“Take it or leave it. I can always give the job to the next person.”
That was what a recruiter told a friend when she recently tried to negotiate a job offer.
Another friend, Emmanuel Ng 吳, used to work at a headhunting firm. When I told him the story, he shrugged and reminded me of something obvious that many jobseekers forget: “The recruiter does not work for you.”
That sounds harsh. But once he explained how recruiters are paid and measured, quite a few of the things we lament about during a job search started making more sense.
1. “The recruiter does not work for you”
Scenario 1: Why does a headhunter approach you enthusiastically on LinkedIn, tell you that your background looks perfect, ask for your CV, and then disappear?
Emmanuel says some headhunters are measured not just on successful placements, but also on “activities”, such as how many people they prospect and contact. So sometimes somebody messages you because they genuinely think you are right for a job. Sometimes, sending you the message is itself part of the activity they need to chalk up.
Emmanuel’s advice is to ask something more concrete: is there an actual vacancy? Has my CV been sent to the hiring manager? What happens next? That tells you much more than how enthusiastic the first LinkedIn message sounds.
Scenario 2: Then there is the perennial complaint: why won’t they tell me why I didn’t get the job?
Emmanuel told me about one internal recruiter who came in on contract to cover somebody on maternity leave and filled 46 positions across APAC in six months. She was recruiting from Australia through to India, talking to candidates and hiring managers across different time zones, arranging interviews, chasing responses and closing almost eight hires every month.
And those were only the people who got the jobs. Think about how many unsuccessful candidates must have sat behind those 46 hires. Long way of saying: sometimes they simply don’t have the time.
Scenario 3: Emmanuel says he has seen four or five candidates being told that they were all “progressing well” for the same job, even when that was not really true.
Again, there is a logic to it. Until Candidate A signs, the recruiter probably does not want Candidate B disappearing.
So rather than asking whether “the client likes me”, ask how many people are still being considered, whether you are in the final round, and whether the hiring manager has actually given that feedback.
2. “Surely the career adviser is on my side?”
This was my next question. Unlike the recruiter, the career adviser are not trying to close that particular company’s vacancy, so surely they can look at your career more objectively and tell you what else you could do.
Mostly, yes. But Emmanuel says career advisers can have constraints of their own.
He has heard of advisers being expected to complete a certain number of consultations a day and, in some cases, being measured partly on placements. I have separately heard similar stories from people working around the career-advisory system. I don’t think that means they don’t care about you. But if you have a queue of people waiting to be helped, there is naturally some pressure to solve the case in front of you and move on to the next one.
There is also a second limitation which I think is much more human. People can only advise from what they know and what they have seen. It is a bit like asking a professor what career you should pursue. A very good professor may know far more than you do, but there is still a horizon to their experience. If they have never seen somebody with your background make a particular jump, they may genuinely struggle to see how it could work.
Emmanuel told me about one man in his mid-40s who had spent much of his career in the military, including aircraft maintenance. When he went for more generic career advice, one suggestion was that he become a trainer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a trainer. But to him, in his mid-40s, it felt like a career dead end. Was this really what the rest of his working life was supposed to look like? So he sought a second opinion. Emmanuel worked through what he had actually been responsible for in the military, which parts of that experience another industry might value, and how to explain those skills to somebody who had never worked in his world. He eventually moved into data-centre security.
Sometimes somebody tells you to stay close to what you have always done because that really is the best option. Sometimes they simply cannot see the bridge.
3. Eventually, you still have to rely on yourself
This is actually how I first heard about Emmanuel. A LinkedIn reader and I had been chatting on and off after she was retrenched from a government cybersecurity role. About six months later, she found another role in cyber governance.
I asked her how she managed the transition. She kept coming back to this 26-year-old resume writer called Emmanuel, who had helped her turn around her CV and cover letter. That made me curious enough to chat with him.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Emmanuel somehow got her a job. What he could do was help her bring out what she already had, work out which parts mattered for the job she wanted next, and put that case into words. Because he had previously worked in headhunting, he could also tell her whether that argument would make sense to somebody sitting on the other side of the hiring table.
That, to me, is the useful part of a good resume writer. Helping you make a case for something that may not be immediately obvious from your last job title.
But even Emmanuel can only take you so far. The headhunter can tell you what employers are looking for. The career adviser can show you possibilities you may not have considered. The resume writer can help you explain why you should be considered for something different. You still have to decide what that something different is.
Emmanuel Ng 吳 is the founder of TheGoodWrite, a resume-writing and career-advisory service he started during the Covid retrenchments. (Although given that he is also a complete motorhead, I joked that The Good Ride might have worked too.) He has since worked on more than 1,000 profiles, from fresh graduates and career switchers to senior executives and C-suite leaders, with more than 700 client reviews and testimonials. He focuses particularly on helping people reposition their experience for career switches and less obvious next moves.
About Eileen Soh
Eileen Soh is a Singapore-based LinkedIn writer and thought leadership advisor who teaches professionals how to catch a senior decision-maker’s attention in 90 seconds and give them a reason to remember you.
Before she started writing publicly, she spent more than a decade writing for senior decision-makers in government. Working for readers with little time taught her to get to the point quickly, make every line worth reading and show immediately why something matters.
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