A recruiter’s job is to find a perfect match for both a prospective employee and for the company. They look at all of one’s skills and experience, meet with the candidate in person to get to know them better, ask them questions, help the person land interviews and more.
An open, honest relationship with one’s recruiter will always be to their advantage. There’s no point in lying – more than likely, the recruiter will find out the truth at some point in time.
Be Up Front About Experience
An example of bad conduct would be stretching dates of employment. Surprisingly, this is more common than people think. Instead of showing a gap in employment, people will stretch the end date of one job and the start date of another. Don’t do this.
If a recruiter (or even worse, one’s future employer) calls these jobs to verify dates of employment, the candidate will most likely not be hired due to lying. Instead, they should be honest about the gap in employment and go from there.
Recruiters will also check one’s social media profiles, so candidates must make sure to keep them clean (and again, don’t lie about them!).
Tony Restell, Social-Hire.com’s CEO states, “For candidates, social media can certainly ‘backfire’ if there’s anything on your social profiles that causes the recruiter to question your professionalism or that doesn’t tally with what you’ve stated on your resume. Nowadays, you should assume that your social profiles will be looked at every bit as much as your actual resume and cover letter, so you should invest in cleaning them up and perfecting them accordingly.”
Honesty is the Best Policy
The article “5 things to ALWAYS tell a recruiter” discusses five things one should never keep from their recruiter.
These things are both important to the candidate and to the recruiter and will help speed up the job-hunting process. For starters, be willing to say “No!” to the recruiter.
If the recruiter is explaining a job that someone knows they’re not interested in, say “no” and move on. A candidate is wasting both their time and the recruiter’s time.
Candidates also need to tell the recruiter their elevator pitch (in other words, they need to sell themselves), they will need to always state the truth (as stated above), they will need to be willing to help them (paying it forward goes a long way) and they should portray themselves bottom line (for example, their salary requirements).
Being a recruiter is no easy task. There are good ones, bad ones and ones that fall in between. For some job candidates, it may take a few recruiters to actually find one they like and click with. Once they find that recruiter, though, they should work at keeping an ongoing relationship with them.
Companies downsize, people get laid off more often than they’d like and people sometimes just want to change careers. Turning to a recruiter may be just the answer.
About the Author: Sarah Brooks is a freelance writer living in Charlotte, NC. She writes on a variety of topics including small businesses, social media and personal finance.
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