Get your foot in the door

Connect with the internal recruiter

By Marissa Yaremich

Then the waiting game begins. Many times, job seekers experience this wait-and-see approach only to receive a single correspondence from companies. That is, the undesired automated response indicating your materials were received and the company “will contact you should your qualifications meet our criteria.”


Yet job seekers can ramp up their job prospects by simply networking with the companies’ in-house recruiters, says veteran recruiter Shelley Zajic, who leads a team of about 50 internal recruiters for Apollo Group/University of Phoenix as vice president of talent management.

“Everyone should go through the online process, but if you want to step it up, then you also want to do some networking to see who you know that can help lead you to the appropriate internal recruiter,” says Zajic.

What is an internal recruiter?

An internal recruiter, also known as an employer-based recruiter, is hired and paid an annual salary by a company to fill that company’s job vacancies. This differs from an external recruiter, who actively markets various companies’ job vacancies and gets paid for placing prospective candidates. Like their external counterparts, internal recruiters also focus on a specialty, such as technology or accounting, to fill the company’s various positions.

“The role of internal recruiters is to spend their waking moments networking with candidates to fill current openings or future openings within their company,” says Zajic.

The recruiter is going to constantly establish potential candidate connections by visiting career and professional events, as well as touching base with his existing network of contacts. This approach expands internal recruiters’ candidate pools so they can easily fill the positions when available.

How to connect

Networking is not only the responsibility of the internal recruiter. According to Zajic, it behooves the job seeker to initiate networking because a cold call does not guarantee that a company’s operator will connect the job seeker to the pertinent recruiter filling the desired position.

Besides, she adds, some of the best candidate leads—even those individuals who already submitted their résumés via the online job board—come from word of mouth.

Ask your friends, family and colleagues whether they know anyone at the company, and then make the recruiter connection through that personal relationship. Another option is to scour the connections in LinkedIn or social media sites to find out who works as an internal recruiter for a specific company or is a former recruiter who may be able to point you in the right direction.

“The candidates I like the best are the ones that come through my referrals and the ones that come through my network,” Zajic says. She explains that these referrals help the job seeker stand apart from the literally 700 to 1,000 applications she receives regularly for a single job posting.

Networking with the internal recruiter further establishes a professional relationship that is equally as important for the job seeker should the present position not be a good fit. The internal recruiter may still prove helpful in the future when they learn about a better-suited job opening and have you to contact, Zajic emphasizes.

Using external and internal recruiters

It doesn’t hurt to layer the connections by having an external recruiter you know also contact the company on your behalf, says Zajic. Companies likely won’t call an external recruiter to fill the same posts handled by their internal recruiters. However, companies will make an exception to the rule if a candidate is truly a perfect fit, she says. “It’s the law of large numbers,” explains Zajic. “The more people you know and talk to, the more likely you are to find a job.”

Approaching an internal recruiter

Ever so diligent, the job seeker eventually identifies the appropriate internal recruiter to contact. So how do you approach this recruiter? Zajic says you pitch your strengths: Emphasize your translatable skills, highlight your leadership and sound convincing enough to make yourself stand apart from other candidates.

The one misstep a job seeker can take is to apply for a job that’s criteria does not reflect his or her skills. For example, Zajic says if an internal recruiter’s job posting specifically asks for a candidate to possess three to five years accounting experience and be a certified public accountant (CPA), then it is likely you aren’t an ideal candidate if you have the experience, but are not a CPA.

“It’s like a mathematical equation,” Zajic says of job vacancies. If it doesn’t add up for the job seeker, rest assured it is likely not going to calculate for the internal recruiter either.

Marissa Yaremich is an award-winning freelance journalist with more than 13 years of experience serving in various positions as a reporter, researcher or photojournalist at several media outlets, including CBS’s Inside Edition, The Boston Globe and the New Haven Register. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Boston University.