LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION One area where I feel Darrell W. Gurney's book, HEADHUNTERS REVEALED! is a little weak is in how to select a third party recruiter or recruiters. I am going to spend quite a bit of time on how to select Headhunters because that is probably the most important single part of getting the job placement success rate to as close to the mythical 27 percent as possible. In the real estate business location, location, location is critical but it is not a critical when selecting a recruiter. The age of email's, faxes, cell phones, instant messaging, etc. has greatly reduced the need to work with a recruiter located where you live or where you want to relocate. I can place someone in China or Thailand as I can in Minneapolis, Minnesota (collecting my money is another issue). Even with this argument, it is surprising how many resumes Discovery Personnel, Inc. gets from people wanting to relocate to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and companies in the Twin Cities contacting us to do searches for them. Why does the bias for working with local recruiters still exist.
- Some recruiters specialize in placing people in their locality, irregardless of specialty and they have contacts in a lot of the companies in their localities.
- Some people like to get to know the recruiter personally so they want a local recruiter that they can go to lunch with or talk to on a regular basis, high tech, high touch.
- Some third party recruiters will not work with candidates who work with candidates who are not local because they want to be able to do a pre-interview before sending them to their client company. Based on my experience of having candidates show up for interviews drunk, with extreme body odor, beach shorts, etc. this isn't a bad idea.
- Some companies want to meet the recruiter before signing the contract and it is rarely economical for a contingency recruiter to travel to the hiring company's site.
My personal belief is that selecting a local recruiter can be an advantage, especially if the recruiter's area of expertise falls withing the candidate's area of job expertise. Points should be assigned for third party recruiters, this is somewhat arbitrary but I give picking a local recruiter a point value of 0 to 3.
10:29:24 PM 
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