177: Why Recruiters Do Not Find Jobs for People | Career Transition Coaching

[00:00:28] And I get it. Sometimes people are just in a hurry and they see that I help engineering managers get promoted and they make that assumption, but it opens up a really interesting mindset, this question of, do I need a coach or do I need a recruiter? When it comes to landing my next opportunity. And this comes up almost every week when Jolie and Max and I debrief on who all has been reaching out to us and booking calls.

[00:00:51] Jolie is the success coach for our flagship program, the lifestyle engineering blueprint, who helps me support all of our clients in their journey and their growth and their success. And Max is our marketing manager, does a tremendous job with the content and helping me get our content out so that. You can listen to it.

[00:01:09] In fact, you can thank Max for this podcast being distributed in a place where you can listen right now. We talk every week about who’s reaching out and how can we sharpen our message and how can we help the people who are coming to us through our coaching and our products and our content. So I wanted to address this question about coaching and recruiting because it does come up all the time.

[00:01:30] You want to land a new role. You get to that point in your career, maybe it’s been five years or 10 years or 15 years in one company, and you’re thinking about what’s next. And when you imagine what support do you need, recruiters often come to mind. And so we asked that question, do I need a recruiter or do I need a coach?

[00:01:50] Somebody who can support me in career coaching and what’s the difference? Well, first and most importantly, understand that a recruiter. is out there finding people for jobs, not jobs for people. A recruiter is looking for people that could be you, people for jobs, not jobs for people. Why is that distinction so important?

[00:02:20] It’s because the company is the client. For a recruiter. The company is the one paying the check. The company is the one creating the specifications. The company is the one who creates all the incentives behind recruiting. Yes, a good recruiter does care about you as a person because they’re a human and they have values and they care, but they don’t really care what they care about is placing someone who’s well qualified into that open rec so that they can get their check.

[00:02:54] And I don’t blame them for that. That’s their job. That’s what they do. That’s what the company pays them to do. Go find people for my open job you are a person looking for a job.

[00:03:09] Your incentive. Is different than the recruiter’s incentive. And we need to keep that basic economics of incentives in mind as we go out and engage with recruiters because they have a very different lens on what success means than you do. So when you ask the question, do I need a coach or do I need a recruiter?

[00:03:31] I would argue you’re asking the wrong question. These are not two different things. It’s not like, Hey, I have this screw that I need to tighten. Do I need a Phillips screwdriver or a flathead? It’s not two separate things. These are both mechanisms to support you in your growth. So let’s talk about recruiters for just a second.

[00:03:53] Do you need a recruiter? The answer is no. You need lots of recruiters. Okay. You don’t need just a recruiter because that one person does not exist for the sole purpose of finding your next job. We just. That person exists to see if you happen to be the right fit for an open job in their purview. You don’t need a recruiter.

[00:04:19] You need lots of recruiters. If you want to leverage recruiters as a part of your strategy for getting your next role, then you Lots of them and make it a point, set an intention to go connect and network with many recruiters. If you go back in this podcast to episode, I think it was 146. with Ken Schmidt.

[00:04:44] In that episode, Ken, who is an executive recruiter has been doing this for a long time, shared a really staggering stat. That only 10 to 15 percent of executive roles are found through recruitment, through job placement services, through recruiters, 10 to 15%, only 5 percent through online job applications like LinkedIn.

[00:05:11] The other 80 to 85 percent of jobs are placed through your network when you’re talking about high level positions. Even at a lower level in the organization, if those stats were to open up a bit, let’s say twice as many of those jobs are filled at the manager level by recruiters. We’re still only talking about 25 to 30 percent of jobs.

[00:05:35] You need to be active in your job search strategy beyond just recruiters. So do you need them? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a key part of your overall job transition strategy, but they are not the whole picture. What you really need is a strategy that includes recruiters as only one spoke of that network and of that system to go find your next position.

[00:06:02] So yes, we need recruiters, but no, that is not all that you need. So what about coaching? Do you need a coach? Of course, I’m incredibly biased. I am a coach, . If you want more speed in your success, if you want more size in your success, if you want more support in the journey toward your future success, then yes, absolutely.

[00:06:27] You need a coach. The best players have the best coaches, and you want those people supporting you. But rather than taking my bias and telling you that’s what you need, let’s look at it through. A few of the most critical gaps that if you have them, coaching would be a really powerful solution to help you accelerate that next transition.

[00:06:51] First, if you feel in any way desperate, desperate for a change. Maybe you’re unemployed. Maybe you’ve been in burnout or in a really toxic situation. And the only thing occupying your mind right now when it comes to finding your next role is get me out of this situation. I’m unemployed and I need a job fast.

[00:07:18] My bank account is burning up. Or, I’m in a bad situation or I’m just bored and the stagnation and this plateau in my career. It’s like every day is just another one of those. I have no passion, no purpose, no excitement at all. I need out of here. If you’re entering your job search from the energy and the mindset of desperation, then you need a coach.

[00:07:45] Desperation will lead you to make poor decisions. Acting from a place of scarcity, acting from a place of fear, acting from that energy of desperation will not serve you in getting to the career and the life of your dreams. If you’re unemployed, you might feel like Carlos. Carlos several years ago came to work in our coaching program because he’d been unemployed for six months and was having no traction whatsoever.

[00:08:17] This was right after COVID. During a time when no one was hiring at the time, you’d say it was even worse than what we’re experiencing right now in 2024, but it doesn’t matter when you’re in this challenge. It happens all the time. Even when the economy was great, we had people come to us who had been unemployed for months and months.

[00:08:37] Well, Carlos had been unemployed for more than six months, no traction, no progress, and he was feeling desperate and it was a tough decision for him to invest into coaching. When the bank account is already drying up, Carlos landed a new role with the strategies that we worked to put in place for him in just six weeks.

[00:09:01] Now imagine for a moment, let’s take a very reasonable salary for an engineering manager, 120, 000 most make lots more than that, but it makes the math easy. That’s 10 K a month. If we can accelerate Your next role by just four weeks, one month, that’s a 10, 000 return on investment. That’s pretty good for Carlos going from six months to six weeks.

[00:09:30] That’s a tremendous difference. And we asked after the fact, just imagine if right after you’d been let go, you’d invested in that support system and that strategy and that coaching right away. How much more. Money would be in your bank account now. And it’s not just about money, but that’s one factor to consider.

[00:09:49] And I get it that it’s scary to invest when you don’t have an income, but there’s no reward without risk. Maybe you have a job, but you still feel that sense of desperation. Well, if you go back, I had another amazing episode of the podcast with Cassandra Thompson. Cassandra talked about. How desperation creates bad outcomes in that episode.

[00:10:16] And the idea that when people just went out of a situation, they open up their lens to take any job that’s maybe better than the one they have instead of getting clear and focused on the job that they want. And the truth is that approach not only slows down the success of your job search, but leaves you unfulfilled and unhappy when you get there.

[00:10:39] Don’t move forward from a place of desperation. Get the support, get the coaching that you need. If you are alone in your job search, then invest in coaching and community to support you. If you are alone, then you want to invest in support. Isolation is the enemy of excellence. Isolation is the enemy of excellence.

[00:11:04] We can go back and refer to what I just told you from Ken Schmidt, that for one, your network is the biggest asset you have in your job search. So if you’re feeling alone, that alone to get connected to a community of like minded leaders who can help open doors for you and create access for you to hundreds of companies around the country and around the world is a huge asset.

[00:11:28] to be able to invest in a network. That’s huge. But on top of that, when you’re alone, you’re going to fall into a pattern of overthinking, of trusting your own strength, of reinventing the wheel when other people have already solved these problems. Isolation is the enemy of excellence. One of our recent Engineering leaders who worked through the lifestyle engineering blueprint called me after the program.

[00:11:59] And I think Kristen meant this as a compliment, but it was kind of a funny thing to say. She said, Zach, I would do the program again. Just for access to the community of engineering leaders who are part of the alumni base of this program, the lifestyle engineering blueprint program. These are the most amazing people I’ve ever talked to access to this community to ask them questions and get support for them has been tremendous for me.

[00:12:26] And I would make the whole program investment again, forget about the training and the coaching and all of the other benefits I got just that community piece was worth the full investment of the program alone. That’s awesome. That’s the kind of reason you want to support yourself and surround yourself, not just with coaching, but great community as well in your job search.

[00:12:49] If you lack confidence, if there’s any self doubt, if there’s any part of you feeling that imposter syndrome, then you want to invest in coaching in a job transition, especially. After those first couple of rejections, it’s not uncommon for our confidence to be shaken. If you’re coming off of burnout or a plateau in your career, your momentum has stalled.

[00:13:18] It’s easy to feel a lack of confidence. And when your confidence falls, that impacts every single action in your job search. If your confidence is low, then you’re not going to interview well. If your confidence is low, you’re not going to network with authority and create results through your network very well.

[00:13:38] If your confidence is low, you’re going to beat yourself up and you’re going to self select as a no for roles that you could absolutely crush because something on that job description isn’t on your resume. Oh, I’m not qualified. And you’ll start ruling yourself out Before you even take the next step, if confidence is low, invest in coaching and support for your transition.

[00:14:04] Eric, one of our now superstar senior director, members of the OAKO family here, he went through our program when he was struggling in his career transition. And in his own words, he was bombing the interviews. He had a lot of anxiety building up around those interviews and his confidence was in the basement.

[00:14:24] Eric went through our coaching program and realized how much that was impacting him way more than he realized on day one. And when we put the strategies in place to help him recover his confidence, to transition and transform his mindset, and to step into that interview with a whole new level of confidence, he turned that equation around in his favor.

[00:14:46] He crushed the interviews. He ended up with an amazing offer. Got what he wanted in terms of the role, got what he wanted in terms of salary, and then built on that confidence and momentum to get yet another promotion, just 12 months time. That’s the kind of shift that we want when you’re going to transition.

[00:15:04] We want to transition with momentum, not transition from a place of self doubt or imposter syndrome. If your confidence is low, then you want to invest in coaching. If you want more than just a new job. Then invest in coaching. If you want more than just a new job, what do I mean by that? You’re looking for a change in your lifestyle.

[00:15:26] You’re looking for a way to experience more from your career, to feel more fulfilled, to make a bigger impact. It’s not just a new job to you. It’s something that you want to use as a pillar of a new life for you. If that’s what you’re looking for, Then there’s deeper work to be done than just polishing a resume and practicing a few interview questions.

[00:15:52] job transition is not just about getting a bigger paycheck or getting into a new industry where the products really excite you. Your career is a building block. It’s a pillar of a fulfilling and happy life. And it’s important that you consider your lifestyle design as you’re making those changes.

[00:16:13] Now, maybe you love your life. You’ve got all of that dialed and this is not a factor for you, but if it is, then you want to make that change. I think back to Mauricio. Mauricio actually has been on this podcast before and shared his story of going through a really tough season in his career. When he joined our program, it wasn’t just about find me a new job.

[00:16:36] He didn’t just need a recruiter. To get out of the place he was in at Spotify before finding his dream job at Metta for Mauricio, it was about a lifestyle transformation. How do I get out of this experience where my career is not working? My life at home is not working. Nothing seems to be working and I just want to escape it.

[00:16:59] Well, a recruiter is not going to solve that for you. Mauricio went through this process and made tremendous transformations in his personal life and his colleagues relationships, found a new role that he loved, and then took his entire family on the road, moved their family to a new place, established a brand new life.

[00:17:20] If you’re looking for more than just a new job, then invest and take care of yourself in coaching a community designed to help you build a lifestyle. And the last thing I’ll ask you to consider is if you really want to maximize the transition, then get into a room with people who can help you know what it takes to do that.

[00:17:44] Maximizing your salary, negotiating, maximizing how that will fit with your values and in alignment in a way that’s going to really deeply fulfill you. Maximizing progress towards your vision. The things that matter most, not just in your career, but in your whole life. How do we maximize what’s there? I think to Sarah, who just went through our program for Sarah, she was looking for a new role and being in this environment of coaching and focusing on building courage and confidence in her leadership.

[00:18:16] And during that transition, she was able to negotiate a higher salary that covered all the costs of the coaching and will continue to pay her more now for the rest of her career. Those kinds of little changes are the things we forget when you say, Oh, I just need a recruiter. You know, that recruiter is not going to be coming alongside you sharing with you about how courage is required to step into these moments like a negotiation and really helping you strengthen that so that you’re ready for those key moments when they come.

[00:18:48] If you wait until the key moment. To do the work on your courage and confidence and strategy for maximizing your career transition. It’s already too late. We do that work before the key moment you practice before the game practice comes before the game. Do the work in a safe place with a coach, with a community of like minded leaders around you who can help you to maximize.

[00:19:15] These are just a few of the examples. There’s many more. If you are desperate, if you are alone, if you lack confidence or you feel that imposter syndrome, if you’re looking for more than just a new job, you’re looking for a lifestyle change, or if you really want to maximize this transition, then I encourage you to make the investment into yourself and get the support of great coaching and community.

[00:19:42] Of course, I recommend look at what we’re doing with the lifestyle engineering blueprint because it is designed for exactly this kind of situation. Our community is tremendous. All the leaders I just talked about, you can connect with, learn from the alumni, hundreds of engineering managers who have gone through this process and accelerated their career while balancing a life and a lifestyle they love.

[00:20:06] It is awesome. If that’s what you’re looking for, reach out. Let’s see if it’s a fit You can grab your phone and text the word lifestyle to the number 55444 lifestyle 55444. Just shoot that text over. We can grab 15 minutes on the phone with you and do a quick assessment. We call it a career growth audit.

[00:20:27] We want to see where you’re at, what you’re looking for, and let’s see if that mindset that I just need a recruiter. Might actually be part of the problem and what’s holding you back from your full potential. 

[00:20:39] coach recruiter.

[00:20:42] The answer is probably both. And I hope this helps you in making that decision. There’s no return without investment. There’s no reward without a risk. And these key moments in our career are ones where we don’t want to just take it on our own. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t go by yourself. Get the support you need and let’s go crush the key moments of transition in your career.