Guidance Counselor 2.0 (Solo Show) + Navigating Recruiters

All righty, what is going on? Good morning, good morning. It is cold in Nashville, it's 32 degrees. Uh, no snow. They said there would be a dusting, but There is no dusting. There's no snow on the ground. Uh, and quite honestly, I appreciate that because my daughter would be up at the butt crack of dawn if we even mentioned the word snow. Um, so good morning everybody. Excited to be here with y'all today again, working through, um, the series that I'm kind of doing of, of really helping you navigate the job search. Um, Uh, you know, today I was kind of thinking about some topics to talk about today, and I was like, man, like, what, what should I talk about? And, um, I recently had a conversation with somebody, um, and we were talking about recruiters. I was like, you know what, I should talk about recruiters. I haven't talked about how dealing with recruiters, how to deal with recruiters, how to navigate working with recruiters, why you should use recruiters, what types of recruiters are there. So we're going to dive into, uh, recruiters today. That, that is what we are going to talk about. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. It's good to see y'all. Uh, y'all are jumping in, I love it. Uh, Tuesday, absolutely. John, it's good to see you, my guy. Pat, I hope you're staying dry. Yeah, it's dry, it's just cold. It's just cold. I, I'd rather to be, um, warm. Listen, if it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be cold. We need some snow on the ground. It's 32 degrees, right? I'm not Jason where he's got multiple inches on the ground. Um, or like my business partner Mark Bosma who's in South Dakota, he said, yeah, we got like 6 inches the other night. I was like, man, like, that is crazy. Uh, but anyways, it's cold. It's cold and dreary in Nashville. Um, Sally, good morning. Amelia, good morning. Um, yeah, John, it's been, it's been too long. It's been too long. So I'm, I'm really glad you're here. And Jason, it's good to see you this morning. So again, uh, for those of you tuning in, um, that kind of missed my kind of ramblings at the beginning, uh, I, I'm kind of working through this series right now. Um, and, uh, so if you go to the Torque YouTube Um, we have a— we have all this stuff there, right? So we have how to write a resume, how to write a LinkedIn, how to navigate using job boards, how to navigate LinkedIn to network, how to navigate LinkedIn to find a job. Um, well, what else have I done? Um, uh, I think that's all the topics. And then today we're going to talk about recruiters. Um, so, uh, recruiters suck, most of them. Yeah, so for those of you, uh, Brian, that is a comment to one of my OG— my OG conference talk that I ran into the ground. For about five years was recruiters suck, use them. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're kind of going to go over this and recruiters if if recruiters chime in like Brian would love to obviously have in the chat and you know would love to have some comments. Brian, that is an epic profile pic. I will tell you that. All right, few kind of housekeeping things as always. Appwrite, go check out Appwrite. I am part of the Heroes Program as my colleague and dear friend Jason Torres. So if you go check out Appwrite and the product, tell them the Torque Boys sent you. sent you. We need to get that trademark, Jason, the Torque Boys. Um, Jordan, it's good to see you, another, another fellow recruiter. Um, also torque.community, a few housekeeping announcements for kind of, uh, what's going on. Again, this YouTube series that I've been doing is on our YouTube, Torque YouTube, How to Navigate the Job Search. Really, hopefully when I'm done with this, you at least have a really good, uh, really good framework on how to navigate the job search. But, uh, ambassador signups and mentor signups are closing. Friday. Um, and, uh, and that'll be it. So we have— last time I checked, Jason and I did a one-on-one yesterday— we had about, I think, 84. Jason, correct me if I'm wrong, around 84, uh, ambassadors that are— or people that are interested in the ambassador program. Um, just as a note, we will not be accepting everybody. Um, again, 2026 is about depth for us. Um, 2025 was about width just because we need to get our name out there. 2026 is gonna be about depth, building kind of really deep relationships, especially with the ambassadors. Uh, one of the things I'm really looking at for our ambassador program— I, I, um, I read an article from Bandit Running. Not a runner, but pull a lot from the run club community and run clubs in general. And one of the articles I read is that, um, they're, they're essentially— their ambassador team, they don't call it the ambassador team, is, is just an extension of them. And that's what I really want, and, and, and that's what we're really going for. in 2026. So go sign up on torque.community. Also, the mentor program is going to be closed up on Friday. Right now we have like 11 mentors and around 23 or 25 mentees, people who want to— Jason just commented we're up to 92 now. That is crazy. To even think there are 92 people who like love what we're doing is pretty cool. I love that. I'm super blessed. We're super blessed. So again, also, yeah, again, Friday. So Friday is the end date for the mentor-mentee program. If you've always wanted to have a mentor, Would love to have you sign up. And if you are senior in your career and have always wanted to mentor somebody but just don't have the time and the effort to do it, we really are going to set that up for you and facilitate that for you. Let's see here. Yeah, Torp Boys. I love it. I love it. All right. So, yeah, Lauren, it's good to see you, brother. It's good to see you. All right. So, so let's dive in. So, oh wait, hold on. Am I finished with my announcements? No, I'm not. Uh, if you want to know when I go live, text me 615-235-5650. Uh, when I go live, I always send a text out so you know when I'm going live and what the topic is. Um, cool. All right, so let's do— so let's talk about recruiters, right? So recruiters, I would say they're a necessary evil. Um, I would say it is good to have them, it is good to use them, but you need to, um, uh, and I really think they should be a pillar in your job search. I tweeted yesterday that, that there are 4 pillars in your job search. I'm actually going to edit that. There really are 5 pillars in your job search because I forgot recruiters, believe it or not. So yesterday I said, reminder, there are 4 buckets. I call them buckets, pillars of your job search. Open up your phone, go through your contacts and reach out, cold DM folks on LinkedIn, set your profile up on job board sites, uh, apply to your own jobs. And the 5th bucket or pillar is recruiters. Um, and so you need to leverage them. You need to leverage us. You need to leverage folks like Jordan or Brian in the chat. Um, and, and there's, and there's a lot of reasons for that, right? So, but first, before we dive in today, um, there's 2 types of recruiters. 2, 2, 2, 2. There's 2 types of recruiters. There's internal recruiters and there's your agency recruiters, right? And then there's kind of your like freelance recruiters. I still consider those agency because they work with a lot of people. So mainly there's internal and there's agency. Let me talk about the difference of the 2. First off, the internal recruiters are recruiters that work directly for the company, right? So when you have a recruiter reach out to you from Google or a recruiter reach out to you from Datadog or recruiter reach out to you from a company, that is an internal recruiter. Those recruiters are tasked usually to recruit all the positions within the organization. If they are a larger organization, they usually have silos. So there's the internal side. The agency recruiter side of things is a lot like Ronstadt where you work with a lot of different clients, right? Think of Mad Men, right? Back in the day, agency working with a bunch of different people. And so I just want to lay that out. And I do believe there is tactics for both. And so I want to get those today. First off, internal recruiters. Internal recruiters are dealing with a lot. If you go back and listen, I've had Jordan on my podcast, my recent episode with Aaron Harmon on my podcast. We kind of go over some internal best practices. You have to remember that internal recruiters, they're they, they don't just recruit, right? They, they are caught up in a lot of kind of HR administrative tasks, or they can be. And so they are spread very thin. The reason why agency recruiters are tapped on to help is usually when the internal recruiters, um, do not have the bandwidth and/or have hit capacity and/or have done all the search that they could do, right? They're spread really thin. If I were you, I would, uh, in your search, if you have a, a set 5 to 10 companies you want to work for, I would try to make friends with the internal recruiters. Um, and, uh, I would not be against, hey, let me, let me buy you a virtual coffee. Um, would love to, uh, have a coffee with you, learn about the culture of the organization, right? I'm not against sending them cookies. Listen, here's the deal, right? You want to cut through the noise in the job search? Send them a Starbucks gift card, right? If somebody were to be like, hey Taylor, would love to pick your brain, what's your favorite coffee shop in Nashville? Would love to, uh, send you a gift card. I would absolutely chat with you because of that, right? Like, some may call that bribery. I just call it playing the game. I just call it playing the game. So what I would do if I were on the job search, I would locate— I would, I would figure out the 5 to 10 companies I really want to work for. And try to make relationships with the recruiters, right? The recruiters are kind of the initial sifting that happens to get your resume through, right? Back in the day, I've talked with, um, a, a few— I've talked with my old boss at Vaco about this. Back in the day, um, uh, to when— back when the internet didn't exist, you'd have to call into the front desk to get transferred to hiring managers, right? And so for me, that's kind of what internal recruiters are, right? You kind of have to butter them up. And I was talking to my old manager at Baker and, uh, and basically I was like, so how did you navigate that? He goes, we would send, we would butter them up, bribe them like Nas said in here, right? Like you really have to, um, back in the day, he was like, you would send, you would send lunch, you would, you know, uh, really make friends with that, uh, front desk person, um, to really make sure that they pick up the phone. And, uh, and send and transfer you, um, from the phone, from the, from the main line, the landline, to the hiring manager. Now we deal with internal recruiters, right, virtually. So again, what I would do is I would definitely try— so what I would do is I would follow all of them, connect with all of them on LinkedIn, engage with their posts. For the most part, a lot of recruiters now are posting. So if you can engage with them consistently, like their stuff, comment, you know, play the long game, right? I was actually thinking about today because I get a lot of DMs like, hey, Taylor, it was great to connect with you. I was like, hey, yeah, hey man, it was great to connect with you too. And then they immediately go in for the ask, and it's like, that's not a good best practice, right? Like, I think you need to like engage a few times or ask a few thoughtful questions like over the course of a few weeks before you go for the ask, right? And so, um, that, that's what I would do with internal recruiters like Aaron Harmon, right? My guy at, um, What was it, PDX or something like that? The company, I forgot the company's name, but like I would go follow Aaron Harmon, engage with his stuff. He posted yesterday, right? Um, and so actually I want to pull up his post real quick because it's actually very applicable to what I'm talking about. So let me pull this up real quick just to show you, uh, just, just everything they have going on. This can also apply to, uh, and, uh, agency recruiters. Um, but, but I want to, um But I want to read, uh, let's see here. All right, y'all still here? Y'all still here? All right, so let me, let me, let me pull up. So, so, so this is, this is what he said. He goes, he goes, candidate, I sent the recruiter a message and never heard back. Recruiter, Outlook inbox, Teams inbox, Careers inbox, Slack inbox, LinkedIn inbox, LinkedIn recruiter inbox. You're not being ignored. We simply have not been able to get to your message yet. So that is just kind of a, a hint into what internal recruiters are dealing with. Now let's talk about agency recruiters. Agency recruiters are a dime a dozen. There are a ton of us out there, right? You can literally go— you can literally like search recruiter on LinkedIn and there's like a gazillion of us out there, right? So what I would do is I would find recruiters who are active on LinkedIn and connect with them and start following along and see what they post about. Remember, when you go back on one of my, uh, previous episodes on how to use LinkedIn, if you type in the word, uh, Gen AI engineer, you can see there comes up a page on LinkedIn where you can see what people are posting about, the jobs open, the groups you could join. What I would do is I would find recruiters posting about the type of positions you want to land. Now, Agency recruiters are terribly, terribly busy. Most of them will not talk to you unless you are a fit for the role. Now, there are a few questions to ask recruiters if there's anything. So, so, so, so if a recruiter— so there's two things I want to highlight here. If there's a— if a recruiter doesn't want to talk to you because you're not a fit for the role, uh, yeah, Naz, his name's Aaron. Here, let me, uh, let me go ahead and drop his information here. Um, great guy. Can I— can't drop it in the chat here. I'll just, I'll just pop it up in a banner right here. All right, this is— no, it's, it's, it's Aaron Harmon. Aaron Harmon. That actually doesn't help at all. Um, that's a terrible— he needs to edit that. Yeah, it's Aaron Harmon. A-A-R-O-N Harmon. H-A-R-M-O-N. He's a recruiter at PDW. Um, so go check them out anyways. All right, so agency recruiters most likely will not talk to you unless you're fit for a role. The recruiters get a bad reputation for the most part because agency recruiters only want to help the people that are a direct fit for the role. That's why I'm so passionate about what we're doing at Torque, right? Torque, the community arm, is to basically take care of all the people that Ron Said Digital recruiters cannot place actively in a job, right? On average, if you talk with an agency recruiter, they are talking to anywhere between 10 to 15 net new people a week. And that— and the numbers shake out to about 1 out of every 10 to 15 people they talk to is a fit for a job. So what are you doing with the other 14 people? That's what— that's where Torque comes in with Ronstadt. We make sure we engage and take care of the 14 people that aren't a fit for a job. That being said, There's a few ways to use internal recruiters. First off, when you are, um, when, when you talk with a recruiter, so let's say, let's say an agency recruiter does take a phone call with you, and let's say they do not have a role for you right away. Here's a few ways to get real good information from them, right? Here's what I would ask. If there's, if there's a few things you get out of this, this is one of them. The things I would ask an agency recruiter every time you talk to one is, A, where does my resume or skillset line up with the people that you see in my industry or in my area? Right? So let's say you're a 3-year Java developer. Be like, hey Taylor, based off the other 3 to 5-year resumes that you've seen for Java engineers, where does mine stack up? Where am I missing? What am I missing? Okay. That's the first question. Second question I would ask them, hey, if there's one piece of advice that you can give me for my resume and/or LinkedIn, what would it be? Right? Recruiters, I will tell you this, agency recruiters are the best when it comes to writing resumes and creating LinkedIns because they, they look at those things every single freaking day. And so, so they are the ones that have a very, very good, um, understanding of what a resume or LinkedIn should look like. So I would ask them, hey, what is one thing I should improve on my resume? What's one thing I should improve on my LinkedIn? The third thing you should ask them Is, hey, what does it look like from a salary perspective? Where do I stack up? Am I asking for too much? Am I asking for too little? Okay, that's another thing. The 4th question is, do you— what is a good follow-up cadence for you, right? I have my thoughts, I'll get to that in a second, but I would ask them, hey, listen, how should I follow up with you? Do you want me to email you every month, every 2 weeks? What does it look like just to keep me top of mind? The game that you need to play with agency recruiters— I mean, I would argue it's the entire job search, but the game that you need to play with agency recruiters is top of mind. Because, because what happens is, is when I was recruiting, or Jordan's recruiting, or Brian's recruiting, or whoever other recruiters who are watching this in the chat now, in the future, they get a role. They get a role. Brian, you're jumping. Brian, you are jumping. You, you are— I'm gonna get there. I'm gonna get there. I have my thoughts, but thank you, Brian, for saying that. I'm gonna get there in a second. Um, I, I lost my train of thought. What was I talking about? Ah, this happens all the time. I do this all the time. I talk too fast and forget what I was saying. Um, follow-up. Oh, top of mind, right? So you have to stay top of mind with recruiters. Okay, now I want to get— I, I want to get to Brian's comment here. Because this is incredibly important. This goes into— this, this goes into, um, dealing with when, when recruiters come to you and ping you for a job and sifting through the spam. Okay, Brian brings up a great point. For those of you listening in the future, an agency recruiter with less than a year of experience would have a hard time gauging where your experience lands on the spectrum. In my opinion, you should only spend time and talk to recruiters who have at least 2 years in the industry. Now, I have spoken about this for years. When I had— when I built my team at Vaco, I had recruiters on my team that were under 2 years, and they got mad at me when they heard me say this. This is a blanket statement. You are going to find diamonds in the rough. My team at Vaco was tremendous, even as a 1 to 2 year person. They were incredible, right? I trained them. Um, for the most part, if you deal with a recruiter under 2 years of experience, like Brian said, you are not going to get the information you need. In my experience, you should really— this number now should probably be up over 5 years of experience. So I would probably not talk to a recruiter who at least doesn't have 5 years of experience. Now, the next thing you need to look for The next thing you need to look for, okay, this is important. How often have they jumped around? If you see a recruiter that jumps around 1 year 6 months, 1 year 10 months, 2 years 9 months, 1 year 2 months, they aren't— these are blanket statements here, I don't need anybody come with me with pitchforks— they are chasing money and they aren't actually good at recruiting. Okay, because typically in agency world, you are typically highly commission-based with a low base. So if you do want to gain experience— or gain, not experience— if you want to gain any sort of base raise, you're going to have to jump around, right? And so for me, if a recruiter DMs you in the inbox and says, hey, I have a job for you, I would go to their profile, look at 2 things: how long have they been in the industry And how long do they stay at the same place? If you talk with a recruiter— so for example, my guy Andy Hutzel, who's at Ronstadt, he's been there, same place, for 14 years. He was just like me at Vaco. I was at Vaco for 11 years, right? If you talk to somebody who's at Robert Half or Tech Systems or Vaco or Ronstadt or any of the big players in the industry, and a recruiter has been there for a tremendous amount of time, They are very ingrained into the culture. They understand recruiting. They understand the market. I would absolutely talk to them. The more junior on the spectrum you get, the more hairy the data points could be, and they don't have a full understanding. So Brian, I'm glad you brought that up. I also wanna get to another thing as well, which is really important, which my conversation recently with a senior engineer really kind of prompted this live. Is hey, when a recruiter messages you about a job, how do you know if it's real? How do you know if it's real? Here are some basic questions, and I'm probably missing some. So any recruiters in the chat now or in the future, please add any that you would add. But here is what I would ask recruiters if they message you for a job. One, how long have you been recruiting on this role for? All right, what that shows you is, have they— are you the first candidate they talked to, or are you the 100th candidate they've talked to? Okay, how long is this? How long you been recruiting this role? 2, do you know who is the hiring manager? Do you know the name of the hiring manager? Most recruiters— I've seen this multiple times— they go on a fishing expedition. So what does that mean? What they do is they see a role open on a company's website. They go and they try to quickly source candidates who could be a fit and proactively sell your resume into the role without having a contract in place. All right, that's a no-no. My teams never did that, but it happens. It happens a lot. And so you need to ask them, hey, do you have the hiring manager name? Because if they don't, that's a red flag. Second, third thing I would ask is, do you have a contract in place? Which kind of goes to what I just said, right? Do you have a contract in place? Do you have a written contract? Again, a lot of times recruiters are out here fishing. They try to proactively sell resumes to get a contract in place. So you could be, you could be the test subject, you could be the guinea pig, right? And you need to know if a contract is in place. I don't think that— listen, as long as you know it's a fishing expedition and you're fine with your resume being sent over, there's nothing wrong with that. But you need to know what you're getting yourself into. Right. So, so again, 3 questions so far. How long have you been recruiting on this role? 2, do you know the manager name? 3, is a contract in place? 4, have you had an intake call about this role? Have you met with the manager and gone over the specifics of this role? And if you have, do you have the notes from the call? I want to get to a question. I feel like they will be offended. I will tell you this. They will not be offended. They will tell you who in the world is telling you this information. There is no recruiter out here telling you this information. I literally— I'm not kidding you— I literally had a candidate use my— this information on me. On me. I spoke at Scenic City Code in Chattanooga years ago. Years ago. This developer attended my session. A few years later, I don't know if they forgot it was me, um, but, uh, you know, essentially he sent me these questions for me to answer. Um, and, and so for me, it's, uh, will they get offended? They'll probably— I don't know if they'll get offended, but they'll probably be like, where are you getting these questions from? But again, this— only use this information when you get a message from recruiters, okay? So again, to, to recap here. One, how long have you been recruited on this role for? Which again tells you if you're the, you're the first candidate or the 100th candidate. I don't think there's anything wrong with either. Again, you just need to know what you're getting yourself into. Do you have a contract in place, or is this a fishing expedition? Again, there's nothing wrong with it if it's a fishing expedition, if you're okay with it. You just need to know on the front end. If it's not a fishing expedition, they have a contract in place. Who's the hiring manager's name? Um, do you— have you met with them for like an intake call? We call them intake calls. You— if you use the word intake call, a recruiter should know what you're talking about. Do you have the notes from the call? I would like to see the notes from the call. They should be able to share those with you. I shared those. I actually never shared job descriptions. I just always shared the notes from my call, believe it or not. The 5th question I would ask is, um, How many people have you hired with this manager and/or company? Okay, so what that means, what that shows is, hey, like, like back when I was recruiting, there was one company in Nashville called, um, what were they called? I'm drawing a blank. They were a healthcare company in town. I forgot what they were called. We placed like 15 of their engineers. We placed like their entire dev team. We knew the CTO. I remember the CTO's name. CTO's name was Cody King. But I forgot the, the company's name. Um, so we placed like 15 of their engineers. We basically placed their entire engineering team, right? I had a very good understanding of what they were looking for. I placed like 7 or 8 of their engineers, right? If again, if they're like, hey, we haven't placed anybody with them or this manager, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. There are multiple times where we signed a new agreement and I was going out and finding candidates. There's nothing wrong with that, but again, a recruiter is going to have a much better understanding of the organization, the culture, and the tech stack and the skills needed to be successful if they've placed 15 engineers versus 1 engineer, right? So ask that question. So again, 5 questions, I think that's what I said. Um, is this, uh, how long you've been recruiting on this role for? Do you have a contract in place? If you do, who the— who's the hiring manager's name? Uh, do you have the intake notes? How many people have you placed with this manager and/or company? Those questions, if you just save those and just copy and paste them to the spam that recruiters send you, 99% of people won't get back to you. That's how much spam is out there, right? My goal for this episode is to arm you with information for you to be able to cut through the noise Of the industry, right? So all right, I'm gonna stop yapping for a second. Brian comes in. You will not want to get caught in that trap because it would lead to prob. Brian, I've been asked these questions by cancer, and luckily I've watched Taylor's show and prepared. Yeah, see other people. Other people have done that, right? Yeah, if it offends them, they're one of the bad recruiters. 100% recruiters should want to help you. Smart smart people know how to ask smart questions. Absolutely. Oh, great question. Are you a preferred vendor? This kind of gets into like the second-level type of questions. So what Brian's meaning here is like there's some enterprise companies that work through like a third-party HR management tool software people thing. And sometimes you could be a tier 1 vendor or tier 2 vendor. If it's a big company, that's a good question to ask. Like one of the companies— yeah, so Chris actually brings it up here, HCA. Big hospital corporation in Nashville. They employ a ton of people in Nashville. So, you know, so, but Vaco was a tier 1 vendor when I was there, right? And so with Brian's question, your preferred vendor, that I would say that's a tier 2 level question, not super important. But if it is a massive company, I think it's a good question to ask for sure. Um, all right, so to recap, 2 types of recruiters. You have any questions, please ask them. I'm gonna try to, try to think if there's anything else I'm missing. 2 types of recruiters: internal, agency. My approach with internal recruiters is find the companies you want to work for, connect with the internal recruiters, engage with them on LinkedIn, um, buy them a virtual coffee, uh, maybe have a chat, talk about company culture, um, figure out best ways to get embedded in the organization. They can give you kind of behind the scenes. Agency recruiters Um, I think, I think there's 2 ways to use agency recruiters. You can do outbound, you can like reach out to recruiters either in your city and/or in your region, right? So like, you know, again, if I was a developer, I'd probably find recruiters in Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, um, Birmingham, uh, Memphis, right? I'd reach out to those people. Um, uh, for me, um, uh, I, I would ask them for a chat. Most likely they won't get back to you. Most of the times agency recruiters are going to come to you. When you do talk with the agency recruiter, um, just in general, because again, agency recruiters network at scale, that's the entire job of agency recruiters. So they may just call you to network with you. If that's the case and there's no set job, a few questions to ask them. Ask them how your resume or your profile stacks up with others, where your salary requirements are at with everybody else, What are you missing, uh, from a skill set perspective to get better? And, um, what's one thing you can fix on your resume and LinkedIn? And then if a recruiter messages you for a job, then you ask them those 5 questions, uh, that I just recently said. Um, all right, see here, uh, Jordan comes here. Ron says, preferred vendor, both my clients. That question could mean everything or nothing. Yeah, again, that's kind of a— yeah, it's, it's not an end-all be-all. Um, for the past 10 months, I have close to 10 recruiters reach out about the same job. Yes. So let's talk about this. This means, John, I'd be curious if it was a big company or not. For the most part, if, uh, if, if a recruiter reaches out, if, if like 10 recruiters reach out to you for one job, it's probably a big company. Um, a lot of times, uh, one thing to ask, especially in this case, is to sign a right to represent. So a lot of times in the recruiting world you can get rejected. Yeah, everybody go check out Nick's panel, um, after I'm finished up. Um, a lot of times in the recruiter space, in the recruiter world, if you are double submitted to a job, you can get rejected. Let me say that again. If a recruiter reaches out to— if 2 recruiters reach out to you about same job and a recruiter submits you both You can get rejected. Now you're probably like wondering, Taylor, why is that? Okay, the reason for that is because what it, what it comes across on the other side of the house is this person is unorganized, doesn't have their together, and, um, is not good with details, right? Having multiple recruiters submit you one role doesn't help you, but help your chances. hurts your chances. Now what I would ask is, um, uh, is, is especially in this case is, um, can I sign a right to represent? A right to represent is just a simple email they'll send you where it's basically, um, I acknowledge, or I, John Verdone, uh, acknowledge that Taylor Dessin from Ronstadt Digital, Torque is submitting me for an Angular role with so-and-so, right? And what they do is then they like screenshot that and send it to the hiring manager, right? So that is something to look at as well. Um, uh, John had 2 recruiters from the same company reach out for the same position on the same day. Yeah, so this happens a lot. The best way I would say this is I would ask those 5 questions to the recruiter And who— whichever recruiter can get back to you the fastest with those questions, I would go with them. Because here's the deal, in a sense of John and Jeff with having multiple recruiters message them about the same role, you could have a not good recruiter get to you first that may not have a relationship with the hiring manager, and you go with that recruiter when the person who has a relationship got to you a little bit later and you missed out. So what I would do is I would— if any recruiter reaches out to you for a job, get them to answer those 5 questions. And, and, and, and for me, if, if a recruit— the, the recruiter who can get back to you with those 5 questions I just said— contract in place, who's the hiring manager name, have you hired from them before, um, do you have the intake notes, Um, and then what was the last one? Um, uh, manager name, whatever. The, the 5 I said. Once the recruiter gets back to you with that information, then move forward with that recruiter. Because what I don't want is for John and Jeff in this case to go with the recruiter who doesn't really know anything, who's just quick to the trigger, which happens a lot. A lot of times junior recruiters have a little bit more engine on them, which is good in some cases. but you could miss out on the opportunity to work with the senior recruiter at another company who actually has a relationship with, uh, with, with, with that company. So I think that's great. Um, going to Jordan's thing here. That checks out in this situation, especially since they're a startup. They probably have a ton of vendors and are trying to cast a wide net. However, they could also have a ton of vendors reaching out to them trying to get their business. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it— to me, it's a red flag if you get hit up by more than like 3 recruiters for a job. Right? Most of the time, um, a, a, and this is what I, I have a whole nother conference talk that I don't even give about how to navigate like hiring people from recruiters especially. Um, I would only work, I, I tell companies and hiring managers, I would only work with 2 to 3 recruiting firms at a max, at a max. And really, you really, you just need 2. Um, you know, is it good to only use one exclusive? Sure. Um, but, um, uh, but yeah, I, I think, I think it's a red flag. Um, my record, because it got so insane, started documenting. Yeah, so I think this is great. John brings up, um, uh, he started documenting who reached out. I do think you need, you need some sort of documentation method, right? I know there's a lot of job search tools out there like Hunter and all this other stuff. You can use an Excel sheet, you can use a Notion doc. I, I don't care what it is, but you need to track this stuff somehow. Which is why I would say have an email dedicated to the job search and then have folders as it relates to the companies and/or recruiters that reach out to you to keep up with stuff, right? I think organization in the job search is something that's not talked about enough and, and highly, highly needed. Um, Jordan, I think it's important to note that in agency recruiting, most recruiters don't have the direct relationship with the hiring manager. Typically the account salesperson have direct relationship. So When asking, I would do— I would, I would say, do you or the AI have— yeah, yeah, I would agree. So, so, so to, for the people who are listening to this in the future, Jordan brings up a great point. He's a recruiter and salesperson at Ronstadt. A lot of times, so, so, so there's layers to this, right? So think of an Oreo. The top, the top layer of the Oreo, the outside is the hiring manager. The cream filling is the account manager, and then the other side is the recruiter. There's some layers here. It's a little bit of a game of telephone tag. And when I was recruiting manager at Vaco, we were directly linked with the salespeople and got brought in on sales calls, and we developed a pretty good relationship with engineering managers. My recruiting team, I'm gonna brag, was really, really good where we actually brought in leads ourselves, which If you're a good recruiter, you should be able to do. We actually brought in a lot of our leads. And so what that did is we had the relationship. But I do agree. I think asking if you're working with a recruiter, do you or, do you or the account manager or salesperson working on this role have the direct relationship? I think that's incredibly important. All right. I think that's it. This episode is dense, dense, dense when it comes to content and information. I would save this. I would come back to it. I would marinate, take some notes, share this with your network. I think other people need to hear this, see this. I would say probably out of all the things I've done, I would say maybe this may be the most important live that I've done in this series. So hopefully you enjoyed it. And tomorrow I'll be back with my guy Ray Gasualdo. Hey, what's up? Ray is a staff engineer out of Atlanta. Um, and we're gonna talk about the job search, how titles play into the job search. Um, he kind of went through 2 quick job searches. He went from Salesloft to Slack, and now he's at another company. So we're gonna just talk about just how he's found success finding jobs so quickly. Um, so that's tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM Central. We'll have a guest back on the episode. Ray is fantastic, another guy in Dads in Tech. Y'all have a great one. If you have any more questions on this topic, Jump into the Discord. Jordan's in there. I'm in there. Tag us or just shoot me a DM. We'd love to answer them. And, uh, we'll see y'all tomorrow, 9:30 AM Central. Y'all have a good one. Peace.