Are you a great candidate?

If you were paying the bill for a recruiter, I'm sure you'd expect them to go out and find you great candidates for your role. People who fit the brief technically, who will fit into the team and company culturally and also come in under the budget. And indeed that's what we always aim to do.

So if you are not getting a lot of traction with recruiters, ask yourself this - are you actually a great candidate?

Just about everyone's automatic answer to this is Yes. "Hey, I've got 6 years of Windows server admin experience, I've got an MCSE, etc, etc". But saying you have x years of experience or certs y and z doesn't really answer the question. We've all seen people in the workplace who aren't very good, in spite of having experience, certs and degrees. Are you genuinely good? 

Reflect on this for a moment - 50% of people are worse than average. And recuiters are trying to track down that top 5 or 10%. That's 9 out of 10 who don't make the grade. Here are some questions you might ask yourself as to whether you are a great candidate:

• Are you an excellent communicator? Articulate, engaging, able to speak directly to the point. 
• Do you actually answer the questions you are asked?
• Is your CV polished, well formatted and sensibly structured?
• Is your career history stable? Good tenures in roles, with no major gaps in your experience.
• Have you worked for well known, well regarded organisations?
• Have you moved to different organisations across your career to prove yourself in different environments?
• Have you kept your skills up to date and relevant? (Keeping in mind it's commercial experience that counts)
• Are you certified in the technologies and methologies that you consider your core area of expertise?
• Are your pay expectations reasonable given your experience?
• And finally, the big one - Are you actually as good as your peers? (and how have you benchmaked this?)

The answer to more than one of two of these questions is no, you might now know why you aren't getting much traction.

My own personal feeling is the people that have the worst experiences with recruiters are in fact the worst candidates.

Why can't we help?

Candidates often feel let down by recruiters when they have a history with the agency and/or the consultant. "I sent them my CV and I never even got a single call about a job".

In some cases this is indeed purely bad customer service, though in many cases I think there's very a willingness to help but a lack of ability to do so.

Recruitment tends to be very much a client driven business. By that I mean we go out and search for what the client is looking for, and thus I am somewhat limited in terms of what I can put in front of my candidates. Even if I reckon you're the best Red Hat Engineer in town, unless one of my clients wants to hire a Linux Engineer, I probably won't be able to help.

And even if I do have a Linux role on, I'm still going to go to market and try find the best three Linux guys I can find. Obviously you'll have a head start given you're known to us, but that doesn't guarantee you'll make the shortlist.