How to get the most out of recruitment agencies

I think it's important to note that not all recruiters are identical.

A recruiter can be an excellent tool for finding employment, especially when a role is only being advertised through that recruitment service.

And we work with some really excellent recruitment partners as part of Jobs Academy, and they are committed to supporting women with employment gaps and looking for flexible working arrangements.

So here in this episode, what we're going to do is explain how recruiters work so you can get the most out of them.

And I think one of the things we should get clear on upfront, everyone, is that there's two sort of categories of recruiter.

So there's retained recruiters and then there's contingency recruiters.

A retained recruiter is someone who's paid an upfront fee and they work exclusively for an organization that's trying to fill a job.

And they tend to have quite a rigorous research-led sort of process where they go out and find someone to fill that job.

A contingency recruiter is probably who most of us are more likely to receive a call from.

They're only paid if they find a candidate that gets hired.

So they tend to work on heaps of different roles at once.

They have lots of overlapping candidate pools and they accept unsolicited CVs and they're incentivized less for delivering the right person for the right job for one client they're working closely with.

For them, it's more about volume and speed.

So they're trying to do a lot of things really fast.

So that's really helpful.

I think the other point to make is that recruiters work for the client.

They're not working for you.

As one executive search insider puts it bluntly, the goal of recruiters is to fill their client searches, not to find work for individuals, however talented you might be.