Career Management Alliance Blog

Last month Jim McFarland wrote a post about why you should work with executive search firms.

CareerJournal.com today features an article about how you can best work with executive recruiters. Just how does the business work, anyway? Here are some highlights from the article:

• Be serious about wanting to change jobs.

Don’t agree to be a candidate unless you are absolutely positive that you want to move on.

• Trust your recruiter with your salary information.

Recruiters need this information to present you as a serious candidate.

• Demonstrate to the recruiter that you’re engaged by asking good questions about job opportunities and checking in every one or two weeks.

You need to put some time and energy into this relationship - simply being passive is not going to get you the results you want.

• Don’t say you’re open to relocation when you aren’t.

The recruiter is working on the assumption that you mean what you say. If you’re not sure you’re willing to move, or work for a certain company, or manage a team of 400 again, don’t say you are.

• Work with a recruiter who specializes in your field.

They are the go-to people for the companies you want to work for.

Here are my own additional two cents: An executive recruiter is one of your job search resources. Recruiters are paid by client companies, so they are not quite as invested in getting you hired as you are! Remember to keep using your other tools, such as good old-fashioned networking.

Heather Mundell

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I’ve just returned from the Career Management Alliance annual convention where I had the opportunity to learn from and hobnob with renowned resume writers and other thought leaders in the careers industry.

A fellow resume writer, I always like to see what John Suarez, founder of Success Stories Ink, has to say. Once again he gave a presentation that delighted everyone and deeply hit home. Aside from offering monumental “little” formatting tips we all should master and insightful advice on content, he shared his joy for the actual writing process. As he put it, so many of us are “verb-aholics” who derive great pleasure from crafting a clever turn of phrase to nail a client’s value proposition or specific contribution. Although we love hearing our clients gush over the final product, impressing them is not our mission. John noted that we are not in the “word” business. We are in the business of using words to sell our clients.

We’re constantly balancing our creative bent and desire to please our clients with the imperative to focus on what hiring decision makers who will be reading their resumes are looking for. A beautifully written and presented document will not open doors for the client if it doesn’t deliver the goods – that candidate’s potential value to their next employer.

What marks us as experts and brings true value to our clients is our talent for mining critical information, knowing what to put in the resume and what to leave out, and packaging it all in a brand-focused, value-driven document that attracts attention and brings them to life on the page.

I was tickled by another interesting point John made. We know that branding is an essential component in today’s career marketing documents, and most top resume writers have jumped on the “brand” wagon. But we’ve been branding our clients all along – by finding the best ways to differentiate them from competing job seekers. We just didn’t have a name for it until recently.

Meg Guiseppi

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