Fashion Recruiters

Fashion recruiters are very helpful for people looking for fashion jobs — and equally important for the companies seeking qualified employees to fill those jobs. Recruiters work for clothing companies or third-party firms to help the hiring company find employees for its openings, matching employers with employees in an industry full of specialised roles that general hiring handles badly.

Recruiters, Headhunters and Agencies

The vocabulary divides by who employs whom. Recruiters are generally employed by the company advertising the open positions, although they can also be third-party firms with no affiliation to the company in question. Headhunters are hired by a company or corporation to find, vet and introduce suitable candidates for a position — the proactive search for a person, rather than the processing of applicants. An employment agency finds employers or employees for those seeking them, its primary purpose being to assist with staffing needs.

One funding rule runs through all three forms: recruiters and employment agencies are paid by the company, not by the employee seeking employment. A candidate asked to pay for placement is dealing with something other than the standard model described here. The fashion recruiter term page linked from this page gives the formal definition, and the fashion employment agencies page linked alongside lists the industry's specialist firms.

Choosing and Using a Recruiting Firm

Enlisting a recruiting firm can streamline a search, but companies must judge which agencies are best equipped to help — and the honest answer is that it is similar to hiring any other type of service. Interview the agency, research the company as thoroughly as possible, and weigh its knowledge of the specific roles being filled: a firm fluent in retail management may know little about pattern rooms.

Candidates should apply the same judgement in reverse, choosing recruiters who genuinely place their kind of role. Fortunately the fashion industry has several companies that specialise specifically in it — the NYC specialists have their own summary, linked below, covering the Jonas Group, SBH Fashion and JBC Style — and the fashion jobs and employment pages linked from this page give the openings those recruiters exist to fill.

What Recruiters See That Candidates Cannot

A recruiter's value is a view across the market. An individual candidate sees advertised vacancies; a specialist firm sees the unadvertised ones — the role being shaped before it is posted, the confidential replacement, the expansion a brand has not announced. That invisible market is why relationships with two or three good firms, maintained between job hunts rather than only during them, pay off across a career. The firm that knows your work before you need it is the firm that calls first when the hidden role appears.