company. All right. So how did they do it? Right. Two methods. There's the active
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and passive method. The passive method, they throw out feelers and try to get applications
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and they'll do the company function of turning on filters and sorting through online applications
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So they will list company positions with Indeed, Monster, Simply Hired, LinkedIn
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Okay. When people see that and they apply to it, the application is not going to the company
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It is going to the recruiter. The recruiter reviews all the applications, comes down to a narrow pool there
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But as we already talked about, that is a huge pain in the butt
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Okay. You're going to get all these people applying that aren't, you know, qualified
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and you turn on the filters too high, you're going to get rid of good candidates and all that stuff
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Okay? So that's not the best way. The best way, and recruiters tend to use a combination of these, is the active pursuit of employees
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And what they do is, so statistically across the U.S., we gave this in a different episode where we talked about LinkedIn
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90% of recruiters, okay, use exclusively LinkedIn and 96 or 97% of recruiters use LinkedIn
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Okay. So nine out of 10, and there are approximately 40,000 recruiters in the United States
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There's only 320 million people in the United States, right? That just shows you on a per capita basis, you know, how many recruiters there truly are out there
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OK, but that being said, OK, the recruiter is actively searching for individuals through LinkedIn and they're doing it the same way you would search for something on Google
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They're doing searching for keywords. So if your resume, that is your LinkedIn profile, everything that's included in your profile, if it doesn't include the keywords that the recruiter is searching for, you're not going to show up
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So it comes back and I highly highly highly encourage you to look at our episode on LinkedIn where we talk about how you proactively use LinkedIn to maximize the opportunity for you being found by recruiters So that the active method And then they can just they can use their industry contacts as well They can reach out to other headhunters
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right? They can reach out to industry professionals. They can reach out to schools
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They can reach out, you know, the career development centers at schools and try to
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identify good candidates for positions because headhunters aren't just for executives anymore
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Back in your parents' day, if you talk to your parents about a headhunter or recruiter
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they were only looking for senior level people in organizations. Now, recruiters are looking for
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people all the way down to your earliest professional hire. Like I said, you know
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lots of companies, your Fortune 500 companies might look for recent graduates through their
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internship program. Well, these smaller midsize companies, they're hiring recruiters to bring in
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you know, recent, you know, recent graduates that qualify for positions. Okay. Just as a big
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company would. So there you go. That's how that, that's how that works. So last question
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tips, it's really not even a question, statement, tips for our listeners when it comes to using or
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working with recruiters. Do you have any? Yeah. Okay. So to start with, um
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make certain, right. That you are preparing yourself to be found by recruiters
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Look at job descriptions, try to identify what companies are looking for and make certain that
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on your resume, on professional profiles, right. Like LinkedIn and others, wherever recruiter may
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be searching. Okay. If it's the passive method and you're applying things with a resume
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make certain that you take the job description and build your resume backwards
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You use those keywords in the job description. Same thing on your LinkedIn profile. If you're
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targeting a specific type of job in a career industry, make certain that you build out your
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LinkedIn profile based upon those keywords and whatnot included in the job description
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because that's the way you're going to be found. So that's my first tip. You got to be found, right
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Yeah, and I think we said this on the resume episode too
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It's the customization of the resume, personalization, if you will. You don't want to always have a single resume
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You want it to be personalized to whatever the position you're going for, whatever the company you're going for, whatever they're looking for
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and always have it. It's a living document that will change for everything that you do
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I think the same thing goes with recruiters. You have to customize it in a way that fits what you're trying to go for and which will let them find you
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So I think that's a great one. My tip, and I only really have one, is that when you're dealing with recruits, this is more or less after the point in which you've been contacted and you've agreed to maybe an interview or a meeting or coffee or whatever
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um my biggest tip for you is to take it much like that they're taking it is you're interviewing them
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as much as they're interviewing you so ask the questions get the feel try to get the read on
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if they're somebody that this is legit that they're going through is this kind of you know
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is this really professional or is this not necessarily professional again I'm coming from the standpoint because I've had that experience where it just didn't feel right and so I feel
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like this is kind of as much of an interview for you as it is for them
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And so that would be my tip. That's a great tip because there are companies out there that are just blindly fishing and
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they're going to do nothing for you, right? Don't waste your time with them. So like you say, interview them the same way
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Great point. The only really other thing I want to say is like, so you've been found, you know, you
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bedded the recruiter and stuff like that is to, one, you still need to network
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You can't depend on this wholly, right? Your best source of finding jobs is networking, but you can also network with recruiters, okay
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You can connect with recruiters on LinkedIn. You can network with HR professionals, right, who you may meet or know
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These people are, again, going to be your best source. And in that way, you can make certain that whoever you deal with as a recruiter is legitimate, right
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If you find on LinkedIn that people list that they recruit for a specific company that you're interested in, try networking with or becoming a connection with that recruiter
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That's going to be very important, again, for you to be found, right
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But you've also, again, identified a professional who is going to act professionally and going to put your best interests up front
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Right. So there you go. I guess those are those are my only tips
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It was a really good episode. This is one I wasn't I was like I said, I was shocked to see it because this is not something I'm well versed in because I don't have a lot of experience
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And a little bit of experience I do have is not necessarily the greatest, but it's been a good episode in the sense that it's been very direct
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Like we didn't, it's, it's pretty straightforward and pretty short. So it's been a fun episode
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Short and informative. Right. There you go. Well, you have anything to say before we head out? Just remind everybody, hit us up on the website, visit our social media profile
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And of course your favorite podcasting app, give us all the stars you can tell the world
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that we're great. Tell a friend, tell anyone. We just want to get listeners. Our stuff never gets old
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It's evergreen. Right. Absolutely. Well, we hope you enjoyed it. We hope to see you next time
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Until then. Goodbye. Take care. Thanks for listening to the Reschooled Podcast
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Be sure to head over to reschooled.com for news and other information on things we're getting into
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