How to Find Recruiters For Your Job Search

Perhaps you’ve decided to reach out to recruiters as a means of accessing potential opportunities at your leadership career level.

If so, how do you find the best executive recruiters for your situation? Many recruiters work nationally and globally, making it difficult to pinpoint the best resources.

You can get in touch with colleagues for a referral, as suggested by the NY Times in Recruiting a Recruiter for Your Next Job, which also outlines steps to take once you’ve found a good contact name.

(Of course, since executive recruiters are tasked with identifying optimum leadership candidates for their client companies, there will also be due diligence on their part to vet YOU.)

With a little resourcefulness, you can also perform online searches to find and build relationships with executive recruiters who are familiar with your field (and potentially, your target companies).

Try these 3 resources to identify potential recruiting agencies for your executive job search:

1 – Locate Recruiters Using LinkedIn.

Executive recruiters are easily findable on LinkedIn with a few simple search techniques. First of all, get familiar with the Advanced People Search function (which will make your life easier throughout your job search).

From any page in LinkedIn, you will see a  use the drop-down menu at the top right, which typically defaults to ”People.” Next to it, you’ll see Advanced – click on this word to access Advanced People Search.

You’ll see many fields to use in searching for recruiters. Often, you’ll get the best results by using the Keywords field (which searches an entire user’s Profile on LinkedIn, rather than just specific fields).

Here, you can specify terms related to your industry or career level (COO, sales executive, manufacturing, IT, etc.), plus the word recruiter.

When you receive a list of results, sort it in Keyword order to prevent only those contacts already linked to you from being first in your list.

Since LinkedIn will typically turn up a massive list of executive recruiters, you’ll want to continually refine your search parameters – until the best contacts start to pop up in your results.

2 – Access Recruiter Listings on Google.

Nothing’s simpler than just hitting Google to find anything, including an executive recruiter. However, you’ll want to ensure you’re finding the right type of firm or recruiting consultant for your situation.

A simple search using IT Director recruiting company turned up more than 1 million results, some of which included recruiting jobs or articles, plus actual recruiters.

To avoid sifting through this volume of results, you’ll need to be selective in specifying parameters, adding filters to help remove specific websites.

For example, you can eliminate recruiter job listings by including -monster.com as a search parameter, which will take all recruiting job listings from Monster out of your results.

As an example, COO recruiter (manufacturing OR production) -simplyhired.com -indeed.com will show recruiters who source COO jobs and candidates in manufacturing and production settings, while removing results shown on simplyhired.com and indeed.com.

3 – Find & Use Executive Recruiter Directories.

In your Google search, you’ll discover executive recruiter listings or groups on various websites. These directories, which are often arranged by industry and geographic region, offer a wealth of recruiter information.

You’ll need to invest considerable time to research these companies against your criteria, with a close review of the candidates and career levels sought by each agency.

Suggested recruiter directory websites include: http://i-recruit.com/, http://www.recruiterresources.com, and http://www.headhuntersdirectory.com/. Your Google results may turn up additional recruiter company listings as well.

In short, you may find working with an executive recruiter to be a valuable component of your job search – and you’ll need to take stock of whether your career trajectory fits a recruiter’s requirements.

However, your first step will be spending time in locating expert, knowledgeable recruiting companies and agents who specialize at your executive level.

Need a competitive edge in your job search? As an award-winning executive resume writer, I create branded, powerful resumes and LinkedIn Profiles that position you as the #1 candidate. My clients win interviews at Fortune 500 firms including Citibank, Google, Disney, and Pfizer, plus niche companies, start-ups, and emerging industry leaders. Get in touch with me to experience the outstanding results I can bring to your transition. – Laura Smith-Proulx, CCMC, CPRW, CPBA, TCCS, COPNS, CIC