On 7/20/2011 9:29 AM, Eric Jacobs wrote: > Does anyone here have experience with recruiters? I posted my resume on > Monster yesterday because I'm looking for sys-admin work, and I got a call > from a recruiter today for contract to hire work. I'm not quite sure what to > think about this. I'm supposed to go meet with him tomorrow. Anybody have a > good experience with a recruiter? > I have mixed feelings, personally. It has been my experience that recruiters tend to form you into some mold they think will better sell to their client. That makes sense, but unless your resume is a bullet-point list of cliche buzzwords, this won't work well for you. If you're just looking for a job that will use your LAMP/Java/PDP-11/AJAX/Linux/Cisco skillset, they will probably do well with you. If you're looking for a startup that needs adaptable people you couldn't use a text-search on a resume for, they tend to be less useful.
In short, I tend to avoid them quite a bit. One actually wanted me to produce 7 different versions of my resume, all wildly different from each other, for 7 different positions, 4 of which were all at the same company. While there's some merit to tayloring your resume to the job, the extreme of that is silly. I will say I enjoyed working with a few recruiters over the years: - Some of the people I've met at TekSystems are great. Others not so much, but they tend not to be there long. - Brian Gephardt at PDS was very nice and communicative. - Consultnet has good and bad reps, I think. They're not a bad company, though. I avoid Robert Half and Smith Johnson. I have never had a good experience with them, and the only people I know on a personal level that have worked with them have also had bad experiences. I haven't worked with them in years, so this may have changed over time, but I will not risk it myself. Smith Johnson is purely off one rep I had that left me with a very bad taste. This may sound like tough criticism, but I should note that a) this is just based off my experiences, not a judgement of the entire company or current states of affairs, and b) negative feedback is just as important as positive feedback to me, so I share what I would like to hear from people. Namely, both sides. Hopefully that's helpful to someone. -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
