As I moved up in my career, around 2014, they would actually meet me for lunch. In 2016, I started working with one of the same recruiters when I was in a hiring position to staff.
By then, when new to company managers, directors, CxOs (small companies) were looking for their first couple of hires and spoke to recruiters they knew, I became top of mind.
That was kind of my thing between 2012-2018.
When people say that remote work hurts early career people, this is one of the issues. People who have been in the industry for awhile can still lean on a network we built when people were working in the office and in the same city.
I have a few new people in my network since working remotely in 2020. But that wouldn’t even be the case if I hadn’t done a lot of business travel meeting coworkers between Covid lifting and late 2023.
2008 was the last time I had to randomly apply for jobs because I stayed at my second job for over 9 years and had no network.
The only time I randomly applied for jobs was last year and the year before even though I had no expectations of it working.
My response rate from using local external recruiters that I had built a relationship with (before 2020) has been 100%.
I had three rejections between 2012-2020. Post 2022, my response rate through recruiters, my network and targeted outreach, has still been 100%. My success rate has been 5/7 for getting an offer - around 70%.