Recruitment – not as easy as it seems!

The Key Competencies of a Recruitment Consultant - Part 1

The key competencies that you require when becoming a recruitment consultant highlight why this job is not as easy as people think. There are so many elements to it, that it’s hard to pick 4 or 5 key competencies. In recruitment, there are 12 that are nearly all as important as the others when you’re a 360^o consultant.

The aim of sharing these competencies in a blog is for you to analyse your own abilities and focus on some improvement areas over the coming months.  We can’t all be perfect, but we can all be striving to be better in what we do. 

 

1.  Planning - No surprise here for people who read my blogs! Planning is the key to being a successful consultant and it’s not just planning your day. Plan for where you want to be in a year’s time, what your objectives are and how you are going to achieve them on a quarterly basis. Plan your calls and your meetings, plan your candidate and client attraction and retention plans… I could go on, but you get the idea.

2. Monitoring - Once you’ve done all of that planning, there’s no point in then not following through. Make sure that you have robust monitoring processes – whether that’s a fantastic IT system that will do it for you and produce the results / reports, or just simply, a pen and paper that you record all of your activities and results. Whichever works for you as there is no right or wrong when monitoring as long as you do it and you do it thoroughly.

3.  Analysing - Now you’ve got the detail from your monitoring, you have to take time out to work out what it all actually means. So many people will perform a SWOT analysis and then not do anything with the results. The analysis is what drives your future plans. For example, once you have been making sales calls to clients and monitoring the results, you can then work out your hit ratios. How many calls does it take to get a meeting or a job on? Then follow on with how many CVs do you need to send to each job to get an interview? How many interviews does it take to get an offer and how many offers to get a confirmed starter?

4.  Sales opportunities - This competency isn’t just about being good at sales; some of the others enhance that ability, such as communication. Sales opportunities is about spotting the prospect – whether that is a client, candidate or position. It’s about being aware of what’s going on with a client, candidate or even your market place, so that you are ahead of the competition and calling the right person at the right time.

5. Meeting goals - Recruitment is a very goals orientated business. This competency speaks for itself. Have goals and plan how to achieve them. Adapt your plan if it‘s not working and re-focus. ‘Simples!’

6. Building profitability - Anyone can do business if you are ‘giving it away’ or ‘buying your business’. Making sure that the deal that you strike is profitable for you, whilst being sensitive to the client’s costs is a key attribute of the ‘consultative consultant’.

 

Look out for part 2 next week where we take you through the remaining 6 steps

Posted by Angela Cripps