How to Work With Recruiters (So They Work for You)

Candidates tend to treat recruiters as either gatekeepers to charm or nuisances to ignore, and both readings cost them. A recruiter is neither an ally nor an obstacle: they are an intermediary with their own targets, and understanding those targets is what turns them into a useful part of your search rather than a source of unanswered messages.

Handled well, one good recruiter relationship produces more interviews than fifty cold applications, because they have live roles that never reach a job board and they know which client will actually move quickly. This guide covers the two types you will meet, who pays them, what to say on the first call, how to stay near the top of their list, and which practices to refuse.

Internal and agency recruiters are different jobs

An internal recruiter works for the company you want to join. Their target is filling that company's roles well, they know the hiring manager personally, and they can tell you what the team is really like and what the salary band is. They have no incentive to push you into an unsuitable role, because a bad hire is their problem for the next year. Treat them as a colleague of your future manager, which is what they are.

An agency recruiter works for many clients and is paid on placements, usually a percentage of your first year salary. That shapes their behaviour in predictable ways: they move fast, they are hungry for candidates, they sometimes submit people to roles that are a stretch, and they occasionally represent a role they have not been formally briefed on. None of that makes them dishonest, and the good ones are genuinely valuable, particularly in specialist fields where they know every hiring manager in the city. It simply means you should understand the commercial logic of recruitment before deciding how much weight to give their advice.

A third category is worth naming: executive search, where a firm is retained and paid in advance to find one senior person. If a search consultant calls you about a specific role, that role is real, funded, and usually confidential, and the process will be slower and more thorough than an agency's.

Who pays them, and why does it matter to you?

The employer pays, always. No legitimate recruiter charges a candidate a fee to be represented, and an employment agency asking you for money for placement, training, or admin is either operating illegally or is not a recruiter at all.

It matters for two practical reasons. First, their fee is a percentage of your salary, so a good agency recruiter has a genuine interest in negotiating your offer upward, which makes them a useful ally at the offer stage rather than a neutral party. Second, the fee makes you expensive relative to a direct applicant, so if a company can hire the same person without the fee, they often will. That is why you should never let an agency submit you to a company you have already applied to yourself, and why you should always ask which client they are submitting you to before they send your CV anywhere.

What to say on the first call

Prepare for it like a short interview, because it is one. The recruiter is deciding whether to spend their week on you, and they are listening for a clear, consistent, and realistic candidate they can describe to a client in two sentences.

• Your pitch in 30 seconds: what you do, the scale you do it at, and the type of role you want next.
• A salary range, not a single number. They need it to match you to roles, and refusing entirely usually just ends the call. The way to prepare it is in researching salary ranges.
• Your constraints: notice period, location or remote requirements, and anything genuinely non-negotiable.
• What you will not consider, which saves both of you weeks.
• Your live processes: say how many other applications are at interview stage. It creates urgency and it is true.

Ask them four things in return: is this a live vacancy with a signed brief or are they building a pipeline, have they placed people with this client before, what is the salary band the client has approved, and what is the process and timeline. Vague answers to the first and third questions usually mean the role is speculative, which is fine to know as long as you know it.

How do you stay near the top of their list?

Be easy to work with, in the small ways that most candidates are not. Reply within a day, take the calls you agreed to take, turn up to interviews they arranged, and tell them immediately if you accept something elsewhere. Recruiters remember the candidate who left them explaining a no-show to a client, and they remember the one who was reliable.

Give them ammunition. Send a tailored CV rather than a generic one, with numbers they can quote to a client, and ask them what the client cares about most so you can foreground it, using the format guidance in choosing a resume format. After each interview they arrange, send them a short note about how it went and what you would want clarified, because feedback that reaches the client through them makes them look competent, which is exactly the currency they need. Keep the relationship narrow and honest: two or three good recruiters in your field working actively for you is far more productive than a dozen who each sent your CV to one client and forgot you.

What should you refuse politely?

Several standard practices are worth declining without drama, and none of these refusals will lose you a genuine opportunity.

Refuse to have your CV sent anywhere without knowing the company name, since blind submissions create duplicate applications that get you rejected on a technicality. Refuse to be submitted to a company you already applied to directly. Refuse to disclose your current salary if you would rather not; give your expected range instead, which is a normal answer and in a growing number of places asking for your salary history is restricted anyway. Refuse to attend an interview for a role that has been described to you only in generalities. And refuse any request for money, bank details, or identity documents before a written offer, which is a scam pattern rather than a process, and the wider version of it is covered in finding legitimate remote jobs.

At the offer stage, remember the recruiter is not neutral: they want the deal closed, sometimes more than they want it optimised. Use them to relay a counter, since a professional intermediary often negotiates more comfortably than you can, but make your own decision on the package using how to evaluate a job offer, and get every agreed term in the written offer rather than in a phone conversation with an agency. Then keep the contact warm even after you accept, because the recruiter who placed you is the first person who will call you about the role after this one, and that is the real long-term value of the relationship, in the same way as the habits in networking for a job. More guides are in the article library.