If the candidate had more power, she would set up interviews and force the employers to impress her.
Of course, that scenario happens only in extreme edge cases. Even in a booming economy with a shortage of workers, John Doe is not going to be pursued aggressively to fill the Senior Marketing Manager role.
This makes intuitive sense: employers have a ton of money, so people come to them.
Right now I have a client who needs to hire truck drivers and can't do it fast enough. I asked him what he'd done to make his company the most attractive (pay, technology, perks, etc.). He said he's done nothing.
Recruiters and headhunters don't necessarily seek people to fill a role. They seek people to fill their batch of application forms to send to those actually doing the hiring.
Recruiters don't replace the interview process, where the dynamic is that the applicant is the interviewee. They only change the way the applicant discovers the job.
If candidate had more power, companies would create whole section of company to try to find and hire talents. Companies would literally pay to find candidates.
A candidate has multiple job offers, and decides which one to take.
The company interviews multiple people for a single position, rejecting the others.
There are only a small number of sectors where the first situation is reasonably possible, a lot of us on here are incredibly fortunate that engineering happens to be one of them. For the majority of the job market (by volume of people rather than volume of money), it takes people attempt after attempt to get a job. They don't get to choose between multiple offers, they have to take the first thing that will allow them to pay the rent, and then they have to hold on to it.
What? Can you explain the reasoning behind this statement?