Career Advice | Working with a Recruiter | Hays Canada
Identifying the right new opportunity for you is not simply a case of playing ‘snap’ with resumes and job descriptions – many other factors come into play. Changing jobs has a significant impact on the direction of your career and recruitment consultants want to ensure that it is taking the direction in which you want to go. Your Hays Specialist Recruitment consultant is involved in helping people find jobs every day of the week and will have seen the career paths of many accountants before you, creating an exceptional pool of information at your disposal.
Where we start
Many professionals have issues with editing their resume to illustrate the key aspects of their career and experience. Your consultant will therefore work with you at the first meeting to produce an edited and effective resume. The process involves assessing your skills and personality, as well as identifying your career aspirations. Since your consultant’s first objective is to get you an interview with the firms you wish to meet, it is in his or her interests to produce the most effective resume in any given market condition. As well as this, a profile of your skills and qualifications will be prepared for our website, hays.com.
The primary consideration will be to forward your details to current vacancies in which you’re interested. Your consultant will discuss with you the opportunities presented by each vacancy and provide you with an insight into the culture of the recruiting organisation. Should you be successful in securing an interview, your consultant will ensure you have all the available information about the organisation beforehand. This doesn’t just include corporate literature but also Hays Specialist Recruitment’s own insight into the organisation, gleaned from regular visits and briefings, as well as from candidates for previous jobs and often temporaries who’ve worked there.
Where you come in
It’s imperative that you provide your consultant with feedback as soon as possible after an interview at a client. If your feedback is positive and you’re interested in the position, your consultants will ensure that your enthusiasm is professionally relayed back. Many Hays Specialist Recruitment clients call their consultant within an hour of conducting a first interview – and can be disappointed to discover that the consultant has not yet received feedback from the candidate. Also, there may of course be questions arising from the interview, or even a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of statements at that meeting. It’s your consultant’s responsibility to resolve all these for you.
Following initial meetings or interviews, your consultant will contact you if there is any positive news from a client in respect of interviews or to seek more information. However, it’s not practical to get back to every candidate when an individual resume application has been unsuccessful, but this information is usually imparted in the course of ongoing conversations. Your consultant and you should agree on a suitable framework for ongoing contact relevant to your circumstances.
Keeping the heat on
If the first marketing exercise has been unsuccessful, your consultant may, after a suitable period of time, suggest a remarketing exercise. The second line of attack is often to draw up a list of firms that you are interested in and that may be interested in you, but where there are no current advised vacancies. These firms can be approached on a speculative basis; this approach can be made with full disclosure and a resume or on a no-names basis.
After the initial marketing exercise, your details are held on a sophisticated computerised search system, so that even if your consultant is unavailable when new jobs are registered, his or her colleagues will be aware of your suitability for the new appointment and contract you.
In addition to interviewing, preparing resumes and marketing exercises, consultants spend a lot of their time liaising with their clients base to market the Hays Specialist Recruitment service. They’ll also be networking with other accountants to keep abreast of issues from the employees’ perspective – all to secure you the right job for you.
