Using Recruiters vs. Applying Directly

If you have not been submitted to a company by a recruiter, you can often apply for a position directly through their website. Almost every corporate website has an “About Us / Careers” type of link you can click on, which lists available positions along with a form for submitting your resume and applying to a position. And at companies that don’t use outside recruiters, this is sometimes the only direct option.

Admittedly, most of these resume submission websites are truly horrid examples of UI engineering. They typically have dozens of fields for you to fill out, often spread over several pages. Some attempt to be clever and parse your Word resume, invariably mangling your text and formatting in the process. One wonders why they can’t just accept an uploaded Word resume and be done with it, since that’s what HR ultimately ends up passing around internally in 99% of the cases anyway.

Anyhow, some people wonder whether anything happens with the information after they click ‘Submit’. You might get an e-mail acknowledgement that the company has received your submission, but most of the time you won’t hear anything back after that.

Well, I can tell you that the submissions do not indeed fall into a black hole. In fact, they usually go into the same pool of candidates as resumes sourced from outside recruiters. I can attest to this not only because I’m a hiring manager, but also because I’ve personally gotten two jobs from applying directly on company websites! There were no recruiters involved in either case.

Having said that, using a recruiter is still the easier approach. You don’t have any silly web form to fill out, and the recruiter can market your resume to a larger number of companies.

It is true that if you apply directly to a company instead of going through a recruiter, the company can save on the recruiter’s fee. However, the fact that a candidate came in through a recruiter should not normally stop a company from hiring the person – assuming that the company uses recruiters, that is. The fact they’re using recruiters means they’ve already mentally swallowed the idea of paying the recruiting fee.

And in case you’re wondering, in my experience a company has NEVER offered a candidate more money just because they applied directly and the company has saved on recruiter costs. It just doesn’t happen.