In the earlier stages of your career, you may have found jobs by sending your resume to recruiters who were willing to add it to their database and sometimes try to market you to their clients. These would have been contingency recruiters. As you progressed in your career, you may even have been contacted by recruiters attempting to lure you away from your current employer for a new job. These would have been retained recruiters who were searching (headhunting) for people with specific skills and experience. Now, as an experienced person in mid-career who is the one looking for a new job, the rules of the game just changed and you need to learn the new rules. Let’s look at some critical distinctions about recruiters that you need to know.
Contingency recruiters typically work at staff and lower management levels and some may specialize in a particular industry at higher levels. Contingency recruiters collect their fees only when a company hires you. In the past, if you sent your resume to more than one contingency recruiter, the one who submitted your resume first was the one that collected a fee. Consequently, they don’t have time to gather enough information from the company or to conduct extensive interviews with multiple candidates. Companies that use contingency recruiters are usually looking for younger and less expensive candidates. Because of this, more experienced people at higher salaries will not be very successful using contingency recruiters to find full-time employment.
Retained recruiters are engaged on an exclusive basis and are typically paid according to a schedule whether or not their client hires a candidate. Retained recruiters usually work at more senior levels or where the skills are technical or very specialized. Since they are paid a large fee (generally one-third of total compensation), clients expect their recruiters to search for candidates from competing companies or, sometimes, even from a company they want to specifically target. In my search practice (I took retained assignments only), my clients would not seriously consider candidates that were not currently working, even if they were the most qualified.
What does this mean for you? Not only are contingency recruiters not going to be helpful to you but neither are retained recruiters – Someone changed the rules of the game on you! This doesn’t mean you should ignore recruiters all-together. It means that you should not spend more than 10% of your time sending your resume to recruiters or trying to contact them. If your resume happens to land on their desk at the moment when they realize they have not been successful at finding someone with your skills and experience, they just might contact you.
