How to Work Best With an ERP Recruiter Tips

You want to develop a close and productive relationship with a recruiter. To that end, one of the things you should do is to ask your peers and colleagues about a recruiter's reputation, methods, and overall attitude. Choosing an ERP recruiter can be one of the most momentous career decisions you ever make, and it is a relationship that should not be entered into lightly. Tapping a network of people with experience allows you to compile information you trust about a recruiter before making that commitment.

While you should ask anything and everything that comes into your mind, some basic questions are: has the recruiter been successful in placing you on the kinds of projects you wanted? Has the recruiter been responsive? How is the recruiter managing or advising you about the longer-term aspects of your career? How well is the recruiter preparing you for interactions with hiring managers? Those questions should start a productive conversation.

Say you’re in the door with an SAP recruitment agency or an Oracle recruitment agency and have picked up some work experience. The recruiter, like a movie agent, will be thinking about the next step of your career, while you have your head down in your own comfort zone. No matter how good you are at a specific ERP consulting domain, or how much you like it, you should also be thinking of your next step up, so you can be on the same page as your recruiter. For example—sure, there's still PeopleSoft recruiting activity, but what'll happen when the core functionality gets folded up in Oracle's roadmap? Or maybe you're doing SAP data entry jobs now, but what's down the road? The point is that, for most ERP consultants, the endpoint will ultimately be project management or serving as a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Setting career goals for yourself, and partnering with a recruitment agency that specializes in your area of expertise will go a long way in getting you to where you want to be.

In general, staffing for SAP jobs and Oracle jobs slows down between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Thus, if you’re working with a recruiter during this time period, you should be patient, and give them time to match you with the right SAP career opportunity or Oracle career opportunity. You definitely should not hesitate to contact a recruiter during the latter few months of the year, as some projects do go through an on-boarding phase at this time. Your specific SAP or Oracle skill set could very well be in demand. Keeping the time of calendar year in mind will allow you to stay poised and patient if you do encounter any delay in finding a new Oracle project or SAP project in the last few months of the year.

A recruiter will try to find you whatever position is available in your skill range. This can mean hustling to find projects you hadn’t considered, in places you hadn’t considered, at pay ranges lower than you might have liked. In such situations, flexibility is the key. Help the recruiter out by communicating your willingness to do any ERP work in a flexible way, and your chances of working (and winning an SAP recruiter or Oracle recruiter's esteem) will be higher than those of a consultant who is unwilling to travel outside their home state, or who will only take on one kind of project. Of course, it’s perfectly natural to have some constraints; the point is to communicate these to the recruiter very early on, and specify your soft constraints versus your hard constraints. Ultimately, an ERP recruiter needs to understand not only what you want to do, but what you can do if necessary, so polish that can-do spirit.

The journey to your next ERP consulting job can be difficult and frustrating. You have financial responsibilities, anxiety about potential gaps in your resume, perhaps a family to look after, and you worry that the ERP market is tanking. Take a deep breath. Tell yourself that the ERP market isn’t going anywhere; businesses can’t run properly without enterprise applications. Remind yourself that you’re in ERP consulting because you’re skilled and excited about helping clients. Approach opportunities with enthusiasm. Handle setbacks with grace. And remember that, once you get placed on a project, your chances of getting future work have just gone up astronomically.

While you’re waiting: if you can develop a positive and patient attitude, you will not only impress recruiters, but be a better consultant when you get the chance to apply your skills on a new project. No one likes to work with negative and impatient people, so don’t be one; anticipate the day you'll celebrate your new SAP project or Oracle project success, and it'll come more quickly.

ERP recruiters aren’t narrowly focused on one domain. They look at SAP recruitment or Oracle recruitment from a high level, and work with many different kinds of consultants, so they understand trends very well. One of the drawbacks of functional consulting is that your focus can rob you of visibility into longer-term trends. For example, a die-hard ABAPer will never concede ground to Java. You would be wise to balance your own skills and interests with a recruiter’s advice about long-term marketability. For example, in SAP recruitment, there are some areas that are simply being de-emphasized as the years pass, whereas other areas are becoming more important. If it’s within your sphere of capability, the right thing would be to position yourself in the area that’s going to be hotter in the long term, if it’s close enough to your abilities.

A recruiter is a highly skilled, highly strategic person whose time is best spent on the phone and on email, arguing your cause with potential employers. Don’t waste an SAP recruiting company's time, or burden an Oracle recruiter, by creating a bunch of busy work that takes them away from high-value activities. The recruiter shouldn’t be spending time finding typos on your resume, trying to track you down, or getting you to be on time for calls and meetings.

Stay on top of your own administrative game. Have your resume professionally edited, and modeled on the ERP consultant resumes that are available via consultant handbooks or the internet. Have a cell phone on you at all times. Respond to emails within hours, not days. Be on time for every appointment, regardless of who it’s with. Committing to these administrative details will take the burden off the recruiter’s shoulders and let them do what they’re best at—getting you a job.

Much of the time, recruiters only encounter you through email and telephone calls. If you can make the relationship more personal, you stand a better chance of either getting a recruiter to work with you, or getting your existing recruiter to work harder for you. If you attend SAP or Oracle industry events, you have a great chance to meet SAP e-recruiting and Oracle recruiting agents face-to-face. If you haven’t landed a recruiter yet, it’ll take a little research for you to figure out who’s going to attend what event, but it’ll be worth your effort to find out. Lots of good personal and professional relationships are forged at these events, and normally hard-to-reach people are available for a chat between sessions and maybe even an after-event drink. Your goal is to imprint your personality and character on the recruiter so that you stand out from the recruiter’s other clients. So enjoy yourself, shake hands, and make the connections.

Understand that a recruiter is in the business of placing skilled people into skilled positions. However, there are some skilled ERP consultants who do not know how best to showcase their skills for a recruiter.

One of the problems that occurs most frequently is that ERP consultants send out non-standard resumes. There are a couple of golden rules to follow in this regard. The first, and most important, is to make sure that your implementation experience takes the most prominent role in your resume. This information should be up top on the first page. Another tip is to make sure that you specify your role in implementation. If you had a special role within a team, explain what it was. Don't be afraid to bang your own drum, and be as specific as possible about how you added value.

Finally, make sure that you send physical resumes out on high-quality paper, and that your fonts and design look good.

Many recruiters won’t call you back until you have at least a year of ERP experience under your belt. Of course, you’re thinking that you can’t get the experience unless a recruiter works with you. So how do you resolve this chicken-and-egg scenario? The easy answer is to get experience, but that’s very hard for a newbie to do. The easier approach is to woo the recruiter. Remember, ERP recruiters hear from hundreds of people all weak, most of them asking the same question: “How do I break into SAP/Oracle?”

Be different. Be the aspiring consultant who researches the domain of SAP e-recruitment or Oracle e-recruitment, whichever applies to you, and asks more intelligent questions. Be professional enough to thank a recruiter for writing back to you, and don’t waste the recruiter’s time by asking questions that can be answered by Google in ten seconds. A combination of intelligence, diligence, and professionalism will get you ERP recruiting attention—over time. Just be willing to keep trying.