Picture this scenario. You walk into an electronics store, and want to buy a laptop. You haven’t spent much time researching and you don’t have a lot of time to figure out what you want. This is where the marketing department for the various computer companies will kick in. Unless you’re married to a brand like Apple, chances are you don’t really know what you want.

If you’re open to suggestion, chances are you’ll find a helpful salesperson at the store that will be able to translate “computer speak” into “everyday speak”. Unless you absolutely know about computers, and have spent a significant amount of time buying computers, chances are you wouldn’t buy online.

If this sounds like you, why would you shop for your next big role online? In the same way that the salesperson at the store is the advisor, recruiters can be the same for you when helping with your career.

If you’ve ever read the choose your own adventure childhood stories, you’ll know that the narrator will be able to dictate to you what the choices are for what path you can go down. In a way, a recruiter is similar to the narrator of a choose-your-own-adventure book.

What we do is help present people the path they may choose to go down. Whether they choose to go down it is entirely up to them, but it definitely makes the adventure more interesting!

Choose your own adventure stories will often present the reader with the acknowledgement that small decisions that are made now are able to affect almost every other part of your story. As a recruiter, in a way we’ve seen these paths happen time and time again. If it helps, we’ll even try to discuss with you where the role you’re choosing will lead, and frame it in context of where your intended path is for your career.

As a recruiter, I get this sort of thing a lot. Candidates will often say to us that they were an absolute superstar in their last role, so it wouldn’t make sense to go through a recruiter. We see this time and time again. I’ve even paraphrased the immortal line from the great rapper Kanye West, because it seems to be very prevalent amongst certain industries.

For most clients of ours, it’s not that they come to a recruiter for lack of trying, it’s that they’ve generally already invested significant amounts of time and energy in the past searching for the right candidate. Added to that, contrary to popular belief it’s highly unlikely that a candidate with a matching set of experience will have a lasting impact in the role, as compared to someone with a mix of experience from different fields.

A C.V. is just a piece of paper. It’s easy to forget that we are now in an age where it’s hard to differentiate, and rather than filling out the manual paperwork of applications and building your profile, why not let someone build your profile for you. With a little bit of polish, almost anything can shine.