Beware that headhunters who work on a contingency basis will claim to "own" you with respect to a referral to a firm for a specific period of time -- it could be 3 months; it could be longer. Depending on the specifics of the agreement between the headhunter and the employer, this could mean that if the firm wants to hire you for
any job during the specified period of time following the referral by the headhunter, he/she may be due a fee. Different firms have different policies for how far across their organization they permit a headhunter to cast such a "prior referral" net. It could be firm-wide; it could be just for that department or division, etc.
Unless you plan on working with exactly one headhunter, there is a good chance that someday you may run into the following situation:
Headhunter A pitches you an opportunity at
firm X, and requests that you send him/her a resume and (hopefully, but not always) asks your permission to submit your resume as a candidate for the opportunity at that firm.
For whatever reason, you don't get hired into that job at
firm X. Perhaps you get selected for an interview but the firm chooses someone else; perhaps the firm wants to hire you but you realize that the specific position is not what you want to be doing, or you and the firm can't come to an agreement re: compensation; perhaps your resume never gets beyond an electronic submission system and is never viewed by a human; perhaps the firm cancels the job requisition and hires nobody at all.
A few weeks later, a different headhunter (call him
recruiter B) contacts you regarding a different opportunity, also with
firm X. He asks, "Have you ever spoken with anyone at
firm X?" (Or, he may ask, "has anyone ever submitted your resume to
firm X?")
In the case where you actually went in for an interview with
Firm X, you would (if you're honest) tell him, "Yes, I was in there several weeks ago for what sounds like a different position."
In such case,
recruiter B may realize that if he submits you to
firm X as a candidate for the position he felt you were suitable for, there is a chance that if you are eventually hired for that job, the firm's recruiting agreement with
headhunter A may require the employer to pay the fee to
headhunter A rather than to
recruiter B, simply because
headhunter A had submitted your resume first. In such case,
recruiter B may decide to not discuss this position with you any further, because he won't be able to get paid for placing you there. He may instead try to match you up with some other firm (where you resume has not yet been submitted), while seeking alternate candidates for the position at
firm X .
Of course, the above presumes that
headhunter A tells you where he is sending your resume, and gets your permission to send it there. There are some (very slimy) individuals in that business who seem to "throw stuff up against the wall and see what sticks." Such a headhunter might submit your resume to one (or many) potential employers without even telling you that he has done so. If a firm has interest in your candidacy, the firm would have to contact that headhunter in order to arrange an interview, etc.
What is more likely to happen is that some time later,
recruiter B contacts you regarding a position which would really be a good fit for your skills and interests. When asked if your resume has ever been submitted to
firm X, you answer "no" -- because you have no idea that
headhunter S (in this case, "
S" is for "slimeball") had submitted your resume all over the place, without getting your permission or even telling you about it. When
recruiter B submits your resume to
firm X, he receives a curt response from Human Resources advising "unfortunately, that candidate's resume has already been submitted to us by another recruiter."
At this point,
recruiter B will either
(1) not call you again, because he thinks you're a liar, or
(2) will tell you that he can't help you with regard to
firm X, because some other (unspecified) headhunter has established a prior claim over you.
In the case where your resume has indeed turned up at an employer by unauthorized submission by (slimeball)
headhunter S, it can be frustratingly difficult for you to determine the identity of such headhunter (assuming you are dealing with far more than 2 headhunters.)
Recruiter B will likely not tell you the name of the contact with whom he is speaking at
firm X, and that contact may well not tell
Recruiter B the name of the headhunter (
S!) who has staked the prior claim over you.
So, you're facing a "Catch-22"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22 whereby someone (
headhunter S) is blocking your path to getting hired at one (or many) firms, but you can't easily determine who that slimeball is, because no one will tell you.
So, you have to be very careful before agreeing to send your resume to a headhunter whom you don't know well. They will invariably insist on your sending them your resume in MS-Word format -- which makes it very easy for them to delete your contact information from the resume, and replace it with their own. This way the employer can't contact you directly -- they have to go through the headhunter.
So, what can you do?
Ask the headhunter how many candidates he/she has successfully placed at the company to which he wants to submit you. (Unfortunately, if the truthful answer is "zero", the headhunter may well lie and give you a positive number -- and you really have no way of verifying this.)
Also, insist on the headhunter disclosing whether he/she is speaking directly with the hiring manager, or whether the headhunter is just speaking to some internal H.R. functionary (the department name varies by employer -- some firms call it "staffing"; D.E. Shaw calls it "Strategic Growth"; etc.)
If the headhunter genuinely does have a close relationship with a hiring manager -- perhaps the recruiter placed the manager in the position he currently holds, or perhaps he has placed multiple candidates at that firm -- then dealing with such a recruiter can indeed be the way to get your resume in front of the right people. As I just mentioned, the problem is that there exist recruiters who will lie, claiming that they have a much closer relationship with an employer than they actually do -- when such is not true -- and how are you going to determine whether they are lying to you?
Also note that firms which recruit graduates directly from universities to enter internal training programs of varying duration will generally have a dedicated "campus recruiting" team. For such opportunities, firms would never hire someone whose resume has been submitted by a recruiter.
Whichever path you take, best of luck.
Just be cognizant of the landmines, quicksand, and dead-ends along the path that you select...