Part four of my series and as a recruitment consultant and manager, there were 5 key lessons that I learnt, which meant that I could take control of my business, rather than my business controlling me.
Tip 1 – Plan your day, but don’t plan your whole day. Leave space for the reactive tasks that will inevitably interrupt your day. I always hear that “recruitment is a reactive business, so you can’t plan”. Well, knowing it’s going to be reactive, we can plan for that!
To be able to plan for the reactive tasks, it means that you need to do some analysis of your normal day / week. There will be some trends that you’ll start to identify. For example, as a recruitment consultant working in the commercial sector 80% of my average Wednesday was proactive. Knowing this, I would persuade my clients to meet me on this day, as I knew I could be away from my desk without too much reactive stuff happening for others to deal with.
Each day it’s been proven that if you spend a few minutes writing out what you want to achieve; you’ll gain that time back – and then some – by being organised.
Tip 3 – Write a To Do’s List. Have it written before you start work each day and update it with the reactive tasks throughout the day in a different colour, so that you are able to do Tip 2 easily).
Once you have your list, plan the activities into your diary picking out the important and urgent tasks first so that you can get them cleared first thing. By organising your time and getting the important tasks done when they should, it means that they shouldn’t get to the ‘urgent’ stage!
Tip 4 – When allocating time to tasks, always add more time than you think it will take. If you end up finishing early, there’s always other work to be done in recruitment!
Tip 5 – Create a weekly calendar whereby you have repeating tasks and copy / recur it. Identify the best times to do things and aim to stick to it. Use this as your base each week and update with your variable and reactive tasks.
Friday afternoons and Monday mornings were the most successful times of the week for me to ‘market in’ candidates to potential clients. This is likely due to the fact that people are more likely to hand their notice in at these times and then may not return or Monday morning is the time people tend to call in sick, so great for temporary staff cover.
By incorporating the 5 above tips into my daily routine, I was able to run up to 100 temporary workers per week (mostly short term bookings) on my own.
We’ll be back in the New Year where we’ll look at communication skills and how they can impact your relationships with your customers.
Posted by Angela Cripps
Angela trains our popular recruitment induction course Recruitment 101 NEXT DATE: Weds 18th – Thurs 19th Jan 2012
