Tip: Don’t Bother Leaving Voicemails
You will find that recruiters rarely return your voicemail messages. The perceived justification for this discourtesy is "I’m too busy,” although the real reason is "Contacting you doesn’t hold the immediate promise of financial reward". Therefore, don’t bother to leave messages – keep calling until you can speak to them in person.
Tip: Be Cautious When Answering Certain Questions
Recruiters will try and gather more information than is necessary, in the hope of learning something that can be used to their advantage. Only discuss what is strictly relevant to the job in question. In particular, look out for the following questions:
Do You Have Any Other Opportunities In Hand?
Recruiters will often make a "friendly enquiry" about how your job hunting prospects are at the moment. This is not idle small talk. The recruiter is trying to gauge:
• How desperate you are i.e. how much leverage they have
• The number of opportunities out there for people with your skill set. At best, this enquiry could be called "market research."
• The names of companies that are currently hiring – so they can approach them.
It is of no advantage to you to provide any of this information to the recruiter, and it could weaken your bargaining position in future. A suitable response might be “I’d prefer not to discuss the status of my job search.” Above all, never appear desperate – it will be a signal to the recruiter that they can get away with dramatically cutting your rate, thereby increasing their profit margin.
What Recruiter Did You Apply Through?
If you tell them you have already made application for the position through another recruiter, they may try and find out who that recruiter is, and what agency they work for. It’s none of their business – tell them so. The same response as above will suffice.
Do You Know Anyone Else Who Might Be Interested In This Job?
Here, the recruiter is trying to get you to refer them to another candidate. Never do this, if you want to keep your friends. Once that information gets into the recruiter’s hands, there is no telling what will happen to it. The only appropriate answer to the above question is “no.” If you do know someone who is interested, still tell the recruiter “no”, and then contact that person yourself so they can approach the recruiter at their leisure, if they so choose.
Who Did You Work For While You Were At Company X?
A common technique recruiters use to broaden their client base is to use candidates to get contacts within companies the candidate has worked for. For example:
Recruiter: Did you work for fictional-name while you were at J-Corp? You: No – I’ve never heard of fictional-name. I reported to John
Smith.
Now the recruiter has a contact name within J-Corp that they can use to get past the company switchboard (companies often have switchboard blocks on recruiters). They can ring J-Corp’s switchboard, ask to speak to John Smith – without revealing that they are a recruiter – and be in a position to market their services directly to someone who is reasonably senior.
What Was Your Rate/Salary In Your Last Contract/Job?
The danger in quoting a contract rate is that the rate at which you actually work (assuming you’re awarded the contract) is yet to be negotiated. If the recruiter can subsequently negotiate a higher rate with his client, he can keep that information to himself and absorb the surplus into his margin.
Tip: Learn A Few Rote Answers
All recruiters tend to ask the same questions. It may surprise you to know that recruiters often follow scripts – the same way that telemarketers follow scripts when cold calling potential customers. They may have worked with the script so long that they’ve now internalized it, or perhaps they’ve developed the script themselves, refining it over the course of hundreds of phone calls. The point is, the recruiter is far more rehearsed in asking questions than you are in providing answers. To level the playing field, you can prepare your own scripts by rehearsing answers to some commonly asked questions:
Why Did You Leave Your Last Job?
Some recruiters will ask this, as if they had the right to know and could put the info to any sensible use. Prepare a brief and suitably vague answer that suggests you bear no animosity towards your last employer, and that your performance wasn’t questioned in any way. A tried and true comeback is “It was just time for a change” – which is impossible to refute or question further.
What Is Your Ideal Job?
Occasionally a recruiter asks this, just on the off chance that your ideal job is currently on their books. Not surprisingly, it never is. They’re not really interested in your response, so much as that you have one and asking it makes it sound like they’re displaying due diligence. Learn a brief and dismissive answer.
Tip: Determine The Purpose Of The Call Early In The Conversation It’s not uncommon to have recruiters contact you even though they don’t actually have a suitable position to discuss with you – the operative word being “suitable.” You may find that they have a position that is clearly unsuitable for you, but will try and use that position to establish contact with you, ask you to come and see them for a chat, and generally begin the recruiting process. These recruiters are desperate and are trying to match the few positions they have to whatever candidature they can dig up, no matter how inappropriate the match. Don’t let them waste your time. If they’re not prepared to put a job specification down on the table, walk away.
Tip: Protect Your Referees From Unnecessary Interruption
There’s no need to put “references available upon request” on your resume – that is understood. Out of consideration for your referees, you should aim to minimize the number of occasions they are contacted. Therefore, never give away your references until there is a job offer on the table, for the following reasons:
• Some recruiters will use your referees as contact points for marketing their services.
• If the recruiter contacts your referees, there is no guarantee that their client will not also want to contact them. Then your referees end up getting hounded with phone calls.
• If the recruiter contacts your referees prior to a job offer being made, and the client does not decide to hire you, then your referees have been pestered for nothing.
Some recruiters will try to tell you that they can’t even submit your resume to their client without references. This is nonsense, and certainly an attempt to collect your referees as contacts.
Tip: Be Suspicious Of Calls From Agents You’ve Never Heard Of Once you have been circulating your resume for a while, and it has been entered in the résumé databases of enough agencies, you’ll find that you start getting cold calls from agents that you’ve never heard of. What’s happened in these cases is that the agent has done a keyword search on their agency’s résumé database for a particular skill set, got back several dozen matches, and then placed a phone call to every person whose resume was a match. Your resume happens to be in the agencies database as a result of your previous contact with some other agent working at that agency.
If an unknown recruiter leaves you a message, if you do call them back, you can expect the following:
• The recruiter doesn’t remember who you are.
• The recruiter doesn’t remember what job description they rang you in relation to.
• Once they’ve worked out those two things, they search their database for your résumé.
• Then they read out their job’s skill requirements and you have to respond “yes” or “no” to each … even though that info is on the screen in front of them.
For this reason I generally don’t return calls from recruiters I’ve never heard of. I have better things to do than read out my résumé over the phone.