Recruiters are hired by a corporation. I’m going to start with contingency recruiters. It really makes no difference whether it’s contingency or retained, but retained I think people understand; contingency most people don’t.

The mistake many job hunters make with contingency firms is that they think that because they talk with them, they work for them—that the contingency recruiter works for the job hunter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contingency recruiters are paid a fee contingent upon them completing an assignment and filling a job with someone who meets a requirement that their client has, for which the client has agreed to pay them a fee.

Now, that’s the structured answer. The short version is: they’re hired by companies to fill jobs, and unless they’re filling a job, they’re not making any money. Their job is not to place you. After all, what are you paying them? Right? You’re paying them nothing. The result winds up being most people have the expectation that recruiters work for them, and they don’t. You work for the people who are paying you, and that’s not the case here.

So, what can you do if you’re in a situation where you want to move? The answer, very frankly, is you start contacting recruiters who seem to have jobs in your area—in the specific geographic area that you’re looking for. You may notice that they have two or three ads—I’ll just use a generic one, let’s say in technology, accounting and finance, operations, whatever it is—and you contact the firms in that area knowing that they may not have a job open.

Just very simply message them—it could be through LinkedIn, it could be through email—and say, “I notice you happen to have a couple of positions open for such and such. I’m not seeing anything that fits my background. Would you please accept my resume, add it to your database, and when something opens up, reach out to me?”

That’s really what you can do. And then you start networking with companies that hire people with your skillset. Now, the reality is recruiters and job ads fill maybe 30% of positions. The rest are filled as a result of networking. Depending upon the statistics that you see, I’m seeing as little as 50% of jobs are filled through networking and as much as 70% filled as a result of networking. So, where do you think you should be spending your time? The answer is networking into firms and to decision-makers who hire people like you.