With today’s technology there are online job boards that allow you to search all day and night for a job that interests you. Many of them will even notify you when they think they have one you would be interested in.
Sounds perfect, right? And in the technology world, no one needs to tell you how well a computer can think like a human.
It’s okay to laugh at that last statement because you know better than anyone that even the smartest technology boils down to a series of numbers. While technology has taken over many aspects of our world, and continues to improve everyday, there are some things that just require human contact.
Computers need someone at the helm telling them what to do–it’s simply the way the world works.
Relationships
A recruiter will take time to understand what you want out of a career. Often recruiters know the right questions to ask to make you think through what you truly want.
You may think you want to shift gears completely and take on an entirely new occupation.
However, maybe your desire to change jobs has less to do with what you are doing and more to do with the company and culture you are doing it for.
The impact your work community has on your daily satisfaction can not be understated. Disliking your boss or coworkers can easily translate into disliking everything about work, including your duties and responsibilities.
Consider finding a job at an organization that is more aligned with your values and character traits. This may be achievable by changing the size of the company you work for. While there is not a blanketing list of characteristics that every big company has, nor a list for smaller ones, there’s no doubt that the culture does change with size.
A recruiter, especially one who has been in the area and field for some time, knows and understands the reputation of the companies around them.
Many companies do exit interviews. For many recruiters, the initial interview with you will cover a multitude of the same topics as the company exit interview.
For example, you may be asked why you left, what you liked about your position, compared to what you didn’t particularly enjoy. All of these, and many more, paint a picture of a company, providing the recruiter insider information on what working for that particular company looks like. What may not have worked out for one person, may be perfect for another.
What a Recruiter Needs
A great recruiter wants to understand what a candidate wants and needs for career satisfaction, compensation and what is needed to maintain balance within the candidate’s family. However, he can only understand what you allow him to.
There is no possible way that being 100% transparent with your recruiter could hurt you. He wants both you and the client to be successful together, and the more he knows the better.
Even if you are just exploring your options and haven’t quite decided to jump ship yet tell him that. It may change the tone of the meeting to more of a pros and cons discussion. While if you are dead set on leaving, the recruiter won’t waste your time convincing you to stay or negotiate pay.
Recruiters are in the business of efficiency. The goal is to save you the time, energy, and hassle of the exhaustive process of job hunting as well as to have a sounding board for what your next career step could be. At the end of the day transparency helps them help you.
Reputation
If you think of recruiting from a business perspective, a recruiter has done a job well done when they have a satisfied customer, the same as you.
The finished product is your satisfying career.
A word from our recruiters: “A great recruiter wants the candidate to achieve long-term success in the role he/she is placed, because that is how clients judge the recruiter. We want our clients to be happy. Happy employees do amazing work.”
So you may think that you don’t need a recruiter or that you can explore your options all alone. And that may be true.
But when something comes up at work that you don’t know how to handle, you go down the hall to the guy who is an expert because he knows how to handle it.
When working on a project, everyone on the team has a task and a job. No one tries to handle the whole thing by themselves (or maybe they do and that’s why you want to leave).
Recruiters are in the business of you. They are on your team and they want to help you. So rely on your team. You could do it yourself, but you will likely have a better finished product, or in this case, career, if you use your team.
