Three Types of Recruiters.
There are three types of recruiters. One works for the employer in-house as a staff member. We call them Corporate Recruiters. The other two work for external agencies. They are often called Agency Recruiters or Third Party Recruiters.
One type of Agency Recruiter is called a Retained Recruiter and the other is called a Contingent or Contingency Recruiter.
The Retained Recruiter gets paid for his work whether he finds a candidate or not. Usually, he or she receives one third of the fee in advance of the search to pay for research. Another third is paid when a short list of candidates is presented and the final third is paid when the candidate is hired.
The Contingent Recruiter gets paid when his candidate gets hired. If no candidate is hired, he gets nothing even if he has done a lot of work. Some people say that the Contingent Recruiter will not invest much time looking for a person who is hard to find because he might not get paid for doing so.
Exclusive Searches
Here is another difference. The Retained Recruiter always has an exclusive search. No other recruiters are working on the search while he is handling it.
The Contingent Recruiter sometimes has exclusive rights to the search but often not. The hiring manager will give the search out to a number of firms and they compete against eachother.
This competition makes speed an issue. The recruiter wants to get to as many candidates as he can before the other recruiters get to them and critics say that this pressure prevents the recruiter from spending much time on thoroughly screen his candidates.
Some contingent recruiters have told me this is true - but not always. I, myself, have worked many retained searches and contingent searches and they have all been managed in the exact same way.
Two Types of Candidates
There are two kinds of candidates. We call people who are actively looking for a job Active Candidates. We call those who aren't looking until the recruiter calls them Passive Candidates.
It's often been said that recruiters are only interested in people who are already employed. That isn't true. We will speak to people who are employed and unemployed. However, our clients usually hire us because they are looking for people who are hard to find. They have skills that are in demand so they are usually employed and they are not looking.
That's also why we're called Headhunters. A recruiter might place an ad in the paper to attract job hunters but that's not the focus of the search. Most of our time is spent trying to identify and approach people who might be suitable for the role but are already employed and will not respond to an ad.
The Recruiter Works For The Client
The headhunter gets paid by the employer not the candidate. So, while the recruiter wants to help the candidate make a good impression on the employer, his job is not to get any one candidate a job. It's to help the employer hire the best candidate for the role.
Therefore, the recruiter will try to have more than one candidate. He will offer equal support to all of them but he might think that one is best suited for the role and tell client so. The employer, however, makes up his own mind and might easily disagree.
Transactional vs Relationship Recruiting
On recruiting blogs you'll often see people touting long-term relationship building over short-term contacts with candidates. Actually, however, a recruiter's relationship with a candidate is bound to be limited because if he places someone with his client, he can't turn around and recruit him out of there -- even if the person wants to go.
Some recruiters do it. If, after three or five years in the company, the candidate calls the recruiter and says it's time for him to move, the recruiter will work with him. Theoretically, it's legitimate because the person really is on his way out but most recruiters don't do it. So, once you place the candidate, your relationship with him - as a candidate - is pretty well over.
Identifying the Employer
A contingent recruiter will often refuse to give the name of his client to a potential candidate until he has established that the person is interested and qualified for the role. That's because some people might try to go to the employer directly or share the information with others and create competition for the recruiter who supplied the information.
The same thing happens to retained recruiters. If I give someone the name of the employer and then tell her that she isn't doesn't have what they are looking for, she might send her resume to the hiring manager directly.
It's happened to me. But, in a retained search the client pays a fee no matter how the candidate gets hired so the hiring manager will just send us the person's resume along with the cover letter in which she complains that we were not able to recognize her amazing qualifications.
Candidate Feedback
When a candidate is interested in a job and is not selected, they often want to know why. Sometimes the recruiter can tell them very clearly that they were missing something specific or that someone else had something attractive that they didn't. Often, though, we can't.
If, during the search, the hiring manager rejects a candidate, I have to know why so I can find people who have what he wants. If, however, we are already at the interview stage and he finds someone he wants, he doesn't have to tell me why he picked her over the other candidates because my work is done.
Also, the hiring manager's choice might not be based on skills. He might like some aspect of one candidate's personality better than another's and he's unlikely to feed that information back to you. What's he going to say? "I don't like her voice." or "I think I have a better rapport with the other guy."
And, finally, sometimes all of the candidates are good and choosing between them is a hard choice so it's almost a coin toss and there's little practical information to offer the candidate for improvement.
