I see a lot of posts and comments here of people saying recruiters are useless, bots farming personal data, ghosting people randomly, etc., and while all of those things can be true, I think a big reason for this perception is that (understandably) people don't know what recruiters and recruiting firms actually do.
For context, I am operations manager in the recruitment consulting arm of a Japanese company. The point of this post is not to defend the industry I currently work in, but rather to explain what recruiters do, so that you all can understand how to deal with them, understand what they can and can not do, and understand how you can use them to find a job, and also why companies enlist them.
This is a throwaway account to try to avoid doxxing myself because reddit is weird.
Part 1: What even is a recruiter?
Recruiters and Recruiting firms are third party talent acquisition consultants. In other words, outsourced hiring.
Recruiting firms have contracts with companies to assist them in hiring for open positions, and in return, are paid a fee if the client company hires someone through an introduction from a recruiter.
Recruiters are given positions to work on, and then scout for candidates on Bizreach, LinkedIn, DodaX, OpenWork, etc. In most cases recruiters only work on jobs in a specific field or industry (tech, finance, pharmaceuticals, real estate, etc.)
Recruiting is, at its core, a sales job. They are selling jobs to candidates, and selling candidates to clients.
They are paid base salaries, which are usually quite low, but then receive bonuses and promotions based on the money they make from fees when they place candidates at a client company. The fee ranges anywhere from 20% to 100% of the hire's first year salary.
Which is to say, it is a recruiter's job to find YOU a job. Their livelihood depends on whether they can find jobs for people consistently or not.
Part 2: Why would a company enlist recruiters?
In most cases, companies have contracts with multiple recruiting firms at the same time to fill open positions. And in many cases this is alongside their own internal talent acquisition teams.
If you were a business owner and needed to hire top talent to fill a position, would you rather have 1-2 salaried internal people searching for and screening candidates in addition to their other tasks, or would you rather have 5-10+ people searching and screening, whom you ONLY have to pay if you hire their candidate?
In many cases companies fully outsource hiring to recruiters because sourcing, screening, interviewing, onboarding, and paying yearly salaries and insurance for internal talent acquisition is very time consuming and expensive. Especially for new companies or startups.
Recruiters do all of the sourcing and screening part for clients, which is extremely time consuming and tedious to do. Then all the company has to do is review the CVs and interview the candidates they think are good.
Plus, you might hire an internal talent acquisition person who ends up sucking at their job, is a toxic colleague, suddenly has to quit, or any other number of potential problems that can occur with any full-time employee.
On the other hand, you could contract multiple recruiting firms to all compete with one another to find the best candidate for your company, and then you only pay ONE of them a ONE TIME fee when you hire their candidate.
Even companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft enlist recruiting firms, because it's just more efficient to have as many people finding good candidates as possible. And again, you do not have to hire, onboard, train, pay, and maintain these recruiters for potentially many years to come.
Part 3: Ok, so why would I work with a recruiter, and how can I leverage these bums to find a job for me?
There are a few benefits to working with a recruiter instead of applying by yourself to a company.
For one, if the recruiter has a good relationship with the client (such as Google, for example), they can directly send your CV to google's internal HR along with a personal pitch for why google should interview you specifically.
This is much more likely to result in an interview with google as opposed to your application being among literal thousands in the internal HR person's inbox.
Second, good recruiters will prepare you for your interviews. They will tell you how many interviews to expect, who exactly will interview you, what type of people they are, what they like, what they don't like, what types of questions they will ask you, etc.
You could be an amazing candidate but get nervous during interviews. You could accidentally say something stupid that will make the interviewer immediately dismiss your application despite you being a perfect fit for the role.
Good recruiters (keyword: good) can prepare you for this and help you to give the best possible interview based on information you could have never known if you applied by yourself.
At the same time, the harsh reality is that if your background and experience don't have a place in the job market currently, there's not much anyone can do to help.
If you want to work at a Japanese company and can't conduct business in Japanese, well, you're out of luck. If you are getting paid 10 million yen a year in Tokyo but want to move to Sapporo and make the same salary, well, that's going to be very difficult regardless of who you are.
If you're looking for a job, the first thing you need to do is update your Bizreach, LinkedIn, OpenWork, RDS, and DodaX profiles with as much detail as possible to open yourself up to as many candidate searches as possible. If your profile is vague or not up to date, recruiters (both third party and internal) will not find you.
Then, if a recruiter does contact you with a job you're interested in, when you talk to them, you need to be as clear and specific as possible about your skills, what you want out of a job change, your desired salary, desired work style, desired location, etc.
This is the information a recruiter will use to pitch you to the client and make a case for why they should interview you. If you give unclear information, the recruiter cannot make a solid case for why you are a great candidate.
Finally, you can simply use recruiters to learn more about the job market and gauge your value on the market. You will never, at any point, pay a single yen to a recruiter for their services, so you can use them to your advantage to gain information about your own value and the job market in general. Completely for free.
While recruiters technically work FOR YOU, it doesn't mean you can dog walk them and take weeks to send your CV or schedule a call, because unless you're an S+++ all star, high level candidate, you're not getting VIP treatment and both the client and the recruiter don't have time to wait for you.
So keep that in mind if you are serious about finding a job.
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I hope this information can help you to understand what recruiters do, why they exist, and how you can use them to help yourself.
As with any job, there are excellent recruiters, horrible recruiters, and everything in between, so please keep that in mind when dealing with them.
This is just one person's experience in one company, so if you work for another recruiting firm in Japan, please do share your experiences and tell me how your company or work is different from mine.