Let’s face it: the average recruitment agency gets a bad rap. They’re great for entry-level positions or commercial, transactional placements, but not experienced professionals.
At least, that’s the myth. In this article, we’re going to refute it.
Because if you have 10, 20, even 30 years of experience, you can certainly benefit from a professional recruitment agency to find your next job. Here are the benefits you get from choosing a firm that specializes in placing experienced professionals.
High quality recruitment agencies go the extra mile
Of course, everything we say in this article is predicated on choosing the right professional recruitment agency. By that we mean an agency that has the resources, networks, and expertise to place you in a career-advancing role where you can make a difference.
Every recruiting agency starts in the same place: gathering basic details about candidates and clients. Most staffing firms stop there. Agencies like Brightwing, however, go several steps further:
- Deep understanding of our candidates’ skill sets to offer consultative career guidance—we don’t shoehorn you into roles you don’t like
- Proactively going to market with your background in mind, skill marketing you to companies you may not have considered (without duplicating your own search efforts)
- Multi-faceted assessments that bring in bosses, coworkers, and mentors to get a full picture of who you are and how others see you—so we can understand you and achieve better outcomes on your behalf
- Pairing process with experience-tested intuition to achieve the optimal outcome for everyone
That probably doesn’t sound like your typical recruitment agency—because it’s not. Our unique process is built to help you advance your career and find a placement where you can make an impact.
Want to learn more about Brightwing’s unique process? See the full picture here.
5 benefits experienced professionals can get from a professional recruitment agency
Let’s get into the five top benefits the right professional recruitment agency will give you. This isn’t theory or guesswork—these are real benefits based on our decades of experience and that can be validated by our own talent communities.
1. Dedicated career support
Who wouldn’t want someone in their corner, cheering them on and offering them ongoing career support? Sadly, too many professional recruitment agencies fall short of this vision. But those that do are a true asset and resource.
This formal and informal career support can run the gamut, including:
- Access to jobs that aren’t yet publicly available
- Insight into the market and which skills (hard and soft) are most attractive to employers in your field
- Industry-specific expertise to help craft your resumé, prep you for interviews, etc.
- A trusted advisor and someone to talk to, air concerns, and provide a sanity check
- Ability to help you for years to come, regardless of whether there’s an immediate placement available—you gain a career counselor for life
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of this support in helping take experienced professionals’ careers to the next level. One candidate described a Brightwing recruiter as follows: “She listens, explains, and has an understanding of the applicant’s needs as well as the clients. All of these are important for a successful placement.”
Another candidate described a Brightwing recruiter as “extremely professional and knowledgeable, but at the same time came across as a very caring person. Looking for a job is so stressful, and having a kind recruiter is such a positive experience for a candidate.”
In fact, working with a solid professional recruitment agency like Brightwing can lead to not just career support, but long-lasting relationships. As one of Brightwing’s candidates said, “I feel like I talk to [my recruiters] on the phone more than my siblings.”
2. Accurate job matches
We’ve all gone through the process of reading a job description, applying, getting an interview (if we’re lucky) and then learning the job was never a good fit to begin with. Often this happens because the person writing the job description—*cough* HR *cough*—doesn’t understand the nuances of the position and relies on canned language.
Alternatively, some hiring managers and agencies are so desperate for applicants they’ll write the job descriptions broadly, hoping to cast a wide net. Unfortunately, the result is they attract the wrong person, wasting everyone’s time.
With Brightwing, instead of blindly applying to roles, a dedicated recruiter can sort through available placements and, based on in-depth knowledge of both you and the employer, can suss out which placements are actually good matches.
Take it from one of our candidates: “[My recruiter] reached out to me based on my skill set and experience as opposed to trying to find someone just to fill a role at a company. He found a position that is the perfect match, and he got everything set promptly.”
3. Flexible career options
The vast majority of the time, experienced professionals are looking for full-time, permanent placements. But sometimes, a career opportunity can come at you from another angle.
Our president Jeff Genovich recently shared a story on his LinkedIn profile about this very thing:
One of our most successful contract engagements ended.
But I don’t consider it a failure. In fact, it’s one of our biggest successes. Here’s why. →
Our client needed a consistent crop of technical writers. Without a constant stream of technical documents, their sales processes were effectively stymied—they couldn’t ship products without the appropriate documentation.
Before working with Brightwing, their contractor force was spread across multiple agencies, who were little more than glorified go-betweens. They had no systems to guarantee the number of manhours needed to meet and beat urgent deadlines.
Brightwing, however, had the processes and pipelines in place to guarantee a specific amount of work every week. If a writer resigned or took time off, we had another ready to go.
The result: a consistent talent pool that exceeded anything they had built out before.
So why did the engagement end?
Because after nine years, 15 contractors went to work for the client—which happened to be a Fortune 200 company—full-time.
Without Brightwing, the client never would’ve built out those talent networks.
Without Brightwing, the contractors never would’ve built the relationships necessary to receive a full-time offer—and get all the perks of being hired by a Fortune 200 company.
And for us, we’re just happy to see everyone succeed.
That’s the difference between a transaction and partnership. Partners go the extra mile to help everyone succeed.
That’s why I love supporting Brightwing clients.
An entire team of technical writers found full-time placement with a Fortune 200 company because they started with and were open to contract work.
You may not immediately think “gee, I’d like to do a 12-month contract.” But working with a professional recruitment agency like Brightwing can provide you with non-typical ways of landing you in your dream job. These opportunities are closed off to those who go it alone.
4. Passive job hunting
Job hunting can be a full-time job in itself. And if you find the process stressful, you’re not alone: 73% of job seekers are stressed out by the job hunting process.
So if someone’s willing to take that process off your hands, why wouldn’t you let them provide you with a free service?
This can be especially helpful if, as inevitably happens, a job opportunity falls through. You have someone ready to tee up the next one—you don’t have to start the process over. A Brightwing candidate actually pointed this out recently: “When my first opportunity fell through [my recruiter] didn’t give up. He found a new opportunity the next day and we are progressing to an interview today. Definitely above and beyond what I have come to expect.”
5. Objective point of view
We mentioned above that the Brightwing process involves bringing in past employers, coworkers, and mentors to get a full view of who you are as a candidate. The reason: we firmly believe that the only way to truly understand a candidate is to get an outside perspective.
Ask yourself this: when was the last time you looked back on the last 3-5 years and tallied up all your accomplishments—big, small, and everything in between? Probably not recently, if at all.
If you did, you’d probably be surprised just how much you’ve accomplished, because you’ve re-objectified your own career.
Now that’s just what happens when you do that. Imagine what would happen if someone else could look from the outside and identify those areas you can’t see?
Sure, it’s scary. It’s vulnerable. But every experienced professional knows that it’s crucial for ongoing success. A top-notch professional recruitment agency can help do this for you.
Why you should choose Brightwing as your next professional recruitment agency
At the end of the day, you should choose Brightwing as your next professional recruitment agency because we can deliver the five benefits listed above. After all, if we’ve done it for other candidates, we can do it for you.
The Brightwing team is obsessed with understanding our candidates. We don’t shoehorn you into whatever job we have available. We wait until the right opportunity comes along—because we don’t want you coming back to us until you’re ready for your next move.
We’re proud of the results, our candidates, and our clients. More than that, we’re proud to see everyone succeed.
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