Messages from Recruiters on LinkedIn
From time to time, I get messages from 3rd party recruiters on LinkedIn who say they have an open position at a local real estate company (they don't name the company) that they'd love to talk to me about.
Why is it that they don't name the company who they're recruiting for? Would a 3rd party recruiter for a top REPE shop, developer, or REIT go about things this way? I feel like if I was recruiting on behalf of a big name real estate firm I'd tell the potential hiree who I was working for off the bat to get them interested. Or could that make the firm look needy?
I'm very satisfied in my current position and have no intention of leaving anytime soon. I'm just interested in hearing y'all's input for future reference.
in my experience, recruiters who reach out to talk but BS when you ask about the role or hiring company are trying to: -have call quotas they need to fill or some other metric -fishing for market intel (may ask your current salary expectations, etc) -want access to your network -you are plan B,C,D, etc -combination of above
for context, i dont work in RE but this is generically fair for many recruiters
I've never had a recruiter cold email me about a job I really wanted.
Most times I look at the job and think, "no" or "the company must be desperate/have a hiring problem."
Agreed, if there is a third-party reaching out to you for recruiting then there is some assumed tumult going on behind the scenes.
We all know these "placement" consultants work of commission so they just need a body to fill the space and move on to the next mission at hand -- ie they blasting a wide spread to see what sticks.
I always assumed it was because they didn't have exclusivity on role and didn't want you going around them - and them losing commission as a result.
This is one factor.
Plus, we recruiters don't want to correspond, we want to have a live conversation because we're constantly assessing you.
Like anything else, humans respond to carrots and the withholding of the company should trigger your curiosity enough to do a quick call.
Then we can learn all shorts of shit about your company, your career, market data, etc, etc.
IB/PE/WM, etc is more focused so we aren't as likely to spam as we would for say a developer but nonetheless, our conversation to success rate is like below 3% so screen hard.
Recruiters should be your last resort as to career advancement. Trust me, hiring is fucked 5 ways from Jenna Jameson.
"Unless your'e offering me $85k starting with a $10k+ sign-on bonus at a BB/EB, fuck off"
About 2/3 of the time they tell me the company if I ask. Or they give me so much detail about the leadership team that it's obvious which company it is.
Granted, I generally tell them I am not interested, but will happily pass the opportunity along to people in my network. That tends to get them talking since you're offering to do their legwork.
Currently at a MF REPE (acq).
That's pretty much how recruiters/headhunters operate in general - it's how they make their money, and it wouldn't really benefit them if they name their clients so that you can leapfrog over them and apply directly yourself.
However, as someone who landed this spot via HH and has worked here for a little while, I'll have to say this seems pretty typical of how these type of firms operate recruiting wise. We simply don't have time to screen recruits ourselves since we run so lean (
Most of the time when I've been hit up by a legit firm, someone from the firm reaches out to me directly (with a firm email handle). This was the case for Goldman, Two Sigma, Point72, etc.
I have had other very legit firms hire headhunters, but in a good proportion of those samples the recruiter made no game about telling me who the role was with. My impression is just that buy side shops rarely have the desire to dedicate enough resources for a robust full time recruitment team. It would make no sense - they don't need HR people to vet hordes of undergrads based on GPA and a 30 second resume flip - those shops tend to take one candidate at a time, bring them in to talk with the deal team, and decide yes or no before inviting another in.
And then yes, there are those recruiters that you can just tell are full of it. Things to watch out for:
-Wont tell you the name when asked -Makes too many qualifying statements when asked to confirm x y or z -"the pay might be a step back but there's huge growth potential"
etc.
My advice (if you can swing it - and at a top firm, you can) is to move forward in your career through referrals. Aside from the fact that going through recruiters can often feel kind of grubby and like you're being used, I think referral hires are respected and valued more. On day one, you have a better shot at some sort of tangible existence in the mind of your new employer, rather than just being white collar chattel that fits the bill good enough.
If you are going to go with a recruiter, know that there are more and less reputable ones. The reputable ones tend to be organized as an actual LLC or corporation and have various levels of leadership. The less reputable ones tend to be some guy that's ex-industry who operates as a sole proprietorship, and I always get the impression that these guys are doing recruiting as a backup plan or for a little extra on the side.
Recruiters used to contact me with all these shitty jobs until I signed somewhere fulltime (haven't started yet). Now I get shit like business development at Oracle and other pretty cool opps in cities I like lol.
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