Behind the Scenes at a Headhunter’s Desk

I often get the impression that the outside world doesn’t really “get” what a recruiter does in their day-to-day life. Sure, hiring managers and candidates get tons of calls from us, you hear us pitching jobs or candidates for jobs, but that’s about all the exposure you get into what we do. So, I decided to dedicate this blog installment to giving you a glimpse into how my process works when trying to fill a job, and how it’s beneficial to my clients and candidates...

MY CLIENT:

A Fortune 500 food manufacturer that is a household name, and in every grocery store in the U.S. Their manufacturing processes are highly automated, and rely on an army of engineers to operate and maintain all the machinery involved. Because of this, they often task me with helping them find engineers with highly esoteric skill-sets, centered around high-speed automation and managing the capital projects.

In early June, they asked me to help them find them an Electrical Controls Engineer. I had been successful in this type of search many times before, and was hungry to jump on the task.

MY PROCESS:

My first step was to make a list of companies and engineers in the organizations I wanted to contact and were in the company’s general area. This is an exhaustive process and usually involves hundreds of “cold calls”. 

On one call, I reached out to an engineer whose name I found in an online database and worked for a competing food manufacturer. The engineer and the company were located a couple of hundred miles from my client’s location. I knew it was unlikely that this person would pick up their phone. It was more unlikely that they’d be interested in the job… and if by some miracle they were, it was highly unlikely that they’d be willing to relocate. 

Still, I intrepidly dialed the phone, and to my surprise, the guy picked up! Even more surprising, he was willing to listen to my pitch, and even chat with me a bit.  It turns out my timing was fortuitous. This engineer worked on capital projects for his company in China, and was back in the states briefly. There were only a few hours all year he was by his phone to pick up, and I was lucky enough to catch him!  However, he wasn’t interested in the job-- but before hanging up, he told me about a colleague who had just told him that he was looking to move on, and wanted to relocate. He then shared said colleague’s name and number. GOLD in the recruiting world!

THEN IT GOT INTERESTING:

My next action was to call the candidate who just referred to me. He didn’t pick up. In fact, it took me more than two weeks to finally connect with him. But when we did connect, I took a considerable amount of time to really learn what was going on in his career and his life: He was a young father of three children, his wife was getting her PhD, and they were originally from a tropical environment and were struggling in dealing with the frigid Northeastern winters. He told me he was interested in my client’s job, but was also interested in relocating to certain cities in the Southwest and West Coast.

This person's skills were seriously impressive. He was what we call an A+, “highly marketable” candidate. To me, this meant that I was willing to make hundreds of calls to hiring managers on this candidate’s behalf, letting them know about his background and availability. By midsummer, I had gotten this candidate five interviews in the cities he told me was interested in moving to. By late summer, he had accepted a position with the company that had originally contacted me to start the search. He got a substantial bump in his pay, and he was able to move his family from a very rural area to an urban one, where his wife would have more options when she finally graduated from school.

The above is a pretty accurate snapshot of what I do every day as a recruiter. I never know what type of situation I may step into, but it’s guaranteed that I'll meet some very interesting and bright people…Thanks for visiting, and if you think any of this can be helpful to you, please reach out and give me a call!