Using Professional Services

Class Location: The Internet.

Description: This class will teach you to use the many resources available for finding a job.

Objective: Land the job!

You want to use every available resource you have to find a job. Professional employment services may be able to help, but proceed with caution and do your homework. Read the contract before you sign anything, and make sure the agency has a respectable reputation. These agencies range from those that deal with temporary clerical help to executive recruiters who handle top-management professionals. Employment agencies, career consultants, and executive recruitment firms vary greatly in what they can offer you and how they get paid.

Employment agencies act as intermediaries between companies that need to fill positions and people looking for jobs. They get paid—usually by the company—for placing people in jobs. Most employment agencies focus on support personnel. They rarely deal with positions that pay more than $30,000 per year. The advantage for the company looking to fill a position is that it saves the time of searching through hundreds of resumes and can instead work from a referral. The value to the job seeker depends on several factors, including the quality of the agency, the kind of work you want, your experience, and how many contacts of your own you have.

Most agencies are more interested in making a placement—thus getting paid—than helping you with your career. However, a good agency can help you develop a job search strategy and prepare for interviews. This would be most helpful to those who are inexperienced in job searching. If you want to use an employment agency, do your research, and make sure the firm is reputable. Treat the meeting the same as a job interview. Be honest about your skills, but also present yourself as marketable. This will make the agency want to place you.

A career consultant acts as a job search coach. The job seeker pays the fee. Services vary from helping you prepare your resume to taking you through the entire process until you find a job. A good consultant can be very helpful, but he won’t find you a job. That responsibility still falls on you. A consultant can help you develop a resume, research the job market, prepare you for an interview, and more. But you’re the one who will have to sell yourself to a potential employer. Turn to a consultant if you’ve exhausted all other options and know exactly what part of the process with which he can help you.

An executive recruitment firm is hired by a company to help fill an upper-level position requiring specific skills. These firms are expensive, generally charging the company 30 percent of the position’s annual salary plus expenses. Recruitment firms usually look for people with established skills in a certain field. They can be very helpful in your job search, since they know how to get to a company’s top decision makers. A referral from a recruiter goes a long way. The trick is to get an appointment with one of these specialists. They usually get hundreds of unsolicited resumes and respond to only a few. They know the job market and have a lot of leads, so if you can get a contact with a recruiter, it could prove to be a huge asset.