At some point, you will meet personally with the executive recruiter who calls you. This meeting will take place even if you must take a day or two off work and travel across the country for it. You would do the same for a potential employer who was interested in you, and you should do the same for an executive recruiter who may have a job for you.
Go into the meeting as relaxed as possible. That will impress the recruiter. In describing the initial interview with a job candidate or someone who is being interviewed as a prospective job candidate, John Foster said, "Usually it's on a first-name basis right from the start. I try to make the setting as informal as possible. There's a myth that the recruiter is going to put the candidate through all sorts of stress. That just doesn't happen. The candidate and recruiter meet as equals. Before a person goes into the search business, he's usually done something significant and knows how to run a business, how businesses are organized, and something about business ethics. A good recruiter is mostly interested in examining the candidate's record, looking at how he did things, and what has been required to accomplish certain things. That's what the initial meeting and any other meetings are all about."
Recruiters agree there are no rules about where a meeting will take place. One recruiter noted, "Often I invite someone here to the office first and then go on to lunch. I might do the preliminary paperwork in the office, so I'm not writing a lot during lunch and attracting attention that way. Lunch is more personal. It's social and one-to-one. I can find out what really makes the person tick. The more time I can spend getting to know someone, obviously, the better it is for my client."
When you have lunch with a recruiter, realize that your social skills are also being evaluated. The recruiter wants to know that you can handle certain social environments with skill and that you don't break under the stress of dealing with difficult waiters, for example. One recruiter admitted, in fact, that his only stress test was to ask a job candidate to meet him in a busy, mid-town Manhattan restaurant with a notoriously rude headhunter. He tells his guest he will make a reservation. He also tells his guest to be shown to his table, something this particular maitre d'hotel hates to do. The recruiter always walks in ten minutes late. He considers the mental state of the candidate something of an acid test. If the candidate has rolled with the punches and says little or nothing about the headwaiter's treatment or comments only jokingly, the recruiter figures the person is easygoing enough to deal with a pressure situation. If the candidate is furious and can't let go of how he has been treated, the recruiter knows he has an anxious, perhaps overbearing person on his hands. Such a person he feels, wouldn't stand up well to on-the-job pressures if headwaiter could throw him or her so easily.
Presumably, if you are an executive, you won't have trouble lunching with a recruiter, and recruiters report that few executives lack the social skills to pass this small test. Mostly, lunch just provided an opportunity to get to know the candidate a little bit better and to talk, perhaps, on a more personal level.
Most executives even pass the time-honored test of whether or not to drink at lunch, according to many recruiters. One recruiter said that it was rare for anyone to order anything strong to drink at lunch these days, and all agreed that in this age of health and fitness possessiveness, candidates are as likely to refuse a drink as to order one. But as long as the candidate didn't down two whiskeys on the rocks over lunch or show an inability to handle a small amount of liquor, no recruiter objected to candidate having a drink with lunch.
The dress rules are a little trickier for a recruiter interview than for a regular job interview. Most executives pass the dress test quite well, according to the recruiters interviewed for this book. It seems that by the time a headhunter calls, most managers know how to dress like an executive.
In general, dress for an interview with a recruiter exactly as you would for any job interview. However, there are occasions when this rule can and should be broken. If you meet with a recruiter over a weekend when you would not normally be wearing work clothes, then wear casual clothes. You should do this to show that you are equals, even to flex your power a little bit, and to avoid the appearance of being stiff. (In fact, under these circumstances, it's okay if the recruiter shows up in world clothes while you are wearing casual clothes.)
Some words of warning, though. Show up in quality casual; clothes, long pants and/or a skirt and a tweed blazer, for example. Unless you are meeting at a club where you have been actively engaged in a sport and have a legitimate reason to be veering active sports clothes, don't wear a leotard, sweat suit, warm-up clothes, or any kind of active sports clothes unless you want to risk looking silly. If you're unsure of your social skills, Executive Etiquette (St. Martin's Press) by Marjabelle Young Stewart and Marian Faux or The New Office Etiquette (Poseidon) by George Mazzei offer a refresher course.
Talk openly and honestly with the recruiter. They’ll probe and check you out so carefully that they’ll find any skeletons in the closet anyway. Your best bet is to impress them with your directness and bring up a problem area before they might have a chance to uncover it. (There are limitations to this, of course, and you don't want to be self-destructive. If you resigned under pressure from a company, but you know the recruiter will never find out the real story, then don't, for example, confess that you officially resigned but were, in effect, fired.)
The recruiter will usually examine your resume carefully and may go through it with you step-by-step, seeking to fill in any obvious gaps and to ferret out any that aren't so obvious. John Foster reported, "During the course of this kind of conversation, centered on a resume, I can usually find out a great deal about a person. I can certainly decide whether I think the person is worth moving on to the client or perhaps not sending him to the client but sticking him in our data bank."
The biggest mistake you can make with an interviewer at this stage is to be dishonest. They will check your references, and most recruiters are good enough at what they do to sniff out problem areas even before they embark on this process. One recruiter noted, "If a candidate is vague with me and talks less about one job than another, I'll probe that job they aren’t talking about. Did they have a boss they didn't like? Was it a resignation? Is there a reason they only worked there for a year? I can smell it, and I usually sniff it out."
Duarte agrees that dishonesty is the worst mistake a job candidate can make. He commented, "A recruiter is very embarrassed if the client learns something about a candidate that the recruiter did not. Maybe I'm being too idealistic, but I think the candidate should be honest almost to the point of volunteering something the recruiter missed. This is a situation where you will work together, and if you try to snow the recruiter, well most of us have been around too long for that to work."
The one area where you should be a little less direct is when discussing salary. Obviously, you want to earn as much as you can. And while a third party can be helpful in this regard, they can also hold you back-primarily by telling a prospective employer who's willing to pay $85,000 for someone that you can be had for $60,000. Try to avoid this situation by stating what your "entire package" is worth rather than naming just your salary. Or say you're looking for something in the "range of" and name a range. Say you missed one raise because of company reorganization or economic policy (whatever is plausible) and will have another raise coming up in two months (if this is true), so to cover these raises, you would have to have some amount of money. Don't waste your time inflating your salary though. With the recruiter's experience, they can causally pinpoint your earnings within a thousand dollars with enough accuracy.
See the following articles for more information:
- How to Start on the Right Foot in Your New Job
- What Are the Sources to Find the Information You Need
- The Background of Application Process
- How to Network and Take an Information Interview
