Perm vs. contracting: How does applying differ?

A typical example of finding a perm role might be checking out a company that you find interesting and going on their careers page. Or searching job boards and looking at which company is hiring. Then you'd go through a relevant role's job description before deciding to apply. The company gets the applications from all applicants and sifts through them.

With contracting, many of the job postings you come across won't include the company name. So you're technically applying to a role without knowing which company it's with!

Well, kind of. Because many of these contract roles are posted by recruiters*, you'll typically have a lot of detail about the role but not much about the end client.

But once you've applied, you'll have a call with the recruiter at which point you'll (usually) find out the company. And if you like the sound of it all and the recruiter thinks you're a good fit, they then pass your CV over to the end client. So the company only gets a select few candidates that the recruiter thinks are a good fit.

So it's a bit different! It's also one of the reasons why it's important to have a good relationship with recruiters, letting them know what types of industries you're interested in (and not interested in), as well as the kind of work you'd like to do.

*For the sake of clarity, this is referring to recruiters from recruitment companies, not internal recruiters that work in-house. This external recruiter is typically passing your CV onto the internal recruiter or internal hiring manager.