What is recruitment?
Recruitment plays a crucial role in building a talented and diverse workforce for businesses and organisations. It involves identifying, attracting, and hiring the right candidates for open positions. To achieve this, many companies and organisations rely on the services of recruitment consultants, who specialize in the recruitment process.
In this article, we will take a closer look at recruitment and the role of a recruitment consultant. We’ll discuss the skills essential to the recruitment process, what a recruiter does, the challenges they face, and the rewards of working in recruitment. Additionally, we’ll explore the impact that recruiters can have on the lives of job seekers and how they can form excellent relationships with their candidates.
Jump to a section
- What is recruitment?
- What is a recruitment consultant?
- Skills essential to recruitment
- What does a recruiter do?
- The challenge
- Things that can go wrong
- The rewards
- Change peoples lives
What is Recruitment?
Recruitment is the process of hiring an employee to fill a job vacancy. The process involves identifying, attracting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding the new employee.
Different businesses and organisations have varying approaches to recruitment. Some organisations have an in-house recruitment team that manages the process, while others use third-party recruitment agencies that specialise in specific niches such as IT, Education, or Executive Search.
The approach an organisation takes to recruitment depends on several factors, such as the frequency of recruitment, the level of specialisation required for the role, the urgency to fill the position, and whether the position is temporary or permanent.
What is Recruitment Consultant?
Skills essential to recruitment
- Excellent organisation and planning skills
- Time management
- Problem-solving
- Confident communication skills – on the phone, through e-mail and face to face
- A passion for being successful
- Resilience
What does a recruiter do?
As a 360 recruitment consultant, you will be responsible for securing new business, acquiring requirements (vacancies) and sourcing high-quality candidates (job seekers) to fill those roles.
Picking up requirements
To be able to make placements, you will need to pick up requirements (vacancies) from a client. To do this, you must have successfully sold your business services to the client, ahead of the numerous other recruitment agencies who are also pursuing the hiring companies’ business. This competition between recruitment agencies can cause hiring managers to be reluctant to engage with agencies, so solid relationship-building skills are essential. Also, you will need to overcome objections and provide evidence of your ability as a specialist recruiter.
One of the biggest challenges in the early stages of a recruitment consultant’s career is a lack of experience or a ‘proven track record’. However, experienced recruiters can describe their previous successes in placing candidates in the chosen clients’ industry and have a deep technical understanding of the client’s requirements.
With this experience, you can utilise your sales skills and your team’s expertise to sell your services to a potential client.
Resourcing
When you receive a requirement (vacancy) from your client, you must find the perfect candidate (job seeker) to fill that role. You will use an existing CRM (extensive database of current candidates accumulated by the recruitment company) and advertisements to source and attract appropriately skilled candidates. Your role as the intermediary is to sell the requirement to the candidate and the candidate to the client (which makes recruitment a sales job.)
The challenge
In recruitment, multiple things need to happen for you to place a candidate successfully.
- You will need to be able to attract a client by overcoming objections and using your sales skills to obtain the requirements
- Deliver outstanding levels of service at all times
- Source the perfect candidate for the requirement
- Candidate needs to agree to the terms of the requirement
- Candidate needs to be successful in what can be a multi-staged hiring process
- The client needs to agree to the candidates’ terms
Things that can go wrong
- The client no longer needs to hire a new employee
- Delays in the hiring process from the client or candidate can cause the other not to wish to pursue
- The candidate changes their mind mid-hiring process
- External impacts – the economy, personal commitments, and health – all have the ability to change the course of the hiring process.
- Security checks/work permits.
- No show’s (Yes, it happens more often than you might expect.)
The rewards
- Basic salary plus commission – The earning potential is high for those who are successful in recruitment. Most recruitment agencies charge companies a percentage of the vacancies’ salary, and a consultant receives a portion of that fee as a commission.
- Beyond intrinsic rewards, many recruiters express pride in being a key player in the growth of large companies by supplying high-quality candidates.
- Many agencies have excellent incentive schemes that support outstanding performance. For example, at Whitehall, we often hold team and individual challenges that create a great sense of team spirit and fun at work. Some of the incentives we offer our consultants include champagne, Amazon gift vouchers, use of the company sports cars, day trips, weekends to our villa in Portugal and Milestone celebrations. In addition, our Christmas party is a chance for every member of the Whitehall team to reflect on and celebrate the previous year and recognise individual success stories during the ‘Whitehall Awards’ presentation.
Change peoples lives
Changing lives may sound a little dramatic; however, a career change can significantly impact a person’s life. As a recruiter, you can have an impact on a candidate’s income, location, career path and lifestyle. As a result, recruiters often form excellent relationships with their candidates.
Who are Whitehall?
Whitehall Resources are the leading specialist SAP and IT recruitment agency in the UK. Our Head Office is based in Colchester, Essex and we have offices in Germany and the US. Learn more about growing your career with Whitehall.
