When you register with a recruitment agency, you are entering a relationship with a person, ie with your recruitment consultant. It is the relationship you build with your consultant that will assist you in your career, it is not the recruiter who achieves this. The usual characteristics of any relationship then come into play and these are honesty, understanding, patience, respect, communication, cooperation and flexibility. Your consultant will do their best to help you but can only do so if you work with them. Here is how you can get the best out of this relationship.
- Honesty – make your consultant aware of holiday dates from the outset, your realistic notice period, and your true commitments to the job. Please make sure that the job you are being put forward to is definitely the job you want. If you don’t want the job, tell the consultant before they even put you forward; it avoids tainting your relationship and losing your credibility.
- Understanding, patience and respect – please be mindful of the fact that the consultant, like you, is in competition with others and they are doing their very best to find you the right opportunity. There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration when your consultant is working for you and many of these are outside of their control. Some of these could be: clients taking a long time to get back to them about your application (more than a week in some cases), other times it could be that the role has already been filled by another source, the consultant is always working with more than one candidate and client at any one time. Another factor that many candidates are not aware of is that the consultant certainly does not have access to every single job or client out there, they have a limited number of jobs and perhaps none of those are a good match for you at the time you are looking. Keep positive!
- Communication and flexibility – this can mean many things but in this case what the consultant would really appreciate is that the candidate can offer full and frank disclosure of facts relevant to the job search so that they can identify the right job. This means: availability to answer your phone or reply to emails quickly, preferred salary and hours of work, realistic commuting options and of course the type of job you are happy to take. When job hunting it’s important to allow yourself the opportunity to attend interviews, be flexible on the salary, location, hours etc, especially if you are changing industries. Once your interview is arranged, please avoid at all costs changing this. A lot of effort goes into making this happen and especially if you are interviewing with a larger company, it can be all the more difficult to re-arrange.
- Challenge the consultant – if there is a particular company you really want to work for, there is a chance that the consultant could potentially get you in. It is not guaranteed, nothing in life is, but they will try their best.
- Interview feedback – Consultants always really appreciate it when you give feedback following your interviews. This helps them in many ways, one of which is to understand the client better and pass this feedback onto the next candidates.
With all this in mind, hopefully you have some insight into what it’s like to work with a recruitment consultant and understand some of their frustrations. They will always do their best to help you out but you certainly need to work with them and, like with any relationship, it’s a two way street.
Good luck!
