There are countless misconceptions about the recruitment industry, endlessly circling on popular sites like LinkedIn, and unfortunately, other media are also quick to jump on. We are fighting hard to change misconceptions by example, but find it extremely important to also spread information. This article summarizes common myths about recruitment and people who chose it as their profession, and our opinion on them, based on our 10-year experience within the industry. Make sure to read on and find out more!

1. There’s no need for recruiters because jobs can be posted and people can apply.

Several positions that are assigned to recruiters are not advertised online. For this reason, candidates we reach out to enjoy priority access to jobs that would not necessarily be available for them. We, as recruiters, are responsible for finding the best fitting candidates to a certain opening, based on several factors like level of education and experience, company culture and much more. It is our main responsibility to serve our clients in the best possible way, in the shortest possible time. For this reason we do much more than just shoot profiles their way. We provide business advice, salary benchmarks, market knowledge and everything else they may need to find the people they are looking for.

2. Recruiters decide who gets a job.

We actually never do. Recruiters only decide which candidates they recommend for the company to interview, after that, everything is their management’s decision. We aim to find a selected number of candidates for each position, not to overwhelm our clients with dozens of applicants to review. We personalize each recommendation to highlight why we think that person is a good fit for the role, and keep both the candidate’s and the company’s goals in mind. If we find someone unfit for a role, we also tend to offer them alternative options, in case they could perform better somewhere else.

3. Recruiters contact you with opportunities randomly.

We never cold call or select your profile randomly. Hours of research go into a position we receive to fill from our clients, and we check thousands of resumes and profiles before we decide to contact you. Our colleagues personalize each message we send, and we keep our candidate’s best interests in mind. We realize that this myth is true in some cases, however. There are still agencies that rather go for quantity rather than quality, but we are noticing a trend that they’re slowly becoming less proportionate in our industry.

4. Negotiating low rates for candidates makes the recruiters more money.

It’s actually the opposite. We work on percentage-based rates for every position, so to put it the simplest possible, the more you get, the more we make. As we have already mentioned, we provide our clients with salary benchmarks and market knowledge prior to negotiating with candidates and determining an accurate range for each position together. We act as mediators between applicants and management and try to adhere to everyone’s best interests.

5. Recruiters will try to force you to take an offer even if you don’t want that.

A job you don’t want is a job you should never be forced into. If you think about it, companies would most certainly be not satisfied with an unmotivated and dull employee, and the blame would definitely be on us. We never want to push you into positions that are uncomfortable or unfit, and that would also do us no good in the long run. If we contact you with opportunities it’s because we think you might enjoy it. Try to keep in mind that we naturally don’t know some of the people we reach out to personally, so we have no way of knowing their deepest drives and motivations, nor their current situations in life. This is one of the reasons we can also make mistakes. But try to understand that ill intentions never determine our goals.

Changing the stigma of our profession is only possible with open, transparent communication and behavior. If you only have bad experiences with recruiters, we encourage you to not judge an entire field based on the mistakes of an individual and treat each new opportunity as what they truly are: opportunities.