Leveraging Recruiters For ERP Consulting Jobs Tips

Your recruiter puts in the time and effort to find you work and manage your career. Unless there are substantively better offers for you out there, or other pressing business or personal circumstances force you to make a change, stay loyal to your recruiter. There are a couple of reasons for doing so. First, if you skip from recruiter to recruiter for no real reason, you may earn a reputation for frivolity—to say nothing of wasting a given recruiter’s time. Second, if you’re skipping, you’re building bad habits that the market can’t sustain. For example, some years ago, it was more common for ERP consultants to entertain counter-offers, whether from clients or recruiting firms, and keep moving from project to project, often without finishing a single assignment.

These days, the supply of ERP consultants has caught up to the demand enough to make such job hopping very unwise, at least if you want a long-term career or aren’t a rock star in your particular focus area. Put your effort into building your relationship with the right recruiter, and finish your SAP projects and Oracle projects, for lasting career success.

Recruiters aren’t narrowly focused on one domain. They look at SAP job openings or Oracle job openings from a high level and work with many different kinds of consultants, so they understand trends very well. One of the drawbacks of niche 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, 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.

An ERP recruiter is in the business of placing skilled people into skilled positions. If you have no ERP skills, don’t approach a recruiter. This doesn’t mean that you have to possess project experience first; only that you have to have something—whether it’s an IT education, training, or work experience in a related area—to show the recruiter. Too many people think that a recruiter is in the business of hand-holding complete newbies from their first glimmer of interest in ERP consulting to an actual job. That just isn’t the way the market works, and you’ll spare yourself a lot of bitterness if you recognize it before you approach a recruiter.

By the time you send that email, you should have some kind of ERP skills on your resume, and you should be prepared to tell a coherent story about your chosen career path and your ability to execute on it. If you already have project experience, you should be looking to get better at what you do, or to add other modules and specialties to your resume. Nothing will impress a recruiter more than skill, so you should invest your time in developing it.

A recruiter is a highly skilled, highly strategic person, whose time is best spent on the phone and on email, presenting your resume and qualifications to potential employers. Don’t waste a recruiter’s time 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.

This is your career — don’t be shy! It’s up to you to tell the recruiter your career goals, strengths, weaknesses, and work history. If you’re really jazzed about going after an SAP job opening, such as SAP CRM jobs, let the recruiter hear about it. If you’re working with other recruiters, or have other professional opportunities going on, do everyone a favor and be transparent about both your goals and commitments. Be open, honest, and unreserved in your communication, and you’ll give the recruiter more chances to help you get the ERP job you want.

Also, you won’t leave a bad taste in the recruiter’s mouth by withholding information that could have come in handy during a placement. If you’re eager to work, don’t drop off the radar. Keep in touch with the recruiter to let him or her know your current status. Touch base briefly—email is okay. You don’t want to tie up the recruiter’s time unnecessarily; you just want to let them know you’re still eager to come off the bench.

You and your recruiter are a team. If one member of the team is out of sync with the other one, you’ll lose the game. In this case, when working with an ERP recruiter, you’ll want to be up front about all kinds of information: how much money you want, where you’re willing to work, what you’re willing to do. Be as detailed as possible, and also explain any mitigating circumstances. For example, you might not normally want to work in New York, but you will do so if a job in SAP HCM comes up there. This information is vital for recruiters to have in order to place you properly, and in order to avoid embarrassment by placing you in situations you don’t want to be in.

The bottom line is that, if you don’t take the time to be on the same page as your ERP recruiter, your chance of getting top SAP top jobs and other ERP work will go down.

ERP recruiters have their own specialties. There are SAP recruiters and Oracle recruiters; there are ERP recruiters with niche specialties like Siebel, and ERP recruiters who are strong in particular industries or focus on specific modules within SAP or Oracle. One size does not fit all. Therefore, assuming that you have enough experience and expertise to attract a recruiter in the first place, choose carefully; it could make all the difference in your Oracle job search or SAP job search.

Begin by checking out the recruiter’s site, looking for specific job postings to get a flavor of the recruiter’s strengths. Then go to Google and see what the Web reputation of the recruiter is. Start with a search for functionality, but keep in mind that there are other differentiating factors, such as an ERP recruiter’s strength in a particular region. The easiest way to leverage a recruiter for an ERP job is to find a recruiter with the right connections and market reputation. Working with the wrong recruiter won’t get you the right ERP job, so make sure you choose the right recruiter with whom to work.

It's human nature to invest more in someone who's going to be around for the long haul, and to not focus as closely on somehow you know is going to go off and do something else.

Recruiters, too, want long-term relationships. It's good for clients, it's good for the recruiter, and it's good for you.

When working with recruiters, it is important to emphasize that you're in it for the long haul. Be sure to communicate with your B2B Workforce Recruiter frequently and update them with your status on your current project. Frequent status updates allow your recruiter to respond appropriately should any issues arise on the project and also allow them to begin work finding your next role as soon as your current one is nearing completion.

When recruiters see your commitment to them, they'll go the extra mile on your behalf. So fight the temptation of recruiter-hopping, and look for the recruiter who's the right long-term fit.

In the Internet age, you can get a lot of business done without leaving your computer. However, making the decision to work with an ERP recruiter is an important one, and it is worth scheduling a face-to-face meeting when possible. Working with a recruiter on a long-distance basis only doesn’t necessarily sour your chances in an SAP job search, for example, but it can make it harder to tell whether there is a true fit between you and the recruiter.

Sometimes, trust and affinity are best established in actual meetings, and it is often hard to really understand someone without having met them. Even if there’s no chance of a face-to-face meeting, it’s a good idea to request some kind of webcam meeting. Anything you can do to make the relationship more personal will help you in deciding whether the recruiter is right for you, and vice versa.

Interviewing with a recruiter is just as important as interviewing with an ERP hiring manager—perhaps more important, since a recruiter can be the gateway to many jobs, not just one. In the context of ERP recruiting, preparing well for an interview means being able to describe your past experience and your future goals, discuss some of your salary and job requirements (such as geographical limitations and/or preferences), and being presentable and communicative.

In the brave new world of SAP job openings and Oracle job openings, the consultant is not a coder sitting in a back room but a front-line presence who is directly exposed to business processes and users. In a way, then, your interview with a recruiter is practice for the kind of face-to-face interaction that is becoming the norm, especially in SAP consulting engagements. Use your time with the recruiter to build and improve upon your communication and personality skills—you’ll need both in client engagements.