Although as a candidate it may seem like your recruiter is doing all the work to get you a job (or doing nothing at all, as the case may be), there are many elements involved in the chain between you and a job.
First is the independent recruiter. They are the ones that pull your resume off the boards or put up the job listing that you respond to. Alternatively, a sourcer may find your resume in a search or by probing your company’s org structure.
Next is the HR representative at the hiring company. There may actually be several HR people involved: for instance one that works directly with the recruiter, one that sifts through the resumes, and another that does interview scheduling. In these cases likely you’ll most likely only have contact with the scheduler.
Next is the hiring manager. You’ll inevitably meet this person during the interview, even if it’s only for a brief introduction and handshake. This is the person you’ll need to impress since they will make the ultimate decision on whether or not you get hired. They may also determine your salary, or at least have significant input on it, though your actual negotiation will likely be done through HR.
There are also other engineers and managers who will sit in on the interview. These people may have had varying amounts of notice; in fact some of them may have been pulled in at the last moment. They have less riding on the hiring decision than the manager, but that doesn’t mean they won’t grill you thoroughly.
Finally, there are the senior executives who have to sign off on the offer. These people rarely meet the candidate in person unless it’s for a fairly senior position. Their only input is likely to be in approving the offer and adjusting the amount if necessary. If they decide that your offer is too high, there’s unfortunately not a lot that you can do to change their minds – especially since you won’t have a clue as to who they are.
2 comments:
This is a good overview of the hierarchy in most mid-to-large size businesses, and I like your point about focusing effort on the actual hiring manager. But how much do you think a candidate should attempt to "impress" a recruiter? Obviously the recruiter is going to "sell" the candidate initially, so you'd want one who believes in your skills (if you were a candidate). As a frequent employer for a mid-size company I wonder how some recruiters weed through applicants. The next link in our current hiring chain, the recruiting community Dayak, has found our company some great applicants, perhaps because their business promotes heavy competition between applicants and their recruiters? Maybe I should ask one of my recent hires how he came upon his recruiter -- is it always just a resume search, or is there more to it than that? I imagine with the job market as competitive as it is now some candidate qualifications bring a high premium among recruiters.
Personally speaking I've found that most recruiters do a minimum amount of filtering of candidates; they just throw resumes at their clients and let the companies sort them out.
Having said that however, I have had recruiters who have talked with me at length in person or over the phone to discuss my skills and interests and see how that might fit their open reqs.
You would think that the more personalized, targeted approach would lead to better fits when the candidates are presented to the companies -- but that's not always the case. As I blogged earlier, sometimes the sheer volume of resumes thrown at us by some recruiters results in as many good candidates as when we are sent hand picked ones by other recruiters.
It could be argued that it should be the recruiter's job to filter out weak candidates before presenting them to the company, but in my experience the hiring managers do a much better job of that than the recruiters anyway.
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