Ten Things Recruiters Don't Need To Know About You

Here are ten pieces of information no recruiter needs to know about you in order to represent you to employers. If one recruiter finds your LinkedIn profile sufficiently interesting to reach out to you, others will do the same thing. You get to decide which recruiters deserve to represent you.

If a recruiter pushes you for personal information, you can say “This is not a good match,” wish them well and hang up the phone.

It’s a new day. Talent is more and more in the driver’s seat every day. Keep these ten tidbits to yourself!

• Your age (or the year you graduated from college)

• Your current or past salary. Don’t share it and don’t give any proof of your past income. Your past earnings have nothing to do with your value to the recruiter’s client now!

• Your living expenses. Some recruiters will ask you “What do you need to earn in order to pay your bills?” which is an inappropriate and intrusive question. You must know your salary target, and it must be in line with the market. It is fine for a recruiter to tell you “I think your salary target is high” and then it will be up to you whether to budge or stick with the salary target you have set. Your living expenses have nothing to do with anything.

• The lowest salary you would accept. The answer to the question “What’s the lowest salary you would accept?” can only be “Make me a job offer, and we’ll find out!”

• Which other companies you’re interviewing with.

• Where you are in the hiring process with other employers. If you want to tell a recruiter or an employer that you are close to getting an offer from someone else or that you’ve already received an offer, go ahead, but you don’t have to answer questions about your other job-search possibilities unless you want to. For instance, if you told the recruiter “I have other interviews scheduled, but they haven’t happened yet” that would be a signal to the employer for which the recruiter is working that there’s no rush in making you an offer. Why give away that negotiating leverage?

• How badly you need a job, or don’t (e.g., the size of your savings account or your on-the-side consulting projects).

• If you are working now, recruiters don’t need to know how well you like your job or how much you hate it. If you were a real estate agent representing a home-seller, wouldn’t you love to learn how desperate each potential home-buyer is to find a new home? Of course you would! If a recruiter contacts you at your current job and asks you whether you’d consider other opportunities outside your company, you can say “I will look at a new opportunity – why not?” Don’t tell the recruiter that you hate your job or that the rumor mill says layoffs are coming. Keep that information to yourself!

• Your frustrating experiences on the job search or on the job — for instance, if you recently missed out on a promotion. The recruiter-candidate relationship begins as a business relationship. Maybe it will blossom into friendship,  but right now you can only hurt yourself by giving the recruiter too much information about your motivation to change jobs.

• Anything you would not tell any other new business acquaintance, vendor or customer.

What does the recruiter need to know? He or she needs to know about your skills, your training, the projects you’ve worked on, your professional goals and your reasons for wanting a new job.

He or she needs to know how soon you could start if you got a new job, and needs to know what it will take salary-wise, bonus-wise and otherwise to get you into his or her client’s shop.

Keep your conversations with recruiters businesslike and don’t spill the beans on your personal situation, your past earnings or your personal reasons for changing jobs, because if you do those pieces of information will be conveyed immediately to the hiring manager the recruiter works for.