Have a burning question about your career or job search you want answered? You’ll be happy to know – you’re not alone!
We spend a large part of our day at RecruitR helping candidates to navigate their career queries and concerns. It’s something we love about what we do. So, we’ve answered some of our frequently asked questions below:
What opportunities are out there?
If you’re thinking about dipping your toe back into the market – this is a useful question to ask your recruiter.
Why? Because we don’t advertise every role that we’re recruiting for. We also have relationships with businesses that work with us strategically for their resourcing needs. Meaning, they’re not actively looking for staff, but they always want to know about job seekers who have the skills and experience needed to be an asset in their business.
So, the best way to understand what opportunities are out there, is to talk to us about it!
How we answer this question comes down to the individual. We start by finding out where you are in your career, your background and experience and what sort of things you’re looking for in your next role. Once we understand this, we can chat to you about our live opportunities and any of the businesses we work with that might be a good fit.
What am I worth? Am I getting paid enough?
Conversations around salary and what your worth shouldn’t be generalised by the market. Without a proper understanding of your level of experience, knowledge and skills – this is a “how long is a piece of string?” answer.
We’d also recommend that you don’t base your worth off the latest salary report published by one of the large recruitment firms. The salaries in these reports are often ambiguous and not tailored at a grassroots level that people need to know.
To answer questions about salary, we work with you to understand what you bring to the table. That way, we can provide you with an individualised evaluation of what your salary expectations should be.
Once we know this information, we can also provide advice for salary negotiations in your career or performance reviews. In fact, we have relationships with many people who contact us throughout the year to gain advice about an upcoming meeting that salary will be discussed in. This is a great reason to build a long-term relationship with a trusted recruiter! We do more than place people in jobs. Many hats are worn in our line of work – one of those being ‘career advisor’.
Is my resume too long?
There’s no special number when it comes to how long your resume should be.
While we’d say 3-4 pages is a good amount to aim for, your resume is there to tell your career story. If your story is 8 pages long because you want to include project lists and go into detail about specific projects you’ve worked on – there’s nothing wrong with that.
As long as your resume:
- has the right information;
- is well written; and
- has basic fonts and a nice layout.
If you’re stuck on how to put your resume together, your recruiter will always help you to rewrite it and optimise it to work best for you.
If a company has ‘no agencies’ on their job ad does this mean you can’t represent me for this role?
In some cases, yes, in most cases – no.
It depends on the relationship we have with that company.
Sometimes, the business has an internal HR team, and that’s their preference. If that’s the case, no, we may not be able to represent you.
BUT there are many companies out there that put ‘no agencies’ on their jobs ads that we’re still doing lots of work with. We may even be on their PSA list. So, in these instances, yes, we can represent you.
They usually include this on their adverts because they’re looking to advertise the role themselves first without being inundated by recruiters from every corner sending resumes.
To summarise – it’s always worth asking the question.
Why should I work with you exclusively?
At times, we will ask candidates to work with us exclusively. If we ask you that, it’s because we believe we can provide you with the best service and the best outcome.
Many job seekers forget, particularly if you’ve been off the market for a while, that if you’re already in a job and you’re looking strategically at other opportunities – managing the process is a full-time job in itself!
If you extend your job search to too many recruitment agencies and start applying for roles yourself, you’ll end up dealing with multiple people and multiple businesses.
This can lead to a scenario where:
- You don’t have enough time to spend with each recruiter to ensure they understand your skills and experience and what you want from your next role.
- The market gets flooded with your resume. In some instances, we’ve even seen jobseekers resumes sent to the same company multiple times!!
A scenario like this doesn’t look good and it doesn’t represent you in the market properly.
By partnering with someone exclusively for your job search, you’ll receive a more personal level of service and be able to effectively manage how you’re being represented in the market.
Working exclusively with someone also means they can help you to navigate the job offer process, which can become stressful if you receive offers from multiple different companies at the same time. When this happens, we work to manage the employer’s expectations, which alleviates some of the pressure from you and gives you the time and space to evaluate what will be the best move.
To chat to RecruitR about your career or job search, you can contact Mahlah or Simone through the details on our Contact Us page. Or to view our current engineering & building services roles, click here for our current jobs.
