Chances are that you’ve done all that you can to position yourself well in your career. You built your experience and invested in your education to ensure that you have an opportunity to be and do what you want.
Whether you’re a Tradesperson, a Sales Leader, a Manager of Operations/Logistics/Customer Service/Finance, etc…you’ve tailored yourself to fit within that mold. And if you’re lucky, you’ve found yourself in the exact place you wanted to be. Completely content and fulfilled with your place in the world. Or not.
And what if you’re not content? What if all that investment has put you in a position that, on paper at least, looked perfect, but in practice? Not so much. Many of us will simply begin to passively search for the next opportunity. Maybe you post your resume online or take a cursory look over job-postings or industry specific publications to get a feeling for the trends and rumors that are affecting your industry.
Maybe you have casual conversations with people in your network to identify if there’s opportunity for you elsewhere? But once you’ve exhausted your network contacts, read the online magazines and news and posted your resume online…what do you do? Wait? Most likely. Hope? Possibly. Get frustrated? Without question. Is there more you could be doing? Yup. You can expand your reach.
It can be true that many Agency Recruiters have not done a great job of marketing what we are capable of. Generally, as a candidate, your relationship with a recruiter is reactive, which is to suggest that you find yourself responding (or not) to a recruiter’s interest in you as a candidate for a client. But is there another way to utilize that potential relationship?
In a previous blog we’ve discussed “WHO IS: your recruiter is to you”. The long and short of it is, recruiters can be a powerful tool for your potential career growth.
The fact is the best recruiters in the world aren’t worth a penny if they cannot provide quality candidates to their clients. Candidates like you. Some of my favorite moments in my job are when a passive or active job seeker comes direct and lets me know that he or she is out there looking for potential change. Maybe they’re looking to relocate closer to home or are yearning for a better work/life balance.
Maybe they’re in a dead-end position that will not allow for growth. Or maybe…they’re just not enjoying what they’re doing anymore. Whatever your motivator, it costs you nothing to expand your career search.
As recruiters, we are an extra tool in your career tool-chest that just might help you find that next great opportunity and its only cost is a conversation with somebody like myself to let them know that, should the opportunity present itself, you would be open to further discussion.
Written by Geoff Simpson, Business Development/Recruitment Consultant – Northern BC
