Few things are more frustrating than not receiving a job offer after a great interview – but a recruiter not passing your resume to an employer you’re sure you’d fit with, is one of them.
Many candidates get frustrated when they express interest in a posted job, only to have their recruiter say “No, I don’t think you’ll be a good fit,” and decline to pass their resume on to a hiring manager. “But this is what I do!”, these candidates think. “My recruiter doesn’t even work in my job – how could they possibly understand the nuances?”
Your recruiter may not work in your job, but they do work in your industry – and understanding the nuances is what they do. Here are three reasons your recruiter may have decided that you weren’t the right fit for a certain position:
Your recruiter knows the company culture – and knows you won’t be happy there.
Job descriptions are typically long on technical skills but short on cultural descriptions. Particularly in tech-heavy or high-achieving positions, technical skills and education are indispensable. Naturally, hiring managers focus on these essential needs.
But every company has a particular culture as well as particular technical needs. And while you may have exactly the right technical skills, the support you need to thrive at work may not be forthcoming from a particular employer. Since even the best-qualified people see their careers stall in the wrong culture, your recruiter may have chosen to spare you the wasted time and energy by withholding your resume from a place where you just won’t fit.
Your recruiter knows that what you think the job description means isn’t what the employer thinks it means.
Often, the description of a job in a job posting is only as good as the information the employer provides about its needs. And often, the information the employer provides is vague, full of buzzwords, or woefully incomplete.
A recruiter who has worked regularly with the employer learns how to “read between the lines” of a vague job description or how to decode the buzzwords to understand what this company means – even if it’s not at all what the industry or the average candidate understands those terms to mean. If the language in a job description sounds exactly like your work but the recruiter hesitates to send along your resume, it may be because your recruiter knows that you and the employer are not “speaking the same language.”
Your recruiter knows what parts of the job description really matter to the employer.
In addition to knowing the company’s culture, your recruiter knows when an employer wants a very specific, hard-to-find skill or experience. However, this specific item might be buried in a list of commonplace job requirements, masking the true importance of this one obscure skill in the employer’s mind.
When a job description looks like “exactly what I do” except for one or two “incidental” differences, it may be the case that the “incidental” differences are actually “essential” to the employer. Your recruiter knows when “95 percent fit” isn’t enough, and he or she won’t waste your time by connecting you to an employer who won’t hire you without that last five percent.
How Can ABA Search and Staffing Assist Your Organization?
At ABA Search & Staffing, our recruiters strive to build a relationship of trust with each candidate. Don’t understand why you didn’t get the position? Ask us! Contact us today to learn more.