What’s the Caffeinated Careers Club?

Caffeinated Careers Club in Arvada is one of the Denver metro area’s longest-running job search club. Often imitated, but never matched!

At the Caffeinated Careers Club, we network, share advice, job leads, resources, and encouragement. Facilitated by job search expert Tracy Laswell Valdez, is positive, businesslike, uplifting, and focused. Established October 1999 and going strong, with typical attendance of 30+ individuals.

Cost: $1.00.

Dress: Business casual, accessorized with a smile.

RSVP: We use Meetup.com for RSVPs and to share meeting minutes (uploaded under files), click here to join Caffeinated Careers Club (Arvada) on Meetup. Info on meeting process and protocol is listed here as well. When you RSVP, add your target job titles and target companies to the comments.

We also have a LinkedIn group to share job search resources, click here to join.

More Info: Call Tracy Laswell Valdez at 303-424-1700.

Caffeinated Careers Club Meetup

The following is a recent exchange with a pretty savvy job seeker – I hope it’s useful information for you as well.

Q. Do recruiters have an extensive list of opportunities, or do they really only get a small portion of what is out there?

A. Interesting question. I think when many people think of recruiters, they think of them as being tapped into hundreds, maybe thousands of positions, in all industries, in all geographies, surely having access to several positions that might be suitable for them. That’s far from true. Given the nature of the work, finding candidates with highly specific qualifications, many recruiters specialize by profession and industry. Most contingency recruiters I know work on no more than 10 positions at a time. Corporate or contract recruiters may work on up to 20 positions at one time for one specific organization. It is estimated that recruiters fill no more than 5% of all available opportunities.

Q. Do recruiters focus on and work at having a large “candidate pool” so that they can pull from it for the opportunities they are trying to fill? (Say a pool of 200 people for 10 opportunities).

A. Methods vary by recruiter. If the recruiter has a specific profession or industry focus, they would be smart to build a candidate database that they can utilize again and again. Many recruiters will build a candidate from scratch each time they start a search. They typically have no more than a couple dozen candidates per position.

Q. Do recruiters care about nurturing a professional connection, or are they just trying to find a quick qualified candidate and leave it at that?

A. As is true of people in all professions, recruiters can vary widely in their approaches. Many recruiters would love to nurture relationships with as many quality candidates as possible, but recruiting is often very deadline driven and competitive. There are so many hours in the day, and they have to spend their time wisely. If you are not qualified for that urgent requisition they are working on, they’re unlikely to be able to spend much time with you.

Relationship building goes both ways. While some may not return the favor, I do recommend that candidates be courteous and helpful when speaking with recruiters. If a recruiter approaches you with a job opportunity that isn’t right for you,offer to spread the word to some of your contacts or to make a referral. Recruiters are often highly networked and when a candidate is rude or unreliable, word definitely gets around.

Q. Job seekers want to find employment sooner than later. Are recruiters a big piece of this, or just another tool in the tool belt like LinkedIn, networking groups, and job boards?

A. If you have highly specialized, highly sought-after job qualifications and are relatively open to relocation, then cultivating recruiter relationships should be a relatively large part of your overall  job search effort (say 20%). If your skills are more generalized and your search is geographically limited, I would recommend building out a good LinkedIn profile so that recruiters can find and contact you more easily.

Hope that’s helpful insight! For more information on creating a smart, productive job search campaign, identifying recruiters with whom to network, or building out your LinkedIn profile, please contact Tracy Laswell Valdez at CAREER-Magic.com – 303-424-1700.

If you’re wondering about the best way to get noticed by a larger organization, you may want to read the 9th Annual Source of Hire Study published by CareerXRoads.com. This study is well-researched and I would guess that last year’s trends are continuing. I would further assume that what holds true for larger companies as far as cost avoidance measures is just as true for smaller companies.

http://www.careerxroads.com/news/SourcesOfHire10.pdf

My clients often ask me for referrals to a good “headhunter.” After a little Q&A on the subject, I often find that my clients often think of recruiters as “jobs dispensers” or in other words, a magical shortcut around the plain old hard, boring, and frightening work of a job search.

Connecting with a headhunter is simply not an easy way out. Here’s how it doesn’t work: You find a great headhunter, they present your resume to the dozens of open job requisitions they have, and a few smooth interviews later, you are hired. Wouldn’t that be nice? Who wouldn’t want to work with a headhunter? I know I would! Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way for the vast majority of people.

After working with recruiters for years, and working as one for the past few years, here is what I know about recruiters:

1. The term headhunter (which still makes me shudder) probably came about from the practice of recruiting talent away from a competitor’s company. Not only is it not really a nice term, in my opinion, but it is incorrect to call a recruiter a headhunter when a job hunter is the party initiating the contact.
2. Reputable recruiters are ALWAYS paid by the employer, typically at a rate of 15-25% of your first year’s salary. Companies utilize recruiters to source, prepare, and present not just any candidate, but the PERFECT candidate while minimizing the impacts to productivity that a search can cause. This means that unless you have exactly the specific industry background and qualifications for a given position, most reputable recruiters are not going to present you to their clients. To do so would be to damage their reputation with the client.
3. Executive Recruiters sometimes refer to their businesses as executive search firms because they search for executives on behalf of their clients. Outplacement companies also like to refer to themselves as executive search firms, but they search instead for a large fee to handle an individual’s job search. Whether it is you or your former employer paying the large fee, this is the type of executive search firm that does not represent a great value. More concerning that the large fee paid is the many many months of unemployment that can follow if you are not actively managing your job search campaign. Ask around in any job forum, or read the section on this matter in any given edition of What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles.
4. Most recruiters work on a small handful of placements at any given point in time, so the odds are, at any given moment, that a recruiter you approach will have nothing for you. Most recruiters work on a contingency or commission basis, and often in competition with other recruiting resources. Therefore, if you are not a near-perfect match for the hot job placement that a recruiter is working on, it is unlikely that they can help you with your search. In some cases, a candidate with rare skills and top industry credentials will be marketed proactively to the recruiter’s client list, but this is the exceptional situation. In a down economy in which an employer feels they have excellent candidates knocking at their door, recruiters have fewer engagements.
5. Given the fact that each recruiter is working on so few jobs at any point in time, if you choose to “work with a recruiter,” then work with several, and contact them every two weeks to stay at the top of their minds.
6. Since only a small fraction of jobs are filled through recruiters, getting your resume to recruiters is only a small fraction of a smart, well-rounded search campaign.

In summary, while recruiters may be able to provide you with assistance in your search, or ultimately connect you with your dream job, they cannot take over your job search for you. What to do? Take charge of your search, network well, hire job search services as needed, initiate a lot, follow it all up, and you will be successful!

Here’s a link to a recent article on the topic.

Questions? Feel free to contact tracy@career-magic.com!

An esteemed colleague of mine, Carol Ross, writes a brilliant blog, often putting lucid words around the topics that I find myself pondering (though with less clarity). Her most recent, The Upside to a Recession, is about “realistic optimism” –an oxymoron better known as the silver lining. Like Carol, I have pondered the implications of our present economic circumstances — and have come to the conclusion that the changes occurring are not all bad.

One of the good things Carol Ross mentions is that we now seem to have a renewed focus on connecting with others, whether live and in person or on Twitter. Connecting with others, sharing thoughts, ideas, feelings, getting real, getting focused, getting help – these are critically important behaviors, in my opinion. Following the enthusiastic response to another recent article by Carol, Nine Networking Mistakes to Avoid, she created a new educational offering – the Networking Naturally Program. While I have not yet attended this teleseminar, I know Carol well enough to heartily recommend it. If you do, let me know what you think.