Recruiters are not your friends, but they are useful

First, see who is actually across the table

In-house recruiters are employees of the hiring company. They are measured on filled roles and hire quality, and they know the team. What you tell them goes into your file. Agency headhunters are paid by the company, as a percentage of your first-year package. So they profit when you get placed, anywhere, at the highest number that closes.

Neither one is your enemy, but both are working toward something other than your career. The agency fee means a headhunter earns more when your salary is higher. Use that. It also means they push you toward whatever closes, even when it is not best for you.

Telling them apart takes ten seconds. Look at the email domain, and at the company on their LinkedIn profile. The hiring company’s own domain means in-house. A search firm you have never heard of means agency. Later, when someone is urging you to accept an offer, remember which of the two is talking and whether a commission is sitting on the table.

How they get paid decides how they treat you

Agency work splits into two kinds, and the difference is worth pulling out of them on the first call. Contingency means they are paid only if their candidate gets hired. The same role may be running at four firms at once, and whoever delivers the right person first collects. That makes their game volume. They send you five roles a week and write “I think you would be a great fit” on every one. The person is not the problem. The phrase just carries no information, because it went out to two hundred people.

Retained is the opposite. The company pays up front to have one firm run the search, usually for a leadership seat or a role too sensitive to post, the kind where the current holder has not been told yet. A retained recruiter is carrying a handful of candidates, not hundreds. They will spend an hour telling you why the seat is open, why the last person left, and what the future manager is like to work for. Take that call even in a year when you have no intention of moving.

Just ask: “Is this a retained search or contingency?” It is ordinary trade vocabulary and nobody is offended by the question. A straight answer tells you how much of their attention you are getting. A vague answer that slides into another topic has told you too.

Getting found by the right ones

Recruiters live in LinkedIn search. Your headline should name the role you want plus two searchable skills, never just “open to opportunities”. A profile that mirrors your resume’s numbered bullets draws messages for the right roles. A vague profile draws spam.

A large share of multinational roles never reaches a local job board at all. It moves through LinkedIn and through search firms. So one evening spent on the passive-search plumbing pays for itself. Turn on Open to Work and set the audience to recruiters only, which keeps it away from your current employer. Write the experience section to the same standard as your resume: verb first, number attached.

Two fields people leave wrong. Location: put the city you want to work in, not the company headquarters, because recruiters filter by region. If you would relocate or work remotely, that belongs in the headline, not in the fourth paragraph of your About. Title: use the name the market searches for. Your card may say Associate Manager, Business Division. The search box says Product Manager.

Once the settings are right, your inbox becomes a readout. A week of scattershot roles usually means the keywords in your headline are pointed at the wrong job.

Reply to good messages even when you are not looking. Two polite sentences plus “not now, but keep me in mind for X” go into their notes. When X appears, your phone rings.

The first phone call is a negotiation too

The headhunter’s first call wants your current salary and your minimum. Give ranges and priorities, never your current number. In most conversations, “I’m targeting total comp around X” does everything your payslip would, without setting a ceiling on you.

Your current pay is private, and handing it over hands over the floor of the negotiation. A line that works: “I would rather focus on the value of the new role. My expectation is in the range of X.” Nobody in this market finds that rude. It is the standard answer, and it is what people who negotiate well say.

Be generous with everything else. Your current title and scope, the direction you want to move, and the conditions you will not take, such as no relocation. A recruiter is holding a lot of roles at once. The sharper your description, the better the match comes back. Vague in, vague out.

Collect as much as you give: why is the seat open, how long has it been open, why did the last candidates fail. Headhunters answer these more honestly than companies do. Who leaves which job is what they trade in daily.

Ask your questions before you send anything

Most people answer the recruiter’s questions, hang up, and wait for the job description to land in their inbox. That half hour is worth far more than the description. Some of these answers exist nowhere else: the interviewer will not tell you the budget, and your future manager will not tell you why the last person left. (What to ask in the final five minutes of an interview is a separate job with a different audience.)

• How long has this been open? A role still open after most of a year usually means the pay sits under market, the manager is hard to work for, or nobody is genuinely hiring.
• Is it a new seat or a replacement? If it is a replacement, why did the last person leave? They may have no answer ready. The length of the pause is the answer.
• Is the headcount approved? Unapproved roles evaporate after you have finished interviewing, and that happens more often than you would guess.
• How many rounds, over roughly how long, and who signs off at the end? No timeline means the company has not built one either.
• What is the band for this role? Ask it in those words. “It depends on the candidate” means they do not know.

Say where your resume is allowed to go

The expensive mistake is letting a resume out of your hands without knowing where it lands. When two agencies submit the same person for the same role, companies often park that person while the two firms argue over whose fee it is. If you applied on the careers site and an agency submits you afterwards, some systems read it as a duplicate application. In both cases nobody writes to tell you. You just notice that the company went quiet.

So set the rule on the first call: tell me the company and the role, and wait for my yes, before you submit me anywhere. In plain words, “Please do not submit me anywhere without checking with me first.” Every decent recruiter hears that and does not blink. The one who starts explaining why that is impractical is exactly who the rule is for.

Keep your own ledger: company, role, which recruiter, what date. Three months in you may have five agencies running at once, and only that list knows where you have already been submitted. Answering “no, I don’t think I applied there” from memory can burn a company for a year.

Hand over a do-not-submit list at the same time: your current employer, its parent and sister companies, and anywhere you do not want to be seen looking. Your resume reaching your own HR is not a horror story. It is a monthly accident in this trade. Two things follow without discussion. Use a personal email address, and do not run any of this from a work laptop during work hours.

They will rewrite your resume

Recruiters rarely forward your PDF untouched. They put it on their own cover template and strip out your contact details, because a client who can call you directly has no reason to pay them. Some also tidy the content on the way past. “Contributed to” becomes “led”. Work the team did becomes work you did. They do not think of that as lying. They think of it as packaging. The person answering follow-up questions in a meeting room three weeks later is you, not them.

So ask every time: “Could you send me the version you are submitting?” Then check two things only. Were the numbers inflated, and was your role upgraded. If either happened, ask for it back the way it was, and say the reason out loud: interviewers dig three levels down, and a claim that collapses under that costs them the client. They understand that reason immediately, because it is their cost and not yours.

Their edits in the other direction are usually worth taking. They have watched this client reject four resumes for this role, so they know which words the hiring manager is hunting for. “Add a line about how many people you managed.” “Name the system, don’t call it a platform.” That is normally something the client asked about out loud. Adding information is fine. Adding work you did not do is not, and you are the only one guarding that line.

Once you are in the process, they are your only source of feedback

Companies do not tell you what went wrong. An in-house recruiter usually sends one template email with no reason anywhere in it. A headhunter is different. They sit in the debrief, and they have a motive to pass it on, because they need to fix you or fix the next candidate. So ask on the day each round ends: “What did they say? Anything I should adjust for the next round?”

What comes back is the sentence a company would never say to your face. “They felt you described the team’s work and could not hear your part in it.” “They want to be sure you can talk to finance without a translator.” One line of that beats an hour of replaying the interview in your head. Even when this role dies, the line travels with you.

At offer stage their position shifts, and you should expect it. Most of the commission is tied to a deal closing, not to how much you end up with. So you will hear “don’t blow this up over a small gap” and “this company rarely moves, I have seen it many times”. Both may be true, and both may also be a person who wants the deal signed this month. How to run the money conversation belongs in its own guide. Here, hold on to one thing: they carry the message, and they are not a neutral wire.

The most useful thing they do is not romantic at all. They chase. “They said an answer this week and it has been four days” is a call that makes you look anxious and makes them look like they are doing their job, and they are calling the hiring manager’s line, not a careers inbox.

Signals that mean you can stop

Stopping does not require a scene. “I will pass on this one, thanks” is the whole message. People in this business move constantly, and the one carpet-bombing resumes today may be sitting in-house at a company you want in two years. Your impression lasts longer than theirs does.

• They will not name the company. It is “a well-known multinational”, and they want your resume first. Usually there is no role. They are building a database.
• They want exclusivity, or a promise that every job at that company goes through them. You owe no recruiter that.
• Every call is about which other interviews you have, what stage you are at, and what the numbers are. Once is scheduling. Every time is market intelligence being collected for their clients.
• The pitch is “I know the hiring manager well, anyone I put forward gets read.” People who actually have that relationship do not need to say it.
• They vanish after submitting you, dodge the question when you ask about progress, and steer you toward three other roles.
• They paste your title, employer and salary range into a group chat or a public post asking who wants this. What they do to other people today, they do to you tomorrow.

When they go quiet

Recruiters disappear. It is normal, and it is usually nothing to do with you. The role got frozen, the company filled it internally, the client pulled the search back in-house, or a candidate closer to signing walked in. “There is no progress” is a sentence that does nothing for them, so they say nothing at all.

How to chase: wait a week, send three lines, and ask one question specific enough to answer in a sentence. “Has the team moved forward with other candidates?” beats “just checking in on the status” by a wide margin, because the second one makes them compose a paragraph, and not wanting to compose that paragraph is why they went quiet. One more week of silence and the thread is finished.

Finished is not deleted. Recruiters change firms often, and six months later the same person comes back with a new desk and a new client. If you were gracious when it fell apart, you are still on the list.

The real risk is not that one of them ghosts you. It is staking a whole search on two or three of them. You can only see the roles they happen to hold, which means someone else’s sales target is setting your options. Agencies are one channel. Direct applications, referrals, and the alert emails from company career pages all run at the same time.

Treat it as a relationship that runs for years

The best headhunters in your field will place you twice in ten years. Between placements, they keep you briefed on the market. Send them the occasional update, refer good candidates to them, and answer their calls in the years you are happy.

Make the “not now” carry content. Tell them what would make you pick up: a bigger team, regional scope, a particular industry. That files you in the right drawer, and the next call is the right role. A bare “thanks, not interested” leaves you in their system as a name that does not respond.

One conversation a year with a good recruiter does the work of a physical. You apply for nothing. You find out what band you sit in now, which skills people keep asking about, and which ones nobody asks about any more. Starting those questions on the day you decide to leave puts you six months behind.

One recruiter watched your title climb for five years. Another met you last Tuesday. They sell you very differently, and that difference gets paid out in your salary.