What Is Your Current Situation?

This cast describes how to effectively answer the "What's your current situation?" question from a recruiter.

Whether you've posted your resume on a job board, sent it to a recruiter, or called a recruiter proactively, you expect them to discuss vacancies with you. However, before they start talking specifics, there are four important questions they need to know the answers to.

So what are the questions? They are: What's your current situation, what are you looking for, what's your salary expectation and what's your location preference? Those questions allow the recruiter to understand both what you want, and of the jobs which they know about, which subset you fit into. They also allow them to dismiss you entirely if you're not the right kind of candidate for the jobs they're looking to fill. This, by the way, is not a bad thing. Neither party wants to be wasting time and energy discussing something that doesn't benefit them.

The first thing many people do as part of their job search is prepare their resume and post it on on an online job board. But "post and pray" isn't a good job search strategy. That said, recruiters do at times read resumes on job boards and call candidates from them. And, in our experience, many people are not prepared for the call, don't know what the questions are going to be, and don't know how to answer. Given that this is the first impression you give to someone who could potentially get you a job, we want you to be prepared.

So the first question you're likely to be asked is 'What is your current situation?' or a variation of that. Today we'll cover how to answer that question.