How to Be Your Own Headhunter

I was painting at ceramics class in a working-class neighborhood on the Northwest side of Chicago twenty-five years ago when one of the sweet and unworldly ceramics ladies shared a story.

That very day before class, the lady had been answering phones at her job in a manufacturing plant not far from the ceramics studio in Rogers Park. The phone had rung, and the lady had picked it up.

"Would you be interested in hearing about a wonderful Office Manager job with one of my clients?" a guy on the phone had asked her. The ceramics lady was befuddled and affronted. "I'm at my JOB," she told the recruiter. "You're calling me at my PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT!"

Of course, the caller knew that. That's how third-party recruiting works.

I was the only HR person in the group painting flowerpots and tea saucers that night, and I tried to explain the business of external recruiting the best I could. The ladies were shocked to hear that a person might call you out of the blue at your job and try to entice you away from it. "Is that even legal?" asked a lady painting a garden elf.

In the years since then, I've often been reminded how many working people misapprehend the structure and mechanics of third-party recruiting, also known as headhunting. Many job-seekers think that headhunters are nice people paid by corporations to help working people like themselves find new jobs. They think headhunters are career counselors, or talent agents whose job is to reach out to local employers on their (the job-seekers') behalf.

Every spring we get calls at our office from parents who ask us to recommend headhunters for their children with new degrees in Marketing and Anthropology.

It falls to us to let the parents know that search people don't get paid to find easily-available candidates like fresh grads with Liberal Arts degrees, but rather to find needle-in-a-haystack candidates that companies couldn't locate on their own. That's how recruiters earn their fees. (Not that we have anything against Liberal Arts degrees! We have them ourselves.)

When we remember that recruiters are paid to find candidates that employers can't find through their own channels, we can easily see why so many talented job-seekers struggle to interest third-party recruiters in their stories. They don't understand that recruiters can't easily place job-seekers who don't match the employers' spec nearly perfectly.

Department managers who hire recruiters to help them fill openings invest big bucks - typically a quarter of the new hire's first-year cash compensation - in recruiting fees. If you were a hiring manager, wouldn't you ask for the moon when paying fees like that?

That's why recruiters can't always place even highly talented candidates in their client organizations. Employers are choosy, and recruiters are sent off to look for candidates who appear on paper to have been raised in a Petri dish and trained throughout their life to perform the job a hiring manager is trying to fill.

Way too many job-seekers see recruiters as magical guides to a foreign world they couldn't enter on their own. That is a dangerous fiction. When we are ignorant of our worth on the talent market such that we become removed from the dollars-and-cents calculations that tell a Chief FInancial Officer "Yes, it's clear we need to hire a new person in this position" we are in a terrible negotiating position. That's when we become victims to a hiring managers' whims. That's the worst possible place for a job-seeker to be.

We can't afford to be so distanced from the value of our contributions that we believe whatever an employer wants to pay us is fine. We have to know what our work is worth to the people who hire us. Apart from that, we have to know who needs the experiences and wisdom we bring. We can't just scour job ads. Like any person in business, we have to know the territory.

Our ancestors until very recently were entrepreneurs without need of a fancy French word (entrepreneur - say it Frenchily!) to describe themselves. They were self-employed on farms and in cottage industries. Industrial Revolution or no, we can't become so removed from our nuts-and-bolts value on the planet that we put our professional fate and earning power in someone else's hands. To do that is intellectually and emotionally self-destructive and potentially financially ruinous to boot.

We are all entrepreneurs again, just as our forebears were, only now many of us manage full-time careers instead of farms and businesses. It's on us to run our careers and not allow them to be dictated by the particular managers we happen to be working for at any moment. Part of the career self-determination we preach at Human Workplace (we call it Driving the Bus) includes staying abreast of your local talent market so that you learn what kinds of business pain you solve, what that business pain costs employers, and which organizations are most likely to be feeling the pain you specialize in relieving.

When you develop that awareness of your talent ecosystem, you're in the driver's seat, because at that point you can contact hiring-managers-in-pain directly and act as your own headhunter.

When I was an HR person for ten million years, I never set foot in a Sales training classroom. I attended hundreds of training workshops and led hundreds myself. Why didn't I ever attend a Sales training seminar? Most likely I thought Sales was tawdry and boring, or I didn't see the application to my work in HR. How naive I was!

When I finally learned that good selling relies on not selling - not pushing, only politely inquiring to learn whether the pain you resolve might be vexing a particular organization at the time of your inquiry - it was a magical awakening.

"Oh my gosh," I said to my friends in Sales. "Who knew selling was so unsales-y! No Glengarry Glen Ross! No pushing! Just listening!"

"Now you know," they said. You can be your own headhunter precisely because effective selling - selling with a human voice, that is - isn't difficult and isn't pushy.

That's the kind of selling you'll do when you call hiring managers on the phone.

Becoming your own headhunter isn't complicated. You can write to hiring managers via snail mail, and you can call them on the phone. You can work with third-party recruiters, too, of course. A job search in 2013 requires a job-seeker to activate as many job-search channels as s/he can, and the direct approach to employers is one of the most critical channels in your array.

Here's how a phone call to a target hiring manager might go:

RRRRRRRRING!

Luna: Luna Lovejoy.

You: Hi, Luna. I'm Ginny Weasley, and I have a quick question for you if you have a second.

Luna: What is it, Ginny?

You: Well, I heard at WizCon LA that you're working on some new RF projects, so I thought I'd check in and see whether you might be short a few electrical engineers with RF experience.

Luna: That describes you?

You: It does. I worked for Mudblood Devices and Whomping Willow Wireless.

Luna: You worked on the Nimbus 2000 by chance?

You: Not that model, but its predecessor.

Luna: Could you send me a resume?

You: I will!

Here's the important thing: if Luna doesn't want to talk to you, she won't. Your life will go on. You will not be injured in any way. Luna won't put a spell on you or come to your house and slash your tires.

What are we all so afraid of, when it comes to taking liberties with the traditional job-search rules?

We have been taught to color inside the lines and follow policies and guidelines, even when a system is as broken as Black-Hole-type big-company and institutional recruiting is. We fear the Godzilla machine itself, as though it could do us harm. People say to me "Couldn't I be blackballed from a company forever for daring to contact the hiring manager myself?"

I suppose you could! Can you imagine the worse fate, though, of having to go and work for a company like that? That would be hell. You'd wish you had been blackballed forever if you gave your time and talents to a place where the mere act of communicating with a fellow human would be grounds for eternal banishment. Getting barred from a place like that would be an honor to your family name.

So try it - be your own headhunter! Send a Pain Letter with a Human-Voiced Resume, or wait 'til your mojo spikes one day and call a hiring manager on the phone. No evil spells will befall you, whether the manager wants to interview you or not. Your muscles will grow. You'll find your voice, little by little, and one of those hiring managers will eventually say "Why don't you send me a resume?" It's all about focusing on the business pain most likely to be vexing the hiring manager you're calling. It's all about asking a simple "I wasn't sure whether you've got those annoying giant ants in your forest, by chance?" question and listening to the answer. That's it!

No halting self-description (no relevance in that!), no list of trophies and awards and no rambling autobiography is needed. You can call anyone you like, any time. You might surprise yourself when you do. Try it! And remember: only the people who get you, deserve you.

Hold out for those people, and wish the others blessings on their path.

Questions and Answers about How to Be Your Own Headhunter

1. How do I find the hiring manager's name? We start with LinkedIn. You can find them via Google very often, too. Join Human Workplace for free to learn more about the step-by-step details. It's not difficult to do, we promise!
2. How do I know which companies to target? Who's in your industry, in your region? LinkedIn lets you search by radius from your house, using keywords.
3. Can I call a hiring manager when I'm not sure whether or not he or she has a job opening? Of course! Call any hiring manager who might have the kind of pain you solve. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether there's a posted job opening or not. It's better for you if there is no posted opening because then the position requirements haven't been set in stone and you have no competition, either.
4. When is the best time to call the hiring manager? We recommend early in the morning and late in the afternoon.
5. You're kidding about being your own headhunter, right - you don't charge the hiring manager a fee!? Nope - just hiring you is plenty!
6. What if I'm already working? In that case, make your calls from your cell phone when you're on your lunch break.
7. What if I can't find the hiring manager's direct line? No problem - just call the main number and ask for the hiring manager by name or use the dial-by-name thingy to dial the manager's extension. Don't leave a message if your hiring manager isn't at his or her desk. Call back later, instead. You can also send a Pain Letter(TM) and Human-Voiced Resume(TM) by mail.
8. What if the hiring manager slams the phone down when I call? We've never heard of that happening, but if it does, you'll shrug it off and say "Whatever." Then go find a nice gelato.

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people. We re-write HR and leadership practices and policies for employers, and help them re-imagine processes from recruiting to strategic planning for humans rather than machines. We work with individuals on their job search direction, strategy and branding and we create custom content for universities, career development agencies and marketers who resonate with the Human Workplace message.

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Who draws the images? Liz Ryan draws them. See tons more Human Workplace images here!

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Our new Toolkit "When the Headhunter Calls" includes eleven tools to help job-seekers find, partner with, brainstorm with and make the most of the recruiters in their talent markets!

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