Recruitment, stripped bare.
Posted by Mitch on 1st April 2015
When you distill everything a recruiter does (or should do) down, there are only two things they need to be good at to be effective.
Those two things are:
1. Candidate Attraction
2. Candidate Assessment
Pretty much everything else is an action that supports one of these two critical activities.
Research, sourcing, channel management, social media, candidate engagement, negotiating and offer management – all of them are support activities to the two main areas of selling jobs to the right candidates and then assessing them.
Of course, this assumes that you’ve taken a really detailed brief, asked difficult questions and are able to make the hiring manager see that hiring someone who is doing exactly the same job for a competitor is, more often than not, an unsustainable approach to finding new employees.
Recruitment is, in simple terms, about finding enough of the right types of people and then assessing which ones are going to be the most likely to succeed and bring the most value.
So who are the best recruiters?
I think the best recruiters are Managing Directors, Hiring Managers and Internal Recruiters. Or at least, they should be.
These are the people who know the most about the business, helped define the culture and have the most to lose by getting it wrong. These are the people with skin in the game.
They’re also the people least equipped to put all of that knowledge into practice.
The MD and Hiring Managers because they tend to lack objectivity and have an unrealistic view of what it takes to actually fill a job and the Internal Recruiter because they’re overworked.
Effective candidate attraction and candidate assessment is what they need (and want) from any 3rd party recruitment supplier they might give a vacancy to.
They want an agency to be able to sell a job effectively, whether that be via adverts, direct approaches or networking – and to then be able to screen and assess the best of those who respond. And to treat them professionally.
If you’re an agency recruiter and you can convince a company of your ability to do both those things, they’ll work with you on your terms and keep coming back.
That’s assuming you can actually do both those things well of course.
And being great at sourcing isn’t the same as being able to build intelligent dialogue with potential candidates once you’ve found them. In the same way that pitching candidates looking for a sideways move into a similar company isn’t recruiting. That’s called candidate trading.
Candidate trading is a form of recruitment that embeds the belief in a client’s mind that agencies are only really useful for accessing same-sector candidates who are doing more or less the same job as the one they need to fill.
The problem with having those types of clients is that a lot of them will never really value you. That is a tough customer type to have to make a living from.
Candidate trading is a perfectly legitimate way of making a living, but please, do not kid yourself that you’re a recruiter.
Trading candidates on the open market is fun – especially when you’re young, but it does start to become a bit tedious as you become older, get married, have kids and take on a mortgage.
Then, not knowing where your fees are coming from becomes a lot less attractive.
So, what kind of recruitment practitioner do you want to be 5 years from now?
One that is forever hitting the phones looking for companies who are lazy or stupid enough to believe that populating their businesses with candidates prepared to make sideways moves constitutes great recruitment practice?
Or one that has a portfolio of loyal clients whose hiring problems you can solve by building bespoke recruitment campaigns and delivering candidates who are a better long-term fit for their businesses?
Do you want to be a Recruiter or a Candidate Trader?
The choice is yours.
Unless you’re an idiot. Then you have no choice.
This blog is sponsored by copywritingforrecruiters.com