Choosing a recruiter can have a big impact on your career: the right recruiter can play an important role in achieving success and job security; the wrong recruiter catches you in a bad or even career detrimental situation. In more than twenty-five years in the recruitment field, I have observed recruiters at these two poles, and mainly somewhere in between; Observe the professional benefits and unhappiness that a recruiter can cause in your life. Of course, you don’t need to make a uniform or ill-informed choice of who to choose as a recruiter. In this post, I will offer some key points for finding the right recruiter for your job search.
- Trust: As in most areas of human interaction, trust, or lack thereof, can be a determining factor in successful personal and professional relationships. Without at least some initial intuition for reliability, based on your first impression of a recruiter, I would suggest that you find someone else as soon as possible. When I started recruiting earlier, what I like to call pre-professional “Wild West Days”, trust was almost always a concern, using a recruiter could often become a “watch out for the buyer” scenario. Today I believe that the reputation, knowledge, consistency of the recruiter, ethics and professional recommendations are among the key indicators to trust and work with a recruiter. If you have a significant negative review on any of these topics, do not immediately select or fire a recruiter. To borrow a phrase from one of our favorite cultural icons, some recruiters are “masters of the art of deception.” These recruiters should be avoided regardless of the “optimistic scenario” they paint of the jobs they offer. Finally, always keep in mind that the hiring company pays a recruiter, no matter how effective it is, which can seriously affect the recruiter’s objectivity and sometimes honesty.

- Knowledge: If a recruiter doesn’t understand what you do and what, and why, you want to do the following, then forget about working with him because he is not qualified to help you. Beyond this basic qualifier, it is important that the recruiter you choose has knowledge and contacts, in your area of expertise: either on your own or through an accredited company that trains junior and intermediate recruiters. The length of experience should not necessarily be the determining factor in your recruiter selection, although companies and business people tend to use experience as a primary selling point to work with them. For the most part, this may be true because unethical entrepreneurs, and often their companies, quickly develop a bad reputation and don’t stay in business for long. Also, an energetic and ethical junior recruiter can work very, very hard on your behalf to establish yourself and have a good reputation, while some highly experienced recruiters can sometimes be exhausted and / or exhausted (recruiting can be an extremely stressful occupation) and just give a minimal effort to your job search
- History: How successful is your potential recruiter in placing people in close proximity to what you are looking for? There are many successful recruiters out there. That in itself is important information, but these locations may not be in your area of expertise. However, these recruiters can often have friends, who are very familiar with what you do, and for a fee from the other recruiters’ seeker, call center recruitment purely professional courtesy. When I first said that recruiting these recommendations or references were relatively rare, except if the recruiters operated in different geographic regions. However, today many recruiters obtain a good part of their income through referrals, generally called divisions, to and from other recruiters with another placement company. This is usually beneficial, but make sure your recruiter gets your preauthorization before sending your resume to a “split partner”. The increasing specialization and globalization of professional opportunities, in particular the economy of services such as IT, has contributed to this trend. Finally, finding a recruiter who has exclusive access to a manager or hiring company can be a great advantage in finding a position that improves your career.


