The Job Search Solution
The Importance of a Relationship Between a Senior Candidate and a Recruiter Part I
Dave Perry Interview with Dave Perry: Dave discusses the importance of the relationship that a senior candidate has to have with a recruiter.
Welcome. This podcast is sponsored by the jobsearchsolution.com. America is only 60 hour program of everything you could possibly imagine about how to find a job. The jobsearchsolution.com has successfully helped more than 100,000 people find a job as fast as possible. The jobsearchsolution.com. Welcome back and as we do every Tuesday we'd like to welcome our friend Dave Perry. He is our international recruiter, Retained Search Recruiter from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He's only been in the business for 35 years. He's written nine books on how to find a job, how to hire and he comes to us every Tuesday talking about all kinds of issues facing recruiters, job seekers and people looking to hire. He's always had some fascinating subjects that are facing recruiters, especially retained recruiters, which is a little bit different than a lot of the recruiters that we work with around the country and lately we've been talking about working with recruiters. He has a particularly interesting story about an issue that came up with one of the situations he was in and it has to do with working with recruiters, teaching both candidates as well as hiring authorities about recruiters. As always Dave, welcome. How are you? Good afternoon sir. I'm absolutely fabulous. As you know that's the room of the day. I'm going to stick with it as soon as we are. That's true. We have to. We have to. That's true. Last couple of weeks we've been talking about working with recruiters and right before we got on the air here, we asked you about should we do that again? You started telling me about a story that came up when you were working with a candidate and a potential reference for the candidate. Tell the listeners about that and what was so important about it? This is not a good news story folks and it absolutely could have been avoided. I was finishing a search for a vice president of manufacturing for a client. The references are one of the last things we do. We'll get an offer autographed, approved an autograph and then we'll do references and then we'll get the client to autograph their entity agreement and it's done. In doing the references, I had five or six references I had to do and I'd done most of them but the most important reference happened to be the VP of HR from one of the companies that he worked for. The reason it was critical is because several of the other executives had retired and were long gone. I mean expired and I needed this person's input and I chased them for three weeks and I'd get odd calls back in the middle of the night at two in the morning saying hey can we talk now? Anyway, I finally called this. I would not complete this search until this particular reference was done because it was just that important. I phoned this reference and left the voicemail probably the 11th or 12th voicemail and I said it's me calling and I'm calling you to do a reference on. The mere fact that we have not been able to connect now for three weeks and I know you're in the country leads me to believe that I should be concerned about this individual's performance and that you're not calling me back because you don't want to be caught in the middle giving an inaccurate reference or being forced to tell the truth and it is negative. So that's my assumption and I'm telling you that and based on that assumption if I do not hear from you in the next 24 hours I will mark this as a negative and I will not be proceeding with an offer. Now this is a 250,000 plus offer that we're talking about. Very senior individual in their mid-50s. These don't come along very often and he was perfectly qualified and the other references were okay but not stellar and couldn't speak to the specific deliverables that this individual would have been accountable for this individual I was trying to reference was about the only person alive that could. So in the end they didn't call back. They didn't call back in time and I had to get to the candidate and say listen I can't finish this. I'm withdrawing the offer or we're not completing the circle for the cycle and pretty much devastated and didn't they call back like two and a half weeks later and tell me that my assumption was incorrect and I told them that's unfortunate but I now believe that they were a barefaced liar and they had zero credibility now in my book's point for now and that we were not going to reopen this and we were not going to be offering the candidate the role so I'm still doing the search that's the part for the course. But here's the point in all this folks when you've gone through a series of interviews and you've gotten excited about an opportunity and you've been asked to give references. Please phone the two things. Phone the reference. Ask for permission to give them as a reference. Tell them why you're excited about the opportunity that you're being recruited into and why you're qualified for the role and remind them about the things that you did in when you were working for them or with them that highlights the fact that by just they're really well qualified for this job because otherwise the reference on the other end of the line when the recruiter calls has no context unless you've given them context and now they're trying to remember you and it may have been last week or last month or ten years ago that you work with them but guaranteed you know they've worked with hundreds if not thousands of other people since they last saw you and they're not going to remember so crisply and so clearly your brilliance unless you tell them. It's really simple. You know it's like priming a pump. You've got to make sure that the data the information is there to deliver. It's really simple. In fact Tony and I both do this. Send them a copy of the job ad. Yes. And highlight you know here's you know they need I got they need I got it makes it so simple for everyone. And you refresh them. You first of all they may not remember you all that well. You have to remind them who you were. You have to remind them exactly what you did and how it relates to the present job and you have to do it in detail and if you don't because they'll say something like oh yeah sure yeah. Dave I'll be more than happy to do that yeah just have them call me and then you know and we need to take a short break and we'll come back and discuss this further because this is so very important. This is Tony Bescher along with Dave Perry here on the job search solution. Stay tuned. This podcast was sponsored by the job search solution.com. It's the world's most successful online job search program. My expert in the trenches advice has been used by more than a hundred thousand people to successfully find a new job. So go to the job search solution.com and start today toward a better job.