Episode 38: How to use recruiters strategically to land jobs with headhunter Serena Wolf

Welcome to The Career Clarity Show, where we help you find a lucrative, soulful, and joyful career path for you! 

If you are playing “all out” in your job search right now, you want to make sure you are using every possible resource to land an awesome role. Most people know about the common resources: job aggregation sites like Indeed or LinkedIn, company websites, perhaps some niche job boards for specific industries. 

One of the resources available that not everyone utilizes is developing relationships with recruiters. Recruiters, also known as headhunters, are people who help individuals find great jobs in exchange for being paid a “finders fee” by the company. In a lot of ways, recruiters can be a fabulous resource for you in your search, as long as you know exactly what you’re looking for and you present like a great candidate for those roles. (They get paid when they place people, so they have a strong incentive to get you hired!) On The Career Clarity Show podcast, headhunter Serena Wolf tells you exactly how.

Step One to having an effective relationship with a recruiter is being crystal clear on exactly what roles you are looking for, and why. Recruiters are most able to help you once you’ve gone through the steps to identify your drivers of career fulfilment and research the types of roles that most often align with what you’re looking for (and what your values are). While some particularly talented and generous recruiters will help you with this part of this process, in these economic times most recruiters (who are still employed) are out of their brains busy. (Not-so-fun fact: recruiters are one of the first types of roles to be let go from organizations during recessions, because if a business is on a hiring freeze there is no work for them to do. Another reason to make sure you’re being super nice to them!) Recruiters are used to that and know how to flex, but an in-house recruiter will definitely bear the brunt of this far more than freelance recruiters who work for themselves, like Serena.

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it makes it harder for a recruiter to “place” you in your ideal roles. That means they are WAY less likely to want to help you — or to have the time to give you all the direction-setting help you need. 

So if you don’t know exactly what you want to be doing next, working with a career coach to clarify and crystallize that direction can be an incredibly important (and profitable) investment. Good career coaches walk you through the process of understanding who you are and how that translates into work, instead of the backwards way that most people think about this. (Starting first with finding a role that looks OK enough on paper, and then figuring out how to contort themselves and their experience to look like a “good fit “candidate.) 

When you start with who you are — and then find the work that fits you, rather than trying to fit yourself to the work — you’re setting yourself up for a significantly higher chance of finding long-term fulfillment and satisfaction in your work.

However, knowing exactly what you want to do and the kind of work that fits you is not enough. If you have a great relationship with a recruiter, as Serena explained on the podcast, you also need to make sure that you look like a fantastic candidate for those types of roles on paper. 

For career changes in particular, this is no small feat. (Your whole deal is that you are trying to go do work that you haven’t quite done before!) So many people find it to be incredibly limiting and frustrating that the best way to get a job in an industry is to have experience in that industry.

How do you get over this hurdle? Create relevant resume-worthy experience points — it’s easier to create industry experience than you might think, as long as you are willing to be creative! 

This is one of the biggest things that we here at Career Clarity teach clients in phase 2 of their career transformation journey. We call this part “running small scale experiments” and creating proof that you can do the things you say you can.

When we think about creating proof, it can look different depending on the industry that you’re trying to break into. If you are trying to move into an industry where you need technical, hard skills your last jobs didn’t give you, the best thing to find is provable ways to develop those skills. 

For clients of ours, that has looked like getting a certification as a scrum master, taking a coding bootcamp, going back to school for a Master’s degree, or teaching yourself the skill by working on small freelance or pro bono projects (especially ones you can share examples of in your online portfolio). Remember that part of what a recruiter (and employer) is trying to do is to weed out the people without provable experience, and focus in on the ones who seem like they have both the most skill — and the most excitement — about doing the work. (Another not-so-fun-fact: a lot of times the reason a company is making a hire isn’t because their current employee can’t do the work, but rather because that person has lost the intrinsic motivation or will to do the work well, on time, or at all.

If you’re trying to make a career switch into an area where you actually have a good number of hard skills but it looks like you’re lacking subject matter expertise, there are lots of ways to show thought leadership and experience in new areas. Some of the coolest things we’ve seen Career Clarity clients do are: start a podcast, publish weekly articles and points of view on platforms like LinkedIn or Medium, develop a micro-site that shows off your thoughts and ideas, create a Github account that shows concept development, or start submitting external article for publication in relevant industry newsletters or blogs. (That’s one of the ways our clients who are most interested in diversity and inclusion work start to develop a unique, memorable name for themselves in a very competitive field.) 

The last situation is you may have the hard skills and the subject matter knowledge to do a great job, but may be lacking relationships. As Serena talks about on the podcast, one of the easiest ways to get a recruiter’s attention is by showing you already have relationships in the industry you want to work in. However, just like the other two issues, this is 100% solvable if you’re willing to use a little bit of connection elbow grease. One of the most important things that we teach individuals how to do in the career Clarity program  is how to build strategic relationships in a new market or sector. To give you a sneak preview of our strategy: LinkedIn can be a great tool for identifying some of the movers and shakers in the area you want to work, and doing the reconnaissance research to know who to reach out to first. When a recruiter or prospective hiring manager sees the depth and breadth of your relationships in a new sector, they know both that (1) you are serious about your transition, and also (2) they see who to call to get dirt on who *you* are and what you’re all about.

Ready to up your job search game? Make it as easy to be hired as possible by following these tips and applying everything that Serena talks about, and you’ll be in good shape to outfox your competition and land some of the coveted jobs available in this market. (And, YES, there are still lots of companies hiring right now that need your gifts!) Let us know how you are applying these tips, or what questions you have.

Want to learn more about our strategic framework for successful career change? Download The Roadmap to Career Fulfillment ebook right here!

SHOW NOTES:

• Serena on LinkedIn
• Wolf Creative Company
• Recession-Proofing Your Career webinar
• Email Lisa at Lisa@GetCareerClarity.com
• Roadmap to a Fulfilling Career eBook

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