I’ve been in the recruiting industry for nine years, and in that time, my job was to find jobs that companies wanted to fill, and couldn’t.
My expertise is finding jobs. I can honestly say that if you want to get a job – a great job – a job that is a career, a passion, pays you well, and gets you inspired – one of the best ways to do so is to sit down with me and buy me a cup of coffee.
But I don’t do that anymore.
And neither do other recruiters who get paid. The reason is sometimes money – the truth is that clients pay us to find people for jobs, and not the other way around. Recruiters find themselves in the same position that doctors and lawyers do in social gatherings. Everybody wants you to find them or their friend or their child a job.
Most recruiters when they start out are willing to help.
Yes, we get paid to search, but we’re human beings, and we don’t mind helping out nice people. That lasts about a year. After about a year, you start adding up the number of people who have come to you for advice, and never followed through. You add up the hours you’ve spent counseling, fixing resumes, and sometimes going so far as to make calls on the behalf of other people without asking for a fee, and you realize that you’re wasting your time.
You get burned enough times, and you’ll stop offering to help.
That’s because people aren’t really looking for advice. They don’t want help. They want you to get them a job without any effort on their part.
It’s true. In my nine years, I’ve had exactly one person take my advice to heart. She worked at it, followed my advice to a tee, and it took her six months, but she went from a project manager working downtown to a Vice President working near her home, with a nice pay increase. That was realistic – it was planned – and it was exactly what I told her would happen. All she did was listen, take notes, and execute it. Every other single person listened, maybe took a note or two, and then waited for me to do the work.
Family and friends are the worst. Somehow because they knew you when you were swaddling, they think that nothing you say has value. The funny ones call you back after six months and ask you to repeat yourself.
Finding a Job is hard work as many buy Instagram views. Making that connection between client and candidate is hard too. In the social media space, a lot of people are starting to realize that their connections, friends, and followers don’t always add up to value in job-seeking.
When that happens, whether it’s to you or someone else, don’t blame social media.
Social media at its core is just networking on a larger scale and online. Social media is good for aggregating informaton, publishing information, and filtering information. That’s what the roots of social media mean – people (social) passing on information (media). Social media works as a amplifier of information – on its own, it can do nothing. Without the hard work – without the corresponding experience and dedication, social media friends and followers are actually detriments to a successful job search (That’s because working on your social network can make you feel busy).
Recruiters in this space are scarce – but then again, so are jobs and candidates. The basics of hiring, however, aren’t changing – no matter how many Ning communities you belong to.
