We have spoken about the circumstances around recruiters being less than cooperative with candidates and the many reasons. Yes, sometimes it is just perception on the candidate's part that a recruiter is not acting in good faith as I outlined in the last couple posts, but sometimes there is shared culpability.

Today let's talk about the candidate taking preventative steps to insure themselves against an unresponsive or adversarial recruiter.

The first step is pretty basic but not always easy. When you have initial recruiter conversations, try your best to identify from the recruiter who will make the ultimate hiring decision. This is not someone in HR (unless you are going for a job in HR or a dept. that is overseen by HR) who may approve the amount of the job offer, but the person who truly has the power to say "let's hire her/him!"

Recruiters will sometimes keep this info close to the vest for a couple reasons: A. They are doing their job in protecting the hiring manager from being harassed by candidates too early in the game when they haven't yet been identified as viable or B. They have the fear of being circumvented and risk their performance being called into question.

So either way it's not easy to get if you are only at the phone interview stage. It gets easier if you move into the in-person interview stage where you will usually get a lineup of who you will be meeting with and if you don't get a direct answer you can usually figure it out from titles (whomever the senior most manager is usually the ultimate decision maker.) If this doesn't work, the next way is ask who you phone interview with from the hiring team, they will be more apt to be forthcoming about the info. Maybe not the actual name but title. If you don't have a phone interview and go straight to in-person, identify someone on the interview team who you seem to have a good rapport with to ask.

OK, I am going to leave it there. My wife has correctly observed I have the tendency to go long so I will finish this up tomorrow. I’ll talk about what to do with the information you obtained (the real decision maker), and also having an honest conversation with yourself to see if it warrants trying to go above the recruiter.