Career Burn Notice: Circumventing A Recruiter

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How would you like to kill your reputation with every staffing firm in town – in one easy step?

The scenario. You get an unexpected call from a headhunter at a staffing firm. He's pitching a job opportunity in town with a hot technology company that's engaged him to find somebody for the position, and if you're interested, he'd like to present your resume to them. Based upon the conversation, it sounds like the job is a great match for you, and would be an interesting step forward for your career. Once you've made it abundantly clear to the recruiter that you're interested in the job, he tells you the name of the company.

"Sure sounds interesting," you say to the recruiter. "Let me think about it and get back to you."

Then, in a moment of supposed clarity you decide that you've got a better chance of representing yourself to the employer, than you do if you have the staffing firm representing you. So, you go online to the company's website, ascertain which position the recruiter was selling you, and apply. Then you go on LinkedIn and send a note to the company's human resources department.

You've cut the staffing firm out of the equation. Pretty clever, right?

Wrong. You've just earned yourself a burn notice within the staffing world.

In case you're not familiar with the term "burn notice," it's a reference to a television show in which a CIA agent is disavowed and disowned by the agency. In essence, he's been labelled unreliable, and nobody wants anything to do with him.

Here's how this applies to you. Recruiters at staffing firms earn their paycheck by placing job seekers at companies. They get paid a fee - typically in the neighborhood of 25% of the first year's salary - to find a qualified candidate and get them hired. By cutting the staffing firm who presented you the job out of the loop, you've demonstrated that you're a liability. So let's say the job paid $100,000 annually; the staffing firm was due to get a cool $25k out the deal by placing you.

You cost the recruiter 25 big ones. At minimum, you've muddied the waters in terms of how you were made aware of the job and how your resume made it into the employer's hands. At most, you've shown both the staffing agency recruiter and the employer you can't be trusted – they'll talk about your application at length, and it's pretty likely that no matter how qualified you are for the job, both parties will decide that you're a bad player and not worth pursuing. It's the end of the road for your candidacy in this particular job.

And you'll have earned a flag on your application at both the staffing firm and the employer, telling anybody who's considering you for a job to avoid you like the plague.

Think it stops there? Think again. Recruiters can change firms, and trust me - when your name comes up in conversation as a potential candidate, they'll remember how you cost them their payday. You'll be persona non grata with their new firm, too.

I'm not saying that there aren't exceptions to this situation. There are always exceptions; but you are taking a substantial risk to your reputation by circumventing the recruiter. However, if you've already applied for the job with the company, that's another story. Let the recruiter know.

Bottom Line: You may have an "in" at the potential company, or simply feel that your chances are better if you apply on your own. Fight the urge to act outside the process. The recruiter is simply doing his or her job, and by identifying you for the role they've staked their claim on you for the position. Going around them at that point will be perceived as high treason, and may hurt your cause in the short and the long term than any gains you may realize.

• Want to boost your chances of getting noticed when applying for jobs online? Follow this link!
• What should you do if your employer finds out you're looking for a new job? Find out here.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

The Interview Lovefest –OR– Who REALLY Makes The Hiring Decision?

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Situations still exist where a hiring manager simply hires who he or she wants for the job. But this has become the exception, rather than the rule. These days, you've got to impress more than just the hiring manager at a potential employer. Hiring has become a group decision, with several interviewers involved.

And the decision to hire a particular person is often consensus-driven; in other words, all interviewers have to agree that the candidate is right for the job. In other words, fail to hit the mark with a single interviewer who has a bee in their bonnet, and they can black ball you. You're out; next candidate, please.

Why is it this way?

A bad hire can be costly to an organization. It costs serious money to pay their salary, to train them, to fix their work, and then to fund their severance package after they've ticked off their coworkers and cost the company a major client.

So, this makes a hiring manager less interested in taking the sole risk and responsibility for a hire. They want other people to play a role in making sure a potential employee fits the culture of the company and technical aspects of the role. They don't want their own career to stall if things don't work out with New Employee X. Conversely, if the individual is a superstar, everybody has a hand in bringing this new gem on board - free margaritas for everyone!

Welcome to the world of hiring by committee. Here are the players you need to impress, and what they want:

• Hiring Manager: That you'll make them look like a genius for hiring you because of the skills you bring; you can take instruction and work independently; you'll reduce their pain by taking over what part of the workload they've been covering. Unless they're really strategic, they want to make sure you won't become their boss anytime soon (though they really should be looking for successors).
• Peers / Coworkers: That you'll take over part of the team's workload, hopefully giving them breathing room and a bit more time to focus on what they want to focus on; you have the business and/or technical skills to keep up with the team; you won't be a threat to their own promotion opportunities; you're not a jerk.
• Human Resources:  That you fit into the salary structure they had planned; you really, really want to work there; you're not an employee relations issue waiting to happen.
• Internal or External Customers: That you have a strong customer-centric orientation; you will listen and respond to their needs; you're not a pain in the butt to deal with.
• Executives: That you are as good as the hiring manager says you are.

As you can see, everybody has a bit of a different motivation during the interview process. It's entirely possible that if an interviewer does or does not like you, they will try to influence the interviewers after them to their way of thinking. And it's much easier to get everybody to agree on "No", than it is to agree on "Yes".

Here are three strategies that should help you maneuver a diverse interview panel:

1. Do your research on the company and the division with which you are meeting. It seems obvious, but it apparently isn't. I've asked candidates, "So, what do you know about us?", and received an incredible number of fudged answers, which reflects very poorly on a candidate. Interviewers think, "We weren't important enough to research? How badly do you actually want to work here?"  Check Google News, Hoovers, and any other sources which can tell you what's going on with your potential employer.
2. Do your research on your interviewers. If you happen to get an agenda in advance, do your research on LinkedIn as to each individual's background. You may wish to Google them as well, see if anything interesting pops up. If one of your interviewers was recently awarded a high-visibility patent, or presented at an industry conference, it can only help to know this.
3. Be respectful to everybody you meet. From the CEO down to the janitor, be friendly, courteous, and helpful to everybody. I, personally, resent candidates who treat the recruiter as a patsy and the hiring manager with reverence - it shows a lack of common decency, and a nasty political side. Anybody who has a bad experience with you will find a way to funnel this information the decision makers.  While we're on the subject, send thank-you notes to all interviewers. Every single one. Email is sufficient. If you aren't able to get business cards for everybody, ask the person who scheduled your interview for email addresses. Send promptly. Interviewers can - and will - talk about who received a thank you card and who did not.

• The hiring manager can't make up her mind? Find out how to get the process moving along here!
• Have the job interview jitters? Here are some techniques to help you feel more confident during the interview.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

Should I Drop Off My Resume In Person?

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You see a job advertisement online, and it suits you to a T. You could do the job with one hand tied behind your back, you'd enjoy the work, and it's at a company you've always wanted to work for.

As it turns out, the company is located just down the street from you. Although the company is directing you to upload your resume, rather than simply posting it online as the advertisement asks, why not take a trip over to the company's office, ask for the corporate recruiter, and hand them the resume?

It'd be great! Why wouldn't they want to meet you? You'd be a perfect fit for the job, and they'd know – on the spot, no less! – that they could end the search right here and now!

Unfortunately, things are a bit more complicated. Showing up unannounced with your resume could cause you more harm than help.

Why?

In the days before everybody had email and the internet (think: the 1990s), if you were interested in a job you saw in the newspaper (!) you'd print up a resume and a cover letter on a nice linen stationery, and drop it in the mail to the company. That meant that from the day a job was posted to receiving the first resume, it was usually a few days before a recruiter would get anything in the mail. So, if you showed up with a resume the day a job opening was published in the paper, there was the possibility the recruiter and the hiring manager were itching to get the job filled. It showed that you were a motivated job seeker with spunk.

In fact, this was how my wife snagged her first job when we moved to Miami; she's an editor and a journalist; she ran in to drop off a resume to a magazine publisher that was preparing to open up a new editor's job. She gave them the resume, they handed it to the publisher, and within a few days she had an interview then a job offer. She spent the next nine years at that magazine.

It doesn't work that way anymore. Generally speaking, it is not considered a welcome gesture these days for a job seeker to drop off a resume at an employer for a professional-level role.

What's changed? Basically, the entire recruitment and hiring process, and this shift was enabled by two factors:

First, email. This change allowed job seekers to send a resume to somebody at a company instantaneously. The person receiving the email could check out the applications at their convenience, but still much more quickly than a resume sent by traditional mail.

Second, online job applications. This started with job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, but grew into several other job portals. Then came along applicant tracking systems (ATS's) – in short, these are software applications that recruiters use to collect, sort, and process resumes; once these ATS's were implemented, they also enabled companies to build out their own job pages on their web sites, where they could collect resumes directly through their system.

As these systems arose, the practice many companies had of running "employment centers" where they would take walk-in applications of job seekers waned. Some companies still operate walk-in employment centers, but they're primarily directed at finding manual or hourly labor, where job seekers wouldn't traditionally have a resume they could email (if the employer does run one of these, by all means feel free to stop by).

Here are three reasons it can be a risky idea for a job seeker to drop off a resume:

1. The recruiter's job is now database and systems driven. They're managing massive amounts of data; it's not unusual for a recruiter to collect thousands of resumes through their ATS, which assists them in prioritizing job seekers based upon fit. Since the process is all digital, presenting a paper resume (without uploading it into the system first) presents a hassle and an inconvenience that needs to be scanned, entered, and prioritized.

2. It's an interruption for the recruiter. A recruiter's day is typically filled with candidate sourcing activities, phone screens, in-person interviews, meetings with hiring managers, strategic projects, and other activities. In other words, they're really, really busy. And here's the conundrum; companies and recruiters are very sensitive to the customer experience for job applicants. They want the employer to be perceived as an employer of choice, and so while it may disrupt the recruiter's day to drop what they are doing and meet with the candidate who showed up unannounced, they may still greet them in order to provide a positive experience to the candidate so they don't feel snubbed by the company – but the recruiter may actually resent it, hurting your chances in the long run.

3. Showing up is outside the process the company asked you to follow. Employers like to hire people who demonstrate a propensity for following directions. It's highly likely they employer asked job seekers to apply online; conversely, it's highly unlikely they asked job seekers to up unannounced. It's a demerit.

What should you do if you feel you're the perfect candidate, and you want to make a positive impression and stand out?

• Apply online first – promptly. Yes, it's a pain in the rump, but go online to the company's website and upload your resume and fill out those boxes, or respond however the online job ad says. But this shows you respect the company's processes – and their employees' time. Besides, the company representatives will likely send you back to this step at some point anyway, so why not get ahead of it?

• Reach out to an appropriate contact online. There is nothing wrong with finding the recruiter or hiring manager and sending them a brief note via email or through LinkedIn. A well placed, well timed note such as this (indicating that you've already applied online, of course) can often elicit a positive response from the recipient if you're a good fit. And they can review it and respond to it on their own time, rather than when you show up.

• Leverage your network. Do you know somebody who works at the company? Ask them to put in a good word and route your resume on your behalf. They may have the inside track on the opportunity, and a respected referral source is usually held in high regard by the human resources department.

One more thing: Should you feel vitally compelled to drop off a resume at that company, just leave it with the front desk. Don't ask for the recruiter to come out and meet you; they'll get the resume anyway – the receptionist will give it to them. And dress professionally.

• Did you ever wonder why companies advertise job openings when they plan to hire internally? Find out here.

• What does it mean when a company tells you that you're "not a cultural fit?" Learn more here.

This article appeared on TheJobNetwork on December 23, 2016. It can be found here.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.