**Candidate Guide At The Bottom**
A staffing recruiter calls you about a job. You talk about your experience. They ask you the same questions you’ve answered 47 times before. They submit your resume. And then you wait.
That’s how a lot of candidates think about staffing recruiters.
But if you’ve built a relationship with a good staffing professional, I think you’re leaving a lot of value on the table.
Here’s a situation that happened to me this week:
A local QA Engineer called me the other day looking for some help.
- He had been solicited by a staffing firm the week before for a role at a local company. They talked, the recruiter told him they’d get back to him, and then…nothing. He followed up. Called. Emailed. Still nothing. So he tapped me.
- He asked if I knew anybody at the company. So we pulled up Sales Navigator and started looking through the roster. We found the two Engineering Managers. Then we found something even more interesting: a manager he had worked with at a previous company, someone he really liked, who had since moved over to the company he was interested in.
- I called both Engineering Managers and helped him put together a message to his former manager asking for some help getting connected.
- Status: Role was in fact active and we scheduled the interview.
I share this story because this happened to me three times in one week. Three different candidates. Three different clients. Two different staffing firms.
Two of the candidates simply couldn’t get a response from the recruiter who had originally contacted them.
The third situation was a little different.
The candidate was told that they had previously been working with another recruiter at the same staffing firm, so the new recruiter was going to route them back to that person.
There’s actually a reason staffing firms do this.
It’s called “candidate ownership” (I’ve never liked this concept).
Basically many staffing firms have criteria around who “owns” a candidate. Maybe that recruiter has spoken with them recently. Maybe they’ve completed an intake. Maybe they’ve done a reference check. The idea is pretty simple: don’t have five recruiters from the same company calling the same candidate and doing the exact same work.
It should make things more efficient.
Except when it doesn’t. In this case, the person who technically “owns the candidate” isn’t responding.
Now you’ve got a candidate who has already completed the same intake multiple times with recruiters in the pit, has been routed back to their original point of contact, and has absolutely no idea what’s happening with the role. That’s a downside of an otherwise pretty logical process.
And I don’t pretend to know what’s happening behind the scenes in any of these situations. Maybe there was a miscommunication. Maybe the client’s priorities changed. Maybe there was never a req open. Maybe they decided to topgrade the role. Maybe the staffing firm didn’t actually have the contract. Maybe the recruiter dropped the ball. There could be a hundred reasons.
But here’s what I really want to talk about: What can you do when you have a staffing relationship and the process starts to break down? Because a good staffing recruiter can be a lot more useful than the person who sends you a job description and submits your resume.
They have access to tools you probably don’t. They understand how companies structure their organizations. They may have relationships inside the company you’re targeting (that’s literally part of the job). And they know how hiring managers are approached every day.
If you’ve built a relationship with a staffing professional you trust, use it.
If you find yourself in a situation like the one above, click the candidate guide to help map your way in.