Why You Can’t Just Pay Someone to Find You a Job
The recruitment market is designed for employers and job seekers don’t value the service equivalently. Leaving no good options.
There are markets in everything you can imagine yet it isn’t easy to simply pay someone to help you find a job. There are many “Career Coaches” who offer to help with this service, yet few dependable, market-vetted options available. Rather than trying your luck it’s just better to do it yourself.
Candidate focused recruitment hasn’t taken off as much as client focused recruitment simply because candidates as a whole do not value how much work it takes a 3rd party to represent them to the market and get them a job. It is less a market failure and more a perception miss-match. The market is working exactly as it should in relation to what people are willing to pay and the services people are willing to provide at that price.
Job Seekers (generally) Won’t Pay What it Costs
This is why the most effective way is often to handle the search yourself. And you probably should. It is much cheaper for you to handle your career search than paying someone to do it for you. You can learn to do it better and handle it better than any third party. As the market changes (See: What happened to all the Senior Jobs?), being skilled at career search is increasingly a necessity.
Cost is a concern as the average hiring-company-paid fee is 20% to 40% of the annual salary for the person hired. That is workable for a company because the value of that person contributing to the company is dramatically more than the salary paid. The recruitment fee is a fraction of the total headcount cost of the business. However, few professionals can afford to take a 20 to 40% pay cut in their first-year compensation. I certainly couldn’t even if I wanted to.
Thus in an open market, recruiters will naturally lean towards helping companies hire people rather than people find jobs. Until fees and costs drop further to a range appealing to both employers and job seekers, recruiters will build cost-structures around the fees possible.
Perception Problem not a Market Problem
Until the market changes to the point where skills are easily measured and personalities are easily matched and interviews are automated, these perceptions of value won’t change. My view: we are a very long way away from such a market. (Tools like www.hired.com are an example of what that market might look like if every industry had skills as easily measured and evaluated as IT programmers who compete in one standardized online competition.)
Recruitment is Economically Efficient and Horrible for People
Many people I speak with argue that Recruitment is a broken market because if it worked properly job seekers should be getting lots of different offers and different kinds of recruiters calling them.
The majority of the recruitment services market isn’t designed for job seekers. To a hiring company they have a wide range of options (likely too many) at all points in the price spectrum including do-it-yourself technology tools, SpamBot recruitment companies and high-touch, premium services.
This wide range of service options designed for employers, contributes to the frustration of job seekers who are often seen as “important but replaceable” to the recruitment service offering. Recruitment services are horrible to people because people aren’t the customers.
Some examples of the paid services available for Job Seekers
1. Assistance without guaranteed placement: there are a lot of websites that offer assistance with the process without guaranteeing you a job or interviews.
1. the Ladders — www.ladders.com
2. Linkedin Job Seekers — https://premium.linkedin.com/
Many others just search for “job search support”.
2. Retained Assistance on a Fees / Charge per use basis: these are normally called “Career Coaches”. There should be a good pool of them within your area. Network around to find a good set of them and then ask who is best.
They will be able to rewrite your CV, advise / work with you on the job search process, interview coaching and also identify potential jobs for you.
You are basically paying them to do the job search for you. And in most places they are not cheap. They will normally charge you fees for each thing that you want them to support. It isn’t easy to handle all of this on behalf of someone else.
The costs are similar to a normal coach and can range from a few hundred to many thousands per session.
3. Success-based Placements: again location dependent there are recruiters, coaches and consultants who do success based job support. These people charge you and not the client as they don’t “represent you” but instead manage the whole process as your recruiter. Basically the opposite of the normal model. You will need to network around to find the best ones in your area.
However, just like with normal recruitment if you are only paying for a successful placement, the recruiter is picky. Success based candidate recruiters are selective about who they work with and what services they provide.
They can also be very expensive. A good success based candidate recruiter can charge at least 10K. In some cases, their fees will be similar to what a company would pay a recruiter.
4. Skill-based / labor-based Placements: in some parts of the world there are massive talent markets where semi-skilled / unskilled labor is bought and sold. In these markets candidates pay for representation and placement. This is common in construction, home services and food services industries globally.
Normally candidates will pay anywhere from 1 to 3 years of their future wages in bonds and fees to get the chance at such a job. And some pay much more than that. In some ways this is the world’s “legal slave trade”.
Adapted from an answer on Quora Feb 15, 2015. Published on Medium 22/05/2017.