Helping tech recruiters vet client requirements and job candidates for technical roles by blending 20+ years of Engineering & Recruiting experience.
Interview with Leverage: Recruiter Edition (Part 2)
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Reader, PART TWO · WHAT YOU SHOULD DOHow to get real information and use itHere’s the shift: stop treating the recruiter call as a formality and start treating it as an intelligence operation. You have more leverage than you think if you ask the right questions.
The goal is to figure out what the actual deal is:
Ask the recruiter these before you prep a single slide: 1. Who am I meeting, and what’s their background?You want names. Then go look them up yourself. 2. What do these people care about?What’s their communication style? Technical and buttoned-up? Casual and vision-oriented? This changes how you speak. 3. Why have others failed in this role?This is the one that makes a bad recruiter sweat and a good one respect you. The answer tells you everything. 4. How many people have already interviewed for this?Tells you whether you’re the first test case or whether they’ve burned through five candidates who were told the same thing you were. Smart candidates shift the conversation from bodies to business impact. Once you understand the real pain, everything else follows. In the room with the hiring manager, ask: 1. What’s the business pain here?Not the job description the actual problem the team is trying to solve. 2. What gaps exist on the team right now?This tells you what they’re really hiring for, even if the job posting says something different. 3. What does success look like in 90 days?Walk this answer back to everything you say about yourself for the rest of the conversation. And if you walk in and realize immediately that the conversation isn’t what you prepped for, slow down. Read the room. Assess how technical this manager actually is versus how technical they think they are. Adjust how you speak. The goal is to figure out what problem they need solved and position yourself as the answer not to recite the prep you did at home. Interviewing is a two-way street. The candidates who figure that out who ask smart questions, read the room, and shift the conversation to business impact are the ones who show up knowing what game they’re actually playing. Everyone else is just winging it and hoping the recruiter did their job. -Jaclyn |
The Better Vetter Letter
Helping tech recruiters vet client requirements and job candidates for technical roles by blending 20+ years of Engineering & Recruiting experience.
Reader, PART ONE · RECRUITER CONFESSIONS Here’s what’s actually happening on our end Let me be honest with you about something the industry doesn’t like to admit out loud. By the time a job gets posted and you apply, a lot of things that should have been figured out, haven’t been. Roles change mid-process all the time. Budget shifts. Leadership realizes they don’t actually agree on what success looks like. Someone internally gets considered after the requisition is already open. Or there are...
Reader, On Monday we covered who to contact and when. You did the work, found the right recruiter and team. Now what? Let’s talk about the message itself. I read a lot of outreach. And I'll be direct: most of it sounds the same. Not because the people sending it are bad candidates, but because they're following an outdated professional template that signals "I didn't really think about this." I’m guilty of it myself. I have looked back and read outreach for sales activity I’ve done and...
Reader, The generic "apply and pray" approach doesn't do anything. It sends you straight to the bottom of a pile that a recruiter may never actually touch. As someone who works in technical recruiting, I want to pull back the curtain a bit. Because the people who actually hear back are playing the game smarter. And it all starts with who to contact. Step 1: Find the Right Recruiter What you want is a recruiter who is actively working in your space, ideally the one listed directly on the job...