4 Ways Building a Relationship With A Recruiter Can Boost Your Career

Building a relationship with a good recruiter is like hiring a personal career advocate – we help you with your CV, give you interview preparation, negotiate salary and conditions on your behalf, schedule your interviews, and provide you with heaps of general advice and insider insights that you would not otherwise have.

The best part is, working with a recruiter costs you nothing but can potentially come with great benefits.

Here are 4 ways a recruiter can directly increase your chances of landing a new job.

1. Recruiters Can Maximize Your Chances of Getting an Interview

A good recruiter will have personal relationships with their clients. That means we meet hiring managers face to face to discuss their needs, preferences, and requirements – giving us an insider view into the whole application process.

We always format CVs before we send them out, checking for mistakes and optimizing presentation with our client’s preferences in mind. For example, if we know the name of the university you attended is important to our client, we make sure to put education at the top of the CV.

Once we send out the CV, we have direct contact to the hiring managers so we can follow up. Having the ability to remind the client to look into your CV, means we can get feedback quite quickly. We can also talk them through your profile, which speeds up the process of getting an interview set up.

If the client is not interested, we have the ability to ask why, and potentially overcome some of their objections with information that we know from speaking with you personally. Perhaps, something just wasn’t clear from the CV.

Our success rate at securing candidates interviews was that 43% of CV’s that we sent got invited to an interview last year.

2. Recruiters Provide Insider Insight and Exclusive Interview Preparation

Once we have helped you lock down an interview, we make sure you are prepared.

When you apply to a position directly, you have no way of knowing what the interviewer is really looking for, how formal/casual to act, what traits or characteristics are most valuable at the company… it’s a shot in the dark.

A good recruiter can give you background information on the interviewer, tell you about his/her preferences, and often even give you insights into the kinds of questions he/she will ask you.

3. Recruiters serve as your advocate and personal negotiator

After an interview, a recruiter serves as your advocate and personal negotiator.

If you are working with a recruiter, give them a call to tell them how it went. Discussing the interview gives your recruiter the ability to handle objections or concerns from the client’s side. If there is something you wish you said (or didn’t say) for example, your recruiter can bring it up and help you rectify the situation when they next speak to the client.

Recruiters will also negotiate your salary and work conditions once the client is ready to make an offer. The best recruiters will have agreed this all at the start of the process so the offer stage should be a smooth step.

4. Recruiters can present you with exclusive opportunities

Sometimes when a recruiter and client have a very strong relationship, the client will work exclusively with that recruitment company. This means, there may be no other way of hearing about the opportunity other than through this recruiter.

This not only opens doors that would not otherwise be there, but it automatically gives you a leg up in the process since your application isn’t competing with as many other candidates.

Another reason you should leverage the recruiter’s strong relationship with their clients is for speculative opportunities. Your recruiter is familiar with the client’s projects, plans, and potential future needs. Your recruiter may be aware of future plans to hire and be able to present your application before a role even officially opens. These speculative applications can put you way ahead of the competition, and result in a placement before a vacancy even arises.

As a recruitment company, we are only successful if you are – so we do what we can to help you get there.