I spent the morning preparing for the meeting with the recruiter. I washed and dressed and put on my new black suit. I formulated questions and surfed the company’s web site to get a better idea about them. An hour before I was to get in the car, I received an email from the recruiter telling me the position has been filled but would I like to come in to talk anyway? I left her a VM saying, I would wait until she had another job lined up. Why should I drive all the way to Conshohocken just to make nice nice? I already lost a morning of productivity. Why lose an afternoon too? I don’t think the position was filled. Yesterday she emailed me, and asked my past compensation plan so she could determine if the company was within my range. I gave her my amount even though I knew that it was higher than what she had mentioned on our first conversation. That’s the reason for the withdrawal, undoubtedly. Oh well.
Now I am all dressed up with no place to go.
Moral:
Try as best you can to avoid talking $ until
you’ve baited your hook and the Big Fish, Inc.
is ready to take a bite.
I know, easier said than done. What color is
YOUR parachute?
if I was closer we could have gone out fo lunch and the toddlers would have wiped dirty paws on you…that is what happens when I am dressed up
Having been in two fields in which recruiters are an active part of the job landscape, my observation is that there are a small number of quality search firms who get business from employers on a regular basis, usually because the employer doesn’t want to bother screening people. These firms often have an established clientele that comes to them over and over whem they want to fill a position. They only look for candidates when their clients ask them to and they tend to be pretty selective about whose resume they send to a client. They don’t go around interviewing people who may be looking without having already been retained to fill a specific position.
Of the remainder of those populating the recriuiting firm worls, IME an awful lot are just collecting resumes in case they come across am employer looking to fill a position. These types of firms, and there are a lot of them, are constantly cold calling potential employers to find out if they are looking to fill a position. If word gets out that a quality search firms has been hired by an employer to find candidates for a position, the scummy recruiters will call the person at the employer involved in hiring in a New York minute to pester him/her about sending resumes over. These kinds of firms are really, really a pain in the ass if you’re a person they find out has some role in hiring. They collect resumes by the barrel and aren’t much use if an employer wants someone to do some screening; if given a chance they’ll send over all their resumes for people who might possibly just maybe kinda fit the employer’s need on the off chance that they may get a hit. The recruiters at these places often have no background in the field in which they are trying to place candidates; I’ve always had the impression that they are doing what they’re doing because they don’t have a whole lot of options amd usually after a year or two they go on to something else like selling whole life insurance.
I agree with Craig, I see it alot in engineer and won’t even come into an interview until they are willing to hire or at least pay for my time/trip/etc. As for talking $$ be sure to say you can negotitate for a dollar amount and leave it at that, let them name their price and work from there.
Anyways good luck
-Jason