Welcome to the Jungle did what it said on the tin. It put me in front of the right person.
I'd updated my profile maybe a year before this with a specific summary of what I was after. Internal recruiter role, mid-to-senior, ideally at a consulting firm or agency, French-speaking but not French-required. I left the profile alone after that. Every six months I'd tweak the profile when something in my career changed. The talent team at a Paris recruiting firm reached out at the end of February. The opening message was three sentences. They were hiring an internal recruiter, the role focused specifically on senior consultant hiring, and they wanted to know whether I was open. I replied yes within an hour, because the role description matched my profile summary almost word-for-word. The first call was the head of talent. Forty-five minutes. Most of it was her describing the firm's hiring process honestly, the broken parts included, and asking what I'd do differently in the first ninety days. I told her. She pushed back on one part specifically and we had a useful argument. Round two was a role-play sourcing call. They gave me the profile of a fictional candidate, a senior consultant at a competing firm, and asked me to make the ↓