It’s almost laughable, how often I’ve had to say exactly the same thing, over and over, to every single recruiter who contacts me.
For the record, I get a lot of contacts from recruiters — not just the spammy emails generated from a recruiting database in a country far, far away, but actual calls from real-live “headhunters” who are hungry to place people in their positions. They want the commission. I (might) need a new job. If it goes right, it works out for everyone.
But the road to the substantive, useful conversations is often long and winding. It can also be a bit tortuous. Like so:
“Hi, my name is Joe Smith and I’m a recruiter with ABC Placements. We have an open contract position for a front-end developer and I found your resume in our system and thought you’d be a great fit!”
“Hi Joe, actually I’m already working full-time at my current company.”
“Oh really – that’s great! How long have you been there?”
“It will be three years, this May.”
“What are you doing in your current role?”
“I’m a technical project manager in the digital solutions group.”
“That sounds very interesting! Are you by any chance looking to make a change?”
“Not at this time, thanks for asking.”
“Would you be open to a change in the future?”
“That all depends on the opportunity… and how things evolve in the organization here.”
“Okay, do you know when you’d be open to considering new opportunities?”
…
I’ve been in the 9-to-5 workforce for over 30 years, and in that time, I’ve talked to hundreds of recruiters. Whether I was actively looking for a job, or they found my resume in a candidates database, I ended up talking to them, covering exactly the same topics, in pretty much exactly the same order.
Multiply 200 recruiters by 10-15 minutes, and that’s a total of a day and a half of my life I’ve spent repeating exactly the same details, over and over, to a whole lot of headhunters.
If I only consider working hours (8 hours a day), that means I’ve spent nearly a full work week making sure callers had my correct information and knew what my situation was.
I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s a lot of time.
About three years ago, after repeating this same “ritual” many times over, I got smart the process. I knew that recruiters were asking me all those questions because they had to. They didn’t have my most current resume, they didn’t have my most current eligibility, and a lot of them didn’t even know who I was working for. I also knew that there had to be a way to get all that information to them before I wasted precious time correcting the information they should have had, before they ever picked up the phone to call me.
I needed to get that info to them up front. And then, if I was still a good fit for the spots they were trying to fill, we could actually have an intelligent conversation when we talked later.
So, in early 2015, I built my Recruit Ready system. I identified the tools I needed and the simple steps to follow to build a system that proactively and pre-emptively got my most current details into the hands (and email inboxes) of the recruiters who were looking to place me. I put the pieces together and started using it, and the steady stream of bogus “opportunities” slowed to a trickle. That left more time for connecting with quality opportunities. And one of them — which was the result of me using my Recruit Ready system — turned out to be a fantastic next step for my career.
I’m still in that job. And I haven’t had to go looking, since.
Pretty sweet, huh?