Recruitment – is it a career for extroverts? Is it a career for someone you know?
I saw a Recruitment Manager recently posting about his ‘new’ strategy to recruit consultants for his own team.
No longer looking for what the market broadly considers to be the ‘typical recruiter’ with a highly extrovert sales profile. But accepting that some recruiters are more suited to be delivery focused behind the scenes, rather being client-facing in sales, others operate as ‘360 degree’ consultants.
I totally agree that there is a place for different characters in recruitment and ‘the non-cloned’ team. One that uses the teams’ varied skills in the best way to deliver for their clients. ‘Cloned’ teams unfortunately still do exist in companies and sales teams, not only in recruitment. From RMG’s experience we know extroverts and introverts, and people in between can all succeed in recruitment.
Diversity is a hot topic generally, and for many years many recruitment firms have chosen to organise their teams into client facing ‘hunter’ or ‘farmer’ relationship building sales driven people and into ‘account management delivery’ teams.
Personally, I believe being an ‘all-rounder’ consultant is the most effective way to relate to your clients (and candidates) – ultimately one and the same over time. It allows you to manage the end-end search process and build true relationships and real understanding of your clients’ needs and aims. Ultimately to recruit people to their business who do impact their strategic growth goals. Besides being a very fulfilling and enjoyable way to work.
Recruitment companies (like any other business) always need to grow and build their teams too; to recruit and retain their own people and this is through continual training and development of their staff (at all levels of experience). The market is constantly changing and has been over the last 30 years too, but saying that, the fundamentals of recruitment have not changed. These fundamental skills include:
• An ability to listen!
• Tenacity and hard work
• Honesty, ethics, confidentiality, straight forwardness
• Emotional intelligence, life-skills to understand people and cultures
• Pragmatism, not having ‘the wool pulled over your eyes’
• Understanding and ability to spot connections and match candidates to client needs!
• Ability to work autonomously and as a team player
• Communication, presentation and networking
• Attention to detail, time management and organisation
• Commerciality, selling, developing win-win relationships with people.
• Research/IT skills
• Negotiation, persuasion, setting realistic expectations
• Flexibility and willingness to change
• Accessibility
• Ability to ‘pick yourself up and go again’ as you are dealing with people’s decisions
• Literacy and numeracy
• Financial understanding, forecasting
• Planning, strategic direction business management (entrepreneurial company leadership if you choose)
• Team leadership if you choose, coaching, mentoring, training
• Positivity, energy and speed, focus and direction
• Low procrastination – just do it
• Education, technical capacity to understand complex needs.
• Passion about your work and life
• Confidence to advise and talk with third parties as a professional equal
• Keep many plates spinning, managing multiple stakeholders demands
• Problem solving, flexibility and ability to see the bigger picture
• Project management and delivery to conclusion
• Being creative and open minded to continually improve and learn
• Sense of humour and patience!
Recruitment is now seen very much as a ‘valid’ professional career for graduates and non-graduates alike. No longer a career that people have ‘fallen into’ by fortunate chance in the past.
If you know anyone considering recruitment and is interested to find out more, I recommend they approach 2-3 different recruiting firms, research their websites, visit and talk to their consultants for open chats to get a feel for what recruitment is like, and what their company culture is like too.
At RMG we are open to talk with you for one. We know no two recruitment firms are the same and that each successful consultancy has its own unique style and place in the market and that we do all operate in different ways.
Culture fit is key to your success, so take time choosing who you work for, a company that accepts your natural personality and shares your values. Recruitment can offer a very rewarding, flexible and varied career, and is suitable for extroverts and introverts. It offers a very interesting perspective of the market in which you operate and being able to contribute to its growth.
