*Spoiler Alert* Great recruitment, is not a sales process.
Now, before I carry on, I can see why you would come to that assumption because most recruitment businesses have been built on a pure sales foundation. This isn’t just the recruiters fault though. Companies bemoan the fact that recruitment is too salesy, that there are too many underhanded tactics (Which there are) but then they engage with 2,3,4 recruiters to fill a single role. From the recruiters side, how can there be any investment in time? Any Quality? Any clear translating of the role and the company to the candidate? It’s very hard in this environment and companies often find themselves in a position where candidates are getting mixed messaged and recruiters are falling out over who ‘unearthed’ the candidate. As long as recruiters are happy to take roles on in this format and companies engage with multiple agencies, this kind of recruitment will always look less like value driven recruitment and will look more like transaction driven sales.
We removed all of this from our way of working from the very start when we set out our stall to only work with clients on an exclusive basis. Now, it was pretty hard in those early days to turn down the opportunity of a fee when we werejust getting going, but we stuck to our guns and brought on the right clients that understood how valuable great recruitment is.
Your people are your most valuable asset, so there has to be full engagement in the process. Our exclusive relationships allow us to spend on average 3 times the amount of time on a role compared to the normal recruiter, and it also means that when particular roles are harder to fill, we don’t vanish over the horizon never to be seen again, we come up with solutions.