If you're in tech and have been for a while, you might be used to obtaining roles through a trusted recruiter or getting calls during a busy time in the market. However, if you're just graduating, newly transitioned to tech, or even on the outside looking in, the world of working with recruiters might seem completely foreign. We're here to address the common assumptions people make about recruiters and assure you that using recruiters as a tool in your job search can significantly aid you in landing the perfect role.
Myth 1: Recruiters are money-hungry and only care about closing the deal, not your well-being.
Does any type of sales role require a competitive nature and a desire to achieve? Absolutely! But this sentiment could not be further from the truth. In the recruiting industry, to be of value to our clients and therefore keep them working with us long term, we need to match them with the right candidates, and this takes time, effort, and many judgment calls.
For instance, if you're hesitant about a role's pay, culture, or responsibilities, you may be reluctant to stay in that role when you learn it wasn't exactly what you were looking for. We want you to stay, both for your own career timeline and for the client's ongoing success. Ensuring you'll stay means taking the time to get to know you, how your values align with our client, and exactly what your next dream job entails.
What else is true of sales roles? Uncertainty in the consistency of pay. There are a lot of emotions that go into someone accepting a brand-new role, and a lot of questions, too. We, as recruiters, choose to take on this role to help people because we enjoy working with people. If it were all about the money, we'd get a job where we were guaranteed a high salary without the risks of working with people making delicate decisions.
Myth 2: Recruiters don't even look at your profile! They just send out as many messages as possible to reach a quota in hopes that they will find the right person by chance.
Clients are more likely to lean on the recruiting agencies that have consistently proven their ability to provide long-lasting, good-fit candidates. Our process of finding these people involves using detailed notes from the sales team to tailor searches to the most important technologies/skills they are looking for.
Some of us click through each individual profile before even sending a message, and not only does this allow the messages to go to the right person the first time, so we're not wasting your time, it will enable us to expand on the knowledge we already have of you and focus on highlighting that in a submission, instead of calling and finding out you're not a fit.
Of course, we need standards or quotas to strive for, but if we can find a candidate who fits the role in fewer calls because we built a strong, specific search, that allows our work to be more efficient and lets us shift our focus to other clients to fill more roles! That's why Market Street Talent's outcomes-based approach works.
Myth 3: Recruiters take a cut of your pay.
A recruiting agency is a service a client pays for, and the fees are predetermined and agreed upon before a role even hits the recruiter's desk. With that in mind, we work with the client's budget to find the right candidates.
When asking a candidate in our initial conversation what you are targeting for a salary or hourly rate in your next role, we are working off of the salary or hourly rate that we know for certain you will be taking home, after all of the fees and costs associated with our services. If you're looking for something higher and it doesn't align with the client's budget, we will never push you into accepting less than you deserve.
Clients give us salary ranges based on salaries and fees they can afford and hourly rates that are purposely higher than the market standard to account for the burden (taxes, commissions, payroll costs, etc.) so that we can actually pay you what you are entitled to. Any commission recruiters earn is already calculated before we share the target pay rate with you.
If you're interested in speaking with a recruiter about your next career move, contact us today!
