Job market

Recruiter Reaches out to You-Now What?

Most of the time during your job search, you’re the one who is responsible for making all the first moves in the process. It’s up to you to write a stand-out resume, find an opportunity that’s right for you, apply to the position(s) and really market yourself to the company/hiring manager. But if you’ve got an impressive enough background or a mastery of hard-to-find skills, chances are that recruiters will be the ones reaching out to you.

So, what should you do when a recruiter contacts you? Here’s what Glassdoor had to say about it:

Hiring Tug of War

The poet William Blake wrote, “Without contraries, there is no progression.”  This quote rings very true to my day-to-day work-life, as the job market shifts from the last decade’s client driven position, to a candidate-centric environment.

The job market is a very different place than it was 10 years ago, when the bottom fell out of the housing market and Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers disintegrated; ushering in the highest unemployment rates seen in a couple of generations. That era was a very dark time in the world of recruiting, when only the best and the strongest recruiters survived.

When the eventual recovery set in a few years later, finding a workable “hot” job was still very difficult.  As the laws of supply and demand would dictate, this allowed companies to be extremely choosy in the candidates they chose to interview, the recruiters they chose to work with, and with their contractual terms for agencies.

The situation is very different in 2017. The job market is roaring at, or close to, full structural employment. The BLS reported in April that the unemployment rate for candidates with professional degrees is 1.6%. The pendulum has swung to the other side, and I find that companies are struggling with some of the realities of this shift.