Recruiters Are Special
People often confuse the Barrett Group, a career management firm, with recruiters, also known as headhunters. There is a fair amount of mystery surrounding the distinction, so let me address that up front.
A recruiter typically is hired by an employer to fill a vacancy. There is usually a job or role description underpinning the vacancy, a compensation range, benefits, a starting date, etc. Recruiters will often have a bank of potential candidates that they have assembled over time. This may include people who have simply contacted the recruiter and provided a resume, but also candidates that the recruiter’s research team has extracted from various databases and/or industry competitors.
Recruiters often specialize in one or more industries and/or geographies.
So, choosing the right recruiter for your target is itself an art. Most recruiters work very hard. They typically have little free time to hobnob indiscriminately with candidates who may or, more likely, do not fit the recruiter’s current vacancies. So, it is typically not easy to casually connect with recruiters.
Personally, I have had 12 jobs so far in my career. Even though I have worked with recruiters, I have never found a job through a recruiter. This is in no way indicative of the market, but it is illustrative of why I say that recruiters are special. They are in fact specialists. Only about 10% of our clients find jobs through recruiters exactly because the recruiter is looking for a very specific profile that most candidates do not fit.
Candidates often think they are looking for a recruiter. Possibly because they either are unaware that there are alternatives, or they think somehow it will be easier and cheaper if they utilize a recruiter. Again, the laws of chance suggest that this cannot be true for most candidates—in our case, 90% of them!
In contrast, the Barrett Group works directly for the candidate—not for the employer.
We help our clients clarify their career objectives holistically during the Targeting stage of our career change process, a process called the Clarity Program© that often ends up actually changing and refining our clients’ career targets because it looks not only at history but affinities (what clients like to do) and adjacent opportunities (different industries or roles that may be even better targets from a probability, life/work balance, and/or compensation point of view).
At the Barrett Group, clients will not have the poor fit or “square peg in a round hole” issue that they usually face when working with a recruiter.
Instead, we help bring the market right to the client’s door, metaphorically speaking.
Besides the careful Packaging of our clients with resumes and LinkedIn profiles that stand out, we can help clients get through the automated defenses that many employers and job boards employ to screen out most candidates. How do we do this? We have been doing this for 30 years now, and are experts, whereas most of our clients are not. So of course, we are more successful at it. In fact, about 15% of our clients land through the online job markets, despite the obstacles.
One of the most important distinctions, though, is that 75% of our clients land through the unpublished market.
These are exactly what they appear to be: opportunities that exist in the minds, on the desks, or in the computers of a potential employer who has for whatever reason not yet published them to the market place in the form of an on-line ad or the hiring of a recruiter.
The Barrett Group specializes in helping our clients locate these unpublished opportunities by being in the right place at the right time (again, metaphorically) so that there is little competition and as a result, higher compensation when the offer comes through.
As a result, 90% of our clients who follow our program will land a job of their choice within the contract period.
Here are two landings announced just today:
- George (the Barrett Group consultant) helped [Client 1] negotiate the offer from [Employer]. The title is Senior Portfolio Manager. It has a base of $210,000 and a 25% bonus, as well as paid relocation. [Client 1] got a nice return on his investment in the Barrett Group program. The negotiated offee included a $15K signing bonus! Our consultant was particularly happy for [Client 1] who had been out of work since 10/18 and had been experiencing some serious age discrimination. Following George’s sage advice [Client 1] landed in under 90 days!
- The negotiations are finally complete and [Client 2] has finally accepted the offer from [Employer]. In the end, the employer came up with another $15K over a technicality. Basically [Client 2] also got all her Barrett Group investment back in the negotiation process.
So, by all means, interact with recruiters because they are special. But if you want to cover the whole market, hire someone who will represent your interests first and foremost. May I suggest the Barrett Group?
Peter Irish
CEO
The Barrett Group
