No matter how long you have been on the job market or what your resume and work experience look like, chances are that you will be making use of a healthcare recruiter if you’re a healthcare professional looking for a healthcare position. Health Jobs Nationwide, an online healthcare jobs board, says that even with extensive listings of vacant positions only a click away, the healthcare recruiter is far from obsolete. That’s because a good healthcare recruiter can be absolutely invaluable for healthcare professionals looking for work. However, something which is less noted than a bad one can be positively disastrous.
A bad healthcare recruiter might lead you to a job, but it will almost certainly be the wrong job. You could well find yourself in a position which does absolutely nothing to advance your career. Even worse, they could lead you down a lengthy and complicated recruitment process that ends in nothing but failure. A good recruiter must understand you, your talents, and ultimately what position would be right for you. Accordingly, you need to apply some discernment in choosing the right recruiter.
Advice For Choosing the Right Recruiter
So, how do you go about optimizing your job search efforts with a top-quality recruiter that will work with you (not against you) and will not waste your time? Pulling this off fundamentally involves ensuring you have a knowledge of what you want for yourself and what you want from the recruiter. Here follows some top advice for realizing this goal:
Know What You Want
In order to pick the right recruiter, you need to understand your own goals. How can a recruiter help you achieve your career goals if you yourself do not even know what these are? Knowing what you want is the only way to effectively convey your expectations to a recruiter. It is this which actually enables you to be discerning when the time comes to actually pick a recruiter.
One important practical consideration is to ensure that you at least know the type of job you want. Your understanding of your own goals should be more detailed than this, but it is nevertheless the most important thing to know about your goals. Recruiters often specialize in different types of healthcare roles – some help with travel placement whereas others will only help with permanent positions. At the very least, you should know which of those you are after.
Interview the Recruiter
The reason why many jobseekers fail to do this is because recruiters will also interview you. A recruiter’s reputation is at stake when they recommend you for a job, so you need to make the grade. However, you need to interview the recruiter too. Fundamental to doing this effectively is knowing your own worth. If you are confident that you are the type of candidate that can make any recruiter look good, then the balance of power swings to you when selecting recruiters. Ask about things like their long-term retention rates and the general success of their candidates.
Pay Attention to Rapport
This is a rule that applies in so many areas of job seeking that it is almost universal. Really, you should have a good personal relationship with your recruiter. The process cannot be mechanical – you need to know each other and, to some extent, trust each other. If you find it difficult to get along with them on a personal level, this is a pretty bad sign.
Healthcare recruiters are vital, but they can sometimes let you down. It really is up to you whether it goes one way or the other.
