Recruiters vs. Job Boards
Be an exclusive candidate.
If I wanted to make a job change, I’d want to distinguish myself as an exclusive candidate. It’s a challenge to stand out when you are one of the masses of resumes, hiring managers receive from job boards or even through their own company website. Your odds of being noticed increases greatly when you align yourself with a good recruiter. If you are aligned with a good recruiter, you show your worth and stand out from the crowd!
Get the inside info.
A recruiter can give you valuable insight into the company environment and culture and can give you a feel for the hiring manager’s personality, hot buttons as well as the hiring manager’s expectations. A recruiter can give you an up-close view of the company and can also provide interview feedback and help with salary negotiations. You would not be able to obtain this information from a job board.
Avoid Being Bombarded by Phone Calls
Some candidates have told me they had to remove their resumes from job boards because they were getting hounded with phone calls. When you have a good recruiter on your side, you have one point of contact and fewer dinnertime phone call interruptions!
Remove some of the stress from your job search.
Recruiters are experts when it comes to interview techniques. We hold our candidate’s hands through the interview process and we prepare them for each interview and every step of the way. Many of our candidates have told us that it was our coaching that got them the job and that they would not have gotten the job through their own efforts.
Maintain control over your resume.
When you post your resume to a job board you lose control. Just about anyone can view your resume, even your current employer. Have you ever thought about that? If you post a resume on certain job boards you don’t know where your resume is going. It could end up just about anywhere.
Avoid Overexposure
Hiring managers want people who stand out from the masses. If three recruiters are calling that same hiring manager to talk about you, it has a negative effect and can result in you looking less credible. It makes you seem desperate in your search, and you don't stand out much when the hiring manager keeps hearing your story from three different people. Some of our hiring managers had told me it sent them a red flag when the same candidate kept coming into the company through more than one source, and they actually started questioning the credibility of that candidate. The hiring manager started to wonder, is this candidate about to get fired, or do they change jobs often?
Confidentiality.
Working with just one carefully selected recruiter, you have a partner and an advocate, who can strategically market you into the right opportunities, while maintaining your confidentiality if you post a resume on a job board, you run the risk that your current employer will find your resume and you risk jeopardizing your current employment situation over the long haul.
Statistics.
When a large company posts an ad to a job board, they could receive as many as 5,000 or even 20,000 resumes and statistically, only 10% of those resumes are actually read by a real person. This can also happen when you send your resume directly to a large company.
Conflicting Interests
Companies do not have an interest in finding you a job, only in filling their current openings, so if you apply for a job and are not the right fit, your resume may go into a file drawer and stay there. Consider that your resume is a tool that doesn't tell the whole story about what you bring to the employer's table. A recruiter, on the other hand, can often get your qualifications in front of the hiring manager to be reviewed and often granted an interview. Once you are in front of the company in an interview, your chances of getting hired are much greater.