So we’ve officially come out of recession in the UK. A lot of companies we work with at Lander Associates, already started seeing the change in recruitment needs around September last year, where there was a significant upturn in the number of jobs being available.
There seems to be a good number of economists suggesting a ‘W’ recovery (or ‘double-dipper), in that there’ll be a short upturn and then a long period of time where everything will plateau, resulting in a loss of confidence again. This then leads to another short downturn, before we finally get to a long period of continuous growth. So what does that mean for us in the recruitment industry?
We know that we tend to feel the recession first and luckily therefore tend to see the results of the recovery first. Recruitment consultancies have to adjust during these tough times, just to survive them. Understandably, this means that margins are squeezed and even Terms of Business adjusted to fit the requirements. Less understandable is that jobs that during the good times would have been automatically excluded, are now considered.
So what surprises me is that during these periods of change, consultants also change the best practice processes they work by.
Qualifying is one of the staple skills that a recruitment consultant needs. Whether that is qualifying the client company they want to work with to make sure they will be a good addition to their client set, or qualifying the individual contact within that company, so that they will also make a good impression on any candidates put forward. High upon their agenda and key tasks should be qualifying the roles they will work on and qualifying the candidates they decide to interview.
Companies and contacts
Working with clients who won’t call you back, won’t give you detailed feedback on interviews or temporaries / contractors, will only spend five minutes giving you a job description and ultimately will query paying the invoice are adding huge amounts of time to your day for no revenue. We can all be ‘busy fools’ in this industry and by not qualifying the companies you’re working with, you’ll be exactly this. As an exercise, go through the jobs that you haven’t filled over the last 6 months and see if any of the above issues have been a factor. Then look at the positions you have filled – these points didn’t arise, did they?!
Jobs and candidates
Taking any job on because the market’s tight and to be honest “we’re desperate”, is saying just that to your customers. How comfortable do you feel dealing with people that sound desperate? Confidence is what people gravitate toward in both their work and their personal lives. That confidence comes from knowing the client, job and candidate inside-out. That way, a near perfect match can be made, rather than sending the CV and hoping … waiting … speculating. How many times have you said “fingers crossed” when sending the candidates out? When you register every candidate onto your database “just in case”, because you don’t want to miss out on that possible chance of them being right for someone, you’re adding huge amounts of wasted hours to your job. I analysed this once, many years ago. We’d taken over 2,000 CVs that year of people that hadn’t been qualified… just in case. Between Xmas and New Year we analysed how much money we’d made from those CVs. Zero. Nothing. Nada. We’d spent hundreds of hours chasing these candidates, to not make one single penny. Busy fools?
Pretty soon there will be more jobs out there than you can reasonably deal with – I know, I’ve been there twice before in the last 20 years. Focussing on your processes of qualifying now, will stand you in good stead for the busy times ahead, making sure that every candidate and every role you take on… gets placed.
Posted by: Angela Cripps
