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Tips for Working with a Healthcare Recruiter

Working with a professional recruiter, also known as a headhunter, may be just what you need to kick your healthcare job search into high gear. Recruiters know about job openings that aren’t widely advertised and can offer sage insight into current hiring trends and salaries for particular positions.

But using a recruiter doesn’t guarantee you’ll easily land a job. Here’s how to determine whether a recruiter could help you and how to forge a fruitful relationship with one.

Know When to Use a Recruiter

If you’re looking for a traditional staff-level position in a hospital or other clinical setting, you probably won’t benefit from a recruiter’s services. However, a recruiter could help if you’re seeking a position in healthcare management or administration, healthcare information technology, pharmaceutical sales or medical-device sales, says Donna Cardillo, RN, a Sea Girt, New Jersey, speaker and healthcare career coach.

Recruiters will even work with inexperienced candidates who have the right credentials, such as recent MBA graduates seeking pharma sales positions or technology professionals or scientists with master’s degrees.

Choose Wisely

Look for a recruiter who specializes in your healthcare area. Get referrals from friends or professional acquaintances, or research possibilities in a sourcebook, such as Kennedy Information’s The Directory of Executive Recruiters. Barbara Folb, MHA, RN, a healthcare recruiter for Bedford, New Hampshire-based Stat Search, recommends sending your resume to a few recruiters who specialize in your area, then following up by phone to gauge your rapport with them. Work with the one whose style most closely matches your own.

Understand the Recruiter’s Priorities

Employers hire and pay recruiters to find them new employees. Therefore, a recruiter’s primary allegiance is to the employers who pay their bills. “I work on a candidate’s behalf, but the candidate is not my boss,” Folb says.

Still, recruiters do recognize that experienced, credentialed candidates are their bread and butter, since recruiters often get paid only if they fill an employer’s opening. “Recruiters have nothing unless they have awesome candidates,” she adds.